Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (12 page)

“Say it!”

“My lord,” Thomas said evenly but with a steady gaze.

“I…I…forgive me, but no.”

“My
lord
,” Thomas said, scooting his chair back a little. Across the hall, Théobald de Barentin scooted his chair back as well.

The hall was silent now.

The seigneur shot Thomas a look that made him suddenly see a lion killing an old man on sand with a hooting crowd looking on. The image left as quickly as it came.

“Very well,” the seigneur said, in a mildly conciliatory tone, “the priest need not speak Latin for us. But he shall have no brains until he does. And no wine until he has brains.”

So saying, he turned his back and walked the spoon back toward the Three Kings.

The priest cleared his throat.

“Hoc…Hoc est cerebrum meum,”
he said quietly.

The lord turned on his heel now, grinning mildly, and steered the spoon for the priest’s mouth, which he opened, accepting the spoonful of salty, garlic-scented meat.

It was the best thing he’d ever tasted.

His goblet was filled.

At just that moment, the seigneur noticed that the hurdy-gurdy player had stopped playing to watch the standoff. He grabbed the little man’s closest arm, dragged him to the table, and, in three nauseating blows, broke his hand against it with a heavy pewter mug. The musician screamed and ran off, dropping his hurdy-gurdy, which broke as well.

“Where’s the viol player?”

“Sleeping, sire,” the herald said. “He played all last night for us.”

“Wake him.”

Thomas and the priest ate to bursting. Thomas ate no monkey, but he did fill his trencher with cuts of strange meat he drenched well in the intoxicating gravy. “What is this?” he asked a serving woman.

“Deer, ram, wild boar,” she said. “It is all roasted together.”

“Tastes boarish, but strange bones for a boar,” Thomas said.

“Perhaps I am mistaken. My lord has beasts from many lands in his cages, and they are eaten when it pleases him. Or perhaps it is a Jew.”

The man next to Thomas laughed so hard at this he nearly choked.

The viol player, while pale with exhaustion, was very skilled. He looked Moorish, and moved his hips in strange and sensual rolls while he drew across the honey-sweet strings. Thomas was becoming drunk, and the priest was drunker. He noticed Père Matthieu watching the musician distractedly.

“Jesus Christ, you are a bugger,” Thomas laughed, though there was no laughter in his eyes.

“No! Just. The music. I am enraptured with it. I have never heard
its equal,” the priest said. A fat drop of sweat fell from his nose. “Or, almost never.”

Thomas noticed the bored gaze of the woman who sat beside the seigneur upon him now. The fire from the hearth and many torches made her headpiece twinkle hypnotically. She was beautiful, more so than he had noticed before. He raised his goblet slightly in salute to her, which she answered by dipping her thumb into a monkey’s head and putting that thumb into her mouth. Thomas saw her tongue flicker for just a moment and knew that the wound he got in St. Martin-le-Preux was completely healed.

“I think the lord’s daughter likes you,” said the man next to Thomas.

“Daughter? She’s past a maiden’s age. Where is her husband?”

“She is newly widowed.”

“How newly?”

“He was killed at Crécy.”

“That was two years ago.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“I was there.”

“Oh, well. Seems like yesterday. She was quite attached to him. We all were.”

“What was the knight’s name?”

“You know, I have forgotten. I’ll just ask her. Euphémie! Ho!”

The woman turned her head slowly and looked at the man. Her eyes were very large and green.

“What do you want, Hubert?”

“What was your husband’s name?”

“My husband?”

“Yes, you know. The very tall, handsome one who gave you several stillbirths, then went off to die in Picardy.”

“Ah. Him. His name was…”

“Horace?” barked her father.

“No.”

“It was Pierrot?” suggested the viol player with a decidedly
Aragonés inflection, never missing a stroke on his instrument or a turn of his waspish hips.

“No, you silly hedge-cock, I would never spread my legs for anyone named Pierrot. No, it was…”

She opened her mouth now and issued a deep, manly belch. One heartbeat after it was finished, the whole room erupted in exuberant laughter.

Thomas was sloshily offended.

He banged his fist on the table. Nobody noticed, so he banged his wooden goblet on the table, splashing wine all over himself and the priest. The laughter died off to a trickle.

