Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“He who wants the plague, come and take this mule. For plague is upon this man you see here. He who wants his soul in Hell, come and take this mule unlawfully from one of God’s priests, and stop us on our pilgrimage.”

This halted their frightening surge toward the cart.

Now the woman with the wooden fork said “Come with us, Father. Help us take the Virgin back.”

“What?” said the priest. He now noticed a stocky, cow-eyed priest among the farmers; he was holding a pewter candlestick like a club, and he seemed abashed to have encountered another of his sort. He shook this off and spoke.

“Yes, brother. We’re taking our Virgin back. She was stolen from our village, Chanson-des-Anges, by those bastards of Rochellela-Blanche during the Great Hunger of ’17. Since then God has smiled upon them and pissed upon us for not defending her. Help us in our rightful suit.”

“Shame on you, brother,” Père Matthieu said.

The girl stood now, wide-eyed, and said, “You’ve got devils with you. Right now, with you.”

“In your hearts!” Père Matthieu said quickly, suddenly scared this mob might decide she was a witch. “For the devil is in any heart that moves a man to hurt his neighbor. Yet will he leave you in peace if you will put your weapons down and turn from your sin. This is your last chance.”

“You’re not from here,” the club-wielding priest said viciously and suddenly, as if the words weren’t his, and began toward the cart. The girl’s gaze stopped him.

“I see it,” she said quietly. “I know what’s at your elbow.”

It was the cutting of a marionette. The stocky priest began to cry then, blubbering incoherently. The woman with the fork came now and grabbed him by the shoulder.

“To Hell with them,” she said. “Let’s get Our Lady back. Chanson-des-Anges!” she said. The crowd echoed her cry, and they lurched toward the village, pulling the weeping priest with them.

Even though it took place at Rochelle-la-Blanche, the battle would henceforth be known as the battle of Chanson-des-Anges, because the attackers shouted that again and again. They shouted it as they waded into and pushed aside the crowd of sick and penitent pilgrims that surrounded the statue. They shouted it as they broke the arm of the priest of Rochelle-la-Blanche, who threw himself in front of his Blessed Lady to defend her. They shouted it as they broke the pretty, white-stone statue from its nook in the white rock beside the church, leaving a piece of her foot. They shouted it at the group of men who began to form in the market square nearby, now six, now a dozen, shouting and pointing and summoning others.

Then one in the Chanson mob said, “Do not let them gather!”

Nobody was sure who said it, because only the girl could see the foul thing that spoke those words.

A stone flew. Then a brick. Someone shot an arrow. Then the invading mob rushed at the outnumbered men in the square, and a horrible melee began. The Rochelle townsmen scattered, but more were coming. The Virgin must have been working true miracles here. More healthy men were gathering than the priest or the girl had seen in one place since the sickness first came. Now a hunchback in a blacksmith’s apron ran toward the Rochelle men, dragging a box, from which they began to pull swords, axes, and hammers.

“Defend the Lady!” someone said, and the Chanson-des-Anges mob fell back toward their cart, where the Virgin of the White Rock lay awkwardly on her side, and formed a ring about it. The men of Rochelle surrounded them. They were reluctant to start killing, but then someone in the square held up the body of a little blond boy whose head had been busted by a brick.

“Perrin!” one screamed. “They killed little Perrin!”

The twenty or so defending the cart screamed defiantly “Chanson-des-Anges, Chanson-des-Anges,” as if daring the thirty well-armed farmers, tradesmen, and granite workers to slaughter them.

They took the dare. The two groups bludgeoned, stabbed, cut, and gouged each other while dust flew and screams rang out. When, at last, the people of Chanson were nearly overcome, the woman with the fork dropped it and picked up a fallen hammer, jumping up into the cart with the Virgin.

“If we won’t have her, you won’t either! Fuck her,” she said, and smashed the Virgin’s arm from her body.

Back in Père Matthieu’s cart, the girl screamed.

The fighting stopped and everyone watched, stunned.

“Fuck her! Fuck her!” the woman screamed, wide-eyed.

The hammer fell again and the Virgin’s nose was busted.

Two more strokes and the statue, once so beautiful that men wept to see her, was nothing but rocks. White dust covered the Chanson woman’s face.

Something laughed, but only the girl saw what.

“Death!” screamed a Rochelle man.

And Death answered his summons.

None from Chanson-des-Anges was left alive.

The last one, the cow-eyed priest, was killed with the same brick that killed the little boy.

Afterward, the survivors took the wounded off and the people of Rochelle-la-Blanche cleared as far away from the killing field as they could. The girl tore herself away from Père Matthieu and walked through the twisted bodies, toward the ruin of the Virgin of the White Rock. She was shaking and weeping, looking far smaller and younger than she had. She bent near the cart and picked up the statue’s arm, hugging it to her.

The priest helped her up into his cart now, where Thomas lay very still, breathing his last. He had the impression that something with a cold, fishy mouth was tugging at him. His bladder loosed and he breathed out, his chest rattling. He did not inhale.

The girl took the Virgin’s hand and forearm up and pressed the two stone fingers, held out in benediction, against the knight’s forehead, just where he had felt St. Sebastian’s thumb the night before.

She pressed hard.

The thing with the fishy mouth left.

Thomas gasped and opened his eyes.

And then he slept.

Thomas woke up and thought something was horribly wrong. A dream in which his mother wove at her loom and sung a chanson de toile about a common woman who loved a great seigneur dissolved; now an angel was rubbing his head with a cool cloth; he had died, he was sure of that, but under no circumstances should he be in Heaven.

He turned his eyes to look at the angel, and saw that it was only the girl. Her very gray eyes were on him, waiting to see if he would speak.

“I died,” he said.

“Almost.”

“You… saved me?”

“God did. With the hand of the Virgin. It was her last miracle.”

Thomas coughed, but less horribly than he had before the end.

“I stink,” he said.

The priest, who was near the hearth, said, “Not like you did. What’s stinking now is just the bedstraw. Some of your sickness went into that, I think. One thing you never get used to is the way the sick ones smell. As if we needed any further proof this curse fell from the heavens to show us how corrupt we are.” He went back to stirring the pot on the fire.

“What’s there to eat?” Thomas said.

“Oh, he has an appetite, there’s a hopeful sign. Of course, having received last rites and lived, you’re supposed to fast perpetually now. And go barefoot. And remain chaste.”

Thomas grunted.

“But I won’t tell anyone if you won’t. ‘What’s to eat?’ he says. Nothing but the worst soup in Christendom; grasses, flowers, twigs, some fungus from the sides of trees, a blighted radish, and, the best of all, four baby birds I broke free from their eggs. I was hoping just to get the yolks and whites, but the chicks were nearly ready to enter this sad world. Now they’re in soup. You’ll have to eat one, bones and all.”