Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

The knight bowed and said, “Thank you, Your Holiness.”

“It is only a trifle, my son,” the pontiff said, his words like warm honey. “Greater wonders await us all.” And then he took a stag by the ear and led her in.

Thomas was half sure the pope had watched him leave, but he did not turn back to look.

Delphine knew she would never make it to the sumptuous apartment near St. Peter’s where they were lodged, so she ran to a dark alley and squatted, pissing for what seemed like half a day.

Thomas turned his back and shielded her from view with his body.

“You didn’t touch any of those deer, did you?” she said.

“No. Wanted to.”

“Uck,” she said.

“Uck, yourself. You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know more than you.”

“Like what?”

She stood up and wiped her hands now, trying to walk like a boy.

“Let’s just say ‘more than you.’ Anyway, I suspect more than I know.”

So saying, she looked down, pulling Thomas’s gaze down to his thigh, where something moved.

It was a maggot.

“What are you doing here?” Robert Hanicotte said.

He had come for his nocturnal visit with Guêpe and had nearly leapt out of his skin to see the small girl in her dirty gown hugging her knees in the back corner of the Arab’s stall.

“You’re going to get stepped on,” he said. “Besides the beating you’ll get if the stablehands find you.”

“Why don’t you beat me?” she said. “You found me.”

“I just might,” he said, but not even the horse was convinced.

She was an odd-looking little bird: long-legged with outsized feet and short hair. A peasant girl, but not from here. She spoke to him in his own Norman French.

And the horse liked her. Goddamn if he didn’t seem to like her.

Her words were lucid, but her heavy-lidded eyes looked half asleep.

“Robert Hanicotte,” she said, causing him to start at the sound of his last name, which nobody had bothered to say for some time, “your brother died bringing me here.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Robert-of-the-bushes.”

Matthieu’s name for him when he hid from his chores in the bushes behind their house. Matthieu, eight years older, who had done what he could to deflect their martial father’s scorn from the younger and even more feminine brother.

She had used his childhood nickname.

He shook this off. Nothing he wanted to hear would come from this girl’s mouth. He just wanted to be left alone.

“How dare you come to me and tell me my brother is dead? What can you know about it, you dirty little thing?”

He turned his head to shout down the stables for the napping boy who was supposed to be watching the horses.

Only when he turned his head, she was standing where he looked.

“Saddle that horse,” she said.

He opened his mouth but said nothing.

“Père Matthieu opened his mouth like that when he wanted to speak but had no words. Now saddle your wasp. I have something to show you.”

“I… the cardinal won’t like it.”

“The cardinal serves a devil.”

“How do I know you’re not the devil?”

“If you were not deaf to your own heart you would know.”

He opened his mouth again.

“Robert, you’re in danger.”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t know anymore. But I know my words are true.”

“Where… where are we going?”

“To the pope’s land.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Delphine sat before the handsome, perfumed man as he cantered the horse through the steep streets of Villeneuve, just across the river from Avignon. It was in this city, away from the press of workers’ houses, Jewish ghettos, market stalls, and ordure, that Cardinal Cyriac kept his great stone house with its tiles and garden and fountain. Most of the cardinals lived here. This was a city of ivy and warm stone and plane trees. Delphine closed her eyes so the beauty of Villeneuve would not distract her—it was going to be so hard to turn this man, she would need to be a clear vessel for…

For what?

For God

God is gone

For His angels then

But Robert had agreed to come with her, and she had not thought he would. He might yet do what she wanted of him.

What they want of him

I’m scared of them, too, almost as much as I am of their dark brothers; they’re so bent against each other how can man matter to them?

I’m going to die soon

Delphine shook her head against her doubt.

There are far, far worse things than dying

And I’m about to see them

The horse stumbled on loose stones and jarred her eyes open just beneath the massive tower Phillip the Fair had built to menace the city of the popes some forty years before; Villeneuve was in France, not Provence, while Avignon had just been bought outright by the pope himself, making an earthly sovereign of him. The tower had been built by a bullying king to bully a weak pope; now both were dead and France and Avignon were in bed together, for good it seemed. The tower’s murder-slits were dark, unlike many windows behind her; sleep was not coming easily to the city of cardinals, where important men could afford candles to burn against their nightmares. The people of Villeneuve did not know how close those nightmares were to birthing themselves in the world.

They rode across the torchlit bridge into Avignon, then took the northern gate toward Sorgues, and toward Châteauneuf.

Delphine had walked this way with Thomas after his transformation; she had seen the handsome ramparts and great square towers of Châteauneuf by day. She had seen the vineyards that provided the last wine in Provence lying still and had not thought to return by night. Unlike Sorgues, which lay dead and open, no part of it still working save the papal mint, Châteauneuf was alive—alive enough to shut the Porte d’Avignon at night as it had even before the plague struck. Delphine’s business was not in the city, however.

It was in the vineyards that aproned it.

They steered Guêpe off the Grand Chemin de Sorgues and onto the small paths between the lieux-dits , bearing names like Bois Renard, Beau Renard, and Mont Redon; these were among the most beautiful vineyards in the world.

But something was very wrong here.

Robert started to speak, but she pinched him to keep him silent, pointing at the rows of vines lying under the nearly full moon.

“What?” he said.

She got off the Arab and led him to a fence.

Robert dismounted, too.

“Tie him,” she whispered, and Robert did.

She pointed again.

“I still don’t…” he started to whisper, and then he did see. The harvest was on. These vines were Grenache, an October grape, sweet, the latest to go in the basket. Now the backs and heads of men and women bobbed like so many black shadows in the moonlit vines. They hunched to gather, then shuffled to the next plant, shearing clusters of grapes off with the curved iron knives of their trade.

“So what?” he said. “There’s moon enough to see. Perhaps they fear a frost and work night and day to save the crop.”

She led them closer, creeping quietly down the row.

To Robert’s surprise, however, she led them past the gatherers altogether, following three women with huge baskets of grapes on their backs. The women made for a stone farmhouse, just outside which a dozen workers tromped in a wine press.