Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

He was afraid to move his tongue—some dream of an arrow in it—but he did move it at last.

“Thank you,” he said.

“French?”

“Yes.”

He recognized the boy.

From Elysium.

“Isnard?” he said.

“Yes, sir. How do you know me?”

I had a different face then!

“I don’t know.”

“Lots not to know about these days. Did you see the angels?”

“No.”

“An army of them in the sky. The most beautiful things. And yet I hope I forget them, for they are awful, too.”

The boy crossed himself.

Thomas grunted.

Angels had come.

The war in Heaven had turned.

“We found you in the ruins of the palace. Along with these. Earthquake.”

Earthquake?

Was that what had happened?

No.

But it was what men could stand to remember.

Thomas got to his feet, painfully, dusting himself off.

The man took a sack from the cart and approached the pit.

“Isnard, have you seen a young girl?”

“Lots of them.”

“Or the page. Have you seen the page that served the comte in the Elysium House? Your little friend?”

“Not since. No. Not in the earthquake. But there are many dead. The Holy Father asked the whole town to help, as well as the soldiers who had come for the crusade. It was worst in the Jewish quarter. And in Villeneuve.”

“How bad was it?”

The boy lowered his eyes.

The man began spreading lye on the dead.

Villeneuve had fallen into the river; it seemed in places to have melted into the river, the stone having turned liquid and then back to stone. And the Rhône had diverted through Avignon. The city walls on the west side had crumbled, as had half the palace. Thomas looked for the girl, asked about her; nobody knew a thing. He returned to the Franciscan abbey, and the Alsatian told him the girl had not come back, but that his horse was waiting for him.

He took Jibreel into town. It was not easy to persuade a warhorse to pull a cart, but Thomas had a way with horses; he always had. He hitched Jibreel up with a team whose job it was to move the heaviest beams so that he and others might look for the living among the dead. He worked near the palace, hoping to see her walking, hoping not to see her under the litter of tiles and the nonsense of limestone bricks and tapestries. He became increasingly certain he would not.

Among the dead were three cardinals, one of them Hanicotte, the priest’s brother, newly minted the night before.

Was it just last night?

So much happened since then.

But what?

Cardinal Hanicotte had been crushed near the entrance to the chapel, where many had tried to hide, his robes and fine gloves matted with blood. One of many, alike in death, wedded together under the stone angels and devils that had arched over the door.

But Hanicotte was at the center.

A stone devil had him by the hair.

A stone saint had him by the hand.

Thomas slept in a field with other workers.

He ate food from the pignotte .

He threw his coat of mail in the river and worked in the simple hose and long shirt of a laborer.

He looked everywhere for the girl, asked everyone twice, but nobody had seen her since that night, the events of which had dulled in all men’s memories but his; he asked soldiers he had seen standing near His Holiness in the Courtyard of Honor, just as he confronted his false double. She had been with them then, they remembered her, but no one could say what became of her.

He thought about seeking an audience with the pope himself, but his station was so low and the pontiff had so many cares now.

He saw the Holy Father several times, blessing the dead, his breath steaming in the cold October air. This Clement was not the same man who had lorded over the feast in the Grand Tinel and called forth the dead stags. This pope radiated benevolence, and his smile now began in his heart, not on his face. He gave an address in front of St. Peter’s asking all men to pray for God’s mercy, and for a swift rebuilding. He said he had been in the grips of a long fever and begged their forgiveness for his folly. There would be no crusade in this time of pestilence, when seigneurs were needed in their demesnes. There would be no pogrom against the Jews, and any who harmed a child of Israel would be cut off from the salve of the church. The pope had already commanded de Chauliac, his faithful doctor, to marshal other doctors, Christians and Jews together, who were putting right a forest of broken bones and stitching the howls of countless lacerations into grim consonants.

On Thomas’s last day in Avignon, he found his sword.

It had fallen in a gutter and broken.

He looked at the blade, the notches in it, trying to remember where the deepest ones had come from. Blurry images of brigandage and war came to him, but he did not try to sharpen them. He let them fall away. Thomas pressed his lips to the ruined blade, not in fondness for the harm it had done, but for the trace of the girl’s blood that still remained on it. After a long crouch, he left it where it lay; some peddler would find it and sell it for scrap, all of it; blade, quillons, tang, pommel, the wooden handle, and the deerskin wrap.

He hoped he would prove so useful.

He wandered north.

November came.

The plague left France for England.

Thomas sold his labor where he could; he turned down an offer to serve with a seigneur’s guard, saying he had no sword and wanted none. Instead, he sold these men his horse and went to the fields, where working men, so scarce now, could come and go as they pleased, and sell their sweat dearly.

Money was lord here now.

Most were heading south for climate’s sake, but he would go where the fewest laborers were.

And, eventually, he would go home.

He learned farming, making up in strength what he lacked in knowledge. But then he gained knowledge, too. He made friends.

Three of these came with him to Normandy.

She saw the four men in their rags and aprons coming down the road, bearing tools and sacks. When the rain came, they went to her barn to shelter. They could be forgiven for thinking her land deserted; the field was wild, and all the farms for miles around were silent. It had fallen on this part of Normandy in the summer, taking first her mother and then her sweet father. That was the last she remembered.

She had awakened in her tree this morning, bitterly cold.

It was August no more.

Her father still lay on the bed where he lost his struggle with the plague, but now skeletal, long dead. Where the months had gone was beyond her understanding.

She was hungry.

The clay and wicker beehives were burned.

Two pots of honey were all she had.

And Parsnip, heehawing by the willow tree.

She had to decide whether to seek her father’s people in the south, though she did not know where to look beyond the name of a village, or whether to stay here and try to get through the winter alone.

But she knew what she had to do first.

She had to approach the strangers.

Her father had spoken with the neighbors in the spring, saying it was likely brigands would come, men who were once soldiers, but who now lived by robbery.

The men in the barn were none of these.

Just peasants.

She poked her head around the door.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello yourself,” said the plumpest of them, amiably.

The tallest of them, a strong-looking fellow with long hair and a nearly white beard, had blanched pale at the sight of her. He looked familiar to her, as though she had dreamed of him.

“I need help burying my father,” she said.

The tall one stared at her and cried, trying to hide it.