“You go too far!” he shouted at his fellow celebrants. “You injure the memory of a worthy man.” He was swaying.

“Oh?” said the seigneur, amused and intrigued. “How so?”

The wine-sotted soldier could not answer, and almost cried, remembering his lord’s hard death.

The man next to Thomas said, “Please forgive him, sire. He was also at the cursed defeat of Crécy, and I think his heart was broken there. Perhaps he knew the man in question. Sir knight,” he said, turning to face Thomas, “while you were serving under our noble king, did you have the honor of knowing a tall, handsome chevalier named…”

At this he belched even more forcefully than Euphémie had.

Everyone laughed.

Thomas went to backhand the man, but fell, causing the room to laugh harder. He got to his feet, feeling nauseated.

“I will not dine with you troop of pigs,” he said, and looked around for the priest, who was passed out now with his head on his arm and a puddle of drool under his face. He jerked at the priest’s robe, but the priest did not awaken. Thomas left him where he was and lurched in the general direction of the door, followed by the viol player, who used his music to dramatize Thomas’s struggle to make an indignant exit. The room was hysterical. A woman gasped for breath near him: “Oh God, oh God, I think I pissed myself!”

He kicked backward at the viol player, catching him in the knee and making his face contort in pain, changing the music from a racy celebration of the drunk’s progress to a lament for all unjustly injured musicians.

Thomas got to the doorway and went out into the darker hall, still hearing laughter and music behind him. He felt his way along the wall for support, realizing now he had no hope of finding his chamber without the boy who had brought him here.

“I’ll sleep in the whoring stable, then,” he said, and kept moving.

He felt his way along the straight wall for what felt like an hour, passing many exquisite tapestries with bizarre motifs. One stopped him and made him stand swaying before it, trying to comprehend; it seemed to show a noblewoman from the previous century bathing an infant; but she was holding it by its legs head-down into the tub. Bored angels in clouds above received the infant’s drowsy, winged soul, while at the bottom of the tapestry, black devils with tusks coming from the bottoms of their mouths, and even stranger devils in a great variety, received the ecstatically grinning soul of the mother. A lionish thing with human hands felt the woman’s breast. Next to it, the largest of the devils had twelve eyes and a round, fiery mouth. It seemed to stand on owl’s legs. Its black hand was between the legs of the woman’s soul, two fingers in her up to the knuckle.

“Filth,” Thomas slurred.

Just then the candle to the left of the tapestry flickered and a spill of wax overflowed its sconce, spilling suggestively on the floor.

“More filth.”

He remembered that he had to find the stable and go to sleep there, so he continued on. Soon he came to an open, well-lit archway he hoped might lead outside. Instead, he entered the Great Hall once again by the same door he had pitched out of. Everyone was looking at him, deeply amused but silent, as if they had been waiting to surprise him. He felt his way to his seat, pulled it forward, and sat down again next to the unconscious priest. He put his arm on his head and slept.

*  *  *

An instant later, someone was shaking him.

It was the man next to him, the man he had tried to strike.

“Sir knight, sir knight,” the man was saying in a hushed voice.

“What?” Thomas slurred.

The man’s mouth was so close to his face he could see the texture of his green little tongue and a dark shred of meat between two of his asymmetrical teeth.

“You passed out. You mustn’t sleep at table.”

Thomas shook his head and sat up, profoundly confused.

He was about to point out to his neighbor that the priest was sleeping and nobody had bothered him, but when he looked he saw that the priest was awake and having his goblet filled again.

“Everyone is toasting the heroic deeds of the war with England. You don’t want to miss it, do you?”

“No,” he said thickly.

The serving woman now filled his goblet. He saw that her nipple was out over the top of her garment and had the nearly irresistible urge to lean forward and lick it.

Across the hall, Théobald de Barentin had taken to his feet and was looking at Thomas with his protuberant eyes.

“And let us not forget our friend, Sir Thomas…of Picardy?” he said. “Although I cannot remember what town in Picardy. But I believe I met you near Cambrai, ten years ago.”

Thomas felt his face flush, and he resisted the urge to look down.

“Yes, it was you!” the other man continued. “Your seigneur, the Comte de Givras, a worthy man with ridiculously large mustachios, was camped near the Count of Hainault as the English drew their battle lines across from us.”

