Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

The captain fell so his head lolled back and his open throat bled into the river. Thomas watched this for a moment, then wiped his sword.

“I told you not to,” the girl said, but her face betrayed her relief that the hurtful man was gone.

“We’re going to pay for that,” she said.

“I’m ready,” said Thomas.

“I’m not,” she said, and looked at the water. Thomas rolled the captain’s limp body off the raft, and it sank as if pulled down.

A fucking hand!

The raft drifted sideways and into the darkness.

When the sky got light enough for the work that had to be done, Guillaume bowed his head and let Thomas stitch him. Thomas had sat with Guillaume through the last hours of darkness, holding the captain’s extra shirt to the wound as the big man shivered and swore. The bone needle and twine had also come from the captain’s trunk.

Guillaume was strong, and he lived.

For a time.

At first it was not easy for the knight and priest to control the raft, but the soldier told them what to do until he was strong enough to take an oar himself. On the second day after the fight, he and Thomas were bending their bodies into the effort of wagging the oars of the raft behind it, pushing it forward just that little bit faster than the current, telling stories and sharing jokes.

“What will you do with yourself?” Thomas asked.

“I’ll keep on for Avignon. I’ll sign on for the new crusade.”

Thomas’s face soured at the memory of the knight and his retinue that passed them close to Auxerre.

A devil and a host of the dead

“Some face you pull. Do you not love the thought of Jerusalem in Christian hands again? It might be just the thing to quench God’s wrath at us.”

“About that,” Thomas said. “What have we done to make God so mad at us? What have we done that our fathers and their fathers did not do?”

“They were punished, too. The year I was born, the famine near made my mother’s milk dry.”

“It can’t have been that bad; look at the size of you.”

But it was that bad, and Thomas remembered it well; for nearly five years, when he was first a page and then a squire, the crops drowned in the rain and murrains killed the beasts; a hanged man had disappeared from the gibbet, and everyone knew the farmers on the edge of town had eaten him. Only the kindness of Thomas’s seigneur had kept his family from taking such desperate measures.

Père Matthieu drew closer, waiting for his chance to join the conversation. The girl ate a salted fish and stared at the water.

“We have famine, too,” Thomas rejoined, “on top of war and pestilence. How are we so wicked as to deserve all of this?”

“Well, you may not be wicked, but I’m wicked enough for both of us.”

“If you were wicked, I’d be in that river. All of us would. You’re a good man, Guillaume.”

“That wasn’t goodness. That was fellowship.”

“Martial camaraderie,” said the priest.

“Fellowship will do,” said Guillaume, nodding his head at the priest as if to say, Can you believe him? Then Thomas was struck funny and laughed, looking not at the priest but at Guillaume.

The priest laughed, too.

“What?” the big-armed man asked.

Thomas said, “I should trim that last stitch. When you jerked your head it stuck straight up. You look like a sour apple with a little stem.”

His face flushed red, though he was smiling.

“And you look like…”

“What?” Thomas dared him.

“The ass of…”

“The ass of what?”

The soldier thought for a moment.

“Something I wouldn’t want to walk behind.”

Even the girl laughed at that.

“Even if we are wicked…” Thomas said, but the soldier cut him off.

“ Everyone is wicked.”

“What about her?” Thomas said, pointing a thumb at Delphine.

“Well, I don’t know her, do I? She doesn’t look rotten, but she could be. Or maybe she will be later. Everyone sins. Isn’t that right, Father?”

“Undoubtedly,” Père Matthieu said, with some enthusiasm, glad the men had moved from martial stories about camp and training (though never Crécy) to something he knew how to talk about. “Man is born into sin. All because of Adam.”

Guillaume said, “Mostly Eve, my priest told us.”

Delphine looked up from the water now.

“That’s not fair.”

“How’s that?” said Guillaume.

“She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Huh,” the priest said, trying to knock the rust off his rhetoric, but failing to find the proper argument.

“I told you everyone was wicked,” said the soldier. “Her sin is that she goes against the teachings of the church.”

The priest said, “May not a man be tempted by a sinful child?”

“As we are now,” laughed the soldier.

The girl thought, absently fingering the scab on her chin, and said, “Yes. But what of a child tempted by a sinful man?”

“As Guillaume was, in the field, by an uncle. Two uncles,” Thomas said.

“Don’t be crude,” she said. “This is important. Is the child misled by the man more sinful than the man misled by a child?”

“I should have warned you her father was a lawyer,” said Thomas.

“Are you not her father?”

“Christ, no. I’d have shaken that out of her.”

“It’s never too late,” said Guillaume.

“Oh, I fear it is.”

“You haven’t answered the question,” Delphine said.

“I’m just going to pull my whoring oar,” said the man.

“Me too,” said the knight.

“Are men who swear foul oaths during a conversation about God fit to point out sin in someone else?” said the girl. And she ate her fish right down to the tail, looking more than a little proud of herself.

At the end of the third day after the fight, just at dusk, they came to a dam in the river. At first it seemed to be something men had made with logs, but as they grew closer, it became clear that the obstruction was composed mostly of dead cows, sheep, and the bodies of men and women. Dead fish, heaps of them, also glittered in the last of the sunlight.

“How the Christ are we to get around that ?” Thomas said.

Guillaume shook his head.

“Shit, what is it? You know this river.”

The big-armed man shrugged his shoulders.

The raft drew closer.

One of the cows moved now, but not of its own power—something under it had shifted, causing it to lurch in the water and bump against the other flotsam.

“I think we should pull to the shore,” the soldier said, and the priest said, “Yes. Yes, please.”

They turned the oars, and the raft turned a little but just kept heading for the island of dead things; they wrenched the oars with all their strength now, leaning back, but still the raft moved downriver, though it faced diagonally.

Something was pulling it.

The girl whimpered and took up the flute-shaped box around her neck, opening the tiny hinges. The priest crossed himself and looked over the side; something white bobbed in the water not far below the surface, and it seemed as though something viscous and opaque had formed itself into long ropes. That was what had the raft; that was what reeled it in.

Other white things bobbed as well; one of them now rushed past the vessel, and the priest saw it was a sheep’s head—but the head was encased in a kind of gelatinous creature the size and shape of a large basket; it pulsed itself to move, opening and closing itself like a flower, its rim fringed with reddish purple tendrils that trailed behind it.