Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  The knock, though expected, startled Delphine when it came.

  She squeaked like a mouse.

  The knock came again.

  The hand that knocked wore mail.

  “Who is it?” Thomas barked, sounding lordly.

  “Servants of His Holiness,” said an unimpressed voice. “Now open this door.”

  This was no invitation.

  They were discovered.

  Delphine confirmed her fears by peeking through a hole in the wooden shutters; two men wearing chain mail and the cross-key emblem of the palace stood in the courtyard below the window, one of them chasing off a kitchen girl who had been clearing up. Both men carried poleaxes.

  Delphine clutched the case that held the spear.

  “I’m sick,” Thomas said. “My neck is swollen and my throat hurts.” He sneezed loudly as punctuation.

  “Amazing how many people we knock for feel the plague coming on. Open the door or I’ll break it down. And you won’t like your trip to the palace if I do.”

  Thomas took up his sword and Delphine shook her head at him, wide eyed.

  “What, then?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know, but not that!”

  The man outside the door flung himself against it; it was a new door, and solidly built.

  “If you make me axe through this whoring thing, you won’t walk out of here. Open this door!”

  Delphine’s eyes got heavy.

  After the man yelled, she noticed a light coming from beyond the window. She put her hand over the spear and opened the shutter.

  The courtyard was gone.

  The window now gave on the bank of the river, outside the city walls, and it was as if the window had lowered; the drop from the ledge would be easy, not five feet.

  An axe hit the door.

  The man in the hallway was swearing.

  Thomas would fight to defend her, but maybe not if she left.

  He was to let them take him.

  “Let them take you,” she heard herself say.

  Let them take me, Peter.

  Come on, Delphine.

  His ear’s off! His ear!

  She closed her eyes.

  What about Thomas!

  She smelled flowers.

  Another one.

  Stronger than mine.

  It would protect her.

  WHAT ABOUT THOMAS?

  Come on, little moon.

  She rolled out the window.

  * * *

  Thomas still had his sword in his hand, though sheathed.

  Something like a wing flashed near the window, a very large wing, and Delphine opened the shutter.

  It had been dark in the room, and the bright daylight dazzled him.

  An axe hit the door.

  “I’m going to break your goddamned legs, do you hear me? I’ll drag you there by your balls if you make me chop this whole door up!”

  Thomas drew his sword.

  “Let them take you,” the girl said.

  Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  She turned her face from him.

  She rolled out the window then, but he never heard her hit the ground.

  He thought he heard wings.

  Thomas launched himself into the man who came through the door, thinking to bowl him down, hoping to find a smaller man behind him. He hit the big soldier, but not hard enough.

  I thought I had him

  I’m in the comte’s body I’m not as strong

  The man reeled back against the wall but gathered himself and gave the Comte d’Évreux the back end of his axe, breaking teeth.

  His body but I feel it GOD

  He fell.

  He looked for his sword, but could not find it.

  GOD

  They hit him again.

  He was not dragged to the papal palace by his testicles.

  He was taken in a cart.

  After they broke his legs.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Of the Doctor

  The boy who served the pope’s physician woke from his little bed at the other end of the room and brought a candle over to his master, who whimpered and thrashed in the grips of another nightmare. How many nights in a row had he seen him disturbed by one of these? He knew the physician, Maître de Chauliac, to be a good man, and wondered what devils could trouble one so kind.

  This was the worst nightmare yet.

  He leaned close to look, but made sure he did not let the candle drip on the man’s full cheeks or big nose. That would be like a story he had told him about a curious woman who drove away an angel. Was it an angel? Maybe just a boy with wings. The maître told him too many stories to keep them all separate.

  “Maître?” he said, but very quietly.

  He had learned not to wake him in these times, but he dearly wanted to end this particular dream. Did men die of dreams? He would try to remember to ask the doctor in the morning. Not tonight, though. He stood with the candle ready to light him to whatever the maître might ask him for.

  Wine, the boy thought.

  The worst ones always wake him and he asks me for wine.

  But if I pour the wine and he does not wake, I shall have to put it back in the jug and clean the goblet so the little bugs don’t get in it.

  Pour the wine, Tristan.

  He took a little enameled goblet from its shelf and poured wine from a pewter jug with three rooster’s feet. He was fond of that jug, as he was fond of the smell of wine. Not lately, though. Something was off, like a hint of rot. Had they waited too late to get the grapes in? He had worked as assistant to a baker, and thought to work his way up to being a butler and minding the pope’s fruit cellar at the foot of the kitchen tower, so good was he at ferreting out rottenness. His mother said he had the nose of a dog. But the great doctor had seen what a clever boy he was and pulled him from the kitchens to replace his former boy, who had died of the plague.

  Actually, three of the doctor’s assistants had died of the plague, but the good doctor had not caught it himself.

  Not yet, he would have corrected. Or he might have said insh’allah, a word he had learned from Arab texts. It meant something like So God be pleased, but Tristan didn’t understand why he didn’t just say that.

