Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

When one of them stole wood from the widow’s house, saying his duties left him no time for chopping, she tried to block his way out but found herself pushed down on her backside. She complained to the herald. This herald promised to take the matter before their lord, but nothing was done. The seigneur, terrified of plague, had suspended court sessions and shut himself away with his retinue. Only the herald was seen, arching his painted eyebrows and reading unenforceable proclamations from the back of his palfrey. Men-at-arms could be seen walking the parapet of the keep, their armor winking in the early summer light; but they never came down anymore. The Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse was all the justice there was in St. Martin-le-Preux.

One night, when there was enough moon, several of the day watch went drunkenly to the river to gather reeds for new members to make masks with. Steering for a growth of reeds near the charred and collapsed timber of the bridge, one of them noticed a pair of red stockings balled up on the shore. Other clothes were concealed nearby.

“Look here, boys,” he whispered, “we’ve got some June frolics in the river!”

“Ho,” one of them cried, slapping the water with his staff. “Come out, little fishes. One of you can show us her gills!”

They guffawed at that and began whistling, but no head broke the water.

“Under there,” one said, pointing at where the western ruin of the bridge still stood. They waded in the mud and looked underneath. There, hiding by the pilings, shivered a very pale and naked priest holding the hands of the reeve’s son, who was also in the state of Adam. Both of them were slicked with mud halfway up their shins.

“I don’t believe my whoring eyes,” one man said.

Now the boy panicked and sloshed out toward the other side of the bridge, running when he got to the bank. Père Matthieu nearly followed him, but then lost all hope. He turned his back to the men, held his face in his hands and cried.

He was sure they would kill him.

None of them moved for a long moment. Then one of them spat on him. Then another. When all of them had done so, they turned, laughing, and walked back up the river and into town to spread the news.

So it was that when the plague came, only a dozen souls were coming to Mass. Père Matthieu’s assistant and bell ringer, a stocky, busy, black-haired child everyone called Bourdon, performed his duties without his former energy. Hardly any received the priest when he came to anoint their loved ones in death. Only a handful sought confession. Soon the reeve’s son died, and the reeve, and nearly the whole village. Heartbroken yet afraid for his life, the priest stopped going to church at all, shutting himself up in his house with his wine. It was not until the monster moved into the river that the villagers sought their shepherd out and shamed him into helping them. There was no one else they could go to. So he tried. He went house to house seeking men who could use a weapon. When he saw how strong the thing was and knew he did not have enough healthy men to fight it, he took up the place where the brotherhood used to wait, and sat with his lantern, praying for soldiers to come down the road.

As it turned out, one did.

As for the Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse, they were already gone. They were, in fact, among the first victims. The widow fell ill, having caught it from the farmer’s child who helped her clear up, and the surgeon had refused to see her. Trying to do for herself what she believed he would have done for her, she bled herself into a wooden bowl, though this only made her weaker. The lump in her groin was so painful that it was all she could do to drag herself down the stairs and to the alehouse door when, after one of her bleedings, the brotherhood pounded at it. They wore their masks. They stank of drink and were demanding more.

She told them to go away because she was tired.

They insisted.

She told them to go away, for the love of God.

They said they had none.

So she served them.

If they tasted the blood mixed into their beer, they never said a word about it.

“So I damned half my village. My weakness made them hate me, so they stayed away from Mass. They were cut off from the sacraments.”

Thomas furrowed his brow at the priest.

“But it doesn’t make sense. As you said yourself, most priests have a mistress. Why would they hate you so for dallying with the girl?”

The priest shook his head and looked at the sky.

“Why would the boy run off and leave the girl in the river with you? And why would she want a knobby old priest twice her age when she could have a handsome lad who was going to be a lawyer?”

“The mysteries of the heart are unknowable.”

“And the way you described his legs. It was the boy who stayed in the river, wasn’t it? Not the girl at all. You kept saying ‘the object of my affection’ because you plumbed the boy.”

“No,” the priest lied.

“What good is confession if you lie?”

“Everyone lies at confession. Around the edges, at least. A man who fornicates with his brother’s wife will say it was a whore. A woman will say she was glad in her heart that her blind and deaf baby died, when what she means is that she drowned it. But I wasn’t lying. Because a man of war like you cannot travel with a known sodomite.”

“You’re goddamned right,” Thomas said.

“You need the object of my affection to have been the girl.”

“Yes.”

“So it was the girl.”

“Good. I hope you fucked her right in half.”

The priest smiled sadly and kept looking at the sky, though the moon was gone again, covered over with clouds. Thomas drank another swig of rainwater and went inside, mildly fuming.

“I wouldn’t leave you,” a small voice said. The priest looked down and saw that Delphine had come from the barn. “If it was the boy,” she continued. “I wouldn’t leave.”

He smiled at her and wiped at his eye with the back of his hand.

Then the rain came again and they all tried to sleep.

In the loft above the barn, a mouse had just peeled herself away from nursing her litter. She left them in the nest and went through a tunnel in the rotten hay, sensing that the rain had driven hosts of little bugs from the sodden ground and into the structure. It was the perfect time to hunt; ants or grubs would make better milk than grain, and there hadn’t been grain in this barn since before she birthed. As she got to the end of the tunnel, she stopped before she crossed the plain of planks that led to the beam she would skitter down to forage in the barn. She poked her nose into the air and sniffed. This was where an owl could most easily kill her, as one had had taken her mate on the path between the barn and the house. She smelled something, but it was no owl.

Something landed wetly on the roof; no heavier than a branch full of wet leaves, but that wasn’t what it was.

She looked up, then froze.

It came through the straw thatching on the roof, forcing its way between the fibers, at once liquid and not liquid. She had never seen tentacles, but that was what it was: a mass of tentacles that knotted on itself again and again to move. It had no head at all; to her, it looked like a nest of snakes’ tails.

She was too afraid to move back into the tunnel, even when it dropped onto the planks not two yards from her.

It writhed nearer, rearing up several of its tail-arms to regard her, but then, thankfully, decided she was not what it was looking for. It collapsed on itself and went liquid again, blacker than blood, so black it was less like a stain and more like the most profound absence of light. It oozed through the spaces between the planks and disappeared.