Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

All but the man beating the drum.

He set this aside now and looked at the crowd.

“I am Rutger the Fair,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. Fair might have been a name from his youth; it seemed a better word to hang on an urbane womanizer than on this handsome but shocking man of thirty or so, graced with the broad, muscular chest of a woodcutter or a swordsman, brutally scarred from months of flagellation. His carelessly shaven (or intentionally cut) scalp would have sat well on a madman, but his deep-set eyes shone with intelligence, even wisdom. A goatish beard of blond and gray erupted from his chin. He seemed less a cleric than the antidote to clericism. If Christ had been German as well as a carpenter, and if He had survived His scourging, and if He had shorn His head with a broken bottle, He might well have looked like this man.

“I come to you, Auxerre, from the land of Saxony, where the plague is not yet come, and shall never come; I stand before you to offer you either the cup or the sword. The cup is that of forgiveness, and the sword is that of wrath.”

Now the boy came up from behind the crowd, bearing a pewter goblet and a small sword. He stood by the man, stomping his feet twice.

“God demands a tithe. If one in ten of you turn from your lives of false comfort and walk with us for thirty days, your town will be spared. Or if three of you will sit the cross for three days, your town will also be spared. But if you stay here and do not show the Lord your love, you will all die the death of the stone under the arm, or the stone in the crotch, or the death of the spitting of the blood. I see by your faces you know these deaths, ja ? Well, you have now the chance to turn the face of death away from you. Shall I speak further on God’s offer, or will you harden your hearts and go to your houses to die in sin?”

“Speak on!” someone yelled.

Another repeated it.

“Hup!” Rutger said, and the cruciform Penitents behind him stood, arms out, faces lifted to the sky.

Some of them were sobbing.

He spoke.

Emma watched, amazed, as the butcher and a vintner named Jules, who had once courted her sister, came bearing a two-wheeled cart. They put her poor, stiff husband in it, revolted by his decomposition but seemingly unafraid of his disease. Why were they not calling out to her? Because she sat in shadow and they thought she was dead, too, like almost everyone on this side of the Yonne. Or they thought that she had run away.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked, letting a little sunlight fall on her face so they could see her. She winced as much from the sunlight as from her fear of their reaction to her color, but she did not startle them. If they thought she was yellow, they were very polite about it.

“The cathedral,” Jules said. “You’ll want to see this, Emma.”

“Are you burying him?”

“No, Emma. Come to Saint Etienne.”

So saying, they carted her Richard away, his knees still locked against his chest, the little blond boy now visible, skipping before them through the thistles and singing a song in German.

The sun was lowering when the three dead Auxerrois were brought before the cathedral of St. Etienne. Richard was the worst of them, having been dead a week, but two others had been chosen. A beautiful young maid who had broken hearts in the wine shop by the front gate was only one day gone, though her beauty had already been cast down; she had been healthy at daybreak, but by Nones, the plague had turned her the color of an eggplant and killed her outright.

The third was Yvette Michonneau, the bishop’s acknowledged mistress, who died after fighting grimly through an unheard-of ten days of lancings and bleedings, leaving behind three of the bishop of Auxerre’s chubby, dark-eyed bastards. She had been wrapped in a shroud and buried, but the German boy commanded her to be retrieved. Yvette’s mother, also a fighter, had brawled in the churchyard to keep her daughter’s hard-won Christian burial from being upset, grabbing away the sexton’s shovel and breaking one Penitent’s nose with it before being wrestled down and hustled off by her neighbors.

Auxerre had tried to please God with Christian burials, but clearly something more was required.

The cart was drawing near Auxerre; the square tower of the cathedral beckoned them as they topped a hill near Perigny, but, with only an hour of sun left, they decided to make camp near the wall of an old convent, long abandoned and swarmed with ivy now blushing mostly red. All the ivy in the abandoned village of Perigny crawled toward Auxerre, as if reaching for it with delicate fingers.

The girl slept hard and neither man wanted to rouse her from her sleep. Thomas covered her with their horse blanket, and then he and the priest left her and went into the damp woods bordering the field looking for sticks dry enough to burn.

Delphine woke alone in the cart, her heart racing from a dream that a devil was in Auxerre turning people into poppets. In the dream, she was able to stop it, but the devil, who had too many eyes, was very angry, and it chased her. That was when she awoke. She knew the dream was true, and this frightened her so much that she pulled the blanket over her head; then she thought of her father and mother, and of how she would have felt to see either of them turned into a devil’s plaything. She gathered her blanket around her, meaning to set off down the road, knowing she didn’t have much daylight in which to walk the last few miles.

An angel was sitting on the back of the mule, facing her and wringing its hands. It was the same one she had seen in Paris and back home in Normandy; it was the saddest she had ever seen an angel look. It told her to stay in the cart, speaking as if every word hurt it.

“Why?” she said.

She would only make things worse, it said, however noble her desire was. Getting to Avignon was all that mattered.

“Is a devil going to Auxerre?”

Yes. A very strong one is already there. And another is coming.

“Who will help the people in the town? Will you?”

It hung its head. It was a minor angel, made better at messages than war. The strong ones were fighting in Heaven.

Delphine thought, from the way the angel spoke, that this fight must not be going well.

She wanted to cry.

What would happen to the souls in Heaven if the angels lost? Would they have to go back to their bodies? Now she imagined her mother and father at the end of a stick, jerking beneath a devil’s hand in a parody of a dance.

Stay in the cart.

She could not bear to say no to the angel, so she shook her head, though so gently a person might not have noticed.

She looked around to make sure the priest and the knight didn’t see her, because they would stop her, or follow her and put themselves in danger. She bent to muddy her finger and wrote on the side of the cart. Then she patted the mule’s side, as much to comfort herself as him, and started off down the road barefoot.

Please, the angel said behind her, and she stopped for a heartbeat and then kept going. She was afraid she might lose heart, so she made herself count ten steps before she looked behind her.

The angel was gone.

Thomas found the cart empty, with writing on its side. He put his meager bundle of sticks and chestnuts on the ground and called the priest over.

The priest read it aloud.

STAY HERE

Fully one hundred people had gathered to see the Penitents perform their miracle in the square before Auxerre’s cathedral. A light breeze blew, but it was not so cold since the rains stopped. Rutger’s followers held candles, the last candles the remaining Benedictine monks at the abbey of St. Germain had. They wanted no part of the Penitents’ display, but the Auxerrois had told them plainly that they would have no more food brought to them unless they gave over their tapers; the brothers had already killed their last hog and chickens, and their measly garden could not get them though the winter. They had reminded the crowd that starving out monks was not high on the list of deeds that would get one into Heaven; further, the abbey was dedicated to St. Germanus, who had taught St. Patrick and argued against the Pelagian heresy, and these brothers were the keepers of his holy bones.