  “Tristan.”

  The doctor was sitting up now, his big, friendly eyes looking bugged and haunted. He rubbed a hand over them and they regained some of their reason.

  “Tristan, help me dress.”

  “Yes, maître. Are you sure? It is still long before morning.”

  “Just get my clothes together, please.”

  The man and the boy went into one of the grand, vaulted hallways of the palace, and the physician stopped, considering. He looked left, in the direction that led to the pope’s bedroom and adjoining study. The boy waited with the candle, looking very much like a small dog waiting for its master to open a door.

  “Is the Holy Father well?” Tristan said.

  “No, Tristan. I do not think he is, though I cannot say why. He seems in good health, but…he is changed.”

  “Is it to do with the wine?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I thought, perhaps the wine…it smells funny.”

  He looked at the boy and narrowed his eyes, considering and rejecting this premise.

  He turned on his heel now and went back into his room.

  Tristan watched, fascinated, as the doctor sorted through the writs in his desk, many of which came directly from the pope. When he found one that seemed to suit his purpose, he fetched one of his chirurgical knives and, as delicately as though he were cutting live flesh, lifted the two separated parts of the wax seal from it. He then fetched a fresh sheet of parchment and wrote something in a very careful hand. When he had finished, he rolled it and, to the boy’s astonishment, heated his knife in the candle flame and used it to graft the two halves of the seal together again.

  “I see your mind frothing with questions, and yet, recognizing the delicacy of the situ
ation, you don’t ask them. Instead, you watch for yourself and come to your own conclusions. I think you have a future, Tristan. I think you will make yourself very useful.”

  Now they left again, the boy hurrying to keep up with his master’s purposeful steps. He turned right this time and opened a door to a set of stairs the boy knew about but had been warned never to follow.

  “I know you wonder why I’m going to this ghastly place, let alone taking you. The truth is I cannot say. Except that the people who work their art down here are the sort of men who might need two pairs of eyes on them to do the right thing.”

  A man groaned in the darkness ahead of them.

  The dungeon.

  This is the dungeon.

  They put thieves and sorcerers here.

  It had not occurred to Tristan, who had the deepest confidence in Maître de Chauliac, to be afraid until just that moment.

  “We don’t fix men down here, good doctor, we break them. I think you’re on the wrong floor.”

  The dungeons, which had sat in such a state of disuse for the first years of the aptly named Clement’s reign that old carts and tools were stored here, had recently come to life again. Sournois, formerly a blacksmith, had been singled out specifically by this changed and un-clement Clement to head up the new “nether wing” of the palace, which was where the enemies of God’s peace would be stored and, when necessary, put to the question. The man hanging from his arms with his ruined legs dangling looked to have been asked a question of some gravity indeed—a question whose answer he could not or would not share.

  The doctor noted, with some revulsion, that the man had neither nipples nor fingernails, and that his shoulders were out of joint.

  Yes, this was the man in de Chauliac’s dream.

  “I’m in the right place. What is that man’s name?”

  “This geezer,” Sournois said, standing up and patting the man’s soft belly proprietarily, “is no less than a Norman comte and a future king of Navarre.”

  “The Comte d’Évreux,” de Chauliac said.

  “That’s the one,” Sournois said, sticking a thumb in the man’s navel and pinching a handful of fat hard enough to make the barely conscious young fellow groan again.

  “Get him down.”

  “And put him where?” the gaoler said, growing suspicious.

  “In whatever you intended to remove him with when you were through. He’s clearly not walking anywhere.”

  Sournois got closer to the doctor, but the doctor did not step back.

  “I have it from the Holy Father himself that this man is to stay where he is. He’s coming by personally before the feast tomorrow. Might even come tonight.”

  The doctor was aware of a cold sweat beginning under his robes.

  He will not come yet please not yet insh’allah.

  “And I have it from the good Clement that he is to leave with me. You might recognize that seal,” the doctor said, handing his parchment to the other, who recognized his name on the outside and snapped the seal.

  He frowned and stared at the writ with confusion and distaste.

  “It says that you are to release your close prisoner to me so that he does not die. Which he most certainly will, and soon, if he keeps swinging from your ceiling.”

  “But why’s it in Latin? It’s always in French for me. I read a little French.”

  “Perhaps His Holiness forgot your lack of education. Shall we wait here for him so we may remind him? Frankly, I don’t know if I can save this man, and I would much rather have him die in your care than mine.”

  Sournois put the writ in his pouch.

  “To hell with that,” he said, and went to fetch a handcart.

  Thomas was cold.

  He hurt so badly in so many places that a strange sort of numbness had settled into him. His chief complaint was the cold, which felt as though it would never be out of him.

  He did not know who the man was that wheeled him out of the oubliettes and through a door meant for horses and carts, but he sensed that he would have died had he remained. Not of his injuries. Something had been coming for him, and he had just escaped. Had he remained, he would not only have died, he would have died spectacularly.

