Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“How do we even know you own the room?” Thomas said.

“If he talks again, I’ve got nothing else to say.”

The priest looked imploringly at Thomas, who shrugged and turned his gaze away.

“Will you show us the room?” said the priest.

“I’m not getting up. I don’t step and fetch for you.”

“What about this young gentleman?” Père Matthieu said, indicating the sly young man.

“He’s busy.”

“May we have the key?”

“When I get the money.”

“May we at least see the key?”

“You may see it and have it when I get the money.”

The priest went to the cart and got the coins, which he reluctantly put in her mannish hand. She made them disappear, then rummaged in a moldy pouch on her belt and produced a small brass key, holding it up before the priest.

He took it and frowned at it.

“It looks like a coffer key, not a proper door key.”

“Oh,” she said, “Am I a liar now as well as your servant? Then give it back to me and go your ways. Go and sleep in shit for all I care.”

“I’m a priest, you know.”

“Then pray for a room.”

“Never mind. We’ll take it. But it had better be what you said.”

“Fine.”

The woman now produced a little piece of ginger and began to chew it.

The girl salivated despite herself and asked, “Do you have any more ginger?”

The woman shook her head and flicked her hand at them.

They left.

Maybe sixty yards away, they stopped the cart near a big depression in the road in which a puddle had formed. The priest approached the blue door the woman had indicated and went to fit the key, which was clearly too small, into the lock, but the door opened anyway.

The room was mad with flies.

Three badly decomposed bodies lay in the room, which stank miserably from them, but also from mold (the roof had fallen in), urine, and feces; several piles of turds lay near the open window—clearly people sat over the ledge to shit or pissed freely through the opening. The dirt floor was also littered with animal bones, eggshells, fish scales, and all other manner of refuse. They had been sold the right to sleep in the neighborhood morgue, latrine, and dump. The priest gagged, the girl moaned, and Thomas went to the cart and got his sword, drawing it from its sheath. He ran the sixty yards back to the stoop, but of course the woman and her companion were not there.

He kicked in the door and went into the building, where a young woman grabbed up a child he had knocked over with the door; the child screamed and held his head. An older woman he didn’t recognize stood frozen near the fire where she had been stirring garlicky pottage, and now a man grabbed up a meat cleaver. He stood in front of the women and the child but was too scared of Thomas to move forward.

“What do you want! Get out!” he pleaded, gesturing impotently with the cleaver.

“The…the old woman on the stoop. She cheated me.”

“What woman!”

“She sold us a bad key.”

“What! You hurt my son! I don’t know about a damned key!”

“You’re hiding her,” Thomas said, but didn’t believe himself. The old trickster had nothing to do with these people. The money was gone.

A thin-limbed man with a strangely protruding belly came from upstairs with a sword, but he froze, too.

Rob them! Make them give you what they have!

Thomas shook that wicked voice out of his head.

The man from the stairs licked out toward Thomas with his sword, but he was scared and kept himself well out of range to hit or be hit back.

“Get out!” said the man with the cleaver, his face very pale now. “Get out !” said the mother, still holding the hurt child. The woman at the pot threw a ladleful of hot, oily pottage at him.

Thomas could see in the young father’s eyes that he was working himself up to take a real swing at him with the cleaver, and there would be blood if that happened. A lot of blood.

“I’m sorry,” he said, backing out the door.

An old man looked at him from a window across the narrow street but then moved into the shadows, saying feebly, “Go away. Leave them alone.”

Confusion, anger, and guilt wrestled in him.

“Whore!” he screamed. “You rotten old whore!”

“Shut your hole,” a deep voice said from a high window. “You’re a thief!”

“You should know about thieves around here!” Thomas rejoined.

He spat on the ground and stomped back to the cart.

Nobody followed him.

Thomas returned to the cart just as the priest was about to throw the useless key into the street, but the girl said, “May I have it?”

“Whatever for?”

“It’s pretty.”

Her simplicity made Père Matthieu embarrassed for his anger at having been cheated. He gave it to her, and she smiled up at him.

“If it made you smile, it’s not completely worthless,” he said, smiling back at her.

“I’m glad you two are so goddamned happy,” Thomas said.

“You have food on you,” said the girl.

“I’ve worn worse. Now what?”

“I suppose we sleep in the cart,” said the priest.

“All right. Let’s pull it away from this shithole of a neighborhood first.”

A few minutes later, on another street, the girl pulled a green ribbon from her sack and tied the key around her neck, then sat back, looking at the last, orange light of the sun on the rooftops. That was when she saw the angel. It was neither male nor female, but both somehow, and more beautiful than either gender. It asked her to sing a song for it.

“I don’t know if I feel like singing,” she said.

It asked her to sing anyway.

The light was on its beautiful hair and the whole street suddenly smelled like pine trees and juniper.

She sang.

“Hey down there!” said a man from a second-floor window. “I know that song. Are you from Normandy?”

The girl nodded.

“So am I. My mother sang us that on our way to church. I haven’t heard it in twelve years or more.”

“My mother sang it to me as well.”

“Are you healthy?”

The girl nodded and showed him her neck.

“All three of you?”

“On the blood of our savior,” said the priest.

“You shouldn’t be on the street now. It’s nearly dark.”

Thomas stopped the cart.

“Do you know what happens after dark?” the man continued.

“We have no place to go,” said the girl.

The man looked back over his shoulder and exchanged a few words with someone. Then he looked at them again.

“I’ll feed you, the three of you, if you’ll sing it for me again.”

Jehan de Rouen was a woodcarver. He sold wooden statues of Christ and the saints, but especially Mary, from his first-floor shop, and he and his wife lived above this. His success meant that they did not share their house with another family, as most merchants were obliged to. The workshop was neatly kept except for the odd piles of shavings, and the priest felt bad about bringing the mule inside.

Jehan insisted.

While his guests sat down to table between the kitchen and the workshop, Jehan fetched a bottle of pale spirits, setting out a bowl and pouring some in. He gave it first to the girl.

“Do you recognize that?”

She made a face but nodded.

“Papa likes that.”

“Everybody’s papa likes that in Normandy. It’s made from the best apples in France.”