Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

Thomas was a small boy now, looking up at something sickening to look at, but which he thought would not hurt him.

  That’s not its job

  It’s just a clerk

  The room was small and dim, and he was not sure where the light came from: no sconce, no niche, no hearth, no window.

  No door.

  How will I get out?

  Will I get out?

  He was not as tall as the table. The other consulted a book and other documents, hobbling around the table on its ankles, its feet turned on their sides like a cripple’s; it carried a stool upon which it sat every third or fourth step, clearly in pain. Thomas had to keep moving around to see it past the big table. It was as if it wanted to hide itself from him, as if it knew it was hideous, its eyes just holes in its gray, formless head, its skin blotched and moldy. So it shuffled painfully and kept the table between them, checking the book, checking parchments against one another; its arms had two elbows each, so it was hard to tell what it would reach for next.

  A sort of fishy mouth opened in the middle of its chest.

  “You really did try at the end. To do the right things, I mean. You nearly escaped. It was your bad luck to die before the retreat from Avignon, when they took all the souls with them, regardless of innocence or guilt. A betrayal of their agreement, of course, but so was attacking Heaven. I suppose the worst thing about this for you, worse than the question of whether I am lying, and I am not, though a liar would say as much, is a question of intent. Will I tell you the truth out of sympathy, because I was naturally sympathetic in life and this part of my damnation is to damn the undeserving; or because your sense of outrage at being unjustly damned will heighten your pain? Hell, like prison, is worse when you don’t feel you earned it. Eventually, of course, that goes numb. And they find something that’s still raw and they work on that, or they give you something back only to make you feel enough to scream when you lose it again. I’ve even heard them make men think they were being pardoned, or born into new earthly bodies, or rescued by God himself. They’re really quite good at it. It’s all they’ve had to do for a very long time. That, and make mockeries of beasts and men. You’ve seen one or two, I think.”

  “I think so,” he said.

  His voice a little boy’s voice.

  He looked at his hand.

  A little boy’s hand.

  A polished mirror on the wall, a stone wall as in a castle, let him see himself.

  His son.

  He was his very young son, as he looked the last time Thomas had seen him.

  He was scared.

  With great difficulty, the thing moved close to him and sat on its stool. It smelled like the bottom of a well. It looked like it wanted to cry.

  “Thomas de Givras,” it said, looking down at him paternally, “I damn thee.”

  “Where…where will I go?”

  “Out.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t you think I’m tired of that question? Can’t you think of me?”

  “May I just stay here with you?”

  “I’d like that,” it said. “But they wouldn’t. And I’m more frightened of them than you understand.”

  Someone yelled in another room, in another language, and then began to beg in that language.

  Hell’s first floor, he began to grasp, was begging.

  An utter loss of dignity, if not hope.

  Not yet.

  “Please.”

  “Well…”

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  Silence.

  It just aimed at him with the holes it had for eyes.

  “How…how do I go, then? Since I must.”

  “Through me, of course.”

  “How?”

  “You’re a smart boy. How do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A bell sounded, deep like a church bell.

  The begging in the close room turned to screaming.

  “I’m sorry. It’s time.”

  So saying, it grabbed the boy by a skinny arm.

  Mouths opened not just on its stomach, but in many places.

  “No! No!”

  It ate him.

  It hurt.

  This scene played out innumerable times, with every sort of variation, but always ending the same way. Each time, he tried to reason with it, or to fight it, or to otherwise avoid the excruciating finale. He told himself not to try, that the end was inevitable, but even after he resolved to give up, still he ran away from it, or tried to use the table to block it, or any other ploy he could devise, because it hurt just that much. At length, when he gave up trying and even speaking, the interaction shortened to nothing more than its reading off his name and sentence

  Thomas de Givras, I damn thee

  and then chewing him down alive.

  He shivered and let it.

  I damn thee

  He cried and let it.

  I damn thee

  And then he just let it.

  Eventually he even stopped yelling, and that was when they decided he was ready for something worse.

  FORTY-TWO

  Of the Harrowing

  He forgot his name. How long he had been there stopped meaning anything. He went from one torment to another, starting with bodily pain and going on to heartbreak; he was skinned and then made to drag his skin behind him, then made to sew this skin back on himself, with the dirt and gravel it had picked up now under it; he was shredded slowly, crammed with thorns and made to eject them, crowded in with naked throngs and scalded, made to fight for cool water or a glimpse of sky, and when they saw that he liked fighting, they made him fight again and again for everything, for years, until even his rage was broken, and he wept and succumbed when confronted; he was murdered and betrayed by those he loved, and then made to murder and betray them, then desecrate them, cannibalize them, regurgitate them. Nothing was left out.

  No weakness was overlooked.

  For pride in his strength he was made a plaything. For his carnality he was rendered sexless.

