Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (34 page)

“What will you do with yourself?” Thomas asked.

“I’ll keep on for Avignon. I’ll sign on for the new crusade.”

Thomas’s face soured at the memory of the knight and his retinue that passed them close to Auxerre.

A devil and a host of the dead

“Some face you pull. Do you not love the thought of Jerusalem in Christian hands again? It might be just the thing to quench God’s wrath at us.”

“About that,” Thomas said. “What have we done to make God so mad at us? What have we done that our fathers and their fathers did not do?”

“They were punished, too. The year I was born, the famine near made my mother’s milk dry.”

“It can’t have been that bad; look at the size of you.”

But it was that bad, and Thomas remembered it well; for nearly five years, when he was first a page and then a squire, the crops drowned in the rain and murrains killed the beasts; a hanged man had disappeared from the gibbet, and everyone knew the farmers on the edge of town had eaten him. Only the kindness of Thomas’s seigneur had kept his family from taking such desperate measures.

Père Matthieu drew closer, waiting for his chance to join the conversation. The girl ate a salted fish and stared at the water.

“We have famine, too,” Thomas rejoined, “on top of war and pestilence. How are we so wicked as to deserve all of this?”

“Well, you may not be wicked, but I’m wicked enough for both of us.”

“If you were wicked, I’d be in that river. All of us would. You’re a good man, Guillaume.”

“That wasn’t goodness. That was fellowship.”

“Martial camaraderie,” said the priest.

“Fellowship will do,” said Guillaume, nodding his head at the priest as if to say,
Can you believe him?
Then Thomas was struck funny and laughed, looking not at the priest but at Guillaume.

The priest laughed, too.

“What?” the big-armed man asked.

Thomas said, “I should trim that last stitch. When you jerked your head it stuck straight up. You look like a sour apple with a little stem.”

His face flushed red, though he was smiling.

“And you look like…”

“What?” Thomas dared him.

“The ass of…”

“The ass of what?”

The soldier thought for a moment.

“Something I wouldn’t want to walk behind.”

Even the girl laughed at that.

“Even if we are wicked…” Thomas said, but the soldier cut him off.

“
Everyone
is wicked.”

“What about her?” Thomas said, pointing a thumb at Delphine.

“Well, I don’t know her, do I? She doesn’t look rotten, but she could be. Or maybe she will be later. Everyone sins. Isn’t that right, Father?”

“Undoubtedly,” Père Matthieu said, with some enthusiasm, glad the men had moved from martial stories about camp and training (though never Crécy) to something he knew how to talk about. “Man is born into sin. All because of Adam.”

Guillaume said, “Mostly Eve, my priest told us.”

Delphine looked up from the water now.

“That’s not fair.”

“How’s that?” said Guillaume.

“She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Huh,” the priest said, trying to knock the rust off his rhetoric, but failing to find the proper argument.

“I told you everyone was wicked,” said the soldier. “Her sin is that she goes against the teachings of the church.”

The priest said, “May not a man be tempted by a sinful child?”

“As we are now,” laughed the soldier.

The girl thought, absently fingering the scab on her chin, and said, “Yes. But what of a child tempted by a sinful man?”

“As Guillaume was, in the field, by an uncle. Two uncles,” Thomas said.

“Don’t be crude,” she said. “This is important. Is the child misled by the man more sinful than the man misled by a child?”

“I should have warned you her father was a lawyer,” said Thomas.

“Are you not her father?”

“Christ, no. I’d have shaken that out of her.”

“It’s never too late,” said Guillaume.

“Oh, I fear it is.”

“You haven’t answered the question,” Delphine said.

“I’m just going to pull my whoring oar,” said the man.

“Me too,” said the knight.

“Are men who swear foul oaths during a conversation about God fit to point out sin in someone else?” said the girl. And she ate her fish right down to the tail, looking more than a little proud of herself.

At the end of the third day after the fight, just at dusk, they came to a dam in the river. At first it seemed to be something men had made with logs, but as they grew closer, it became clear that the obstruction was composed mostly of dead cows, sheep, and the bodies of men and women. Dead fish, heaps of them, also glittered in the last of the sunlight.

“How the Christ are we to get around
that
?” Thomas said.

Guillaume shook his head.

“Shit, what is it? You know this river.”

The big-armed man shrugged his shoulders.

The raft drew closer.

One of the cows moved now, but not of its own power—something under it had shifted, causing it to lurch in the water and bump against the other flotsam.

“I think we should pull to the shore,” the soldier said, and the priest said, “Yes. Yes, please.”

They turned the oars, and the raft turned a little but just kept heading for the island of dead things; they wrenched the oars with all their strength now, leaning back, but still the raft moved downriver, though it faced diagonally.

Something was pulling it.

The girl whimpered and took up the flute-shaped box around her neck, opening the tiny hinges. The priest crossed himself and looked over the side; something white bobbed in the water not far below the surface, and it seemed as though something viscous and opaque had formed itself into long ropes. That was what had the raft; that was what reeled it in.

Other white things bobbed as well; one of them now rushed past
the vessel, and the priest saw it was a sheep’s head—but the head was encased in a kind of gelatinous creature the size and shape of a large basket; it pulsed itself to move, opening and closing itself like a flower, its rim fringed with reddish purple tendrils that trailed behind it.

“God preserve us, please, please,” Père Matthieu said. The men at the oars stopped trying to use them to move the boat and came to look at what the priest was gaping at.

Now several of the jellied things pulsed underwater around the raft, seeming to glow with their own faint light; at the center of each of them was the head of a man, woman, beast, or child.

