Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (24 page)

Something landed wetly on the roof; no heavier than a branch full of wet leaves, but that wasn’t what it was.

She looked up, then froze.

It came through the straw thatching on the roof, forcing its way
between the fibers, at once liquid and not liquid. She had never seen tentacles, but that was what it was: a mass of tentacles that knotted on itself again and again to move. It had no head at all; to her, it looked like a nest of snakes’ tails.

She was too afraid to move back into the tunnel, even when it dropped onto the planks not two yards from her.

It writhed nearer, rearing up several of its tail-arms to regard her, but then, thankfully, decided she was not what it was looking for. It collapsed on itself and went liquid again, blacker than blood, so black it was less like a stain and more like the most profound absence of light. It oozed through the spaces between the planks and disappeared.

She had never given any thought to the people sleeping below her, but she knew this not-owl, this snake-knot was after them.

She went back into the tunnel and burrowed in with her blind young ones, shivering so hard they moved away from her.

Thomas dreamed.

He was walking across a burning landscape of dry grass and nettles, and sand that shifted in the hot wind and stung his eyes. He was wearing armor. The sun seemed to hang closer to the earth than it should have; it seemed to press on his armor as if it had hands, heating the links of his mail unbearably. Smoke began to fill the air; fires at the horizon line twinkled as figures moved near them, fanning the flames.

He had heard that the infidels under Saladin had burned the grass at the Horns of Hattin to drive the crusaders mad with thirst before he crushed them in battle, driving them out of the Holy Land, and Thomas thought that was where he was. Near Jerusalem, in the Levant. The figures working the fires didn’t look like people, though, not even Moslems.

“Goddamn it, stop that!” he tried to shout, but the words caught in his throat as if they had hooks. His throat was unbearably dry, and he knew he might die of thirst. It was the figures who were doing this
to him; if he could reach them and kill them, it would stop. But they were so very far away, and his sword was so rusted it looked as though it would break if it struck anything hard. He clenched his teeth and moved forward, but then one of his teeth broke; he pulled a mailed glove off and pulled the tooth out. The action of doing this dislodged another one so it wobbled in his gums, then another; soon his whole mouth was full of loose teeth as dry and fragile as kindling. He opened his mouth to try to get some air in it, but then he realized that was a mistake. Almost as soon as the idea came to him that the sun was so hot it might light his teeth on fire, it did exactly that. They smoldered painfully in his gums, even after he shut his mouth, and he looked around for anything at all that might give him relief.

That was when he saw the thorn bush.

It was about as high as his ribs, with long, wicked thorns. The whole bush seemed to bend around something at its center: a pear. But not just any pear. This was the fattest, sweetest-looking pear he had ever seen, with a leaf on its stem of impossible greenness. He knew that it was so full of watery nectar that one bite would not just ease his pain, but strengthen his limbs so he could set about the business of killing the shadowy fire makers on the horizon.

He put his glove back on against the thorns and knelt down before the bush, picking gently at the needled twigs encasing the fruit. How like ribs around a heart they were. He had to be delicate so he didn’t rupture the pear, but this was hard. The thorns were so long and slender they slid deeply into his fingers even through the links of his mail. He had to make the thorn bush want to yield the pear, so he tried to say
Please
, but all that came through his ruined mouth was a grunt. Smoke came from his nose. The arrowhead was lodged in his tongue again. He couldn’t speak; he would never speak. He would never be understood by anyone or anything again. He jerked more roughly at the branches, but they pulled back.

Rip it open. Use your strength. Destroy it and eat the pulp. You can’t know how sweet it is!

Lies.

He was being lied to.

He understood at once that this pear was cousin to the fruit that ruined man in the Garden of Eden, and it would ruin him, too. If he ate it, he would march to the horizon, but he would not fight the fire makers. He would become one of them. Forever. He had to pull himself away from it and then move toward the horizon.

He had to fight them.

It was a miserable thing to leave that sweetness behind, but he did it.

He got up on his leaden legs and marched toward the fire.

He coughed a huge gout of stinging smoke from his mouth and nostrils into his eyes, sending him to his knees.

That was when he sneezed a horrific sneeze that ejected smoke, snot, and blood all at once. He even thought some of his brain came out of his nose. Something definitely came out of his nose, and maybe his ears as well.

And then he realized he was kneeling not in a hot and dry grassland, but somewhere cold, dark, and damp.

The barn.

With the rain on the roof and thunder growling outside.

Something ran across his lap, something oily and dark,

die with her then you limp weak prick

and it rained itself upward somehow through the planks of the loft above them.

It had left smears on his white thighs.

Or was that blood?

His breeches were down and his
verge
was half erect.

Delphine was in front of him, and he was holding her arms so tightly he must have been close to breaking her delicate bones. He loosened his grip but still held her, trying to understand.

She was naked.

“Oh Christ, Christ, no,” he moaned helplessly.

She shook her head.

“You didn’t,” she said. “You stopped. It tried to make you, and you could have, but you stopped.”

He blinked dumbly at her dark outline with the sound of the rain dripping.

