Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“READY?” screamed the lord, raising his axe.

Théobald raised his lance.

Thomas raised his.

The axe fell.

The chargers started off, Thomas’s more heavily, and the two made for each other. At French tournaments, a barrier normally separated the jousting knights to prevent collision, but this was open like a German field. Thomas reined his horse to keep it on the right side, his lance pointed crosswise, but the horse stubbornly made right for its oncoming counterpart. At the last minute, the other horse corrected and the men shocked their lances into one another. Thomas felt his glance solidly but harmlessly off Théobald’s chestpiece, rocking him back with the impact. Théobald’s point, however, gouged into Thomas just below the left hip, dislodging several links of chain and digging a hotly painful furrow into him. He gritted his teeth and tried unsuccessfully not to grunt, reeling but staying upright in the saddle.

Both men had kept their lances, so they wheeled their horses around and repositioned themselves for another charge. Neither waited for a signal from the seigneur this time; they both made for each other.

This time, however, Thomas felt his horse slowing beneath him. He swore at it and spurred it, but Belâtre kept losing speed, even as the other knight loomed larger and more dangerous through the slit in Thomas’s helm. The horse stopped altogether.

“You whore !” Thomas said to his mount even as Théobald’s point dropped and slammed into Belâtre’s chest. The horse screamed, reared, and threw Thomas off. He landed heavily on his back, sending a wave of pain down his legs all the way to his heels. He sat up to see the dying horse topple on its side, kicking its legs in the air. No sooner had it landed than at least a score of dark shapes rushed from beneath the stands and swarmed over it. The monkeys. Only this time Thomas wasn’t sure they were monkeys. Whatever they were, they dragged the horse away, already disemboweling it.

“Forgive me, Sir Thomas,” the seigneur said. “I didn’t know my horse was a fucking coward.”

Thomas crabbed his way to his feet. Why wasn’t his squire helping him up? He removed his borrowed helmet and looked back down the list. He saw Matthieu now, lolling against a rail, his head tipped back. The viol player from before was pouring wine down his throat, his free hand rubbing the older man’s crotch.

The lord barked, “On foot!” and now Thomas turned and saw the other knight stomping toward him, swinging a flanged mace, his helmet also off.

“Right,” Thomas said, and drew his sword.

He moved first against Théobald, running at him and lunging his point at the other man’s face. The knight spun and sidestepped at the same time, bringing his mace around into Thomas’s back, breaking a rib. Thomas let the momentum take him forward so he wouldn’t be in jeopardy from a second blow. The armorer was right. Théobald was fast.

As a fish from a dead man’s skull.

He heard the armor moving behind him and sensed the mace passing only half a hand’s length from where his head had just been.

But Thomas had tricks, too; he planted his foot and spun suddenly, crouching at the same time, driving his point at the other man’s middle. It struck home, and, even though the mail stopped it, the force pushed the man back and sapped the strength from his mace swing so that, when it landed on Thomas’s shoulderpiece, it hurt but didn’t damage.

His back was in agony.

Did water just come from Théobald’s armor?

Thomas didn’t have time to pull back for a proper swing, so he chopped short across his body, hacking at Théobald’s inner arm to try to knock the mace out of it; he knocked the mace arm wide, but his foe kept his weapon, letting the momentum carry it over his own head, and backhanded into Thomas’s arm, which went numb.

Salt water got into his eyes. Théobald was definitely leaking salt water. And his armor was now finely coated with rust. Thomas didn’t actively notice these things; without hesitation, he switched hands and licked out with the sword point, which caught the other man between the knuckles of his mace hand, opening the links of his chain mitten and making him drop the mace.

Now Thomas saw the exposed hand and how white it was. So white it was almost translucent.

A fucking hand!

He lashed out with the blade again and caught Théobald across the side of the head. Seawater, not blood, gushed from the wound. It stank. Théobald looked amused. He opened his mouth and a scream came out, but it was not his scream. It was the scream of the fat peasant who had died in the river. It was the scream the thing in the river had mimicked.

Thomas recovered from his stupefaction and swung hard now with his working arm. Théobald, who was getting puffier and whiter by the second, raised his arm so it caught the force that had been meant for his neck. The armor saved the arm from getting severed, but the bones in it were broken and he careened sideways. More water gushed from him.

An eel slithered out of his leg armor to writhe on the sand.

The sky was not as dark as it had been.

Théobald scrambled for his mace now, picking it up with the badly broken arm; Thomas struck him across the back, breaking his scapula. Unconcerned, Théobald lurched up and the mace head backhanded Thomas across his own numb arm, which was also broken.

The opponents paused now and looked at each other.

Théobald grinned at Thomas, and thread-fine marine worms sprouted from his lips. A small fish ate one of his eyes from the inside.

And he stank, and he stank.

Théobald de Barentin, Théobald…

Dead at the battle of Sluys.

He fell into the sea when an English ship rammed into the ship he was on. He was the best fighter in Normandy, but he was not stabbed or shot with arrows. He just slipped on the wet deck and fell into the water, where his armor pulled him under. Thomas’s lord had told his men before they met the English at Crécy, to remind them that no death was inglorious when suffered in the field.

Light was coming into the sky.

“Hurry!” screamed a woman from the stands, and the cry was picked up by the other spectators, all of whom were beginning to rot now. Some yelled “Kill him!” or “The sun!” The lord of the castle shouted “HURRY!” as well, and tried to shout it again, but the word changed into the roar of a lion. Thomas spared a glance at him, and saw that he was growing taller, stretching out of his armor, so that his skin showed between sections. His head was a lion’s head now, but lumpy and corrupt, balanced badly on the ungainly stack of flesh and armor he had become.

A devil.

A devil from Hell and a court of the damned.

The thing that had been the seigneur started taking jerky steps toward them.

Théobald lashed madly with his mace now, and Thomas blocked or avoided all but one blow, which he stepped into at the last instant to avoid taking the head of the mace; instead he caught the shaft across his jaw, which broke.

“Hurry,” screamed the mob, which had begun running off the stands toward the combatants.

Thomas shoved his sword into the face of what used to be Théobald de Barentin, and it shuddered and stopped moving. Thomas yanked the sword out of it but fell on his side. The lion-devil roared, standing over Thomas.

The crowd of finely dressed corpses moved closer. One of the monkey-things tugged the armor off his foot and bit it.

Thomas held his sword up.

The sun’s crown came over the edge of the land, just one brilliant orange diamond’s worth.

And it was all gone.

Everything.

Thomas was lying in a cow field, holding up his sword, dressed in his rusty armor. Neither his arm nor his rib nor his jaw were broken. A rusted plow stood where the lion-devil had been, one of its spars hanging at the angle of the axe it had just been holding. A dead sheep lay in exactly the position the corpse of Sir Théobald had assumed when he collapsed. A small Norman tower, long abandoned and crumbling, stood where the mighty castle had been when they first saw it at dusk. The priest, lying facedown in his robes, was breathing heavily in sleep.