Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  The work was hard, but good. Delphine learned the fine points of net mending from a little boy whose parents had died, and whose father, mad with fever, had tried to blind him with a hot poker so the boy wouldn’t catch the illness through his eyes. He managed to snuff only one eye before the boy, who was already infected, ran to his uncle’s house and carried it there. He awoke from his fevers to find himself alone in a dead-house. Nobody else would take him in, so he walked to Nemours. And then St. Lazarus.

  The woman ate first, with her sons. Then they served the rest, measuring it out to the drop so all got the same portion.

  “This is exceptional stew,” the priest said. “What’s in it?”

  The woman told him.

  Cabbage. Turnips. Mushrooms. Pork belly. And a few pinches of real pepper.

  And at precisely that moment a sparrow in the tree above Thomas shat in his.

  * * *

  They slept in a threshing room that still smelled like last year’s barley, and in the morning they got back into the cart. The woman gave them a sack of blueberries and a squash to take with them, and told them there was a town three miles downriver with a wooden bridge still standing.

  “What’s it’s name?” the priest asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s dead. It’ll be all weeds in a year, except for the steeple. Oh, and if you see any yellow fruit in the trees, don’t eat it. It’s rotten.”

  She laughed inscrutably at this, then slapped the mule’s ass to get it moving, showing them the callused palm of her hand in farewell as they clopped away.

  The woods got thick again, and beneath the limbs of a very old oak tree they saw a flash of yellow. As they got closer, they saw that it was a cotehardie, saffron yellow, adorning the week-old, grinning corpse of a hanged squire; they all knew that cotehardie, and knew that its owner had once had pimples. There was a sign around his neck.

  The priest shivered and crossed himself.

  RAPIST

  EIGHTEEN

  Of the Penitents, and of Auxerre

  The first sign of the group they were following was their tracks. They had pocked the damp ground of the road with their footprints, as any large group walking would have; but every hundred yards or so they left an imprint where it seemed as though they had all fallen and pressed their bodies into the mud. Also, Thomas had noticed the white stumps of freshly snapped branches on trees near the road, with tracks leading up to those trees. When they got to the town of Ponchelvert, a strange sight greeted them.

  Someone had crucified a dwarf.

  He was still very much alive, however.

  As the cart drew closer, they saw that he had been tied in place rather than nailed there, and his feet rested on a little platform, although he was wearing a crown of very real thorns. A ladder lay in the grass near him, as well as a bucket of water with a sponge on a long stick.

  He did not speak to them as they approached, though he watched them the whole way. Père Matthieu stopped the mule and they all looked at him, dumbstruck.

  He nodded at the bucket.

  Delphine clambered out of the cart and soaked the sponge, which she then held up to his mouth. He lipped at the sponge in a way that made her think of a sheep.

  “Do you want to come down?” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “Are you sworn to silence?”

  “No,” he said. “They didn’t say anything about that.”

  “They who?” said Thomas.

  “The Penitents.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  He closed his eyes now, moving his lips silently in prayer.

  “Pardon me,” Delphine said.

  “What?”

  “You should come down,” she said. “That can’t be good for you.”

  “I have two days to go. I’m only on my first day, and each town is to crucify someone for three days. Don’t you know?”

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s the only way.”

  “The only way for what?”

  “If you’re going to make me talk, give me more water. My throat hurts.”

  She dipped the sponge again and held it aloft for him.

  “The only way to appease God. So He’ll take the pestilence away.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Very wicked towns are to crucify three people. But we were no better or worse than most.”

  “Who decides how wicked your town is?” said Père Matthieu, fascinated.

  “They do.”

  “Were you out in the rain?” Delphine asked.

  “They came after the rain. They came yesterday.”

  “Do you have to stay out all night?” she said.

  He tried to ignore her and return to his prayers, but she repeated her question.

  “They come and take me down at night.”

  “The Penitents?”

  “No. The town. The Penitents are heading for Auxerre to perform a great miracle.”

  “Come down,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “Why you?”

  “What?” he said again, clearly annoyed.

  “Why did they pick you? Did you volunteer?”

  “The town picks. They vote. It’s a big honor.”

  Thomas laughed, and the dwarf gave him a dirty look.

  “Are you sure they’re coming back for you?” Thomas said, still amused.

  The dwarf went back to his prayers.

  “DEUS meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum, eaque detestor, quia peccando, non solum poenas…”

  “Because if it were me up there, I’d start thinking maybe the good people would leave me on the cross to make sure God was happy. Did you think of that?”

  “…non solum poenas a Te iuste statutas promeritus sum, sed praesertim quia offendi…”

  The girl looked at Thomas.

  “I think you should take him down.”

  “He clearly wants to stay there,” the priest said.

  Thomas smiled. He knew the girl wanted to keep the man from harm; Thomas liked the idea less for that reason and more because he knew the dwarf would fuss about it, and he was glad to do something good that was also entertaining.