The raft lurched against the dam of bodies, none of which had heads attached. Thomas looked at the nearer shore and removed his helm and chain hood. Guillaume, seeing his intention, began to help him off with his surcoat, but it was too late.

One of the things flopped onto the raft.

The head in the middle of this one was decomposed, but not so much they could not tell its filmy eyes were set too far apart and looking in different directions. It pulsed and slithered forward, its frill of tentacles waving in the air now. Thomas lashed at it with his sword, but it parted around his blade and did not suffer. The girl tried to touch it with her spear, but it twitched away from her, one of its frills brushing her wrist in riposte.

It stung her.

She cried out in pain and nearly dropped the spear; that brief caress had burned like touching a hot coal. The priest pulled her back.

Now another one, with an old woman’s head at the middle of it, flowed up from the river onto the raft.

Yellowish tentacles, presumably from a much larger cousin of theirs, began to rise up from below and wrap themselves around the raft, causing a corner of it to dip underwater. Desperate, Thomas writhed out of his surcoat, but the chain hauberk was still on him, threatening to pull him down like so many bricks if he went over.

He had no time.

The tendrils yanked harder, pulling the raft at a sharper angle, causing some of their cargo to slide forward. A case of weapons slid into the water; now the wrapped salt cases were moving, too.

Salt!

The priest ran for the salt and began working at the twine that kept the oiled cover on it.

Delphine backed up, lashing at the first horrid thing with her spear, though she missed and was stung every time; her wrist had swollen and she could barely feel her hand.

Worse than its stings were its words; it spoke to her, and even though the mouth of the captain’s head moved in its viscous host, she wasn’t sure if the voice was only in her thoughts or not:

I AM CAROLUS THAT WAS A GIFT FROM CAROLUS CAROLUS AND WHAT IS YOUR NAME YOU’LL TELL ME WHEN I TAKE YOUR HEAD UNDER WITH ME TO THE BEAUTIFUL THE LIGHTLESS BOTTOM OF THE SEA WHERE THE DROWNED WILL MARRY US

Guillaume grabbed an axe and hacked at the jaundiced ropes hauling the raft under, but some of these lashed about and stung him, too. Thomas sidestepped the second of the jellied things, which were not graceful out of water, and saw what the priest was doing. He stepped over and cut the twine. The priest opened a sack and flung it now, hoping he was right about its properties.

The properties of salt.

He was.

The one he salted twitched and recoiled at the first grains of the desiccant, and, when showered with a proper fistful, browned and died, melting from around the stinking head of the woman, which now lay still and dead.

Thomas sheathed his sword and opened two sacks, grabbing one in each fist; he hurled these at the monster that was hurting Delphine and it, too, hissed and died its second death, leaving the captain’s head openmouthed in a rictus of betrayal and pain.

The sun was long gone now, and the gloaming was upon them.

The water shone with phosphorescence; it would have been impossible to count the number of them moving about in the river.

“Salt!” Thomas yelled to Guillaume. “Salt the bastard that’s sinking us!”

He turned now and ran for the sacks, as Thomas also went to grab more, but a fresh bloom of tentacles rose from the river and lashed the fore of the raft, pulling it so sharply that the salt, the weapons, the fish, the men, and the girl all went into the cold water.

They plunged into the river, which was mercifully shallow here, having flattened out to flow around the dam as best it could, perhaps thirty yards from the shore. At once, the priest grabbed for Delphine and made for the bank, half swimming and half stumbling on the bottom.

At the same time, Guillaume put himself under Thomas and hoisted him to help keep his head above water.

They got ten yards before the things realized where they were.

And the stinging began again.

The large one, visible now that night had come, shone dimly as a sort of luminous, grayish-white sail in the middle of the dead island; it could not move from the deeper middle of the Rhône, but it sent out long strands of its underside, trying to wrap them around the fleeing men and the fleeing child, which it wanted most. Its tendrils smoked and broke when she touched them with her stinger, but the smaller swimmers were stinging them dead.

Thomas lived because his armor and surcoat protected him from the worst of the stings. Delphine lived because the priest used his body to shield her.

Guillaume was taken.

He had been pushing Thomas forward, but the things had stung his submerged groin and legs countless times, and he fell behind, jerking now with every sting.

Three or four of them crowded around him now and brushed him all over with their frills.

The poison in him stopped his heart.

He went still and sank.

The tentacles from the big one webbed him now; they pulled his head from him and reeled it back into itself, where a new swimmer would be made. Guillaume’s body was pulled into the island.

Thomas, unaware of Guillaume’s fate and mad to get out of the river, strode through the shallower water now, bulling forward so as not to slip under; he caught up with the envenomed priest, who was barely moving, his remaining force going to his arms, which held the girl up and out of the water.

She had passed out.

She was dead weight.

And yet he held her.

The knight would never forget the image of the faltering priest holding the girl up; how like the raising of the Eucharist it looked.

Thomas, kicking one of the swimmers out of the way, grabbed the priest’s belt, hauling him the last yards to the shore. The priest wanted to fall, but Thomas would not let him; not until they reached a small road by the river, crossed that, and made their way to a field gone fallow and wild with lavender bushes past their flowering.

They were almost in Provence.

When the men and the girl were clear of the water, the tentacles from the thing in the island whipped around furiously, making a small rain fall around it, and, from below, a ghastly moaning came from the submerged and captive mouths of the dead.

It was supposed to take the girl.

It would be punished.

The island bobbed and shifted and moved south as the abomination in its middle dragged its prizes down the Rhône and to the sea.

TWENTY-FOUR