Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

They would have to cross the field of fire.

“Please don’t shoot us, brothers,” the priest called to them.

“We don’t shoot priests,” said one of them.

“Well, he doesn’t,” said the other.

“Hey, Father! Make a circle with your arms! A big circle!”

The others laughed.

They were drunk.

“Yes, and put that bastard driving the cart in the middle of it.”

“Shut up. He looks like a knight.”

“Knights ride horses.”

“A glass of cider says he’s a knight.”

“All the more reason to fling a shaft at him. Maybe he’s one of the eunuchs that let the English shame us at Crécy.”

“Don’t let Sir Jean hear you.”

“Fuck him, he went with the king.”

“You may pass, but hurry up.”

“Yes, hurry!”

Thomas urged the mule forward.

For a long moment the only sound was the clop of the mule’s hooves on the muddy street.

“You wouldn’t,” one of the archers said.

“I dare you,” said another.

Thomas said “Don’t look at them.”

An arrow whistled behind their heads and stuck in the dead man’s open mouth.

“Phillipe! You did it.”

“I work better with obstacles.”

Past the palace and St. Barthélemy church, they went right on rue de La Vielle Draperie, and then right on La Juiverie, named for Jews now absent, having been expelled from the city yet again nearly thirty years before. Soon, seeing the twin square towers of Nôtre Dame off to his left, Thomas tilted his head back and spat toward the great cathedral, watching the white spittle arc and separate in the air; he imagined it was a stone tossed by a trebuchet and that it would knock a hole in the gorgeous round window over the doors, but it just fell in the mud.

They were coming to the southern part of Île de la Cité, where the Hôtel Dieu stood near the Petit Pont that led to the Latin Quarter. The Hôtel-Dieu would have let any poor travelers stay one night, as was its custom, had the great hospital not been overwhelmed with those dying of plague. A staggering heap of bodies lay outside awaiting removal, two of them filles blanches , young nuns in white who had been taking care of the sick. A glimpse through an open door revealed a hell of vomiting, coughing, and sobbing with a very few wretched figures in white trying to ease the torments of far, far too many.

The girl sobbed and the priest held her. Thomas’s hand jerked with the long-suppressed reflex to cross himself, but he did not do that. He ground his teeth and shook his head.

As they approached the bridge to the Left Bank, the girl sat up from where the priest had been holding her and looked at the gray waters of the Seine rushing under it. A dead sheep floated by but didn’t keep going on the other side. The priest wondered if it had caught on debris down by the piers, and if that debris included people, and surprised himself by not feeling anything about it. On the other side, at the entrance to the Latin Quarter, they passed a painted wooden statue of Christ up on a pedestal of stone, at the foot of which a feverish woman grinned, sweating, with a dead cat cradled in her arms. Thomas looked up at the long-headed Christ and said, not wholly under his breath, “You’re dead, too, aren’t you? If not, get off that whoring thing and do something. Or at least whoring wink at me. You can do that much, can’t you?”

It didn’t wink.

But the woman did.

They wheeled along in the butchers’ quarter, where the mud stank with the blood and viscera of slaughtered animals, a few of which were still being butchered despite the paralysis that gripped so much of the city. A man grinned a nearly toothless grin at them as he cut the throat of a suckling pig he had just tied up by its feet, its blood jetting on his stiff leather apron and into the pail he had placed beneath it. He called out the price of the pig, but they couldn’t hear it over its squeals. The men of rue de La Bucherie seemed to be doing better than the dyers on Gobelins, just nearby, where nothing was moving at all.

They got lost again in the labyrinthine streets and began to despair of finding lodgings. The sun was so low that only infrequently did it finger its way between the buildings to throw cool, golden light on the mud. Just such a shaft of light illuminated the foot of a masculine-looking woman. She sat in the doorway to a leaning timber building with flaking paint. A sly-looking young man stood near her, cleaning his nails with a rusty knife.

“You look lost,” she said to them.

The priest looked first at her greasy blue stockings, then up at her tangled hair, and finally at her face. She had the look of a wary mastiff. She also had a moustache that might have better suited a thirteen-year-old boy.

“We are,” he said.

Thomas noted that she was a big woman with strong hands and shoulders, old enough that the man near her might have been her son, and that she wore a fine hat, a rich man’s floppy felt hat with a gold pin. Doubtless there were more fine hats than living heads to fill them in this city, and after a point it could hardly be considered looting to liberate them.

The girl noticed her eyes. They seemed kind to her, despite the woman’s rough look. Out of nowhere, she wanted the woman to hold her. It had been so long since she had smelled a woman’s skin that even a dirty woman’s embrace would have been welcome. She was still disturbed by the sight of the dead young nuns near the hospital and she wanted a woman to hold her and tell her that the whole world didn’t yet belong to Death, masculine Death with his hourglass and his holes for eyes. Death with his bony arms that only embraced to take you away, like a lamb from market. Like the pig on La Bucherie. How did Heaven come into all of this? Heaven was life, not death. Heaven was a woman holding your head in the crook of her arm and looking down at you. Heaven was a warm hand on your cheek and the smell of soup with garlic on the fire.

How could people enjoy anything in Heaven with their noses rotted off and their ears full of mud and worms, and no cheeks, and no hands to lay on cheeks?

She had never felt so alone, or so confused.

“Maybe I can help. What are you looking for?”

She thought she smelled garlic coming from the building.

“A bed,” the priest said. “A stable. Anything.”

“You’re in luck,” the woman said. “I own a few buildings in this neighborhood; the renters all died in one just down the street, you see it there by the big puddle, with the blue door. But it’s dry and it’s got two decent beds. How much have you got?”

“How much do you want?” the priest said.

“Ho-ho!” said the woman. “You’re stumbling around this dead city an hour before dark with your heads up your asses, lucky anyone says a word to you, and you want things done your way. Are you going to tell me how much you’ve got?”

“Well, no, but I will tell you what we’re willing to spend.”

“I’m sure it’s not enough. But tell me. I could use a laugh.”

The last of the sun slipped off her foot and now winked on a silver spoon hanging from her belt.

“Ten deniers.”

“Ha! That’s a country priest for you,” she said to the young man, whose nails didn’t really look any cleaner for all his knifing under them. “First time in the big city, eh?”

“All right, all right. How much?”

“Three sous.”

“Is this room perhaps in the royal palace?” Thomas said.

She narrowed her gaze and jerked a thumb at him, looking still at the priest.

“I don’t like him.”

The priest said, “He’s a bit gruff at first, but he has a good heart. How about one sou, five deniers?”

“I’m not the one who has to bargain. It’s three sous.”