  Horribly.

  The man with the fly’s head would have bitten him.

  He shivered.

  He looked up at the man wheeling him, and the man looked down at him with kind eyes. He wanted to ask him who he was, but he didn’t have the strength.

  When he saw that Thomas was still shivering, despite the garments that had been laid across him, the wheeling man stopped and removed his robes, revealing a long shirt that bore the irremovable stains of surgeries.

  He placed this around Thomas, and Thomas smiled.

  A doctor, then.

  He might yet get home to Arpentel and see his wife.

  “Don’t speak.” The man smiled down at him. “You have only one task, and that is to live. See that you do it.”

  He wanted to tell the doctor to get the arrow out of his tongue, but then he realized that was another doctor, another time. He wanted to ask him if angel’s blood was made of egg whites, but that was wrong, too.

  And no wife was waiting for him.

  He wrinkled up his face as if to cry, but didn’t let himself.

  He lost consciousness.

  When he came to again, a girl was looking at the wheeling man.

  He was looking wide-eyed at her, as though he saw something Thomas did not see.

  Delphine? Was that her name?

  Her hair was short.

  “Remember this, boy,” the doctor said to a young man Thomas had not seen before, who also stared wide-eyed at Delphine.

  What were they seeing?

  Delphine put her fingers to her lips, and the man and the boy left.

  Now she looked down at Thomas, smiling.

  Those gray eyes.

  She cooled his brow with her sleeve, which had been dunked in the Rhône.

  “I’m going to die,” he managed.

  “You already did die, remember? You’re the dead one.”

  He felt his spirit coming loose, like a ship from its moorings, but she lifted his head and pointed.

  “Hold on,” the girl said, “just for a moment.”

  She put her hand behind his head and lifted so he could see.

  Something was coming out of the river, lit by the moon.

  A man.

  A man in rusty armor, carrying a sword by the blade, cruciform.

  A heavily muscled man with a graying beard and a scarred face.

  Him.

  He weakly shook the ruined head that was not really his.

  Thomas de Givras stepped dripping from the river, eyes closed, a sleepwalker.

  Delphine got out of the dripping revenant’s way, and he came to the cart. Thomas was afraid. Was he already dead?

  He watched himself bend over, getting closer.

  Dripping on him.

  He felt very dizzy; the world was going black.

  He was being kissed now by his own mouth, not as lovers kiss, with tongues, but as true lovers kiss, sharing breath.

  He breathed out of the comte’s lungs and into his own.

  The ship of his soul lurched away from his false body.

  And into his true one.

  He opened his eyes.

  The body of the comte twitched now, once, then twice, only now it was under him. His mouth, his actual mouth, was on the dead man, and he pulled up. He breathed in, his strong lungs filling with air, his hands clutching, ready to grab weapons or levers or to brace against the pillars of the temple. He was strong again. He ran his hand through his full beard, and tugged on his longish hair.

  He laughed, and Delphine laughed, too, shushing him as he put the doctor’s robes on over his cold, wet armor.

  She now bent and kissed the cheek of the dead man in the cart.

  “Give the river back its due,” she said.

  Thomas tipped th
e body into the water, and it floated for a moment, and then the darkness took it away.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Of the Arming, and of the Vigil

  “Isnard!”

  The chamber boy at Elysium House peered out the window and down at the street, the darkness of which still resisted the prying of the low morning sun between the close buildings.

  “Here, Isnard!”

  He wrinkled his nose and put down the piss-pot he had been about to chuck. Was that his new friend, the page? And had not that page served the arrested knight?

  “Diego?” he called down in a carefully measured whisper.

  “Yes!” Delphine said.

  She, too, was an expert whisperer.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He looked behind him to make sure no hand was reaching to yank his ear for idleness.

  “I need a favor.”

  “What is it?” he said. “And be quick!”

  Why was Diego in his nightclothes?

  “My master’s things—have they been taken?”

  “No. The room is as it was. The carpenter is coming tomorrow to fix the door.”

  “And my master’s horse?”

  “In the stables, eating twice his share of hay. The English lord means to take him.”

  “Open the door for me.”

  “What? I can’t!”

  “Yes you can. Open the door, and help me fetch out my master’s armor and horse.”

  He looked behind him again.

  “A horse? They’ll hang me for stealing a horse!”

  “It’s not stealing. The horse belongs to us.”

  He considered this.

  “All the same, they’ll kill me! Then they’ll turn me out, and my father will kill me again!”

  “They won’t turn you out. You speak French, Italian, and Provençal. How many times have they used you to translate? Just let me in, and I’ll do most of it.”

  “They’ll see you.”

  “Not if you distract them.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Fall down the stairs with something loud. A pan or something.”

  This was beginning to sound fun.

  He would get a beating, but some things were worth a beating.

  And he liked the little Spanish page with the French accent, even if he looked a bit like a girl.

  “Why should I?”

  “If you do, I’ll give you this ivory comb I found in the street.”