Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“You’re all alike, aren’t you?”

He was just about to leave the road and head into the countryside, hoping to find some fallow vineyard in which to sleep, but he saw a lovely young woman dash topless from a large house, laughing; a fair-haired young man, down to his breeches, stumbled out and fished her back in. It would do Thomas’s eyes no harm if they fell upon a pretty whore before he took to his field, so he strayed closer to the Stews of the Arch, smiling a little. Ten years earlier, with a pouch full of deniers, he would have gone into this place, which steamed enticingly in the first cool of the evening, and which rang with laughter.

Now he was content to look.

He saw that one man sat outside the building, drinking from a flagon, swaying on his bench. A guard. He called inside to the others, but not in French, and not in Provençal.

His language was English.

And his weapon was a longbow, strung and propped against his bench, with a fence of three arrows stuck in the ground.

A stack of other bows leaned against the wall near him, along with a heap of quivers and a couple of poleaxes.

Thomas stopped cold.

These were the killers he had sworn to give God’s justice, drunk on wine purchased with the blood of the last village. They would enjoy these women and be on their way in the morning, before news of the massacre reached Orange and the girls of this place stopped laughing with them. From the number of dead in the last town, these archers were likely only one wing of the company—the others would have secured a camp and fanned out to find other entertainments. If this was the only brothel, they would come here in shifts.

Did they even care if news reached Orange while they were still here? It was unlikely the provost of the town or the local seigneur could raise enough men to challenge this band. The plague was on the wane here, but it had done its work. More houses were empty than not, and for every girl laughing in the stews, there were probably two shoveled under in a common hole nearby, or tossed in the river.

Thomas faded between two houses before the drunk sentinel turned his attention back to the road. The knight crouched down in an alley and watched, batting away an orange cat that purred and rubbed itself against him.

It was not long before the watchman went to piss.

The Englishman wove his way into the alley, seemed about to piss against the bordello’s wall, then apparently thought better of raising a stink in the Stews of the Arch and turned to piss against the building across. He barely noticed Thomas, who was alone, walking rather than running, seeming intent on simply passing the man. Rather, he put one hand over the man’s mouth and used the other to ram his head twice against a house beam. The man went limp, still pissing, and Thomas let him fall.

The knight unsheathed his sword and moved across the courtyard, stopping just before the door. “Saint Denis and glory,” he whispered bitterly, and now breathed in and out twice like something between a bellows and a bull.

He stepped through the doorway and into a womb of flickering candles and steam. His knees were bent as he walked in, and his chain hauberk rasped against a beam.

He carried his sword over his shoulder, one hand on the pommel, the other under the quillons; he was ready to kill with it.

Several of the men in the tubs gasped. They all stared at him, none of them daring to speak.

They saw that this man was lethal.

He was huge and armored and they had seen enough fighting to know a killer’s eyes, even through steam and in the flickering light of candles.

In an open field they would have stuck him to his death with arrows, but here they were drunk and naked and at close quarters; just so many heads bobbing in hot water.

A woman, who had been smiling at first, thinking him one of their company, now felt the fear of the archers and said, in French, “Please sir, do not quarrel here.”

Another woman echoed her in Provençal.

He stepped farther in, moving so his back was not to the open door. One Englishman considered the plank spanning his tub, the remains of a game hen and two cups of wine upon it; could he wrench the plank up and wield it as a club and a shield? He would have no leverage in the tub, and he would be decapitated before he could get out of it.

The man in the tub nearest Thomas prepared to splash water in his face, clamber over the girl next to him, and roll over the edge, hoping to find his dagger on his belt among his clothes, drunk and in the half darkness; but the girl, sensing his tension, grabbed his bitte underwater as if to hold him fast by it. Even had she not, the plan seemed so clumsy to him that he couldn’t gather the nerve to move.

Nobody moved.

One ruddy blond man spoke to him in English, telling him to do it if he was going to, but Thomas did not understand.

Or care.

It was then that it happened.

He felt something touch his heart, as though tiny fingers were on it, holding it as gently as one might hold a bird.

Voices came to him, as if from far away.

Don’t kill him.

Don’t kill anyone else again.

Thomas.

Sir Thomas.

We’re going to pay for that.

Find my brother… tell my brother…

Do you swear to give them God’s justice?

I swear.

He breathed in and cocked his hips, and the nearer men ducked underwater, one of the filles de joie screamed, but he stopped. He had fully intended to start lopping and gouging these helpless men in their four huge vats.

But he just stopped, waiting until the submerged men came up panting.

He looked at each man in turn, and each of them, even the ruddy one, looked away when his turn came.

He sheathed his sword.

“Not tonight,” he said, and backed out of the room.

None of them mistook his actions for cowardice.

He had them.

All of them.

And they knew it.

Thomas slept that night in the belfry of a small, dead church that overlooked the road; he doubted the routiers would follow him, but it was always better to act as though the worst might happen. On his way out of the stews, he had walked by the stables and seen them full; how desperately he longed for the feel of a horse under him, but a little voice in him said no and he knew it was her voice somehow. He left the stable alone and veered off the road and into the fields.

This belfry was a good spot.

More than for the brigands, of course, he was watching for the girl, whom he suspected he had passed up. It had occurred to him that he might have harmed her indirectly by letting those men live—what would they do with her, after all, if they found her? Yet her wishes were unmistakable.

Her command.

Well, who is she to command me?

Who are you to resist her?

He tried to answer that, but only said, “Huh.”

For whose sake did he keep pretending that she was not something like a saint? He had never believed that saints were anything more than figures in stories, no more a part of this world than basilisks or griffins or the other magnificent beasts nobody he knew had ever seen with their eyes.

And yet.

If he told anyone of this girl who spoke languages she did not speak and played instruments she did not play, they would say…

Witch.

That was what they would say.

It was easier to believe in witches, after all. Their motives were of this world. Revenge, power, pleasure. Who has not wanted one or all of these?

And yet.

If any goodness remained in this world, it was in her, brat or not, witch or not. With her hair combed or tangled.

“She’s holy,” he said, the words strange in his mouth.