Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

That night and the next day brought them tremendous luck.

The town of Chagny had not admitted them, but three miles on they were able to find a functioning inn that was actually willing to rent them a room, and use of a dry stable. The man who ran the inn was a former Franciscan monk who had left orders and taken a wife, the very same who now served them watery radish soup with some bitter green in it. Outside, near the well, a statue of the saint, covered in little stone birds and well shat on by living ones, looked toward the gate; it was the innkeeper’s avowed belief that the saint himself protected his house from plague, as well as from the things that had hammered their way into Beaune, and sometimes ranged as far south as Chagny.

“Have you seen them?” Thomas asked him.

“Yes,” he said in a very final way, looking down. He said no more about them.

One other guest shared the inn that night: a young merchant from Tuscany who was on his way home from Paris on foot. His French was terrible, but the priest figured out from his badly grafted snatches of Franco-Italian that his wife had gotten a letter to him saying she was still alive. He took it out and cried over it, and asked the priest to kiss it, and to touch it with a rosary. He did.

His translation of news from home gave them a taste of Florentine dark humor; the mass graves, with their layers of bodies, lime, and dirt, had inspired less reverential Tuscans to say the dead had “gone to the lasagna.”

Rinaldo Carbonelli had thick, well-shaped eyebrows over his almond eyes, and Delphine found herself wishing she were the wife who had sent him his letter, alive in Italy with a handsome man walking home to her. She found herself looking at his hands as he spoke, and wondering what those hands would feel like touching her hair; in her innocence, she imagined him petting her hair as if she were a kitten; she knew there was more after that, but she contented herself with letting her thoughts run to the edge of that cliff without looking over. Suffice it to say that she would have very much liked for the Italian to pet her hair.

Her gaze was so intense that the Tuscan caught her looking, and smiled, indicating her to the others with a nod and a flick of his expressive eyes.

“Ragazza,” he said, as if that explained everything, eliciting a chuckle from Thomas.

“You could come with us,” the priest said at one point. “As far as Avignon, at least.” The Italian understood, and nodded slowly, considering.

The sparrow was fluttering in Delphine’s chest now; she was enjoying herself so much mooning over her new infatuation that she wished it would go away, but it fluttered harder and harder until she spoke.

“Please don’t come with us.”

The Italian understood that.

“Why…why you say this thing?”

She just stared at him.

He laughed.

“What, you no like my face?”

She answered him in rapid, perfect, Florentine Italian.

Nobody else at the table could follow what the girl said, but his face went white, and he excused himself and went to bed.

“What did you tell him?” the innkeeper asked, crossing himself.

She looked into her empty soup bowl.

“I don’t know.”

The Italian came with them as far as Chalon-sur-Saône, walking beside the cart on his nimble young legs. He carried a bow and had six arrows left in his quiver, and, soon after their departure, agreed to accompany Thomas into a patch of woods to hunt. Thomas, stripping out of his armor near the cart, guessed from Rinaldo’s gestures that he intended to shoot one arrow, and that he would not shoot a second for any reason whatever. If that was what he said, he proved himself a liar.

They moved as silently as they could in the brown leaves, following a sort of path in the undergrowth that less experienced hunters than the Italian might have missed. To his eye, the broken twigs, missing leaves and bent grass were as plain as a Roman highway; the trail led to a lush dip in the land where crabapple trees had been savaged for their fruit. He pointed and winked at Thomas, splaying his fingers over his head to suggest horns. As if this gesture summoned them, antler marks appeared on the bark of a chestnut tree, with little bits of velvet adhering.

This would be a good place.

The men crouched upwind, Thomas’s straw hat covered in branches, both of their faces darkened with mud; Thomas, having no bow, held his sword over his shoulders, knowing that his limited role encompassed only protecting Rinaldo, and, if they were lucky, hauling back their prize.

They were just about to give up, having been out for two hours or more, their fear of being caught at night too close to Beaune and Chagny finally overcoming their hunger, when they saw the stag. It entered the woods before them at a kingly, slow walk, its coat the same reddish brown as the carpet of leaves below it. Its antlers were magnificent, a trophy Thomas would have loved to set on his hearth in Picardy, though he knew he could never take such a prize, as feeble as he was with the bow. Rinaldo drew his breath in and drew the fletching of the arrow halfway to his cheek; he would pull it all the way and release in the same motion as soon as the deer turned its side or back to them. He never got the chance, though.

The deer heard something moving in the brush nearer to the two men and raised its head. Ten steps closer and Rinaldo would have loosed at its exposed chest, but at this distance he would have to shoot higher to account for the drop, and he didn’t want to strike its head or clip its nose, wounding the magnificent thing for no reason.

The noise came again, a crackling of leaves, louder this time. The deer left, not at a run, but too quickly for the Italian to adjust for both its motion and the saplings it crossed behind. He grimaced with his mouth open, his breath steaming out between his clenched teeth, still tracking the stag in case it turned, but it did not seem likely to do so.

He felt Thomas’s hand on his shoulder and reluctantly turned his head away from the disappearing red deer. Thomas was looking at him as if to say, Can you believe this?

In a time of famine, when poaching laws were forgotten and men had all but emptied the woods of game, one magnificent trophy animal had been saved by a second.

A wild boar snuffled in the brush, as yet unaware of the hunters.

“Porca troia,” Rinaldo whispered, drawing the bow again and loosing.

His arrow sank into the cheek of the wild boar, causing it to squeal and lash out in all directions with its tusked snout. He drew a second arrow, and that was when it locked its black little eyes on him and identified him as the source of its pain.

It charged.

He was now glad for the broad-shouldered Frenchman beside him, whom he had regarded as something of a hindrance on a deer hunt.

This was a goddamned big boar.

Rinaldo knew Thomas had stood up to a crouch and cocked his sword for a two-handed thrust, but he was too busy loosing his second arrow to see that Thomas was smiling like a little boy.

And so it was that the four of them approached Chalon-sur-Saône with their bellies full, with a blanket full of cooked meat in the cart, and in possession of the boar skin that would keep Rinaldo Carbonelli warm on his long trek over the mountains, since the girl had told him he would surely die if he came with them to the river.

He might have dismissed this warning had she not also told him that his wife, Caterina, prayed for him each night, looking out the window that gave on the Arno; that when she prayed, she held between her clasped hands the little figurine of an angel he had carved for her from the bones of the stag he brought her father on the day he asked to marry her.