Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

There was no fixing the misunderstanding.

From then on, Thomas said, “I’m looking for my daughter—have you seen a young blond girl?” but those were too many words for the others he caught sight of. They either cupped a hand to an ear and shook their heads, or else they fired their own language back at him, causing him to cup his hand and shake his head.

He passed a large ocher rock covered in scrub, and then a small village. Two bearded men sat on the ground outside a house with missing roof tiles, one of them whittling a stick with a knife, the other sitting far away from him, holding a bloody cloth to his face and glaring at Thomas as he passed. A pig slept in the sun nearby.

He kept walking into the evening, past a convent with a garden full of long-dead nuns and then to a gully, where he lay down and slept until just before sunrise.

The castle on the hill near Mornas flew the cross-key ensign that announced it belonged to the pope. When he tried to approach the walled city, he was shouted away without even the chance to ask about the girl.

“Goddamn it.”

As he turned his back on Mornas, he heard bells ringing in the south.

He found out why within the hour.

His first thought, upon seeing the crowd gathered in the street of the next village he came to, was that the plague must be over here. Although he had seen a great many desiccated cadavers in Provence, he had not seen a fresh body in some time, and these people were standing near one another with no apparent concern for contagion. As he drew closer, he saw that there were, in fact, fresh bodies here: a dozen or so of them laid out in front of the church. These were not plague victims, though. They bled. A priest bent over one on the end, removing an arrow that looked to have stuck the young man’s liver.

A very long arrow.

Several of the mourners saw Thomas now, and began to shout and point.

This was not just a group of villagers.

It was a group of furious villagers.

It was a mob.

“Oh, whore,” he said.

There were too many to fight and he was too encumbered to run.

Mostly women and old men, too.

This would be a hell of a way to die.

He showed them his hands.

An old man grabbed one of these and jerked him toward the bodies. He pulled away, but then several sets of hands grabbed him, and he allowed himself to be pulled and pushed along. A woman whose eyes blazed wide with grief and hate dipped her hand in a young corpse’s wound and rubbed blood on Thomas’s face.

“Wait! I haven’t done anything!” he said, though he wasn’t sure they could hear him through the shouts.

“I did not kill these men!”

He was hit several times, once with the end of a rake, and a remarkably quick little boy took Thomas’s sword from his sheath, running away with it, its edge making sparks on the ground.

Another man now shouted at the crowd and moved his hands in a gesture to suggest calm, although he still held in one hand the arrow he had just pulled from a dead man.

It was their priest.

Despite his predicament, Thomas suddenly missed Père Matthieu so badly he almost sobbed.

The crowd stopped its jeering.

“You are… from France?” the cleric said.

“Yes.”

“Not English?”

“No! Picardy. I’m from Picardy,” he said, careful to enunciate every syllable, pointing back up the road that led north.

“You are come for crusade?”

“I…am looking for my daughter. Have you seen a strange girl? A blond girl?”

The priest’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head, suspicious of distraction.

“You are not with these English routiers ?” he said now, showing Thomas the bloody arrow. Priest or not, he looked capable of shoving it into Thomas’s eye.

“No,” Thomas said solemnly. “I swear it.”

An old man, his cheeks soaked with tears, said something to the priest and pointed at the church. The priest nodded.

“You make your oath in church.”

Thomas knelt. The priest stood before him.

“Are you a knight of France?”

“I am.”

“Swear it.”

“Yes. I do so swear.”

“By Saint Michael and Saint Denis?”

“By Saint Michael and Saint Denis, I swear that I am a knight.”

“Are you a knight turned routier ? Brigand?”

“No.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear I am no brigand, nor taker of men’s goods, nor of their lives. I swear that I am a loyal knight of France, servant to God and to the king, and a friend to Provence.”

“These men who come… with the long bows. They are routiers . If you see them, and you are able, you give them God’s justice? You will find others and give them justice?”

“Yes. I swear it.”

The priest motioned for Thomas to stand, and he did so.

Now the holy man made an announcement to the crowd.

Many nodded, and some stepped forward to clap the knight’s shoulder.

The boy brought his sword back, his father at his arm, the point well off the ground.

Thomas wiped it with the tail of his gambeson and sheathed it.

Before he left, women sat him down and pulled off his boots. His feet and face were washed for him. He was offered a pot of lukewarm chicken stew, redolent with garlic and leeks, and so thick the wooden spoon stuck straight up out of it.

He ate it all.

He stood tall as he walked toward the town of Orange. Even in his all-but-ruined chain mail, even with his tattered boots and his sweat and rust-stained gambeson, his bearing made him look more like a knight than he had in years.

A hare crossed the road in front of him.

He laughed.

The city of Orange sat behind a big Roman arch that seemed to guard the road it straddled, the road leading up to the gates. Shops and houses that had sprung up outside the city walls leaned against those walls, or against one another, but a reverential space had been left around the arch. It was as if the emperor or general who had commanded it to be raised were still held in such awe that his arch was left unmarred, even when men seeking stone for houses poached freely from the amphitheater against the hill.

The bathhouse sat closer to the arch than any other building, and the girls who worked there loved the old monument. They pulled vines from it and pulled up young trees whose roots might one day have harmed its foundations. They came to sit against its cool stone when they had to get out of the steam. Like the arch itself, these girls were known.

Travelers from all over Provence and Langue d’Oc knew about the Stews of the Arch, as the bathhouse was called, and about the women who worked there; not the fairest flowers of Orange, perhaps, for those were sent to Avignon; these were the gently flawed pretty ones that would have gone south but for a mole or the weakness of a chin. Girls who had not married because their fathers put them out to get money, or girls who had married, found it bitter, and came to live in the shadow of the arch. Girls who knew pleasure and taught it.

The sun had just gone down when Thomas approached the hulking Roman arch and the small town outside the town. He had little money, so there was no point in going up to the gates of Orange, which were closed in any case, or to the cluster of inns and wine shops just past the arch, whose lanterns advertised they were open for commerce. He did want a look at the town, though; he had first heard the name of this city in a chanson de geste called “ La Prise d’Orange ,” in which a splendid Arab queen betrayed her husband and her faith to deliver the city to the Franks.