Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Of the Arrest

The lodgings at which the pope had placed the Comte d’Évreux and his page sat practically in the shadow of the hulking palace, quite near St. Peter’s church. The series of slanting and hunch-shouldered workers’ houses that had occupied the place before had been pulled down four years earlier, the lumber carted to the palace and cheerfully burned in its kitchens and beneath its baths—it was as though the palace had eaten them. Pope Clement had continued his predecessor’s policy of building up a stone Avignon to replace the wooden one, and the Elysium House was a fine example of the new extravagance.

Thomas and Delphine had sequestered themselves in their room, having excused themselves from the midday feast that an English duke was putting on in the courtyard. The sounds of revelry had been floating up to them for nearly an hour, and, as the revelers emptied pitcher after pitcher of the pope’s wine down their gullets, more and more often the Valois and English lords who had once faced each other across battlefields now united in good-natured mockery directed at the window of the man they took for the Comte d’Évreux and his Navarrese page. This was precisely what Thomas had feared—though he bore the face and body of the dead man, he did not share his memories, and the world of high-placed men, though embracing all of Europe, was as small and incestuous as a village.

He was dangerously near betraying himself as an impostor.

“Is my lord of Navarre taken ill?” shouted the young William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, in the boxy, snub-nosed French of English nobility. “For I should have liked to have a wrestle with him.”

Delphine used the tip of her comb to trace the hem of a woman’s dress on the wall hanging near the window. It was the simple comb of her mother’s, brought from Normandy—she had flung the ivory comb from the stag orchard into the muddy street the instant Thomas had given it to her.

“No, my lord Salisbury, he will not wrestle you. He was only wont to wrestle his little brother until Charles grew a moustache. Now he wrestles other men’s wives.”

“That is too much, my lord,” laughed another Frenchman, though it was hard to hear him over the horsy guffaws of Sir William, who displayed a foreigner’s overappreciation of French wordplay, as well as an Englishman’s amusement at French adultery.

“I but jest. If our good Chrétien would poke his head out his window, he would see that I am all smiles.”

Thomas felt vertiginously insulted and also pleased that the Comte d’Évreux was being insulted.

“Leave him be; he is ill from the other night’s excess.”

“Then how does he propose to face tomorrow’s excess?”

A messenger had come the day before, crying the news below every window: Since the plague had killed so many cardinals, a new one was to be created tomorrow night; the celebration would be held outside, in the open courtyard of the palace, and open to all.

Now Delphine traced the legs of a knight, skipped chastely past his middle, and rejoined the outline at his belly. Past the tapestry knight, a young girl and her father bent in the field, their faces turned away, gathering sheaves. She traced them, too. It soothed her to keep her hands busy while she waited for a helpful thought to come. For once, Thomas would have been grateful to see the heavy-lidded gaze that meant she was about to use words that were somehow not hers. Neither of them knew quite what to do while waiting for an invitation to see the pope, an invitation that might not come at all.

He shuddered at the thought of trying to stab the false pope in camera , let alone in front of a table full of knights and a company of guards.

It doesn’t matter.

I’ve come here to die.

“Give us at least your head, my lord of Navarre, so we may know you are not dead!” shouted up the English duke.

“You’d better,” said Delphine, now tracing a little dog.

Thomas smoothed his unfamiliar, closely shorn hair and wiped at his beardless chin before thrusting his head out the window to general applause. He waved a hand at the celebrants.

“Come down,” one said.

“No,” Thomas said. “Our friend is quite correct; I ate more than a young man should at the warrior’s feast, and have paid an old man’s price for it.”

The table below erupted with laughter.

“Where’s Don Eduardo de Burgos?” another shouted. “He’ll purge it out of you with jerez !”

Thomas swallowed hard at this.

“But,” he continued, waving the last comment away, “with temperance and prayer, I should be whole by this evening. If my lord the earl does not throw me to the ground too roughly.”

They laughed again.

“Well, get back to your sickbed,” said the Valois, “and no more excuses tonight. Though you should send your page down for a bowl of this stew. It’ll make a man of him. Oysters, ginger, and pepper.”

Thomas made as though to vomit, provoking a cheerful “Hoooo” from the table, then withdrew his head and closed the shutter. It was struck by what sounded like a plum.

Delphine raised an eyebrow, impressed.

“Now go get us a bowl of that stew,” he said.

The soldiers came an hour later.

Delphine had eased out of the bindings that flattened her modest unboyishness and sat upon her pallet near the window. The spear was around her neck. Thomas was scraping at the bottom of his bowl with a crust of hard bread, eager to get every drop of the spicy stew.

The sound of boots on the stairs froze them both.

They looked at one another.

These were not the light footsteps of the chamber boys, one of whom, Isnard, had made fast friends with Delphine in her role as page, nor was this a solitary messenger.

The knock, though expected, startled Delphine when it came.

She squeaked like a mouse.

The knock came again.

The hand that knocked wore mail.

“Who is it?” Thomas barked, sounding lordly.

“Servants of His Holiness,” said an unimpressed voice. “Now open this door.”

This was no invitation.

They were discovered.

Delphine confirmed her fears by peeking through a hole in the wooden shutters; two men wearing chain mail and the cross-key emblem of the palace stood in the courtyard below the window, one of them chasing off a kitchen girl who had been clearing up. Both men carried poleaxes.

Delphine clutched the case that held the spear.

“I’m sick,” Thomas said. “My neck is swollen and my throat hurts.” He sneezed loudly as punctuation.

“Amazing how many people we knock for feel the plague coming on. Open the door or I’ll break it down. And you won’t like your trip to the palace if I do.”

Thomas took up his sword and Delphine shook her head at him, wide eyed.

“What, then?” he whispered.

“I don’t know, but not that!”

The man outside the door flung himself against it; it was a new door, and solidly built.

“If you make me axe through this whoring thing, you won’t walk out of here. Open this door! ”

Delphine’s eyes got heavy.

After the man yelled, she noticed a light coming from beyond the window. She put her hand over the spear and opened the shutter.

The courtyard was gone.

The window now gave on the bank of the river, outside the city walls, and it was as if the window had lowered; the drop from the ledge would be easy, not five feet.

An axe hit the door.

The man in the hallway was swearing.

Thomas would fight to defend her, but maybe not if she left.

He was to let them take him.

“Let them take you,” she heard herself say.

Let them take me, Peter.