Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Thomas shook his agonized head, his eyes tearing.

“Further,” the squire said, “you are declared excommunicate. The bishop of Laon himself has ordered it, against the protests of your priest. They will strip you of your spurs in absentia, empty the chalice, and lay down the cross; if ever you return and try to claim your land back, the priest must deny the people the sacraments as well.”

Thomas made a sound that might have been, “When?”

“The ceremony is tomorrow.”

And so Thomas had healed. When his money ran out, he went west to Normandy and sold his soul to Godefroy, watching always for the heraldic crest of the man who had ruined him, Chrétien, Comte d’Évreux: the gold-on-red wheel of Spain quartered with a barred field of fleur-de-lys. Thomas agreed to stay with the brigands so long as they stayed in High Normandy; Godefroy agreed that they would often visit the comte’s domain. Thomas swore that this grasping lord with lands in Spain, Normandy, and Picardy, who had his piggish eyes even on the crown of France, would die in the mud at a brigand’s hands.

He swore it, spat on a cross, and flung it down.

Since God had permitted his excommunication, he would earn it.

Thomas never thought himself the kind of man to take part in theft and killings, and to permit rape, but, in the name of revenge, he became exactly that kind of man.

For a time.

“What became of your squire?” said the priest.

“I’ve no whoring idea. I sent him off rather than take him to Hell with me, but he’s like to have found another hell. Probably married an English girl and hung a mess of brats off her dugs.”

The woodcarver’s eyes were open now. Thomas turned his gaze upon him.

“How much did you hear?”

“More than I shall soon forget.”

Thomas breathed in, as if to exhale some oath, but he had mellowed with the telling of his tale. He suffered the priest to put his hand on his shoulder, then hung his head. Now the woodcarver sat up and put his hand on Thomas as well.

Jehan the woodcarver was nearly out of food, so he had to go to market. Normally he would have done this on his own, wearing a yoke with two baskets and wearing a cloth about his face, taking care to stay as far away from others as he could; but today Delphine insisted on coming along. Which meant Thomas would go as well. The priest was half dying for want of wine, and things had gotten so bad in the quarter that Annette didn’t want to be left alone. Neither did the mule, but it wasn’t asked.

Annette went up to a trunk at the foot of her bed and took out a pair of pretty yellow woolen hose that had belonged to her daughter, as well as a pair of wooden pattens for tying to the bottoms of one’s shoes to protect them from the mud and worse of the Parisian streets. She made a gift of these to Delphine and combed her hair out, humming the same Norman tune the girl had sung beneath their window the night before. She was smiling more than Jehan had seen her smile in months.

It was midday when they left.

The five of them kept tight to each other and walked a twisting mile through the streets, with the shop fronts shuttered, the few open windows on higher stories staring at them like dead sockets. Other groups huddled to themselves, and nobody spoke. A cart passed them, forcing them to hug up against the buildings, the driver saying, “Watch out,” as mechanically as if he were talking to himself. Rats ran in the gutters and sometimes on the roofs, but otherwise things were so still that a dog barking in the distance sounded like music.

It got noisy as they drew near, however.

The market on the rue Mont-Fetard was one of the few places where people would still congregate, and, as such, was one of the most dangerous places one could go. Many of the spaces where stalls once stood were empty now, and those that remained had distanced themselves well away from their neighbors, like teeth in old gums.

Still, the market presented a rich spectacle, even in fraction.

Yellow finches fluttered and chirped in cages; an acrobat walked backward on her hands with eyes painted on her bottom and outsized gloves on her feet; a Spaniard berated two little dogs who had grown tired of spinning in circles on their hind legs while he played a horn.

People yelled and bargained as they had before the sickness; they just did it farther away from each other. Hawkers called to the group in singsong chants:

The girl, who had walked very near the group while they made their way through the dead streets, now let herself be pulled this way and that, now trailing the group, now trotting awkwardly ahead, unaccustomed as she was to wearing pattens on her shoes. She had the feeling that whatever she sought in Paris would be here, in this market, but she loved the market’s éclat with the love of a child who has been quiet too long. She loved the colors and the motion of commerce, but especially the noise. The sound of foreign languages pleased her particularly, reminding her that a whole world lay beyond the horizons of Normandy and Paris: a world of varied provinces and innumerable towns and hamlets that might not all be dying.

Foreigners were in no short supply at the Mont-Fetard market; Germans hunched over stacks of iron, spraying beer through their whiskers as they called out. Spaniards sang “ Cuero, cuero, cuero de Córdoba ” over shoe leather so fine one could almost see light through it. Bohemians tapped bars of lead in rhythm and sang inscrutable songs, more to amuse themselves than to draw custom.

Delphine loved it all.

The Florentines had the biggest and most beautiful stall; they had lived in the city and had grown rich selling the bright red wool of Florence in bolts that drew the eye from thirty paces. Now they wore plague masks that made them look like awful birds. A table sat before them with a bowl of water in which one was to place money, as it was believed this would cleanse it of bad air. These merchants had grown adept at showing their cloth by means of two sticks, and they rolled and fluttered it before Annette as she came near, though she could only come so near; little stacks of bricks marked the boundary past which customers’ feet were not to step.

But where was the food?

When the priest, whose stomach was rumbling noisily, asked Jehan where the food sellers were, the woodcarver pointed up ahead, past a group of bickering men. As they approached, they saw a sergent with his baton of office yelling through a handkerchief at a shrugging merchant who sold tortoises and tiny owls and other exotic animals. The officer gestured at a miserable-looking monkey in a cage.

“That beast has it. You have to pitch its cage in the river, or burn it, but either way, get it out of here.”

“Monkeys don’t get plague. He’s just tired. Who wouldn’t be tired with you yelling at him?”

“Monkeys are just little men, aren’t they? Foul little men who bite and throw filth. I’m telling you, he’s got it.”

The sergent was obliged to use reason because he had only one man with him, and the merchant, who had a Gascon accent, had several dark-skinned fellows who looked like brothers sitting within easy reach of staves and knives.