Between Two Fires

For they had been so long alone in the lower depths, the fallen had made their own kingdom there and declared themselves lords of that place. From the first days of their captivity, they had ignited false stars on the roof of Hell to make a mockery of what was above. They had dug dead rivers and gouged seas that smoked and blistered; they had raised cruel hills; they had set forests of iron beneath an igneous moon.

This was allowed them in their exile, but one thing was forbidden.

To engender life had been reserved unto the Lord of Hosts, and the numbers of the alchemy of life had been hidden from the angels.

Yet on the eve of the New War, the fallen under Lucifer had set their hands to the task of creation, and tried to bring forth fresh invention; but so far below the Lord were they that they could not quicken any new thing, but only the dead; and they wedded dead flesh together with the souls of the damned and made both live again; and they took the fishes of the sea and river and the creatures of the mountain and woods and corrupted them, made them monstrous in size and quick to do harm; because none of these could propagate, save by killing, the devils set their hands to each one, working in secret until they made an arsenal of unclean flesh against the day they might release their bestiary into the world of men.

That day had come.

The vaults of the seas opened in the dark that was blacker than ink, and the devils’ children snaked up into the rivers that veined between the cities of men; and the vaults of the mountains opened, and heinous things walked down the roads that bound the towns to one another; and great was the suffering of the seed of Adam.

And the Lord made no answer.

And still the war in Heaven persisted, and neither could the wicked angels break through, nor those of God drive them down.

So one of the fallen, whose name was Baal-Zebuth, said, “Let us wear their greatest men like skins, and when they speak, they will speak our words; they will speak of wars and purgings, and of dashing the babe’s head. We will turn their understanding so they make their Christ a god of war, and we will cause them to set navies to the seas and armies under the moon with generals whose eyes glow like brands, and we will stir Turk and Christian alike to madness by our own deeds, and by our own hands will we hasten the death of men.”

And great was the noise of flies around him as he walked the earth.

And Ra’um walked with him with his twelve eyes blazing.

And Bel-phegor shook off his mane and walked in armor, received at the tables of wrathful men, who knew him not.

And the damned who had deceived men as false prophets rose again, and again lied.

And the Lord made no answer.

TWENTY Of the Monk in White

“We have to build a raft.”

“What?”

“A raft. Build one or find one.”

Thomas looked at the girl.

A brisk wind had just blown a shower of brown leaves on them, and one perfectly shaped maple leaf, stippled red on its points, perched in Delphine’s hair. Thomas removed it and chewed on the stem, trying to keep his balance in the pitching cart; the road, if it could be called that after the rains had furrowed it, was quite rough here. He had found them near dawn. They had gone to town together, but now they were in the cart again and moving south and east. His head throbbed from the blow it had sustained last night; he touched the egg above his eye, remembering how gently the girl had wiped the dried blood from it. He was drunk. The priest, bearing two black eyes from catching the girl, was worse. And the girl was not sober.

Their tour through the ruins of Auxerre had yielded a cask of good wine; it had been the priest who spied it among the timbers and wattle of a fallen wine shop. It had not seemed wrong to him to take it, nor to ask the girl to help him roll it past the fallen buildings, past the dead Penitents (all of them, it seemed—none of those zealots moved among the injured and dazed, though he saw one hand clutching a hooked whip, its owner obscured beneath stones). He had said Mass again for the first time in months, given last rites, issued wafer, issued wine. The remaining Auxerrois had even helped hoist the barrel into his cart; they had seen the angel, too. Even though catastrophe had visited them, the long months of death and suffering at last seemed to mean something: Good was fighting back. They knew the girl was blessed. As the cart pulled away, a woman had touched Delphine’s sleeve with a hand as yellow as an onion’s skin, and its proper color had been restored, though Delphine had been unaware of this.

And now this talk of a raft.

“Did you dream this, daughter?” the priest said, belching terribly at the end of it. His teeth were darker than his skin.

“No. I thought about it. The devil on the road said we would still be clip-clopping around at Christmas. I thought, too, about the wine. It’s very good wine.”

“It is,” both men agreed.

“But what about the wine?” Thomas asked.

“Oh. Yes. They ship it on the river. It would take too long on a cart. Rivers are fast.”

“Some rivers are fast.”

“They’re all faster than a mule because they don’t rest.”

The priest nodded, impressed.

“Agreed. But the Yonne doesn’t go to Avignon,” Thomas said, spitting out his leaf.

“The Rhône does,” said the priest.

The girl filled her bowl again, drinking while the men spoke. Thomas took the spoon of ram’s horn from his hat and chewed it, punctuating his words by poking its gently gnawed end at Père Matthieu.

“What’s the closest city on the Rhône?”

“Lyon.”

“That’s far.”

“A river feeds it, though. I can’t remember the name.”

“The name doesn’t matter. What near town sits on it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You know wine. What wine comes from Burgundy?”

“Burgundy,” the priest said, blinking his bloodshot eyes.

“Don’t be funny. Think.”

“I’m too drunk to think.”

“Then just say something. A wine town. Burgundy. Quick!”

“Auxerre.”

Thomas winced, thinking about their exit across the Pont Roi Louis, where many of those fleeing the town had been hacked apart by something stronger than a man.

“We’re drinking the last from Auxerre. Name another.”

“Arbois? No, that’s Franche-Comté. And it’s straw-colored.”

“The river?”

“No. The wine. From Arbois.”

“What’s its river?”

“I don’t know.”

Thomas grunted. “Name another.”

“Beaune.”

“That’s Burgundy, all right. But what’s the river?”

“I don’t know.”

The conversation continued like that until the girl fell asleep, the priest got too drunk to guide the mule, and Thomas took the reins. Soon the road forked, and a sign stood by the right fork, which led into very pretty woods whose leaves were going soft yellow and startling red.

The priest was puking over the side, oblivious, trying vainly not to get any on his robes. Thomas had enough Latin for this one, though, and he mouthed each syllable.

“We won’t be going to Vézelay,” Thomas said, though only the mule, who twitched an ear in his direction, seemed to hear him. “Hope you weren’t counting on finding a nice jenny-ass there, you grass-eating bastard.”

The mule made no reply.

“I hope you don’t take this personally, but if we build a raft, you’re not coming aboard. Except in our bellies.”

“Not the mule,” the girl slurred, half asleep, halfheartedly striking Thomas with the back of her hand.

“The Saône,” she said.

“What?”

“The Saône feeds the Rhône,” she said dreamily. “This road goes to Beaune. Another road goes to Chalon-sur-Saône. Beaune-Saône-Rhône.”

“Beaune-Saône-Rhône,” Thomas repeated. “Even I can remember that.”

“But we’ll steer around Beaune.”

“Why?”

“Monsters there,” she said, drawing her blanket around her head against the chill.

And she slept.

Père Matthieu woke in the abandoned grain loft he shared with Thomas and the girl, putting his hands immediately to his head, which was splitting. Thomas’s snore, a deep, bullish noise, shook the priest to his bones, and his mouth was so dry he thought it was full of nettles.

The night was dark and cold.

A stream. This loft was near a stream.

He got to his feet, stepped over the knight, and eased himself past Delphine, who was also snoring, and louder than such a small creature should have been able to. He descended the rickety ladder. He pulled his robes aside, meaning to piss against a fence of sticks, but only groaned, unable to start.

“God forgive me my excess,” he whispered, “and I will try never to drink so very much again.”

“Try is the word that trips you, brother.”

The priest fumbled his robes closed and looked for the source of the voice. A monk in Cistercian white stood near him, a silver-white ring of hair around his bald crown.

“I know,” the priest said. “You are right to point out my evasion.”

“God has no love for half measures. I believe you need water. Come with me.”

The priest stumbled through the brush behind this man, who seemed to radiate a calm strength he found irresistible. He wanted to cry. They came to the stream, and both of them bent and sipped water from their cupped hands.

“Are you with an abbey here?” Père Matthieu asked when both of them had slurped their fill.

“I have come home.”

“Did your abbey succumb?”

“All I served with are gone to their reward. And you? I do not think you are Burgundian.”

“No. Norman.”

“You follow a girl.”

“Yes.”

“A girl who is not what she seems.”

The priest chuckled fondly. “Quite so.”

“She seems to be from God.”

Père Matthieu lost his smile at the other man’s implication.

“She is from God. I would stake my soul on it.”

“And so you have.”

The priest stared at the old monk.

“Who are you?” he said after a long moment.

The monk put his hand over the priest’s eyes and closed them, as one might close a dead man’s eyes. At that moment, his headache left him and a great sense of ease filled him.

The old man turned and walked away.

Père Matthieu followed.

When next the old man stopped, he sat down on the side of a hill, the grass and wildflowers of which rippled in the cold breeze. The priest sat next to him, and they both looked out across the dark countryside. One house on the side of a hill opposite had a fire in the hearth. Everywhere else was dark, save above them, where the stars blazed with a sad, desperate light that seemed to Matthieu Hanicotte like the gaze of a mother watching her child wrestle with a killing fever. A comet with a long greenish tail chased two more near the constellation of the Cart.

“What do you have against the girl?” asked the priest.

“You should rather ask why you trust her.”

“She has given me every reason to do so, and none to doubt her.”

“Who was her father?”

“A country lawyer.”

“Or a heretic who fled justice in Langue d’Oc.”

Père Matthieu rubbed his temples, even though they had long since stopped hurting.

“She stopped devils in Auxerre.”

“Or brought them there.”

The priest shook his head and opened his mouth, closing it again.

The weight of the old monk’s stare yoked him, and he rubbed his neck. At length he said, “She is good. We travel with a knight…”

“A thief.”

“A knight who has sinned.”

“A knight who has been spat out by the church. A knight no longer.”

“My point was…”

“What was your point, brother?”

“She is good. She… loves.”

“As Salomé loved Herod.”

“She always counsels peace.”

“When the wicked are near, for she protects them. She will tell the thief to kill when it suits her. But we are wasting time.”

“Who are you?”

The old man got up and walked down the hill. He never looked back to see if the priest was following, and the priest almost did not follow him. Then he realized he was about to lose sight of him in the very dark night, and he would never find him again. So he got up and hurried after him.

The old monk walked quickly now, so much so that the priest had to skip every third step to keep up. They crossed a low stone wall and walked past a living calf, something the priest had not seen for a long while. It was a white Charolais, and it moved away casually, unconcerned with them. Its mother lowed nearby, as faint in the night as a diurnal moon, and it went to her. He stared after the wondrous creature so long he nearly lost his guide.

Who are you

Who are you

Who

“Are you?” the old Cistercian said as the priest drew near him.

“Pardon me?”

“Are you prepared to see what God wants from you?”

The priest did not answer but still followed him, uphill now, across another wall and around a hedge. Now the window that shone across the hill glowed warm before them and they approached a door. The old monk knocked and a woman opened; she was plain and modest, more handsome than pretty, her hair bound in a clean wimple, her apron stained with sauce. The smell of wine-stewed beef rose up and made the priest’s stomach rumble; he had put nothing in it since he had vacated his wine over the side of the cart that afternoon.

“Come in,” she said, looking intimately upon the priest and taking his hand. “Papa!” a girl at the table said, bouncing excitedly on her bench; she was long-headed like him, like his brother. “Papa,” an even younger girl echoed, both of them ecstatic at the sight of him. “Mama said you weren’t coming!”

They were not saying Papa as in priest, but Papa as in father.

It was like a bad joke.

The priest looked for the monk, but he was gone.

The woman took his chasuble and robe off, throwing them in the fire.

“Wait,” he said. “You can’t…”

The woman put her finger to her lips to silence him.

She brought him a coarse wool overshirt and helped him on with it. He had decided this was a dream and was now content to see where it led him. It was not unpleasant.

Except that…

“Mama said you almost went to Hell because you were a bugger. And that you were following a wicked little girl to commit murder. Is that true, Papa?”

“Yes, dear,” he said, smiling at her.

“Well, I’m glad you’re home,” the other one said, smiling and showing the gap where a baby tooth had fallen out.

