Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“You little bastard ,” Thomas said, angry now.

The little man fumed at him from where he sat in the high grass. The priest thought of a surly rabbit and laughed into his hand despite his best intentions.

The dwarf tried to climb the cross and resume his place, but Thomas grabbed him by the britches and hauled him down again.

“I want to save my town!” the dwarf screamed, with tears of frustration in his eyes, and the game lost its humor even for Thomas.

“Do you really want to go back up there?” Thomas asked.

The man sat down in the grass and looked bewildered.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But don’t you see? This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can’t plow. I can’t build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now.”

The priest opened his mouth to contradict the man, but nothing came out.

“Shit,” Thomas said.

And then he hauled the dwarf back up the cross and tied him fast.

Emma LaTour looked out from the darkness of her house, stunned by the beauty of the day; except for visits to the well, she had not left her home since her Richard had been racked with pains by the fence and died there. At the end, he had been grabbing his knees, and now his joints had locked him in a parody of childbirth, bloated like a dead dog or sheep. How was she to believe man was anything special when he looked so much like any other animal in death? He was just a rained-on, ruined carcass, as if he had never kissed her, as if he had never danced. The beautiful blue sky seemed to mock him, as did the bulk of the St. Etienne cathedral and the spire of the abbey, both of these stabbing upward from the high ground across the river in Auxerre. Nothing but false promises lay across the river, or up in the sky.

Her carrots were nearly gone, and she was sick to death of them; they hurt her few teeth and she checked the skin of her arms constantly because she had the idea the carrots were turning her yellow. She needed to cross the bridge into town, though the thought made her shiver with fear. If only her sons would come; but they had their own children to think of, and she had not seen any of them in a week or more. Her little cottage had been forgotten.

Now she was looking out her window, staying well back from the light so it wouldn’t illuminate her yellow skin; she heard a voice coming across the fields.

And it was beautiful.

It belonged to an angel.

She saw him (or her?) sprinting down the weedy path, wearing a white skirt of sorts ruched up to the belt for running, bare of chest and foot. It was a boy. Nimble as a fox, and so lovely to watch, with his tangled blond hair bouncing. The child-angel leapt upon her fence of uneven branches and balanced along its length, calling to the window in a beautiful, heavily accented singsong, as if he could see her where she cowered in shadow.

He leapt off the fence and over the birthing corpse of her husband and ran through the field, which was spotted purple with new growths of thistles; Emma had a mother’s instinct to yell at him not to stick his feet on their evil little crowns of spines, but he ran through them as if on purpose, then dove and actually rolled through the thickest patch of them , laughing and shouting, “Iesu! Iesu! Iesu!”

The Penitents had come to Auxerre.

The threescore farmers, carpenters, drapers, vintners, wives, and daughters who stood in cool sunlight near the St. Etienne cathedral had all been summoned by the beautiful boy. He gathered them with his songs and gambols, but especially with his promises of miracles against the plague. Hucksters of every stripe had tried to profit from the disease, especially in the early days, before they, too, sickened or grew afraid; so many relic sellers and apothecaries had come that soon any stranger with a case and a gleam in his eye was in danger of being beaten and flung into the Yonne, along with his sweetly herbed potions, deer bones, magic feathers, Galen cakes, or sap from the Cedars of Lebanon.

When the disease bore down and the die-off began, the town was left alone, although her gates stood open. The bishop had said, when asked for his counsel on whether to impose a quarantine, “the fox already makes his bed among the hens,” which was very close in spirit to the seigneur’s observation that “closing those gates would be leading hens to piss.” Auxerre, thus, dutifully flew the black banner announcing the presence of the Great Death but remained open to whoever cared to brave it, be they pilgrims, refugees, or men with pretty lies to tell.

But now the boy had come, and he was different.

He was quite credible as the herald to a prophet, with his eyes of northern ocean blue and his dimpled smile. Even his German accent, normally a hindrance in these xenophobic times, lent him an air of exoticism; after all, if some holy cure were to come to Auxerre, it would not come from Burgundy. Why not the piney forests of the north?

But this boy sold no cures.

He never mentioned money at all.

“Wait!” he said, capturing his audience with an up-pointed finger and a theatrical tilt to his head. “I believes I hear them. But perhaps you will hear them, too, if you make der Alleluia.”

Nobody spoke.

“Children of Gott, make der ALLELUIA!”

“ALLELUIA!” they cried, and a drum began to beat a simple march.

The sound came up through the narrow streets that led down and to the river and echoed on the shuttered shop fronts and timbered houses that bordered the square. A line of ecstatic men and women entered the Place St. Etienne, shuffling slowly in something like a drugged march, striking themselves in time to the drumbeats with leather thongs fitted with iron hooks or spikes. They were naked from the waist up, like the boy, all wearing simple skirts that had once been white but had been marched in and bled on until they were the color of earth and as stiff as leather. The crowd gasped at the sight of them; the women’s bare breasts, the old blood drying, the new blood trickling, the white caps they wore with red crosses on the front and back. Some of the Auxerrois even fell to their knees wailing, thinking Judgment Day had come, here, now, and soon Christ himself would split the sky and part the damned from the saved.

Now four women called out and four men answered:

And then the men called and the women answered:

Then, all together:

Behind these eight and the drummer trained a score or so who had clearly been recruited from other towns, all stripped to the waist, though less uniform in appearance. Some of them whipped themselves with tree branches; a girl walked behind bearing a bundle of sticks on her back to replace those that split.

Now the drummer beat three beats and they all stopped. They shouted “Iesu!” and flung themselves facedown into the street, arms out, cruciform, eliciting a gasp from the crowd. The ones at the rear then stood and came forward, giving a stroke of the whip or the branch to each prone figure they passed, until they reached the front and flung themselves down again. In this way, like some horrible caterpillar, the entire line worked its way toward the square in front of St. Etienne and the astonished crowd of onlookers, then collapsed all at once.