Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“No luck at all,” he said, and suppressed the urge to spit.

The dormitory was empty, except for ten straw beds, several of which bore the stains of plague on them. He backed out quickly.

He found the girl kneeling outside the church, praying silently into her clasped hands, her cheeks wet.

“Why didn’t you go in?” he said.

She just looked at him and wiped her cheeks.

And then he smelled them.

He peeked in the door, waving flies away from his face, and saw four puffy corpses lying in the nave, wearing their off-white, undyed woolen habits. Three were lying on their backs, and the last one, an old man, was curled like a baby near them. He had his eating knife in his hand, and his habit was open on one side. The floor was sticky under him. He had died trying to burst one of those awful lumps. Flowers were strewn on the lot of them.

“Cistercians,” Thomas said.

Fresh dirt mounds out back covered the first brothers who fell, but only four. If they had been buried one to a grave, and if all the beds had been filled, a few were unaccounted for; probably those who had emptied the buttery. Maybe they thought they would go to another abbey. Thomas didn’t envy them trying to travel unarmed with the last cart of food in the valley.

When the girl finished her prayers, Thomas said, “No food. They got the stores, and emptied the fishpond and the dovecote. They had an oven, but it’s been cold a long while. The garden where they grew food is all turned up. All they’ve got is damned herbs and flowers.”

The girl went to the herb garden and motioned for Thomas to follow. She handed him a bucket from the well and walked him through the garden, filling it with flowers and greens she tore expertly with her small, white hands. He started grabbing at everything, but she stopped him before he grabbed one green stem. She shook her head at him urgently.

“What? Why?”

She used her finger to write monkshood in the dirt.

He furrowed his brow to read it, sounding out each letter.

Monkshood .

Poison.

“Oh. Thank you. So, what, you’re not talking?”

Not here.

He sounded this out, too, pointing at each letter.

“What, because it’s a monkery?”

She nodded.

“You didn’t take a vow.”

Yes I did , she wrote. By the church. In my heart.

It was taking him so long to read this that she just pointed at the church and placed her hand over her chest.

He grunted.

“Is this vow for the rest of your life?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Just while we’re here?”

She nodded.

“In that case, we are definitely spending the night. Maybe a week.”

She reached into the bucket and threw some damp leaves at his face. One stuck on his forehead and she laughed in spite of herself and her temporary status as maiden Cistercian.

They ate their bucket of greens and bright flowers. Along with the buttery little crowns of calendula, which he remembered now from his mother’s garden—she used to mix it with chickens’ grain to make their egg yolks darker and, she said, better for the blood—Thomas kept picking out one broadish leaf, nodding his head as he tasted it.

“What’s this one?”

Sorrel , she wrote.

He followed the letters with his finger, pronouncing each syllable as shakily as a foal walks. She nodded when he pieced them together correctly.

“It’s good. Like a lemon, but good. And this?”

Lovage

“This?”

Comfrey

“This one I know. Don’t eat it all. And get more of it in the morning, if there is more. It’s good to pack in a wound to stop bleeding.”

Yarrow

“How do you know all this?”

Mother , she wrote, and a smile broke so gently on her face that Thomas bit his tongue viciously to keep from weeping for his own.

They slept in the open air of the cloisters, near statues of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Genevieve of Paris, and the Archangels Michael and Gabriel. Thomas woke up in the middle of the night and went to look at his comet. It was across Cygnus’s neck now, and seemed to be reddish at the tip, as if there were a tiny vein of blood in it. He rubbed his eyes and looked away, but when he looked back it was still there. He noticed a second comet now, close to it and very faint.

“Just kill us all,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

He slept hard after that, and dreamed of monks singing plainchant. He woke in the peach light that came just before sunrise. The air was chilly, and the girl was still sleeping.

The air smelled of juniper, though he saw no juniper bush.

It also smelled of wildflowers.

Both of them had been covered in flowers.

They met travelers the next day: a cloth merchant from Bruges, his family, and two Flemish men-at-arms, with five horses between them. All seemed to be in good health. Thomas would have been glad to meet them two months before, with Godefroy and his band of killers behind him; the horses were young, the cart promised excellent pickings, and Godefroy would not have raped this woman.

The two parties stayed fifty paces apart and Thomas and the merchant each shouted news about what lay behind him. The news was not good in either direction. Then the man offered to buy food. Thomas said he had none to spare, and would have said the same had the girl’s sack been full of sausages and peas; money wasn’t what it used to be. The merchant looked at the sack. The older of the two Flamands suddenly looked nervous, and Thomas guessed that he was afraid the merchant might order them to search the sack. Neither man wanted to tangle with Thomas. The merchant, who was in fact assessing Thomas, finished this, saluted him, and moved his party on.

The bridge Thomas wanted to cross was said to be just on the other side of a river town called St. Martin-le-Preux, but as he and the girl approached the town, they came to an overturned and wheel-less handcart, on the bottom of which someone who was not a confident speller had painted, in what looked like blood:

GO BACK

As this was the only bridge they knew of, they continued forward, although Thomas traded his straw hat for the helmet and carried the sword naked across his shoulders. The girl took her bird whistle out, poured a little of her water, and began to make birdsong with it.

“Stop that,” he hissed.

“I just don’t want to surprise anyone. And I thought this would let them know we’re friendly.”

“I’m not friendly.”

“But I’m friendly, and I’m the one with the whistle.”

He was just about to take it from her when a priest walked out to meet them, easily visible in his white linen alb, holding in his hand a horn lantern. It was still light enough to see, but the priest kept the lantern near his nose and mouth.

He came from a hidden recess in the woods near which the skulls of animals had been nailed to trees.

“Stop. Please,” the priest said, holding up one very delicate-looking hand.

Thomas was glad to keep his distance; he turned his head to left and right to make sure nobody was moving on their flanks. The priest now looked to the right and left as well, wondering if the soldier had confederates skirting up the sides.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” the girl called out to the priest, but Thomas pinched her arm.

“Speak when I tell you to,” he told her. Then he called to the priest, “We’re not sick.”

“Do you promise?” he said.

“On my word,” Thomas said. “Are you alone?”

“Oh, yes. Quite alone.”

The priest lowered his lantern.

“I’m not sick, either.”

“We saw your sign.”