Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“Are you quite done?” Jacquot said.

She nodded. He tilted the table and Papa fell in the hole, breaking open like rotten fruit. The girl didn’t watch this, but she did watch Jacquot’s face as he watched it.

“It’s all right,” she said. “That’s not really him anymore.”

“No shit,” he said, and coughed into his face cloth, which he was about to remove when Thomas motioned to the dirt pile.

“Oh, come on. Let me take a rest.”

“After you shovel.”

While the man with the drooping eye sweated and complained and by and by filled the grave behind the little house, the girl went back inside and soon returned bearing over her shoulder a tied sheet full of goods she clearly meant to salvage.

“Where are we going?” she asked Thomas.

“Well, I am going south, or maybe east. I haven’t decided.”

“What is there to the south, besides the pope?” she said.

“I don’t know. I only know it’s not the west.”

“What’s in the west?”

“More of this,” he said, gesturing to the still, broken land around them.

“All right then. South,” she said.

“One town,” Thomas said, holding up a thick, callused finger. “I’ll take you along until we come to the next town, and keep you safe until then. But if you cry, bitch, or moan on the way there, I’ll leave you flat. If you behave tolerably, I’ll dump you in the lap of the first live abbess or even whoring novice nun I see.”

She squinted her eyes at his profanity, but he moved his finger closer to her face, saying, “And I’ll swear as I please. By the Virgin, by her sour milk, by the hair of dead pigs, whatever the devil puts in my mouth. And the more you complain about it, the worse I’ll get.”

She narrowed her eyes yet further at him, which made him think her papa had a slow hand for hitting.

“Don’t pull a face at me. Hand me that sack you brought out.”

“Why?”

“It’s too heavy for you and we don’t have a horse,” he said, snatching it out of her grasp.

“You could have had a donkey.”

“What?”

“You ate my donkey.”

He grunted at her and began pulling things out, starting with a sextet of yellow beeswax candles.

“Fancy,” he said. “No serf has wax candles. What did your papa do?”

“He’s a lawyer. And he keeps bees. Kept bees, I mean. He traded honey and comb for them with the chandler. Soon after people started getting sick, some apprentices came and burned the hives up, saying that the bees had brought it here, flying to sick towns, and towns where Jews were. Later, they came back starving and asking for honey, but Papa told them they burned it up, so they threatened to kill him, but only hit him. But he wasn’t hurt much. Only he did have some left.”

“So he did,” Thomas said, tasting his finger as he pulled out a sticky pot. And then another one. He darted his eye to Jacquot, who had already seen the pots and was coming over quickly, forgetting that he was still holding the shovel.

Thomas stood up and leveled his sword at the man, who remembered the shovel, dropped it, and dropped to his knees, clasping his hands before his chest. He opened his mouth as if waiting for communion. Thomas stood over him with the honey pot and the sword.

“Please?” Jacquot said in the smallest voice he could muster.

“All right, all right, baby bird. Stop your peeping,” Thomas said, sheathing his sword. He tipped the pot of thick, amber stuff and held it over the smaller man’s mouth so a string of it fell slowly in. Jacquot made glad noises and swallowed it, grinning, getting it nastily in his beard. But there wasn’t a second dripping, even though he opened his mouth expectantly again.

“Dig.”

“It’s done.”

“It’s almost done. Dig.”

Thomas pulled a large book from the girl’s pack.

“What’s this?”

She just looked up at him.

He squinted at the letters and sounded them out.

“Thomas Aquinas? Really?”

She nodded.

“Can’t you read?” she asked.

“Not Thomas Aquinas.”

“I thought knights could read.”

“Who said I was a knight?”

“You look like a knight.”

“You haven’t met many knights. Most can write enough so they don’t have to draw a chicken for a signature, but nothing…scholarly.”

“Thomas Aquinas is Papa’s favorite. Because he could have been a lord but chose to renounce the world. Although I much prefer Saint Francis.”

“I thought Aquinas was fat.”

“I don’t know.”

“He was. He was great and fat. So he renounced tits on women, then ate cakes until he got tits of his own.”

“You shouldn’t mock a great man.”

“Even his book is fat. It weighs as much as a calf.”

“I’ll carry it.”

“You’ll begin by carrying it and then I’ll carry it. If your papa loved it, leave it with him. And this? What the hell is this?”

He held up a small deer-bone instrument of sorts with a stem and a bulb at the end. She took it from him, took it to the water pail, and put some in. Then she blew into the stem and it chirped agreeably, sounding just like a bird.

“Leave it,” he said, taking it from her.

He was about to snap it, but she put her hand on his.

“Why? It doesn’t weigh a thing. And it makes me happy.”

“Making you happy is not my job.”

“I know. That’s why I want the whistle.”

He grunted and gave it back to her.

“Don’t you do anything but grunt?”

He grunted again.

She answered him by blowing into her toy, managing to look both innocent and defiant, the whistle sputtering out its cheerful birdsong.

“But you’re leaving this,” he said, displaying for her a cross of pine and lead.

She stopped chirping.

“No,” she said.

“The real one weighed less.”

“It was given to us by a Franciscan.”

“For a fistful of silver and a long leer at your mother, if I know my Franciscans.”

“Please don’t talk dirtily about my mother. For all your other swearing, please don’t do that.”

“Fine. But this goes.”

So saying, Thomas stood and chucked the cross into a muddy field. No sooner had he thrown it than the girl took off on her broomstick legs and fetched it out of the mud, clutching it to her breast, further dirtying her once-white gown. He took it from her and threw it again. She ran again to fetch it.

“Goddamn it,” he said when she brought it back. He took it from her again and threw it against a tree, where it split into two pieces. The girl looked at him and sobbed and put her wrist to her mouth.

“It’s just the weight of it,” he said. “We’ll find you a smaller one.”

Still she sobbed.

“Don’t cry for the thing. It’s just junk.”

“I’m not crying for that.”

“Jesus, what then?”

“Just for a moment. I saw it.”

“You saw what?”

“Your soul.”

“Souls are invisible.”

“Not always.”

“Yes, always. But not for you, eh? Well, how was it? Horns and little goat’s feet? Am I a devil?”

“No. But there’s one near you. There’s always one near you. They want you.”

“A witch. Jesus Christ bleeding, I’m about to go on the road with a small, weird witch.”

She wiped tears from her cheeks with the insides of her wrists. She looked like a wild little peasant brat. Who would ever agree to take her in?

“Do you have a comb in that bag?”

“No.”

“Is there one in the house?”

“Yes. It was my mother’s.”

“Bring it. And start using it.”