“I am too,” the mother-wife-woman said, ladling out a rich spoonful of beef and onions and mushrooms on Matthieu’s trencher.

They all watched him.

He ate.

Then they ate as well.

A ripple of gooseflesh went down his arm; nothing had ever tasted so good.

Now his wife brought wine.

At first his stomach quivered at the thought of it, but then a sense of peace came over him. He was about to reach for it, but then the older girl spoke up.

“Papa?” she said.

His hand hovered near the cup.

“Yes?”

“I want to live.”

“Of course you do. We all do.”

“But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t be born unless you renounce your love of men.”

“No… I suppose not. You’re a very smart child.”

“And quit being a priest.”

“I was never a very good priest.”

“And stop that girl.”

The room got just a little darker as smoke from his robes obscured the fire. He could smell them burning.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“Delphine. She calls herself Delphine. But that’s not her name.”

“Did you say… stop her?”

Both girls nodded now, and the elder spoke.

“Stop her with a rusty old sword between her eyes. Or hold her head underwater. Or dash her brains out with a big stick.”

The younger one hit the table three times with her fist for emphasis, making the serving vessels rattle, then smiled.

“Because she’s wicked, Papa. Her father was a Cathar and she serves the devil. And she’s going to commit murder.”

He looked down and reached for the wine, his brow furrowed.

The old monk, who had reappeared at his side, grabbed his wrist before he took the cup and hauled him standing, hurting his shoulder. The monk slapped him hard.

The children started crying, but the monk made the same gesture in the air that he had made on the priest’s eyes to banish his hangover. The girls stopped crying and sucked their thumbs like placid infants. The wife did as well.

He hissed his next words at Matthieu Hanicotte.

“Will you drink your wine before you agree to what is asked of you? God should be your comfort, but you have made comfort your god. What have you ever given up in His name, except the promise of a wife and family you never wanted?”

“How can you ask me to kill a girl?”

“Killing in God’s name is a holy thing.”

The room seemed to spin.

“Pick up that sword.”

“What sword?”

The room and the hearth winked out into darkness, and when Père Matthieu’s eyes adjusted, he was standing near the stream, struggling to start pissing.

He managed.

As relief came to him, he saw a sword, badly rusted, stuck in the bank of the stream. He finished, tucked himself away, and looked again at the sword. It repulsed him.

“Pick it up, sweet Matthieu,” a voice behind him said. A gentle voice. A beautiful voice. “And take it up the ladder.”

He turned now to see Michel Hébert standing nude and glorious before him, his feet in the stream, mud up to his shins as when Matthieu last saw him nude under the burned bridge. The priest walked through the stream to him and put his face quite close to the boy’s, trying to see if the freckle was still in his eye.

The left eye.

“Go up the ladder and do what you have to.”

He could smell Michel’s breath, somewhere between a young dog’s breath and cloves. He could never get enough of that breath in his face.

“But…”

“The knight will sleep through it.”

“Michel… I…”

He tried to kiss the boy, but the boy smiled and moved his mouth away.

“Do it. We’ll kiss, and more, when you get back.”

The priest took the sword out of the bank. He felt the end of it, and it was sharp. He took it to the base of the ladder. If this was a dream, he might do what was asked for in the dream and dream a kiss from the only being for whom he had ever known carnal love.

He was owed at least that.

And perhaps more.

He took the first step.

And the second.

At the third, his testicles turned to ice.

The knight will kill me.

THE FUCKING THIEF WILL FUCKING SLEEP NOW DO IT

He took another rung. And another. And he stood in the loft, looking down at the girl.

None of this is real

He held the sword by the hilt, point down, one hand over the other, his knees bent like a man about to drive a stake into the ground.

Quick so it doesn’t hurt

How can it hurt if it’s not real

Should have wiped the mud off the end at least

The girl hiccupped in her sleep.

He smiled despite himself even as tears ran down his cheeks.

The light was growing less faint.

He saw one of his tears run down the runnel in the blade and perch at the point swaying back and forth, threatening to drop on the child’s nose.

He lifted the point carefully, taking care to lift the drop, until the sword pointed up and the drop ran back toward the hilt.

He exhaled and came to himself.

Good Lord what am I doing

MISERABLE EUNUCH DO IT NOW OR DIE WITH THEM

He went back down the ladder.

The boy was gone.

The monk had returned, but there was something wrong with him.

His eyes were mouths.

They spoke in unison while the mouth below his nose grinned like that of a father about to spank a richly deserving child.

“Too weak, were you? You’ll have to give your gifts back.”

He took the sword from the priest’s hand and threw it so it spun end over end out of sight.

I’ll never hold a sword again.

Then he grabbed the priest’s face with a hand as cold and hard as a horseshoe and forced the first two fingers of the other hand into the priest’s mouth and down his throat, making him gag.

“I thought you liked this. Being penetrated.”

The fingers jammed in hard.

Matthieu vomited the stew he had eaten.

It came out his nose as well as his mouth and burned.

And the monk was gone.

Breathing hard, he went to rest his head on the mule’s side, then climbed into the back of the cart.

Before sleep took him, he saw the girl’s eyes as she peered over the side of the cart at him. Her bare feet must have been on the hub of the wheel.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I had a bad dream,” she said.

“Me too. What was yours about?”

“Saint Bernard.”

“Of Clairvaux?”

She nodded, saying “His abbey was in Clairvaux. But he’s from here. Near here.”

She waited for him to ask.

“What happened in your dream, daughter?”

“He made you kill me.”

The priest shuddered.

Despite the cold air, he broke into a sweat.

“Why would he do that? I heard he was a very good man.”

“My father said he condemned Abelard. He argued against the Cathars. He founded the order of the Templars and told men God wanted them to kill for him.”

The priest’s testicles, which had only just warmed up, went cold again.

“But, surely a saint…”

“He’s not really a saint.”

“No?”

She shook her head.

“Men made him a saint. Not God.”

The priest said nothing.

“He’s in Hell.”

“Oh,” the priest said.

“Or he was.”

The girl blinked a couple of times, still looking at the priest.

“He would hurt me if he could. You wouldn’t let him do that, would you? Hurt me?”

“Not for all the world.”

He could tell by the way her eyes turned up that she was smiling.

“Not even for wine?”

He smiled, too.

“Not even for wine.”

He looked down and noticed that his robes were still on; they had not burned. Though they did smell like a hearth fire.

A rooster crowed, and Delphine went back up the ladder, looking just a little less like a child.

TWENTY-ONE Of Monsters, and of Blessings

Despite the wide berth they gave the city of Beaune, they did see evidence of Delphine’s monsters in the farmlands just south of the town; a tree in the middle of a field had all the leaves stripped from it, and now its branches hung with people and animals, all still as herrings. A fire twinkled at the base of the tree. They were being smoked. A heap of clothes lay nearby, as well as a separate pile of logs to feed the fire. A large, recently dug hole gaped in the side of a hillock not far from the tree; the darkness of this hole was preternatural, seeming to push back against the daylight. It was big enough for a man on stilts to have entered without ducking. At the entrance to the hole was a scattering of feet. Whatever it was, it didn’t like feet. Something moved in the darkness of the hole, and then they heard a sound that was somewhere between a rattling groan and an insect’s buzz. The mule sped up his trot with no encouragement from his driver.

That night and the next day brought them tremendous luck.

The town of Chagny had not admitted them, but three miles on they were able to find a functioning inn that was actually willing to rent them a room, and use of a dry stable. The man who ran the inn was a former Franciscan monk who had left orders and taken a wife, the very same who now served them watery radish soup with some bitter green in it. Outside, near the well, a statue of the saint, covered in little stone birds and well shat on by living ones, looked toward the gate; it was the innkeeper’s avowed belief that the saint himself protected his house from plague, as well as from the things that had hammered their way into Beaune, and sometimes ranged as far south as Chagny.

“Have you seen them?” Thomas asked him.

“Yes,” he said in a very final way, looking down. He said no more about them.

One other guest shared the inn that night: a young merchant from Tuscany who was on his way home from Paris on foot. His French was terrible, but the priest figured out from his badly grafted snatches of Franco-Italian that his wife had gotten a letter to him saying she was still alive. He took it out and cried over it, and asked the priest to kiss it, and to touch it with a rosary. He did.

His translation of news from home gave them a taste of Florentine dark humor; the mass graves, with their layers of bodies, lime, and dirt, had inspired less reverential Tuscans to say the dead had “gone to the lasagna.”

Rinaldo Carbonelli had thick, well-shaped eyebrows over his almond eyes, and Delphine found herself wishing she were the wife who had sent him his letter, alive in Italy with a handsome man walking home to her. She found herself looking at his hands as he spoke, and wondering what those hands would feel like touching her hair; in her innocence, she imagined him petting her hair as if she were a kitten; she knew there was more after that, but she contented herself with letting her thoughts run to the edge of that cliff without looking over. Suffice it to say that she would have very much liked for the Italian to pet her hair.

Her gaze was so intense that the Tuscan caught her looking, and smiled, indicating her to the others with a nod and a flick of his expressive eyes.

“Ragazza,” he said, as if that explained everything, eliciting a chuckle from Thomas.

“You could come with us,” the priest said at one point. “As far as Avignon, at least.” The Italian understood, and nodded slowly, considering.

The sparrow was fluttering in Delphine’s chest now; she was enjoying herself so much mooning over her new infatuation that she wished it would go away, but it fluttered harder and harder until she spoke.

“Please don’t come with us.”

The Italian understood that.

“Why…why you say this thing?”

She just stared at him.

He laughed.

“What, you no like my face?”

She answered him in rapid, perfect, Florentine Italian.

Nobody else at the table could follow what the girl said, but his face went white, and he excused himself and went to bed.

“What did you tell him?” the innkeeper asked, crossing himself.

She looked into her empty soup bowl.

“I don’t know.”

The Italian came with them as far as Chalon-sur-Saône, walking beside the cart on his nimble young legs. He carried a bow and had six arrows left in his quiver, and, soon after their departure, agreed to accompany Thomas into a patch of woods to hunt. Thomas, stripping out of his armor near the cart, guessed from Rinaldo’s gestures that he intended to shoot one arrow, and that he would not shoot a second for any reason whatever. If that was what he said, he proved himself a liar.

They moved as silently as they could in the brown leaves, following a sort of path in the undergrowth that less experienced hunters than the Italian might have missed. To his eye, the broken twigs, missing leaves and bent grass were as plain as a Roman highway; the trail led to a lush dip in the land where crabapple trees had been savaged for their fruit. He pointed and winked at Thomas, splaying his fingers over his head to suggest horns. As if this gesture summoned them, antler marks appeared on the bark of a chestnut tree, with little bits of velvet adhering.

This would be a good place.

The men crouched upwind, Thomas’s straw hat covered in branches, both of their faces darkened with mud; Thomas, having no bow, held his sword over his shoulders, knowing that his limited role encompassed only protecting Rinaldo, and, if they were lucky, hauling back their prize.

They were just about to give up, having been out for two hours or more, their fear of being caught at night too close to Beaune and Chagny finally overcoming their hunger, when they saw the stag. It entered the woods before them at a kingly, slow walk, its coat the same reddish brown as the carpet of leaves below it. Its antlers were magnificent, a trophy Thomas would have loved to set on his hearth in Picardy, though he knew he could never take such a prize, as feeble as he was with the bow. Rinaldo drew his breath in and drew the fletching of the arrow halfway to his cheek; he would pull it all the way and release in the same motion as soon as the deer turned its side or back to them. He never got the chance, though.

The deer heard something moving in the brush nearer to the two men and raised its head. Ten steps closer and Rinaldo would have loosed at its exposed chest, but at this distance he would have to shoot higher to account for the drop, and he didn’t want to strike its head or clip its nose, wounding the magnificent thing for no reason.

The noise came again, a crackling of leaves, louder this time. The deer left, not at a run, but too quickly for the Italian to adjust for both its motion and the saplings it crossed behind. He grimaced with his mouth open, his breath steaming out between his clenched teeth, still tracking the stag in case it turned, but it did not seem likely to do so.