  He was made to live each oath he’d spoken, no matter how ridiculous, lapping Christ’s wounds, drowned with Christ in shit, boiled in Mary’s sour milk, sodomized by the cocks of the Apostles, until he had been stripped of his capacity for laughter, or even the capacity to disbelieve the outrageous. They took his humor from him not because they themselves were humorless—they most certainly were not—but because it so offended them that man had been given this, too.

  Hell was mutable and hard, banal and shocking, painful and numbing, burning and frozen, but mostly it was real.

  He had become the butt of every joke he told.

  Hell was real.

  He was back in Paris.

  Île de la Cité.

  He lay against a wall, bloated, fat, dead of plague but not dead. He could not move except to blink. He could not close his mouth, which stood painfully open. To his right, a stack of empty, broken wine barrels. Arrows lay near him, stuck in mud, or lying with their points broken off from having struck the wall behind him.

  An arrow hissed down at him from a crenellated wall, punching an agonizing hole in his gut. It burned. He yelled through his gaping mouth.

  “That’s it, Phillipe!” a man said to his companion on the wall.

  More arrows flew, some missing, most piercing him. The last one went in his tongue and through the back of his throat.

  “I work better with obstacles.”

  He shrieked.

  Then he saw the light.

  Coming from farther down the street.

  The light in this infernal Paris had been dim, as on a rainy day or just after sunset, but now a proper light was coming.

  The guards on the wall looked at its source, then began firing their arrows at it. They lost the lie of their human shapes, tails snaking out behind them. More devils came, leveling cruel, barbed weapons. A wheel of sorts made entirely of severed arms and legs rolled up and formed itself into something worse, tak
ing up arrows with which to stab whatever was coming.

  But it never got to.

  He could not believe what he saw.

  But then it made perfect sense.

  He remembered that day, before they met the woodcarver.

  The cart.

  The girl drove it.

  He tried to remember her name.

  That girl.

  Who was she?

  Then he remembered her name and just as quickly forced it from his thought. It was not a name to be remembered here. It was a name that would kill with sadness and failure.

  The devils spat at her and leapt, but none could touch her, nor the mule, nor the cart; a dome of daylight as golden as if culled from the spring of one’s twenty-first year surrounded the intruder, and no unclean thing could tread where it shone.

  She descended now, ignoring the hail of missiles and threats falling around them both, but powerless to harm.

  She walked toward him.

  It was the she of the girl’s dreamy eyes, the maker of the words she had spoken that were not her own.

  The thing that had been Thomas croaked through its open mouth but could not speak. This was the meeting of their souls, then—his withered, hers in glory, hers somehow not just her.

  He had never seen a sight that looked so beautiful; he had forgotten what beauty was.

  Another betrayal

  These are false shapes sent to bring memory

  And memory is pain

  The only truth here

  He shut his eyes against them and waited for the next tortures to begin. He sensed her drawing warmly closer, kneeling before him.

  The arrow in his mouth came out, painlessly.

  She pulled the others out, too, each one a candle flame of misery, now extinguished.

  He wept at the relief, the pure ecstasy of relief.

  Her small hand lay across his eyes and it felt good.

  Beyond good.

  Her hand went to his chin and shut his agonized mouth.

  They were so devious, so low to do this.

  She whom he had loved as a daughter, and more than that, if that were possible, had come again to give him hope.

  He grew angry.

  This was the best illusion of her they had sent, but it was not the first. How many times had they sent her to beckon and then abandon him, how many times had his limbs refused his commands to stop as he choked the life from her or violated her or butchered her like a lamb?

  He opened his eyes, and still she remained.

  I SEE THROUGH YOU YOU CUNT

  He spat in her face and she smiled.

  I understand.

  Go away.

  Not without you, Thomas.

  What did you call me?

  Your name. Would you like to hear it again?

  I’m not falling for it.

  I’ll wait.

  Horrid things raged behind her, bit at her, yet none came within the light that pooled around her and around the cart. He watched her for a day and a night, or what seemed like it in this place where time had been beaten beyond recognition.

  At once, everything shook.

  The horrors around them stopped raging and turned to see.

  A sextet of Hell’s princes, each as tall as a castle’s outer wall, came down through the roof, bearing the smoldering body of an angel beautiful beyond imagination, drooping as dead as a martyr in their arms as they gnashed their teeth and descended with him through the ground and to the deepest, safest, most secret vaults of Hell.

  His (her?) pale skin.

  His wings smoking like paper about to catch.

  Lucifer is fallen.

  Mammon is Lord here now.

  At last she saw a kernel of trust come into Thomas’s eyes.

  Are you ready?

  He nodded.

  Barely perceptibly, but he nodded.

  She blew into his hands to warm them back to life. She kissed his feet. She kissed his forehead.

  She smelled of cedar and of the sea.

  You’re Him.

  There is no him or her.

  Why did you not come as I would know you?

  I came as you would follow me. I came as you would love me in innocence.

  Why me?