  He didn’t expect the fight he got, though. As soon as he untied the dwarf’s feet, the small man started kicking at Thomas so hard he made the cross rock; it was all Thomas could do to keep the ladder upright, especially since he was laughing the whole time. Delphine furrowed her brow at Thomas’s attitude, and the priest paced restlessly, afraid one of them would be hurt.

  Thomas had the dwarf over his shoulder and nearly down the ladder when his burden kicked against the side of the cross and tipped the ladder, spilling them both into the soggy grass.

  “You little bastard,” Thomas said, angry now.

  The little man fumed at him from where he sat in the high grass. The priest thought of a surly rabbit and laughed into his hand despite his best intentions.

  The dwarf tried to climb the cross and resume his place, but Thomas grabbed him by the britches and hauled him down again.

  “I want to save my town!” the dwarf screamed, with tears of frustration in his eyes, and the game lost its humor even for Thomas.

  “Do you really want to go back up there?” Thomas asked.

  The man sat down in the grass and looked bewildered.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But don’t you see? This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can’t plow. I can’t build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now.”

  The priest opened his mouth to contradict the man, but nothing came out.

  “Shit,” Thomas said.

  And then he hauled the dwarf back up the cross and tied him fast.

  Emma LaTour looked out from the darkness of her house, stunned by the beauty of the day; except for visits to the well, she had not left her home since her Richard had been racked with pains by the fence and died there. At the end, he had been
grabbing his knees, and now his joints had locked him in a parody of childbirth, bloated like a dead dog or sheep. How was she to believe man was anything special when he looked so much like any other animal in death? He was just a rained-on, ruined carcass, as if he had never kissed her, as if he had never danced. The beautiful blue sky seemed to mock him, as did the bulk of the St. Etienne cathedral and the spire of the abbey, both of these stabbing upward from the high ground across the river in Auxerre. Nothing but false promises lay across the river, or up in the sky.

  Her carrots were nearly gone, and she was sick to death of them; they hurt her few teeth and she checked the skin of her arms constantly because she had the idea the carrots were turning her yellow. She needed to cross the bridge into town, though the thought made her shiver with fear. If only her sons would come; but they had their own children to think of, and she had not seen any of them in a week or more. Her little cottage had been forgotten.

  Now she was looking out her window, staying well back from the light so it wouldn’t illuminate her yellow skin; she heard a voice coming across the fields.

  And it was beautiful.

  It belonged to an angel.

  She saw him (or her?) sprinting down the weedy path, wearing a white skirt of sorts ruched up to the belt for running, bare of chest and foot. It was a boy. Nimble as a fox, and so lovely to watch, with his tangled blond hair bouncing. The child-angel leapt upon her fence of uneven branches and balanced along its length, calling to the window in a beautiful, heavily accented singsong, as if he could see her where she cowered in shadow.

  And der angel open der seal, and all of Auxerre behold

  For they are afraid, but now der holy men are come

  So holy from Gott in Heaven, to make miracles on der square,

  Come and see!

  In front of der church,

  but not in it,

  for thrown down are the priests

  and dead are der bishops.

  Come and see! Come and see!

  People of Auxerre, come and see!

  He leapt off the fence and over the birthing corpse of her husband and ran through the field, which was spotted purple with new growths of thistles; Emma had a mother’s instinct to yell at him not to stick his feet on their evil little crowns of spines, but he ran through them as if on purpose, then dove and actually rolled through the thickest patch of them, laughing and shouting, “Iesu! Iesu! Iesu!”

  The Penitents had come to Auxerre.

  The threescore farmers, carpenters, drapers, vintners, wives, and daughters who stood in cool sunlight near the St. Etienne cathedral had all been summoned by the beautiful boy. He gathered them with his songs and gambols, but especially with his promises of miracles against the plague. Hucksters of every stripe had tried to profit from the disease, especially in the early days, before they, too, sickened or grew afraid; so many relic sellers and apothecaries had come that soon any stranger with a case and a gleam in his eye was in danger of being beaten and flung into the Yonne, along with his sweetly herbed potions, deer bones, magic feathers, Galen cakes, or sap from the Cedars of Lebanon.

  When the disease bore down and the die-off began, the town was left alone, although her gates stood open. The bishop had said, when asked for his counsel on whether to impose a quarantine, “the fox already makes his bed among the hens,” which was very close in spirit to the seigneur’s observation that “closing those gates would be leading hens to piss.” Auxerre, thus, dutifully flew the black banner announcing the presence of the Great Death but remained open to whoever cared to brave it, be they pilgrims, refugees, or men with pretty lies to tell.

  But now the boy had come, and he was different.

  He was quite credible as the herald to a prophet, with his eyes of northern ocean blue and his dimpled smile. Even his German accent, normally a hindrance in these xenophobic times, lent him an air of exoticism; after all, if some holy cure were to come to Auxerre, it would not come from Burgundy. Why not the piney forests of the north?

  But this boy sold no cures.

  He never mentioned money at all.

  “Wait!” he said, capturing his audience with an up-pointed finger and a theatrical tilt to his head. “I believes I hear them. But perhaps you will hear them, too, if you make der Alleluia.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Children of Gott, make der ALLELUIA!”

