Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  Delphine made her way first into the garden, with its smells of night flowers and the calls of strange birds, and she skimmed the wall until she came to a door at the bottom of a tower.

  Is it here?

  Yes.

  She kissed the iron lock and the studded door swung open.

  The room she entered served as storehouse for the pope’s wine; candles flickered on sconces (it would not be long before the butler’s boy came to tend them), revealing graceful vaulted ceilings in the same exquisite limestone that composed the rest of the palace. Barrels hunched together, looking short beneath this ceiling, though each of them was taller than she. She stepped uncertainly to one barrel, laying her cheek against its cool oak and listening.

  Quem quaeritis? the cool walls seemed to ask.

  Whom do you seek?

  You won’t hear anything.

  Feel him.

  She now crawled on top of one of the huge tuns and curled on it like a kitten settling in for a nap.

  Not this one.

  She did this again and again until she came to one very near the back, one that had been waiting since August.

  Here

  He’s here

  You can’t do this you can’t this is a dream

  She looked around and saw a rack of tools, pulling out a prying bar that felt much too heavy for her.

  I’m too weak

  No little moon not tonight

  We’re coming

  Our strength is yours

  She lifted the bar and brought it down with great force, nearly falling in as the lid began to give. She laughed at herself and stood on a neighboring tun to finish.

  She got the lid off, throwing the broken disk aside, and a sour-sweet wall of scent hit her.

  The wine looked black.

  Splinters floating in it.

  Say “Rise.”

  She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  Say it he will hear

  THAT CUNT FROM PARIS IS IN THE CELLAR WITH HIM

  Hurry

  “Rise,” she whispered.

  Nothing.

  At first.

  Then a ripple.

  Nothing.

  Another ripple.

  Then a white finger.

  The hand followed it.

  Pinkish-white, waxy, shocking beneath its splendid rings.

  She took it in hers.

  God don’t let it come apart in my hand I can’t take it I can’t

  It squeezed.

  That night in August. He could not sleep. The braziers on either side of him lit his bedroom with a fierce light, illuminating the curls and spirals of the fresco of the oak tree that embraced all four walls. Squirrels and birds perched there, and acorns, all on the slender branches that looped over a frescoed sky of the rarest blue. Pierre Roger, known as Clement, was sweating in his silk sleeping-gown, the cord of his sleeping cap wet beneath his chin. He called for Luquin, his cubicular, to bring him a little watered wine. The young man, an angelic blond from Bordeaux, had been charged by Maître de Chauliac not only to keep the braziers hot enough so fire might be seen (this to keep the Holy Father free of plague), no matter how uncomfortable the heat, but also, and more urgently, to watch that neither coverlet nor pillow should be pushed by sleeping hand or knee into the flame.

  This was the hottest night since the fires had been prescribed. Clement felt he was suffocating and said as much, but then said, “Yet I withdraw my complaint; it is not for you to choose between love for me or fidelity to my good doctor’s instruction. Is it, Luquin?”

  “My first loyalty is to you.”

  “And mine is to God, whom I serve through ministering to his flock. And whom the doctor serves through ministering to me. It will not do for me to defy God’s purpose by thwarting another of his servants, will it, Luquin?”

  “Yet it seems to me, Holy Father, that by this argument no two Christians might honestly disagree. Could God not be served in different ways by men with different minds?” the young man said, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve.

  “Ah. Not wholly unsound. But your discomfort skews your argument, for you want the fires out. The maître’s métier is fighting illness, a field in which I am ignorant; humility demands submission to those who know best. Keep the fires lit. I will go and nap in the room of the stag until I can stand to return.”

  His feet probed for the floor. Luquin rushed to bring his slippers, but he waved the young man off.

  “The tiles are cooler than the air. My feet shall be grateful to feel them.”

  Clement shuffled through the stone connecting room with its staircase and then into his private study, fitted out with a small second bed for when he tired of the grand canopied one in the bedroom. The walls of this room gave it its name, for its frescoes sang the glories of the hunt, not only of the stag, but of all manner of game; a man in parti-colored clothes let loose a ferret on a rabbit. Fishermen dangled nets over an embarrassment of fish. A naughty-looking boy took birds at the top of a tree. Some had grumbled that the pope should look upon scenes from Scripture rather than the delights of hunting and bathing and birding, but he had said, “God made earthly pleasures, too, which may be enjoyed without sin. Shall I affront Him with pride by thinking myself above them?”

  Célèste was waiting for him.

  Clothed modestly, as she always was, so that they might more easily separate and look guiltless at the sound of the far door opening. Might not a young woman privately visit her uncle by marriage to discuss a matter of Christian law? And as for sounds of pleasure, castle walls treat the ears capriciously. Do you know what you risk with this accusation? Are you very, very sure?

  The entrance from the bedroom was safe; Luquin knew never to enter the room of the stag, and he was not so dull as not to know why. “They call it the room of the stag because that is where His Holiness mounts horns on his nephew’s head,” as he told his friend, the second falconer, and other friends besides.