He felt Thomas’s hand on his shoulder and reluctantly turned his head away from the disappearing red deer. Thomas was looking at him as if to say, Can you believe this?

In a time of famine, when poaching laws were forgotten and men had all but emptied the woods of game, one magnificent trophy animal had been saved by a second.

A wild boar snuffled in the brush, as yet unaware of the hunters.

“Porca troia,” Rinaldo whispered, drawing the bow again and loosing.

His arrow sank into the cheek of the wild boar, causing it to squeal and lash out in all directions with its tusked snout. He drew a second arrow, and that was when it locked its black little eyes on him and identified him as the source of its pain.

It charged.

He was now glad for the broad-shouldered Frenchman beside him, whom he had regarded as something of a hindrance on a deer hunt.

This was a goddamned big boar.

Rinaldo knew Thomas had stood up to a crouch and cocked his sword for a two-handed thrust, but he was too busy loosing his second arrow to see that Thomas was smiling like a little boy.

And so it was that the four of them approached Chalon-sur-Saône with their bellies full, with a blanket full of cooked meat in the cart, and in possession of the boar skin that would keep Rinaldo Carbonelli warm on his long trek over the mountains, since the girl had told him he would surely die if he came with them to the river.

He might have dismissed this warning had she not also told him that his wife, Caterina, prayed for him each night, looking out the window that gave on the Arno; that when she prayed, she held between her clasped hands the little figurine of an angel he had carved for her from the bones of the stag he brought her father on the day he asked to marry her.

Although Rinaldo would never see the priest, the girl, or the knight again in this world—he would bid them farewell on the banks of the Saône as they embarked in the company of dangerous men—his hard-won reunion with his Caterina would be celebrated in a public feast for which half the town would gather; the couple’s embraces would inspire a local sculptor to carve an Apollo and Daphne so beautiful that Apollo’s fingers would be worn away with two centuries of women’s kisses.

TWENTY-TWO Of the Fishers of Men

“I told you to go to sleep,” Thomas whispered to the priest.

They stood in the front of the raft, watching the fat orange sun sink on their right.

“I can’t sleep. I’m too…agitated.”

“How are you going to keep watch tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“For Christ’s love, Father…”

“Perhaps you should sleep now and keep watch later.”

“I should be awake when they are.”

Both men turned to look at the men on the rudders, who were moving them back and forth with their strong brown arms to add a little speed. The younger of the two was missing an ear.

A thief.

The captain sat atop the cabin, eating salted herring and drinking beer from a goatskin. He was a lanky, untrustworthy, but highly intelligent fellow with the most decisively separated walleyes Thomas had ever seen. While negotiating the outrageous price of passage with these river men, who were clearly more pirates than raftsmen, it had been difficult to figure out where the captain was resting his gaze. He had undoubtedly used this to his advantage in business as well as war, though he was clearly not half the warrior his first mate was.

The fourth man, the strong one, bent and cocked two more crossbows, his arms getting even thicker as he used his muscles to work the windlass. He had the look of a wrestler, the kind who fought for small purses at fairs. And won them. Once he had fitted the deadly, iron-tipped bolts into their grooves and propped the bows against the cabin, he removed the bolts from the cocked ones and discharged them.

“Resting the crosspiece,” Thomas said. The man knew his weapons.

“Some of them will have to sleep.”

“Yes, probably two while the others steer. I can watch all four of them at once. Can you?”

“Better than I can at night. I don’t see as well at night as I used to.”

Thomas threw up his hands and stepped over Delphine, who was sleeping soundly at their feet, using Thomas’s leather satchel as a pillow. She had made it her practice to sleep or sit on the satchel whenever possible, as it contained their remaining gold and silver coins, as well as a handful of rings and necklaces left over from the spoils of Thomas’s brigandage. The three of them would be in mortal danger if their hosts got a look in that bag, or if the men seemed to be guarding it.

The captain came up to the front now, leaning on his pole. He spoke to them for the first time since they came to terms at the docks.

“Tournus,” he said, pointing his long spear at a cluster of houses over which the two towers of a church peered. Two men with cloths around their noses unloaded three dead women and a Benedictine monk into the water. One of these used a pole to push them out into the current.

“Greetings, friends!” the captain shouted at them. “Is it not a merry day to feed the fish? Merrier still, for you feed them a fisher of men!”

The carters looked up, one of them twitching his arm as though he thought to make a rude gesture but reconsidered when he saw the yellow fish on red strung over the cabin; this was the sigil of the Guild of Simon Peter, the disarming name used by the ring of pirates that controlled the Saône all the way to Lyon.

“Merry enough,” one shouted back submissively, and they turned their backs and wheeled their cart away. The bodies floated near the raft for a short way, as though trying to keep up.

“Sad bastard dolphins we have to play in our wake,” the captain said, spittle flying from his lips. He turned to face his guests. “Have you been to the sea?”

As it was not possible to tell which one he was looking at, both men said, “No.”

“Too bad,” he said. “You may have missed your chance. There’s talk of the sea turning to gravel soon. Or was it glass? Or maybe it will just roll out and keep rolling and never come back. But that’s not all bad. I’d like to have a look at what’s on the bottom. Maybe come back with a mermaid’s ribs for a hat. Eh?”

Neither man responded.

“Eh?” he said again, more forcefully.

“As you say,” said the priest.

He nodded happily, satisfied. There was something weak in this man, Thomas thought. Something that needed to be told he was in charge, where stronger men just knew it. The one with the hammy arms would be captain soon, if he wanted it. Maybe he was more like Thomas had been, though. Happy to fight and take his share. Until he was given the wrong order.

“Captain,” one of the oarsmen said, “that plaguey geezer’s about to bump us.”

The captain turned his attention to where the monk floated on his back, as if at leisure, with his arms trailing beside him. His face, though waxy from the sickness, looked beautiful in the rippled orange water. The captain used his spear to push the dead man farther off.

“You would have liked to float with your arms outstretched like Our Lord, would you not? Float to glory like Our Lord? Maybe you weren’t such a good monk as you thought. Go and ask Saint Philibert, sad dolphin.” Now he called back at the oarsman, “It is Saint Philibert, that abbey?”

“It is,” the oarsman said.

“It’s important to know the names of things,” he said, as if to himself.

Thomas woke to the girl’s fingers pinching his nose. He slapped her hand away and reached for the hilt of his sword, but she held a finger to her lips, then pointed. It was just dawn. The river seemed a mirror of itself from the night before, just the same rose-orange light in the sky and reflected on the water, only now the red ball of the sun was on their left.

The river men were arming themselves.

Thomas kicked the priest, who sat up quickly with fish scales on his cheek, so startled he broke wind.

The raft was closing in on a larger vessel, a barge, riding low in the water with its cargo of stone from the quarries near Tournus. A half dozen stout fellows stood watching the raft approach; it was clear to Thomas that they didn’t know whether they should arm themselves and provoke a fight, or allow themselves to be boarded. Their inaction made the decision for them.

The captain came over to Thomas now, assaulting him with the oniony smell of his recently dyed yellow shirt, saying, “You’ll help us. I doubt it will come to blows, but stand with your sword ready as if you’re one of us.”

Thomas stood, giving his friends a reassuring look. He didn’t believe the bargemen had the stomach for a fight. Still, he traded his straw hat for his chain hood and helmet.

“You know who we are?” the captain shouted.

“Simon Peter’s Guild,” the captain of the other boat said.

“Where’s your banner?”

The bargeman said nothing.

“How am I to know you’ve paid tribute if you don’t fly the proper banner?”

“I haven’t paid.”

“No worries, friend. You can pay now.”

So saying, he grabbed up a pole-hook from the bow and pulled the raft snug up against the barge. The two oarsmen held crossbows now, and the captain, big-arms, and Thomas all stepped onto the other ship. The men suffered their boat to be completely looted, losing all their food, a cask of wine, and a small box of coins that the crew would later make impressed noises over, even though it was slightly less than Thomas and the priest together carried.

All the while, Thomas stood at the ready, though he was embarrassed enough to be back at his old vocation that he didn’t return the hateful glare of one of the young bargemen, who seemed to be working himself up to act foolishly.

Instead, the massive armored man with the scarred cheek and broken nose looked mildly at the boy and said, “Don’t.”

The boy didn’t.

“Do we at least get our whoring banner so we don’t get robbed by the next lot?”

The raft captain, taking up his long spear, said, “But you haven’t sold your stone yet! This was only half the necessary amount. You’ll have to settle accounts with the next boat. But, as a personal favor, I will allow you to keep your cargo.”

“You sure, Captain?” one of the oarsmen said, chuckling a bully’s chuckle. “That’s some really nice granite. I could build a hell of a bridge with granite like that.”

“No, Thierry. Fair is fair. Let them keep it.”

“Thanks,” the barge captain said. “You’re a real friend.”

The captain lost his wagging-dog look and his voice shed its false good humor.

“I’m a better friend than you know, you fat, whoring slug. You’ve been very lucky today, and only because of my Christian spirit. If you’d like to remember me at Mass, my name is Carolus.”

So saying, the walleyed pirate pushed off with the spear, leaving the granite barge to drift.

The raft moved down the river without incident over the next days. The girl slept on the knight’s satchel by day and watched over Thomas and the priest when their sleeping hours overlapped, all the way to Lyon, where the Saône married the glacier-cooled Rhône and took its name. This was the biggest town on the river until Avignon, and the captain and both oarsmen were willing to take their chances with the plague to sample her remaining pleasures. Big-arms stayed on the raft.

“You roll dice?” the pirate asked Thomas.

“Every day I wake up in this world, the same as you.”

Big-arms liked that, and took that as a yes, producing pig-knuckle dice.

The two soldiers gambled for small coins, big-arms winning more often. When the others came they bore bad news about the whores but good news about the alehouse; they shared out generous bowlfuls of beer for everyone and joined in the dicing. The captain remarked, “I like your priest. He doesn’t waste his breath telling us what Christ would and wouldn’t like.”

The priest looked down at his hands.

Later, when the captain and the younger oarsman pissed over the side and the other oarsman went to fetch an instrument, big-arms leaned very close to Thomas.

“You were there, weren’t you?” he said.

“Where?”

The man pointed at the pit in Thomas’s cheek.

He nodded.

“I was there,” big-arms said. “French crossbowmen mixed in with the Salamis. I’ve got one of those, too,” he said, pointing at the scar again, “but I won’t show you where.”

Thomas laughed. They looked at each other for two heartbeats, then looked away. It occurred to Thomas that big-arms hadn’t brought up Crécy while the others were ashore because he hadn’t wanted to linger on that field too long. The man slapped Thomas on the back. There was nothing else to say about it.

Now the older of the two oarsmen returned with his cornemuse and began to play it with some skill. The captain took off his leather shoes and beat time on the raft’s dirty floor, and soon the other oarsman and big-arms started dancing. Thomas joined them, imitating their raftsman’s dance, which involved a lot of heel stamping and sliding of the feet on the gritty boards, all done with the hands on the hips or linking arms.

They called for the priest.

“We’re only supposed to dance at Christmas. And the feasts of Saints Nicholas and Catherine.”

Père Matthieu did sing, though, when the piper left his raftsman’s dances and played a Norman harvest song. The girl sang, too, joining in on the second verse.

For the first time, Thomas allowed himself to think they might just get to Avignon, and that whatever the girl had come to do might just get done.

The raftsmen boarded two more vessels in the next three days: one a fishing boat manned by two frightened teenagers, both missing fingers, and their one-handed father, who surrendered their astonishing catch of pike without incident. The other was a shallow-hulled sailing boat that tried to run. Big-arms cranked the windlass while the younger oarsman and the captain shot bolt after bolt into the ship; a man with a parti-colored cowl took a quarrel in the hip, and he howled lamentably while the other two fought over the limited shelter provided by a wooden chest aft, one getting his scalp grazed so he bled awfully, though the wound was not serious. Neither bothered about the rudder, and the quick little boat ran aground at a bend in the river just as the distance was getting too great for real accuracy.

