Between Two Fires

Now the great plague had stilled the hearths in the countryside, and darkened the windows of the cities of man; Death’s hand sat upon the brow of the king and also the farmer; Death took the beggar and the cardinal, the money changer and the milkmaid. The babe died on the breast, and sailors brought their ships to port with dead hands. And the wickedness of man was laid bare, so great was his fear of this pestilence; for the mother fled her children and the son nailed shut his father’s door, and the priest betrayed his flock. Still other men said, “God is gone from us, or never was at all; let us do as we will, and take pleasure as we may, for all is lost.” And so the wicked went in bands and took the daughter’s maidenhead, and killed others for their sport. And some shut themselves away in walled towns, and let none pass; when the bread was gone, they drew lots, and some were given to the butcher that the rest might live. Some righteous men and women yet held faith, but they were scattered so far that none could see the other’s light, and it seemed the darkness had no end.

And the Lord made no answer.

Now devils walked the earth, at first in dreams and then in flesh, and Hell had dominion in diverse kingdoms. Those men who died in furtherance of evil yet walked as shades, and even those who died in goodness might be raised by devils and abused. Sacred places were turned rotten, and holy men abased, so the seed of Adam could take no comfort, and the prayers of men and women would not strengthen the angels of the Lord, who were grown frail.

And the Lord made no answer.

Now the greater devils who walked the earth were Ra’um and Oillet, and Bel-phegor and Baal’Zebuth, whose agents were flies. Two-thirds of the fallen had gone even to the walls of Heaven, where a great war raged, a war of bent light and thrown stars and noises that killed; a war of great limbs locking, and the spear, and the sword, it was a war of tooth on wing; a war of machines whose effects were abomination, a war of shaken walls, a war of hammers that, though turned, broke the arm that held the shield. For the strength of the angels of God was reflected strength, and the source was grown distant; yet the fallen had sat long in the coals of their exile and grown hard, and their strength was their own; and their generals were Lucifer and Asmodeus and Astaroth and Moloch; and the angels who resisted at the gates were Michael and Zephon and Uriel and Rafael, for Gabriel had gone to look for the Lord.

But the Lord made no answer.

Some few angels of God slipped from Heaven by stealth, and hid themselves, whether in the fields or in the cities, and worked against the fallen angels as best they could, and to save the lives of men, though they did these things in secret, for their powers were grown weak upon the earth. Certain treasures from Heaven they hid in the earth as well, in case the walls were breached, and among these were pots of oil and scents from Heaven’s gardens, and nectar, and gold from the tails of stars; and also they preserved certain tokens from the time God walked among men, and among these were His sandals, and His crown of thorns, and the nails from His wrists and ankles, and also the spear that pierced His side.

It was the hour of the fallen angel.

And God had stopped the fountain of His love.

And it was said that He had gone to make a new world and new angels and new men.

And the walls of Heaven would fall.

And all these now struggling above and below would perish.

NINE Of the City of Paris

Paris first announced herself with a column of smoke rising over a hill. They knew they were close, as they had been following the river from the west, and Thomas and the priest wondered if the whole city might be burning. When they crested the hill, Thomas felt ashamed of his naïveté; the city dwarfed the fire, which was outside the walls in any case. A fire big enough to burn that city would have rivaled the furnaces of Hell, and the smoke from it would have blackened the bottoms of the clouds.

All that was burning was a wheat field, and the fire was at its end, burning itself out against the banks of the Seine. Several houses had been reduced to blackened skeletons, as had two cows. One calf lowed from a hillock, barely visible from behind the curtain of white smoke that surrounded it; the fire would spare this beast. The octet of ragged figures around it, however, would not. Already they were testing the smoking earth to see if it would burn them through the rags and bad shoes on their feet. Already they were hefting their axes and daggers. They didn’t look like farmers. Thomas scanned the fields and saw a pair of legs jutting from a patch of unburned wheat. Murder, then. Thomas was suddenly sure these men had set the fire. He should have waited and watched longer before they approached; but it was too late now. Several of the killers looked at the cart as it passed, but nothing in the cart could possibly interest them as much as the calf. One of them looked at Thomas, and he met the man’s gaze, not in threat, but to let him know he would fight if he had to. The man quickly assessed that they could take the cart, but not without cost. He looked back up the hillock. Now Thomas lowered his eyes in shame to remember that, had things fallen out differently, he might be standing in that group, along with Godefroy and Jacquot, waiting to carve the dead man’s calf.

I saw it.

What?

Your soul.

Thomas remembered the last winter with Godefroy, when his were the most feared brigands in High Normandy. In the better months they had restricted themselves to robbing merchants, particularly on the roads leading south and east toward the Champagne fairs, trundling away carts laden with food and wool on the way down and gold and spices on the way up. December came, however, with rain and sleet in its fists and breath that numbed them to their feet. Food ran scarce and their reputation now worked against them—what merchants traveled then did so under arms. Villages set watches for them and hid their grain in caves and under clever hidden doors and pits in the fields. Their very few coins and other small goods went down wells or in coffers buried under straw. They hid themselves, too, because they knew that Godefroy, whom they called “the black cat,” would stop at nothing, even torture, to learn where they hid their meager treasures.

And their livestock, which, to Godefroy’s mind, included daughters.

In response, Godefroy learned stealth.

Near Gisors, just before the Christmas feasts began, the brigands stopped outside a village they would all remember, though they never knew its name. Two men stayed with the horses; the rest waited until almost sundown and walked two miles through the woods to the most isolated farmhouse. Everyone inside was likely to be asleep; peasants slept long hours in the winter to save strength. The thieves muddied their faces and crawled on their bellies until they were close enough for Jacquot to shoot the guard dog. The windows were hung with sheepskins to keep the heat of the fire in, and the cold thieves coveted the warmth nearly as much as the food they hoped to find.

Thomas grabbed the sheepskin and yanked it down, rolling awkwardly through the window with his sword drawn. A calf lay in the middle of the dirt floor, with a goat and two children sleeping against it. They woke up at the sound of Thomas’s heavy feet, and stared at him; they thought a devil from Hell had come to them, and they weren’t far wrong. The others leapt in as well. One of the children cried out and the rest of the house woke up, all in one room, six adults on a moss-stuffed bed. An old man at the end reached for something on the floor, but a nearly toothless little killer named Pepin leapt the calf and the children in two steps and stabbed the man’s belly. He dropped whatever it was he’d grabbed for and palmed his wound, huffing, “Oh, oh.”

The only other men, probably an in-law and a hired man, froze and offered no fight; they were soon shamed by an old woman who swung at Thomas with a fire poker. He ducked it and shoved her down, where another man sat on her. She yelled and this man punched her until she stopped.

Godefroy noticed that one of those on the bed was a decent-looking girl of perhaps fourteen. Probably already married. He yanked her off the bed by the foot while Pepin hovered over the rest of them with his knife.

They took the girl and the beasts out; Thomas carried the goat over his neck, and Jacquot led the calf, but the real prize was a milk cow on the other side of the house. They butchered her that night in the hills, along with the other animals, smoked the meat, and rode off before the local lord could muster sufficient men to deal with them. Just before they left, they let the girl stumble back into town, mostly intact on the outside.

Thomas had argued with Godefroy about the girl, but in the end he had walked away.

The meat had gotten them through January.

The family, of course, would have been reduced to begging from their neighbors, perhaps even forced to sell their land.

As the brigands left the house that night, the old woman had gotten up and yelled after them from the doorway. Her words were slurred from her newly broken teeth.

“God will see you in Hell! You’re the Devil’s now. May you choke and die and go to him sooner.”

Normally some of them would have jeered back at her, but her words fell on them with the weight of a proper curse. Robbing peasants felt much more sinful than robbing merchants, but winter didn’t care about such sensibilities.

In February, they robbed another farmhouse, and this time the men fought. Pepin was killed. As were the men. Godefroy ordered the house burned. A dark-haired little boy just in pants stood bewildered near the blaze, saying, as if there had been some mistake, “We live here. We live here.”

Not six months later the plague had come, killing most of the thieves.

And everybody else.

Nothing matters anymore.

Thomas shook away his ghosts and turned his eyes now to Paris. Her walls were the faintly yellowed white of bones, and her turrets stood proudly, each a lazy bowshot from its neighbor. He could see what must have been the Louvre, the king’s fortress, strong and white, cut from the same stone as the city walls. The spires of cathedrals poked at the sky, and the roofs of the shops and houses tumbled against one another. Even dead, if she was dead, Paris made a lovely corpse.

And yet Thomas wished she had burned. He would have embraced any excuse to keep going, as they had been, on small roads or no roads, meeting few living souls, foraging as best they could. How long could they live like that? Until winter. But what then?

“I don’t care,” Thomas said, at the end of this chain of thoughts, and neither of his cartmates pressed him for what he meant. There was a great deal in this world not to care about.

The Port du Louvre was the closest gate, and, luckily, one of the few that remained open; the provost of Paris, on the authority of the king, who had long since fled, had shut most of the other gates in a vain attempt to close out the scourge that was killing the city. Rare carts bearing food were allowed in; anyone at all was allowed out; strangers could enter so long as they appeared healthy.

The guards on the top of the wall did not appear healthy. They were underslept, ashen, and cranky, though not energetic enough to cause much mischief. They told the girl to display her armpits, neck, and groin to them, but did not care to make Thomas strip down his armor, and likewise told the priest to keep his robe on. The priest shook his head at them. One of them apathetically tossed a small stone at the priest. They waved the cart through.

“Now would be a good time to tell us what you’re looking for,” Thomas said. The girl nodded. She looked frightened. She didn’t look like she knew anything about why they were here.

“The first thing is to find lodgings,” the priest said.

Nobody alive wanted them, and the dead didn’t answer.

They wound through the narrow, muddy streets, at turns disgusted by the filth beneath their feet and awed by the soaring spires of churches or the houses of the very rich. On some streets the houses and shops were so close they nearly touched heads together over the muddy paths, throwing everything into shadow. Some bodies, at least, were being picked up in tumbrils pushed mostly by desperate-looking fellows who had as much to fear from hunger as from the murderous, stale air around the dead.

Nobody answered at the inns on the Right Bank, or, when they did, it was just to tell them to go away. Most of the people who had gold had already piled their possessions in whatever they could still find with wheels on it and headed for the countryside. The only medical advice that proved sound against this sickness was “run far and stay long.” Yet even that worked only if you were lucky or well-informed enough to run where it hadn’t struck yet. And if you were not already sick. The only thing that slowed its spread was the speed with which it killed; once it was in you, you had a day or maybe two before you were too sick to travel. Or hours. Thus it spread from town to town at the speed of a leisurely walk, but it missed nothing.

So they went south on St.-Denis until they got to the bridges that crossed the Seine onto Île de la Cité, the island at the heart of the city. The larger of these bridges, the Pont aux Changeurs, was for wheeled vehicles and beasts and had shops along the sides, none of which were occupied. Likewise, nobody was bothering to collect tolls. Between the shops on their right they could make out the smaller bridge, the Pont aux Meuniers, which was only for pedestrians and had thirteen water mills at its base. Both bridges were wooden. The celebrated stone bridge, the Grand Pont, had collapsed during a winter flood fifty years before. At the time, that had seemed the greatest calamity Paris could suffer. Now the mills at the base of the pedestrian bridge regularly spat out corpses that citizens living close to the river had jettisoned rather than waiting for the cart to come.

On the island, they rode past the strong, white walls of the royal palace, atop which several archers were laughing, firing their bows at something on rue St. Barthélemy. As they cleared a stack of empty, ruined wine barrels, just near St. Barthélemy church, they saw the target; a very fat dead man with thirty or forty arrows stuck in him, and more stuck in the mud or lying with their points broken off from hitting the stone building behind him.

They would have to cross the field of fire.

“Please don’t shoot us, brothers,” the priest called to them.

“We don’t shoot priests,” said one of them.

“Well, he doesn’t,” said the other.

“Hey, Father! Make a circle with your arms! A big circle!”

The others laughed.

They were drunk.

“Yes, and put that bastard driving the cart in the middle of it.”

“Shut up. He looks like a knight.”

“Knights ride horses.”

“A glass of cider says he’s a knight.”

“All the more reason to fling a shaft at him. Maybe he’s one of the eunuchs that let the English shame us at Crécy.”

“Don’t let Sir Jean hear you.”

“Fuck him, he went with the king.”

“You may pass, but hurry up.”

“Yes, hurry!”

Thomas urged the mule forward.

For a long moment the only sound was the clop of the mule’s hooves on the muddy street.

“You wouldn’t,” one of the archers said.

“I dare you,” said another.

Thomas said “Don’t look at them.”

An arrow whistled behind their heads and stuck in the dead man’s open mouth.

“Phillipe! You did it.”

“I work better with obstacles.”

Past the palace and St. Barthélemy church, they went right on rue de La Vielle Draperie, and then right on La Juiverie, named for Jews now absent, having been expelled from the city yet again nearly thirty years before. Soon, seeing the twin square towers of Nôtre Dame off to his left, Thomas tilted his head back and spat toward the great cathedral, watching the white spittle arc and separate in the air; he imagined it was a stone tossed by a trebuchet and that it would knock a hole in the gorgeous round window over the doors, but it just fell in the mud.

They were coming to the southern part of Île de la Cité, where the Hôtel Dieu stood near the Petit Pont that led to the Latin Quarter. The Hôtel-Dieu would have let any poor travelers stay one night, as was its custom, had the great hospital not been overwhelmed with those dying of plague. A staggering heap of bodies lay outside awaiting removal, two of them filles blanches, young nuns in white who had been taking care of the sick. A glimpse through an open door revealed a hell of vomiting, coughing, and sobbing with a very few wretched figures in white trying to ease the torments of far, far too many.

The girl sobbed and the priest held her. Thomas’s hand jerked with the long-suppressed reflex to cross himself, but he did not do that. He ground his teeth and shook his head.

As they approached the bridge to the Left Bank, the girl sat up from where the priest had been holding her and looked at the gray waters of the Seine rushing under it. A dead sheep floated by but didn’t keep going on the other side. The priest wondered if it had caught on debris down by the piers, and if that debris included people, and surprised himself by not feeling anything about it. On the other side, at the entrance to the Latin Quarter, they passed a painted wooden statue of Christ up on a pedestal of stone, at the foot of which a feverish woman grinned, sweating, with a dead cat cradled in her arms. Thomas looked up at the long-headed Christ and said, not wholly under his breath, “You’re dead, too, aren’t you? If not, get off that whoring thing and do something. Or at least whoring wink at me. You can do that much, can’t you?”

It didn’t wink.

But the woman did.

They wheeled along in the butchers’ quarter, where the mud stank with the blood and viscera of slaughtered animals, a few of which were still being butchered despite the paralysis that gripped so much of the city. A man grinned a nearly toothless grin at them as he cut the throat of a suckling pig he had just tied up by its feet, its blood jetting on his stiff leather apron and into the pail he had placed beneath it. He called out the price of the pig, but they couldn’t hear it over its squeals. The men of rue de La Bucherie seemed to be doing better than the dyers on Gobelins, just nearby, where nothing was moving at all.

They got lost again in the labyrinthine streets and began to despair of finding lodgings. The sun was so low that only infrequently did it finger its way between the buildings to throw cool, golden light on the mud. Just such a shaft of light illuminated the foot of a masculine-looking woman. She sat in the doorway to a leaning timber building with flaking paint. A sly-looking young man stood near her, cleaning his nails with a rusty knife.

“You look lost,” she said to them.

The priest looked first at her greasy blue stockings, then up at her tangled hair, and finally at her face. She had the look of a wary mastiff. She also had a moustache that might have better suited a thirteen-year-old boy.

“We are,” he said.

Thomas noted that she was a big woman with strong hands and shoulders, old enough that the man near her might have been her son, and that she wore a fine hat, a rich man’s floppy felt hat with a gold pin. Doubtless there were more fine hats than living heads to fill them in this city, and after a point it could hardly be considered looting to liberate them.

The girl noticed her eyes. They seemed kind to her, despite the woman’s rough look. Out of nowhere, she wanted the woman to hold her. It had been so long since she had smelled a woman’s skin that even a dirty woman’s embrace would have been welcome. She was still disturbed by the sight of the dead young nuns near the hospital and she wanted a woman to hold her and tell her that the whole world didn’t yet belong to Death, masculine Death with his hourglass and his holes for eyes. Death with his bony arms that only embraced to take you away, like a lamb from market. Like the pig on La Bucherie. How did Heaven come into all of this? Heaven was life, not death. Heaven was a woman holding your head in the crook of her arm and looking down at you. Heaven was a warm hand on your cheek and the smell of soup with garlic on the fire.

How could people enjoy anything in Heaven with their noses rotted off and their ears full of mud and worms, and no cheeks, and no hands to lay on cheeks?

She had never felt so alone, or so confused.

“Maybe I can help. What are you looking for?”

She thought she smelled garlic coming from the building.

“A bed,” the priest said. “A stable. Anything.”

“You’re in luck,” the woman said. “I own a few buildings in this neighborhood; the renters all died in one just down the street, you see it there by the big puddle, with the blue door. But it’s dry and it’s got two decent beds. How much have you got?”

“How much do you want?” the priest said.

“Ho-ho!” said the woman. “You’re stumbling around this dead city an hour before dark with your heads up your asses, lucky anyone says a word to you, and you want things done your way. Are you going to tell me how much you’ve got?”

“Well, no, but I will tell you what we’re willing to spend.”

“I’m sure it’s not enough. But tell me. I could use a laugh.”

The last of the sun slipped off her foot and now winked on a silver spoon hanging from her belt.

“Ten deniers.”

“Ha! That’s a country priest for you,” she said to the young man, whose nails didn’t really look any cleaner for all his knifing under them. “First time in the big city, eh?”

“All right, all right. How much?”

“Three sous.”

“Is this room perhaps in the royal palace?” Thomas said.

She narrowed her gaze and jerked a thumb at him, looking still at the priest.

“I don’t like him.”

The priest said, “He’s a bit gruff at first, but he has a good heart. How about one sou, five deniers?”

“I’m not the one who has to bargain. It’s three sous.”

“How do we even know you own the room?” Thomas said.

“If he talks again, I’ve got nothing else to say.”

The priest looked imploringly at Thomas, who shrugged and turned his gaze away.

“Will you show us the room?” said the priest.

“I’m not getting up. I don’t step and fetch for you.”

“What about this young gentleman?” Père Matthieu said, indicating the sly young man.

“He’s busy.”

“May we have the key?”

“When I get the money.”

“May we at least see the key?”

“You may see it and have it when I get the money.”

The priest went to the cart and got the coins, which he reluctantly put in her mannish hand. She made them disappear, then rummaged in a moldy pouch on her belt and produced a small brass key, holding it up before the priest.

He took it and frowned at it.

“It looks like a coffer key, not a proper door key.”

“Oh,” she said, “Am I a liar now as well as your servant? Then give it back to me and go your ways. Go and sleep in shit for all I care.”

“I’m a priest, you know.”

“Then pray for a room.”

“Never mind. We’ll take it. But it had better be what you said.”

“Fine.”

The woman now produced a little piece of ginger and began to chew it.

The girl salivated despite herself and asked, “Do you have any more ginger?”

The woman shook her head and flicked her hand at them.

They left.

Maybe sixty yards away, they stopped the cart near a big depression in the road in which a puddle had formed. The priest approached the blue door the woman had indicated and went to fit the key, which was clearly too small, into the lock, but the door opened anyway.

The room was mad with flies.

Three badly decomposed bodies lay in the room, which stank miserably from them, but also from mold (the roof had fallen in), urine, and feces; several piles of turds lay near the open window—clearly people sat over the ledge to shit or pissed freely through the opening. The dirt floor was also littered with animal bones, eggshells, fish scales, and all other manner of refuse. They had been sold the right to sleep in the neighborhood morgue, latrine, and dump. The priest gagged, the girl moaned, and Thomas went to the cart and got his sword, drawing it from its sheath. He ran the sixty yards back to the stoop, but of course the woman and her companion were not there.

He kicked in the door and went into the building, where a young woman grabbed up a child he had knocked over with the door; the child screamed and held his head. An older woman he didn’t recognize stood frozen near the fire where she had been stirring garlicky pottage, and now a man grabbed up a meat cleaver. He stood in front of the women and the child but was too scared of Thomas to move forward.

