Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“Well, er… it… it seems our kitten is a cat.”

Delphine was too restless to sit in the cart, so she walked alongside while the two older men rode. The cloths she had bundled around her middle were coarse and chafed her, but she was glad to have found them in the farmhouse; the mother of the dead family inside had been halfway through sewing a dress for herself when the disease came and made her lay her needle aside. She had been found leaning out the window, dead a good month so she was mostly bone, the wattle under her dark as though she had melted into the wall. Delphine thought the woman’s fever might have made her want air at the end of it. She guessed, too, that the whole family had sickened at once; one small corpse hugged another in the corner opposite, the smaller of them clutching a cloth poppet with eyes of snail shell. The mother was already too weak to bury them when they died. And where was the man of the house? Was it the old man in the barn? Or was he the woman’s father? She guessed it was the father, and that he had been mad before and they kept him in the barn; but then it occurred to her that he might have hidden himself there to save his life, perhaps warning others away with that rusty scythe, and there lost his mind. And the husband? Was he dead before the plague came, in the war perhaps, or had he run off to save himself? She knew many such stories of betrayal and selfishness from her village, though she also knew stories of great faithfulness and courage. This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

“What are you thinking about over there?” Thomas said. Ever since the incident in the barn, he had been kinder to her. She wondered how long it would last.

“Death,” she said.

“That’s cheerful. Perhaps you’d like to sing us a song about it?”

She ignored this.

“No singing? Maybe you’ll dance us a merry brawl, then? The priest and I grow bored with watching this mule’s ass sway.”

She wrinkled her mouth, trying not to encourage his vulgarity by smiling at it. Instead she bent down for a mud clot and threw it, though it sailed well behind and landed in the cart.

“Ha!” he laughed at her. “Now that you’re a woman, you can’t do things boys can do, can you? A boy would have pelted me right between the eyes.”

She snarled at him and walked faster, cutting in front of the mule.

“Now I will watch the mule’s ass and he will watch yours, is that your remedy?”

She walked faster, letting herself smile now that the coarse knight would not have the satisfaction of seeing it.

The priest knew something had transpired between the knight and the girl, but the nature of the change puzzled him. If Thomas had forced himself upon her, would she still go with them? To keep herself alive, perhaps, but surely she would not jest and smile so much. What if she had allowed him? Or had gone to him? She was the right age to start thinking of such things, after all, now that she bore the mark of Eve. If that were the case, surely he would see it in a thoughtless caress or in a too-long glance; they did look at each other more, but almost as a father and daughter might where the father had picked the child as his favorite and teased her playfully. It did not seem carnal; he had taught himself to divine when his parishioners were fornicating so he could better coax them to lighten their souls with confession.

But who was he to judge anyone, or propose any remedy for sin?

He was such a profound sinner that he had considered leaving off his robes and stopping the pretense. He was just an old bugger who would sell his last possession for a barrel of good wine. Or any wine.

And he was lonely.

The most puzzling thing for him was his own reaction to the newfound, though seemingly platonic intimacy between his companions; Père Matthieu was jealous.

On their fifth day since Paris, they camped near a swollen stream, up on a rocky bank that gave them a decent view of the country around them. Thomas and the priest sharpened long sticks to use as spears and spent the last hours of daylight trying to gig fish in the river. They got only one, and a small one. The frogs they had hunted eluded them easily, sheltering between rocks or hopping into thick river grass, and now mocked them with their buzzing evensong farther down the stream. The girl went to forage in the woods; she returned at twilight with a rusty, hole-ridden pot in which she carried two handfuls of acorns, several walnuts, and a broken horseshoe.

“Goddamn it,” Thomas said, gazing at her small cache.

“Maybe God would be more generous if you swore less.”

“God starves babies sometimes, and they don’t swear at all.”

Having no answer for that, Delphine found a tree stump and began pounding acorns with the horseshoe. They would make an awful, mouth-puckering companion to the two mouthfuls of trout they could each look forward to, but it would be marginally better than nothing.

“Babies go straight to Heaven,” she said now.

Thomas didn’t look up from his work setting river stones to make a fire. “Bad ones don’t,” he said.

“There are no bad babies,” she said. “They don’t know any better.”

“Sounds like you’ve never met a baby. Many of them are awful. I knew one in Picardy who stole his father’s money and crawled down the road to the whorehouse. “

“It was you,” she said. “The only bad baby ever was you.”

The priest sighed and went off to gather more sticks for the fire.

They ate their awful dinner, sucking each slender bone and washing the bitter acorn meal down with water. The walnuts were last, least and best. Stomachs still rumbling, they each settled down, the men near the cart, the girl with her head against the tree stump. The only sounds were the stream, the frogs, and the mule munching his fill of grass.

In the morning, as the men stirred, Delphine woke up at dawn, but the exhausted men slept later. She amused herself first by collecting river pebbles in her gathered gown front, and then sowing them as a farmer would with an apron full of seeds. When she was out of pebbles, she took up one of the fishing spears and, holding it butt end down, pretended to stir the rusty pot. The priest sat up, stiff from his night on the rocky ground, and noticed her at her game.

“What are you cooking for us, daughter?” he said.

“A stew!”

“Christ, don’t start that,” Thomas said.

“What kind of stew?” the priest asked, secretly happy to needle the knight’s hunger.

“Cabbages and pepper.”

“Real pepper?” the priest said. “Will the king be joining us?”

“Yes,” she said, “and all his ministers. But I wasn’t done with the stew.”

“Christ drowning in shit,” Thomas said, putting his straw hat over his face.

“Mushrooms and turnips and even pork belly.”

“And shit,” Thomas grumbled from his hat. “Don’t forget the shit.”

“What a lovely meal,” the priest said. “May I have some?”

Delphine nodded gravely, still stirring. The priest got up and held his wooden bowl out so she could pretend to fill it with her stick-ladle. He slurped air from a pretend spoon and said, “My compliments. It’s perfect.”

Thomas peeked from under the hat to confirm what he thought he was hearing. Then he replaced the hat, saying, “Jesus wept.”

Just before they left their camp, the priest found another walnut, which had escaped through a hole in the girl’s gathering pot. He found the broken horseshoe and looked around for the stump but couldn’t find it. Thinking nothing of it, he opened the nut against the cart and brought it to Delphine, who did her best to take exactly one-third of it. He shared the rest with Thomas, who said, “How can you stuff yourself so? Aren’t you full of shit and cabbage stew?”