Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Two men from town came with them; one a heavily bearded young man with an ancient boar spear, the other a fat, blond farmer with blond porcine bristles on his jowls, armed with a billhook for hedges. Both wore straw hats. The smaller one looked scared, as did the priest. They had both been to the river to see the thing’s signs. But not the farmer. The farmer was piss drunk. Thomas reminded himself to stay well away from him if a fight started, because he was stout and thick-armed and likely to gut friend and foe alike. Among the bitterer lessons of brigandage Thomas had learned was that farmers were strong, often stronger than the horsemen who despised them, and that they lived so close to starvation that they would fight like bears to hold on to what crumbs and bits of wood or leather they owned.

If the priest hoped their procession would draw fresh recruits from the houses they passed, he was disappointed. A few women peered at them from windows, all crossing themselves, and, on the outskirts of town, one bare-ribbed dog looked up at them briefly before going back to breakfast on the foot of a corpse leaned up against a sheep wall. The body had a flour sack over its head at least, but it had stained the sack and it stank even in the cool rain. Sheep’s bones littered the field past the wall—sheep had fared as poorly as men in this scourge—and the seigneur’s keep came into view around a stand of alder trees.

The pilgrims marched up to the gate, where Thomas pulled a leather cord that rang a bell up on the battlements. He waited the time it took the swaying, fat farmer to piss against the wall—the priest admonished him with his name, Sanson, but was waved away with the man’s free hand—and then Thomas rang the bell again. After a third tug on the cord, a very pale young man with plucked and redrawn eyebrows looked down at them from the wall. He held a crimson woolen cloak squared over his head, presumably to protect fine clothes they couldn’t see from their angle.

“If you’re not here to buy grain, then go your ways,” he said.

“Good herald,” the priest said, “please let us speak to Guillaume.”

“Guillaume has fallen. I am seneschal now. You may speak to me.”

“Then I will say a Mass for Guillaume, and rejoice in your good fortune. We have not come here to buy grain, which you know we cannot afford, or to rent your mill, for we have nothing to grind, or your oven, for we have nothing to bake. Rather, we offer your master the chance to win God’s love in battle.”

“Go away,” he said simply, and disappeared.

Thomas felt his anger rise.

“Herald!” he shouted, making the skinny man flinch.

No answer came from above.

“Whoreson ass-sniffing herald!”

The herald reappeared.

“Who has the insolence to speak that way to me? When you speak to me, you speak directly to my lord!”

“Then tell your lord to get his little prick out of his wife and help us kill the thing in the river.”

“You common bastard!” the herald yelled. “I’ll have you know we still have men-at-arms in here.”

“Then tell them to stop husbanding their hands and come down to the river. Something is killing your people.”

“It’s called the plague, you idiot,” the herald said, more quietly, and disappeared again. Thomas’s worst insults didn’t bring him back this time. So he grabbed the cord and yanked with all his might, grinning at the sound of the bell coming loose and clanging down stone steps somewhere above them.

The five of them gasped at what they saw. Tracks in the muddy bank, like a snake would make, but much larger, had beaten under all the grass close to the river, and crisscrossed and looped between here and the town. It was visiting the town now. The piles of foul shit the priest had described were still there, full of bones and clothes. A woman’s severed leg lay white but mud-spattered just by the bank. This was nothing less than a visitation from Hell. The priest, quite pale now, began to pray psalms in Latin, and he urged the girl to swing the censer, which she did. The man with the big beard started shaking. Thomas said, quietly, “Priest. If it goes badly for us, run like a young man, and take the girl. She’ll try to stay, but don’t let her.” The priest never stopped praying, but nodded, which Thomas didn’t see because he kept his eyes fixed on the milky gray waters of the river.

He went forward at a crouch, with his sword at the ready. The stout, drunk one with the billhook came next, and the beardy one barely walked forward at all, staying close to the priest and the girl. Thomas was as taut as wire.

Step.

Step.

Step.

He froze when something moved in the water near the pilings of the collapsed bridge, something like an oily black arm, but the width of a draft horse’s chest. He wasn’t entirely sure he had seen it.

Then all of them said some variant of “My God” when its head broke the water’s surface.

White-eyed and flat-headed, like some giant cross between eel, newt, and frog, it laid its head on the bank and felt the ground with long whiskers around its mouth and eyes until it found the woman’s leg. Its tongue darted out and latched onto the leg with a thatch of evil little hooks at its tip, pulling it under the water with it, bending a growth of sweetflag rushes. They sprang back up. The water foamed and then flowed gently again, as if none of it had happened.

Those white eyes, a grandfather’s blind eyes.

The small, beardy man dropped his boar spear and ran so fast his hat blew off him.

The stout one stood openmouthed, then vomited. But he didn’t run. Rather, he followed Thomas right up to the edge of the water, which flowed gently now and showed no sign of the thing.

“Please, sir knight. Please protect me in this fray.”

“Wipe your chin,” Thomas said.

Now what?

He was so heavily armored he dared not go far into the water, but, when his slapping the water with the flat of his blade and his shouts of “Ho! Ho, there! Bring your black ass out of the water and fight me!” failed to rouse it, he ventured first one leg and then the other into the softly flowing murk. The big farmer stood near him, wide-eyed, shocked sober, his arms so tense the end of the billhook quivered.

“Hand me that boar spear,” Thomas said. The farmer did as he was told, fetching and handing over the wickedly pointed spear. Thomas put his sword in his left hand and began to use the spear to probe the water in front of him. He jabbed at it viciously, hoping to goad the thing into surfacing. It didn’t.

Thomas went a little farther in.

He looked at the burned pilings, wondering if it nested down there, curling itself around them. Perhaps he should wade over there—he could use them to help him keep his head above water.

The wind blew harder, and the rain came now, threatening to snuff the girl’s censer, which she still swung dutifully. The priest’s Latin prayers were harder to hear.

Thomas alternated between stabbing the water with the spear and slapping it with the sword’s flat, until it seemed to him that he was wasting his time.

“What, you only kill mules and fishermen? You only take the legs off fishwives? Come and get me! Me!” he said, his voice cracking a little. Rain poured into his armor and down his face, making him blink. Relief that the thing didn’t want to fight him blended with shame at that relief, but then relief won out. Perhaps a few more stabs at the base of the pilings and then he could say he’d done his best. He slapped the surface of the river halfheartedly again, then began backing out of the mucky water.

And tripped.

He put his booted heel down on a submerged log in the mud behind him; the log slithered out from under his foot at great speed, causing him to fall into the river and hurl the sword behind him. He thrashed in the water and sputtered, getting to one knee with difficulty, cocking his spear arm.