  That question has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. But you were the last one. The last one I could still save.

  And yet this is Hell. I’m here.

  Not for long.

  I’m damned.

  Not anymore.

  Night lay behind her head, but true night, with stars in their proper places, and no comets to trouble them. He was in the cart. She looked down at him.

  I want you to answer a question, Thomas.

  Yes.

  Do you want to remember?

  His eyes welled with tears and he shook his head, his mouth contorting to sob.

  Not Hell. I mean me. Us.

  You?

  Her. Delphine.

  I don’t know. What are you?

  I was two things together. Then one. Now two again, apart.

  I don’t understand.

  You don’t have to. You just have to say yes or no. But it will be harder for you if you remember. Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them. Love is loss of self, loss of other, and faith in the death of loss.

  Those gray eyes.

  Those gray eyes through every part of him, loving what was strong and what was weak indifferently.

  Yes.

  I say yes.

  She got in the front of the cart and took up the reins.

  The cart rolled down a road near the beach.

  Night was harmless here.

  Someplace warm.

  Provence.

  Galilee.

  No place at all.

  He saw the stars above him, and something passed before them.

  A seagull.

  Just a seagull.

  He slept.

  FORTY-THREE

  Of October’s End, and of November

  Thomas became aware of his body again, became aware of pain. Breathing was difficult because of the weight jostling on top of him as the cart rolled, some fabric half-covering his nose and mouth. Wet. Everything was wet. The stink of day-old blood and the ejecta of death were everywhere. A dog barked. Two dogs. The cart stopped.

  “Ready?” a man said.

  A boy answered, “Yeah.”

  Provençal, but Thomas understood that much.

  The language of ravens rasped out as well, obscure in vocabulary but clear in intent.

  Feeding time.

  Vertigo as the cart was tipped and Thomas tumbled with the others. A dead thumb in his eye. Bewildering daylight. Pain again as he landed on his shoulder and neck on a pile of wet bodies, one of which farted.

  He grunted loudly.

  Provençal again, but beyond him this time.

  I thought the big one’s arm was off.

  It was, I saw it too. He was deader than hell. Another miracle.

  What do we do?

  Help him, idiot.

  Now arms hooked under his and lifted him out of the pit of bodies.

  He was afraid to move his tongue—some dream of an arrow in it—but he did move it at last.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “French?”

  “Yes.”

  He recognized the boy.

  From Elysium.

  “Isnard?” he said.

  “Yes, sir. How do you know me?”

  I had a different face then!

  “I don’t know.”

  “Lots not to know about these days. Did you see the angels?”

  “No.”

  “An army of them in the sky. The most beautiful things. And yet I hope I forget them, for they are awful, too.”

  The boy crossed himself.

  Thomas grunted.

  Angels had come.

  The war in Heaven had turned.

  “We found y
ou in the ruins of the palace. Along with these. Earthquake.”

  Earthquake?

  Was that what had happened?

  No.

  But it was what men could stand to remember.

  Thomas got to his feet, painfully, dusting himself off.

  The man took a sack from the cart and approached the pit.

  “Isnard, have you seen a young girl?”

  “Lots of them.”

  “Or the page. Have you seen the page that served the comte in the Elysium House? Your little friend?”

  “Not since. No. Not in the earthquake. But there are many dead. The Holy Father asked the whole town to help, as well as the soldiers who had come for the crusade. It was worst in the Jewish quarter. And in Villeneuve.”

  “How bad was it?”

  The boy lowered his eyes.

  The man began spreading lye on the dead.

  Villeneuve had fallen into the river; it seemed in places to have melted into the river, the stone having turned liquid and then back to stone. And the Rhône had diverted through Avignon. The city walls on the west side had crumbled, as had half the palace. Thomas looked for the girl, asked about her; nobody knew a thing. He returned to the Franciscan abbey, and the Alsatian told him the girl had not come back, but that his horse was waiting for him.

  He took Jibreel into town. It was not easy to persuade a warhorse to pull a cart, but Thomas had a way with horses; he always had. He hitched Jibreel up with a team whose job it was to move the heaviest beams so that he and others might look for the living among the dead. He worked near the palace, hoping to see her walking, hoping not to see her under the litter of tiles and the nonsense of limestone bricks and tapestries. He became increasingly certain he would not.

  Among the dead were three cardinals, one of them Hanicotte, the priest’s brother, newly minted the night before.

  Was it just last night?

  So much happened since then.

  But what?

  Cardinal Hanicotte had been crushed near the entrance to the chapel, where many had tried to hide, his robes and fine gloves matted with blood. One of many, alike in death, wedded together under the stone angels and devils that had arched over the door.

  But Hanicotte was at the center.

  A stone devil had him by the hair.

  A stone saint had him by the hand.

  Thomas slept in a field with other workers.

  He ate food from the pignotte.

  He threw his coat of mail in the river and worked in the simple hose and long shirt of a laborer.