The priest snored.

She managed to smile through her quiet sobbing.

He let her arms go and she put her gown back on.

He pulled his breeches up, still staring at her, peripherally aware that his hands hurt.

When they were both clothed again, she hugged him and cried warm tears onto his neck. He patted her sides and shoulders awkwardly.

“You beat it,” she said, her lean body hitching with sobs.

“You won.”

He saw that her gown was bloody, but then realized it was his blood. His hands were bleeding freely where they had been stuck with thorns.

In the morning, Delphine woke again to find that not all the blood on her gown was from Thomas’s hands, which she knew had been injured.

Thomas was at the other end of the barn, with the mule’s leg between his, scraping mud and rocks from its shoe. How like him, to defy his pain by doing something to make it worse.

Her belly hurt, and her thighs were slick with blood. At first she feared that she might have been wrong and that he might have violated her in the night, but this was only for an instant.

The dream had seemed like other true dreams. She had dreamed that Thomas had a black crab in his head that was driving him as a man drives a cart, and this crab wanted him to hurt her. She had awakened in the darkness to find him undressing her, delicately at first, but then roughly, his eyes far away. But as she tried to pull away from him, he sneezed violently and something came out of him. He had pushed it out of him. Besides, the pain was in her belly, not where it would have been had she been taken.

No, the blood was not from the loss of her maidenhead.

Sometime in the night, she had become a woman.

She would have liked to speak to her mother about this, or to Annette. As soon as she remembered these two vacancies in her heart, she braced herself for sadness to overwhelm her. Instead, she imagined Père Matthieu trying to advise her on these matters, and the thought struck her so funny that she giggled. Her giggling turned to laughter, and even though she cupped her hand over her mouth, she woke the priest.

“My, but you’re in a good mood this morning,” he said; but then he caught sight of the blood and turned the corners of his mouth down, saying, “Sweet heavens,” which seemed such a ridiculous oath to attach to the mess in her lap that she laughed even harder.

“What’s so funny?” Thomas said, still scraping. The mule looked over, too.

The priest went and washed his hands in rainwater even though he had not touched her, stammering a moment before he found his voice.

“Well, er…it…it seems our kitten is a cat.”

SIXTEEN

Delphine was too restless to sit in the cart, so she walked alongside while the two older men rode. The cloths she had bundled around her middle were coarse and chafed her, but she was glad to have found them in the farmhouse; the mother of the dead family inside had been halfway through sewing a dress for herself when the disease came and made her lay her needle aside. She had been found leaning out the window, dead a good month so she was mostly bone, the wattle under her dark as though she had melted into the wall. Delphine thought the woman’s fever might have made her want air at the end of it. She guessed, too, that the whole family had sickened at once; one small corpse hugged another in the corner opposite, the smaller of them clutching a cloth poppet with eyes of snail shell. The mother was already too weak to bury them when they died. And where was the man of the house? Was it the old man in the barn? Or was he the woman’s father? She guessed it was the father, and that he had been mad before and they kept him in the barn; but then it occurred to her that he might have hidden himself there to save his life, perhaps
warning others away with that rusty scythe, and there lost his mind. And the husband? Was he dead before the plague came, in the war perhaps, or had he run off to save himself? She knew many such stories of betrayal and selfishness from her village, though she also knew stories of great faithfulness and courage. This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

“What are you thinking about over there?” Thomas said. Ever since the incident in the barn, he had been kinder to her. She wondered how long it would last.

“Death,” she said.

“That’s cheerful. Perhaps you’d like to sing us a song about it?”

She ignored this.

“No singing? Maybe you’ll dance us a merry brawl, then? The priest and I grow bored with watching this mule’s ass sway.”

She wrinkled her mouth, trying not to encourage his vulgarity by smiling at it. Instead she bent down for a mud clot and threw it, though it sailed well behind and landed in the cart.

“Ha!” he laughed at her. “Now that you’re a woman, you can’t do things boys can do, can you? A boy would have pelted me right between the eyes.”

She snarled at him and walked faster, cutting in front of the mule.

“Now I will watch the mule’s ass and he will watch yours, is that your remedy?”

She walked faster, letting herself smile now that the coarse knight would not have the satisfaction of seeing it.

The priest knew something had transpired between the knight and the girl, but the nature of the change puzzled him. If Thomas had forced himself upon her, would she still go with them? To keep herself alive, perhaps, but surely she would not jest and smile so much. What if she had allowed him? Or had gone to him? She was the right age to start thinking of such things, after all, now that she bore the mark of Eve. If that were the case, surely he would see it in a thoughtless caress or in a too-long glance; they did look at each other more, but
almost as a father and daughter might where the father had picked the child as his favorite and teased her playfully. It did not seem carnal; he had taught himself to divine when his parishioners were fornicating so he could better coax them to lighten their souls with confession.

But who was he to judge anyone, or propose any remedy for sin?

He was such a profound sinner that he had considered leaving off his robes and stopping the pretense. He was just an old bugger who would sell his last possession for a barrel of good wine. Or any wine.