Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (53 page)

Thomas became aware of his body again, became aware of pain. Breathing was difficult because of the weight jostling on top of him as the cart rolled, some fabric half-covering his nose and mouth. Wet. Everything was wet. The stink of day-old blood and the ejecta of death were everywhere. A dog barked. Two dogs. The cart stopped.

“Ready?” a man said.

A boy answered, “Yeah.”

Provençal, but Thomas understood that much.

The language of ravens rasped out as well, obscure in vocabulary but clear in intent.

Feeding time.

Vertigo as the cart was tipped and Thomas tumbled with the others. A dead thumb in his eye. Bewildering daylight. Pain again as he landed on his shoulder and neck on a pile of wet bodies, one of which farted.

He grunted loudly.

Provençal again, but beyond him this time.

I thought the big one’s arm was off.

It was, I saw it too. He was deader than hell. Another miracle.

What do we do?

Help him, idiot.

Now arms hooked under his and lifted him out of the pit of bodies.

He was afraid to move his tongue—some dream of an arrow in it—but he did move it at last.

“Thank you,” he said.

“French?”

“Yes.”

He recognized the boy.

From Elysium.

“Isnard?” he said.

“Yes, sir. How do you know me?”

I had a different face then!

“I don’t know.”

“Lots not to know about these days. Did you see the angels?”

“No.”

“An army of them in the sky. The most beautiful things. And yet I hope I forget them, for they are awful, too.”

The boy crossed himself.

Thomas grunted.

Angels had come.

The war in Heaven had turned.

“We found you in the ruins of the palace. Along with these. Earthquake.”

Earthquake?

Was that what had happened?

No.

But it was what men could stand to remember.

Thomas got to his feet, painfully, dusting himself off.

The man took a sack from the cart and approached the pit.

“Isnard, have you seen a young girl?”

“Lots of them.”

“Or the page. Have you seen the page that served the comte in the Elysium House? Your little friend?”

“Not since. No. Not in the earthquake. But there are many dead. The Holy Father asked the whole town to help, as well as the soldiers who had come for the crusade. It was worst in the Jewish quarter. And in Villeneuve.”

“How bad was it?”

The boy lowered his eyes.

The man began spreading lye on the dead.

Villeneuve had fallen into the river; it seemed in places to have
melted
into the river, the stone having turned liquid and then back to stone. And the Rhône had diverted through Avignon. The city walls on the west side had crumbled, as had half the palace. Thomas looked for the girl, asked about her; nobody knew a thing. He returned to the Franciscan abbey, and the Alsatian told him the girl had not come back, but that his horse was waiting for him.

He took Jibreel into town. It was not easy to persuade a warhorse to pull a cart, but Thomas had a way with horses; he always had. He hitched Jibreel up with a team whose job it was to move the heaviest beams so that he and others might look for the living among the dead. He worked near the palace, hoping to see her walking, hoping not to see her under the litter of tiles and the nonsense of limestone bricks and tapestries. He became increasingly certain he would not.

Among the dead were three cardinals, one of them Hanicotte, the priest’s brother, newly minted the night before.

Was it just last night?

So much happened since then.

But what?

Cardinal Hanicotte had been crushed near the entrance to the chapel, where many had tried to hide, his robes and fine gloves matted with blood. One of many, alike in death, wedded together under the stone angels and devils that had arched over the door.

But Hanicotte was at the center.

A stone devil had him by the hair.

A stone saint had him by the hand.

Thomas slept in a field with other workers.

He ate food from the
pignotte
.

He threw his coat of mail in the river and worked in the simple hose and long shirt of a laborer.

He looked everywhere for the girl, asked everyone twice, but nobody had seen her since that night, the events of which had dulled in all men’s memories but his; he asked soldiers he had seen standing near His Holiness in the Courtyard of Honor, just as he confronted his false double. She had been with them then, they remembered her, but no one could say what became of her.

He thought about seeking an audience with the pope himself, but his station was so low and the pontiff had so many cares now.

He saw the Holy Father several times, blessing the dead, his breath steaming in the cold October air. This Clement was not the same man who had lorded over the feast in the Grand Tinel and called forth the dead stags. This pope radiated benevolence, and his smile now began in his heart, not on his face. He gave an address in front of St. Peter’s asking all men to pray for God’s mercy, and for a swift rebuilding. He said he had been in the grips of a long fever and begged their forgiveness for his folly. There would be no crusade in this time of pestilence, when seigneurs were needed in their demesnes. There would be no pogrom against the Jews, and any who harmed a child of Israel would be cut off from the salve of the church. The pope had already commanded de Chauliac, his faithful doctor, to marshal other doctors, Christians and Jews together, who were putting right a forest of broken bones and stitching the howls of countless lacerations into grim consonants.

On Thomas’s last day in Avignon, he found his sword.

It had fallen in a gutter and broken.

He looked at the blade, the notches in it, trying to remember where the deepest ones had come from. Blurry images of brigandage and war came to him, but he did not try to sharpen them. He let them fall away. Thomas pressed his lips to the ruined blade, not in fondness for the harm it had done, but for the trace of the girl’s blood that still remained on it. After a long crouch, he left it where it lay; some peddler would find it and sell it for scrap, all of it; blade, quillons, tang, pommel, the wooden handle, and the deerskin wrap.

He hoped he would prove so useful.

He wandered north.

November came.

The plague left France for England.

Thomas sold his labor where he could; he turned down an offer to serve with a seigneur’s guard, saying he had no sword and wanted none. Instead, he sold these men his horse and went to the fields, where working men, so scarce now, could come and go as they pleased, and sell their sweat dearly.

Money was lord here now.

Most were heading south for climate’s sake, but he would go where the fewest laborers were.

