Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (37 page)

Delphine shivered now and could not stop.

This thing was going to kill her.

She reached for the case and began to open its tiny latches.

“If you open that case, I’ll bite your fucking thumbs off.”

She withdrew her hands.

“Now give it to me.”

Something occurred to Delphine.

Her breathing calmed.

“Why don’t you take it?” she said, her voice trembling.

Silence.

“You wouldn’t like that very much.”

“Well, I don’t like being threatened very much, either. I repeat my question. If you’re capable of hurting me, why do you ask me for what you want? Why not just take it?”

“Because that wouldn’t be friendly.”

Delphine took a deep breath. When she spoke again, her voice was steady.

“Friends don’t terrorize one another. If you’re really my friend, leave me in peace.”

The rattling hiss came.

The thing in the room dropped the pretense of human voice.

Give me that fucking case.

“I refuse.”

Something bit in front of her face, the smell of mold and dust and stale death washing over her.

Delphine stood up now. Hands groped and clutched at her,
more than two hands
, but she pushed them off and stood up anyway. Now she opened the case and took the spearhead out. The thing scuttled back with a dry, scratching sound.

“I believe you are only able to do to me what I permit. I forbid you to touch me again.”

The room now exploded in a fury of flung objects as something moved around the room, banging on the altar, punching what glass was left out of the windows, and a dry scream bounced off the walls, hurting Delphine’s ears.

She felt her way to the door and stepped out into the wind; the stars were out, and she could see well enough to walk toward a tree.
She climbed it, the spear in her teeth, and found a branch she could sleep on.

It followed her outside and to the base of the tree, but it had drawn around itself her blanket, which she had forgotten inside, and she could not see what it was; she thought she saw a blackened face and a wisp of hair.

You stupid Norman cunt you’ll die in your sleep tonight and fall from that tree like rotten fruit

“I will not fall. And you will not be here in the morning. There are wicked things strong enough to harm me, but you are not one of them. You’re a scarecrow. You are made of lies, and you are not made well. I feared you, but now I pity your suffering. Good night.”

The only sound that answered Delphine was the wind in the leaves around her.

By and by she slept.

In the morning, she saw her blanket at the bottom of the tree. A profanity of sorts lay atop it, but a very sad one, made from a broom, three cross-sticks, and the missing arms from the nuns in the garden. A skull crowned with reddish-gray hair sat atop the broom. She dragged the blanket over to the garden, then took the thing apart, using the saw she found in the chapel to cut the twine that bound it together. She put the human remains in the garden and said an
Ave Maria
over them. She used the broom to sweep the chapel out and then leaned it against the chapel door.

Delphine shook out her blanket and put it around her shoulders, walking down the road that led to Orange and then to the city of the pope.

TWENTY-SIX

The girl was gone.

The knight looked around their camp for signs that she had been taken, but found nothing.

He was sure she had left.

She had barely spoken since the priest’s death, and he believed she blamed him for it.

“We’ll pay for that,” she had said when he cut the raftsman’s throat, and he was sure she had decided the priest’s death was ordained from the moment Thomas broke her commandment not to kill.

He wasn’t sure she was wrong.

Yet he could not bring himself to regret finishing that wretched, murderous walleye.

“Goddamn it,” he said, feeling truly lost for the first time since this had all begun. Who was he now, without his pack of brigands, without that girl and her visions, without a coat of arms on his chest or a horse or the first whoring idea what he might do if he never saw her again?

“Goddamn it.”

Thomas called for her a dozen times or more, but then his voice went hoarse fighting the dry wind, and he set off down the road heading south.

If he took big steps, he just might pass her.

When the big, dirty soldier saw anyone at all, he asked, “Have you seen a girl?” The first response he got, other than a shrug, or a quick flight up a hill or into the shadows of a thicket, was from a Provençal with a deeply lined face. The man nodded, slowly got up from the shadow of his house, and went inside, fetching out a homely teenager who pouted her lips at Thomas despite the fact that she was nursing a large infant.

There was no fixing the misunderstanding.

From then on, Thomas said, “I’m looking for my daughter—have you seen a young blond girl?” but those were too many words for the others he caught sight of. They either cupped a hand to an ear and shook their heads, or else they fired their own language back at him, causing him to cup
his
hand and shake
his
head.