“What do you want! Get out!” he pleaded, gesturing impotently with the cleaver.

“The…the old woman on the stoop. She cheated me.”

“What woman!”

“She sold us a bad key.”

“What! You hurt my son! I don’t know about a damned key!”

“You’re hiding her,” Thomas said, but didn’t believe himself. The old trickster had nothing to do with these people. The money was gone.

A thin-limbed man with a strangely protruding belly came from upstairs with a sword, but he froze, too.

Rob them! Make them give you what they have!

Thomas shook that wicked voice out of his head.

The man from the stairs licked out toward Thomas with his sword, but he was scared and kept himself well out of range to hit or be hit back.

“Get out!” said the man with the cleaver, his face very pale now. “Get out!” said the mother, still holding the hurt child. The woman at the pot threw a ladleful of hot, oily pottage at him.

Thomas could see in the young father’s eyes that he was working himself up to take a real swing at him with the cleaver, and there would be blood if that happened. A lot of blood.

“I’m sorry,” he said, backing out the door.

An old man looked at him from a window across the narrow street but then moved into the shadows, saying feebly, “Go away. Leave them alone.”

Confusion, anger, and guilt wrestled in him.

“Whore!” he screamed. “You rotten old whore!”

“Shut your hole,” a deep voice said from a high window. “You’re a thief!”

“You should know about thieves around here!” Thomas rejoined.

He spat on the ground and stomped back to the cart.

Nobody followed him.

Thomas returned to the cart just as the priest was about to throw the useless key into the street, but the girl said, “May I have it?”

“Whatever for?”

“It’s pretty.”

Her simplicity made Père Matthieu embarrassed for his anger at having been cheated. He gave it to her, and she smiled up at him.

“If it made you smile, it’s not completely worthless,” he said, smiling back at her.

“I’m glad you two are so goddamned happy,” Thomas said.

“You have food on you,” said the girl.

“I’ve worn worse. Now what?”

“I suppose we sleep in the cart,” said the priest.

“All right. Let’s pull it away from this shithole of a neighborhood first.”

A few minutes later, on another street, the girl pulled a green ribbon from her sack and tied the key around her neck, then sat back, looking at the last, orange light of the sun on the rooftops. That was when she saw the angel. It was neither male nor female, but both somehow, and more beautiful than either gender. It asked her to sing a song for it.

“I don’t know if I feel like singing,” she said.

It asked her to sing anyway.

The light was on its beautiful hair and the whole street suddenly smelled like pine trees and juniper.

She sang.

“Hey down there!” said a man from a second-floor window. “I know that song. Are you from Normandy?”

The girl nodded.

“So am I. My mother sang us that on our way to church. I haven’t heard it in twelve years or more.”

“My mother sang it to me as well.”

“Are you healthy?”

The girl nodded and showed him her neck.

“All three of you?”

“On the blood of our savior,” said the priest.

“You shouldn’t be on the street now. It’s nearly dark.”

Thomas stopped the cart.

“Do you know what happens after dark?” the man continued.

“We have no place to go,” said the girl.

The man looked back over his shoulder and exchanged a few words with someone. Then he looked at them again.

“I’ll feed you, the three of you, if you’ll sing it for me again.”

Jehan de Rouen was a woodcarver. He sold wooden statues of Christ and the saints, but especially Mary, from his first-floor shop, and he and his wife lived above this. His success meant that they did not share their house with another family, as most merchants were obliged to. The workshop was neatly kept except for the odd piles of shavings, and the priest felt bad about bringing the mule inside.

Jehan insisted.

While his guests sat down to table between the kitchen and the workshop, Jehan fetched a bottle of pale spirits, setting out a bowl and pouring some in. He gave it first to the girl.

“Do you recognize that?”

She made a face but nodded.

“Papa likes that.”

“Everybody’s papa likes that in Normandy. It’s made from the best apples in France.”

He shared the bowl around. It made a pleasant little fire in their bellies.

The priest set in praising the artisan’s figures. Thomas, who recognized their long-headed style, said “Did you make the Christ on this side of the bridge?”

The woodcarver flushed with pride, hoisting up his very heavy brown eyebrows, which hardly thinned over his nose.

“I did.”

“A marvelous figure,” said the priest. “A welcome reminder of Christ’s love after the misery at the Hôtel Dieu.”

“Actually, the abbey commissioned it, hoping it would keep the plague out. But we’ve had plague. And worse.”

“Worse?” the priest asked, not incredulously, but hoping for specifics.

“You’ll sleep in my workshop. Keep the windows closed and barred. If you use the slop jar, don’t open the windows to throw it out until morning. They don’t come every night, but it’s been nearly a week. They’re due.”

“What are due?”

“If you hear something heavy treading in the street, pray hard but quietly, and stay away from the windows. And if anything knocks, don’t open.”

“What knocks?”

Jehan darted his eyes at the girl, then shook his head and took a deep breath.

“What comes?”

“We don’t know. Nobody who sees them lives.”

Jehan’s wife, Annette, brought out stale bread trenchers with the last of their thin soup. “Don’t be shy about finishing it; we’ve had ours,” she said. Overcome with emotion at her kindness and her plain, handsome face, the girl kissed her hand. The wife stroked her hair. The girl suddenly felt the hurt in the woman, how it mirrored her own hurt. One had lost a daughter, the other a mother. Each saw a flicker of the dead one. It was bitter but very sweet and good. Annette took her head into her bosom, tentatively at first, but then with great emotion, and cried down into her hair.

“What are you called, little bird?”

“Delphine.”

They cried together and held each other as the priest looked at Thomas and Thomas looked down, deeply ashamed.

In their weeks together, neither man had ever asked her name.

The liquor was soon gone, and the embers of the fire were cooling. After a hushed consultation with his wife, the woodcarver took his hat in his hands and asked Thomas and the priest if the girl might be allowed to sleep in the bed with Annette; Jehan would make his bed on the woodshop floor with the other men. They nodded.

“Thank you,” Delphine said, and went upstairs.

The priest and Thomas looked at each other, each thinking the same thing.

She’s home. This is her home now.

When the men were all settled on the tightly packed dirt floor, Jehan spoke to them in a whisper.

“It’s not that nobody has seen those that knock; it’s that what they’ve seen is so awful.”

“Go on,” Thomas said.

“Maude, a widowed hatmaker on the next street, heard the knock and didn’t open. But she heard her neighbor, Humbert, open for them and then yell. Her house is old and she could see out through a space between the beam and plaster. She said a stone man had Humbert by the hair and bit his nose off. Then it went in, and a stone woman after it. The whole family was killed: bludgeoned and bitten. The work of the Devil.”

“It was dark, yes?” the priest said.

“Course it was; they only come at night.”

“How could she be sure it was stone? Maybe these were just thieves.”

“There was stone dust and bits of stone in the house from where Humbert’s son tried to fight them. And I reckon you could tell a stone man from a man of flesh even in the dark. And what thieves bite people to death?”

“Hungry ones?” Thomas said, but neither of the other men found that funny.

His sorry joke hung in the thick darkness of the workshop for a long moment, until the mule took a relaxed and abundant shit on the woodcarver’s floor. Thomas started chuckling, and soon the priest and Jehan were chuckling as well, and then the three of them were trying unsuccessfully to bite back laughter like naughty boys in church.

“What’s so funny down there?” Annette called.

“Oh, nothing,” Jehan said. “One of our guests said he enjoyed his supper.”

They laughed themselves to sleep.

Nothing knocked for them that night.

Morning came. The sky was a bright gray that neither threatened rain nor allowed for the possibility of sunshine, but it was welcome after the night the men had spent huddled on the workshop floor listening for the knocking of God knew what. Thomas was up first, and he opened the window enough so that he could try to scrub the worst of the rust off his armor. The sound woke the priest, but the woodcarver snored on, the scent of his Norman apple brandy still spicing his exhalations.

The priest sat close to Thomas and spoke quietly into his ear.

“What are you going to do if the girl stays?”

“She’ll stay, all right. She’s already spreading rushes with the woman and helping her kill fleas on the coverlet.”

“So what will you do?”

“Same as before. Push on.”

“Where?”

“Hadn’t thought about it yet.”

“I have. I think I still want to get to Avignon.”

“Your catamite brother?”

The priest winced at that, but nodded. There was something flinty about Thomas this morning.

“You might come with me.”

“In your cart?”

“How else?”

“I might take the cart and leave you here.”

“I couldn’t stop you, of course.”

“I know.”

“Don’t talk like that. What’s gotten into you?”

“I’ll talk as it pleases me to talk. And don’t look so wounded about the cart. Just because you went out to the orchard and found it doesn’t make it yours.”

“I’m not contesting that. I just thought…”

“Well, don’t think. I do better alone, that’s all. I don’t know how I found myself tagging behind that little witch in the first place. Or with you. I’m damned already, as are you, though you don’t realize it because you’ve got your robe and your cross and your Latin. I just…don’t want anybody’s eyes on me. If I have to do things to survive.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t see. What you don’t see is that you’re a common bugger priest. And she’s just a skinny little girl who wants her mother. And I’m an outlaw knight who’s been formally cut off from the sacraments of the church. Death means Hell, so I’m going to keep death off me as long as I can. And I’ll do that better in the country than I will in Paris or Avignon.”

The woodcarver stirred, but then went back to snoring.

“You’re…you’re excommunicate?”

Thomas nodded, then stood up from the floor without the use of his hands, as a fit young squire might have; as if his anger made him youthful. With his brow creased and his eyes set belligerently he looked thirty, not forty. He looked like figures of Mars. Or Lucifer. He got his sword and sharpening stone and squatted nimbly back on his heels.

“When?” the priest said.

“Does it matter?”

“I’m just curious. It’s…It’s so final.”

“I thought I’d let you know before you cried too hard about parting company with me.”

“Why did they do that to you?”

“What do you want, the given reasons? Or the real one?”

“Given, first.”

“Heresy, sodomy, blasphemy. The usual things to turn a petty lord’s village against him.”

“You don’t strike me as a sodomite.”

“Oh, but heresy and blasphemy sit well, do they?”

“Perhaps blasphemy. You do have a colorful way of expressing displeasure. But why did they really excommunicate you?”

“To get my land. Why else?”

“Blasphemy is serious.”

“This from the man who took communion from a monkey’s head.”

“That really happened?”

“If we both remember it, I’d say yes.”

The priest’s face reddened with shame, and then he looked forlorn.

“Don’t take on so,” said Thomas. “Nothing cunting matters.”

“That’s the way a man talks before he damns himself.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve said it.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Is our host sleeping soundly?”

As if to answer the question himself, Jehan the woodcarver exhaled horsily with his lips, making a sound like “Plah.”

The priest looked back at Thomas.

“Tell me.”

TEN Of the Battle of Crécy

It had rained.

Just a quick August shower and then it was gone and everything smelled like late summer with just that hint of damp and rot. The farms in Picardy were stubbled where the wheat and barley had already been mowed. The ground was moist and Thomas could smell the good, black soil of his home province, even over the equally pleasant nose of horses and oiled steel.

His lord, the Comte de Givras, had sued for the pleasure of being in the first line of knights to charge the English where they set themselves on the field at Crécy, which meant he sued for Thomas’s right to be there, too. They drew up in the first line of attack along with Alençon, the king’s brother, and came up to the edge of the field, looking at their adversaries.

The invaders under King Edward of England had backed themselves up a terraced slope between two copses of trees with a flat field before them. At least, it looked flat on the approach. A bank with a drop the height of a man revealed itself as the French host drew up; to attack the English lines, the knights of France would have to ride around to where it flattened out, which was only about eighty yards from another run of trees, and then mount the hill.

It was a funnel.

It was a trap.

The crossbowmen, mostly little Genoese mercenaries whom the French called “Salamis,” went out first at the king’s command. They were bitching because the big shields they hid behind while reloading hadn’t come forward yet, and their hempen strings were wet from the rain; besides, it was late in the day and they would have to shoot uphill and into the sun. They wanted to wait for their pavisses. They wanted to wait until morning, when the sun would confound English arrows. King Phillip told them they would have worse than arrows to deal with if they didn’t do their work tonight. But, as the French were all about to find out, the king didn’t have anything worse than arrows.

The Salamis came running back after about ten minutes, more than a few of them bloodied and stuck with feathers; Thomas would always remember how one had an arrow stuck straight through his hand and was waving it about as if it were on fire and he might put it out. A French knight yelled, “They’ve switched sides!” and another yelled, “Cowards!” and soon the impatient knights were riding over the Genoese through that narrow pass to get at the English. Some even struck down at the fleeing men, but Thomas’s lord did not, so neither did Thomas.

They rode hard at the line of English knights, who were standing at the top of their tawny slope like bait. They were standing with their poleaxes and swords, confident the French would not reach them in any shape to hurt them. They were flying the banner of the dragon, as the French were flying the sacred red oriflamme, which the Valois king had fetched with great ceremony from St. Denis; both banners meant the same thing—no quarter. Thomas’s seigneur wanted at the English king, whose camp sat by a large windmill, or at his son, the Prince of Wales. He wanted to punish them for the insult of their small numbers; the French had them three to one, as men-at-arms went. Most knights, lords of manors and castles large and small from the breadth of France, had only contempt for the rows of farmer-soldiers arranged in wedge formations between the English knights, but Thomas’s blood wasn’t so far above theirs. And he had a bad feeling. The archers were standing like dogs at the crouch with their longbows strung and little fences of arrows stuck into the ground at their feet. They were waiting. Thomas guessed that they had picked a landmark to range their first flight, and that they would loose when the French vanguard passed it. Now the hill got steep and took the speed out of their charge, the horses sweating and blowing hard from their nostrils. Thomas looked at a knobby shrub jutting out, and thought, That’s it, even as Alençon’s horse drew beside it.

The English archers, rough plowmen from Lancashire to Kent with overmuscled right shoulders and no feeling in the first three fingers, sank into their hips and pulled their heavy bowstrings back to their ears. As did the pale, dark-haired Welsh bowmen in their parti-colored green and white. Some five thousand archers in all.

They loosed.

Thomas couldn’t hear the slap of all those bows through his padded aventail and helm, but he saw the arrows rise like a swarm of flies and then come down. He had no visor. Many of those who had them didn’t push them down in time. The arrows fell hard with a noise like hail on tiles, but also sick and wet where one slammed through chain mail or into horseflesh. Men gasped and swore and screamed, but the horses’ screams were worse. They bucked and reared and bit at the arrows sticking in them. Some turned their haunches and ran, while others lay down and refused to move again. Many fell and pitched their riders. The French line was dissolving, and they weren’t halfway to their enemy. Thomas saw that his lord was riding crooked in his saddle, and then he saw two shafts sticking out of the older man, both in the chest; the older man would have fallen but for the deep saddle and high pommel made expressly to keep knights cinched in place. Thomas raised his lance and couched the butt in its fewter, reaching out to grab the reins of the comte’s horse; and then an arrow went whung on his lord’s conical helm, and he felt a hard slap on his face, like from his mother’s spoon in the kitchen. Suddenly he was leaning back, almost out of the saddle, looking up at the clouds. But his eyes weren’t focused right because there was something white in the sky.

Fletching.

He had an arrow in the face.

He sat up and the pain hit him so hard he dropped his lance and almost passed out, but he didn’t. The horses had both stopped. His seigneur was slumped to one side, in danger of falling. Thomas tried to speak, but only blood came out of his mouth—the point was in his tongue. What was left of the French line, maybe four dozen knights and the Comte d’Alençon, was bulling toward the English, their backs receding as they rode to die.

As the remnants of the French vanguard closed, the English began to touch off crude cannons, sending brass and stone balls whizzing into men, sending limbs and scraps of armor and fabric in all directions, sending gouts of smoke skyward. The banging cracks, like near thunder, further terrified the injured horses. One knight to Thomas’s left, whose surcoat blazed with three crescent moons argent, tried to regain control of his mount, which was kicking madly with a half dozen shafts in him. The horse kicked Thomas’s leg and broke it even through the greave, then, his eyes as wide as goose eggs, threw his rider off and stamped the man’s helmeted head into the mud again and again with his front hooves, destroying it utterly. Then he lay down and died on what remained of his master. He was not alone; one Englishman would later say the dead horses were lined up like piglets to suckle.

Thomas grabbed again for his lord’s reins, using the rowels on his spurs to guide his own horse, and turned them both away. The Comte de Givras groaned, as if in disappointment, and another shaft caught him in the back. Thomas spurred them both for the French lines, but the next wave of knights was charging at them, shouting “Saint-Denis!” and “Glory!” They were beautiful in their surcoats of many colors, a flock of exotic birds heading for birdlime. Some of them were dying already, as the arrows were falling their way now.

Only the fact that the archers preferred charging knights to retreating ones saved Thomas and his Lord from being riddled; the volleys had also opened up big enough holes in the ranks for the two men to pass through, although one knight in robin’s-egg blue glanced against Thomas so hard he knocked him into his seigneur, who nearly fell again. He was shaking his head, ashamed not to be dying on the field. But he was certainly dying.

His little page, Renoud, and Thomas’s squire, André, ran up with a barber-surgeon, who helped the injured men off their mounts. Thomas was nauseated from pain and all the blood he had swallowed, and the eye above the arrow wouldn’t stop tearing.

The surgeon used a pair of shears to cut the arrow on the comte’s back so he could lie down to die; the Comte de Givras was a more important man than Thomas, but the surgeon attended Thomas because he saw that he might live. He pulled the big man down and wedged a stone between his back teeth to keep his mouth open, then cut the corner of his mouth forcing the shears in to snip the shaft. He got the point out of the tongue—nothing had ever hurt Thomas so badly—then pulled the shaft up out of the cheek. His hands were slimy with blood, and his grip kept slipping. He would have stitched Thomas, but someone had him by the sleeve now, shouting, “The king’s musician is hurt, the king commands you!” and he was gone.

The page held the seigneur’s hand as Thomas heard his awful breathing; he was drowning. He died clenching his teeth and shivering. He was awake until the very end and knew what was happening to him, but he did not cry out. Thomas did, as much to see that the great man was dead as for his own pain.

It was the worst day he had ever known.

With the squire’s help, Thomas sat up and watched the second wave fail, too, though some had gotten close enough to exchange blows near the banner of the Prince of Wales. Soon they were finished, and a lull followed. Now bare-legged Welshmen ran from the English lines and stuck knives into the eyes and visors of the stunned knights on the ground, killing them as easily as boys hunting crabs.

Thomas’s eye was hemming itself shut as the injured side of his face swelled. Men who passed them did not recognize him. Now a man wearing the king’s livery came and took both Thomas’s warhorse, who was lathered in sweat and stooping his head, and his mild-mannered palfrey, who always did a side-to-side dance when he smelled lettuce. He never saw either horse again.

The sun went down and still the beaten French rallied again and again to ride into the gloaming. Thomas had a moment’s hope when he saw the windmill near the English king on fire, its great spars turning ablaze like a slow wheel in Hell; but the English had burned the windmill themselves to give their archers light to murder by.

It had been dark for an hour when the call went up to flee. There would be no more French charges; the English were coming down from their terraced hill, and there was nothing to stop them. Thomas was suddenly aware of being alone—he did not know where his squire was and could not remember the last time he had seen him. The cries of wounded men being killed on the ground grew closer, as did the rude, choppy language of their killers, confident now, calling out to one another. Thomas sat up as best he could with his sword pointed behind him, ready to take the leg off a Welshman before he died. He heard hooves and wondered if an English knight was about to spit him. He turned his head. Here was his squire with a horse, a tired old nag from the baggage trains. Thomas tried to speak but wept when his swollen tongue touched his palate. André made a shushing gesture and, with some effort, got Thomas up, and then on the nag’s broad back. He leapt in front of his master and took Thomas’s great weight on his back as he took the reins and they cantered away from Crécy-en-Ponthieu. The night was very dark. The nameless horse sometimes pitched to avoid the body of one who had tried to flee but succumbed to his wounds; so many had died that Thomas could not comprehend it. The plain below the English position would be known as the valley of clerks, for it would take an army of men with pens and field desks to record the names and titles of the French dead.

It was at the town of Amiens where Thomas convalesced, his squire having paid a surgeon to see to him.

