Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“River froze last winter… saw you on skates of horse’s shinbones… and now… so white… your legs… not red at all.”

Thomas understood now.

“Moon’s light… on you…”

He wanted to turn his gaze away at this talk of love between men, but couldn’t; he knew it was the last he would see of this flawed priest who had become so dear to him so quickly. This was harder than the comte’s death. For all his goodness, the comte was not gentle; he was of this world, and of the brutality of the world. This man, Matthieu Hanicotte, seemed to have been misplaced here.

He hoped there was wine in his Heaven.

Could a sodomite attain to Heaven? He remembered the priest holding the girl up out of the water as the abominations stung the life from him.

Hoc est corpus meum.

If that was not good enough, nothing would be.

“Robert…” he said now, grabbing Thomas’s hand.

“Thomas,” the knight said in the husky voice of one fighting with tears, “I am Thomas.”

“No… find Robert… tell him…”

“Who’s Robert?”

“My brother… tell him…”

“Tell him what?”

The priest worked one eye open again and looked at Thomas, breathing with great difficulty.

“What do you want me to tell him?”

The priest smiled.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He breathed three more hard breaths, each one longer in coming, and then he stopped.

Thomas had seen so many die that his hand moved with the reflex to close the priest’s eyes, but they were already glued shut for good.

“Play another song, would you?” the old man said.

Delphine looked up at him, surprised he was looking at her.

He repeated himself, and she looked down at the instrument in her lap as though it had just appeared there. Her tears fell on its face.

“Play us something sad and sweet.”

“Go on,” the knight said. “I don’t think his soul’s so far above us yet.”

She gave them a look and a sad smile that puzzled the old man, but Thomas had seen enough from her to understand.

She doesn’t know how.

It wasn’t her who played.

Later that night, while the old man and Thomas stole a few hours’ sleep, Delphine went to Matthieu’s cold body. She put her finger below his nose and felt nothing. She sensed herself on the verge of some great blasphemy but felt so angered at the sweet priest’s death that she didn’t care if she made God angry now.

It would serve Him right.

I can’t think like that.

She prayed.

“Let me do this, please, work through me.”

She pried open the priest’s waxy mouth and breathed into it, as if she were God Himself breathing life into Adam’s dead clay.

Nothing.

She tried to conjure the feeling of the sparrow fluttering in her chest, and she thought she did, but wasn’t sure. She sensed that she could almost do this, that with just a little help…

Is this a sin?

Delphine breathed into his mouth again.

His big, cool hand, into which she had slipped her fingers, squeezed hers gently.

Her heart beat like a rabbit’s in her chest.

She almost laughed with joy.

And then the hand relaxed.

No!

She breathed into his mouth again.

Nothing.

PLEASE, she thought, he’s so good I need him please I love him!

Now the fluttering, different from her racing heart.

Now her answer.

Leave him with us, little moon.

You’re not strong enough for that.

Not yet.

She shook her head against this denial.

She blew into the dead man’s mouth a dozen more times, but his fingers never moved again, and, when she began to have the feeling she was troubling him, she went to a corner and sobbed until she washed the whites out of her eyes.

Delphine traced her fingers on the sleeping knight’s face.

ThomasThomasThomasThomas.

She touched him lightly enough that she knew he would not stir; he slept like a soldier, always set to spring awake at a strange sound, but he seemed to know it was her hand upon his face, and that she was no threat to him.

But I am.

The land was drier now, rockier. Warmer. The sky blazoned its unquenchable Provençal blue over plane trees with yellow-green leaves and bark like linen. It had not rained since they left the old man’s house, and the vines were still green here. They had stopped in a shallow cave near a stream, exhausted after two days on foot. They had sold the goat to a Provençal family the day before, Thomas gesturing his way through much of the exchange, getting in return a hot meal and a small pouch of silver that wouldn’t get them far.

Thomas had told her flatly that he intended to steal the first horse they saw, but they saw horses only when troops of men, sometimes soldiers, sometimes laborers, headed south and past them. It had not seemed plausible that any of these groups would turn their horses over to one man, no matter how big and dangerous he looked, so Thomas stole nothing.

It wasn’t going to work like this.

She had been thinking about it for both days as they walked.

She had prayed, and prayed hard, for a dream to tell her what to do. In the dream, she saw the city of Avignon lying before her, a little below her as if she were a bird; and then the city filled with birds that flew about and ate a multitude of flies. She did not see herself or Thomas, nor did she have any sense of what she was supposed to do there.

It made her angry.

She tried to imagine what her father would do, but she already knew, and it scared her. Her father would not want to bring harm to another. How many were gone now because of her? Annette and her husband, the soldier on the raft.

And now funny, sad-eyed Père Matthieu.

Even an angel of God.

This was not counting the three men Thomas had slain.

Her father would not bring this knight any farther to kill or, worse, get killed himself. And what was she becoming now, to think it better if Thomas killed another than that any harm should come to him? That was the way everyone thought, protecting the beloved at the cost of the stranger.

She would go on alone.

Her fingers lingered just below his nostrils, and the feel of his living breath pleased and thrilled her.

If God wanted her in Avignon, He would have to get her there safely without using Thomas and then casting him away when he was no longer needed.

Am I tempting God or doing His will?

Mother Mary, help me.

She climbed to the top of a rocky outjut full of ocher and crowned with thorny bushes and bushes whose leaves flashed silver undersides when the wind blew. And the wind did blow here, not quite cool, but neither warm. Just hard. She gathered her new horse blanket, the one from the old man’s stable, around her shoulders. A mountain rose to the south, slightly blurred with haze, protected by a pack of smaller, sharp mountains that seemed ready to intercept anyone who tried to approach the large one. She saw the Rhône snaking south to her right, deceptively blue.

Come get your raft dear

Follow me to the city of your dying

She wanted to cry but pushed that down and lifted her chin.

Her shoes were nearly worn through. The road that had been punishing her feet lay close to the river.

Romans made that.

How do I know this?

I’m becoming something.