  “ALLELUIA!” they cried, and a drum began to beat a simple march.

  The sound came up through the narrow streets that led down and to the river and echoed on the shuttered shop fronts and timbered houses that bordered the square. A line of ecstatic men and women entered the Place St. Etienne, shuffling slowly in something like a drugged march, striking themselves in time to the drumbeats with leather thongs fitted with iron hooks or spikes. They were naked from the waist up, like the boy, all wearing simple skirts that had once been white but had been marched in and bled on until they were the color of earth and as stiff as leather. The crowd gasped at the sight of them; the women’s bare breasts, the old blood drying, the new blood trickling, the white caps they wore with red crosses on the front and back. Some of the Auxerrois even fell to their knees wailing, thinking Judgment Day had come, here, now, and soon Christ himself would split the sky and part the damned from the saved.

  Now four women called out and four men answered:

  Iesu will you die for us?

  —Yes, love, yes, love!

  Do you fear the Roman whip?

  —No, love, no!

  And then the men called and the women answered:

  Sinners, will you bleed for me?

  —Yes, love, yes, love!

  Do you fear the pestilence?

  —No, love, no!

  Then, all together:

  Who will come and walk with us

  In His steps?

  To show Him that our love is true

  Thirty days!

  Behind these eight and the drummer trained a score or so who had clearly been recruited from other towns, all stripped to the waist, though less uniform in appearance. Some of them whipped themselves with tree branches; a girl walked behind bearing a bundle of sticks on her back to replace those that split.

  Now the drummer beat three beats and they all stopped. They shouted “Iesu!” and flung themselves facedown into the street, arms out, cruciform, eliciting a gasp from the crowd. The ones at the rear then stood and came forward, giving a stroke of the whip or the branch to each prone figure they passed, until they reached the front and flung themselves down again. In this way, like some horrible caterpillar, the entire line worked its way toward the square in front of St. Etienne and the astonished crowd of onlookers, then collapsed all at once.

  All but the man beating the drum.

  He set this aside now and looked at the crowd.

  “I am Rutger the Fair,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. Fair might have been a name from his youth; it seemed a better word to hang on an urbane womanizer than on this handsome but shocking man of thirty or so, graced with the broad, muscular chest of a woodcutter or a swordsman, brutally scarred from months of flagellation. His carelessly shaven (or intentionally cut) scalp would have sat well on a madman, but his deep-set eyes shone with intelligence, even wisdom. A goatish beard of blond and gray erupted from his chin. He seemed less a cleric than the antidote to clericism. If Christ had been German as well as a carpenter, and if He had survived His scourging, and if He had shorn His head with a broken bottle, He might well have looked like this man.

  “I come to you, Auxerre, from the land of Saxony, where the plague is not yet come, and shall never come; I stand before you to offer you either the cup or the sword. The cup is that of forgiveness, and the sword is that of wrath.”

  Now the boy came up from behind the crowd, bearing a pewter goblet and a small sword. He stood by the man, stomping his feet twice.

  “God demands a tithe. If one in ten of you turn from your lives of false comfort and walk with
us for thirty days, your town will be spared. Or if three of you will sit the cross for three days, your town will also be spared. But if you stay here and do not show the Lord your love, you will all die the death of the stone under the arm, or the stone in the crotch, or the death of the spitting of the blood. I see by your faces you know these deaths, ja? Well, you have now the chance to turn the face of death away from you. Shall I speak further on God’s offer, or will you harden your hearts and go to your houses to die in sin?”

  “Speak on!” someone yelled.

  Another repeated it.

  “Hup!” Rutger said, and the cruciform Penitents behind him stood, arms out, faces lifted to the sky.

  Some of them were sobbing.

  He spoke.

  Emma watched, amazed, as the butcher and a vintner named Jules, who had once courted her sister, came bearing a two-wheeled cart. They put her poor, stiff husband in it, revolted by his decomposition but seemingly unafraid of his disease. Why were they not calling out to her? Because she sat in shadow and they thought she was dead, too, like almost everyone on this side of the Yonne. Or they thought that she had run away.

  “Where are you taking him?” she asked, letting a little sunlight fall on her face so they could see her. She winced as much from the sunlight as from her fear of their reaction to her color, but she did not startle them. If they thought she was yellow, they were very polite about it.

  “The cathedral,” Jules said. “You’ll want to see this, Emma.”

  “Are you burying him?”

  “No, Emma. Come to Saint Etienne.”

  So saying, they carted her Richard away, his knees still locked against his chest, the little blond boy now visible, skipping before them through the thistles and singing a song in German.

  The sun was lowering when the three dead Auxerrois were brought before the cathedral of St. Etienne. Richard was the worst of them, having been dead a week, but two others had been chosen. A beautiful young maid who had broken hearts in the wine shop by the front gate was only one day gone, though her beauty had already been cast down; she had been healthy at daybreak, but by Nones, the plague had turned her the color of an eggplant and killed her outright.