“A good thing it was a bodkin point on that shaft,” the surgeon had said as he put first wine and then egg white in the punctured cheek. “A broadhead would have never come out. As it is, I’m scared that tongue will sour and kill you, so I’m tempted to have it off. But then what would you pray with?”

Before he pulled the tooth whose roots were knocked loose by the arrow, then stitched the tongue and face, the surgeon told the squire to hold Thomas’s head still. Thomas grunted something.

“That’s what they all say,” he said, “but he’ll hold you just the same. And if your lordship bites me, I’ll yank a good tooth as well.”

It had taken less than an hour, but it was the longest hour Thomas could recall.

The ten minutes he took to set the leg seemed merely purgatorial after the hell of little pliers fishing in his cheek for loose bone, and the dip and bite of the curved needle in his tongue.

“You’ll not be so pretty now, but you may live to thank the Virgin, if she saves you. The pain’s a good sign. I’ll come around again tomorrow night. Splash some more wine on that around suppertime, but no supper for you till Tuesday, and then only broth and raw eggs. God felt so bad about throwing man out of the garden, he gave us the chicken, which gave us the egg. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out angels’ blood was egg whites. God rest you, sir knight.”

The squire stayed with Thomas for two weeks while the arrow wound toyed with his life, first reddening around the margins, then running clear, then slowly, very slowly, beginning to heal. When he was out of danger, though still not well enough to travel, he sent his squire home to tell the lady of the manor he was alive. The seneschal, who had been watching for Sir Thomas, stopped André at the gate and told him what had happened.

The squire turned around quickly and rode hard for Amiens.

André stood in the little room with his hat in his hands and his hood thrown back. He measured his words and spoke them slowly, pausing before the worst ones.

“Sire…Your keep and the lands of Arpentel are…forfeit to the Comte d’Évreux, of Navarre and Normandy. Your seneschal made to stand against him and prepared for siege; but your wife, fearing the comte’s cruelty should he breach the walls, treated with d’Évreux and let him into your keep. And, it seems, after very little struggle…her bed. Your son, however, has been declared by the comte the lord of the manor and stands to inherit when he comes to majority. D’Évreux, in the interval, is regent and protector, and your rents will go to him, save enough for your lady to keep a modest household.”

Thomas shook his bandaged head and said words that sounded like “the king.”

“The king is weak now. The lords of Normandy scheme against him, and treat with England. King Phillip gave our fallen lord’s lands of Givras to the Norman to keep him from rising in plain revolt. And now he has seized yours, which border Givras. Because he can. Because you were faithful to your seigneur, and he was faithful to the defeated king, you have been…moved aside.”

Thomas shook his agonized head, his eyes tearing.

“Further,” the squire said, “you are declared excommunicate. The bishop of Laon himself has ordered it, against the protests of your priest. They will strip you of your spurs in absentia, empty the chalice, and lay down the cross; if ever you return and try to claim your land back, the priest must deny the people the sacraments as well.”

Thomas made a sound that might have been, “When?”

“The ceremony is tomorrow.”

And so Thomas had healed. When his money ran out, he went west to Normandy and sold his soul to Godefroy, watching always for the heraldic crest of the man who had ruined him, Chrétien, Comte d’Évreux: the gold-on-red wheel of Spain quartered with a barred field of fleur-de-lys. Thomas agreed to stay with the brigands so long as they stayed in High Normandy; Godefroy agreed that they would often visit the comte’s domain. Thomas swore that this grasping lord with lands in Spain, Normandy, and Picardy, who had his piggish eyes even on the crown of France, would die in the mud at a brigand’s hands.

He swore it, spat on a cross, and flung it down.

Since God had permitted his excommunication, he would earn it.

Thomas never thought himself the kind of man to take part in theft and killings, and to permit rape, but, in the name of revenge, he became exactly that kind of man.

For a time.

ELEVEN Of the Market on Rue Mont-Fetard

“What became of your squire?” said the priest.

“I’ve no whoring idea. I sent him off rather than take him to Hell with me, but he’s like to have found another hell. Probably married an English girl and hung a mess of brats off her dugs.”

The woodcarver’s eyes were open now. Thomas turned his gaze upon him.

“How much did you hear?”

“More than I shall soon forget.”

Thomas breathed in, as if to exhale some oath, but he had mellowed with the telling of his tale. He suffered the priest to put his hand on his shoulder, then hung his head. Now the woodcarver sat up and put his hand on Thomas as well.

Jehan the woodcarver was nearly out of food, so he had to go to market. Normally he would have done this on his own, wearing a yoke with two baskets and wearing a cloth about his face, taking care to stay as far away from others as he could; but today Delphine insisted on coming along. Which meant Thomas would go as well. The priest was half dying for want of wine, and things had gotten so bad in the quarter that Annette didn’t want to be left alone. Neither did the mule, but it wasn’t asked.

Annette went up to a trunk at the foot of her bed and took out a pair of pretty yellow woolen hose that had belonged to her daughter, as well as a pair of wooden pattens for tying to the bottoms of one’s shoes to protect them from the mud and worse of the Parisian streets. She made a gift of these to Delphine and combed her hair out, humming the same Norman tune the girl had sung beneath their window the night before. She was smiling more than Jehan had seen her smile in months.

It was midday when they left.

The five of them kept tight to each other and walked a twisting mile through the streets, with the shop fronts shuttered, the few open windows on higher stories staring at them like dead sockets. Other groups huddled to themselves, and nobody spoke. A cart passed them, forcing them to hug up against the buildings, the driver saying, “Watch out,” as mechanically as if he were talking to himself. Rats ran in the gutters and sometimes on the roofs, but otherwise things were so still that a dog barking in the distance sounded like music.

It got noisy as they drew near, however.

The market on the rue Mont-Fetard was one of the few places where people would still congregate, and, as such, was one of the most dangerous places one could go. Many of the spaces where stalls once stood were empty now, and those that remained had distanced themselves well away from their neighbors, like teeth in old gums.

Still, the market presented a rich spectacle, even in fraction.

Yellow finches fluttered and chirped in cages; an acrobat walked backward on her hands with eyes painted on her bottom and outsized gloves on her feet; a Spaniard berated two little dogs who had grown tired of spinning in circles on their hind legs while he played a horn.

People yelled and bargained as they had before the sickness; they just did it farther away from each other. Hawkers called to the group in singsong chants:

The girl, who had walked very near the group while they made their way through the dead streets, now let herself be pulled this way and that, now trailing the group, now trotting awkwardly ahead, unaccustomed as she was to wearing pattens on her shoes. She had the feeling that whatever she sought in Paris would be here, in this market, but she loved the market’s éclat with the love of a child who has been quiet too long. She loved the colors and the motion of commerce, but especially the noise. The sound of foreign languages pleased her particularly, reminding her that a whole world lay beyond the horizons of Normandy and Paris: a world of varied provinces and innumerable towns and hamlets that might not all be dying.

Foreigners were in no short supply at the Mont-Fetard market; Germans hunched over stacks of iron, spraying beer through their whiskers as they called out. Spaniards sang “Cuero, cuero, cuero de Córdoba” over shoe leather so fine one could almost see light through it. Bohemians tapped bars of lead in rhythm and sang inscrutable songs, more to amuse themselves than to draw custom.

Delphine loved it all.

The Florentines had the biggest and most beautiful stall; they had lived in the city and had grown rich selling the bright red wool of Florence in bolts that drew the eye from thirty paces. Now they wore plague masks that made them look like awful birds. A table sat before them with a bowl of water in which one was to place money, as it was believed this would cleanse it of bad air. These merchants had grown adept at showing their cloth by means of two sticks, and they rolled and fluttered it before Annette as she came near, though she could only come so near; little stacks of bricks marked the boundary past which customers’ feet were not to step.

But where was the food?

When the priest, whose stomach was rumbling noisily, asked Jehan where the food sellers were, the woodcarver pointed up ahead, past a group of bickering men. As they approached, they saw a sergent with his baton of office yelling through a handkerchief at a shrugging merchant who sold tortoises and tiny owls and other exotic animals. The officer gestured at a miserable-looking monkey in a cage.

“That beast has it. You have to pitch its cage in the river, or burn it, but either way, get it out of here.”

“Monkeys don’t get plague. He’s just tired. Who wouldn’t be tired with you yelling at him?”

“Monkeys are just little men, aren’t they? Foul little men who bite and throw filth. I’m telling you, he’s got it.”

The sergent was obliged to use reason because he had only one man with him, and the merchant, who had a Gascon accent, had several dark-skinned fellows who looked like brothers sitting within easy reach of staves and knives.

The group continued on, the ailing monkey locking eyes with the priest and staring at him with disturbing intelligence.

Now the chants of food sellers came to them; hazelnuts, apples, pork pies in crusts. One stall was wild with hanging game, some of it none too fresh; the hunter, sweating in a hat made from no less than three foxes, was using a leafy branch to swat flies away from a deflated-looking rabbit.

“Wolf pelts!” he barked at them, now gesturing at an impressive stack of hides. “Winter isn’t so far away, you know. You’ll want good furs for the little girl.” The priest politely waved away the man’s solicitation, provoking something very like a silent snarl from him.

Next were the fishmongers, their carp and sturgeons and black bass laid out on wet straw, the sellers stinking of the river, wearing aprons brown with blood and glittering with scales. Thomas went to a large carp, but Jehan pulled him away.

“Not this stall,” he whispered. “They have a stall on the Right Bank as well, and whatever doesn’t sell there comes here. They redden them with pig’s blood.”

“Let the man look!” the fishmonger hissed.

Jehan made the sound of a pig snuffling.

“That’s a lie!” the man said.

“Since when is an oink a lie?”

“Leave it,” Annette said, as the fishmonger wiped a rusty filleting knife with his apron. A look from Thomas made him put it down.

The other fish stall was ropy with eels, and neither Thomas, the priest, nor the girl wanted any part of it. The butchers were next, and there were a good many cuts of meat to be had, though the prices were ruinously high. Annette debated with Jehan about a shoulder of pork, which he haggled for and got. Soon she found a bag of onions, leeks, and garlic. Then two fistfuls of hazelnuts; Annette was happier than she had been in many weeks, and she was going to cook a proper meal for their guests.

Thomas cheerfully munched a black pudding he found for a denier, sharing pieces of it with the priest, until his attention was called by the sound of a barrel rolling. He walked over to a table full of bright, new chain mail, though this was not for sale.

“Clean your armor, my lord?” sang out a man too old for the scalloped fripperies he wore as he turned a handle that turned a barrel full of sand and vinegar. “Ten minutes in here and your hauberk will shine like God’s teeth.” He had the air of a squire, perhaps one whose seigneur had died. When he saw that Thomas was hooked, he said, “Two deniers to make it like new, sire. You won’t find better or cheaper.”

Thomas had just begun stripping off his belt and surcoat when the girl yelled, “Père Matthieu! Please come!” with such urgency that he ran with one hand holding the belt closed and the other on the hilt of his sword.

The priest and Thomas arrived at the same time to find Delphine standing near a cart belonging to a seller of religious articles, a hunched, pale little man with very black hair who seemed to smile at everything, even the sight of Thomas stomping toward him.

“What in Christ’s name is it?” Thomas said.

“The oil!”

“What?”

“This is the oil that the Magdalene used to wash Jesus’ feet!” the girl said excitedly, bouncing a little on the balls of her own feet. She was pointing at a little clay vial stoppered with cork.

“Sure it is. And I’ll bet that’s the hammer that pounded in the nails,” he said, gesturing at a plain wooden mallet.

“No, actually,” the seller said, “it’s the hammer that fixed the axle of this cart. But…” he continued, producing a carpenter’s plane, “this is the plane used by the carpenter Joseph, father of Our Lord; the very one sweet Jesu learned to use as a boy. It is said that any beam planed with this is proof against fire, and no two such beams might ever be separated. Imagine! A house that would never burn and never fall!”

“Do I look as though I build houses?”

“No, my lord, you look as though you knock them down and none can stop you. But surely you will want a fine house built one day, and you may lend the carpenter this holy thing.”

“I had one house. I will not have another.”

“A traveler! Then look upon this…” he said, fishing something out of a leather sack. “A lock of Saint Christopher’s hair in a reliquary of horse bone. The horse was Caesar Constantine’s horse, a stallion of white so fair he made snow look like coal ash.”

“You met this horse?”

“He was described to me, as I have described him to you, as it was described to him that sold it to me, and on backward to antiquity. Ride with this in your saddlebag, sir knight, and your horse will never stumble in a river, nor throw a shoe save within thirty yards of a farrier. Also, you will never lose your way again, for Saint Christopher himself will lead your horse by the nose, even to the tavern door.”

Delphine had stood rapt throughout this pitch, but now the priest spoke up.

“Your stories are very pretty, but surely you see that only the child believes them. Good day to you.”

Thomas had already turned his back to walk away, and the priest now reached for Delphine’s hand. She withdrew it before he touched her and wove her limbs through the spokes of the cart’s wheel, looking at the priest like some feral St. Catherine.

“Let’s go, child,” the priest said.

“No!” she all but howled, and gripped the spokes tighter. “This is why we’re here! It’s here!”

“Nothing is here, girl, but old tools and donkey bones. I know this man’s sort. Now let’s go.”

“Perhaps you seek the vintner,” the pale little man said, his very green eyes twinkling significantly at Père Matthieu.

“What did you say?” asked the priest.

“There’s a vintner selling good wine from Auxerre just four stalls up the street. You want wine so badly you’re gray from it. Your upper lip is sweating.”

Thomas turned around now.

The priest opened his mouth to speak but closed it again because he had nothing to say. This man had seen right through him.

“You seem lost, brother. Perhaps you need something to point the way for you. Perhaps something very dear.”

“Like what?” Thomas said.

“Something others think they have in holy shrines, but which is in this humble cart. In my keeping. The only one that’s real.”

“What,” Thomas said, “the milk of the Virgin? The cocks of the magi?”

“Better.”

“Gabriel’s turd? God’s piss pot?”

“Oh, much better.”

So saying, he scrambled into his cart and tugged out a box of cedar with Greek letters on it. He passed his hands over it several times like a magician, then opened it to reveal a leaf-shaped shining spearhead worked with ivory, and also lettered in Greek.

“You’re not saying…” the priest said.

“I am.”

“Why is it inscribed in Greek when a Roman soldier pierced Our Lord with it?”

“It went to Alexandria for a time. Oliphants from the Afric continent gave their tusks for it.”

“Why should I think this greatest of all relics should be in the care of, forgive me, a man of such…”

“Poverty?” the little man suggested as the priest gestured impotently in search of an inoffensive word. “Humble means?”

“Something like that.”

Delphine spoke up from her wheel now, saying, “Did not Our Lord go humbly in His time? In sandals or on a donkey?”

“The child is wise,” said the relic seller. “Heavenly treasures and earthly ones are not the same.”

“It does look… quite credible,” said the priest.

“Do you hear your own words?” said Thomas, stepping closer. “This is no more the holy spear than this man is Christ’s wet nurse. He has bewitched you! Both of you. Let’s go.”

“Yes, perhaps you should go,” the relic seller said, shutting the box with a loud snap and fastening the latch. He looked anxiously past the priest and hastily began to pack his goods away. Thomas saw why, and then the priest turned and saw as well. A group of agitated men was bearing down on them, pointing at the relic seller.

One of them said the word “Jew.”

The sergent who had been arguing with the monkey seller was now being pushed along by the crowd, who seemed intent on making him do some duty or other regarding the little man and his cart.

“We have to get out of here,” Thomas said. “Now.”

The priest nodded, sweating now from more than want of wine, and tugged gently at the girl, who shook her head stubbornly and kept a tight grip on the wheel, shutting her eyes against the approaching group. She was frightened, too.

Thomas wasn’t having any. He shoved the priest out of the way and unwound her limbs from the wheel even though his grip hurt her and made her cry out.

“Goddamn it, you’ll come with me if I have to pull the whoring wheel off with you,” he said, and soon had her over his shoulder even though she cried and slapped at him. The priest had already gotten clear, and now Thomas stepped out of the way as the small mob reached the cart.

The relic seller had packed away his things, if sloppily, and was now pulling at the spars of the cart to get it going. Three or four men stepped in front of him, one of them bearing a table leg as a club. He tried to ignore them and move past them, but one of them put his hand on the man’s face and pushed him down. It wasn’t very hard to do.

A paunchy, middle-aged fellow with a beakish nose and ginger hair took off his straw hat and faced the sergent.

“I am Pierre Auteuil, pardoner, and I am the licensed seller of relics in this quarter. On my oath, I affirm that this man is a known Jew. And by royal decree, there are to be no Jews in the city of Paris.”

“I know him to be a Jew as well,” shouted an old fellow. “I have seen him at the Hot Fair in Troyes.”

The sergent, who saw far less harm in the little man than he had in the sick monkey, sighed and said, “How do you know this? He wears no yellow circle.”

“He was pointed out to me!”

“That’s no proof.”

“Ask him, then,” one said.

“Yes, ask him his name,” said another.

“What is your name?” said the sergent, not unkindly.

The perhaps-Jew said nothing.

“Tell me your name,” said the sergent, beginning to shed his benevolence.

The man said simply, “I am a Christian.”

Now the woodcarver and his wife had found Thomas, the priest, and the girl. They all stood transfixed by the scene developing on the rue Mont-Fetard, as did a number of others, many of whom forgot the danger of the plague and stood near one another to see.

“Christians have names,” said the sergent. “What is yours?”

“Look at his cock,” one said.

Now two fellows bulled to the front of the crowd and grabbed the man’s arms. The pardoner yanked his trousers and underthings down and pointed at his foreskinless member.

“Stop,” Delphine yelled, and was ignored.

“What more proof do we need?” said the pardoner.

“I’m a convert,” pleaded the man, and he began to say a Pater Noster but was shoved again to the ground. Now several kicks were aimed at him, but the sergent and his man interposed themselves.

“This will be done right, if it’s to be done. We’ll pillory him and I’ll send to the abbot to find out what he wants done with him.”

So saying, the lawman helped him up, pulled his pants up, and took him away, directing his man to stand guard over the cart. The crowd followed behind the Jew to where a pair of pillories stood in a little square. A spice merchant who had adulterated precious sacks of peppercorns with pellets of soot and clay stood bent over in one set, with his hands and head in the stocks and a brick on a rope around his neck. The Jew was put in the other, and a lock secured through a hasp.

And there he stayed.

Delphine seemed distracted all through dinner. She chewed birdy little bites of Annette’s roast pork and kept cutting her eyes toward the door.

“What has you, child?” the woodcarver’s wife said.

“What will they do with the Jew?”

“If he’s lucky, flog him out of the city. If he’s unlucky, hang him,” Jehan said.

Thomas ate wolfishly. The priest shared out his wine to the others, holding the bottle patiently while the last three drops fell into Jehan’s wooden cup.

“That is,” Jehan went on, “if they don’t leave him out all night. God help him if they do.” He crossed himself and pulled off a piece of the bread trencher he had been eating from, thumbing a stringy bit of pork on top of it and tucking it into his mouth.

Delphine looked at the door.

“Don’t even think about it,” Thomas said, even as she sprang out of her seat faster than seemed possible. Her little white hand was on the bolt and drawing it as Thomas shoved back the bench he shared with the priest so he could stand, spilling Père Matthieu, who, falling backward onto the packed dirt floor, held his cup of wine straight up and managed to save most of it.

The girl ran barefoot, her pattens and hose left in Annette’s room, and Thomas followed behind her, yelling “Stay here!” to the rest of them. His armor was off, piled in the corner of the workshop, so he was almost light enough in his gambeson to catch her at a sprint. Almost. His fingers wisped through her bouncing hair, of which he would have grabbed a fistful to stop her, but then he began to lose speed and the gap between them grew. He growled and huffed a string of oaths behind her, causing her to call back at him, “You shouldn’t swear like that.”

The streets were stiller and emptier than before as they made their way to the market in the twilight; no rats ran now, and not even a dog’s bark competed with the sound of Thomas’s panting. At length he slowed his run to a loping walk; the girl, who had been peeking back at him at intervals, slowed to a walk as well. Even winded and angry, it occurred to him to be glad for the boots that saved him from feeling the filth of the Parisian muck between his toes, as she doubtless was.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“To help the Jew,” she said, peeking again to make sure he hadn’t started running.

