Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Near Gisors, just before the Christmas feasts began, the brigands stopped outside a village they would all remember, though they never knew its name. Two men stayed with the horses; the rest waited until almost sundown and walked two miles through the woods to the most isolated farmhouse. Everyone inside was likely to be asleep; peasants slept long hours in the winter to save strength. The thieves muddied their faces and crawled on their bellies until they were close enough for Jacquot to shoot the guard dog. The windows were hung with sheepskins to keep the heat of the fire in, and the cold thieves coveted the warmth nearly as much as the food they hoped to find.

Thomas grabbed the sheepskin and yanked it down, rolling awkwardly through the window with his sword drawn. A calf lay in the middle of the dirt floor, with a goat and two children sleeping against it. They woke up at the sound of Thomas’s heavy feet, and stared at him; they thought a devil from Hell had come to them, and they weren’t far wrong. The others leapt in as well. One of the children cried out and the rest of the house woke up, all in one room, six adults on a moss-stuffed bed. An old man at the end reached for something on the floor, but a nearly toothless little killer named Pepin leapt the calf and the children in two steps and stabbed the man’s belly. He dropped whatever it was he’d grabbed for and palmed his wound, huffing, “Oh, oh.”

The only other men, probably an in-law and a hired man, froze and offered no fight; they were soon shamed by an old woman who swung at Thomas with a fire poker. He ducked it and shoved her down, where another man sat on her. She yelled and this man punched her until she stopped.

Godefroy noticed that one of those on the bed was a decent-looking girl of perhaps fourteen. Probably already married. He yanked her off the bed by the foot while Pepin hovered over the rest of them with his knife.

They took the girl and the beasts out; Thomas carried the goat over his neck, and Jacquot led the calf, but the real prize was a milk cow on the other side of the house. They butchered her that night in the hills, along with the other animals, smoked the meat, and rode off before the local lord could muster sufficient men to deal with them. Just before they left, they let the girl stumble back into town, mostly intact on the outside.

Thomas had argued with Godefroy about the girl, but in the end he had walked away.

The meat had gotten them through January.

The family, of course, would have been reduced to begging from their neighbors, perhaps even forced to sell their land.

As the brigands left the house that night, the old woman had gotten up and yelled after them from the doorway. Her words were slurred from her newly broken teeth.

“God will see you in Hell! You’re the Devil’s now. May you choke and die and go to him sooner.”

Normally some of them would have jeered back at her, but her words fell on them with the weight of a proper curse. Robbing peasants felt much more sinful than robbing merchants, but winter didn’t care about such sensibilities.

In February, they robbed another farmhouse, and this time the men fought. Pepin was killed. As were the men. Godefroy ordered the house burned. A dark-haired little boy just in pants stood bewildered near the blaze, saying, as if there had been some mistake, “We live here. We live here.”

Not six months later the plague had come, killing most of the thieves.

And everybody else.

Nothing matters anymore.

Thomas shook away his ghosts and turned his eyes now to Paris. Her walls were the faintly yellowed white of bones, and her turrets stood proudly, each a lazy bowshot from its neighbor. He could see what must have been the Louvre, the king’s fortress, strong and white, cut from the same stone as the city walls. The spires of cathedrals poked at the sky, and the roofs of the shops and houses tumbled against one another. Even dead, if she was dead, Paris made a lovely corpse.

And yet Thomas wished she had burned. He would have embraced any excuse to keep going, as they had been, on small roads or no roads, meeting few living souls, foraging as best they could. How long could they live like that? Until winter. But what then?

“I don’t care,” Thomas said, at the end of this chain of thoughts, and neither of his cartmates pressed him for what he meant. There was a great deal in this world not to care about.

The Port du Louvre was the closest gate, and, luckily, one of the few that remained open; the provost of Paris, on the authority of the king, who had long since fled, had shut most of the other gates in a vain attempt to close out the scourge that was killing the city. Rare carts bearing food were allowed in; anyone at all was allowed out; strangers could enter so long as they appeared healthy.

The guards on the top of the wall did not appear healthy. They were underslept, ashen, and cranky, though not energetic enough to cause much mischief. They told the girl to display her armpits, neck, and groin to them, but did not care to make Thomas strip down his armor, and likewise told the priest to keep his robe on. The priest shook his head at them. One of them apathetically tossed a small stone at the priest. They waved the cart through.

“Now would be a good time to tell us what you’re looking for,” Thomas said. The girl nodded. She looked frightened. She didn’t look like she knew anything about why they were here.

“The first thing is to find lodgings,” the priest said.

Nobody alive wanted them, and the dead didn’t answer.

They wound through the narrow, muddy streets, at turns disgusted by the filth beneath their feet and awed by the soaring spires of churches or the houses of the very rich. On some streets the houses and shops were so close they nearly touched heads together over the muddy paths, throwing everything into shadow. Some bodies, at least, were being picked up in tumbrils pushed mostly by desperate-looking fellows who had as much to fear from hunger as from the murderous, stale air around the dead.

Nobody answered at the inns on the Right Bank, or, when they did, it was just to tell them to go away. Most of the people who had gold had already piled their possessions in whatever they could still find with wheels on it and headed for the countryside. The only medical advice that proved sound against this sickness was “run far and stay long.” Yet even that worked only if you were lucky or well-informed enough to run where it hadn’t struck yet. And if you were not already sick. The only thing that slowed its spread was the speed with which it killed; once it was in you, you had a day or maybe two before you were too sick to travel. Or hours. Thus it spread from town to town at the speed of a leisurely walk, but it missed nothing.

So they went south on St.-Denis until they got to the bridges that crossed the Seine onto Île de la Cité, the island at the heart of the city. The larger of these bridges, the Pont aux Changeurs, was for wheeled vehicles and beasts and had shops along the sides, none of which were occupied. Likewise, nobody was bothering to collect tolls. Between the shops on their right they could make out the smaller bridge, the Pont aux Meuniers, which was only for pedestrians and had thirteen water mills at its base. Both bridges were wooden. The celebrated stone bridge, the Grand Pont, had collapsed during a winter flood fifty years before. At the time, that had seemed the greatest calamity Paris could suffer. Now the mills at the base of the pedestrian bridge regularly spat out corpses that citizens living close to the river had jettisoned rather than waiting for the cart to come.

On the island, they rode past the strong, white walls of the royal palace, atop which several archers were laughing, firing their bows at something on rue St. Barthélemy. As they cleared a stack of empty, ruined wine barrels, just near St. Barthélemy church, they saw the target; a very fat dead man with thirty or forty arrows stuck in him, and more stuck in the mud or lying with their points broken off from hitting the stone building behind him.