Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

The women dumped their grapes in as men in knee-length sackcloth switched out empty juice bowls for full ones, handing these off to men on ladders who funneled them into a giant tun.

The men seemed to be smiling, or making some other face that showed their teeth.

Robert did not care for this at all and did not want to know more.

“Let’s get back before we’re caught,” he said.

“Do you see?” she whispered.

“I just want to go back.”

“They’re not singing,” she said. “And they’re not humming and they’re not talking. Have you ever seen wine treaders tread in silence?”

He was fuming now.

This child who did not speak as a child was bewitching him.

He turned to leave and ran directly into a man bearing grapes on his back. Robert began to excuse himself, and then the smell hit him. He had walked directly into a dead man, whose lower jaw was missing and whose eyes had collapsed in on themselves. The dead man pushed by Robert, and then, as if it had struck him that something wrong had just happened, he turned. His black stub of a tongue worked and he pointed at them.

Neither Delphine nor Robert had to tell the other to run.

The dead man now drew air into his unsound lungs as best he could and made a dry, horrid sound like something between a busted cornemuse and a dying calf.

The treaders stopped treading and the gatherers stopped gathering.

All of them turned now to look at the fleeing man and girl who had intruded upon the vineyard. Whether by instinct or at some command, the treaders climbed out of their vat and the gatherers dropped their baskets. But not their knives. Now they ran, too, some of them falling as they blundered into vines.

They were gaining.

Guêpe bucked and reared at the smell of them, or perhaps at the sound of them rushing through the leaves and butting against one another, and his rope threatened to come loose—if he ran off without them, Robert and Delphine would be

hung like pigs with cut throats to bleed out into the vats

caught.

It was the girl who grabbed his reins, calming him while Robert fumbled with the knot.

“Hurry!” she said.

The rope came loose.

Robert mounted and nearly bolted without her, but he wheeled and scooped her up just as the dead swarmed over the fence. She would never forget their faces—even as their bodies rushed to do violence, what remained of their faces betrayed sadness, even apology for the murder they were being compelled to commit.

Their knives were out, and the first ones grabbed for the reins. Guêpe jumped one way and then another avoiding the flashing knives; he back-kicked one man whose head fell mostly off, causing him to flail his arms wildly, and then the horse found his footing and bolted down the Grand Chemin de Sorgues.

Behind them, the sound of threescore corpses shouting through blasted lungs and throats rose up, and, above them, the moon flirted with slow, ragged clouds as though everything below her had not spun wild.

The bridge was nearly deserted as Robert and the girl cantered across. She did not have long left to convince him.

“If you insist on blinding yourself to what you have seen, you’ll have peace for a time. But they will come for you; and then you, too, will stomp in the wine press. Or you will go to Marseilles and sew sails with those who do not flinch when the needle pricks them. Or they’ll strip your flesh from your bones for sport; you have no idea how much they hate you, though they smile.”

“What do you want from me?” Robert said.

“The… Holy Father trusts you.”

“Yes.”

“Arrange an audience with him for my lord the Comte d’Évreux. A private one.”

“Why does he not send the request himself?”

“Because the meeting must happen, and it must happen in the next days. There is no time to filter the request through secretaries.”

Robert sighed heavily, pushing the air out, still shaken by the night vintners. He shook his head, though she could not see him behind her.

“Something about this smells.”

“Yes,” she said. “It does. And the stink is coming from the palace.”

While Robert Hanicotte eased back in next to the belly-sleeping cardinal, Thomas sat on the edge of the linen-covered bed in his lodgings. He had not slept, worrying about the girl. He had stirred happily at the sound of footsteps once before, but those had belonged to a chamber boy bringing up a brazier of hot coals.

At last he heard her small, bare feet on the steps, and the door creaked open.

They looked at one another. His hands were folded like the hands of a father waiting to scold, but it was not his place to scold her, whatever she was. She was much more powerful, now, than she had been in that long-ago barn.

“You don’t like me to be away,” she said.

He shook his head.

She smiled.

She smelled like night air.

“It’s good and warm in here,” she said, putting off the harder thing.

He nodded.

“It’s going to be tomorrow,” she said.

“What is?”

“What we came for.”

“And what is that?”

“We’ll save the pope.”

Thomas laughed a little at that.

“It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that. An orphan from Normandy and a thief from Picardy saving the pope. The whoring pope .”

“You know when you swear that I’ll say ‘don’t swear,’ and then you won’t for a while. Why not just not swear in the first place? But I suppose that’s asking a horse not to whinny. Anyway, you’re not a thief. And as long as you’re with me, I’m not an orphan.”

Thomas grunted.

“He doesn’t look like he wants saving. The Holy Father, I mean,” Thomas said.

“The man we saw wasn’t him.”

Thomas stood up and went to the window, looking up where a faint, reddish stain seemed to corrupt the moon. Subtle, but there.

“Who was he, then?”

“You know.”

“The Devil?” Thomas said, with neither sarcasm nor disbelief.

“No. But one of his marshals.”

She drew in a breath to say the next thing.

“And he’s raising the dead. Lots of them.”

Thomas’s hand twitched, but he still could not cross himself.

“How do you know this? Dreams?”

“Yes. And I saw the unclean risen tonight, harvesting in his vineyards. And those girls…”

“Girls?”

“The stags in the Grand Tinel. They were readied before the great hearth in the dressoir , out of sight. They were perfumed and then filled with warm olive oil and honey, and then they were all backed up against the fire to heat their loins. Hot brass was put in their mouths and hands to warm those. So nobody would notice. That they were dead. The knights and cardinals had intercourse with the dead.”

Thomas turned around now, his massive silhouette blocking the moonlight, but not the cool breeze that blew in the window.

“The devil in the pope’s robes… does he have a name?”

The girl said something so faintly he could not hear.

He asked her to repeat it, so she wiggled her finger to make him bend down.

She said it in his ear, whispering as if the wall itself might hear her.

The wind blew the dead leaf of a plane tree into the window.

Thomas closed the shutter and lowered the bar.

“And what are we going to do with this… Baal’Zebud?”

“Zebuth.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You know that, too,” she said.

And his hand was already holding the pitted spear from Jerusalem.