Big-arms and the younger oarsman searched the boat, the latter pitching the man with the hip wound into the shallows to stop his caterwauling; he managed to scramble onto the bank and limp away in great, loping spasms that made the captain laugh girlishly from where he sat his supervisory post cross-legged atop the cabin. He laughed harder yet when the man collapsed in a field of rotten squash.

The take was unimpressive.

A few coins, a small drum, some extra clothes, and three finches in wooden cages; the oarsman put his foot exactly next to the foot of the wounded man and then made him remove his leather boots.

“You idiots fled to save this shit?” he said, trading shoes, handing the hurt man his worn-out slippers.

The other man, a paunchy youth with soft hands, said, “We did not wish to be harmed for our poverty. We were going to Avignon to seek work at the court of His Holiness—the man you pitched over is a great jester.”

“Well, he sure runs funny.”

The oarsman presented the cages to the captain, who had leapt down from the cabin.

He reached inside a cage, caught the panicked bird with some difficulty and wrung its neck, throwing it at soft-hands. He was reaching for another cage when Delphine ran forward, just escaping the grasp of the priest, who tried to stop her. She wrapped her arms around the cage and sat down, putting her hand over the door. The oarsman tried to yank the cage away, but she held tight, letting him jerk her halfway to her feet. The captain instinctively drew back to strike her, but checked himself, sensing that Thomas had taken a step in his direction, also having noted that big-arms was still on the other boat.

He changed what would have been a vicious backhand into a tousling of her hair, at which she grimaced, clutching the cage more tightly.

“Let her have the birds,” the walleyed man said, proud of his spontaneous magnanimity. “Her papa has been useful.”

“We thank you,” the priest said, as Delphine set the cages down and opened their doors, taking one docile bird and then the other into her hands. She kissed them both, then released them. One flew up into the sky; the other went toward the bank.

The captain turned his head toward Thomas.

“Happy?” he said.

Thomas pulled Delphine behind him.

“So happy I could shit,” he said, sheathing his sword.

Big-arms got back on the raft. The uninjured man tended his friend’s scalp.

Nobody saw the second finch fly into the squash field, where it stayed for a moment before flying up again and into the clouds.

Neither did they see the jester now get to his feet and run toward a farmhouse in the distance, no longer limping.

Big-arms, whose Christian name was Guillaume, had argued against it, but now it was happening.

The captain, seeing that the foolish priest was sleepy, had given him unwatered wine to put him under so he might peek at what their passengers were carrying. Once the priest was asleep, the captain had looked into the knight’s satchel even as the girl slept on it, and the sight of gold had maddened him. He took a chain and a few coins without waking her, but more lurked under her head. He called the others to the rear of the raft and told them the time had come to bid their passengers farewell.

Guillaume and the older oarsman wanted none of it; the oarsman was fine with piracy but felt that harming paying passengers was a kind of oath-breaking.

Guillaume, for his part, felt a deeper loyalty to the knight who had also faced the English at Crécy-en-Ponthieu than he now did to this captain, whose arrogance and madness were worsening by the day. He said it went against his conscience to rob their guests, who had been good and useful companions.

The captain had said, “The guild knows its own, and has no loyalty to any other. It also saw fit to make me captain of this raft, and master of you, even unto your life. We send them from this wicked world, and take upon ourselves the guilt of their wealth. That is my command.”

Guillaume nodded his assent but asked that the girl should be spared and brought to Avignon, if she would go with them after.

The captain had agreed, but Guillaume knew he was lying.

And now it had begun.

The oarsmen had their daggers out and were creeping toward Thomas as if toward a sleeping bear. The captain, holding a brutal, rusty falchion, was on his way to dispatch the priest where he snored sitting up near his empty wine bowl. The stars were very bright above them and the Rhône was creeping slowly, lulling with its mutter, leaving the raft a steady platform for murder. Guillaume had his crossbow at the ready, and two others at his feet. If the knight stirred, he was to shoot him.

The oarsman’s knife was almost at the knight’s throat.

Guillaume only knew he was going to do it a heartbeat before he did; the thought came to him and seemed so clear and correct that his fingers squeezed the lever almost on their own.

He shot the oarsman.

The man made a small gagging sound and jerked, reaching for the quarrel in his back.

He dropped his dagger pommel first, and the sound woke Thomas.

The younger oarsman looked back at Guillaume with wide, betrayed eyes, and at that moment Guillaume’s sight went black as the captain’s falchion struck him on the crown and he fell.

Thomas had been dreaming of his wife; she was crying, pounding the heel of her hand against the table and shaking with something between remorse and outrage. It seemed wrong that her small hand had made such a loud noise on the table, a noise like dropped metal, and Thomas opened his eyes to see two men standing over him, one of them twisting, grabbing at his own back, the other turning now to look behind him. Farther down the raft, big-arms went to his knees and the figure that had struck him moved toward Thomas.

He scooted forward on his butt and kicked the feet out from under the confused oarsman while the wounded one managed to touch the feathered part of the quarrel in him, the pain making him vomit all over himself. He fell suddenly, and then lay still.

Thomas just had time to get to his feet, taking a slash from the falchion that numbed his mailed forearm and then kicked the captain in the hip to push him back. He used his still-sheathed sword to slap the younger oarsman across the head, knocking him down, and then he drew his weapon.

The girl was awake now, howling, “Stop! Stop!” at the brawling men, shaking the priest to wake him.

The captain sprang back, sheathed his falchion, and grabbed up his long spear.

“Don’t kill him!” the girl yelled.

“I won’t if he jumps over!” Thomas answered.

Guillaume fell on his stomach, but then struggled up on all fours, panting like a dog, trying to make sense of the chaos around him, and of the blood pooling under his face.

The younger oarsman, also stunned, shook his head clear and dashed between Thomas and the captain. He grabbed the girl by her hair now and exposed her throat. The priest tried to grab his arm but was viciously elbowed in the nose and fell backward.

“Drop the sword or I’ll open her!” the oarsman said.

“Don’t kill them, please!” the girl yelled, as if she were not the one closest to death. Her hands were on the man’s knife arm, but they were little more use than a cat’s paws would have been.

Then she shut her eyes because she felt the oarsman’s arms tense and knew he was about to cut her throat.

Except that he didn’t.

Big-armed Guillaume, blinking blood out of his eyes, had crawled over and now held the oarsman’s arms from the outside, pulling them apart as slowly and irresistibly as a starfish opening a clam, clutching as hard as he could and hoping his blood-slick hands kept their grip; if he slipped, the other man’s knife would all but cut the girl’s head off.

“Don’t!” she yelled again, still at Thomas, who was coming at the captain, ducking his spear slashes laterally, but unable to get inside because the other man circled so quickly.

Guillaume had the oarsman spread-armed now, and the priest hit him in the face with his wooden bowl so hard he broke it; the oarsman dropped his knife. Guillaume let the man’s arms go, then heaved him over the side, passing out as he did so that one arm trailed in the cold water.

The girl got to her feet, as did the priest, and she stood behind him, wanting to jump between Thomas and the captain, but knowing the captain would kill her.

“Drop that whoring thing and jump if you want to live,” Thomas said to the walleyed man.

“I don’t need to live,” the captain said, “I’ve already seen the sea!” and, keeping his gaze deceptively on Thomas, he lashed out sideways with his spear, just missing the priest, whom he would have impaled.

The girl cried out in a startled squeak.

Thomas attacked the spear rather than the man now, driving it down with his sword and stepping through it, breaking off the first third. The captain, not missing a beat, whipped the remaining part of his shaft around and caught Thomas a glancing blow on the shoulder that also struck his head, rattling him even through his chain hood.

It wasn’t enough.

Thomas cut the man’s arm off just below the elbow.

He looked stupidly at it where it lay, and bent to pick it up with the remaining one.

“Thomas!” the girl yelled at him. “Thomas!”

She meant to make him spare the beaten man, if his life could still be saved at all, but her words had the opposite effect; the captain’s jab at the priest had clipped her below the mouth; not much, but enough to beard her chin in blood.

When Thomas saw that the girl was cut, he breathed out like a bull, grabbed the dazed captain’s hair, yanked his head back and cut his throat with the long, notched blade. He took his time about it.

The girl screamed, “Noooo!” and then she just said, “No,” and she let the priest take her in his arms even though the tears she thought herself about to shed didn’t come.

The captain fell so his head lolled back and his open throat bled into the river. Thomas watched this for a moment, then wiped his sword.

“I told you not to,” the girl said, but her face betrayed her relief that the hurtful man was gone.

“We’re going to pay for that,” she said.

“I’m ready,” said Thomas.

“I’m not,” she said, and looked at the water. Thomas rolled the captain’s limp body off the raft, and it sank as if pulled down.

A fucking hand!

The raft drifted sideways and into the darkness.

When the sky got light enough for the work that had to be done, Guillaume bowed his head and let Thomas stitch him. Thomas had sat with Guillaume through the last hours of darkness, holding the captain’s extra shirt to the wound as the big man shivered and swore. The bone needle and twine had also come from the captain’s trunk.

Guillaume was strong, and he lived.

For a time.

TWENTY-THREE Of the Island of the Dead

At first it was not easy for the knight and priest to control the raft, but the soldier told them what to do until he was strong enough to take an oar himself. On the second day after the fight, he and Thomas were bending their bodies into the effort of wagging the oars of the raft behind it, pushing it forward just that little bit faster than the current, telling stories and sharing jokes.

“What will you do with yourself?” Thomas asked.

“I’ll keep on for Avignon. I’ll sign on for the new crusade.”

Thomas’s face soured at the memory of the knight and his retinue that passed them close to Auxerre.

A devil and a host of the dead

“Some face you pull. Do you not love the thought of Jerusalem in Christian hands again? It might be just the thing to quench God’s wrath at us.”

“About that,” Thomas said. “What have we done to make God so mad at us? What have we done that our fathers and their fathers did not do?”

“They were punished, too. The year I was born, the famine near made my mother’s milk dry.”

“It can’t have been that bad; look at the size of you.”

But it was that bad, and Thomas remembered it well; for nearly five years, when he was first a page and then a squire, the crops drowned in the rain and murrains killed the beasts; a hanged man had disappeared from the gibbet, and everyone knew the farmers on the edge of town had eaten him. Only the kindness of Thomas’s seigneur had kept his family from taking such desperate measures.

Père Matthieu drew closer, waiting for his chance to join the conversation. The girl ate a salted fish and stared at the water.

“We have famine, too,” Thomas rejoined, “on top of war and pestilence. How are we so wicked as to deserve all of this?”

“Well, you may not be wicked, but I’m wicked enough for both of us.”

“If you were wicked, I’d be in that river. All of us would. You’re a good man, Guillaume.”

“That wasn’t goodness. That was fellowship.”

“Martial camaraderie,” said the priest.

“Fellowship will do,” said Guillaume, nodding his head at the priest as if to say, Can you believe him? Then Thomas was struck funny and laughed, looking not at the priest but at Guillaume.

The priest laughed, too.

“What?” the big-armed man asked.

Thomas said, “I should trim that last stitch. When you jerked your head it stuck straight up. You look like a sour apple with a little stem.”

His face flushed red, though he was smiling.

“And you look like…”

“What?” Thomas dared him.

“The ass of…”

“The ass of what?”

The soldier thought for a moment.

“Something I wouldn’t want to walk behind.”

Even the girl laughed at that.

“Even if we are wicked…” Thomas said, but the soldier cut him off.

“Everyone is wicked.”

“What about her?” Thomas said, pointing a thumb at Delphine.

“Well, I don’t know her, do I? She doesn’t look rotten, but she could be. Or maybe she will be later. Everyone sins. Isn’t that right, Father?”

“Undoubtedly,” Père Matthieu said, with some enthusiasm, glad the men had moved from martial stories about camp and training (though never Crécy) to something he knew how to talk about. “Man is born into sin. All because of Adam.”

