Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

All the while, Thomas stood at the ready, though he was embarrassed enough to be back at his old vocation that he didn’t return the hateful glare of one of the young bargemen, who seemed to be working himself up to act foolishly.

Instead, the massive armored man with the scarred cheek and broken nose looked mildly at the boy and said, “Don’t.”

The boy didn’t.

“Do we at least get our whoring banner so we don’t get robbed by the next lot?”

The raft captain, taking up his long spear, said, “But you haven’t sold your stone yet! This was only half the necessary amount. You’ll have to settle accounts with the next boat. But, as a personal favor, I will allow you to keep your cargo.”

“You sure, Captain?” one of the oarsmen said, chuckling a bully’s chuckle. “That’s some really nice granite. I could build a hell of a bridge with granite like that.”

“No, Thierry. Fair is fair. Let them keep it.”

“Thanks,” the barge captain said. “You’re a real friend.”

The captain lost his wagging-dog look and his voice shed its false good humor.

“I’m a better friend than you know, you fat, whoring slug. You’ve been very lucky today, and only because of my Christian spirit. If you’d like to remember me at Mass, my name is Carolus.”

So saying, the walleyed pirate pushed off with the spear, leaving the granite barge to drift.

The raft moved down the river without incident over the next days. The girl slept on the knight’s satchel by day and watched over Thomas and the priest when their sleeping hours overlapped, all the way to Lyon, where the Saône married the glacier-cooled Rhône and took its name. This was the biggest town on the river until Avignon, and the captain and both oarsmen were willing to take their chances with the plague to sample her remaining pleasures. Big-arms stayed on the raft.

“You roll dice?” the pirate asked Thomas.

“Every day I wake up in this world, the same as you.”

Big-arms liked that, and took that as a yes, producing pig-knuckle dice.

The two soldiers gambled for small coins, big-arms winning more often. When the others came they bore bad news about the whores but good news about the alehouse; they shared out generous bowlfuls of beer for everyone and joined in the dicing. The captain remarked, “I like your priest. He doesn’t waste his breath telling us what Christ would and wouldn’t like.”

The priest looked down at his hands.

Later, when the captain and the younger oarsman pissed over the side and the other oarsman went to fetch an instrument, big-arms leaned very close to Thomas.

“You were there, weren’t you?” he said.

“Where?”

The man pointed at the pit in Thomas’s cheek.

He nodded.

“I was there,” big-arms said. “French crossbowmen mixed in with the Salamis. I’ve got one of those, too,” he said, pointing at the scar again, “but I won’t show you where.”

Thomas laughed. They looked at each other for two heartbeats, then looked away. It occurred to Thomas that big-arms hadn’t brought up Crécy while the others were ashore because he hadn’t wanted to linger on that field too long. The man slapped Thomas on the back. There was nothing else to say about it.

Now the older of the two oarsmen returned with his cornemuse and began to play it with some skill. The captain took off his leather shoes and beat time on the raft’s dirty floor, and soon the other oarsman and big-arms started dancing. Thomas joined them, imitating their raftsman’s dance, which involved a lot of heel stamping and sliding of the feet on the gritty boards, all done with the hands on the hips or linking arms.

They called for the priest.

“We’re only supposed to dance at Christmas. And the feasts of Saints Nicholas and Catherine.”

Père Matthieu did sing, though, when the piper left his raftsman’s dances and played a Norman harvest song. The girl sang, too, joining in on the second verse.

For the first time, Thomas allowed himself to think they might just get to Avignon, and that whatever the girl had come to do might just get done.

The raftsmen boarded two more vessels in the next three days: one a fishing boat manned by two frightened teenagers, both missing fingers, and their one-handed father, who surrendered their astonishing catch of pike without incident. The other was a shallow-hulled sailing boat that tried to run. Big-arms cranked the windlass while the younger oarsman and the captain shot bolt after bolt into the ship; a man with a parti-colored cowl took a quarrel in the hip, and he howled lamentably while the other two fought over the limited shelter provided by a wooden chest aft, one getting his scalp grazed so he bled awfully, though the wound was not serious. Neither bothered about the rudder, and the quick little boat ran aground at a bend in the river just as the distance was getting too great for real accuracy.

Big-arms and the younger oarsman searched the boat, the latter pitching the man with the hip wound into the shallows to stop his caterwauling; he managed to scramble onto the bank and limp away in great, loping spasms that made the captain laugh girlishly from where he sat his supervisory post cross-legged atop the cabin. He laughed harder yet when the man collapsed in a field of rotten squash.

The take was unimpressive.

A few coins, a small drum, some extra clothes, and three finches in wooden cages; the oarsman put his foot exactly next to the foot of the wounded man and then made him remove his leather boots.

“You idiots fled to save this shit?” he said, trading shoes, handing the hurt man his worn-out slippers.

The other man, a paunchy youth with soft hands, said, “We did not wish to be harmed for our poverty. We were going to Avignon to seek work at the court of His Holiness—the man you pitched over is a great jester.”

“Well, he sure runs funny.”

The oarsman presented the cages to the captain, who had leapt down from the cabin.

He reached inside a cage, caught the panicked bird with some difficulty and wrung its neck, throwing it at soft-hands. He was reaching for another cage when Delphine ran forward, just escaping the grasp of the priest, who tried to stop her. She wrapped her arms around the cage and sat down, putting her hand over the door. The oarsman tried to yank the cage away, but she held tight, letting him jerk her halfway to her feet. The captain instinctively drew back to strike her, but checked himself, sensing that Thomas had taken a step in his direction, also having noted that big-arms was still on the other boat.

He changed what would have been a vicious backhand into a tousling of her hair, at which she grimaced, clutching the cage more tightly.

“Let her have the birds,” the walleyed man said, proud of his spontaneous magnanimity. “Her papa has been useful.”

“We thank you,” the priest said, as Delphine set the cages down and opened their doors, taking one docile bird and then the other into her hands. She kissed them both, then released them. One flew up into the sky; the other went toward the bank.