The light was failing, throwing the streets between the close buildings into yet more profound darkness.

“Help yourself. Something bad goes on here at night.”

“Go back if you’re scared.”

“Scared?”

“You heard me.”

“I should damned well turn around and let you go.”

“Maybe you should.”

He didn’t.

They kept on all the way to the rue Mont-Fetard, the small girl before, and the large man behind, even as the last of the shutters of the living closed on the sight of them.

Thomas never noticed the smell of juniper riding over the baser scents of the gutter.

“I know you,” the Jew said as he regarded the small girl before him. The pillories stood deserted in the square, not far from the relic cart, which had been completely picked over. The guard had stayed with it until as near dark as he dared, with no word back from the abbot and no orders from the sergent, and by the time he left for his house, nobody wanted to be burdened with the weight of the cart, which was heavier empty than it should have been full.

“How do you know me? From today?” she said.

“No.”

“Then how?”

“I just do.”

The spice seller was oblivious to her, tossing his head horsily against the pain of the hanging brick, until he felt its weight being lifted. She threw the brick into the muck past the platform. He opened his moist eyes and looked at her, saying, “You’re not supposed to do that.”

“I don’t care.”

Now the Jew called her over, saying, “Girl. Look at me. In the eyes.”

She did.

“Is it time?” he said.

She wasn’t sure why she said it, but she said, “Not yet,” and the Jew nodded, closing his eyes. He looked very old just then, and very tired.

Thomas arrived.

He was so nonplussed at how calmly she was standing there, talking to the men bent over in the stocks, that he did not scoop her over his shoulder or drag her by the arm, having weighed the merits of both actions as he stomped behind her. It was almost fully dark.

“Well, little witch, what now?”

“Will you break their locks?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t got a hammer.”

She looked sad.

Several streets away, the sound of knocking came.

“Get her home,” the Jew said. “Now.”

“Break my lock. Please,” whimpered the spice seller.

Thomas reached for her, but she moved away from him, and he only grabbed the back of her shirt, which ripped, and the ribbon around her neck, which broke. The key that had been at the end of it fell onto the wooden platform with a tink. She bent to grab it as Thomas grabbed her hips.

He hoisted her up as she held the key in her small fist, arching her body toward the locked hasp that held the Jew.

“No!” she yelled, “Let me try it!”

“Get her home!”

Something knocked, closer now.

“Please…” said the spice seller.

“Please,” said the girl, more softly.

“Goddamn it,” Thomas said, setting her down and taking the key from her. He was about to pitch it in the muck.

“Please, sire. Sir Thomas,” she whispered.

He spat, then shoved the key into the lock, “See? It doesn’t whoring fit!”

But it did.

He turned it.

The lock opened and the Jew stood up.

A man no more than two streets away yelled, “Let go! Let me go!”

“PLEASE!” shrieked the spice seller.

The girl took the key from Thomas, who didn’t try to keep it from her, and opened the other pillory. The dishonest merchant jerked straight and ran, tripping over the brick that had been around his neck and twisting his ankle. He limped off in the direction opposite the man’s scream, but faraway knocking came from that way, too. The night seemed to swallow him completely.

The Jew said, “You wanted something?”

“Yes,” she said. “But they got it… your cart.”

“They got the one I showed you. Not this one.”

He pulled a hemp rope from around his neck, dangling at its end a hinged wooden tube that came out of his shirt. It was about the size of a short flute case. He gave it to her. She kissed him.

Thomas hefted her and ran, even as she put the rope around her neck.

“When?” the Jew called after her.

But she did not answer.

TWELVE Of the Ones Who Knock by Night

When they got to the door of the woodcarver’s house, Thomas had the good sense not to knock; he said, “Priest!” and then the girl said, “Annette! It’s me.” The bolt slid back and the door opened, the woodcarver motioning them in. The married couple and the priest were all pale with fear.

Jehan whispered into Thomas’s ear, “They’re here. In the quarter.”

“I know,” Thomas said.

“They’re close.”

The husband and wife stared at the shuttered windows and bolted doors, listening to the sounds of knocking, which were unmistakably drawing nearer. Thomas picked up his chain mail hauberk and began slithering into it. He put on his mail gloves as well. Annette said an Ave Maria, which her husband and the priest joined in, though the priest was watching the girl.

Delphine inclined near the wick in tallow, which was now a soupy graveyard for moths; moths lighted in her hair and flitted about her as she opened the tube the Jew had given her. Its hinges were tiny and delicate, but her small hands were made to open such things. The inside of the tube was cushioned with brown leather, upon which the mud-colored shaft of pitted iron was hardly visible. She took it in her hand. It was not what she expected; not leaf-bladed or triangular like a boar spear; rather, it was a thin rod that flared gently to a point at the end; more of a fire poker than a proper spear. She tested the point with her thumb and found it still sharp enough to make her gasp in a hitch of air. Had this piece of metal really been driven under one of His ribs? It seemed impossible that anything or anyone still in the world had actually touched Him. But it had. This was it. She kissed the spearhead and sealed it back in its case. The word pilum occurred to her, and she wondered if she had read it in her father’s books, or if it simply came to her as so many words had lately.

“What is that?” Père Matthieu said.

“You know what it is.”

None of them slept.

They stood around the table or sat against the wall.

Near dawn, something heavy brushed against the front of the building. Delphine held her breath, then nearly peed herself when the mule brayed next to her.

Now something scratched at the shuttered window.

“Please God, please angels, do not leave me alone,” she prayed.

The priest stood in front of her and put his hand on her chest. She grabbed his little finger, and felt that he was shaking. Thomas and Jehan had moved near the door, the knight with his sword behind him, ready to strike, the woodcarver holding a mallet. “Get back,” Jehan whispered to his wife, but she kept her place just behind him.

Whatever was outside tapped at the window. Delphine grabbed the priest’s finger so hard she would have hurt him if he had not been too agitated to feel it. It tapped again, more urgently. Everyone but Thomas and the girl made the sign of the cross.

“Come Saint Michael, come Saint Sebastian, do not leave us alone,” Delphine whispered, but she felt abandoned; they were going to be killed now by some wicked thing, and God would not or could not interfere.

The thing outside took two heavy steps and now banged on the door. Hard. Delphine squealed. Jehan put his free hand over his wife’s mouth to stop her from whimpering, but then he whimpered. Delphine heard Thomas breathing in and out like a bellows, preparing to fight; she knew that for all his faults, he would die before he let harm come to her. She felt safer.

Then it banged again so hard that a flake of daub fell off the wall and the building shook, rocking the several long-headed wooden saints and Virgins in the workshop. The mule brayed madly and shuffled from side to side, restless for room to move or kick. It knocked over its water bucket, and Delphine felt the water between her toes.

The banging continued, faster and faster. It was maddening. Thomas began to reach for the door, ready to have done with it, but Jehan pushed his arm down and shook his head, wide-eyed with fear and warning.

Now everything became quiet.

It stayed quiet for some time, but Delphine knew it wasn’t over. The grown-ups in the room were frozen like clockwork figures, and soon they would move again, urgently, as Hell came into the room. Waiting was so hard. The priest stroked her hair once, as he might have done to calm a dog. She heard his fast breathing and kissed his hand. His breathing slowed.

That was when they heard it.

A baby’s cry.

In the street just outside the door.

“Oh sweet God,” Annette said, moving toward the door.

Her husband pushed her back and shook his head, too scared to speak.

The baby cried again, bawling in terror or pain.

“We have to!” Annette shouted.

Now a woman’s voice came to them through the oak door.

“Please,” it begged.

Annette struggled with her husband, but he kept her back.

“Please, help us. In the name of mercy, I beg you,” the woman’s voice implored. “My baby…Help my baby.”

The child cried again, more pathetically now, ending in an alarming rasp.

“I don’t think you should open it,” Delphine said quietly, too scared to make herself heard even by the priest. She knew she should speak louder, but she couldn’t.

Thomas looked over his shoulder at the priest, who crossed himself and nodded.

“Help my baby…”

Delphine let go of the priest’s hand and moved to grab Thomas’s arm, but she was too late. She watched helplessly as the door opened.

A woman. No, a statue of a woman. With a crown. The Virgin.

Delphine’s heart leapt with gladness that they were saved, and then it sank just as quickly.

And she did wet herself.

The door had opened on a six-foot statue of the Holy Virgin with a high crown, holding a scepter in one hand. But where the Holy Infant should have been cradled in the other, her stone hand held the ankle of an infant who dangled upside down with the purplish skin of a plague victim. He had been dead for some time. Flies buzzed around him. His milky eyes saw nothing. And yet he opened his swollen mouth and cried again.

“Help my baby,” the statue said, its mouth moving jerkily. It ducked its crown and stepped into the room with the sound of a millstone grinding, and everyone recoiled from it. Now it flung the infant at Thomas so hard it knocked him backward. Delphine gaped at it; when it moved, it somehow seemed like a statue seen in glimpses; it moved fast, but choppily. It was impossible.

The fight was awful. It was hard to see in the near-darkness of the candlelit workshop. Delphine shook her head, trying to wake up from what couldn’t be happening; the unholy Virgin had Annette by the arm. The arm broke. It bit something off her face and spat it at Jehan. It stove her head in with its scepter.

God, God, why sweet Annette?

“No!” Delphine tried to scream, but it came out like a kitten’s mew.

The priest pulled Delphine behind him again, saying a Pater Noster, but she looked around his robes; Thomas had flipped his sword, holding it near the point, bludgeoning the living statue, making sparks and chipping it, but he could not stop it. It wanted the woodcarver now. Jehan’s mallet knocked a point off the crown, but then it lowered its head like a bull and gored him against the wall, again and again, shaking the building with the force of it.

A trio of wooden Marys seemed to look on helplessly as a stone version of themselves killed their maker.

Now it was coming for the knight. Thomas, putting his back into a low swing, broke a foot off it, but it dropped to all fours and bit and gored at him, toppling wooden statues, wrecking everything around it. It swept out with the scepter, hitting his leg hard, almost spilling him. He grunted in pain, then lashed down and broke the scepter.

Get the spear.

Delphine ran to the table where the flute-shaped case held the spearhead, and she grabbed it just before the panicked mule kicked the table over, almost on top of her. She opened the case. The priest said her name; she handed him the spear and he understood.

Thomas had broken great pieces off the abomination, but still it kept after him.

Until it saw what the priest held.

It flipped over sideways like an acrobat doing an arch and righted its head, making the priest stop. It grinned at him and black ichor came out of its mouth. It grabbed the dead infant and whipped it around, trying to knock the spear out of Père Matthieu’s hand.

“Touch it!” Delphine yelled now. “It doesn’t want you to touch it!”

The priest stepped forward again.

Thomas swung for all he was worth and caught it square in the face with his sword’s heavy hilt and quillons, breaking the nose from it.

The priest poked at it with the spear, and it scuttled backward out the door.

“I see you,” it said to Delphine, though its stone eyes did not seem to see anything.

She shuddered.

“You didn’t help the baby,” it said, and walked backward into the night.

They had little time to mourn their hosts. The priest yelled, “Fire!” as he noticed one wall of the house smoking, and licking flames spreading from a pile of wood shavings near Jehan’s work desk. One of the candles had landed there when the mule kicked the table over, catching not only the wall but an apron hanging from the corner of the desk. The priest tried to swat out the apron, then tried to swat it against the walls, but only succeeded in stirring the flames to greater activity. Throwing down the apron, he took the mule by its halter and handed it to Thomas, who, with difficulty, led the terrified animal out into the street. The priest now gathered up both the spearhead and its case from the floor, and then he went to Delphine. He had to unmake her fists from where she held strands of Annette’s hair to cry into, but then she allowed herself to be picked up. He took her through the kitchen and out back, put her into the cart, gave her the reliquary, and then unbolted the door that led from the tiny courtyard garden into the street; Thomas had led the beast around and now the priest hitched it up. Thomas ducked back into the house for the rest of his and the priest’s things, then loped up the stairs for Delphine’s sack as she yelled, “Leave it! Hurry!”

Choking black smoke sifted up through the planks of the bedroom floor, but he found her sack and limped down the stairs, past the now-smoldering wooden figures, and through the kitchen. Coughing savagely, his eyes tearing and his face besooted, the knight lifted himself and their goods into the cart.

He patted out with his mailed hand the edge of the priest’s linen robes where they glowed orange and curled, just on the verge of breaking out in flames.

Barely noticing this, Père Matthieu reined the mule, yelling, “Fire! Wake up!” several times for the benefit of any neighbors who might be left alive. They pulled away from the woodcarver’s doomed house and rode into the last of the night, dazed and stinking of smoke.

They looked warily about them all the way, lest some fresh horror come at them from the blackness of an alley. Thomas coughed intermittently, the priest awkwardly slapping his back. Delphine held her spear tightly, distracting herself by singing, while crying:

The only person they saw was a woman who dragged an old man out of her house and sat him by the door; she had trouble propping him up, but finally managed. When she saw the cart, she said, “Take him, please! I’ll pay! I have radishes, you can have them! He was good to me and I want him buried. Please!”

Thomas shook his head at her.

“At least give him last rites! You’re a priest, aren’t you?”

Père Matthieu moaned softly in his throat but fixed his eyes forward.

“Stay in the cart,” Thomas said wearily.

The priest said, “I’m sorry,” too quietly for the woman to hear, and kept the cart moving, even though she followed for a few steps, imploring. The girl, who might have protested, just sang her song again and closed her eyes.

On their way out of the quarter, they passed a church whose stone walls were covered with mold and whose stained-glass windows had been broken out. Deep tracks from all directions pocked the ground around the building, which stank so badly of rot and mold that all of them gagged. The life-sized statue of the Virgin stood by the door, with a bloody, broken crown, a missing foot, and no nose. She held the broken haft of a scepter and cradled the abused form of a child dead of plague.

The priest stopped the cart.

They had to go past this church to get to the bridge.

“It’s nearly dawn,” said the girl. “I don’t think they move in daytime.”

The priest urged the mule forward, but it took its steps slowly, as though it reserved the right to stop the moment it felt inclined to.

The church was ghastly; if it had once belonged to Heaven, it did not now, and the air around it swarmed with flies. The mule swished his tail or jerked the skin of his flanks constantly against the many flies that landed on him. Flies crawled maddeningly in the priest’s arm hair or landed near Thomas’s mouth.

They drew closer, hugging as tightly as they could to the shops on the other side of the narrow street, but still coming uncomfortably close to the spoiled église.

Besides the gruesome Virgin, other statues of saints, kings, and apostles stood on their pedestals, lighter in color than the greenish-black growth quilting the walls, their limbs and faces also spattered here and there with blood. Although it was hard to see in the gray of first light, the blood looked bright and fresh; they had only just returned from their hunt. Did an angel with a missing wing just shift itself? Did a gargoyle lick its forepaw as a dog might? Several of them held small forms that, as the cart drew closer, the knight, the priest, and the girl were sickened to recognize as dead children. A blood-mouthed St. Paul the apostle held his stone book in one hand and, with the other, dangled a limp boy-child aloft by the head as if the saint were being fellated, the boy’s arms gone entirely, his pale legs swinging gently like a hanged man’s.

St. Paul turned his stone head and looked squarely at Père Matthieu. The priest felt an icy finger in his heart, and then his head exploded in pain as St. Paul assaulted him with a wordless shout:

DO YOU LIKE THIS BUGGER PRIEST WE DID THIS FOR YOU YOU FILTHY BUGGER SODOMITE DRUNK WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FOOLING WOULD YOU LIKE TO CLIMB UP HERE WITH ME AND HOIST THOSE ROBES HOC EST ENIM VERGUM MEUM

The priest let drop the reins and put his hands over his ears, but it didn’t help. At the same time, a statue of St. Martin pointed his sword at Thomas and split his head with:

COWARD HAVE YOU RAPED THE GIRL YET BECAUSE YOU WILL WE WILL MAKE YOU RAPE HER IN THE ASS BUT NOT THE CUNT BECAUSE SHE WILL BE A VIRGIN WHEN YOU CUT HER THROAT FOR YOUR MASTER AND YOU KNOW WHO THAT IS DON’T YOU

St. Anne crouched as though she might leap at the girl and thought-screamed into her head:

EVERYONE YOU LOVE WILL DIE THIS PRIEST AND THIS KNIGHT BOTH OF THEM WILL DIE BECAUSE OF YOU WE WILL KILL THEM WE DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE BUT WE WILL FIND OUT EVEN IF WE HAVE TO CUT YOU OPEN AND THAT TOY WON’T HELP YOU

The cart wandered unguided as the three of them writhed under the words hurled at them. Then, beyond the buildings to the east and behind the clouds, the sun rose unseen and the voices stopped. The priest collapsed against the good weight of the knight and did something like sleeping.

Delphine, who had begun to feel nauseated and had a pain in her lower belly, comforted herself by leaning forward to stroke the priest’s hair.

Thomas took his chain mail gloves off his shaking hands and took up the reins.

The only sounds as they left the Latin Quarter were the clop of the mule’s hooves and, somewhere, the barking of a dog.

THIRTEEN Of the Rain and the Figure of Death

The rain started almost as soon as they went out the Port St. Bernard and left Paris behind, the girl thinking of the tale of Lot’s wife, telling herself not to look back at the dying city and then doing it anyway. A column of smoke above Paris bade them farewell, as another column of smoke had once greeted them; this one, however, was in the city, where the fire at the woodcarver’s would burn his whole block, sending the healthy into the streets, consuming the sick and the dead. The drops of cold rain that fell on Delphine’s face were the vanguard of the deluge that would save the Left Bank from burning but flood the marshy land on the Right Bank all the way to the Place de Grèves. Bells tolled in the Latin Quarter; there were enough hands, at least, to pull a rope or two. Delphine tried to picture the people ringing those bells; a lone Dominican monk or a paid ringer for the convent; another priest like Père Matthieu, too scared to minister to his flock but trying to save what was left of his soul by warning them about fire. Or were the dead ringing their own bells? If statues could walk, why not them? She felt more tears coming for Annette, and also for herself; when would she feel a woman’s love again? Had Annette died because Delphine had wanted to stay with her? The words of the wicked statues rang in her head again, and she looked at the men in the front of the cart.

Please don’t let them die because of me, God.

And now the rain fell, and fell, and fell.

On the third day of it, and their second day without food, the priest saw a stone barn and a cottage and hoped they would be deserted. What had things come to when a man of God wished misfortune on a family because he coveted their roof?

The door to the cottage was open, but they made for the barn, as they would have more room for the mule, and none of them were in the mood to find bodies.

The barn was not deserted.

The priest walked in first and found a naked man on all fours, stuffing hay into his mouth. An abundance of hay and grasses were knotted into his white beard and hair. His ribs were showing, and he was grimed over and wet, whether with rain or the sweat of some fever was unclear. His eyes were wild, though. And he was not frail. He picked up a rusty scythe with a broken shaft from a pile of farming tools and started toward the priest.

Good God, he means to eat me.

Then Thomas and Delphine walked in, Thomas with his sword unsheathed, and the man bolted out the other door, falling when the edge of the scythe clipped the door frame and slipped from his hand, but scampering to his feet again almost instantly. He ran straight across the puddled field and kept running, his bare feet kicking up water all the way, disappearing not in the direction of the house, but toward the tree line past the field.

Thomas broke the silence that followed by saying, “So that’s what the reaper looks like without his robes.”

The priest laughed after a pause, but the girl just blinked rain out of her eyes and looked at them for an explanation.

“Death, girl. Death,” said the priest.

Now she laughed, too, and the sound of it was good in the barn.

They built a fire and took off as many of their clothes as decency allowed, hanging these on sticks to dry. When they had, they changed out of their underlinens and then hung them, putting the cozy, dry ones back on, glad for once not to be cold and soaked. The weather had changed, and where the days had been warm and the nights cool, now the days were cool and the nights cold. They agreed to stay in the barn until morning, then scout the fields for fruit or nut trees, or whatever they could find. In the meantime, they set out their cups and bowls, as well as Thomas’s helmet and thigh armor, to catch enough water to keep their bellies full, which somewhat eased the pain of their hunger.

“I wish we had music,” the priest said, poking at the glowing logs with the broken end of the scythe he was nearly killed with.