Guillaume said, “Mostly Eve, my priest told us.”

Delphine looked up from the water now.

“That’s not fair.”

“How’s that?” said Guillaume.

“She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Huh,” the priest said, trying to knock the rust off his rhetoric, but failing to find the proper argument.

“I told you everyone was wicked,” said the soldier. “Her sin is that she goes against the teachings of the church.”

The priest said, “May not a man be tempted by a sinful child?”

“As we are now,” laughed the soldier.

The girl thought, absently fingering the scab on her chin, and said, “Yes. But what of a child tempted by a sinful man?”

“As Guillaume was, in the field, by an uncle. Two uncles,” Thomas said.

“Don’t be crude,” she said. “This is important. Is the child misled by the man more sinful than the man misled by a child?”

“I should have warned you her father was a lawyer,” said Thomas.

“Are you not her father?”

“Christ, no. I’d have shaken that out of her.”

“It’s never too late,” said Guillaume.

“Oh, I fear it is.”

“You haven’t answered the question,” Delphine said.

“I’m just going to pull my whoring oar,” said the man.

“Me too,” said the knight.

“Are men who swear foul oaths during a conversation about God fit to point out sin in someone else?” said the girl. And she ate her fish right down to the tail, looking more than a little proud of herself.

At the end of the third day after the fight, just at dusk, they came to a dam in the river. At first it seemed to be something men had made with logs, but as they grew closer, it became clear that the obstruction was composed mostly of dead cows, sheep, and the bodies of men and women. Dead fish, heaps of them, also glittered in the last of the sunlight.

“How the Christ are we to get around that?” Thomas said.

Guillaume shook his head.

“Shit, what is it? You know this river.”

The big-armed man shrugged his shoulders.

The raft drew closer.

One of the cows moved now, but not of its own power—something under it had shifted, causing it to lurch in the water and bump against the other flotsam.

“I think we should pull to the shore,” the soldier said, and the priest said, “Yes. Yes, please.”

They turned the oars, and the raft turned a little but just kept heading for the island of dead things; they wrenched the oars with all their strength now, leaning back, but still the raft moved downriver, though it faced diagonally.

Something was pulling it.

The girl whimpered and took up the flute-shaped box around her neck, opening the tiny hinges. The priest crossed himself and looked over the side; something white bobbed in the water not far below the surface, and it seemed as though something viscous and opaque had formed itself into long ropes. That was what had the raft; that was what reeled it in.

Other white things bobbed as well; one of them now rushed past the vessel, and the priest saw it was a sheep’s head—but the head was encased in a kind of gelatinous creature the size and shape of a large basket; it pulsed itself to move, opening and closing itself like a flower, its rim fringed with reddish purple tendrils that trailed behind it.

“God preserve us, please, please,” Père Matthieu said. The men at the oars stopped trying to use them to move the boat and came to look at what the priest was gaping at.

Now several of the jellied things pulsed underwater around the raft, seeming to glow with their own faint light; at the center of each of them was the head of a man, woman, beast, or child.

The raft lurched against the dam of bodies, none of which had heads attached. Thomas looked at the nearer shore and removed his helm and chain hood. Guillaume, seeing his intention, began to help him off with his surcoat, but it was too late.

One of the things flopped onto the raft.

The head in the middle of this one was decomposed, but not so much they could not tell its filmy eyes were set too far apart and looking in different directions. It pulsed and slithered forward, its frill of tentacles waving in the air now. Thomas lashed at it with his sword, but it parted around his blade and did not suffer. The girl tried to touch it with her spear, but it twitched away from her, one of its frills brushing her wrist in riposte.

It stung her.

She cried out in pain and nearly dropped the spear; that brief caress had burned like touching a hot coal. The priest pulled her back.

Now another one, with an old woman’s head at the middle of it, flowed up from the river onto the raft.

Yellowish tentacles, presumably from a much larger cousin of theirs, began to rise up from below and wrap themselves around the raft, causing a corner of it to dip underwater. Desperate, Thomas writhed out of his surcoat, but the chain hauberk was still on him, threatening to pull him down like so many bricks if he went over.

He had no time.

The tendrils yanked harder, pulling the raft at a sharper angle, causing some of their cargo to slide forward. A case of weapons slid into the water; now the wrapped salt cases were moving, too.

Salt!

The priest ran for the salt and began working at the twine that kept the oiled cover on it.

Delphine backed up, lashing at the first horrid thing with her spear, though she missed and was stung every time; her wrist had swollen and she could barely feel her hand.

Worse than its stings were its words; it spoke to her, and even though the mouth of the captain’s head moved in its viscous host, she wasn’t sure if the voice was only in her thoughts or not:

I AM CAROLUS THAT WAS A GIFT FROM CAROLUS CAROLUS AND WHAT IS YOUR NAME YOU’LL TELL ME WHEN I TAKE YOUR HEAD UNDER WITH ME TO THE BEAUTIFUL THE LIGHTLESS BOTTOM OF THE SEA WHERE THE DROWNED WILL MARRY US

Guillaume grabbed an axe and hacked at the jaundiced ropes hauling the raft under, but some of these lashed about and stung him, too. Thomas sidestepped the second of the jellied things, which were not graceful out of water, and saw what the priest was doing. He stepped over and cut the twine. The priest opened a sack and flung it now, hoping he was right about its properties.

The properties of salt.

He was.

The one he salted twitched and recoiled at the first grains of the desiccant, and, when showered with a proper fistful, browned and died, melting from around the stinking head of the woman, which now lay still and dead.

Thomas sheathed his sword and opened two sacks, grabbing one in each fist; he hurled these at the monster that was hurting Delphine and it, too, hissed and died its second death, leaving the captain’s head openmouthed in a rictus of betrayal and pain.

The sun was long gone now, and the gloaming was upon them.

The water shone with phosphorescence; it would have been impossible to count the number of them moving about in the river.

“Salt!” Thomas yelled to Guillaume. “Salt the bastard that’s sinking us!”

He turned now and ran for the sacks, as Thomas also went to grab more, but a fresh bloom of tentacles rose from the river and lashed the fore of the raft, pulling it so sharply that the salt, the weapons, the fish, the men, and the girl all went into the cold water.

They plunged into the river, which was mercifully shallow here, having flattened out to flow around the dam as best it could, perhaps thirty yards from the shore. At once, the priest grabbed for Delphine and made for the bank, half swimming and half stumbling on the bottom.

At the same time, Guillaume put himself under Thomas and hoisted him to help keep his head above water.

They got ten yards before the things realized where they were.

And the stinging began again.

The large one, visible now that night had come, shone dimly as a sort of luminous, grayish-white sail in the middle of the dead island; it could not move from the deeper middle of the Rhône, but it sent out long strands of its underside, trying to wrap them around the fleeing men and the fleeing child, which it wanted most. Its tendrils smoked and broke when she touched them with her stinger, but the smaller swimmers were stinging them dead.

Thomas lived because his armor and surcoat protected him from the worst of the stings. Delphine lived because the priest used his body to shield her.

Guillaume was taken.

He had been pushing Thomas forward, but the things had stung his submerged groin and legs countless times, and he fell behind, jerking now with every sting.

Three or four of them crowded around him now and brushed him all over with their frills.

The poison in him stopped his heart.

He went still and sank.

The tentacles from the big one webbed him now; they pulled his head from him and reeled it back into itself, where a new swimmer would be made. Guillaume’s body was pulled into the island.

Thomas, unaware of Guillaume’s fate and mad to get out of the river, strode through the shallower water now, bulling forward so as not to slip under; he caught up with the envenomed priest, who was barely moving, his remaining force going to his arms, which held the girl up and out of the water.

She had passed out.

She was dead weight.

And yet he held her.

The knight would never forget the image of the faltering priest holding the girl up; how like the raising of the Eucharist it looked.

Thomas, kicking one of the swimmers out of the way, grabbed the priest’s belt, hauling him the last yards to the shore. The priest wanted to fall, but Thomas would not let him; not until they reached a small road by the river, crossed that, and made their way to a field gone fallow and wild with lavender bushes past their flowering.

They were almost in Provence.

When the men and the girl were clear of the water, the tentacles from the thing in the island whipped around furiously, making a small rain fall around it, and, from below, a ghastly moaning came from the submerged and captive mouths of the dead.

It was supposed to take the girl.

It would be punished.

The island bobbed and shifted and moved south as the abomination in its middle dragged its prizes down the Rhône and to the sea.

TWENTY-FOUR Of the Cottage, and of the Song

Thomas took the girl from Père Matthieu, hoisting her over his shoulder in the same way that Jacquot had so long ago on that rainy afternoon in Normandy. The knight pulled the priest along by the arm for as far as the cleric could walk, which was not far; he was struggling to breathe, and his face had swollen so badly his eyes had shut. He looked dead already. He collapsed in a field not far from a house where the light of a hearth fire danced behind closed shutters.

Thomas, dripping and cold in his armor, laid the girl down next to the priest. He knew they would both need warmth—he must go to the house, and he must hurry—but the priest sounded as if he were choking even now. Thomas stripped down to his shirt and breeches and propped Père Matthieu’s head up as best he could with the soaked gambeson he wore beneath his chain mail, and that seemed to help.

The priest pawed the air blindly with one shaking hand, and Thomas squeezed it.

“Don’t die, bugger,” he said, now picking up the girl and sloshing through the high grass and wildflowers toward the cottage.

Dogs barked at him from inside, and he heard a goat bleat as well. A shadow blocked the firelit gaps in the shutters as someone inside peeked at him. He held the girl out as if she were his bond of peace.

“I am unarmed. I need help.”

“Are you sick?” an old man said.

“No.”

“Well, I am. I buried my last son yesterday and today I can’t stop sneezing. I know what that means.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Neither am I.”

“Our ship sank in the river. My daughter will die without warmth.”

“She’ll die if she comes in here, like as not. There’s a horse blanket in the stable, if nobody’s taken it.”

“I want to bring her near the fire. Please.”

“Your choice,” he said, and drew the bolt, letting the door swing wide.

The goat ran out but stayed near the house.

The dogs whimpered and barked uncertainly until their master kicked them, which was what he always did to show them a visitor was safe, so they stopped and settled near the fire, one of them halfheartedly wagging her tail. They were kicked again to clear a spot for the girl, who was waking up now.

She whimpered.

“What happened to your faces?” the old man said.

“River. Something in it stung us.”

He looked at the old man now, with his fine white hair plastered to his head, and saw the sorrow in his eyes, and the sag of the skin around them. The man looked gray. The man looked sick.

“Stung you? I’ve fished that river fifty years and nothing ever stung me.”

“I’ll talk later. Our priest dies tonight, but not in a field.”

The old man looked Thomas over but then sighed, concluding that he had nothing to lose by trusting him; death at this giant’s hands would be kinder than what would come in a day or two.

And it would be nice to see a priest.

“Bring him, then.”

The old man sneezed three times in a row and crossed himself as Thomas limped off into the darkness beyond the door.

The female dog licked the priest’s face.

Thomas went to push it away, but Delphine pointed at the priest’s mouth, which bore a hint of a smile, so Thomas acceded. He wondered how long the man had left—he had thrown up violently and now he couldn’t stop shaking; worse, he fought for every breath.

But he did not cry out.

“You might not have been a soldier, bugger, but you’re tough.”

“Stop calling him that,” said the girl.

Thomas turned an angry glance at her but softened it immediately.

“Yes.”

He put his hand on the priest’s chest.

The priest fought one of his slitted eyes open and looked at the knight. Then he looked up and past him, pointing at something on the wall.

A lute hung diagonally, covered in dust, near several upside-down bouquets of dried flowers.

Thomas turned now to the old man and said, “Do you play?”

“I did,” he said, holding up two hands with gnarled fingers. “I thought I wanted to be a troubadour, but then I married.”

“Can you play at all?”

“Maybe a little.”

The old man clambered onto a stump and pulled the instrument down from its pegs, blowing a plume of dust off it. He tried to tune it, but couldn’t manage with his wrecked fingers; he plucked a few sour strings and limped through half a Provençal love song, singing in his croaking voice; then he couldn’t stand the sound of himself anymore, and he stopped.

