Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

He shared the bowl around. It made a pleasant little fire in their bellies.

The priest set in praising the artisan’s figures. Thomas, who recognized their long-headed style, said “Did you make the Christ on this side of the bridge?”

The woodcarver flushed with pride, hoisting up his very heavy brown eyebrows, which hardly thinned over his nose.

“I did.”

“A marvelous figure,” said the priest. “A welcome reminder of Christ’s love after the misery at the Hôtel Dieu.”

“Actually, the abbey commissioned it, hoping it would keep the plague out. But we’ve had plague. And worse.”

“Worse?” the priest asked, not incredulously, but hoping for specifics.

“You’ll sleep in my workshop. Keep the windows closed and barred. If you use the slop jar, don’t open the windows to throw it out until morning. They don’t come every night, but it’s been nearly a week. They’re due.”

“What are due?”

“If you hear something heavy treading in the street, pray hard but quietly, and stay away from the windows. And if anything knocks, don’t open.”

“What knocks?”

Jehan darted his eyes at the girl, then shook his head and took a deep breath.

“What comes?”

“We don’t know. Nobody who sees them lives.”

Jehan’s wife, Annette, brought out stale bread trenchers with the last of their thin soup. “Don’t be shy about finishing it; we’ve had ours,” she said. Overcome with emotion at her kindness and her plain, handsome face, the girl kissed her hand. The wife stroked her hair. The girl suddenly felt the hurt in the woman, how it mirrored her own hurt. One had lost a daughter, the other a mother. Each saw a flicker of the dead one. It was bitter but very sweet and good. Annette took her head into her bosom, tentatively at first, but then with great emotion, and cried down into her hair.

“What are you called, little bird?”

“Delphine.”

They cried together and held each other as the priest looked at Thomas and Thomas looked down, deeply ashamed.

In their weeks together, neither man had ever asked her name.

The liquor was soon gone, and the embers of the fire were cooling. After a hushed consultation with his wife, the woodcarver took his hat in his hands and asked Thomas and the priest if the girl might be allowed to sleep in the bed with Annette; Jehan would make his bed on the woodshop floor with the other men. They nodded.

“Thank you,” Delphine said, and went upstairs.

The priest and Thomas looked at each other, each thinking the same thing.

She’s home. This is her home now.

When the men were all settled on the tightly packed dirt floor, Jehan spoke to them in a whisper.

“It’s not that nobody has seen those that knock; it’s that what they’ve seen is so awful.”

“Go on,” Thomas said.

“Maude, a widowed hatmaker on the next street, heard the knock and didn’t open. But she heard her neighbor, Humbert, open for them and then yell. Her house is old and she could see out through a space between the beam and plaster. She said a stone man had Humbert by the hair and bit his nose off. Then it went in, and a stone woman after it. The whole family was killed: bludgeoned and bitten. The work of the Devil.”

“It was dark, yes?” the priest said.

“Course it was; they only come at night.”

“How could she be sure it was stone? Maybe these were just thieves.”

“There was stone dust and bits of stone in the house from where Humbert’s son tried to fight them. And I reckon you could tell a stone man from a man of flesh even in the dark. And what thieves bite people to death?”

“Hungry ones?” Thomas said, but neither of the other men found that funny.

His sorry joke hung in the thick darkness of the workshop for a long moment, until the mule took a relaxed and abundant shit on the woodcarver’s floor. Thomas started chuckling, and soon the priest and Jehan were chuckling as well, and then the three of them were trying unsuccessfully to bite back laughter like naughty boys in church.

“What’s so funny down there?” Annette called.

“Oh, nothing,” Jehan said. “One of our guests said he enjoyed his supper.”

They laughed themselves to sleep.

Nothing knocked for them that night.

Morning came. The sky was a bright gray that neither threatened rain nor allowed for the possibility of sunshine, but it was welcome after the night the men had spent huddled on the workshop floor listening for the knocking of God knew what. Thomas was up first, and he opened the window enough so that he could try to scrub the worst of the rust off his armor. The sound woke the priest, but the woodcarver snored on, the scent of his Norman apple brandy still spicing his exhalations.

The priest sat close to Thomas and spoke quietly into his ear.

“What are you going to do if the girl stays?”

“She’ll stay, all right. She’s already spreading rushes with the woman and helping her kill fleas on the coverlet.”

“So what will you do?”

“Same as before. Push on.”

“Where?”

“Hadn’t thought about it yet.”

“I have. I think I still want to get to Avignon.”

“Your catamite brother?”

The priest winced at that, but nodded. There was something flinty about Thomas this morning.

“You might come with me.”

“In your cart?”

“How else?”

“I might take the cart and leave you here.”

“I couldn’t stop you, of course.”

“I know.”

“Don’t talk like that. What’s gotten into you?”

“I’ll talk as it pleases me to talk. And don’t look so wounded about the cart. Just because you went out to the orchard and found it doesn’t make it yours.”

“I’m not contesting that. I just thought…”

“Well, don’t think. I do better alone, that’s all. I don’t know how I found myself tagging behind that little witch in the first place. Or with you. I’m damned already, as are you, though you don’t realize it because you’ve got your robe and your cross and your Latin. I just…don’t want anybody’s eyes on me. If I have to do things to survive.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t see. What you don’t see is that you’re a common bugger priest. And she’s just a skinny little girl who wants her mother. And I’m an outlaw knight who’s been formally cut off from the sacraments of the church. Death means Hell, so I’m going to keep death off me as long as I can. And I’ll do that better in the country than I will in Paris or Avignon.”

The woodcarver stirred, but then went back to snoring.

“You’re…you’re excommunicate?”

Thomas nodded, then stood up from the floor without the use of his hands, as a fit young squire might have; as if his anger made him youthful. With his brow creased and his eyes set belligerently he looked thirty, not forty. He looked like figures of Mars. Or Lucifer. He got his sword and sharpening stone and squatted nimbly back on his heels.

“When?” the priest said.

“Does it matter?”

“I’m just curious. It’s…It’s so final.”

“I thought I’d let you know before you cried too hard about parting company with me.”

“Why did they do that to you?”

“What do you want, the given reasons? Or the real one?”

“Given, first.”

“Heresy, sodomy, blasphemy. The usual things to turn a petty lord’s village against him.”

“You don’t strike me as a sodomite.”

“Oh, but heresy and blasphemy sit well, do they?”

“Perhaps blasphemy. You do have a colorful way of expressing displeasure. But why did they really excommunicate you?”

“To get my land. Why else?”

“Blasphemy is serious.”