“I don’t. You might be tempted to sing,” Thomas said, inspecting his leg where the thing had hit him with her scepter. He suspected the bone of the shin was chipped; a truly ugly bruise had formed, and the flesh around his ankle was swollen and bruised as well. The damned thing had gotten him right where the horse had broken his leg at Crécy.

“Perhaps the girl will sing,” the priest said.

“I don’t feel like it,” she said in a nasal little mew. She was getting sick. She had no fever, but she sniffled and complained of an ache near her hips. She had been in enough cold and wet that neither man suspected her of plague. “But what kind of music would you like to hear if you could choose?” she asked Père Matthieu.

“Oh. A lute. Most certainly a lute. And you, sir knight?”

“A lute? That’s court music. That’s for troubadours to make wives spread their legs when their husbands are at war.”

“I find it very pretty. If the player is skillful. It takes more training to master the lute, don’t you agree?”

“Than what?”

“A drum, for example. Or a cornemuse.”

“That’s what I’d like to hear. A drum and a cornemuse.”

“Soldiers’ music. That’s for making husbands leave their wives behind for troubadours.”

“Ha!”

As night came on, they fell to telling stories to pass the time.

The priest began, telling the story of a knight who was actually a werewolf, but a very considerate one who removed himself into the forest to change his skin. His wife, however, betrayed him by hiding his clothes so he could not change back; in this way, her husband was thought to have disappeared and she was able to marry her lover.

“Go on,” Thomas said. “Finish it.”

“It is finished.”

“The hell it is.”

“Is it not?”

“No, it is not. You only told half of it.”

“It’s all I know.”

“What the hell kind of story is that? The adulterous wife wins out? The noble werewolf is deceived and banished?”

“Forgive me if I gave offense. Perhaps you should tell one now to instruct me in how these things are properly done.”

“Imagine it’s a sermon. A good story has a lesson. What’s the lesson here? Whores triumph?”

“I don’t know,” the priest said, fidgeting. “Maybe. Something about the deceiving nature of woman.”

Thomas stared intently at the priest in the firelight, and it was difficult for him to tell whether Thomas was being jocular or actually growing angry.

“That explains it, then,” he said. “They tell priests stories about how bad women are so they won’t fuck them.”

“It’s hardly working. I’m the only priest I know without an acknowledged mistress in his village.”

Now Thomas laughed and the priest relaxed.

“I know how the story ends,” the girl said.

“Oh?”

“Father used to tell it.”

“Well, let’s hear it,” said Thomas.

“The knight went into the woods as a beast,” Delphine said, and here she made the sound of a beast. “And one day the king and his hunting party found him. They were about to slay him, but then the big wolf bowed to the king.”

“I like it better already,” Thomas said, nudging the priest.

“Now the king decided to make a pet of him, and he took him home to the castle. Everyone came to marvel at the beast, who was so tame and courtly. Until one day the wife and the knight came…wait, I forgot something.”

“Are you sure you know this story?” the priest said, but Thomas nudged him again, a bit harder.

“Yes,” she said gravely, looking at Père Matthieu until he held his palms up in acquiescence. She sneezed, and started again.

“When the king found the beast, the knight who had married his wife was there, and the beast growled at him.”

She growled and gnashed her teeth, causing both men to laugh.

“They wanted to kill it, and that’s when it went up and licked the king’s hand. So, now we are back at the castle. And when the wife and the bad knight come in, the beast bites her nose…”

Delphine trailed off and the priest knew what she was beginning to remember, so he clapped his hands twice, startling her.

“The story, the story,” he said. She nodded and blinked her tears away, wiping at them with her sleeve and snuffling.

“It bites her. He bites her. The knight.”

“Yes, I think we have it.”

“And they want to kill it again, but the king’s wise counselor says not to.”

“Where do they find these wise counselors in stories?” Thomas said, “for I’ve never met a king who let one speak.”

“So they make the wife tell them why it bit her.”

“I definitely like this version better. Whore wife bitten and tortured,” Thomas said.

“And the king commands the bad knight to bring the good knight’s clothes. Wait…he’s wearing them. So he just takes them off.”

“Now he’s naked.”

“I guess so. Yes.”

“Is it cold in this castle?”

“Of course,” she said, very seriously. “All castles are cold.”

“Exactly how many castles have you been in?”

“I haven’t been in boats, but I know they have sails.”

“Ha! There’s your lawyer father. I knew he’d come visit.”

She sighed sharply in exasperation.

“Do you want to hear this?” she said.

“So we have a shivering knight with a shrinking bitte.”

Both of them looked reproachfully at Thomas.

“Do you want me to finish? Because I can’t when you keep interrupting me to show how clever you are.”

“Ooooooh,” Thomas said. “I stand rebuked. So the naked knight.”

“They give him a robe.”

“So the knight with the robe.”

“The knight is not important now.”

“So the unimportant knight.”

Delphine got up and walked away, folding her arms. Both men, giggling like boys at her irritation, now implored her to come back.

“Sweet Delphine, tell us the story!”

“Don’t take on so! The story, the story!”

At length she took her place again but pointed her small finger at Thomas. He put his hand over his mouth.

“So the king laid out the clothes for the beast, but it just sniffed them and sat down.”

Thomas removed his hand and said, “Did it…?” but she cut him off with a “Ssst!” and pointed her finger again. He replaced his hand.

“The wise counselor said that the knight was ashamed to change in front of them. So they put the beast in a bedroom with the clothes. He went in on four legs and came out on two.”

They both looked at her expectantly.

“What?” she said.

“Finish it,” Thomas said.

“I did. He became a man again.”

“What about the bastard knight and the whore wife? Were they killed?”

“If you like.”

“What do you mean, ‘if I like’? It happened or it didn’t.”

“It’s just a story.”

“Yes, and it has an ending.”

“I told you the ending.”

“But we still have loose ends.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll finish it to your tastes. The knight takes his sword and cuts the heads off both of them. Blood goes everywhere. Blood, blood, blood. Then he cuts the head off the king, too. Bloody blood-blood. And he puts the crown on his own head, so he’s king. And the wise counselor gives him his pretty daughter to marry, even though she’s only fifteen years old, and they have lots of babies, and then die and go to Heaven. How do you like that, Sir Thomas?”

He clapped his hands and hooted.

“Now that’s a cunting story!” he said.

“Uh…I think we have a visitor,” the priest said, pointing at the barn window, where a pair of eyes peeked at them below a mane of tangled, wet hair knotted with grass.

Thomas threw a log from the fire, and it hit the wall next to the window, showering sparks.

“Go on!” he shouted, reaching for his sword, but the eyes just blinked at him. He got up, and the face disappeared; they saw the naked old man run by the door, looking wildly in at them.

“This is MY BARN!” he said, outraged, and ran into the rain again.

There was no question of Thomas catching him.

The knight slept poorly.

He woke panting in darkness from a dream about riding his horse through a field of brambles, and tried to remember where he was. When he did, he noticed that the rain had stopped, and he walked outside to look up at the sky. The half-moon flirted with him through gouges in slow-moving clouds that still held water, but he would not be able to look for his comet. He thought it might be out of sight now, having murdered its stellar swan, but he had no doubt that others had come; this had been a promiscuous summer for comets.

Only it wasn’t summer anymore. His breath plumed out in front of him. It was nearing mid-September, but it was cold like October.

He heard movement behind him, and then a sound of mild displeasure; he turned to see the priest stooping to drink from the bowl he had set out.

“It’s musty,” he said. “My bowl could do with a scrubbing.”

Thomas looked at the sky again.

“Couldn’t sleep?” the priest asked.

Thomas didn’t answer.

“I know. Stupid question. Hardly worthy of William of Ockham. I should have asked if you had bad dreams. I did. Would you like to know what about?”

Thomas didn’t speak.

“I was being led around the countryside by a little girl. There were horrid things in rivers, and statues crawled off churches, and a great sickness had killed most everybody. I was starving, to boot.”

Silence.

“My only other companion was a moody, excommunicate knight who rarely spoke and didn’t have the slightest interest in hearing about my nightmares. And, of course, a mule.”

Thomas sighed.

“I liked the mule.”

“What did you really dream?”

“I dreamed my brother had no legs.”

“The one in Avignon? The catamite?”

“I have only one brother. He walked about with crutches, like a stilt man, but drab and sad. I fed him from my hand as if he were a bird, but he was not grateful. He hated me for my legs.”

“That sounds better than the other one. Perhaps you should go back to sleep.”

Now the priest looked at the sky.

“What’s up there?”

“If a priest doesn’t know, how should I?”

“Huh. Maybe a better priest would.”

He stooped now and took rainwater from the knight’s thigh-piece. Thomas took a long look at Père Matthieu.

“You haven’t been defrocked or anything, have you?”

“Should have been, perhaps. But, no.”

“You just don’t always seem quite like a priest.”

“Funny. I’ve felt the same way ever since the day I took orders.”

“Why did you, then?”

“Like most of the others. My father sent me.”

“Why didn’t you follow him into his trade?”

The priest didn’t say anything.

“Well?”

“He was a soldier.”

“And?”

“Do I seem like a soldier to you?”

“Not even a little.”

“And yet I am heroic compared with my brother.”

Thomas grunted, imagining how he might look upon his son if he proved too weak for arms. He imagined himself beating it out of him and making a man of him. It occurred to him that the priest’s father had probably tried.

“Our father used to say, ‘Since God has sent me only daughters, I shall send the bearded ones to take orders, and the others to fetch back sons.’”

Thomas chuckled.

“Yes, I suppose it is funny,” the priest said, “the first dozen times.”

Thomas drank out of his helm.

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“We’re in for more of it,” Thomas said.

The priest nodded.

“May I tell you?”

“What?” Thomas said.

“What I did.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I know.”

“Then why ask?”

The priest folded his arms around himself against the cold.

“I don’t have anyone else to confess to.”

FOURTEEN Of the Stained Priest and the Widow’s Revenge

Two months before the plague came to St. Martin-le-Preux, Père Matthieu Hanicotte was in love. His hands shook as he put on his chasuble and prepared the candles and the incense, and when he preached his sermon, his left armpit ran cold with sweat, even though the mornings were still cool that May. It seemed curious to him that only the left armpit was affected; perhaps, he thought, because the heart was supposed to sit just a little to the left. And his sin, as of this morning, was still only in his heart.

The sweat would run from the moment he approached the altar; even with his back to his flock, he thought about where the object of his affection would be standing; three or four rows back, always closest to the aisle, at the level of the stained-glass window portraying the brides with their lanterns.

He could even distinguish the young man’s cough from the rest of his congregation.

On this particular day, the object was wearing his best gray cotehardie buttoned snugly up his trunk, and standing with one leg in the aisle, which the others took for rascality, but which was in fact to better display his bright red stocking and the long, well-calved leg in it.

As Père Matthieu lifted the Eucharist, he tried to keep his thoughts on the words he was pronouncing; but then he felt the cold sweat running, and knew it was making him stink. This new love-sweat hit high in the nose with a sharp note like cheese, or salt, or metal, or the miscarriage of all three. His inner cassock was so ripe with infatuation that he sweated again when he brought it to the laundresses and blushed when he gathered it back.

The boy’s father was the village reeve, whose job it was to act as liaison between the farmers and their seigneur. As was often the case with reeves, Samuel Hébert was mistrusted by each side. The seigneur believed he let the villagers off too early when they worked his manor farm their customary two days per week. This was true. But many of the villagers believed Hébert was too scrupulous in counting and weighing the shares of livestock and harvests they owed their lord. In fact, this was not true; he often let the best cow stay with the inheritors after a peasant died and brought a slightly less meaty one up the river as heriot. Nonetheless, it was Samuel Hébert who took from them, and these proud Norman farmers better perceived slights than kindnesses.

And, by peasant standards, he was rich.

Michel Hébert, his second son, was going to Paris to study law. At twenty, he would be a bit older than most of his colleagues; but a tidy bribe had been administered, and a bursar from the university had met the boy and declared him good enough in Latin that something might be made of him. Soon, Père Matthieu thought, with great sadness and resignation, those red legs would not be standing in the aisle near the window. He was right, of course, but not because the boy was going to Paris.

The Great Death was coming.

It had already begun devouring Avignon, where it was said the pope heard audiences between two fires to burn off pestilential air, and nibbling at Paris, where the first afflicted households were trying to hide their sick so they would not be shunned by their neighbors.

The priest knew his congregation was hungry for news about the disease and its progress; he knew they craved some reassurance that St. Martin-le-Preux would be spared, whether for its holiness or because they had suffered enough under the hand of their greedy seigneur, but he could not summon up the words. The truth was that he knew nothing. He did not know how it was spread, what had caused it, where it would go, or what could be done for the ill. What troubled him most was his feeling that God could see into his heart and knew that his love was twisted. God would weigh his most secret thoughts and, finding them repulsive, would take an even heavier toll on the villeins of his flock. He would have thrown himself into the river, but a suicide priest might be worse in God’s eyes than a would-be sodomite.

He had never felt so ignorant, useless, or doubtful in his life.

His homily addressed the sin of wrath, and how much it displeased the Lord when neighbors bickered over the placement of fences or insults spoken in the alehouse.

“What do you think will happen in the alehouse? Will you make peace there? Or will you quarrel? I tell you, a devil loves no better hiding place than a bowl of beer.” He knew as soon as he said the words that he had stepped on dangerous ground; the whole village knew him for a tippler. He had more to say about alcohol making people fight, but decided to cut that short and get on to something about angels. People liked angels. But he was too late. As he cleared his throat to buy himself a moment, his most frequent sparring partner took advantage of his slip.

“If devils hide in beer, is that why you drink so much wine?” said Sylvan Bertier, the drover. Not everyone laughed, but enough of them so that he forced himself to smile rather than trying to rebuke the popular Bertier.

A drop of that awful, cold sweat ran down his left side.

“Yes. I know that I take more comfort than I should in wine; even God’s shepherds are not without sin. But which of you has seen it make me quarrelsome? Our drover here often has blacker eyes than his oxen.”

He glanced at the object, who was smiling now at his skillful riposte, then cut his eyes quickly away to make it look as though he were surveying all of them. For every time he sneaked a glance at Michel Hébert, he made himself look ten more parishioners in the face.

The rest of the homily went smoothly, if blandly, until the water clock told him half an hour had gone by and he began to wrap things up.

When Mass was over and he saw his congregation out, he made sure to turn his right side toward those who came to speak to him, especially Michel.

“You’re a clever man,” the younger Hébert said, and looked at Père Matthieu just long enough for him to notice the boy had a sort of black freckle in the hazel of his eye. His left eye.

“There are greater virtues,” the priest said, wishing Michel would clasp hands with him before he turned and left. He did not. Rather, he hurried on his pretty red legs to walk beside Mélisande Arnaut, a plump girl whose pretty face, just the color of cream, turned the heads of even those who liked their women lean.

He knew from the confessional that Michel had already fornicated with several girls, including his own half-sister, and fully expected Mélisande to be inventoried soon. He had also lately confessed to having impure thoughts about men. Whatever demon oversaw lust had his hooks deep in Michel Hébert and used him now to ensnare others.

If there were demons at all.

If that boy is Satan’s instrument, God, show me some sign. Let him look back at me.

But he wanted that backward glance so much that he couldn’t bear to attach wickedness to it, so he confounded himself.

Rather, let him look back at me if there are no devils in him.

The boy did look back over his shoulder at him. Just once, and only for an instant, but it was enough.

He would always think of it as having started that day.

Each night became a battle for Matthieu Hanicotte. He was in danger of losing his belief, if not his soul. Were there souls at all? Was there really a naked, invisible little version of himself hiding under his skin, so valuable to Heaven and Hell that each would send emissaries down to fight for it?

He started by telling himself he would not drink more than one cup of wine, then two, and then three, lest he should become drunk and give himself up to thinking about those red legs. In the end his head was reeling, he was spent, dry-mouthed from spitting in his hand, and he lay in his shame and guilt until the small hours of the morning.

The days were better; even though his parishioners began to ask after his health because he had lost weight and had bags under his eyes, he was far less miserable ministering to them than lying alone with his thoughts. It was better to counsel fat, bearded Sanson Bertier to apologize to his wife for menacing her with his billhook, and to smell the farts Bertier would gravely fan away with his straw hat; it was better to walk with his box of holies out to give last rites to Clement Fougière three times in one week only to have him get well; it was even better to be bitten by Fougière’s dog on the last visit and hear the old man laugh from his sickbed.

One night near the end of May, he went down to the river and walked along its banks, enjoying the pleasantly cool air and getting lost in the beauty of the sky, where the moon was veiling herself with gauzy, fast-moving clouds. She was not full, but she was bright enough to illuminate the river, sending cloud shadows racing over the water and the willows near this part of the bank.

It was near one of these willows that a bright swath of moonlight dragged itself over a set of cast-aside clothes. Père Matthieu could not resist peeking at the river, where he was sure he would spy a bather. He was not disappointed. In fact, there were two of them, and much closer than the clothes.

Seeing him, a girl inexpertly stifled a squeal, then thrashed out of the water, covering her breasts and running for her homespun dress. She was plump and pale. God help him, it was Mélisande.

He knew who was in the river.

The girl picked up her clothes and ran to where the trees got thicker before dressing and loping home. The other made no effort to run; he did not even leave the river; rather, he just crouched to hide all but his head and languidly oared the water around him with his arms.

He was looking directly at the priest, who stood there for a long moment, torn between turning and walking home and trying to find something to say. Nothing occurred to him. He could not see the freckle in the boy’s eye, but he imagined it. He imagined more than that. Cloud shadows moved across the water, now darkening the lad’s head, now letting the moon paint it silver.

“Come in,” the boy said, so quietly that Père Matthieu convinced himself he had not heard it. He just opened his mouth and closed it again, like a landed fish trying to breathe.

“Come in,” the object of his affection said again.

“I can’t.”

“Père Matthieu can’t.”

“No.”

“So shed him with your clothes, and put him back on when you leave.”

“No.”

“That’s the beauty of being nude in a river; you’re nobody. You’re anybody you want to be. It’s just a dream.”

You used the same words to get the girl in there.

The priest opened and closed his mouth.

“Come in,” the boy said again.

And he did.

The Great Death got close in June, and the bridge leading to Paris was burned on the seigneur’s command. Little groups of armed farmers hid in the woods and frightened off those coming overland from the other side; they soon found that the days off from farm labor were to their liking. They also found that, with no wives to nag them, they could drink all the beer and cider they cared to. They fashioned masks of river reeds and clay, raven’s feathers, and the teeth of foxes to make themselves terrifying, and also to remind them not to look anyone in the eyes—it was widely believed that the plague leapt from one man to another by means of a deadly beam from the eyes. They called themselves the Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse. They drank themselves into such a state of belligerence that even groups of strangers who agreed to turn around found themselves cudgeled so they would remember not to try again.

It was not long before they carried their antics back with them into town; Élise Planchette, the widow who ran the alehouse, soon learned to hate the hooting and boasts that announced the brotherhood’s return from patrol. Shutting the door was no good—they would keep at her until she opened it, then expect their drinks for free for their solemn work guarding the town from pestilence. Nearly every day they could be seen at the widow’s tables, dicing and carousing with their masks tipped back; those who watched by day came in the evening. Those who watched in the evening came by day. Their farms suffered as their wives and fathers took up the manuring and the weeding and the harrowing, but the men of the brotherhood had grown so fond of their newfound status as militiamen that there was no reasoning with them. The reeve could not make them work. The priest could not turn them away from their folly. Their number did shrink as some men, like Sanson Bertier, dropped out; but it grew again as bullies saw a way out of work.

When one of them stole wood from the widow’s house, saying his duties left him no time for chopping, she tried to block his way out but found herself pushed down on her backside. She complained to the herald. This herald promised to take the matter before their lord, but nothing was done. The seigneur, terrified of plague, had suspended court sessions and shut himself away with his retinue. Only the herald was seen, arching his painted eyebrows and reading unenforceable proclamations from the back of his palfrey. Men-at-arms could be seen walking the parapet of the keep, their armor winking in the early summer light; but they never came down anymore. The Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse was all the justice there was in St. Martin-le-Preux.

One night, when there was enough moon, several of the day watch went drunkenly to the river to gather reeds for new members to make masks with. Steering for a growth of reeds near the charred and collapsed timber of the bridge, one of them noticed a pair of red stockings balled up on the shore. Other clothes were concealed nearby.

