Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“How am I supposed to eat if I keep a whoring helmet on all the time? Or speak? Or…”

She held up the helmet to him.

The last of the light reflected in its fine steel, the color of smoke and lavender; the helmet also reflected a face back at Thomas.

But it wasn’t his face.

She took him down to the stream and asked him to kneel.

She took water in her hands and asked him if he forgave the dead man whose face he now wore.

He paused; and then he said yes, and she poured water over his head.

She asked him if there was anyone else he carried anger for.

He paused again, and she waited.

“My wife,” he said.

“Do you forgive her?”

“I can’t.”

She looked at him gravely.

“You can,” she said. “If you choose to.”

“No,” he said, his eyes turned to the side.

“Then go back to Picardy,” she said, and she let the water fall from her hands.

He looked down at his reflection in the stream; it was too dark for him to see clearly, but he could make out the outline of a bearded man with long hair. He was himself again.

The miracle was spent.

Delphine went back to where her makeshift pot of soup smoked and began to eat. She poured some for Thomas, and they ate in silence, although she looked at him the whole time.

She took his bowl and the helmet and walked to the stream to rinse them.

“Do you want to try again?” she said.

“Tell me she’s dead. Tell me the plague took her and she died in a fever saying she was sorry. Maybe then.”

“It doesn’t work that way. That’s not forgiveness, it’s justice. And wretched justice at that.”

“Why does it matter?”

“It just does,” she said.

“Whatever we have to do in that city—and I’m frightened of that city, I’m not ashamed to tell you—it’s going to get us killed, right? Isn’t that enough?”

She furrowed her brow, thinking.

“No,” she said, and handed him the clean vessels.

“What do you want me to do with these?”

“Put them somewhere, I don’t know. I’m not your wife.”

He tossed them down.

She started walking toward the road.

“Wait,” he said. “Delphine.”

She looked at him with that drowsy look he had come to dread; the look that meant she was about to speak words that weren’t her own.

“Go back to Picardy and ask the bishop to pardon you, if he’s still alive. He’ll send you on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, or maybe on crusade, if there’s anyone left to make war on in the east; and back you’ll come to the bishop, and you’ll say words you don’t mean and he’ll say words he doesn’t mean, and you’ll get your castle back. If you can find anyone to run it. And be a seigneur, if anyone’s alive to grow the wheat. And you won’t have to forgive anyone or be merciful, or thoughtful or courteous, because devils will rule here. They’ll kill the good ones first, and when all the good men are dead, they’ll come for men like you, who were almost sound, but not quite; the bowls that leaked. And when you’re gone, the worst of men will find themselves in the teeth of their masters, because those that fell have no love for man. And they’ll take good and bad alike to Hell, because there won’t be anyplace but Hell anymore. Not without love. Not without forgiveness.”

Thomas stood and looked at her, and she at him, and night came on with a strong wind in the trees.

“We all fall short of perfection. You. Me. Père Matthieu. We all disappoint someone. Can we forgive only those who sinned against others?”

He closed his eyes and saw the priest’s swollen, stung face, smiling weakly at the thought of his brother.

If you see Robert, tell him

Tell him

I don’t know

Do you forgive her?

Thomas de Givras married Marguerite de Péronne on a sleeting Candlemas Day, 1341. The daughter of a minor seigneur of the lagoons, she still brought a decent dowry: a cedar chest, three mares, two tapestries, ten gold livres, and a much-coveted recipe for pâté of smoked eel. Her true dowry was twofold. First, her connections—her mother’s sister had married into the family of the great Enguerrand de Coucy. Next, and more troublesome, was her beauty. Many lords and not a few merchants had sought her hand, and yet her father had held out, hoping to thicken his descendancy with a drop or two of royal blood. It never came. By the time he lowered his standards, Marguerite was twenty.

Bad luck spoiled two near-matches. One knight of Abbeville died from a bee sting. The other, the very handsome son of a Ghent textiles merchant, hanged himself following an argument with his true love, a laundress, regarding his impending nuptials to a Frenchwoman he had never met.

Had he seen his betrothed, he might have only toyed with the rope.

Beautiful or no, Marguerite was on the waning end of her twenty-third year. Worse, it was widely rumored that she numbered among the nearly two hundred girls in Picardy to have been deflowered by the troubadour Jehan of Poitou, who was keeping count, if not naming names, in his verses. Even if this was true, she was a lucky catch for a foul-mouthed knight of low birth like Thomas de Givras. The father’s agreement had been woven from three cloths: his desperation to see her avoid the nunnery; his love for the Comte de Givras, who had proposed the match; and the girl’s own preference.

At first she had been wary of the match, disappointed to receive no letter from Thomas, rightly suspecting that his education stopped at the tiltyard.

It was October when he came to visit.

As soon as she saw what a costaud Thomas was, thin of waist, thick of chest, with his hair still dark on the fine head he had to lower to enter a room, his face still clear of the arrow-pit she would never see, she was dressed for the oven.

When she saw the impish humor in his eye, she was cooked. If he had few letters, he was neither stupid nor dull.

She was well matched for Thomas in this way, too.

It was common for her to take the Lord’s name in vain twenty times between confessions.

She did it the moment she laid eyes on her future husband.

“My God,” she said, too low for anyone to hear.

And then she said it again.

On the cool October day of their meeting, Thomas had gone with a riding party that included the Seigneur de Péronne, the Comte de Givras, and Marguerite. From the moment she spoke, he was intimidated by her learning—this was no kitchen woman, as his mother had been; this Marguerite de Péronne not only knew Latin, she told jokes in it; following a hawk’s near-refusal to come down from its tree, she said something to her paunchy, well-dressed abbot of an uncle that nearly made him tumble sideways from his palfrey. She sang, too, and not out of duty. Her voice was unfiltered joy. On the ride back, at any time the men ran out of words to say about the king or the war or the quality of the horses, she lit up her father’s birch woods with snatches of carols, and sometimes looked at her suitor to see if he was moved.

He was, and that was good.

For at that young age, she still told herself she would never lie beneath a man who did not love a song.

On the day after their wedding, Thomas took his new bride to the top of the old Norman tower he had just received from the Comte de Givras. The February sky, gray, though no longer spitting ice, stretched above them, and the brown fields and few houses of Arpentel stretched below. His wife was smarter than he would ever be and prettier than he thought wives were made, and yet she was happy with him. Her pleasure in the marriage bed had seemed to touch even her soul, and her verdant eyes had rarely left his; three taps of her ring would always remind him of the three times he took her. “Once like a bull, once like a fox, once softly as a lamb,” she said. He would be faithful to her. They would have many sons. He had risen. By God and by the grace of his beloved seigneur, he had risen.