Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“God preserve us, please, please,” Père Matthieu said. The men at the oars stopped trying to use them to move the boat and came to look at what the priest was gaping at.

Now several of the jellied things pulsed underwater around the raft, seeming to glow with their own faint light; at the center of each of them was the head of a man, woman, beast, or child.

The raft lurched against the dam of bodies, none of which had heads attached. Thomas looked at the nearer shore and removed his helm and chain hood. Guillaume, seeing his intention, began to help him off with his surcoat, but it was too late.

One of the things flopped onto the raft.

The head in the middle of this one was decomposed, but not so much they could not tell its filmy eyes were set too far apart and looking in different directions. It pulsed and slithered forward, its frill of tentacles waving in the air now. Thomas lashed at it with his sword, but it parted around his blade and did not suffer. The girl tried to touch it with her spear, but it twitched away from her, one of its frills brushing her wrist in riposte.

It stung her.

She cried out in pain and nearly dropped the spear; that brief caress had burned like touching a hot coal. The priest pulled her back.

Now another one, with an old woman’s head at the middle of it, flowed up from the river onto the raft.

Yellowish tentacles, presumably from a much larger cousin of theirs, began to rise up from below and wrap themselves around the raft, causing a corner of it to dip underwater. Desperate, Thomas writhed out of his surcoat, but the chain hauberk was still on him, threatening to pull him down like so many bricks if he went over.

He had no time.

The tendrils yanked harder, pulling the raft at a sharper angle, causing some of their cargo to slide forward. A case of weapons slid into the water; now the wrapped salt cases were moving, too.

Salt!

The priest ran for the salt and began working at the twine that kept the oiled cover on it.

Delphine backed up, lashing at the first horrid thing with her spear, though she missed and was stung every time; her wrist had swollen and she could barely feel her hand.

Worse than its stings were its words; it spoke to her, and even though the mouth of the captain’s head moved in its viscous host, she wasn’t sure if the voice was only in her thoughts or not:

I AM CAROLUS THAT WAS A GIFT FROM CAROLUS CAROLUS AND WHAT IS YOUR NAME YOU’LL TELL ME WHEN I TAKE YOUR HEAD UNDER WITH ME TO THE BEAUTIFUL THE LIGHTLESS BOTTOM OF THE SEA WHERE THE DROWNED WILL MARRY US

Guillaume grabbed an axe and hacked at the jaundiced ropes hauling the raft under, but some of these lashed about and stung him, too. Thomas sidestepped the second of the jellied things, which were not graceful out of water, and saw what the priest was doing. He stepped over and cut the twine. The priest opened a sack and flung it now, hoping he was right about its properties.

The properties of salt.

He was.

The one he salted twitched and recoiled at the first grains of the desiccant, and, when showered with a proper fistful, browned and died, melting from around the stinking head of the woman, which now lay still and dead.

Thomas sheathed his sword and opened two sacks, grabbing one in each fist; he hurled these at the monster that was hurting Delphine and it, too, hissed and died its second death, leaving the captain’s head openmouthed in a rictus of betrayal and pain.

The sun was long gone now, and the gloaming was upon them.

The water shone with phosphorescence; it would have been impossible to count the number of them moving about in the river.

“Salt!” Thomas yelled to Guillaume. “Salt the bastard that’s sinking us!”

He turned now and ran for the sacks, as Thomas also went to grab more, but a fresh bloom of tentacles rose from the river and lashed the fore of the raft, pulling it so sharply that the salt, the weapons, the fish, the men, and the girl all went into the cold water.

They plunged into the river, which was mercifully shallow here, having flattened out to flow around the dam as best it could, perhaps thirty yards from the shore. At once, the priest grabbed for Delphine and made for the bank, half swimming and half stumbling on the bottom.

At the same time, Guillaume put himself under Thomas and hoisted him to help keep his head above water.

They got ten yards before the things realized where they were.

And the stinging began again.

The large one, visible now that night had come, shone dimly as a sort of luminous, grayish-white sail in the middle of the dead island; it could not move from the deeper middle of the Rhône, but it sent out long strands of its underside, trying to wrap them around the fleeing men and the fleeing child, which it wanted most. Its tendrils smoked and broke when she touched them with her stinger, but the smaller swimmers were stinging them dead.

Thomas lived because his armor and surcoat protected him from the worst of the stings. Delphine lived because the priest used his body to shield her.

Guillaume was taken.

He had been pushing Thomas forward, but the things had stung his submerged groin and legs countless times, and he fell behind, jerking now with every sting.

Three or four of them crowded around him now and brushed him all over with their frills.

The poison in him stopped his heart.

He went still and sank.

The tentacles from the big one webbed him now; they pulled his head from him and reeled it back into itself, where a new swimmer would be made. Guillaume’s body was pulled into the island.

Thomas, unaware of Guillaume’s fate and mad to get out of the river, strode through the shallower water now, bulling forward so as not to slip under; he caught up with the envenomed priest, who was barely moving, his remaining force going to his arms, which held the girl up and out of the water.

She had passed out.

She was dead weight.

And yet he held her.

The knight would never forget the image of the faltering priest holding the girl up; how like the raising of the Eucharist it looked.

Thomas, kicking one of the swimmers out of the way, grabbed the priest’s belt, hauling him the last yards to the shore. The priest wanted to fall, but Thomas would not let him; not until they reached a small road by the river, crossed that, and made their way to a field gone fallow and wild with lavender bushes past their flowering.

They were almost in Provence.

When the men and the girl were clear of the water, the tentacles from the thing in the island whipped around furiously, making a small rain fall around it, and, from below, a ghastly moaning came from the submerged and captive mouths of the dead.

It was supposed to take the girl.

It would be punished.

The island bobbed and shifted and moved south as the abomination in its middle dragged its prizes down the Rhône and to the sea.

Thomas took the girl from Père Matthieu, hoisting her over his shoulder in the same way that Jacquot had so long ago on that rainy afternoon in Normandy. The knight pulled the priest along by the arm for as far as the cleric could walk, which was not far; he was struggling to breathe, and his face had swollen so badly his eyes had shut. He looked dead already. He collapsed in a field not far from a house where the light of a hearth fire danced behind closed shutters.

Thomas, dripping and cold in his armor, laid the girl down next to the priest. He knew they would both need warmth—he must go to the house, and he must hurry—but the priest sounded as if he were choking even now. Thomas stripped down to his shirt and breeches and propped Père Matthieu’s head up as best he could with the soaked gambeson he wore beneath his chain mail, and that seemed to help.