Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

The priest pawed the air blindly with one shaking hand, and Thomas squeezed it.

“Don’t die, bugger,” he said, now picking up the girl and sloshing through the high grass and wildflowers toward the cottage.

Dogs barked at him from inside, and he heard a goat bleat as well. A shadow blocked the firelit gaps in the shutters as someone inside peeked at him. He held the girl out as if she were his bond of peace.

“I am unarmed. I need help.”

“Are you sick?” an old man said.

“No.”

“Well, I am. I buried my last son yesterday and today I can’t stop sneezing. I know what that means.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Neither am I.”

“Our ship sank in the river. My daughter will die without warmth.”

“She’ll die if she comes in here, like as not. There’s a horse blanket in the stable, if nobody’s taken it.”

“I want to bring her near the fire. Please.”

“Your choice,” he said, and drew the bolt, letting the door swing wide.

The goat ran out but stayed near the house.

The dogs whimpered and barked uncertainly until their master kicked them, which was what he always did to show them a visitor was safe, so they stopped and settled near the fire, one of them halfheartedly wagging her tail. They were kicked again to clear a spot for the girl, who was waking up now.

She whimpered.

“What happened to your faces?” the old man said.

“River. Something in it stung us.”

He looked at the old man now, with his fine white hair plastered to his head, and saw the sorrow in his eyes, and the sag of the skin around them. The man looked gray. The man looked sick.

“Stung you? I’ve fished that river fifty years and nothing ever stung me.”

“I’ll talk later. Our priest dies tonight, but not in a field.”

The old man looked Thomas over but then sighed, concluding that he had nothing to lose by trusting him; death at this giant’s hands would be kinder than what would come in a day or two.

And it would be nice to see a priest.

“Bring him, then.”

The old man sneezed three times in a row and crossed himself as Thomas limped off into the darkness beyond the door.

The female dog licked the priest’s face.

Thomas went to push it away, but Delphine pointed at the priest’s mouth, which bore a hint of a smile, so Thomas acceded. He wondered how long the man had left—he had thrown up violently and now he couldn’t stop shaking; worse, he fought for every breath.

But he did not cry out.

“You might not have been a soldier, bugger, but you’re tough.”

“Stop calling him that,” said the girl.

Thomas turned an angry glance at her but softened it immediately.

“Yes.”

He put his hand on the priest’s chest.

The priest fought one of his slitted eyes open and looked at the knight. Then he looked up and past him, pointing at something on the wall.

A lute hung diagonally, covered in dust, near several upside-down bouquets of dried flowers.

Thomas turned now to the old man and said, “Do you play?”

“I did,” he said, holding up two hands with gnarled fingers. “I thought I wanted to be a troubadour, but then I married.”

“Can you play at all?”

“Maybe a little.”

The old man clambered onto a stump and pulled the instrument down from its pegs, blowing a plume of dust off it. He tried to tune it, but couldn’t manage with his wrecked fingers; he plucked a few sour strings and limped through half a Provençal love song, singing in his croaking voice; then he couldn’t stand the sound of himself anymore, and he stopped.

He sneezed, wincing, putting his finger to his neck and feeling for the first time the exquisitely painful, acorn-sized lump there.

“And so,” he said, letting the lute dangle from his hand.

He looked at the man dying by the fire, and at the sadness in the knight’s face, and he thought about the shallow graves near the lavender. All he could do was to chuckle without humor, coughing as he did, shaking his head at the lies he’d believed in his youth about God’s love and mercy.

At least there might be someone to bury him now, in the lavender, near all that he had loved.

The girl held out her hand for the lute.

He narrowed his eyes; she seemed half asleep, and he knew no young girls who played.

Yet, when he handed it to her, she tuned it expertly.

“I had no idea,” Thomas said, but she ignored him and he was silent.

She played.

She sang.

It was a song Thomas dimly remembered from his wedding feast, when his wife’s eyes looked so kindly upon him; he had thrown a handful of sweetened nuts into his mouth, and his new, heavy ring had hit his tooth, making him swear, making her laugh. The whole table had laughed.

From that day forward, three taps of her ring on anything meant, Do you remember our wedding day? and three taps on his part meant, God, yes .

He recalled it all quite sharply: the smell of bergamot in her hair, the whiteness of her neck, her eyes pear-green, how sweet the marriage bed had been. How, even after years of amorous tusslings with camp women and kitchen girls, he had stood nervously while the old women took the ribbons off his verge , looking at this beauty whose pale, lovely belly was his to put children in and whose mouth was his to kiss for as long as she lived.

Or, as it turned out, until he left for war.

The old man knew this song, too; it was the one he had learned in Valence his seventeenth year, in the music teacher’s studio above a candle shop, where those gorgeous sounds had married themselves to the smell of tallow such that even fifty years later he could not smell candles in church without being transported. It was this song, more than any other, that made him want to travel with his lute; it was this one he played to seduce the chestnut-haired girl whose pregnancy anchored him on this little patch of land forever.

The priest also remembered the song. He had heard it just before he went to take orders, when the bishop’s personal musician came to the lord’s castle and hushed the room with it, making it seem possible to Matthieu that a greater world lay beyond the disappointment of his father and the vanity of his brother; a world where God’s love was unfiltered by priests or texts and could be had freely by looking up at the sky. Or hearing a man sing. It was a promise of joy he would not feel again until the May before the Great Death came, a joy made even brighter by how swiftly it was seized back again, how much it cost him.

It had never occurred to him that a female voice might animate those fondly remembered lyrics even more sweetly than that long-ago minstrel in the bishop’s train, but now it did.

The next two days would be hard.

Thomas would dig Père Matthieu’s grave as their host burned with fever and lost his reason; he would pull Matthieu from under the arms while his feet dragged and the girl cried and he got a last noseful of the priest’s woolly, winey, lonely smell. The following day Thomas would dig another grave and lay the old man in it without ever learning his name, though he knew the name of the wife, because it was to her the old man addressed his last words. On the third day, he and the girl would make for Avignon, pulling the little goat on a rope, trying to call the dogs to follow them; but the male would stay whimpering in his master’s house and the female would lie on his grave, wagging her tail at them until their forward motion eclipsed her behind a stand of goldenrod.

That would be tomorrow.

For this moment, all three men remembered the best hours of their lives.

When the song finished, the priest spoke.

“The river,” he said, and Thomas thought he meant the Rhône, the one that had killed him.