Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“I was never a very good priest.”

“And stop that girl.”

The room got just a little darker as smoke from his robes obscured the fire. He could smell them burning.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“Delphine. She calls herself Delphine. But that’s not her name.”

“Did you say… stop her?”

Both girls nodded now, and the elder spoke.

“Stop her with a rusty old sword between her eyes. Or hold her head underwater. Or dash her brains out with a big stick.”

The younger one hit the table three times with her fist for emphasis, making the serving vessels rattle, then smiled.

“Because she’s wicked, Papa. Her father was a Cathar and she serves the devil. And she’s going to commit murder.”

He looked down and reached for the wine, his brow furrowed.

The old monk, who had reappeared at his side, grabbed his wrist before he took the cup and hauled him standing, hurting his shoulder. The monk slapped him hard.

The children started crying, but the monk made the same gesture in the air that he had made on the priest’s eyes to banish his hangover. The girls stopped crying and sucked their thumbs like placid infants. The wife did as well.

He hissed his next words at Matthieu Hanicotte.

“Will you drink your wine before you agree to what is asked of you? God should be your comfort, but you have made comfort your god. What have you ever given up in His name, except the promise of a wife and family you never wanted?”

“How can you ask me to kill a girl?”

“Killing in God’s name is a holy thing.”

The room seemed to spin.

“Pick up that sword.”

“What sword?”

The room and the hearth winked out into darkness, and when Père Matthieu’s eyes adjusted, he was standing near the stream, struggling to start pissing.

He managed.

As relief came to him, he saw a sword, badly rusted, stuck in the bank of the stream. He finished, tucked himself away, and looked again at the sword. It repulsed him.

“Pick it up, sweet Matthieu,” a voice behind him said. A gentle voice. A beautiful voice. “And take it up the ladder.”

He turned now to see Michel Hébert standing nude and glorious before him, his feet in the stream, mud up to his shins as when Matthieu last saw him nude under the burned bridge. The priest walked through the stream to him and put his face quite close to the boy’s, trying to see if the freckle was still in his eye.

The left eye.

“Go up the ladder and do what you have to.”

He could smell Michel’s breath, somewhere between a young dog’s breath and cloves. He could never get enough of that breath in his face.

“But…”

“The knight will sleep through it.”

“Michel… I…”

He tried to kiss the boy, but the boy smiled and moved his mouth away.

“Do it. We’ll kiss, and more, when you get back.”

The priest took the sword out of the bank. He felt the end of it, and it was sharp. He took it to the base of the ladder. If this was a dream, he might do what was asked for in the dream and dream a kiss from the only being for whom he had ever known carnal love.

He was owed at least that.

And perhaps more.

He took the first step.

And the second.

At the third, his testicles turned to ice.

The knight will kill me.

THE FUCKING THIEF WILL FUCKING SLEEP NOW DO IT

He took another rung. And another. And he stood in the loft, looking down at the girl.

None of this is real

He held the sword by the hilt, point down, one hand over the other, his knees bent like a man about to drive a stake into the ground.

Quick so it doesn’t hurt

How can it hurt if it’s not real

Should have wiped the mud off the end at least

The girl hiccupped in her sleep.

He smiled despite himself even as tears ran down his cheeks.

The light was growing less faint.

He saw one of his tears run down the runnel in the blade and perch at the point swaying back and forth, threatening to drop on the child’s nose.

He lifted the point carefully, taking care to lift the drop, until the sword pointed up and the drop ran back toward the hilt.

He exhaled and came to himself.

Good Lord what am I doing

MISERABLE EUNUCH DO IT NOW OR DIE WITH THEM

He went back down the ladder.

The boy was gone.

The monk had returned, but there was something wrong with him.

His eyes were mouths.

They spoke in unison while the mouth below his nose grinned like that of a father about to spank a richly deserving child.

“Too weak, were you? You’ll have to give your gifts back.”

He took the sword from the priest’s hand and threw it so it spun end over end out of sight.

I’ll never hold a sword again.

Then he grabbed the priest’s face with a hand as cold and hard as a horseshoe and forced the first two fingers of the other hand into the priest’s mouth and down his throat, making him gag.

“I thought you liked this. Being penetrated.”

The fingers jammed in hard.

Matthieu vomited the stew he had eaten.

It came out his nose as well as his mouth and burned.

And the monk was gone.

Breathing hard, he went to rest his head on the mule’s side, then climbed into the back of the cart.

Before sleep took him, he saw the girl’s eyes as she peered over the side of the cart at him. Her bare feet must have been on the hub of the wheel.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I had a bad dream,” she said.

“Me too. What was yours about?”

“Saint Bernard.”

“Of Clairvaux?”

She nodded, saying “His abbey was in Clairvaux. But he’s from here. Near here.”

She waited for him to ask.

“What happened in your dream, daughter?”

“He made you kill me.”

The priest shuddered.

Despite the cold air, he broke into a sweat.

“Why would he do that? I heard he was a very good man.”

“My father said he condemned Abelard. He argued against the Cathars. He founded the order of the Templars and told men God wanted them to kill for him.”

The priest’s testicles, which had only just warmed up, went cold again.

“But, surely a saint…”

“He’s not really a saint.”

“No?”

She shook her head.

“Men made him a saint. Not God.”

The priest said nothing.

“He’s in Hell.”

“Oh,” the priest said.

“Or he was.”

The girl blinked a couple of times, still looking at the priest.

“He would hurt me if he could. You wouldn’t let him do that, would you? Hurt me?”

“Not for all the world.”

He could tell by the way her eyes turned up that she was smiling.

“Not even for wine?”

He smiled, too.

“Not even for wine.”

He looked down and noticed that his robes were still on; they had not burned. Though they did smell like a hearth fire.

A rooster crowed, and Delphine went back up the ladder, looking just a little less like a child.

Despite the wide berth they gave the city of Beaune, they did see evidence of Delphine’s monsters in the farmlands just south of the town; a tree in the middle of a field had all the leaves stripped from it, and now its branches hung with people and animals, all still as herrings. A fire twinkled at the base of the tree. They were being smoked. A heap of clothes lay nearby, as well as a separate pile of logs to feed the fire. A large, recently dug hole gaped in the side of a hillock not far from the tree; the darkness of this hole was preternatural, seeming to push back against the daylight. It was big enough for a man on stilts to have entered without ducking. At the entrance to the hole was a scattering of feet. Whatever it was, it didn’t like feet. Something moved in the darkness of the hole, and then they heard a sound that was somewhere between a rattling groan and an insect’s buzz. The mule sped up his trot with no encouragement from his driver.