Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (38 page)

The city of Orange sat behind a big Roman arch that seemed to guard the road it straddled, the road leading up to the gates. Shops and houses that had sprung up outside the city walls leaned against those walls, or against one another, but a reverential space had been left around the arch. It was as if the emperor or general who had commanded it to be raised were still held in such awe that his arch was left unmarred, even when men seeking stone for houses poached freely from the amphitheater against the hill.

The bathhouse sat closer to the arch than any other building, and the girls who worked there loved the old monument. They pulled vines from it and pulled up young trees whose roots might one day have harmed its foundations. They came to sit against its cool stone when they had to get out of the steam. Like the arch itself, these girls were known.

Travelers from all over Provence and Langue d’Oc knew about the Stews of the Arch, as the bathhouse was called, and about the women who worked there; not the fairest flowers of Orange, perhaps, for
those were sent to Avignon; these were the gently flawed pretty ones that would have gone south but for a mole or the weakness of a chin. Girls who had not married because their fathers put them out to get money, or girls who had married, found it bitter, and came to live in the shadow of the arch. Girls who knew pleasure and taught it.

The sun had just gone down when Thomas approached the hulking Roman arch and the small town outside the town. He had little money, so there was no point in going up to the gates of Orange, which were closed in any case, or to the cluster of inns and wine shops just past the arch, whose lanterns advertised they were open for commerce. He did want a look at the town, though; he had first heard the name of this city in a
chanson de geste
called “
La Prise d’Orange
,” in which a splendid Arab queen betrayed her husband and her faith to deliver the city to the Franks.

“You’re all alike, aren’t you?”

He was just about to leave the road and head into the countryside, hoping to find some fallow vineyard in which to sleep, but he saw a lovely young woman dash topless from a large house, laughing; a fair-haired young man, down to his breeches, stumbled out and fished her back in. It would do Thomas’s eyes no harm if they fell upon a pretty whore before he took to his field, so he strayed closer to the Stews of the Arch, smiling a little. Ten years earlier, with a pouch full of deniers, he would have gone into this place, which steamed enticingly in the first cool of the evening, and which rang with laughter.

Now he was content to look.

He saw that one man sat outside the building, drinking from a flagon, swaying on his bench. A guard. He called inside to the others, but not in French, and not in Provençal.

His language was English.

And his weapon was a longbow, strung and propped against his bench, with a fence of three arrows stuck in the ground.

A stack of other bows leaned against the wall near him, along with a heap of quivers and a couple of poleaxes.

Thomas stopped cold.

These were the killers he had sworn to give God’s justice, drunk on wine purchased with the blood of the last village. They would enjoy these women and be on their way in the morning, before news of the massacre reached Orange and the girls of this place stopped laughing with them. From the number of dead in the last town, these archers were likely only one wing of the company—the others would have secured a camp and fanned out to find other entertainments. If this was the only brothel, they would come here in shifts.

Did they even care if news reached Orange while they were still here? It was unlikely the provost of the town or the local seigneur could raise enough men to challenge this band. The plague was on the wane here, but it had done its work. More houses were empty than not, and for every girl laughing in the stews, there were probably two shoveled under in a common hole nearby, or tossed in the river.

Thomas faded between two houses before the drunk sentinel turned his attention back to the road. The knight crouched down in an alley and watched, batting away an orange cat that purred and rubbed itself against him.

It was not long before the watchman went to piss.

The Englishman wove his way into the alley, seemed about to piss against the bordello’s wall, then apparently thought better of raising a stink in the Stews of the Arch and turned to piss against the building across. He barely noticed Thomas, who was alone, walking rather than running, seeming intent on simply passing the man. Rather, he put one hand over the man’s mouth and used the other to ram his head twice against a house beam. The man went limp, still pissing, and Thomas let him fall.

The knight unsheathed his sword and moved across the courtyard, stopping just before the door. “Saint Denis and glory,” he whispered bitterly, and now breathed in and out twice like something between a bellows and a bull.

He stepped through the doorway and into a womb of flickering candles and steam. His knees were bent as he walked in, and his chain hauberk rasped against a beam.

He carried his sword over his shoulder, one hand on the pommel, the other under the quillons; he was ready to kill with it.

Several of the men in the tubs gasped. They all stared at him, none of them daring to speak.

They saw that this man was lethal.

He was huge and armored and they had seen enough fighting to know a killer’s eyes, even through steam and in the flickering light of candles.

In an open field they would have stuck him to his death with arrows, but here they were drunk and naked and at close quarters; just so many heads bobbing in hot water.

A woman, who had been smiling at first, thinking him one of their company, now felt the fear of the archers and said, in French, “Please sir, do not quarrel here.”

Another woman echoed her in Provençal.