“Look here, boys,” he whispered, “we’ve got some June frolics in the river!”

“Ho,” one of them cried, slapping the water with his staff. “Come out, little fishes. One of you can show us her gills!”

They guffawed at that and began whistling, but no head broke the water.

“Under there,” one said, pointing at where the western ruin of the bridge still stood. They waded in the mud and looked underneath. There, hiding by the pilings, shivered a very pale and naked priest holding the hands of the reeve’s son, who was also in the state of Adam. Both of them were slicked with mud halfway up their shins.

“I don’t believe my whoring eyes,” one man said.

Now the boy panicked and sloshed out toward the other side of the bridge, running when he got to the bank. Père Matthieu nearly followed him, but then lost all hope. He turned his back to the men, held his face in his hands and cried.

He was sure they would kill him.

None of them moved for a long moment. Then one of them spat on him. Then another. When all of them had done so, they turned, laughing, and walked back up the river and into town to spread the news.

So it was that when the plague came, only a dozen souls were coming to Mass. Père Matthieu’s assistant and bell ringer, a stocky, busy, black-haired child everyone called Bourdon, performed his duties without his former energy. Hardly any received the priest when he came to anoint their loved ones in death. Only a handful sought confession. Soon the reeve’s son died, and the reeve, and nearly the whole village. Heartbroken yet afraid for his life, the priest stopped going to church at all, shutting himself up in his house with his wine. It was not until the monster moved into the river that the villagers sought their shepherd out and shamed him into helping them. There was no one else they could go to. So he tried. He went house to house seeking men who could use a weapon. When he saw how strong the thing was and knew he did not have enough healthy men to fight it, he took up the place where the brotherhood used to wait, and sat with his lantern, praying for soldiers to come down the road.

As it turned out, one did.

As for the Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse, they were already gone. They were, in fact, among the first victims. The widow fell ill, having caught it from the farmer’s child who helped her clear up, and the surgeon had refused to see her. Trying to do for herself what she believed he would have done for her, she bled herself into a wooden bowl, though this only made her weaker. The lump in her groin was so painful that it was all she could do to drag herself down the stairs and to the alehouse door when, after one of her bleedings, the brotherhood pounded at it. They wore their masks. They stank of drink and were demanding more.

She told them to go away because she was tired.

They insisted.

She told them to go away, for the love of God.

They said they had none.

So she served them.

If they tasted the blood mixed into their beer, they never said a word about it.

FIFTEEN Of the Visitation in the Barn

“So I damned half my village. My weakness made them hate me, so they stayed away from Mass. They were cut off from the sacraments.”

Thomas furrowed his brow at the priest.

“But it doesn’t make sense. As you said yourself, most priests have a mistress. Why would they hate you so for dallying with the girl?”

The priest shook his head and looked at the sky.

“Why would the boy run off and leave the girl in the river with you? And why would she want a knobby old priest twice her age when she could have a handsome lad who was going to be a lawyer?”

“The mysteries of the heart are unknowable.”

“And the way you described his legs. It was the boy who stayed in the river, wasn’t it? Not the girl at all. You kept saying ‘the object of my affection’ because you plumbed the boy.”

“No,” the priest lied.

“What good is confession if you lie?”

“Everyone lies at confession. Around the edges, at least. A man who fornicates with his brother’s wife will say it was a whore. A woman will say she was glad in her heart that her blind and deaf baby died, when what she means is that she drowned it. But I wasn’t lying. Because a man of war like you cannot travel with a known sodomite.”

“You’re goddamned right,” Thomas said.

“You need the object of my affection to have been the girl.”

“Yes.”

“So it was the girl.”

“Good. I hope you fucked her right in half.”

The priest smiled sadly and kept looking at the sky, though the moon was gone again, covered over with clouds. Thomas drank another swig of rainwater and went inside, mildly fuming.

“I wouldn’t leave you,” a small voice said. The priest looked down and saw that Delphine had come from the barn. “If it was the boy,” she continued. “I wouldn’t leave.”

He smiled at her and wiped at his eye with the back of his hand.

Then the rain came again and they all tried to sleep.

In the loft above the barn, a mouse had just peeled herself away from nursing her litter. She left them in the nest and went through a tunnel in the rotten hay, sensing that the rain had driven hosts of little bugs from the sodden ground and into the structure. It was the perfect time to hunt; ants or grubs would make better milk than grain, and there hadn’t been grain in this barn since before she birthed. As she got to the end of the tunnel, she stopped before she crossed the plain of planks that led to the beam she would skitter down to forage in the barn. She poked her nose into the air and sniffed. This was where an owl could most easily kill her, as one had had taken her mate on the path between the barn and the house. She smelled something, but it was no owl.

Something landed wetly on the roof; no heavier than a branch full of wet leaves, but that wasn’t what it was.

She looked up, then froze.

It came through the straw thatching on the roof, forcing its way between the fibers, at once liquid and not liquid. She had never seen tentacles, but that was what it was: a mass of tentacles that knotted on itself again and again to move. It had no head at all; to her, it looked like a nest of snakes’ tails.

She was too afraid to move back into the tunnel, even when it dropped onto the planks not two yards from her.

It writhed nearer, rearing up several of its tail-arms to regard her, but then, thankfully, decided she was not what it was looking for. It collapsed on itself and went liquid again, blacker than blood, so black it was less like a stain and more like the most profound absence of light. It oozed through the spaces between the planks and disappeared.

She had never given any thought to the people sleeping below her, but she knew this not-owl, this snake-knot was after them.

She went back into the tunnel and burrowed in with her blind young ones, shivering so hard they moved away from her.

Thomas dreamed.

He was walking across a burning landscape of dry grass and nettles, and sand that shifted in the hot wind and stung his eyes. He was wearing armor. The sun seemed to hang closer to the earth than it should have; it seemed to press on his armor as if it had hands, heating the links of his mail unbearably. Smoke began to fill the air; fires at the horizon line twinkled as figures moved near them, fanning the flames.

He had heard that the infidels under Saladin had burned the grass at the Horns of Hattin to drive the crusaders mad with thirst before he crushed them in battle, driving them out of the Holy Land, and Thomas thought that was where he was. Near Jerusalem, in the Levant. The figures working the fires didn’t look like people, though, not even Moslems.

“Goddamn it, stop that!” he tried to shout, but the words caught in his throat as if they had hooks. His throat was unbearably dry, and he knew he might die of thirst. It was the figures who were doing this to him; if he could reach them and kill them, it would stop. But they were so very far away, and his sword was so rusted it looked as though it would break if it struck anything hard. He clenched his teeth and moved forward, but then one of his teeth broke; he pulled a mailed glove off and pulled the tooth out. The action of doing this dislodged another one so it wobbled in his gums, then another; soon his whole mouth was full of loose teeth as dry and fragile as kindling. He opened his mouth to try to get some air in it, but then he realized that was a mistake. Almost as soon as the idea came to him that the sun was so hot it might light his teeth on fire, it did exactly that. They smoldered painfully in his gums, even after he shut his mouth, and he looked around for anything at all that might give him relief.

That was when he saw the thorn bush.

It was about as high as his ribs, with long, wicked thorns. The whole bush seemed to bend around something at its center: a pear. But not just any pear. This was the fattest, sweetest-looking pear he had ever seen, with a leaf on its stem of impossible greenness. He knew that it was so full of watery nectar that one bite would not just ease his pain, but strengthen his limbs so he could set about the business of killing the shadowy fire makers on the horizon.

He put his glove back on against the thorns and knelt down before the bush, picking gently at the needled twigs encasing the fruit. How like ribs around a heart they were. He had to be delicate so he didn’t rupture the pear, but this was hard. The thorns were so long and slender they slid deeply into his fingers even through the links of his mail. He had to make the thorn bush want to yield the pear, so he tried to say Please, but all that came through his ruined mouth was a grunt. Smoke came from his nose. The arrowhead was lodged in his tongue again. He couldn’t speak; he would never speak. He would never be understood by anyone or anything again. He jerked more roughly at the branches, but they pulled back.

Rip it open. Use your strength. Destroy it and eat the pulp. You can’t know how sweet it is!

Lies.

He was being lied to.

He understood at once that this pear was cousin to the fruit that ruined man in the Garden of Eden, and it would ruin him, too. If he ate it, he would march to the horizon, but he would not fight the fire makers. He would become one of them. Forever. He had to pull himself away from it and then move toward the horizon.

He had to fight them.

It was a miserable thing to leave that sweetness behind, but he did it.

He got up on his leaden legs and marched toward the fire.

He coughed a huge gout of stinging smoke from his mouth and nostrils into his eyes, sending him to his knees.

That was when he sneezed a horrific sneeze that ejected smoke, snot, and blood all at once. He even thought some of his brain came out of his nose. Something definitely came out of his nose, and maybe his ears as well.

And then he realized he was kneeling not in a hot and dry grassland, but somewhere cold, dark, and damp.

The barn.

With the rain on the roof and thunder growling outside.

Something ran across his lap, something oily and dark,

die with her then you limp weak prick

and it rained itself upward somehow through the planks of the loft above them.

It had left smears on his white thighs.

Or was that blood?

His breeches were down and his verge was half erect.

Delphine was in front of him, and he was holding her arms so tightly he must have been close to breaking her delicate bones. He loosened his grip but still held her, trying to understand.

She was naked.

“Oh Christ, Christ, no,” he moaned helplessly.

She shook her head.

“You didn’t,” she said. “You stopped. It tried to make you, and you could have, but you stopped.”

He blinked dumbly at her dark outline with the sound of the rain dripping.

The priest snored.

She managed to smile through her quiet sobbing.

He let her arms go and she put her gown back on.

He pulled his breeches up, still staring at her, peripherally aware that his hands hurt.

When they were both clothed again, she hugged him and cried warm tears onto his neck. He patted her sides and shoulders awkwardly.

“You beat it,” she said, her lean body hitching with sobs.

“You won.”

He saw that her gown was bloody, but then realized it was his blood. His hands were bleeding freely where they had been stuck with thorns.

In the morning, Delphine woke again to find that not all the blood on her gown was from Thomas’s hands, which she knew had been injured.

Thomas was at the other end of the barn, with the mule’s leg between his, scraping mud and rocks from its shoe. How like him, to defy his pain by doing something to make it worse.

Her belly hurt, and her thighs were slick with blood. At first she feared that she might have been wrong and that he might have violated her in the night, but this was only for an instant.

The dream had seemed like other true dreams. She had dreamed that Thomas had a black crab in his head that was driving him as a man drives a cart, and this crab wanted him to hurt her. She had awakened in the darkness to find him undressing her, delicately at first, but then roughly, his eyes far away. But as she tried to pull away from him, he sneezed violently and something came out of him. He had pushed it out of him. Besides, the pain was in her belly, not where it would have been had she been taken.

No, the blood was not from the loss of her maidenhead.

Sometime in the night, she had become a woman.

She would have liked to speak to her mother about this, or to Annette. As soon as she remembered these two vacancies in her heart, she braced herself for sadness to overwhelm her. Instead, she imagined Père Matthieu trying to advise her on these matters, and the thought struck her so funny that she giggled. Her giggling turned to laughter, and even though she cupped her hand over her mouth, she woke the priest.

“My, but you’re in a good mood this morning,” he said; but then he caught sight of the blood and turned the corners of his mouth down, saying, “Sweet heavens,” which seemed such a ridiculous oath to attach to the mess in her lap that she laughed even harder.

“What’s so funny?” Thomas said, still scraping. The mule looked over, too.

The priest went and washed his hands in rainwater even though he had not touched her, stammering a moment before he found his voice.

“Well, er… it… it seems our kitten is a cat.”

SIXTEEN Of the Maple Tree

Delphine was too restless to sit in the cart, so she walked alongside while the two older men rode. The cloths she had bundled around her middle were coarse and chafed her, but she was glad to have found them in the farmhouse; the mother of the dead family inside had been halfway through sewing a dress for herself when the disease came and made her lay her needle aside. She had been found leaning out the window, dead a good month so she was mostly bone, the wattle under her dark as though she had melted into the wall. Delphine thought the woman’s fever might have made her want air at the end of it. She guessed, too, that the whole family had sickened at once; one small corpse hugged another in the corner opposite, the smaller of them clutching a cloth poppet with eyes of snail shell. The mother was already too weak to bury them when they died. And where was the man of the house? Was it the old man in the barn? Or was he the woman’s father? She guessed it was the father, and that he had been mad before and they kept him in the barn; but then it occurred to her that he might have hidden himself there to save his life, perhaps warning others away with that rusty scythe, and there lost his mind. And the husband? Was he dead before the plague came, in the war perhaps, or had he run off to save himself? She knew many such stories of betrayal and selfishness from her village, though she also knew stories of great faithfulness and courage. This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

“What are you thinking about over there?” Thomas said. Ever since the incident in the barn, he had been kinder to her. She wondered how long it would last.

“Death,” she said.

“That’s cheerful. Perhaps you’d like to sing us a song about it?”

She ignored this.

“No singing? Maybe you’ll dance us a merry brawl, then? The priest and I grow bored with watching this mule’s ass sway.”

She wrinkled her mouth, trying not to encourage his vulgarity by smiling at it. Instead she bent down for a mud clot and threw it, though it sailed well behind and landed in the cart.

“Ha!” he laughed at her. “Now that you’re a woman, you can’t do things boys can do, can you? A boy would have pelted me right between the eyes.”

She snarled at him and walked faster, cutting in front of the mule.

“Now I will watch the mule’s ass and he will watch yours, is that your remedy?”

She walked faster, letting herself smile now that the coarse knight would not have the satisfaction of seeing it.

The priest knew something had transpired between the knight and the girl, but the nature of the change puzzled him. If Thomas had forced himself upon her, would she still go with them? To keep herself alive, perhaps, but surely she would not jest and smile so much. What if she had allowed him? Or had gone to him? She was the right age to start thinking of such things, after all, now that she bore the mark of Eve. If that were the case, surely he would see it in a thoughtless caress or in a too-long glance; they did look at each other more, but almost as a father and daughter might where the father had picked the child as his favorite and teased her playfully. It did not seem carnal; he had taught himself to divine when his parishioners were fornicating so he could better coax them to lighten their souls with confession.

But who was he to judge anyone, or propose any remedy for sin?

He was such a profound sinner that he had considered leaving off his robes and stopping the pretense. He was just an old bugger who would sell his last possession for a barrel of good wine. Or any wine.

And he was lonely.

The most puzzling thing for him was his own reaction to the newfound, though seemingly platonic intimacy between his companions; Père Matthieu was jealous.

On their fifth day since Paris, they camped near a swollen stream, up on a rocky bank that gave them a decent view of the country around them. Thomas and the priest sharpened long sticks to use as spears and spent the last hours of daylight trying to gig fish in the river. They got only one, and a small one. The frogs they had hunted eluded them easily, sheltering between rocks or hopping into thick river grass, and now mocked them with their buzzing evensong farther down the stream. The girl went to forage in the woods; she returned at twilight with a rusty, hole-ridden pot in which she carried two handfuls of acorns, several walnuts, and a broken horseshoe.

“Goddamn it,” Thomas said, gazing at her small cache.

“Maybe God would be more generous if you swore less.”

“God starves babies sometimes, and they don’t swear at all.”

Having no answer for that, Delphine found a tree stump and began pounding acorns with the horseshoe. They would make an awful, mouth-puckering companion to the two mouthfuls of trout they could each look forward to, but it would be marginally better than nothing.

“Babies go straight to Heaven,” she said now.

Thomas didn’t look up from his work setting river stones to make a fire. “Bad ones don’t,” he said.

“There are no bad babies,” she said. “They don’t know any better.”

“Sounds like you’ve never met a baby. Many of them are awful. I knew one in Picardy who stole his father’s money and crawled down the road to the whorehouse. “

“It was you,” she said. “The only bad baby ever was you.”

The priest sighed and went off to gather more sticks for the fire.

They ate their awful dinner, sucking each slender bone and washing the bitter acorn meal down with water. The walnuts were last, least and best. Stomachs still rumbling, they each settled down, the men near the cart, the girl with her head against the tree stump. The only sounds were the stream, the frogs, and the mule munching his fill of grass.

In the morning, as the men stirred, Delphine woke up at dawn, but the exhausted men slept later. She amused herself first by collecting river pebbles in her gathered gown front, and then sowing them as a farmer would with an apron full of seeds. When she was out of pebbles, she took up one of the fishing spears and, holding it butt end down, pretended to stir the rusty pot. The priest sat up, stiff from his night on the rocky ground, and noticed her at her game.

“What are you cooking for us, daughter?” he said.

“A stew!”

“Christ, don’t start that,” Thomas said.

“What kind of stew?” the priest asked, secretly happy to needle the knight’s hunger.

“Cabbages and pepper.”

“Real pepper?” the priest said. “Will the king be joining us?”

“Yes,” she said, “and all his ministers. But I wasn’t done with the stew.”

“Christ drowning in shit,” Thomas said, putting his straw hat over his face.

“Mushrooms and turnips and even pork belly.”

“And shit,” Thomas grumbled from his hat. “Don’t forget the shit.”

“What a lovely meal,” the priest said. “May I have some?”

Delphine nodded gravely, still stirring. The priest got up and held his wooden bowl out so she could pretend to fill it with her stick-ladle. He slurped air from a pretend spoon and said, “My compliments. It’s perfect.”

Thomas peeked from under the hat to confirm what he thought he was hearing. Then he replaced the hat, saying, “Jesus wept.”

Just before they left their camp, the priest found another walnut, which had escaped through a hole in the girl’s gathering pot. He found the broken horseshoe and looked around for the stump but couldn’t find it. Thinking nothing of it, he opened the nut against the cart and brought it to Delphine, who did her best to take exactly one-third of it. He shared the rest with Thomas, who said, “How can you stuff yourself so? Aren’t you full of shit and cabbage stew?”

They climbed wearily into the cart and left.

None of them noticed that the maple stump against which Delphine had slept had grown into a tree.

SEVENTEEN Of St. Lazarus and the Rotten Fruit

The soldiers passed them near the town of Nemours, just as deep, cold woods gave way to overgrown and deserted farms. They had just broken camp, and their hunger gnawed at them. They had begun to discuss the possibility of eating their mule. Rather, Thomas had started discussing it, provoking fierce resistance from Delphine and causing the priest to say, “I would rather starve than walk.”

“We can all see our ribs. It isn’t right. We could smoke this bastard and eat like kings for a week.”

“Did you see his ear twitch?” Delphine said. “He heard you.”

“I don’t care if he did.”

“You can’t really want to eat our friend? He’s been so faithful.”

“I have to eat something. I’m losing my whoring mind.”

“NOT the mule,” she said, and that put an end to it.

The soldiers came then, just at first light. No fewer than six knights and another twenty men-at-arms rode up on them, the horses’ hooves shaking the road. A voice shouted, “Get that cart out of the way,” barely leaving them enough time to do so, startling Père Matthieu so that he reined the mule hard, taking one wheel off the road and causing them all to be buffeted by low branches. One of the knights called, “Hooo,” slowing his horse to a stop and obliging the rest to stop as well.

“I know that man,” the knight said, wheeling his horse around to get another look at Thomas. Thomas recognized him, too, though he could not retrieve his name or title; his surcoat bore a red chevron bisecting a silver griffin rampant on a field of blue.

“That man fought at Crécy, and bravely, too.”

Thomas squirmed with shame at his shoddy armor and his mule cart, and wished the troop would ride on.

“Am I right? You were beside the Comte de Givras when he fell.”

“I was.”

“Where is your coat of arms?”

“I lost it at dice.”

The man stared at him for a moment while he decided whether Thomas’s comment was a joke or an insult. He decided it was a joke.

“Ha!” he barked. “What are you doing in that cart, man?”

“We’re going to the Holy Land to fetch back the True Cross.”

“Ha! This is a man of levity. He might lighten our journey with his japes if he were of a mind to come with us.”

“Never mind him,” said a youthful knight with golden locks. “Can’t you see he’s fallen? This man is a brigand.”

Thomas chafed, but Delphine put her hand on his before he could rest it on the hilt of his sword.

“What is a brigand in these days? Which of you does not charge tolls on travelers? And woe to those who do not pay their due, eh? Besot me, I’ll not have you insult a man who rode up that hill while you dandled dolls in Évry.”

