Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (51 page)

Robert Hanicotte shook his head.

His mind was going.

His silk gloves were spattered with blood.

He crawled under the tables and ran for the gates, but he found himself pushed back as those who had tried to get out the gates now flooded back in.

An abomination chasing them.

So that’s what was in the Jewish quarter.

A surge of corpses squeezed into the courtyard, not separately; they moved as one thing. Once inside, it re-formed itself. Four legs, or three, at its pleasure, composed entirely of stacked corpses. It moved around the courtyard gathering up fleeing people with its horrid mouth. It was fast. Human ribs as teeth. A light in the middle of it its sentience. When the bodies that formed the ends of its legs wore out, it left them behind and newer ones moved down, upside down, their arms clutching at whatever it wanted clutched at, their backs and chests taking its weight, unmindful of their broken necks. It fed
found bodies into itself, or killed living ones. All manner of dead seethed in its frame; Jews and Christians, soldiers and midwives, the clothed and the nude; even a woman with a stag’s head turned in the top of a limb, waiting her turn to be moved to the end to clutch at others and bear weight.

Robert’s screaming turned into laughter.

Oh this is good this is really good Hell is here and here is its cavalry!

Off to his left, devils the size of towers killed soldiers.

He would almost prefer to face them than this living desecration.

No. I must run! I must live!

He ran with others, trying to get into the chapel, but the door was barred. Stone angels and devils looked impassively from the arch.

He was pressed in, smothering.

He turned to see where it was.

It stood alone in the courtyard, near what remained of the girl. The girl from the vineyards. She really was holy, then.

It picked her up, meaning to assimilate her.

That was a mistake.

Her goodness was lethal to it.

As soon as its inverted limb-corpses wrapped the nubs of their arms around her, those corpses fell away, as did all the others in that limb.

It was unraveling.

The light in the middle of it went out.

It toppled, gratefully.

Its dead all sighed at once, released.

Just another pile of dead in a dying world God had left behind.

And then.

And then.

A light came from the girl.

It shone into the sky, up and up, as warm and heartbreaking as the first finger of dawn.

She split down the middle and the light got bigger.

A wing came from her.

It was not hers.

It came
through
her.

An angel of God was born into the world.

Her blood on its wing.

The devils tried to stop it. They screamed their mind-killing scream, they flung blocks of rubble that would have sunk warships at it. They closed with it, the three of them, biting and lashing, desperate to block the gate by killing it.

They could not.

The glowing one absorbed their blows, but did not strike back at them.

It did wrestle them back, though, to make room for the others.

It was one of the strongest.

Zephon

Muscled and without need of muscle, ancient and exuberantly youthful, full again of the heat of stars and the patience of pushing mountains.

It shone its warm, moonish light all over the courtyard.

The horrid noise that broke minds was itself broken.

Another came.

Uriel

Its name in Robert’s head as beautiful as a lost lover’s name.

The light in the courtyard of honor redoubled.

Tripled as another birthed itself through the girl’s ruined body.

And another.

And another.

The most perfect one yet, larger than the others and bearing a sword too bright to look at, a shard of the sun, now flew up and perched on the tower of the angels, the tower topped with a chapel.

The chapel named for it.

St. Michel

Robert could not see it where it landed, but he saw it fly brilliantly past on white eagle’s wings the size of sails, prisms in its wake, prisms of new colors that made the old ones look gray.

Michael I’m seeing the archangel Michael.

It sang from its place on the roof, and it was the most beautiful thing Robert had ever heard. Now those who had survived in the courtyard made a noise of relief and thanks, a hoarse shout that lay beyond the power of words to contain. Some clasped hands and knelt, crying; some embraced one another.

And still the angels came, a host of them.

Their light casting wild shadows.

And yet the people were not safe.

The Archangel Michael, breaker of Lucifer’s back, swooped down at the lion-faced devil, who feared it so that he flew blindly into the top floor of the great chapel, toppling the building and its wall on those pressed against its door.

On Robert Hanicotte.

Darkness and pressure.

The uncompromising weight of stone.

A noise like a squeal escaped him.

This was it.

Something had his hair.

A hand squeezed his as his life left him.

He thought it was Matthieu’s.

I’m sorry, Robert-of-the-bushes.

I’m sorry.

The light of them was so bright it made a wildly careening amber day of sorts all over the city. Maître de Chauliac watched what he could of it from the windows of the pope’s study, the pope himself raving that this was his fault, ordering his ermines burned. Ha! Who could carry all of them, enough of them to carpet the palace, and what would
they be burned with? The candles, hearth, and brazier were out, so the men and women in this room huddled together in panting near-darkness, striped at times by lights from outside swinging as though on pendulums. The doctor ordered his men to keep the pontiff here, in this smallish room in the Tower of Angels. The singing from the roof had given him the idea that it, at least, might not fall.

