Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

It punched through something. The thing shuddered and turned on him now and bit him, taking his head and neck into its mouth as it had done with the peasant, but, though the pressure on his chest was terrible, its strength was ebbing and its teeth did not pierce his chain. Thomas screamed hoarsely in the darkness of its mouth, and then couldn’t scream anymore as it took him underwater. Water and foul issue flooded its mouth and Thomas began to black out. Then it shuddered again and vomited Thomas into the river, along with the dead farmer, someone’s head, the woman’s leg, and any number of eels.

Thomas fought to keep his head above water, praying the priest would haul him out. But he was alone and dying, with his armor heavy on him in the river. He would have to save himself. He heard it thrashing, and then the thrashing stopped. He thought it was dead but didn’t think he had the strength both to turn and look at it and to keep from falling into the water. He hauled himself to the shallow part and nearly collapsed, but he knew he would still drown if he did. So, with his leg going numb from the thing’s spine in his groin, and the river and black sky seeming to spin around him as if he were a bead in a toy top, he crawled through the mud on his three good limbs until his face was far enough out of the water that he knew he would not breathe any in.

His legs were still in the water. If it wasn’t dead, it would drag him under. But he didn’t care now.

Something was banging on his armor and his helmet.

Hail.

It was hailing.

So this is the end of the world, he thought, feeling nauseated, hoping to pass out.

And he passed out.

The woman stumbled down the muddy road, trying to remember how to get to the river. She had lived in St. Martin-le-Preux her whole life, but the fever made her forgetful and she kept losing her way. The hail had woken her up from what might have been her last sleep, and when she woke she had such thirst that only the river could slake it. Besides, a devil was in her house. Not the Devil himself, but a small one. A goat kid with a twitching tail that climbed on the bed with her and tried to steal her breath when she got sleepy. It leapt away when she woke, and hid in the shadows, waiting for her to get sleepy again. She would cheat it this time; she knew it wouldn’t follow her to the river. She went out into the hail and took a beating from it, but it stopped soon and turned to cold, stinging rain.

She got terribly lost even though she knew the river was close, and she slapped her palm on several doors, some of them doors she recognized as belonging to friends, but nobody opened to her. She cried against the wall at one house and a gentle voice from inside, her sister’s voice, said “Go on, now, Mathilde. I still have the two children and you mustn’t give it to them. Go on.” So on she went. Her children had died of it, and her sweet, old husband, and his brother, and she was the last one in the house. She had paid a young boy to care for her when she knew she had it, but he had left after one day. All he did was bring her things she asked for; but he refused to empty her slop jar and still he wanted a week’s farm wages for the first day. She paid him, but he saw where she got the money from and took the coffer in the night, leaving her with nothing. The boy had worked with her husband. Learning to be a cobbler. Now he had his master’s money, but little good it would do him in Hell; he was already sweating with the first fevers. It was after he left that the little goat had come.

The woman had no wimple on and her pale orange hair hung greasily about her shoulders. Her eyes were red and swollen. Windows closed as she passed them, and it began to make her angry. She wanted to stop and have words with the betrayers who were abandoning her, but her throat hurt like it had pins in it, and if it came to a fray, she didn’t want anyone touching her left armpit, which had grown a painful swelling the size of a crabapple that gurgled at night and seemed to speak to her.

She had to get to the river.

At length, she remembered a turn between two houses that she had passed several times, and she stumbled downhill, laughing and crying at the same time at the sight of the water. She didn’t care if the water was clean as long as it was cold. She would wade into it and might even put her head under to stop the heat in it.

That was when she saw the knight, lying on his stomach with his feet in the river. She knelt next to him and drank, coughing half of it back up; something foul was in it. Foul and oily. But her throat felt better.

She looked at the knight and saw that he was strong and beautiful, and dead. She cried for how beautiful he was. Even his scars were beautiful and perfect, the pit on his cheek where God had put His finger to mark him as holy. She lay down next to him on her side and took off his helmet. He still wore a chain hood, but she could see his hard, beautiful face better now. Her husband’s wedding ring was on a cord around her neck, and she took this off, and breathed on it, and pushed it onto the knight’s finger, though it wouldn’t pass the second knuckle because his were soldier’s hands.

“I marry you,” she said. “I marry you now, knight.”

She cried and kissed his still mouth, tenderly at first, then with her tongue. His mouth was warm. He was breathing. She became confused about whether he was dead. Perhaps not, but, like her, he would be soon. Everyone would be soon. She used her hair to clean his brow, and she stroked his face with her hand.

“My husband is in Heaven with his first wife, but I will go to Heaven, too, and you will be my husband there. And I will be a good wife. I will show you. I will dress for bed,” she said, and took off her sickness-stained gown and one of her muddy hose. She got tired unrolling the second one and draped herself across the knight’s armored back and died there.

And that was how the priest found the armored man and the pale, dead woman, nude but for one stocking, her back covered in plague tokens the color of eggplant, as if a little goat had danced upon her and bruised her with its hooves.

“Where am I?” Thomas shouted from the bed, his eyes wild.

“You’re in my home,” the priest said, looking down at him. “You’ve been hurt.”

The priest was holding a lantern near his nose and mouth.

It was night.

Thomas began to remember. The creatures in his dream had not been friendly, so he took a moment trying to remember if this priest was. Frogs. Now he remembered. Frogs had come, latching onto him, feeding on him, covering his face and hands. He had been watching from outside himself as spiny little frogs ate him. He shuddered, then kept shuddering. The pains in his head and in the corner of his groin were distinct: one was leaden and dull, like an old rusty lock set at the top of his neck, and embraced his temples; the other was hot like someone had taken a coal from a brazier and tucked it at the top of his pubis. Everything on him felt clammy and sticky. He sneezed.

He looked up at the priest again and saw the half of his face that was brightly lit by the lantern he held close to it. Three superficial scratches jagged across his cheek.

“What have you done with her?” Thomas said, and sat up heavily, looking at the priest with dangerous, murky eyes.

“Nothing, friend. She’s… oh, the scratches. She gave me those when I pulled her away from you. On the shore. Really, I was pulling her away from the…There was a…a young wife, Mathilde. A good woman. With Christ now, if any of us are. You may be sick.”