He sneezed, wincing, putting his finger to his neck and feeling for the first time the exquisitely painful, acorn-sized lump there.

“And so,” he said, letting the lute dangle from his hand.

He looked at the man dying by the fire, and at the sadness in the knight’s face, and he thought about the shallow graves near the lavender. All he could do was to chuckle without humor, coughing as he did, shaking his head at the lies he’d believed in his youth about God’s love and mercy.

At least there might be someone to bury him now, in the lavender, near all that he had loved.

The girl held out her hand for the lute.

He narrowed his eyes; she seemed half asleep, and he knew no young girls who played.

Yet, when he handed it to her, she tuned it expertly.

“I had no idea,” Thomas said, but she ignored him and he was silent.

She played.

She sang.

It was a song Thomas dimly remembered from his wedding feast, when his wife’s eyes looked so kindly upon him; he had thrown a handful of sweetened nuts into his mouth, and his new, heavy ring had hit his tooth, making him swear, making her laugh. The whole table had laughed.

From that day forward, three taps of her ring on anything meant, Do you remember our wedding day? and three taps on his part meant, God, yes.

He recalled it all quite sharply: the smell of bergamot in her hair, the whiteness of her neck, her eyes pear-green, how sweet the marriage bed had been. How, even after years of amorous tusslings with camp women and kitchen girls, he had stood nervously while the old women took the ribbons off his verge, looking at this beauty whose pale, lovely belly was his to put children in and whose mouth was his to kiss for as long as she lived.

Or, as it turned out, until he left for war.

The old man knew this song, too; it was the one he had learned in Valence his seventeenth year, in the music teacher’s studio above a candle shop, where those gorgeous sounds had married themselves to the smell of tallow such that even fifty years later he could not smell candles in church without being transported. It was this song, more than any other, that made him want to travel with his lute; it was this one he played to seduce the chestnut-haired girl whose pregnancy anchored him on this little patch of land forever.

The priest also remembered the song. He had heard it just before he went to take orders, when the bishop’s personal musician came to the lord’s castle and hushed the room with it, making it seem possible to Matthieu that a greater world lay beyond the disappointment of his father and the vanity of his brother; a world where God’s love was unfiltered by priests or texts and could be had freely by looking up at the sky. Or hearing a man sing. It was a promise of joy he would not feel again until the May before the Great Death came, a joy made even brighter by how swiftly it was seized back again, how much it cost him.

It had never occurred to him that a female voice might animate those fondly remembered lyrics even more sweetly than that long-ago minstrel in the bishop’s train, but now it did.

The next two days would be hard.

Thomas would dig Père Matthieu’s grave as their host burned with fever and lost his reason; he would pull Matthieu from under the arms while his feet dragged and the girl cried and he got a last noseful of the priest’s woolly, winey, lonely smell. The following day Thomas would dig another grave and lay the old man in it without ever learning his name, though he knew the name of the wife, because it was to her the old man addressed his last words. On the third day, he and the girl would make for Avignon, pulling the little goat on a rope, trying to call the dogs to follow them; but the male would stay whimpering in his master’s house and the female would lie on his grave, wagging her tail at them until their forward motion eclipsed her behind a stand of goldenrod.

That would be tomorrow.

For this moment, all three men remembered the best hours of their lives.

When the song finished, the priest spoke.

“The river,” he said, and Thomas thought he meant the Rhône, the one that had killed him.

“River froze last winter… saw you on skates of horse’s shinbones… and now… so white… your legs… not red at all.”

Thomas understood now.

“Moon’s light… on you…”

He wanted to turn his gaze away at this talk of love between men, but couldn’t; he knew it was the last he would see of this flawed priest who had become so dear to him so quickly. This was harder than the comte’s death. For all his goodness, the comte was not gentle; he was of this world, and of the brutality of the world. This man, Matthieu Hanicotte, seemed to have been misplaced here.

He hoped there was wine in his Heaven.

Could a sodomite attain to Heaven? He remembered the priest holding the girl up out of the water as the abominations stung the life from him.

Hoc est corpus meum.

If that was not good enough, nothing would be.

“Robert…” he said now, grabbing Thomas’s hand.

“Thomas,” the knight said in the husky voice of one fighting with tears, “I am Thomas.”

“No… find Robert… tell him…”

“Who’s Robert?”

“My brother… tell him…”

“Tell him what?”

The priest worked one eye open again and looked at Thomas, breathing with great difficulty.

“What do you want me to tell him?”

The priest smiled.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He breathed three more hard breaths, each one longer in coming, and then he stopped.

Thomas had seen so many die that his hand moved with the reflex to close the priest’s eyes, but they were already glued shut for good.

“Play another song, would you?” the old man said.

Delphine looked up at him, surprised he was looking at her.

He repeated himself, and she looked down at the instrument in her lap as though it had just appeared there. Her tears fell on its face.

“Play us something sad and sweet.”

“Go on,” the knight said. “I don’t think his soul’s so far above us yet.”

She gave them a look and a sad smile that puzzled the old man, but Thomas had seen enough from her to understand.

She doesn’t know how.

It wasn’t her who played.

Later that night, while the old man and Thomas stole a few hours’ sleep, Delphine went to Matthieu’s cold body. She put her finger below his nose and felt nothing. She sensed herself on the verge of some great blasphemy but felt so angered at the sweet priest’s death that she didn’t care if she made God angry now.

It would serve Him right.

I can’t think like that.

She prayed.

“Let me do this, please, work through me.”

She pried open the priest’s waxy mouth and breathed into it, as if she were God Himself breathing life into Adam’s dead clay.

Nothing.

She tried to conjure the feeling of the sparrow fluttering in her chest, and she thought she did, but wasn’t sure. She sensed that she could almost do this, that with just a little help…

Is this a sin?

Delphine breathed into his mouth again.

His big, cool hand, into which she had slipped her fingers, squeezed hers gently.

Her heart beat like a rabbit’s in her chest.

She almost laughed with joy.

And then the hand relaxed.

No!

She breathed into his mouth again.

Nothing.

PLEASE, she thought, he’s so good I need him please I love him!

Now the fluttering, different from her racing heart.

Now her answer.

Leave him with us, little moon.

You’re not strong enough for that.

Not yet.

She shook her head against this denial.

She blew into the dead man’s mouth a dozen more times, but his fingers never moved again, and, when she began to have the feeling she was troubling him, she went to a corner and sobbed until she washed the whites out of her eyes.

TWENTY-FIVE Of Delphine, and of the Scarecrow

Delphine traced her fingers on the sleeping knight’s face.

ThomasThomasThomasThomas.

She touched him lightly enough that she knew he would not stir; he slept like a soldier, always set to spring awake at a strange sound, but he seemed to know it was her hand upon his face, and that she was no threat to him.

But I am.

The land was drier now, rockier. Warmer. The sky blazoned its unquenchable Provençal blue over plane trees with yellow-green leaves and bark like linen. It had not rained since they left the old man’s house, and the vines were still green here. They had stopped in a shallow cave near a stream, exhausted after two days on foot. They had sold the goat to a Provençal family the day before, Thomas gesturing his way through much of the exchange, getting in return a hot meal and a small pouch of silver that wouldn’t get them far.

Thomas had told her flatly that he intended to steal the first horse they saw, but they saw horses only when troops of men, sometimes soldiers, sometimes laborers, headed south and past them. It had not seemed plausible that any of these groups would turn their horses over to one man, no matter how big and dangerous he looked, so Thomas stole nothing.

It wasn’t going to work like this.

She had been thinking about it for both days as they walked.

She had prayed, and prayed hard, for a dream to tell her what to do. In the dream, she saw the city of Avignon lying before her, a little below her as if she were a bird; and then the city filled with birds that flew about and ate a multitude of flies. She did not see herself or Thomas, nor did she have any sense of what she was supposed to do there.

It made her angry.

She tried to imagine what her father would do, but she already knew, and it scared her. Her father would not want to bring harm to another. How many were gone now because of her? Annette and her husband, the soldier on the raft.

And now funny, sad-eyed Père Matthieu.

Even an angel of God.

This was not counting the three men Thomas had slain.

Her father would not bring this knight any farther to kill or, worse, get killed himself. And what was she becoming now, to think it better if Thomas killed another than that any harm should come to him? That was the way everyone thought, protecting the beloved at the cost of the stranger.

She would go on alone.

Her fingers lingered just below his nostrils, and the feel of his living breath pleased and thrilled her.

If God wanted her in Avignon, He would have to get her there safely without using Thomas and then casting him away when he was no longer needed.

Am I tempting God or doing His will?

Mother Mary, help me.

She climbed to the top of a rocky outjut full of ocher and crowned with thorny bushes and bushes whose leaves flashed silver undersides when the wind blew. And the wind did blow here, not quite cool, but neither warm. Just hard. She gathered her new horse blanket, the one from the old man’s stable, around her shoulders. A mountain rose to the south, slightly blurred with haze, protected by a pack of smaller, sharp mountains that seemed ready to intercept anyone who tried to approach the large one. She saw the Rhône snaking south to her right, deceptively blue.

Come get your raft dear

Follow me to the city of your dying

She wanted to cry but pushed that down and lifted her chin.

Her shoes were nearly worn through. The road that had been punishing her feet lay close to the river.

Romans made that.

How do I know this?

I’m becoming something.

She turned now and looked for Thomas, conflicted about whether she hoped to see him. She knew he would be following her—there was no mystery about where she was going—but she was sure she had a long head start. Her heart sank just a little to see that the road behind her was empty.

She wanted to play her bird flute, but it had fallen out of her pouch in the river. Her mother’s comb had not, and she put it to her lips now, blowing through its teeth, but unable to get anything like music out of it.

She walked on.

As late afternoon came on, she found a pretty little farmhouse roofed with the lazy U-shaped tiles they used here. Whoever had been here must have left; she found nothing in the house but furniture and tools. She went to the well in the back, her throat parched, and started lowering the bucket. She stopped, though, when she first smelled, then saw how rancid the well was.

Very little water pooled in that well, not at all enough to cover a man’s mostly skeletal remains bunched at the bottom, his back twisted so his skull and torso faced the wrong way, the eye sockets drilling up at her.

An accident? Did people still die of those?

Then she saw the child’s skull, just the top and one eye visible, one small foot perched on a rock.

No. He threw the body in and jumped.

May God forgive him, since he couldn’t forgive God.

Can I?

She crossed herself.

Did the child’s skull move?

Were two eye-pits now visible?

Join us! Tell us stories about the world where the sun shines all day!

She went back toward the road.

The bucket’s rope creaked.

Her hand went to the flute-shaped box around her neck.

She walked faster.

She couldn’t find any water near the road or in the several houses she visited. She did, however, spend nearly an hour crouching in a vineyard where the dark little grapes had missed their harvest time, some of them beginning to pucker at the stem. She stuffed her mouth with them almost to the peril of her fingers until she vomited, then slowed down, eating a little more and napping under an iron-wheeled cart; she got her strength back, but after another hour on the road her thirst returned.

Still no Thomas.

She chided herself for looking.

One house was occupied, its shutters flung wide, but two men quarreled there; she saw their shapes move in the darkness of the house, their angry, bearded faces illuminated in flashes as they circled each other and took turns passing through a swath of sunlight where roof tiles were missing. Likewise, she could understand only flashes of their southern language, which was like French but not French:

“Hate you… your… kill you… No, no, You… MINE… CHRIST… last time…”

She hugged the limestone wall near the house and kept on, tempted by their well but not wanting to risk being seen. A skinny pig in an enclosure of twined-together branches saw her and snuffed the air at her, but then rolled in the little bit of mud near its trough. She leaned over and stole a palmful of water from that trough, and then scurried on, her thirst worsened.

It was only when she was out of earshot that her fear gave way to pain and her limp returned.

She went to the Rhône an hour before sunset—she would want to be away from it before the sun slipped behind the hills.