The blond knight grimaced but did not respond.

“What say, man? We’ve got a spare horse. It’s yours if you’ll ride with us.”

Delphine’s hand gripped Thomas’s harder, but he pulled away from her.

“Where are you bound?”

“Avignon. His Holiness has summoned certain knights to him. There’s talk of a new crusade.”

“Jerusalem?”

“Aye. So it is whispered. He will not issue a bull until the English have declared they will join us, though it is said their king already gave his word.”

Thomas considered this.

“We are also bound for Avignon.”

“Then it is decided! Bring up the bay.”

An acneous squire in saffron yellow rode up now, holding the reins of a handsome bay stallion.

“Where may my companions ride?”

The knight leaned closer, looking the priest and the girl over.

“In the cart, of course, as befits their station. We will be in Avignon before a fortnight. This cart will still be clopping about at Christmastime. On your horse, man, and let them meet you there.”

“I…”

“I, I, I. This is not the time for speeches, sir. On your horse and piss standing up, or in your cart and squat for it.”

“Go your ways,” Thomas said coolly, “and I will go mine.”

Did that knight’s nose just wrinkle like a lion’s?

His surcoat was different now; behind the chevron, a lion rampant tore an old man in an arena.

Monkeys eating a wild-eyed horse.

The dead woman’s moley back in the pit.

“Who is the girl?” the knight said.

“Just an orphan.”

“Who is she really?”

“Ask your mother.”

“Ha.”

Thomas’s hand drifted for the handle again, and again Delphine steered it away, saying under her breath, “It’s what they want. These are only shades, but your anger is feeding them. Get rid of it.”

“Ha,” Thomas said. Then he imagined the knight’s nose was the tail of a horse. He pictured it lifting and a pile of road apples falling out of the knight’s mouth. His defiant “Ha” turned into an actual laugh, and he let himself laugh freely.

The knight’s face reddened.

He showed his teeth for just an instant.

Thomas laughed harder.

The knight gathered himself enough to speak again, his voice trembling.

“Would that we had more time. I would like to discuss this further with you. But we are stayed for. Perhaps our paths will cross again, when we may linger in knightly fellowship.”

“Good luck on your crusade,” the priest offered.

“Go to Hell,” the squire in yellow said, unconsciously fingering one of his pimples.

They turned their horses and thundered down the road leading to Nemours, tramping autumn’s first golden leaves into the black mud beneath them.

They were not out of sight the length of a troubadour’s verse before the sun peeked between the trees.

Nemours would not let the three of them in. The gates were barred, and the very skinny man at the parapet told them they would be shot if they rode closer.

“Where may we ford the river, then? If we may not use your bridge?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where may we find food?”

“Wait till one of you starves,” he advised. “Then eat that one. That’s how we’re managing. We call it Gigot de Nemours. But no one comes in, and by God no one goes out.”

On the other side of the town, near the banks of the Loing, they came across an encampment of twenty or so men and women hauling in nets and working little patches of field. It was unusual to see such industry now. Something was cooking in a large stew pot, and it smelled like hot, greasy heaven. The priest pulled the cart up to the rough-hewn new-wood fence.

A woman with very red cheeks and a veiny nose motioned two men over. They had been working a two-man saw, but now they put that down and hefted wood axes, holding them casually over their shoulders, standing near the woman.

The trio walked uncommonly close to the cart—people just didn’t walk up to strangers like this anymore. The priest unconsciously leaned back from them.

“Are you healthy?” the priest asked.

“I don’t give a shit if they aren’t,” Thomas said, “We’re asking them for food if I have to eat it from a leper’s hands.”

“We’re healthy now,” the woman said.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what does that mean?”

“It means we’ve already had it here.”

“And it’s gone?”

“It’s never gone. I mean we’ve all had it. And lived. Nobody gets it twice. We call our town Saint Lazarus; the bastards behind the walls wouldn’t let my husband and me in. He died. I didn’t, and neither did my boys. The girls died, though. Four of them. Others came. Now Nemours is full of scarecrows and cannibals and we get survivors every week or so. We’ll let you move in if you’re willing to spend the first night in a sick-blanket. Have any of you had it?”

“Just him,” the priest said, indicating Thomas.

“Yep. He looks strong, though you can’t always tell by that. We think it’s one in five gets through, as long as it’s the swelling kind. The blood coughers all die. The ones who turn black die, too. And quick.”

“We didn’t have any of those in my town.”

“Lucky you.”

“We’re starving. Can you help us?”

The woman scratched her chin, looking them over.

“Will you work for it?”

“God, yes.”

“What can you do?”

“He kills people. I read Latin. The little girl asks questions. And also reads Latin.”

“All right. The big one helps build the fence. You, too. And the girl mends nets. You give us a half day of work and we’ll feed you tonight. But then you’re on your way tomorrow. We don’t want to start liking you and have you up and die on us.”

“You’ve got a deal. Would you like me to say a Mass for you in the morning?”

“What, God-in-Heaven? The only thing I say to God is my daughters’ names. And it’s not a prayer. It’s a rebuke. We’ll thank you not to say any blessings at dinner.”

The work was hard, but good. Delphine learned the fine points of net mending from a little boy whose parents had died, and whose father, mad with fever, had tried to blind him with a hot poker so the boy wouldn’t catch the illness through his eyes. He managed to snuff only one eye before the boy, who was already infected, ran to his uncle’s house and carried it there. He awoke from his fevers to find himself alone in a dead-house. Nobody else would take him in, so he walked to Nemours. And then St. Lazarus.

The woman ate first, with her sons. Then they served the rest, measuring it out to the drop so all got the same portion.

“This is exceptional stew,” the priest said. “What’s in it?”

The woman told him.

Cabbage. Turnips. Mushrooms. Pork belly. And a few pinches of real pepper.

And at precisely that moment a sparrow in the tree above Thomas shat in his.

They slept in a threshing room that still smelled like last year’s barley, and in the morning they got back into the cart. The woman gave them a sack of blueberries and a squash to take with them, and told them there was a town three miles downriver with a wooden bridge still standing.

“What’s it’s name?” the priest asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s dead. It’ll be all weeds in a year, except for the steeple. Oh, and if you see any yellow fruit in the trees, don’t eat it. It’s rotten.”

She laughed inscrutably at this, then slapped the mule’s ass to get it moving, showing them the callused palm of her hand in farewell as they clopped away.

The woods got thick again, and beneath the limbs of a very old oak tree they saw a flash of yellow. As they got closer, they saw that it was a cotehardie, saffron yellow, adorning the week-old, grinning corpse of a hanged squire; they all knew that cotehardie, and knew that its owner had once had pimples. There was a sign around his neck.

The priest shivered and crossed himself.

EIGHTEEN Of the Penitents, and of Auxerre

The first sign of the group they were following was their tracks. They had pocked the damp ground of the road with their footprints, as any large group walking would have; but every hundred yards or so they left an imprint where it seemed as though they had all fallen and pressed their bodies into the mud. Also, Thomas had noticed the white stumps of freshly snapped branches on trees near the road, with tracks leading up to those trees. When they got to the town of Ponchelvert, a strange sight greeted them.

Someone had crucified a dwarf.

He was still very much alive, however.

As the cart drew closer, they saw that he had been tied in place rather than nailed there, and his feet rested on a little platform, although he was wearing a crown of very real thorns. A ladder lay in the grass near him, as well as a bucket of water with a sponge on a long stick.

He did not speak to them as they approached, though he watched them the whole way. Père Matthieu stopped the mule and they all looked at him, dumbstruck.

He nodded at the bucket.

Delphine clambered out of the cart and soaked the sponge, which she then held up to his mouth. He lipped at the sponge in a way that made her think of a sheep.

“Do you want to come down?” she said.

He shook his head.

“Are you sworn to silence?”

“No,” he said. “They didn’t say anything about that.”

“They who?” said Thomas.

“The Penitents.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

He closed his eyes now, moving his lips silently in prayer.

“Pardon me,” Delphine said.

“What?”

“You should come down,” she said. “That can’t be good for you.”

“I have two days to go. I’m only on my first day, and each town is to crucify someone for three days. Don’t you know?”

“No,” she said.

“It’s the only way.”

“The only way for what?”

“If you’re going to make me talk, give me more water. My throat hurts.”

She dipped the sponge again and held it aloft for him.

“The only way to appease God. So He’ll take the pestilence away.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Very wicked towns are to crucify three people. But we were no better or worse than most.”

“Who decides how wicked your town is?” said Père Matthieu, fascinated.

“They do.”

“Were you out in the rain?” Delphine asked.

“They came after the rain. They came yesterday.”

“Do you have to stay out all night?” she said.

He tried to ignore her and return to his prayers, but she repeated her question.

“They come and take me down at night.”

“The Penitents?”

“No. The town. The Penitents are heading for Auxerre to perform a great miracle.”

“Come down,” she said.

He shook his head.

“Why you?”

“What?” he said again, clearly annoyed.

“Why did they pick you? Did you volunteer?”

“The town picks. They vote. It’s a big honor.”

Thomas laughed, and the dwarf gave him a dirty look.

“Are you sure they’re coming back for you?” Thomas said, still amused.

The dwarf went back to his prayers.

“DEUS meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum, eaque detestor, quia peccando, non solum poenas…”

“Because if it were me up there, I’d start thinking maybe the good people would leave me on the cross to make sure God was happy. Did you think of that?”

“…non solum poenas a Te iuste statutas promeritus sum, sed praesertim quia offendi…”

The girl looked at Thomas.

“I think you should take him down.”

“He clearly wants to stay there,” the priest said.

Thomas smiled. He knew the girl wanted to keep the man from harm; Thomas liked the idea less for that reason and more because he knew the dwarf would fuss about it, and he was glad to do something good that was also entertaining.

He didn’t expect the fight he got, though. As soon as he untied the dwarf’s feet, the small man started kicking at Thomas so hard he made the cross rock; it was all Thomas could do to keep the ladder upright, especially since he was laughing the whole time. Delphine furrowed her brow at Thomas’s attitude, and the priest paced restlessly, afraid one of them would be hurt.

Thomas had the dwarf over his shoulder and nearly down the ladder when his burden kicked against the side of the cross and tipped the ladder, spilling them both into the soggy grass.

“You little bastard,” Thomas said, angry now.

The little man fumed at him from where he sat in the high grass. The priest thought of a surly rabbit and laughed into his hand despite his best intentions.

The dwarf tried to climb the cross and resume his place, but Thomas grabbed him by the britches and hauled him down again.

“I want to save my town!” the dwarf screamed, with tears of frustration in his eyes, and the game lost its humor even for Thomas.

“Do you really want to go back up there?” Thomas asked.

The man sat down in the grass and looked bewildered.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But don’t you see? This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can’t plow. I can’t build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now.”

The priest opened his mouth to contradict the man, but nothing came out.

“Shit,” Thomas said.

And then he hauled the dwarf back up the cross and tied him fast.

Emma LaTour looked out from the darkness of her house, stunned by the beauty of the day; except for visits to the well, she had not left her home since her Richard had been racked with pains by the fence and died there. At the end, he had been grabbing his knees, and now his joints had locked him in a parody of childbirth, bloated like a dead dog or sheep. How was she to believe man was anything special when he looked so much like any other animal in death? He was just a rained-on, ruined carcass, as if he had never kissed her, as if he had never danced. The beautiful blue sky seemed to mock him, as did the bulk of the St. Etienne cathedral and the spire of the abbey, both of these stabbing upward from the high ground across the river in Auxerre. Nothing but false promises lay across the river, or up in the sky.

Her carrots were nearly gone, and she was sick to death of them; they hurt her few teeth and she checked the skin of her arms constantly because she had the idea the carrots were turning her yellow. She needed to cross the bridge into town, though the thought made her shiver with fear. If only her sons would come; but they had their own children to think of, and she had not seen any of them in a week or more. Her little cottage had been forgotten.

Now she was looking out her window, staying well back from the light so it wouldn’t illuminate her yellow skin; she heard a voice coming across the fields.

And it was beautiful.

It belonged to an angel.

She saw him (or her?) sprinting down the weedy path, wearing a white skirt of sorts ruched up to the belt for running, bare of chest and foot. It was a boy. Nimble as a fox, and so lovely to watch, with his tangled blond hair bouncing. The child-angel leapt upon her fence of uneven branches and balanced along its length, calling to the window in a beautiful, heavily accented singsong, as if he could see her where she cowered in shadow.

He leapt off the fence and over the birthing corpse of her husband and ran through the field, which was spotted purple with new growths of thistles; Emma had a mother’s instinct to yell at him not to stick his feet on their evil little crowns of spines, but he ran through them as if on purpose, then dove and actually rolled through the thickest patch of them, laughing and shouting, “Iesu! Iesu! Iesu!”

The Penitents had come to Auxerre.

The threescore farmers, carpenters, drapers, vintners, wives, and daughters who stood in cool sunlight near the St. Etienne cathedral had all been summoned by the beautiful boy. He gathered them with his songs and gambols, but especially with his promises of miracles against the plague. Hucksters of every stripe had tried to profit from the disease, especially in the early days, before they, too, sickened or grew afraid; so many relic sellers and apothecaries had come that soon any stranger with a case and a gleam in his eye was in danger of being beaten and flung into the Yonne, along with his sweetly herbed potions, deer bones, magic feathers, Galen cakes, or sap from the Cedars of Lebanon.

When the disease bore down and the die-off began, the town was left alone, although her gates stood open. The bishop had said, when asked for his counsel on whether to impose a quarantine, “the fox already makes his bed among the hens,” which was very close in spirit to the seigneur’s observation that “closing those gates would be leading hens to piss.” Auxerre, thus, dutifully flew the black banner announcing the presence of the Great Death but remained open to whoever cared to brave it, be they pilgrims, refugees, or men with pretty lies to tell.

But now the boy had come, and he was different.

He was quite credible as the herald to a prophet, with his eyes of northern ocean blue and his dimpled smile. Even his German accent, normally a hindrance in these xenophobic times, lent him an air of exoticism; after all, if some holy cure were to come to Auxerre, it would not come from Burgundy. Why not the piney forests of the north?

But this boy sold no cures.

He never mentioned money at all.

“Wait!” he said, capturing his audience with an up-pointed finger and a theatrical tilt to his head. “I believes I hear them. But perhaps you will hear them, too, if you make der Alleluia.”

Nobody spoke.

“Children of Gott, make der ALLELUIA!”

“ALLELUIA!” they cried, and a drum began to beat a simple march.

The sound came up through the narrow streets that led down and to the river and echoed on the shuttered shop fronts and timbered houses that bordered the square. A line of ecstatic men and women entered the Place St. Etienne, shuffling slowly in something like a drugged march, striking themselves in time to the drumbeats with leather thongs fitted with iron hooks or spikes. They were naked from the waist up, like the boy, all wearing simple skirts that had once been white but had been marched in and bled on until they were the color of earth and as stiff as leather. The crowd gasped at the sight of them; the women’s bare breasts, the old blood drying, the new blood trickling, the white caps they wore with red crosses on the front and back. Some of the Auxerrois even fell to their knees wailing, thinking Judgment Day had come, here, now, and soon Christ himself would split the sky and part the damned from the saved.

Now four women called out and four men answered:

And then the men called and the women answered:

Then, all together:

Behind these eight and the drummer trained a score or so who had clearly been recruited from other towns, all stripped to the waist, though less uniform in appearance. Some of them whipped themselves with tree branches; a girl walked behind bearing a bundle of sticks on her back to replace those that split.

Now the drummer beat three beats and they all stopped. They shouted “Iesu!” and flung themselves facedown into the street, arms out, cruciform, eliciting a gasp from the crowd. The ones at the rear then stood and came forward, giving a stroke of the whip or the branch to each prone figure they passed, until they reached the front and flung themselves down again. In this way, like some horrible caterpillar, the entire line worked its way toward the square in front of St. Etienne and the astonished crowd of onlookers, then collapsed all at once.

All but the man beating the drum.

He set this aside now and looked at the crowd.

“I am Rutger the Fair,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. Fair might have been a name from his youth; it seemed a better word to hang on an urbane womanizer than on this handsome but shocking man of thirty or so, graced with the broad, muscular chest of a woodcutter or a swordsman, brutally scarred from months of flagellation. His carelessly shaven (or intentionally cut) scalp would have sat well on a madman, but his deep-set eyes shone with intelligence, even wisdom. A goatish beard of blond and gray erupted from his chin. He seemed less a cleric than the antidote to clericism. If Christ had been German as well as a carpenter, and if He had survived His scourging, and if He had shorn His head with a broken bottle, He might well have looked like this man.

“I come to you, Auxerre, from the land of Saxony, where the plague is not yet come, and shall never come; I stand before you to offer you either the cup or the sword. The cup is that of forgiveness, and the sword is that of wrath.”

Now the boy came up from behind the crowd, bearing a pewter goblet and a small sword. He stood by the man, stomping his feet twice.

“God demands a tithe. If one in ten of you turn from your lives of false comfort and walk with us for thirty days, your town will be spared. Or if three of you will sit the cross for three days, your town will also be spared. But if you stay here and do not show the Lord your love, you will all die the death of the stone under the arm, or the stone in the crotch, or the death of the spitting of the blood. I see by your faces you know these deaths, ja? Well, you have now the chance to turn the face of death away from you. Shall I speak further on God’s offer, or will you harden your hearts and go to your houses to die in sin?”

“Speak on!” someone yelled.

Another repeated it.

“Hup!” Rutger said, and the cruciform Penitents behind him stood, arms out, faces lifted to the sky.

Some of them were sobbing.

He spoke.

Emma watched, amazed, as the butcher and a vintner named Jules, who had once courted her sister, came bearing a two-wheeled cart. They put her poor, stiff husband in it, revolted by his decomposition but seemingly unafraid of his disease. Why were they not calling out to her? Because she sat in shadow and they thought she was dead, too, like almost everyone on this side of the Yonne. Or they thought that she had run away.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked, letting a little sunlight fall on her face so they could see her. She winced as much from the sunlight as from her fear of their reaction to her color, but she did not startle them. If they thought she was yellow, they were very polite about it.

“The cathedral,” Jules said. “You’ll want to see this, Emma.”

“Are you burying him?”

“No, Emma. Come to Saint Etienne.”

So saying, they carted her Richard away, his knees still locked against his chest, the little blond boy now visible, skipping before them through the thistles and singing a song in German.

The sun was lowering when the three dead Auxerrois were brought before the cathedral of St. Etienne. Richard was the worst of them, having been dead a week, but two others had been chosen. A beautiful young maid who had broken hearts in the wine shop by the front gate was only one day gone, though her beauty had already been cast down; she had been healthy at daybreak, but by Nones, the plague had turned her the color of an eggplant and killed her outright.

The third was Yvette Michonneau, the bishop’s acknowledged mistress, who died after fighting grimly through an unheard-of ten days of lancings and bleedings, leaving behind three of the bishop of Auxerre’s chubby, dark-eyed bastards. She had been wrapped in a shroud and buried, but the German boy commanded her to be retrieved. Yvette’s mother, also a fighter, had brawled in the churchyard to keep her daughter’s hard-won Christian burial from being upset, grabbing away the sexton’s shovel and breaking one Penitent’s nose with it before being wrestled down and hustled off by her neighbors.

Auxerre had tried to please God with Christian burials, but clearly something more was required.

The cart was drawing near Auxerre; the square tower of the cathedral beckoned them as they topped a hill near Perigny, but, with only an hour of sun left, they decided to make camp near the wall of an old convent, long abandoned and swarmed with ivy now blushing mostly red. All the ivy in the abandoned village of Perigny crawled toward Auxerre, as if reaching for it with delicate fingers.

The girl slept hard and neither man wanted to rouse her from her sleep. Thomas covered her with their horse blanket, and then he and the priest left her and went into the damp woods bordering the field looking for sticks dry enough to burn.

Delphine woke alone in the cart, her heart racing from a dream that a devil was in Auxerre turning people into poppets. In the dream, she was able to stop it, but the devil, who had too many eyes, was very angry, and it chased her. That was when she awoke. She knew the dream was true, and this frightened her so much that she pulled the blanket over her head; then she thought of her father and mother, and of how she would have felt to see either of them turned into a devil’s plaything. She gathered her blanket around her, meaning to set off down the road, knowing she didn’t have much daylight in which to walk the last few miles.