  When, with one warm, backward glance, Célèste slipped barefoot down the stairs between the rooms, her kirtle smoothed (if damp), her question of Christian law duly answered, Clement lay back on the bed, enjoying the air coming in through the window. Not cool, perhaps, but mild. A breeze from paradise itself compared with the furnace raging in his bedroom.

  Sleep would come now.

  It began to, at least.

  At first he wove a nightmare for himself. Four soldiers of low rank and rust were on the verge of raping a girl in a barn. A donkey hung half-eaten from the roof.

  Flies everywhere.

  He woke.

  The sound of high, girlish laughter had awakened him.

  But whose?

  And what a dream!

  Guilt for his carnal sin, no doubt, the four soldiers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John teaching him the grotesquery of his adultery with his niece by marriage. And the ass from Bethlehem or Palm Sunday, too.

  He exhaled, considered returning to his proper bed.

  No.

  Cooler here.

  Poor Luquin sweating in there, but he’ll sneak out soon enough.

  He closed his eyes again.

  He slipped into a pleasant dream of children laughing.

  What children?

  Oh.

  Those.

  The tittering came from the wall next to him, where four boyish girls or girlish boys played and cooled their plump feet in frescoed waters. Not his favorite part of the painting, easy to overlook.

  He had never really seen them before, these puti, as they appeared to him in this nascent dream.

  So vivid and so happy.

  He liked them very much.

  That youth’s endless pleasures must end had not occurred to the bathers, and he felt now that they were right. He saw, in the nave of his mind, one of them look at him with the shared, secret wisdom of immortality. Out of the corner of the eye, as befit the sly nature of the secret. He or she drew his or her feet out of the stream and stood on the
bed next to Clement. The weight of the painted child was real somehow, somehow pressed down the bed.

  More tittering.

  Those watching from the wall.

  Now that cherubic face bent to his, and he smiled in his half sleep, but the child’s hand took his cheeks and made him soften his mouth, the better to receive the kiss. And what a kiss. It was spearmint and fennel, it was brandied and onioned and wild, it was water and the mark water leaves when it retreats from sand.

  Célèste, he wanted to say, both her name and how this kiss tasted, celestial, an earthly pleasure upside down with its feet hung in stars.

  But he could not speak, for he could not breathe.

  This became urgent.

  He pushed the bather’s face away, and the boy-girl shrugged and returned to its fellows, one of whom bent to kiss it even more intimately.

  Clement woke, gasping for air.

  He looked and saw the fresco, which lay as it had been made, motionless save for the guttering of the candle that illumined it, and mute.

  His lips tingled, though.

  What of that?

  “Célèste?” he said.

  Nothing.

  Only the sound of a fly.

  He looked at the painting again and saw that he had been mistaken; it was not as it had been. He counted three children, not four.

  He put his hand on the bed next to him and found it wet, whether from the loins of his niece or the feet of the bather he was unsure.

  Enough of this.

  He would return to his canopied bed and to the companionship of his cubicular.

  He got to his feet in the shimmering near-darkness, and felt water under them.

  As if something had dripped across the floor.

  He took another step, but instinct slowed this one.

  He nearly started out of his skin to see it standing near the doorway.

  A child, neither boy nor girl but both, its skin pale.

  Its feet wet.

  It put a finger to its lips, but the man was too frightened to speak.

  It pointed at the candle, which went out, though moonlight still lit the room enough for him to see it walking toward him.

  Pierre Roger went to cross himself, but his arm cramped and froze in the third position, the useless claw of his right hand stuck to his left breast.

  He backed up away from the boy-girl until his legs bumped against the frame of his bed.

  The sound of a dog licking.

  He half-turned to see one of the bathers on all fours, spiderlike, lapping at the love-stain on the sheet.

  He inhaled a gasp of air, but another child, standing on the bed behind him, stoppered his mouth with a cool hand, aborting his shout in a spasm.

  They pulled him down on the bed.

  The one who had kissed him straddled him now, fluidly but with a boulder’s weight.

  Can God make something He can’t lift? its black eyes asked him.

  Now its arm down his throat, tearing his mouth.

  He could not breathe.

  He did not breathe again.

  Until.

  He sat up from his bath.

  A small hand held his.

  He could not see, and then he could, only shapes at first but his eyes were clearing. He could not tell who had his hand.

  He needed to breathe out but could not.

  His lungs were heavy and full.

  He tried twice before he managed to empty them.

  The dead man sat up.

  He expressed thick, dark wine from his nose and mouth.

  Delphine wrinkled her nose in disgust as it washed over her feet where she crouched on the neighboring barrel, but she did not let him go. His skin had the consistency of roseate wax; yes, he was a giant wax doll who had been held too close to a fire so that the features sagged and melted just a bit. She had to get him out of the barrel.

  God, the stink.

  The wine had covered it, sealed it.

  But no more.

  She felt ill.

  Hurry.

  She pulled, afraid that his arm would come off, but, though it did not, he was too heavy for her to lift alone.

  She tried again, feeling more strength in her, and nearly got him out. He lifted his head and blinked what was left of his eyes at her. Then his eyes became whole. His features shifted and tightened.

  He saw her for the first time.

