Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

There was no question of Thomas catching him.

The knight slept poorly.

He woke panting in darkness from a dream about riding his horse through a field of brambles, and tried to remember where he was. When he did, he noticed that the rain had stopped, and he walked outside to look up at the sky. The half-moon flirted with him through gouges in slow-moving clouds that still held water, but he would not be able to look for his comet. He thought it might be out of sight now, having murdered its stellar swan, but he had no doubt that others had come; this had been a promiscuous summer for comets.

Only it wasn’t summer anymore. His breath plumed out in front of him. It was nearing mid-September, but it was cold like October.

He heard movement behind him, and then a sound of mild displeasure; he turned to see the priest stooping to drink from the bowl he had set out.

“It’s musty,” he said. “My bowl could do with a scrubbing.”

Thomas looked at the sky again.

“Couldn’t sleep?” the priest asked.

Thomas didn’t answer.

“I know. Stupid question. Hardly worthy of William of Ockham. I should have asked if you had bad dreams. I did. Would you like to know what about?”

Thomas didn’t speak.

“I was being led around the countryside by a little girl. There were horrid things in rivers, and statues crawled off churches, and a great sickness had killed most everybody. I was starving, to boot.”

Silence.

“My only other companion was a moody, excommunicate knight who rarely spoke and didn’t have the slightest interest in hearing about my nightmares. And, of course, a mule.”

Thomas sighed.

“I liked the mule.”

“What did you really dream?”

“I dreamed my brother had no legs.”

“The one in Avignon? The catamite?”

“I have only one brother. He walked about with crutches, like a stilt man, but drab and sad. I fed him from my hand as if he were a bird, but he was not grateful. He hated me for my legs.”

“That sounds better than the other one. Perhaps you should go back to sleep.”

Now the priest looked at the sky.

“What’s up there?”

“If a priest doesn’t know, how should I?”

“Huh. Maybe a better priest would.”

He stooped now and took rainwater from the knight’s thigh-piece. Thomas took a long look at Père Matthieu.

“You haven’t been defrocked or anything, have you?”

“Should have been, perhaps. But, no.”

“You just don’t always seem quite like a priest.”

“Funny. I’ve felt the same way ever since the day I took orders.”

“Why did you, then?”

“Like most of the others. My father sent me.”

“Why didn’t you follow him into his trade?”

The priest didn’t say anything.

“Well?”

“He was a soldier.”

“And?”

“Do I seem like a soldier to you?”

“Not even a little.”

“And yet I am heroic compared with my brother.”

Thomas grunted, imagining how he might look upon his son if he proved too weak for arms. He imagined himself beating it out of him and making a man of him. It occurred to him that the priest’s father had probably tried.

“Our father used to say, ‘Since God has sent me only daughters, I shall send the bearded ones to take orders, and the others to fetch back sons.’”

Thomas chuckled.

“Yes, I suppose it is funny,” the priest said, “the first dozen times.”

Thomas drank out of his helm.

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“We’re in for more of it,” Thomas said.

The priest nodded.

“May I tell you?”

“What?” Thomas said.

“What I did.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I know.”

“Then why ask?”

The priest folded his arms around himself against the cold.

“I don’t have anyone else to confess to.”

Two months before the plague came to St. Martin-le-Preux, Père Matthieu Hanicotte was in love. His hands shook as he put on his chasuble and prepared the candles and the incense, and when he preached his sermon, his left armpit ran cold with sweat, even though the mornings were still cool that May. It seemed curious to him that only the left armpit was affected; perhaps, he thought, because the heart was supposed to sit just a little to the left. And his sin, as of this morning, was still only in his heart.

The sweat would run from the moment he approached the altar; even with his back to his flock, he thought about where the object of his affection would be standing; three or four rows back, always closest to the aisle, at the level of the stained-glass window portraying the brides with their lanterns.

He could even distinguish the young man’s cough from the rest of his congregation.

On this particular day, the object was wearing his best gray cotehardie buttoned snugly up his trunk, and standing with one leg in the aisle, which the others took for rascality, but which was in fact to better display his bright red stocking and the long, well-calved leg in it.

As Père Matthieu lifted the Eucharist, he tried to keep his thoughts on the words he was pronouncing; but then he felt the cold sweat running, and knew it was making him stink. This new love-sweat hit high in the nose with a sharp note like cheese, or salt, or metal, or the miscarriage of all three. His inner cassock was so ripe with infatuation that he sweated again when he brought it to the laundresses and blushed when he gathered it back.

The boy’s father was the village reeve, whose job it was to act as liaison between the farmers and their seigneur. As was often the case with reeves, Samuel Hébert was mistrusted by each side. The seigneur believed he let the villagers off too early when they worked his manor farm their customary two days per week. This was true. But many of the villagers believed Hébert was too scrupulous in counting and weighing the shares of livestock and harvests they owed their lord. In fact, this was not true; he often let the best cow stay with the inheritors after a peasant died and brought a slightly less meaty one up the river as heriot. Nonetheless, it was Samuel Hébert who took from them, and these proud Norman farmers better perceived slights than kindnesses.

And, by peasant standards, he was rich.

Michel Hébert, his second son, was going to Paris to study law. At twenty, he would be a bit older than most of his colleagues; but a tidy bribe had been administered, and a bursar from the university had met the boy and declared him good enough in Latin that something might be made of him. Soon, Père Matthieu thought, with great sadness and resignation, those red legs would not be standing in the aisle near the window. He was right, of course, but not because the boy was going to Paris.

The Great Death was coming.

It had already begun devouring Avignon, where it was said the pope heard audiences between two fires to burn off pestilential air, and nibbling at Paris, where the first afflicted households were trying to hide their sick so they would not be shunned by their neighbors.

The priest knew his congregation was hungry for news about the disease and its progress; he knew they craved some reassurance that St. Martin-le-Preux would be spared, whether for its holiness or because they had suffered enough under the hand of their greedy seigneur, but he could not summon up the words. The truth was that he knew nothing. He did not know how it was spread, what had caused it, where it would go, or what could be done for the ill. What troubled him most was his feeling that God could see into his heart and knew that his love was twisted. God would weigh his most secret thoughts and, finding them repulsive, would take an even heavier toll on the villeins of his flock. He would have thrown himself into the river, but a suicide priest might be worse in God’s eyes than a would-be sodomite.