Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“Sign?”

“Go back.”

“Ah. That will have been the militia.”

“Where are they?”

“As I was their confessor, I fear they probably bypassed purgatory on their way straight to the cauldron.”

“Dead?”

“Some time ago.”

“We just want to cross the bridge.”

“That’s problematic.”

“Why? There’s no toll, is there?”

“There’s no bridge. When was the last time you had wine? And I mean good wine.”

Thomas smiled broadly, showing teeth in surprisingly good shape for his age. Teeth he would be very glad to stain purple.

The people in the town near the river had burned the bridge to try to isolate themselves, but the Death was on both sides and found them anyway. A peddler had paid a farmer to sleep in his barn, against the orders of the seigneur, but the next morning the farmer found him there with his face frozen in pain and fear, and muck from the horrid buboes staining the pits of his shirt. The farmer had seven children, who worked and played in the fields with neighbor children and helped out at the widow’s alehouse. Soon half the families on the east side of town were stricken, along with the widow. The die-off started, as it always did, with those who were good enough to minister to the sick and bury the dead, and with those who gathered at the alehouse, including the militia. When the churchyard was full, families dumped the bodies in the river and the eels fed on them.

Then something else moved in that also liked to eat what the eels grew fat on. Fishermen who speared or cast nets for trout, eels, and pike began to disappear, even when they went in groups of two or three.

Nobody knew what was happening until a young boy sprinted back to town and said that his father and uncle had been eaten by a “great black fish or snake” with a “flat mouth” that hid in the murky shallows. It had lashed at them with the end of its tail and pulled the men in, then tore them with spines, and then its great, froggy mouth had opened and clamped down on their heads, swallowing each of them whole in several fast gulps. The boy had stood transfixed until he saw that it was slithering up the bank toward him, and then he had run screaming for the road. The monster would have caught him, but his panicked flight had startled his uncle’s mule, still tied to its cart, causing it to buck and catch the thing’s attention. It wanted the mule more than the boy, so it coiled all around the poor animal and bit its head off, dragging the body, cart and all, back down the bank and into the river.

“How long was it, boy?” the priest had said.

“I don’t know.”

“Think. You saw it take the mule. So of course it was longer than a mule. As long as three mules perhaps?”

The boy shook his head.

“How many, then?”

The boy held up eight fingers, then corrected it to nine.

Several of the men in town who were still healthy and still brave enough to leave their houses met up at the alehouse and drank until they had the stomach to go down to the river and look for it. They took their axes and wooden flails, their clubs and scythes, and they swore to Saints Martin and Michael and Denis to cleave the thing in two or die in the attempt. The priest, who drank with them, witnessed these oaths, and agreed to come with them, and to hold over the men his processional crosier with its agonized Christ. All their boozy courage left them when they went to the banks and saw the wreckage of the cart, and the piles of shit the thing had left on the bank, all full of boots and bones and broken tools, and even the shredded cuirass of a man-at-arms. Even with the bridge down, it seemed, some were trying to cross the river. But they were not making it to the far shore.

“This is beyond our power, brethren,” said the priest. “God forgives us the oaths we make in ignorance. Let us return to town before we make the thing stronger on our fat and our blood.”

None of them protested.

“What about the seigneur?” asked Thomas, leaning toward the priest over his modest table. “If he’s well enough to issue orders about letting in strangers, he should have enough spunk to buckle on his armor and put a sword in that thing.”

The priest smiled his distinctive, sad smile, making the well-used lines around his eyes deepen. He was probably a year or two older than Thomas, but drink and soft living made him look closer to fifty than forty; faded speckles of wine on the chest of his alb, only muted by his attempts to clean them, testified to the death of the town laundress. Despite his woolly eyebrows and masculine chin, there was something womanish, almost wifely, about the cleric’s aspect.

“Our lord is what you might call…”

“A frightened cunt?”

“If no more generous term occurred to you. He has shut himself and his retinue in the tower. His herald comes down on Fridays and reads his proclamations, which are ignored. He never gets off his horse. A man confessed to me that he intends to throw a slop pot at the herald the next time he comes, and asked me to pardon him in advance. I told him that gesture would put him one slop pot closer to Heaven. Better the herald should get a faceful of shit tomorrow than an axe handle across the nose next week. That’s where things are heading. We starve down here, unable even to pull fish from the river now, while our master has the water mill and ovens and has hoarded back enough grain to keep himself fed until doomsday.”

“So, a week’s worth, then?”

The priest laughed and went to pat Thomas’s arm in fellowship, but Thomas pulled his mailed arm back with the sound of money being withdrawn from a card game. He waved a cautionary finger but was still laughing. As was the priest.

The priest noticed the salt stains on the knight’s dark garments and the rust stains on his light ones. Had he had a page and squire? A wife? Or had he been this dirty before the Death came?

“Who is the girl to you?” asked the priest, gesturing where the girl lay sleeping on a straw pallet. “And don’t say your daughter.”

“I don’t know who she is. But she sleeps a lot.”

“Maybe she’s hoping to wake up from this bad dream.”

“If so, she’s smarter than both of us.”

“I don’t know what smart is anymore. More wine?”

“With pleasure.”

“Good, isn’t it?”

“The best. Black as a woman’s heart and sweet as her…”

“Yes?” the priest said, amused.

“Other heart.”

The priest tipped the small cask of wine so the last of the pretty, red liquid spattered out of it and into the serving jug.

“The wine is from Beaune, but it comes via Avignon, from the private stock of His Holiness.”

“But how…?”

“Where my younger brother is a steward of sorts; one of those who dresses His Holiness, or was. His office now is less…formal.”

“But, still…”

“My very handsome younger brother. Eight years my junior, but seems younger still. A certain cardinal is…fond of masculine beauty. And this pope is known for his generosity. Even when it comes to vices he does not share.”

“Ah.”

“Indeed.”

Thomas laughed.

“So you drink the fruit of your brother’s damnation?”

“Just the one barrel. I believe God has it within His heart to overlook my overlooking.”

“You had only one barrel of this? Why drain it tonight?”

“Why not? The desire came on me suddenly. It’s the last wine in town. I should have used it up at Mass, but there is neither wafer nor bread to go with it. I think the monks who made my wafer are all dead.”

“Cistercians? Half a day from here?”

“Yes,” the priest said hopefully.

“They’re dead. A few may have fled.”