A horrible noise came from the direction of Villeneuve, across the river. He could not see from his angle, and he was glad. He looked out the window, trying to control his breathing.

The spectacle he beheld was less a battle after all, and more an ineluctable pushing back of darkness, the habit of the sun, the birthright of light. More devils came, streaking down like stones on fire, trying to hold this earthly redoubt since the war in Heaven had soured. In their anger and impotence, they ruined the cities of Avignon, Villeneuve, and Carpentras, and killed men in the thousands, but their position against the angels was hopeless. They raged and bit at beings so calm, beautiful, and deliberate that it seemed they and the devils occupied two entirely different realities. One scene stayed with de Chauliac forever, obsessing him, even though, mercifully, the rest would blur; he saw a devil with wide black wings gripped by two angels, who drove it down and seemed to speak in its ears as they fell; they hit the bend of the Rhône, sending up a great, illuminated plume of water visible from Orange.

Two angels and a devil had tumbled into the water.

Three angels came up.

Forgiveness, then, was possible even for the worst.

FORTY-ONE

Thomas went to his knees. The world swam with black. He knew he was dying, that unmooring feeling came again, and still he tried to see where the girl was, if she was safe. He could not see past the devils, their wings fanned out behind them, though he knew they were killing. Making more like him. Dead men. Ruined bodies. His vision failed him and a curtain of blackness fell; he felt the bricks of the courtyard flat beneath him now, his face on them. Cold. He smelled the stink of the wicked angels, brutal and nauseating. He listened for his heartbeat but heard only silence in his chest. His arm was off, that he remembered, but he could not feel any of his limbs. He had the impression that his stomach emptied itself through his mouth, but he was not breathing, so he had no fear of choking. Then he felt his bowels and bladder voiding. Then he ejaculated, barely feeling it, his body’s final, muted pleasure. Images and words came to him in an urgent jumble, inside his head but louder than the sound of shrill madness that rose up outside, a sound that he had heard before, but now it was distant, receding, unimportant.

That’s how the poor bastards sing

He smiled at that, or thought he did, but he was beyond the power to move any part of himself, even the tiny muscles that pulled his mouth. His hearing winked out, leaving only thoughts.

Is this it?

When does even this stop?

Is this how it was for the ones I killed?

Something in him broke free, and he got his vision back. He saw himself as if from above in a spreading pool of blood. His eyes, which he had thought were closed, were not.

I’m old,
he thought.
When did I get old?

Blood in my white beard.

Vomit under it.

I’m ugly.

He wanted to touch his face but had nothing to touch it with.

He wanted to lift his vision to see what was happening in the courtyard, he wanted to see the girl.

YOU CAN FORGET THAT

YOU’RE OURS

And the courtyard melted away as if it had never been.

“They destroyed my body. God made it, not them, and they destroyed it. What right did they have?”

“You might have asked that question yourself. You’ve destroyed a body or two.”

Thomas was a small boy now, looking up at something sickening to look at, but which he thought would not hurt him.

That’s not its job

It’s just a clerk

The room was small and dim, and he was not sure where the light came from: no sconce, no niche, no hearth, no window.

No door.

How will I get out?

Will I get out?

He was not as tall as the table. The other consulted a book and other documents, hobbling around the table on its ankles, its feet turned on their sides like a cripple’s; it carried a stool upon which it sat every third or fourth step, clearly in pain. Thomas had to keep moving around to see it past the big table. It was as if it wanted to hide itself from him, as if it knew it was hideous, its eyes just holes in its gray, formless head, its skin blotched and moldy. So it shuffled painfully and kept the table between them, checking the book, checking parchments against one another; its arms had two elbows each, so it was hard to tell what it would reach for next.

A sort of fishy mouth opened in the middle of its chest.

“You really did try at the end. To do the right things, I mean. You nearly escaped. It was your bad luck to die before the retreat from Avignon, when they took all the souls with them, regardless of innocence or guilt. A betrayal of their agreement, of course, but so was attacking Heaven. I suppose the worst thing about this for you, worse than the question of whether I am lying, and I am not, though a liar would say as much, is a question of intent. Will I tell you the truth out of sympathy, because I was naturally sympathetic in life and this part of my damnation is to damn the undeserving; or because your sense of outrage at being unjustly damned will heighten your pain? Hell, like prison, is worse when you don’t feel you earned it. Eventually, of course, that goes numb. And they find something that’s still raw and they work on that, or they give you something back only to make you feel enough to scream when you lose it again. I’ve even heard them make men think they were being pardoned, or born into new earthly bodies, or rescued by God himself. They’re really quite good at it. It’s all they’ve had to do for a very long time. That, and make mockeries of beasts and men. You’ve seen one or two, I think.”

“I think so,” he said.

His voice a little boy’s voice.

He looked at his hand.

A little boy’s hand.

A polished mirror on the wall, a stone wall as in a castle, let him see himself.

His son.