Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“Where is the girl?”

“I persuaded her to sleep in the stables tonight, but she will come back when she wakes up. She sat on that little stool near you until an hour ago. She’s quite faithful.”

Thomas looked under the threadbare sheet that covered him and saw what the thing in the river had done to him; an awful hole a few inches above the base of his verge wept into the hair there. All the skin around it was swollen, and a separate swelling was coming in near it, where the leg met the groin. The whole area was a misery.

“So I have some uncleanness in me from that thing, as well as plague.”

“It seems so.”

“Did you give me last rites?”

“Three hours ago.”

“I’ll try not to sin.”

“You’re in no condition to sin, except perhaps unclean thoughts.”

“Not having any. Hurts too much down there.”

“You’re safe from lust, at least. Having any temptations about gluttony?”

Thomas shook his head.

“And it’s hardly sloth for a sick man to rest. Don’t worry. I’ll look after your soul. As for the body, that’s in God’s hands.”

Thomas nodded.

“You killed it, you know.”

Thomas made a pleased sound and his lids got heavy.

“It floated downriver like an old empty sock, leaving its awful guts behind it. It was an awful, murderous thing, and you killed it with your own hand. It was worthy of a saint.”

Thomas slept.

He woke up again just before dawn, to the sound of labored breathing. Not his own. Someone was suffering, trying to breathe with pierced lungs. He hadn’t heard that sound since the catastrophe at Crécy, when he lay with a broken leg and an arrow through his face, listening to his seigneur breathe his last breaths, sucking bloody air in around the ashwood arrows that had punched through his chain hauberk in three places. He always loved his lord for not moaning, as other men did. As Thomas did. He knew in his heart that his lord, the Comte de Givras, had died awake, gritting his teeth, using his last strength to keep from making an unchivalrous noise. The comte was not as strong in the arms as Thomas, almost nobody was, but he was tougher. He died a better death than Thomas was about to, fouling his sick-sheets in bed.

But now that horrible breathing.

Outside his window.

A shadow passed.

He got to his feet and found that the right leg was completely numb, as if it had fallen asleep, and it was all he could do not to crash to the floor. He was sick and dizzy and his nose was running into his beard, but he got his sword and moved past the sleeping priest. He opened the door in time to see the form of a man limping toward the stables.

Where the girl was.

“You!” he said, but coughed at the end of it.

The figure didn’t turn.

Thomas tried to run at it, but now his woodish leg betrayed him and tumbled him onto the ground, where he blacked out. He came to not very long after, and went farther toward the stables, where he saw the girl and the figure talking over a lantern. His eyes were tearing, and he couldn’t see well, but it looked like a man. A shirtless man with long spines. Thomas lurched toward the couple, but the world spun again and he went out.

He woke again moments later, or thought he did, to find the spined man helping him into bed. Except the man was bleeding all over the bed and laboring to breathe, because he was full of arrows, not spines.

“Seigneur!” Thomas tried to say, but it wasn’t his lord.

He didn’t recognize the man, a short dark-haired youth with protuberant, drilling eyes that looked almost luminous.

The man exhaled a shuddering breath, spraying a small amount of froth from his chest wounds, then pressed hard with his thumb on Thomas’s forehead, forcing him to fully recline. It hurt. The man wheezed and coughed horribly and limped out of the room.

Thomas still felt the imprint of that hard thumb.

He slept.

But not before he muttered, “Sebastian. Saint Sebastian, help me.”

In the morning, the girl told the priest that the three of them were going to the shrine of the Virgin of the White Rock, ten miles north. She was granting miracles to some, and she would rid Thomas of the plague.

“But, child,” the priest said, “this man cannot travel. And the bishop heard rumors of this shrine many years ago, and visited it and declared that, while it was a holy place and Christians should pray there, they should expect no miracles.”

A saint had told her. She bit her lip, wondering if she should let them know one spoke to her. It seemed better to keep that secret.

“A higher power than the bishop says the shrine is healing people. And we can take the knight upon a cart.”

“If I had a cart.”

“Go to the almond orchard and pray. God will show you a way.”

“No,” the priest said forcefully. “We must stay here. If God wants our friend to live, He will bestow that grace upon him wherever he is.”

Her insides fluttered as though a small bird were near her heart. Words came to her. She closed her eyes and said them.

“Matthieu Hanicotte,” she said, calling the priest by his true name, which he had never told her, “you say these words because you fear to leave your little home. But I turn your words upon you; if Death means to take you, he may do it here as easily as on the road. He is already in this house.”

A chill passed through the priest, and he said meekly, “Watch over our friend. I am going to the orchard.”

The dead man’s cart was in good repair, and the three of them were soon upon the road to Rochelle-la-Blanche, a hill village where granite was quarried. The priest drove the fine cart, while Thomas lay feverish in the back of it. The girl held a cross over him with one hand and lay her other hand upon his burning chest. The priest was certain she was a saint. He had no other way to explain his discovery in the orchard.

The cart’s owner had broken his neck trying to stand on the wheel of the cart and beat the last almonds from a high branch. The body was still warm when the priest found him. A chill had gone through Matthieu Hanicotte, and for a moment he had wondered if the girl was diabolic in nature. He thought not. Then he had a moment to wonder whether God had slain this man to provide them a cart, or if He had merely directed Matthieu to the scene of this sad event, already foreordained. What was the difference? Everything served God’s will, and here, at last, after months of senseless deaths and unending tears, was a tragedy that bore some fruit. The priest had blessed the man, then cried and thanked God for at last revealing His face to him. For all those thanks, however, the mule was stubborn, and it had taken the priest nearly half an hour to get it moving.

But now the mule was happy to pull.

As they got closer, they passed others bearing the sick and dying to Rochelle-la-Blanche.

It was midday when they saw the town.

And the mob that was heading there.

Nearly thirty peasants, mostly men, were marching on the town, several of them pulling a small, empty cart by hand. They were all armed. When they noticed the priest’s cart coming up behind them, they turned.

“A mule!” one shouted.

“Get the mule!” said a woman with a two-pronged wooden pitchfork.

“It’s a priest,” another said.

“Fuck him, we have a priest, too. And we need that mule,” said a man in gaudy yellow stockings.

Père Matthieu felt a shock of ice in his heart, and he nearly froze with fear. The knight could have made the mob think twice, but he was dying. Then an idea came to Matthieu and he leapt to his feet, standing tall in the cart, and, though his knees shook, he kept his voice firm.