Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

His feet probed for the floor. Luquin rushed to bring his slippers, but he waved the young man off.

“The tiles are cooler than the air. My feet shall be grateful to feel them.”

Clement shuffled through the stone connecting room with its staircase and then into his private study, fitted out with a small second bed for when he tired of the grand canopied one in the bedroom. The walls of this room gave it its name, for its frescoes sang the glories of the hunt, not only of the stag, but of all manner of game; a man in parti-colored clothes let loose a ferret on a rabbit. Fishermen dangled nets over an embarrassment of fish. A naughty-looking boy took birds at the top of a tree. Some had grumbled that the pope should look upon scenes from Scripture rather than the delights of hunting and bathing and birding, but he had said, “God made earthly pleasures, too, which may be enjoyed without sin. Shall I affront Him with pride by thinking myself above them?”

Célèste was waiting for him.

Clothed modestly, as she always was, so that they might more easily separate and look guiltless at the sound of the far door opening. Might not a young woman privately visit her uncle by marriage to discuss a matter of Christian law? And as for sounds of pleasure, castle walls treat the ears capriciously. Do you know what you risk with this accusation? Are you very, very sure?

The entrance from the bedroom was safe; Luquin knew never to enter the room of the stag, and he was not so dull as not to know why. “They call it the room of the stag because that is where His Holiness mounts horns on his nephew’s head,” as he told his friend, the second falconer, and other friends besides.

When, with one warm, backward glance, Célèste slipped barefoot down the stairs between the rooms, her kirtle smoothed (if damp), her question of Christian law duly answered, Clement lay back on the bed, enjoying the air coming in through the window. Not cool, perhaps, but mild. A breeze from paradise itself compared with the furnace raging in his bedroom.

Sleep would come now.

It began to, at least.

At first he wove a nightmare for himself. Four soldiers of low rank and rust were on the verge of raping a girl in a barn. A donkey hung half-eaten from the roof.

Flies everywhere.

He woke.

The sound of high, girlish laughter had awakened him.

But whose?

And what a dream!

Guilt for his carnal sin, no doubt, the four soldiers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John teaching him the grotesquery of his adultery with his niece by marriage. And the ass from Bethlehem or Palm Sunday, too.

He exhaled, considered returning to his proper bed.

No.

Cooler here.

Poor Luquin sweating in there, but he’ll sneak out soon enough.

He closed his eyes again.

He slipped into a pleasant dream of children laughing.

What children?

Oh.

Those.

The tittering came from the wall next to him, where four boyish girls or girlish boys played and cooled their plump feet in frescoed waters. Not his favorite part of the painting, easy to overlook.

He had never really seen them before, these puti, as they appeared to him in this nascent dream.

So vivid and so happy.

He liked them very much.

That youth’s endless pleasures must end had not occurred to the bathers, and he felt now that they were right. He saw, in the nave of his mind, one of them look at him with the shared, secret wisdom of immortality. Out of the corner of the eye, as befit the sly nature of the secret. He or she drew his or her feet out of the stream and stood on the bed next to Clement. The weight of the painted child was real somehow, somehow pressed down the bed.

More tittering.

Those watching from the wall.

Now that cherubic face bent to his, and he smiled in his half sleep, but the child’s hand took his cheeks and made him soften his mouth, the better to receive the kiss. And what a kiss. It was spearmint and fennel, it was brandied and onioned and wild, it was water and the mark water leaves when it retreats from sand.

Célèste, he wanted to say, both her name and how this kiss tasted, celestial, an earthly pleasure upside down with its feet hung in stars.

But he could not speak, for he could not breathe.

This became urgent.

He pushed the bather’s face away, and the boy-girl shrugged and returned to its fellows, one of whom bent to kiss it even more intimately.

Clement woke, gasping for air.

He looked and saw the fresco, which lay as it had been made, motionless save for the guttering of the candle that illumined it, and mute.

His lips tingled, though.

What of that?

“Célèste?” he said.

Nothing.

Only the sound of a fly.

He looked at the painting again and saw that he had been mistaken; it was not as it had been. He counted three children, not four.

He put his hand on the bed next to him and found it wet, whether from the loins of his niece or the feet of the bather he was unsure.

Enough of this.

He would return to his canopied bed and to the companionship of his cubicular.

He got to his feet in the shimmering near-darkness, and felt water under them.

As if something had dripped across the floor.

He took another step, but instinct slowed this one.

He nearly started out of his skin to see it standing near the doorway.

A child, neither boy nor girl but both, its skin pale.

Its feet wet.

It put a finger to its lips, but the man was too frightened to speak.

It pointed at the candle, which went out, though moonlight still lit the room enough for him to see it walking toward him.

Pierre Roger went to cross himself, but his arm cramped and froze in the third position, the useless claw of his right hand stuck to his left breast.

He backed up away from the boy-girl until his legs bumped against the frame of his bed.

The sound of a dog licking.

He half-turned to see one of the bathers on all fours, spiderlike, lapping at the love-stain on the sheet.

He inhaled a gasp of air, but another child, standing on the bed behind him, stoppered his mouth with a cool hand, aborting his shout in a spasm.

They pulled him down on the bed.

The one who had kissed him straddled him now, fluidly but with a boulder’s weight.

Can God make something He can’t lift? its black eyes asked him.

Now its arm down his throat, tearing his mouth.

He could not breathe.

He did not breathe again.

Until.

He sat up from his bath.

A small hand held his.

He could not see, and then he could, only shapes at first but his eyes were clearing. He could not tell who had his hand.

He needed to breathe out but could not.

His lungs were heavy and full.

He tried twice before he managed to empty them.

The dead man sat up.

He expressed thick, dark wine from his nose and mouth.

Delphine wrinkled her nose in disgust as it washed over her feet where she crouched on the neighboring barrel, but she did not let him go. His skin had the consistency of roseate wax; yes, he was a giant wax doll who had been held too close to a fire so that the features sagged and melted just a bit. She had to get him out of the barrel.