He stepped farther in, moving so his back was not to the open door. One Englishman considered the plank spanning his tub, the remains of a game hen and two cups of wine upon it; could he wrench the plank up and wield it as a club and a shield? He would have no leverage in the tub, and he would be decapitated before he could get out of it.

The man in the tub nearest Thomas prepared to splash water in his face, clamber over the girl next to him, and roll over the edge, hoping to find his dagger on his belt among his clothes, drunk and in the half darkness; but the girl, sensing his tension, grabbed his
bitte
underwater as if to hold him fast by it. Even had she not, the plan seemed so clumsy to him that he couldn’t gather the nerve to move.

Nobody moved.

One ruddy blond man spoke to him in English, telling him to do it if he was going to, but Thomas did not understand.

Or care.

It was then that it happened.

He felt something touch his heart, as though tiny fingers were on it, holding it as gently as one might hold a bird.

Voices came to him, as if from far away.

Don’t kill him.

Don’t kill anyone else again.

Thomas.

Sir Thomas.

We’re going to pay for that.

Find my brother…tell my brother…

Do you swear to give them God’s justice?

I swear.

He breathed in and cocked his hips, and the nearer men ducked underwater, one of the
filles de joie
screamed, but he stopped. He had fully intended to start lopping and gouging these helpless men in their four huge vats.

But he just stopped, waiting until the submerged men came up panting.

He looked at each man in turn, and each of them, even the ruddy one, looked away when his turn came.

He sheathed his sword.

“Not tonight,” he said, and backed out of the room.

None of them mistook his actions for cowardice.

He had them.

All of them.

And they knew it.

Thomas slept that night in the belfry of a small, dead church that overlooked the road; he doubted the
routiers
would follow him, but it was always better to act as though the worst might happen. On his way out of the stews, he had walked by the stables and seen them full; how desperately he longed for the feel of a horse under him, but a little voice in him said
no
and he knew it was her voice somehow. He left the stable alone and veered off the road and into the fields.

This belfry was a good spot.

More than for the brigands, of course, he was watching for the girl,
whom he suspected he had passed up. It had occurred to him that he might have harmed her indirectly by letting those men live—what would they do with her, after all, if they found her? Yet her wishes were unmistakable.

Her command.

Well, who is she to command me?

Who are you to resist her?

He tried to answer that, but only said, “Huh.”

For whose sake did he keep pretending that she was not something like a saint? He had never believed that saints were anything more than figures in stories, no more a part of this world than basilisks or griffins or the other magnificent beasts nobody he knew had ever seen with their eyes.

And yet.

If he told anyone of this girl who spoke languages she did not speak and played instruments she did not play, they would say…

Witch.

That was what they would say.

It was easier to believe in witches, after all. Their motives were of this world. Revenge, power, pleasure. Who has not wanted one or all of these?

And yet.

If any goodness remained in this world, it was in her, brat or not, witch or not. With her hair combed or tangled.

“She’s holy,” he said, the words strange in his mouth.

“Goddamn it,” he added, and felt better.

A piece of the moon hung in the sky like a polished bone.

He would be able to see her if she came.

He fell asleep watching for her, then eased seamlessly into a dream about her walking down this very road; she had a basket of wildflowers, and she scattered them as she went. He felt as proud as a father when he saw what she was doing. It was brilliant of her to think of strewing wildflowers behind her; he smiled in his sleep. He would be able to find her now.

*  *  *

The traffic on the road to Avignon astounded him.

He had not seen so many people since the Death had fallen on them those few but very long months ago. A cart of mystery players went by, beating drums, two men in skull-faces dancing to show they were risen, an angel Gabriel blowing his horn while a ridiculous halo, painted gold but scratched to show the wood beneath, wobbled behind his head. An ox, of all things, pulled them.

“A whoring ox,” he said, waving as they went by.

Later that morning he was walking in the road because the ground on the shoulders was loose and gravelly; he did not want to turn his ankle and hobble the rest of the way into Avignon. A man shouted at him to clear a path, and he obliged, shielding his eyes against the sun as the most recent of several military processions he had seen cantered by. Four knights headed this one, followed by a dozen men-at-arms.

This was, for Thomas, no ordinary procession.

This group of men and horses changed everything for him. It drowned his foal-legged love of mankind and his suckling desire to let even the wicked live in peace. It took him back to the days after the tragedy at Crécy-en-Ponthieu, when hate had draped the furniture of his heart and left him willing to damn himself for revenge.

One of the four knights was Chrétien d’Évreux, heir to the throne of Navarre, and the man who had stolen his land, his wife, his knighthood, and his soul.

TWENTY-EIGHT

He trotted after the horsemen until the weight of his hauberk and the warmth of the day slowed him to a fast walk. He knew where they were going, of course. And he had no idea what he would do if he caught up with them, whether in Avignon or on the road. He would prefer the road.

I should have taken one of those goddamned horses.

But then I would have been in front of them.