And, eventually, he would go home.

He learned farming, making up in strength what he lacked in knowledge. But then he gained knowledge, too. He made friends.

Three of these came with him to Normandy.

She saw the four men in their rags and aprons coming down the road, bearing tools and sacks. When the rain came, they went to her barn to shelter. They could be forgiven for thinking her land deserted; the field was wild, and all the farms for miles around were silent. It had fallen on this part of Normandy in the summer, taking first her mother and then her sweet father. That was the last she remembered.

She had awakened in her tree this morning, bitterly cold.

It was August no more.

Her father still lay on the bed where he lost his struggle with the plague, but now skeletal, long dead. Where the months had gone was beyond her understanding.

She was hungry.

The clay and wicker beehives were burned.

Two pots of honey were all she had.

And Parsnip, heehawing by the willow tree.

She had to decide whether to seek her father’s people in the south, though she did not know where to look beyond the name of a village, or whether to stay here and try to get through the winter alone.

But she knew what she had to do first.

She had to approach the strangers.

Her father had spoken with the neighbors in the spring, saying it was likely brigands would come, men who were once soldiers, but who now lived by robbery.

The men in the barn were none of these.

Just peasants.

She poked her head around the door.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello yourself,” said the plumpest of them, amiably.

The tallest of them, a strong-looking fellow with long hair and a nearly white beard, had blanched pale at the sight of her. He looked familiar to her, as though she had dreamed of him.

“I need help burying my father,” she said.

The tall one stared at her and cried, trying to hide it.

The plump one said they would help, and they did.

When the work was done, they made a fire in the barn and shared roasted chestnuts with her. They were warm and good.

In the morning, she left with them, riding her donkey as they walked around her.

The tall one walked nearest.

The one with the dark hair, just graying.

He wore a wide straw hat with a spoon through it.

She liked him very much.

It would be too bold to ask him on only a day’s acquaintance, but she prayed for some sign that she could trust him; her dearest and wildest hope was that this man would be a second father to her. She would need one.

He was not a learned man, as her father had been, but goodness shone from him as from an unseen sun.

“What is your name, good sir?” she said.

“Thomas. And not a ‘sir.’”

“May I ask where you come from?”

He turned a mirthful eye to her.

“A town.”

“Yes, but what is the town called?”

“Town.”

“No town is called town.”

“Mine is. Townville-sur-…Town.”

She laughed.

“Is it near a mountain, this town?”

“Givras,” he said. “I am from Givras.”

“Which rhymes with Thomas. Would you like to know my name?” she said.

“I already do.”

She smiled impishly.

She liked games.

“Then tell me.”

He bent toward her.

This would be a secret.

Little Moon.

The old friar mounted the road leading up to the tower’s gate. The guard called for and received permission to let him pass.

“The kitchens are that way.” He pointed, but the friar didn’t look up for directions. He just nodded at him and thanked him, making his way painfully around the west side of the keep, where a young boy in fine clothes waved a wooden sword at him. The friar mocked fear for the boy, making him giggle and gallop closer, pressing his attack.

“We don’t charge at men of God,” said a young nobleman. The lord of the castle, a minor seigneur. A big man, broad through the chest, fearsome in aspect, yet shod in the fashionable long-toed
poulaines
that had become the object of ridicule for older knights and a frequent subject of sermons. Perhaps he expected to receive one from the friar; his verdant gaze was wary, dismissive. Or perhaps he feared the itinerant might carry more than a begging bowl; the plague had returned, though not in its former strength. Only the lumps, not the blood-coughing. Villages were tithing a tenth of their number, not two-thirds, but the tenth it chose was especially hard. Some were
already calling this the children’s plague. Carpenters all over France had grown skilled at making small coffins.

“The door’s there. Marie will fill your bowl. Prayers are welcome, but keep them short. And don’t touch anything.”

The friar waved that he understood and went to the kitchen.

Marie, a youngish, formless woman with teeth in only half her mouth, filled the friar’s bowl with soft turnips and leeks. She also filled his battered pewter mug with beer. She had seen him before, in town, though he had never come to the castle. She had seen him once, smiling a little through another friar’s sermon about Hell, saying after the other left that fear of Hell is one of many paths to it. Forget Hell and love one another. That is all He wants of you.

He was the only friar she had seen who meant the things he said.

“I’m expecting,” she said. “A prayer for the baby? And for the little ones at home?”

She placed his huge hand on her belly.

He smiled, then granted her a warm benediction.

“Father?” a chamber woman said from the kitchen door.

“Yes?”

“The lady of the house, my lord’s mother, craves a word.”

The friar blushed.

“She lives, then?”

The chamber woman laughed, then spoke low.

“Of course she lives! The reaper fears to bend his scythe on Lady Marguerite.”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“Of course.”

The stairs were hard for him, but he followed his guide faithfully.

“Are you well, Father?”

“Ah. Yes. The injuries of spring are forgotten in the summer, but remembered in the winter.”

She looked back at him, noting again the pit in his cheek. Injuries,
indeed. Probably an old soldier. He had the size, even if old age had stooped him.

The lady waited in her parlor, an open book next to her, yet the old woman had the eyes of the blind. An impression in a near cushion told the friar the chamber woman had been reading to her.

She did not see him duck just a little to enter the room.

Not with those milk-white eyes with just a hint of green.

“Leave us, Jacqueline,” she commanded.

The chamber woman left.

The friar entered the room alone. His nostrils flared as he filled his nose with familiar scents, bergamot chief among them. He glanced at the far door, which led to the bedchamber.

Now he looked at her.

“You wanted to speak with me, my lady?”

She tilted her head at the sound of his voice.