No bodies floated there, and no monsters shouldered up from the river’s middle. She saw nothing but weeds on the sandy bottom near the shore; half of a wrecked fishing boat mudded in the shallows looked to have been there a long time, perhaps since before the world and Hell began to couple.

The wind stung her with grit and chopped the surface of the river, but she knelt in the shallows, happy for the cool water lapping at her knees. She cupped her hands to her mouth and slurped, her lips stinging insignificantly just before she swallowed and her cooled, slaked throat became the glad center of her awareness.

She took off her stiff, almost formless shoes, delicately so as not to snap what was left of the thong that wrapped around her ankles, and put her feet in the water.

It was good.

She felt herself smiling for the first time since Père Matthieu died.

Delphine started awake with the feeling that someone was watching her. She opened her eyes, but the night was so dark they were useless.

Where am I?

Think!

The old man’s house?

No.

She remembered now; the priest was dead and she had left Thomas—she was alone. But where?

The convent.

The wind whipped outside, moaning in little nooks of the stone building. She panted, scared of the dark, scared of her solitude.

But someone was watching her—she was sure of it.

Who or what could see in this pitch?

“I hear you breathing, child.”

A woman’s voice. Not unfriendly.

But all the nuns in this little grotto convent were dead; she had seen them arranged in the garden, their faces wrapped tightly in cloths, nearly skeletal arms clasped as if in prayer and wound with wooden rosaries. She remembered that several of these cadavers had no arms on them, but she had seen the human body so abused in so many ways in the last three months that she gave it no further thought.

Despite the sadness in the garden, the building itself had been empty and had offered protection from the wind. She liked the stone cross over the chapel.

But now.

Who was in the room with her?

“You needn’t breathe like a hunted thing. You rest in the arms of the Lord tonight.”

She was in the chapel. She remembered now, an old stone dome near rows of lavender past its blooming time, and a palm tree! She had never seen a palm tree before. The wind made its leaves rattle, and it was browner than she thought a healthy one should be, though not from thirst, surely? It inclined gently toward a statue of Mary with neither crown nor scepter nor babe.

“Who are you?” the girl asked.

“A sister. Sister Broom, if you like. I clean up here.”

“Will you light a lamp, Sister?”

“I haven’t one. I see quite well in the dark. The older sisters who did not see so well have no need of lamps now.”

Delphine forced herself to breathe more easily.

“That’s better,” the other said.

She felt a hand on her chest, patting her as if in reassurance, but it seemed to be feeling its way toward what she carried around her neck. She shifted away from the hand. The hand was withdrawn.

“My, but you’re a nervous little thing.”

“Forgive me. I am…Forgive me.”

“What is it that you’re so worried about?”

“A gift. My father gave it to me.”

“I love gifts. What kind of gift is it?”

She struggled to see but could make nothing out.

“A… an instrument.”

“Of song?”

“…Yes.”

“May I see it?”

Delphine swallowed hard, trying to think of a response, but she couldn’t. Then she remembered not to think at all, but just to speak and see what came out.

“My father told me not to let anyone touch it.”

“That’s too bad. Well, I shouldn’t be selfish. All the things of the convent are mine to amuse myself with now.”

Delphine heard what sounded like a sack being dragged closer, and then the sound of someone fishing around in that sack.

“Here,” the woman’s voice said, “what do you imagine this is?”

An object was placed in Delphine’s hand. It was round and thin and made of metal.

“A bracelet?”

“Yes. The Mother Superior bought it with money from the convent treasury. She wore it over her elbow where the others could not see it, and looked at herself nude in a glass, imagining she was Salomé. Can you imagine? It’s silver with little grape vines and jeweled grapes on it. It was from the time when this place was called Gaul. I do wish I had a lamp. Can you feel the vines in the metal? They’re exquisite, aren’t they?”

Delphine grew afraid again and panted, but she managed to nod, not thinking about the darkness.

She was seen.

“Clever thing,” Sister Broom said.

The hand was on her chest again, but she twisted away.

The hand was withdrawn.

“But what is in that case?”

“I want to go outside.”

Silence.

Delphine started to get to her feet.

The woman’s voice spoke before she stood.

“I’ll be angry if you stand up.”

She stayed sitting on her heels, sweating and trying not to pass out from fear, wishing she could see well enough to run somewhere. Wasn’t there a window in this place? Yes, past the altar. She should at least be able to make out a window by the stars, unless clouds had come. Was the other in front of it?

“I don’t want to make you angry.”

“And I don’t want to be angry. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“As you say.”

A hand moved again in the sack. Now a cold, round object went into Delphine’s hand, the hand that placed it there brushing hers, dry and cool.

“What is that, do you think?”

She struggled to control her breathing.

“A coin.”

“Good! A piece of silver. One of thirty Judas received for the betrayal of the Nazarene. This convent kept it in a box of cedar, but the Mother Superior broke it and took it out, took it for herself. How selfish she was! Can you imagine what they’d pay for it in Avignon? Would you like to keep it? I’ll give it to you for what’s around your neck.”

“No…” she managed to mew. “The coin belongs to you now.”

The cold, dry hand took the coin back, and a sound like very dry hissing or rattling came from the other in the room.

“May I please go outside now?”

“Not unless you wish to end our friendship. Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“I agree. Let us be loving with each other. There’s so little love anywhere.”

Now another object was removed from the sack.

She heard the sound of sawing near her.

She smelled the dust of very old wood.

Now the saw was placed in her hand.

“I know you know what that is, but can you guess its significance?”

“Something…something to do with the Mother Superior?”

“Of course! She used this to build something very special before she left this place. Her lord told her to. Her new lord.”

“Where is she? Now? Are you…”

“No, child, you flatter me! I am not the Mother Superior! She went to Avignon. Or, that’s where she thought she was going. But as she packed her sack, what she made came to life. It had orders of its own to follow. She is still here now, part of her at least, and that part is past vanity and greed.”

Delphine shivered now and could not stop.

This thing was going to kill her.

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

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

She withdrew her hands.

“Now give it to me.”

Something occurred to Delphine.

Her breathing calmed.

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

Silence.

“You wouldn’t like that very much.”

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

“Because that wouldn’t be friendly.”

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

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

The rattling hiss came.

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

Give me that fucking case.

“I refuse.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By and by she slept.

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

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

TWENTY-SIX Of Thomas, and of an Oath Long Overdue

The girl was gone.

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

He was sure she had left.

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

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

He wasn’t sure she was wrong.

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

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

“Goddamn it.”

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

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

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

There was no fixing the misunderstanding.

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

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

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

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

“Goddamn it.”

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

He found out why within the hour.

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

A very long arrow.

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

This was not just a group of villagers.

It was a group of furious villagers.

It was a mob.

“Oh, whore,” he said.

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

Mostly women and old men, too.

This would be a hell of a way to die.

He showed them his hands.

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

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

“I did not kill these men!”

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

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

It was their priest.

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

The crowd stopped its jeering.

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

“Yes.”

“Not English?”

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

“You are come for crusade?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You make your oath in church.”

Thomas knelt. The priest stood before him.

“Are you a knight of France?”

“I am.”

“Swear it.”

“Yes. I do so swear.”

“By Saint Michael and Saint Denis?”

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

“Are you a knight turned routier? Brigand?”

“No.”

“Swear it.”

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

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

“Yes. I swear it.”

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

Now the holy man made an announcement to the crowd.

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

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

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

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

He ate it all.

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

A hare crossed the road in front of him.

He laughed.

TWENTY-SEVEN Of the Routiers

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

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

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

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

“You’re all alike, aren’t you?”

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

Now he was content to look.

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

His language was English.

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

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

Thomas stopped cold.

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

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

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

It was not long before the watchman went to piss.

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

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

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

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

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

They saw that this man was lethal.

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

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

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

Another woman echoed her in Provençal.

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

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

Nobody moved.

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

Or care.

It was then that it happened.

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

Voices came to him, as if from far away.

Don’t kill him.

Don’t kill anyone else again.

Thomas.

Sir Thomas.

We’re going to pay for that.

Find my brother… tell my brother…

Do you swear to give them God’s justice?

I swear.

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

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

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

He sheathed his sword.

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

None of them mistook his actions for cowardice.

He had them.

All of them.

And they knew it.

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

This belfry was a good spot.

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

Her command.

Well, who is she to command me?

Who are you to resist her?

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

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

And yet.

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

Witch.

That was what they would say.

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

He would be able to see her if she came.

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

The traffic on the road to Avignon astounded him.

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

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

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

This was, for Thomas, no ordinary procession.

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

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

TWENTY-EIGHT Of the Affair of Honor

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

I should have taken one of those goddamned horses.

But then I would have been in front of them.

It was when he came around a limestone bluff that he saw the stream. The road humped in front of him to form a small bridge that went over a stream feeding the Rhône. It was an old stream, then, one that soldiers had likely been stopping at for years to water their horses.

As these men bearing the quartered arms of Navarre had also stopped. Chrétien and his men were here, all sixteen of those Thomas had seen ride by. Putting on helmets and mounting their lovely Spanish and Norman destriers. They were just getting ready to take to the road again. If Thomas was going to do something, it had to be now.

But what?

A dense thicket and a sort of hill braced the clearing by the stream; it would have been easy to approach in force and deal these men an ambush, but what was a single man to do?

Stop thinking of ambushes and stealth.

You are a knight again, not a brigand.

Act like a knight.

“I seek an audience with Sire Chrétien d’Évreux. It is a matter of honor,” he said in his war voice, walking up to the men, staring at the comte.

A squire, holding his helmet in one hand and leading his horse with the other, walked closer to Thomas, looked at him from his boots to his head, and then called behind him, “Sire, there is a sort of routier or raggedy-man here who speaks of honor.”

Thomas stepped past him.

Men surrounded the comte now, unsheathing their swords and taking axes from their saddle-hooks.

“You should teach your squires respect, sire. It is unbecoming for a man to let his dogs bark for him. I have come here hoping that there is enough honor in you to grant a knight audience.”

A big man reined his horse closer. He was nearly close enough to give Thomas a chop with his axe. Thomas’s hand drifted for the pommel of his sword.

Don’t.

It was Delphine’s voice in his head.

Don’t.

Thomas did not unsheathe his sword.

The comte, still three horse lengths away, leaned forward in his saddle to peer at Thomas. Thomas had never seen him before; he knew him only by his heraldry. He was a big man, like Thomas, but softer in the face and very young, not twenty-five. Had his wife really shared her bed with this puppy?

He was a resplendent puppy, though; that armor was the ransom of a village.

“I know of no knight,” the young man said, “who goes alone on foot, with no surcoat, and a month overdue for a shave. Who are you?”

Some of the men-at-arms laughed to show their loyalty.

A boy of ten, a page in Navarrese red and yellow, leaned closer, his pale face excited; this could be the first time he saw blood shed in earnest.

The comte’s horse was excited, too; it wanted to wheel about and get to open ground, but the nobleman reined it firmly and heeled it back the two steps it had taken.

The raggedy-man spoke.

“I am Thomas of Picardy, once seigneur of the little village of Arpentel, until it was stolen from me while I served our king.”

“Hoooo!” one knight called out, apparently familiar with the story and aware of the implications.

Another of the knights near the comte blanched.

Thomas cut his eyes to this man.

It was André, his squire, the one who had saved him on the field; but he was a squire no more. He wore a fine suit of chain now, and had a moustache coming in. He rode a horse from the stables at Arpentel, one that Thomas had left behind when he went to war because it was too young and green.

What was the horse’s name? He had ridden him only twice.

Jibreel, Arab for Gabriel.

Though this was a warhorse, no Arab.

My goddamned horse.

And my squire.

André. I hope your dubbing was the best day of your life. How could you serve this bastard now?

The squire did not lower his eyes, but those eyes moistened with shame.

The big man with the axe had cheated closer to Thomas and now nudged him with the head of his weapon.

“Leave him,” the comte said.

Thomas turned his gaze back to the comte.