“You are correct, sir knight. I was there. Let us speak of something happier.”

“Forgive me, I must continue, it’s just too good! This Thomas was not yet a knight, though he had thirty years behind him. Still, his
manners were so coarse and his birth so low, his seigneur, again, a wise and worthy man, had not yet bestowed upon him his belt and spurs. Now, imagine! This great battle was about to start, and, suddenly, a noise went up from all the men on both sides. The Count of Hainault hastily knighted some dozen of his young squires and men-at-arms so that they might fight and perhaps die in the holy state of Christian knighthood. This man’s lord, looking at his brawling, overmuscled squire with white hairs coming into his beard, took pity upon him and knighted him as well. Only the battle hadn’t started yet. A hare had leapt between the legs of the French army, and they had been cheering at that. A hare! The battle never started. Our king decided to remove himself, and everyone went away. Only here were all these sad bastards knighted because of a hare. The Knights of the Order of the Hare! And one of their illustrious number is with us tonight!”

“I have fought many actions since then!” Thomas roared.

“All in our king’s service, no doubt.”

“Get yourself
fucked
, and your shit-nosed girl of a squire. I don’t have to answer to you. Where have you fought? In a whorehouse brawl? For the right to plow your whore mother without paying?”

“Ah, there’s that rare strain of nobility that made your lord so proud to knight you. And you know perfectly well where I fought. You’re just too drunk to remember.”

“My nobility will show itself on the field,” Thomas said, waving off the girl who tried to fill his cup again. “And not in perfumed words to impress teenaged serving girls.”

Théobald bowed.

“Ho-ho!” the seigneur said. “Now I would not miss the night tourney for anything. Not cunting
anything
.”

He smiled with his mouthful of black teeth.

Night.

The blackest hour of it.

Thomas found himself in bed, but he was not sure how he got
there. His head hurt miserably. A small wax candle guttered in a nook, making the shadows on the stone walls hop nauseatingly. He would have done anything for a cupful, or even a palmful of water. The figure next to him shifted.

“Père Matthieu,” he whispered.

The figure shifted again, pulling the blanket half off itself, revealing the very pale, moley back of the lord’s daughter. Something growled from the lower half of the bed. He looked up to see a tiny dog curled between his mistress’s feet, growling a warning at him. He growled back at it, then reclined. The room smelled like hot cunt and red wine vomit. He checked over his side of the bed and confirmed his suspicion that he had been the source of the latter.

Fragments of the night’s events came to him in watery flashes:

Her open mouth coming to kiss his, her teeth graying toward the black of her father’s teeth, her pear-green eyes half-lidded as her tongue flicked forward, her breath with its notes of garlic, fecundity, and rot; his two fingers sunk in her up to the knuckle; her wheezing beneath him and digging into his shoulders with her fat little fingers, her legs curled up so she made a football of herself. She had bitten one of his nipples so badly he wondered if he might lose it.

“So this is Hell,” he muttered.

He glanced at his borrowed robe, which was hanging from a nail near his head. He noticed the cloth-of-gold stars on the sage-green fabric and saw that they looked very much like the stars in the actual night sky. He found the constellation of the swan. Then he found his comet, with its little bloody vein. And the smaller one near it.

He was afraid now.

He did not want to touch the robe, so he put on his soiled long shirt and inner leggings. When he sat gingerly upon the bed to put his boots on, the little dog uncurled itself and stood yapping and growling at him as if it were in pain. Soon it was, because it made the mistake of biting Thomas’s arm, for which he grabbed it, absorbing two more little bites, and flung it against the wall. It made a great noise. He didn’t look to see if it had roused the woman on the bed, because he
didn’t want to see one of her large green eyes fixed on him; he was grateful to hear her chortle softly and then snore.

He took his sword and left.

Soon he was lost again in the labyrinth of stone halls, dripping candles and sputtering torches. At last he felt cool air and went outside into the night; other people, still dressed in finery from the feast, were moving in the dark courtyard as well, and some now came through the same door he had just used. The woman from his bed was one of these, her headpiece perched on her high forehead again, the wicked little dog in her arms, her green dress shining.