  Terror filled his eyes; not terror of her, but of what he had seen before.

  She pulled again, with all her might, and this time he helped her. He clambered out in a great rush of wine, kneeing his way to the barrel next to her.

  He covered his nakedness and shuddered, his mouth open, drool coming from it, but it was a living mouth now.

  His teeth were purple.

  When he spoke, he panted between words.

  “I. Was. In Hell.”

  “You still are.”

  “Are. You. An angel?”

  “No. But there’s one here. And more are coming.”

  “Good,” he said, crying, looking like a pale, adult toddler. “That’s good.”

  “Maybe we won’t think so. The war is coming with them.”

  PART V

  The Lord made answer.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Of the Gemini, and of the Unmasking

  Jacquot squinted his eyes, waiting for the smoke from the pope’s twin braziers to drift in another direction. His post as papal guard would not allow him to rest his loaded crossbow, nor could he wipe his tearing eyes. Neither could he fetch the untouched quail that mocked him from the plate of the new bugger cardinal just in front of him, despite its tempting crust of herbs and his desperately rumbling stomach.

  Fuck off, smoke.

  The smoke persisted.

  He fought the urge to turn his head away, fearing to draw attention to himself. His duty was to remain still. Thus far, his duty was proving indistinguishable from that of a pillar.

  He had not worn the crossed-key insignia of the guard for very long; it was less than two weeks since he rode into Avignon with the troop of Breton archers that had pulled him from his Norman tree, all of them slavering for Jerusalem gold and the absolution that going on crusade would bring. Yet his ability to quarrel a crabapple off a stump at thirty yards had so impressed the quartermaster that the captain of the guard had sent for him.

  Now this.

  Cunting, cunting smoke.

  He had just wondered for the fortieth time how much longer this goddamned feast could last when he heard a gasp go up from the crowd. Several pointing fingers jabbed toward the rear of the courtyard, and the cardinals turned to look as well. Now the other guards looked, so Jacquot did as well.

  What he saw bewildered him.

  A second pope had entered the courtyard; Jacquot’s watery eyes were unsure, but this pope seemed a perfect twin to the one who sat before him, save for his white robes and miter. A troop of soldiers in cross-key tabards, the captain of the guard among them, marched at this white pope’s side. His right hand held a crosier and a peasant girl held his left.

  The seated pope, wearing ruby-littered robes of burnt orange and a miter with three crowns of gold, looked right at his geminus but remained seated. The guards around the nearer pope, like him, were all new recruits culled from those who had drifted south, and none of them had the first idea what to make of this.

  The men near the pope in white had their gazes fixed. They had been prepared for what they would see. Most of those were veterans of the palace, kept farther away from His Holiness these last months, but now standing together near the pretender.

  Sweet Christ there’s going to be a fight and fuck this fucking smoke.

  He stepped back out of the smoke’s path and wiped his eyes in case he had to shoot.

  “False pope!” the pope in white shouted, his voice echoing off the walls in the Courtyard of Honor. “You know you are a devil! Show your true form or depart!”

  Now the near pope stood, his ey
es wide, pointing at the other.

  “A devil in white cries devil at your Father! Lord protect us!” he shouted, but his fear seemed false.

  “Tell them what lord you mean,” said the little girl. Her voice seemed familiar to Jacquot. He wanted to wipe his eyes again to get a better look at her, but now the knight who had lately accompanied the pope and all but taken over the duties of the captain of the guard, a harsh seigneur with a leonine face and black teeth, growled, “Crossbows ready.”

  Jacquot raised his weapon.

  The bugger cardinal, his upper lip dewed with sweat, turned on his bench and looked first at Jacquot and then at his crossbow, where his trigger hand partly obscured the ivory inlay picturing the Last Supper.

  “No worries, Your Eminence,” he said, knowing that a wink from his drooping eye was unlikely to inspire confidence but giving the young cardinal one anyway. He had found that steadying others steadied himself.

  Peering from beneath his lowered hood, Thomas saw that the true pope had entered the courtyard of honor. All eyes had turned that way. The knight in friar’s robes did not breathe like a bull before his charge, but silently readied his sword, curling his body around it to hide it from the poor of Avignon jostling around him.

  He must slide it from its sheath and leap the first table in one motion.

  He must be upon the higher table before they saw him.

  He must kill the false pope before they could react.

  He must surprise them.

  At least two at the upper table were devils.

  Now, he thought.

  The sword leapt from its sheath and he leapt upon the first table, kicking a plate of dark bread aside.

  The lion-faced knight turned, faster than Thomas had hoped, his axe already out. Recognition flashed in his little black eyes; he did not alert the others—he wanted to handle this himself.

  YOU FUCKING THIEF YOU WANT DEATH AND HERE IT COMES

  The devil-knight leapt upon the cardinal’s table, just where Thomas had planned to jump. It squatted and slashed with its axe, but Thomas ducked and turned so it bit through his habit and glanced off his backplate, continuing his turn so the point of his sword wheeled around and into the lion-knight’s face. It continued through the back of the head. The stabbed knight screamed, but it was also a roar.