He passed a large ocher rock covered in scrub, and then a small village. Two bearded men sat on the ground outside a house with missing roof tiles, one of them whittling a stick with a knife, the other sitting far away from him, holding a bloody cloth to his face and glaring at Thomas as he passed. A pig slept in the sun nearby.

He kept walking into the evening, past a convent with a garden full of long-dead nuns and then to a gully, where he lay down and slept until just before sunrise.

The castle on the hill near Mornas flew the cross-key ensign that announced it belonged to the pope. When he tried to approach the walled city, he was shouted away without even the chance to ask about the girl.

“Goddamn it.”

As he turned his back on Mornas, he heard bells ringing in the south.

He found out why within the hour.

His first thought, upon seeing the crowd gathered in the street of the next village he came to, was that the plague must be over here. Although he had seen a great many desiccated cadavers in Provence, he had not seen a fresh body in some time, and these people were standing near one another with no apparent concern for contagion. As he drew closer, he saw that there were, in fact, fresh bodies here: a dozen or so of them laid out in front of the church. These were not plague victims, though. They bled. A priest bent over one on the end, removing an arrow that looked to have stuck the young man’s liver.

A very long arrow.

Several of the mourners saw Thomas now, and began to shout and point.

This was not just a group of villagers.

It was a group of furious villagers.

It was a mob.

“Oh, whore,” he said.

There were too many to fight and he was too encumbered to run.

Mostly women and old men, too.

This would be a hell of a way to die.

He showed them his hands.

An old man grabbed one of these and jerked him toward the bodies. He pulled away, but then several sets of hands grabbed him, and he allowed himself to be pulled and pushed along. A woman whose eyes blazed wide with grief and hate dipped her hand in a young corpse’s wound and rubbed blood on Thomas’s face.

“Wait! I haven’t done anything!” he said, though he wasn’t sure they could hear him through the shouts.

“I did not kill these men!”

He was hit several times, once with the end of a rake, and a remarkably quick little boy took Thomas’s sword from his sheath, running away with it, its edge making sparks on the ground.

Another man now shouted at the crowd and moved his hands in a gesture to suggest calm, although he still held in one hand the arrow he had just pulled from a dead man.

It was their priest.

Despite his predicament, Thomas suddenly missed Père Matthieu so badly he almost sobbed.

The crowd stopped its jeering.

“You are…from France?” the cleric said.

“Yes.”

“Not English?”

“No! Picardy. I’m from Picardy,” he said, careful to enunciate every syllable, pointing back up the road that led north.

“You are come for crusade?”

“I…am looking for my daughter. Have you seen a strange girl? A blond girl?”

The priest’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head, suspicious of distraction.

“You are not with these English
routiers
?” he said now, showing Thomas the bloody arrow. Priest or not, he looked capable of shoving it into Thomas’s eye.

“No,” Thomas said solemnly. “I swear it.”

An old man, his cheeks soaked with tears, said something to the priest and pointed at the church. The priest nodded.

“You make your oath in church.”

Thomas knelt. The priest stood before him.

“Are you a knight of France?”

“I am.”

“Swear it.”

“Yes. I do so swear.”

“By Saint Michael and Saint Denis?”

“By Saint Michael and Saint Denis, I swear that I am a knight.”

“Are you a knight turned
routier
? Brigand?”

“No.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear I am no brigand, nor taker of men’s goods, nor of their lives. I swear that I am a loyal knight of France, servant to God and to the king, and a friend to Provence.”

“These men who come…with the long bows.
They
are
routiers
. If you see them, and you are able, you give them God’s justice? You will find others and give them justice?”

“Yes. I swear it.”

The priest motioned for Thomas to stand, and he did so.

Now the holy man made an announcement to the crowd.

Many nodded, and some stepped forward to clap the knight’s shoulder.

The boy brought his sword back, his father at his arm, the point well off the ground.

Thomas wiped it with the tail of his gambeson and sheathed it.

Before he left, women sat him down and pulled off his boots. His feet and face were washed for him. He was offered a pot of lukewarm chicken stew, redolent with garlic and leeks, and so thick the wooden spoon stuck straight up out of it.

He ate it all.

He stood tall as he walked toward the town of Orange. Even in his all-but-ruined chain mail, even with his tattered boots and his sweat and rust-stained gambeson, his bearing made him look more like a knight than he had in years.

A hare crossed the road in front of him.

He laughed.

TWENTY-SEVEN