An angel was sitting on the back of the mule, facing her and wringing its hands. It was the same one she had seen in Paris and back home in Normandy; it was the saddest she had ever seen an angel look. It told her to stay in the cart, speaking as if every word hurt it.

“Why?” she said.

She would only make things worse, it said, however noble her desire was. Getting to Avignon was all that mattered.

“Is a devil going to Auxerre?”

Yes. A very strong one is already there. And another is coming.

“Who will help the people in the town? Will you?”

It hung its head. It was a minor angel, made better at messages than war. The strong ones were fighting in Heaven.

Delphine thought, from the way the angel spoke, that this fight must not be going well.

She wanted to cry.

What would happen to the souls in Heaven if the angels lost? Would they have to go back to their bodies? Now she imagined her mother and father at the end of a stick, jerking beneath a devil’s hand in a parody of a dance.

Stay in the cart.

She could not bear to say no to the angel, so she shook her head, though so gently a person might not have noticed.

She looked around to make sure the priest and the knight didn’t see her, because they would stop her, or follow her and put themselves in danger. She bent to muddy her finger and wrote on the side of the cart. Then she patted the mule’s side, as much to comfort herself as him, and started off down the road barefoot.

Please, the angel said behind her, and she stopped for a heartbeat and then kept going. She was afraid she might lose heart, so she made herself count ten steps before she looked behind her.

The angel was gone.

Thomas found the cart empty, with writing on its side. He put his meager bundle of sticks and chestnuts on the ground and called the priest over.

The priest read it aloud.

Fully one hundred people had gathered to see the Penitents perform their miracle in the square before Auxerre’s cathedral. A light breeze blew, but it was not so cold since the rains stopped. Rutger’s followers held candles, the last candles the remaining Benedictine monks at the abbey of St. Germain had. They wanted no part of the Penitents’ display, but the Auxerrois had told them plainly that they would have no more food brought to them unless they gave over their tapers; the brothers had already killed their last hog and chickens, and their measly garden could not get them though the winter. They had reminded the crowd that starving out monks was not high on the list of deeds that would get one into Heaven; further, the abbey was dedicated to St. Germanus, who had taught St. Patrick and argued against the Pelagian heresy, and these brothers were the keepers of his holy bones.

When Giles the armorer suggested that these bones might be put into broth, the monks knew they would get nowhere appealing to the better natures of the Auxerrois, and the candles were surrendered.

Rutger beat his drum, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

The Penitents, having handed their candles off to the people, bloodied themselves with their whips and branches in time to the rhythm, ending in an orgiastic frenzy that actually sprayed droplets into the crowd. The madness spread from the flagellants to the townsfolk; many cried out or swayed, and some were moved to begin striking themselves or one another.

“More!” shouted Rutger, and the blond boy echoed him, crying, “More!” His openmouthed grin might have been the same if he were sledding down a steep hill.

Some in the crowd punched each other.

Then the biting began, and the scratching.

One who held a candle held it to his face, lighting his beard, then slapping it out with a hoarse scream.

At the crescendo, Jules cut his little finger off with his own knife, shocking Emma, who stood near him openmouthed.

Rutger saw this and smiled for the first time, showing his crooked teeth.

“Yes!” Rutger said. “Und zo! It is enough!”

He beat the drum one time hard.

The crowd’s violence ebbed, and they edged closer.

Now he pointed at his acolytes, the four men and women who had given the call and response.

They took their evil, hooked whips and stood near the dead.

Rutger banged the drum.

“Death, where is your power?” he asked.

“Gone!” responded the eight, whipping the dead ones.

With each question, he banged the drum.

With each response, the dead were scourged.

With this last stroke, the body of Yvette Michonneau jerked.

The crowd gasped.

Now all of the dead spasmed when struck. Some at the edges of the crowd ran away, but others leaned in, eyes wide. The last slice of sun dipped below the horizon, leaving the sky lavender and pink.

Yvette stood in her shroud. A stain spread from where her mouth was. A woman screamed while a few men cheered, and more ran.

The once-pretty barmaid stood, her blackened face searching the crowd, bewildered.

After three savage whip blows, Richard unbent his legs and rolled over on his stomach. He lacked the strength in his limbs to stand unaided, so the acolytes helped him. He swayed there, his simple cap still tied below his chin, moving his ruined jaw as if to speak, but nothing came out. Another half dozen broke and ran, including two shirtless Penitents who had come from the last town.

“When these sisters and this brother are strong enough, I will send them to find the unbelievers who ran from this holy place. They are very good at finding. And all of you who march with me shall be proof against the plague; for if you die, I will make you live again, as you have seen with your own eyes.”

Emma, who had been watching all of this as if in a dream, moved forward shouting, “No!”

Rutger saw her, and said, “This woman fears her husband, even as Lazarus was feared. But her man will heal and love her once more. All these departed shall be restored to health. If you believe.”

“This is wrong!” Emma shouted, pointing her cane. And then, pathetically, “Leave him alone.”

“Wrong? How can this be wrong when it comes from the Lord?”

“It is only for Christ to raise the dead. And I do not think you are Him.”

“Are you sure? There is no middle place, you know. You had better be sure.”

“If you’re a man of God,” Emma said, “pray the Pater Noster.”

Rutger smiled and wagged his finger at her, as if she were a naughty child.

“Lord,” Rutger said, “if this woman’s disbelief displeases you, show us some sign.”

The boy threw the stub of a carrot at her, hitting her dress.

The crowd gasped.

Everyone was looking at her, many with their mouths open in disbelief.

She looked at her arms and saw why.

She had turned yellow.

Now a voice from the crowd spoke up.

“Stop it!”

A young girl in a dirty gown stood near the front of the crowd, holding a blanket around her.

“STOP IT!” she shrieked. The people of Auxerre parted to let her through. All of the Penitents, even Rutger, were dumbstruck at the sight of her, and nobody stopped her as she went to poor old Richard and kissed his hand.

As soon as she did, he collapsed and returned to death.

“No!” Rutger shouted.

The boy ran over to her, shouting madly, “Was tust du?! Was tust du?” She ignored his words and shouldered him aside, now kissing the hand of the wine maiden, who also gratefully crumbled.

Now the boy pushed her from behind, but instead of falling, she let the momentum carry her forward toward Yvette, whose hands were still bound in the shroud. The girl knelt and kissed one of her bare feet, causing her, too, to fall.

The boy spun the girl around.

“WAS TUST DU, HEXE!?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at him, even through him, with her sad, luminous gray eyes, “It’s not your fault. But you’re dead, too.”

She kissed the beautiful boy on the cheek and he exhaled in a long rasp, and did not inhale again. Rather, he turned back to the plague-spotted dead boy he had been when Rutger found him, and fell as if exhausted into Delphine’s arms. She laid him down and gently closed his eyes.

Now two of the Penitents grabbed Delphine’s arms brutally, shouting, “Witch! Witch!”

“Let go of her!” shouted a woman.

“No! She is a witch!” a man screamed, and soon the crowd was pushing and tearing at itself, some trying to get at the girl, some trying to protect her. She was slapped sharply, and her hair was yanked so hard it hurt her neck. The acolytes who held her pulled her back, looking at Rutger for leadership, but he was oblivious to them, staring at the girl as if he might stare through her skin and see what she was.

The crowd had become a mob.

Those who saw the girl as wicked had overpowered the others and now surged toward the acolytes, who threw her to them and ran.

The crowd grabbed her roughly, tearing her blanket from her and using it to bind her arms to her sides. She knew she was too weak to fight them; she wished Thomas were here, then blinked that wish away, knowing he would die for her and still the mob would have her.

They lifted her up above them, and she was sure they would dash her head against some wall; it seemed they were all shouting at once. She let her body go limp, trying to see it from outside herself. If she must die, she would neither cry nor cry out—it was all she could do, so she focused on that. She would die bravely.

Rutger was walking closer, still staring at her.

What are you?

“Throw her in the Yonne!” one shouted.

“Yes! And with a stone around her neck!”

They had started moving in that direction, toward one of the dark little streets that led steeply downhill and to the river, but they did not leave the square with her.

A woman who was holding Delphine’s leg screamed.

Then another.

Delphine was dropped, but thankfully landed on her feet.

She worked her arms free from the hastily bound blanket as a man yelled, “I’m blind!”

“Me, too!” said another.

“God help us!”

Rutger pulled the tongue from the one who said that and flung it to the ground, now looking around madly for whatever or whoever had struck the people blind.

All of the townsfolk and acolytes near the girl had lost their sight, falling on all fours, groping their way toward the walls of the church or the buildings nearby, moaning or sobbing or praying. She took a thumb in the eye from one of them, got kicked in the back, and scampered between the legs of another. It was chaos.

A knight with a face somewhere between a man’s and a lion’s had entered the square from the direction of the river. His armor was bloody, as was the axe he carried head-down in his left hand. He was riding a grayish horse with human mouths where its eyes should be and hands instead of hooves.

Rutger, who was a head taller than he had been, started moving toward Delphine, flinging the blind out of his way; his eyes seemed to be multiplying, now four, now eight. The ghastly horse at the far end of the square reared, the hands at the ends of its forelegs grasping at the air.

Now Delphine saw the angel; it stood in an alley, unseen by the devils in the square, more purely itself than it had been upon the mule. Its beauty crushed something inside Delphine and made nectar of it.

It looked right at her.

Then, with what seemed very little effort, it pushed over the glover’s shop it stood next to, a woman screaming from the top floor; the building fell heavily between Delphine and the devils, shielding her from their view.

The angel said only one word.

It said, Run.

NINETEEN Of the War Drawing Near

The wind picked up, now rushing north, then turning hard south as though something massive were sucking air in and blowing it out again. Thomas and the priest looked at one another, the sound of the rustling leaves thick around them and the sky seeming to glow faintly green, though the sun was well down.

The glowing coals of their fire went out entirely.

“The girl,” Thomas said.

The priest licked his lips and looked at the sky.

A tar-black cloud of sorts bled up from Auxerre, tapered from the ground like a snake’s tail, spinning. He had heard of such a thing before; a sailor had told him of spouts that came down from the clouds and played on the face of the sea. But this one did not dip down from clouds; it rose from the ground and spread, making clouds where there had been none, blackening the faint green of the sky like ink polluting water. The tapered cloud, spinning ever faster, swayed now like a seductress at her dance, kicking up debris at its base.

The two men thought they heard the sound of screaming, but it was impossible to tell if it was coming from Auxerre or the awful wind, which blew harder now, sucking in, blowing out.

“Mary, Mother of God,” the priest said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

“We have to find her!” Thomas said, pulling the priest into the cart, but neither one of them could make the mule move. So they went on foot, at something between a walk and a run, Thomas still limping on his hurt leg.

Now the ground shook, as though something impossibly heavy had fallen. One corner of a stone farmhouse to their right collapsed, and the wind blew harder yet, slowing the men to the speed of a steep uphill walk. Stinging twigs and other small missiles pelted them, and then a branch tumbled from the sky, catching the priest on the crown of his head, knocking him down. Thomas took his hand and yanked him up; they trudged on, coming to a higher place on the road. Shielding their faces with their arms as best they could, they saw that a second spinning cloud had joined the first, both of them tearing trees from the ground and sucking them upward. A man’s shout rose from a farmhouse nearby, and the men saw why; the two clouds had broken contact with the ground. Their tapered bottoms became tails, and their thicker tops seemed to become wings. One of the clouds grew two great black wings, and the other grew six that seemed to fold in on one another

Seraph good sweet Lord a fallen seraph

and, just like that, both of them bled themselves up into the larger cloud that now covered most of the sky.

The exhausted priest stopped running and fell to his knees.

God God God

“Where are you?” the priest said.

“Here!” Thomas said, but the priest was looking at the sky.

“WHERE ARE YOU?” the priest now screamed, gnashing his teeth.

Thomas yanked him up, but he pulled away, shaking his head. Finally he collapsed against a tree and wrapped his arms around it, refusing to move farther.

Thomas left him and trudged on for Auxerre, where the bells of the cathedral were ringing with great urgency.

The cloud had become a proper thunderhead now, its tops chaining with jags of lightning.

Everything about the sky was wrong.

It was a sky of Revelation.

The ground shook again, harder than before, raising a chorus of shouts from the town.

The bell stopped ringing.

Thomas stopped walking now, transfixed by the spectacle taking place in the sky.

And then he saw it.

A great blackness against the sky.

It circled twice, then stopped. How unlike a bird it was, though it had wings, or at least explained itself with them; no bird could just hang in the sky like a still image of itself. It peered down into the fields, its face almost feline, but wrong, its teeth black in a sickly glowing mouth. It roared, and its roar was familiar, that lion’s roar in grotesque.

An angel of wrath

A lion tearing an old man in an arena

It saw something that interested it; a great black limb, now an arm, now a sort of paw, reached down impossibly far and picked something up.

A girl.

Christ, no, no, not her.

But it was not her.

This girl was older and wore a dark dress, though her hair was the same length and color. She hung limply, doll-sized. The lion-devil’s two hot eyes regarded her, and then it huffed in disappointment, bit the legs from her, and flung her so she spun end over end into the greenish night.

It was closer now, and a great stink came down from the sky, at once sour and burned. Still it looked down in the fields, pulling the roofs from houses, knocking carts over to look beneath them.

A flung cart hit the road near Thomas, its wheel flying off and striking the knight above the eye, knocking him to all fours.

It was coming closer.

It searched the road, the field.

Thomas crawled into a gully and pulled branches over himself.

But it was not looking for him.

It wanted Delphine.

Pére Matthieu hugged his tree and shuddered, too afraid to move again, and too angry that God had abandoned them to these horrors. “Where are you, where are you,” he said at intervals, but it was not until the wind calmed down that he heard a voice above.

“Here,” it said.

It was small and scared.

Delphine.

She was up a tree.

Of course.

She had run to the same strong old oak tree that had attracted him.

With her to protect, some small strength came back to him. He let go of the trunk and reached up to her.

“Come down,” he said.

“No. You come up.”

“I’m old. I can’t climb a tree.”

“If you don’t, I think he will find you.”

“Who?”

“The fallen angel. The bad one. It’s coming.”

Père Matthieu Hanicotte climbed the tree.

The wind picked up again.

The priest prayed silently, forming his mouth around the unvoiced Latin but giving no thought to the words; his mind was on the sky above them and he listened, as she did, to the awful noise battering them from above. Growing closer. The stink pouring down on them was as bad as the noise, and he fought hard not to retch, for fear that if he started he wouldn’t stop until he had fallen from the limb he clung to. The noise grew louder and closer yet, banging like fists inside his skull. He squared his mouth to scream, but Delphine’s small hand stoppered it. He looked up at her where she perched on the small branch above his. She pulsed her hand and shook her head no. Tears wet her cheeks, and her mouth, too, was a rictus, but she did not cry out.

Don’t, her eyes said.

Please.

He choked back the sound in his throat and clung tighter to the rough branch that swayed wildly in his arms and between his knees. The wind raged, needling his face and hands with small debris. He was becoming dizzy. Squinting, he glanced up to make sure the girl was still holding on, too.

She was.

But it was over them now.

Its round mouth of fire hot behind backlit leaves.

The idiot scream in his head formed into words.

WHERE ARE YOU LITTLE WHORE WE’LL FIND YOU IF WE HAVE TO PRY UP EVERY ROOF FROM HERE TO THE SEA AND YANK UP EVERY TREE THAT’S IT ISN’T IT YOU’RE IN A TREE WE SMELL YOUR FEAR CLOSE YOUR THOUGHTS OF HOW YOUR DEATH WILL BE BUT IT WILL BE WORSE AND DEATH ISN’T THE END OF IT YES! HERE! We see you.

Now a white hand

A fucking hand!

the size of a pony snaked down from the sky on the end of an arm with far too many joints. It pulled branches from their tree. Now the priest did scream. As did Delphine. More hands. Five? Six?

They grabbed the tree now and heaved and shuddered it up from the earth. It turned upside down, turning around Père Matthieu as he fell, buffeting him with branches and what leaves remained, but slowing his fall so when the earth rose and whacked his side and head and banged his knees together, he lost the wind from his lungs but broke nothing.

He watched the tree recede above him, her face white in the foliage, her legs padlocked on her branch.

NO! he tried to scream, but his flat lungs allowed only a croak.

The thing above him held the tree like a toy.

It was an abomination.

Six wings.

Six arms.

Pulling the tree apart now.

Why must you hurt her she’s so small

Twelve eyes glowing and a round mouth of fire.

Père Matthieu clasped his hands together in prayer, unable to form words but imagining an angel of God coming down.

Then he saw it.

It came.

A small moon, newly risen, amber behind the clouds, moving fast.

One of the thing’s twelve eyes cocked that way, but the rest stayed fixed on its task. It shook the tree.

Something fell.

One of those white hands just missed it.

The girl.

The priest stumbled to his feet, tried to get beneath her, but he was too far away. Too old. Too slow.

Still he ran.

He had some air in him now, and he cried out.

“God, please!”

The light from the cloud dove as a falcon would, one of the smallest and fastest of them for which kings pay the price of towns, and it caught her.

And was itself caught.

A hand jerked its beautiful ankle.

More tore at its wings.

The forgotten tree tumbled, slowly, as if in a dream.

The angel, yanked backward, lost its grip on the girl, and she fell again; something from the other (a tail?) grabbed for her and missed.

A sword of pure moonlight flashed in the angel’s hand.

The two fought viciously as another dark shape closed in.

The girl fell.

Closer to the ground now.

Close to the priest.

He ran under her.

Her form grew bigger swiftly, coming at him.

Please, God.

He caught her, mostly.

His nose bloodied, his eye shut, his mouth full of grit.

They rolled.

She smelled of juniper.

Somehow he picked her up and ran.

Thomas lay in his gully, covered in sticks, struggling to stay conscious—the wheel from the dropped cart had hurt him.

He had to watch for the girl, but he could not tear his eyes from the fight.

An angel and two devils.

The end of the world.

The battle pitched through the sky, careening over Auxerre, then back over the fields. Now a light, golden-orange and lovely, just the sort the sun casts through clouds before it sinks, broke and lit up the river and the eastern part of town. Then everything went black, and the light shone only in flashes, painting scenes that formed in instants and dissolved into darkness again. Now a mass of black tentacles roped around the source of the light; now a beautiful arm glowing with pale light flashed down with a sword, cutting some of these, and causing the firmament to shudder like a ripple going through a pan of water. Thomas knew somehow that what he was seeing was not precisely true, but a translation; he had no way to understand what he was seeing, so his mind painted its own pictures. Now one black, winged thing tore at the beautiful winged thing with a mouth like a lion’s mouth, over which its two eyes blazed with insanity and rage. Now the six-winged darkness wheeled down, and fire from its round mouth spouted against the beautiful one, in a huge gout that impacted against its target and was deflected, flowering and raining down all over the fields, lighting up the countryside here and there in a multitude of small fires. Everything went black again until the three figures locked together, the black ones driving the illuminated one down and down, into a field of barley not far from the river. A screaming sound that was at once animalistic and mechanical shocked Thomas’s ears and raised all the small hairs on his body.

The shock of their fall dug a deep trench, knocked trees down in a circle, their tops pointed away.

In the barley field, great beings, beings the size of windmills, thrashed and rolled and gouged the earth. Two of them were as black as though holes had been cut in the fabric of the world; one shone like the full moon, just that heartbreaking in its beauty, casting mad shadows through the grain and the trees and along the hills as it moved. Now its light grew fainter as the six-winged one pinned it down and smothered it. Thomas stood up to see the two-winged one rise up, filling the air with a lion’s roar that was at once tortured and triumphant; its great arms whipped down and thrust a spear at the source of the light, which sputtered and quit. The ground shuddered so hard that Thomas was knocked from his feet.

At just that moment, every bird in the forest and fields cried out in a great cacophony, even those that sing only by day, so loud and crazed that it even drowned out the roaring wind.

Thomas realized that he was shouting, but, even realizing it, he couldn’t stop. A warm rain began to fall, but what fell was thicker than water, smearing on the knight’s face, even into his mouth, affronting it with the coppery, salty taste of blood.

He covered his eyes with his hands and curled his knees up to his chin, still shouting hoarsely, at the edge of his sanity.

He passed from consciousness and, mercifully, dreamed nothing.