He knew what the young man was thinking: How could he be shut of this nastiness and come out looking honorable? Thomas had been respected. Everyone knew that his excommunication was unjust and that his lands had been stolen. Every man who served a king or a seigneur looked at Thomas’s betrayal and wondered when an accident of loyalty and war would leave him vulnerable to a powerful opportunist like Chrétien.

His hands and more were up your wife’s gown she loved it she loved a pretty young man in her bed and he is pretty not a scarred old bullock like you have you seen your ridiculous beard you look like a whoring prophet

Thomas blinked his eyes hard to bring him back to now; this was not a time to let his thoughts wander.

“What is it you want?” d’Évreux said.

Your Christless head lying in the grass for me to kick into that stream.

“Justice.”

A crow cawed in the trees.

“And what sort of justice might I give you in a field, in Provence, away from my lands?”

Some of which are my lands

The crow again.

“I think you know.”

“Hooo,” the ignorant knight started again, but the comte shot him a look that cut it short. This was deadly serious business.

“Are you threatening me?” Chrétien d’Évreux said, leaning forward a little, hoping there was a trap here for the older man to stumble into.

“I am offering you the chance to redeem your honor, and mine, in an affair of arms. Here, in the sight of witnesses, both men and…”

“And what?”

“Those higher than men.”

The crow again.

Now all eyes were on the comte. He had mishandled this—he desperately wished he had shoved this man aside before he could say his piece; but now the words were hanging there, and none of these men would forget them. Particularly not the young man, recently knighted, who had served as squire to Thomas of Picardy. Chrétien had once delighted in the theft of this man’s fealty, on top of everything else he had taken; but now he thought the former squire’s true allegiance lay where it always had.

He wished, too, that he had not ridden ahead in his eagerness to meet with the pope; another forty loyal men rode three days behind them with his younger brother, Charles.

He wished he were with them now.

If only that goddamned crow would stop.

“This man is excommunicate,” he declared, “and cut off from honor, and the rights and privileges that come with it…” He felt the gazes on him now, and they were not kind. They weren’t going to let him dismiss this man now that they knew who he was. If Chrétien opened the gates of Jerusalem with one hand and burned down Acre with the other, these men would remember his cowardice here, by this stream, and they would speak of it. His father had been cousin to the king; his blood was royal on his mother’s side, too. He would be king of Navarre when she died. Death was promiscuous now; it was not impossible that the crown of France might fall to him, him, if he had enough support. If he was not thought a coward.

He would have to fight.

He might best this rustic fellow on his own.

If not, Don Eduardo would save him in extremity, out of love for his dead father.

“Notwithstanding that,” he said, changing his tone, “I would not have any man here say that the Comte d’Évreux and the heir to the throne of Navarre would hide behind such words, especially from a man who insults him before his peers. Many who ask for justice are sorry to get it, and so shall it be with you.”

Don Eduardo de Burgos, the oldest of the four knights, a Spanish vassal of d’Évreux’s father and a veteran of battles with the Moor, shook his head at the young man’s foolishness. It was always best to avoid a fight that would cost much and gain little. The man in the rusty armor was a serious man.

“Ay,” Don Eduardo said, shaking his head again, and he dismounted, as did the others, all of them making their way back to the clearing by the stream.

The crow stopped cawing.

As Thomas had no horse and would not condescend to borrow his own, it was decided that the affair of honor would take place on foot.

The men squared off.

Thomas in his bad hauberk, bareheaded, his legs unarmored as his cuisses and greaves had sunk in the Rhône.

The comte in his thigh and shin armor, his arms likewise covered in steel, fine riveted mail under all of it, and under his breastplate, which gleamed in the weak sun—he had removed his surcoat so it would not be torn should the man’s notched and snagged war sword cross it.

His own sword was beautiful, almost pristine, the shallower notches of the training yard having been easily ground out of it by his squire.

“Ready?” said the Spanish knight, who would reluctantly serve as marshal for this grotesquerie.

Thomas nodded.

The comte nodded as well, lowering the visor of his helm.

The Spanish knight lowered his baton.

“This is your last chance to think again,” the comte said, his voice muffled ridiculously. He circled the older man but kept well out of range.

Thomas said nothing, holding his ground, his legs at a good bend.

“I will be willing to forgive your insults if you apologize and go your ways.”

Thomas said nothing.

He knew the man would speak again.

“Then prepare yourself for the justice you—” he started, but Thomas launched himself at just the moment he knew the other man would have to inhale. He was stronger than the comte, much stronger, and lighter, too, since he had little armor. The comte defended himself, his training overriding his fear enough to keep from being killed, though only just. His breastplate deflected a thrust, aimed at the armpit, that would have broken his ribs through chain mail. He panted and gave ground, setting himself again.

“Anything else to say?” Thomas asked, but this time the younger man kept quiet. He licked out at Thomas with the point of his sword, and his reach was so long it might have caught a slower man, but Thomas batted it down, struck the young man a vicious upswing against his helm, and then knocked his sword down again. The comte managed to hold on to it, using it to block the blow that came at his legs. And so it went. Thomas worked at exhausting his better-armored foe, battering down his sword six times, causing the other knight, whose sword was getting very heavy, to panic and flail. Thomas ducked one fatigued upswing and this time planted his sword deftly in the comte’s armpit; the chain kept it from killing him, but he tore muscle, and the comte cried out.

He saw motion to his side.

The one with the axe had gotten closer.

He circled away from that man and tried to close again with the comte, but the Spaniard interposed himself.

“Hold!” he cried.

“What?” Thomas shouted.

“I will make sure the comte can continue.”

“The fight is on, man. There is no stopping it!”

“You will have your chance,” the Spaniard said regretfully, “but I will make sure his armor is not damaged so as to prevent him from defending himself. Because this would not be honorable.”

He took his time about checking the articulation of the injured man’s armor, giving him plenty of time to catch his breath. Several of the squires and even the little page were shaking their heads at this, but it continued.

“If your lordship is quite ready,” Thomas called.

The younger man nodded.

The Spaniard stepped away and, before he lowered his baton, gave the young lord a look that said quite clearly he could expect no more indulgences.

It started.

When Thomas beat down the exhausted knight’s sword again, the man with the axe stepped too close for Thomas’s taste; he spun just in time to raise his sword at the man, who had indeed shifted his axe in preparation for a swing. The man shrugged as if to suggest he had no such intention, but it was obvious to everyone watching that he had been about to strike. Now Thomas’s former squire took that man by the shoulders and threw him down. The ignorant knight, seeing this, pushed Sir André away from the downed axe-man and drew his sword. André drew his in answer.

“Stop it!” the Spaniard barked, deeply ashamed, knowing that his lack of honor in defending his dead friend’s cowardly son was to blame for the disgrace this was becoming.

Before the axe-man could get up, Thomas had a moment of inspiration about how to deal both with him and with the problem of the comte’s armor. He kicked the downed soldier in the face, throwing his own sword out of reach and taking the heavier axe from the stunned man. He now rushed at the Comte d’Évreux, who, blinded by sweat and confused by all the motion, parried high, protecting his head, using his mailed palm to reinforce the blade near the point. He was right that the stroke would be heavy. He was wrong about where it would land. Thomas caught him squarely in the breastplate, his hips sunk into the blow; but the armor was Milanese, and, though it dimpled with a loud clang under the war axe, saved the outmatched comte’s life again. He fell backward onto his ass.

Thomas had no intention of giving the comte the time he would need to stand in that armor.

He circled now; it was only a matter of seconds before he would see the correct angle for the killing blow.

Chrétien, Comte d’Évreux, dug in with his heels to swivel on his ass, keeping his sword high to parry. The sword seemed to weigh as much as a small tree. The bearded cuckold had put the sun behind him and was about to kill him. With a whoring axe, as if he were a whoring capon. He tried to remember a prayer but couldn’t think of one.

The ignorant knight’s squire, who had stayed out of it until this moment, now saw his chance to earn the comte’s favor at no great risk to himself; he walked up behind Thomas and clubbed him in the head with the iron-capped back end of his poleaxe.

Thomas went to his knees.

Curiously, the man who hit him fell down, too.

Thomas looked at his former squire, who had been shouting at the ignorant knight. He stopped now and looked at Thomas, seeing he was in need of help. He started walking toward his former master, then stopped as if another thought had occurred to him.

Something was wrong, though.

He tried to speak, but couldn’t, and Thomas saw why.

An arrow had sprouted from the front of his head, all the way down to the fletching.

One eye filled with blood and he fell.

Thomas fell, too, his dizziness taking him as the clearing erupted with the whistle and crack of arrows striking home, and with the cries of those they struck.

The last sounds he heard were the brutish grunts and drawls of English as the routiers came out of the trees to finish their work.

Janus Blount, the leader of the English and Gascon brigands, led his men down through the stand of trees that sloped to the clearing. He had counted twenty horses before it started, and fifteen still stood near the stream, waiting to be led or mounted by men now dead.

“Shite,” he called, “Who shot the page?”

Nobody answered. The boy lay curled around his chest wound, still alive but dying. Janus looked down at the tearful, shuddering boy and saw that his wound was hopeless. He knew of a monastery with a handful of monks still alive in it, but this little bird was stuck too deep to make the journey. He would die in minutes, and long minutes they would be. The brigand put his callused palm against the page’s soft cheek and said, “Sorry, lad.” He punched his rondel dagger up under the boy’s sternum and, when he finally lay still, thumbed his eyes closed.

“Christ!” he roared. “Did you see what I just had to do because of one of you blind pricks? And I’ll do the same to any man that looses on a woman or a child again, understand? You look first. This doesn’t fucking go, you hear?” The thirty Englishmen, many of whom had served under him when he was a centenar under King Edward, all said, “Aye, sir.” His Gascon second in command repeated the order in French, and the dozen Gascons nodded, too.

He walked to the body of a very rich knight, a big, young fellow in exquisite armor that had nonetheless failed to stop the arrow that went through his aventail under the chin. He sorted through the pouch on the fellow’s belt and took the coins out, tossing aside a piece of rolled parchment bound with a cloth-of-gold ribbon.

“What were you quarreling about, then, eh?” he asked the dead man jovially. His Gascon was just picking up the dead knight’s facedown adversary by the hair, meaning to cut his throat, when Janus glanced over. The big man was still breathing, but not for long. The knife was under the chin, angling for the jugular behind the half-white beard.

That beard.

“Attends!” he said.

The Gascon looked at him, still holding a fistful of greasy longish hair, so comfortable with killing that he might as well have been holding a flower he was about to be asked not to gather.

“Je regards son visage,” Blount said.

The Gascon lifted the head higher, the eyes in it rolling white.

It was the man from the stews.

The big Frenchman who had walked into the Stews of the Arch like a goddamned bear and caused them all to piss their tubs. He could have killed half of them, maybe the lot, but didn’t.

Blount had no idea what had stayed the Frenchy’s hand, but quid pro quo was one of the few Latin terms he knew and he was a big believer in it.

“Not him,” he said. Then, in case somebody else happened over, he shouted it and pointed down at the man.

Not him.

Now the routiers killed the rest, took their money and horses, and melted back into the woods.

The wind had started up.

Thomas woke with his head in a woman’s lap.

Not a woman’s.

A girl’s.

Her luminous, almost lupine gray eyes looked down into his as she wiped his temples. It was hard to focus—everything looked blurry. Something moved behind her, and he thought he saw wings.

He had trouble remembering the last time he had seen her, yet it seemed very important that he should.

“You left wildflowers,” he said.

“What?” she said, smiling.

He slept.

Near dark, he woke again, and smelled food.

Delphine had made a good, hot fire from blackthorn wood, and over that she boiled thyme, chard, and turnips in a soldier’s wide-brimmed helmet. He heard a sound that at first seemed quite natural, but which he then remembered as wondrous.

A horse’s whinny.

Jibreel stood eating grass near the stream, handsome and brown with white forelegs.

“He wouldn’t go away,” she said.

“He was mine.”

She nodded.

“He remembers you. There’s another horse hanging around, but it’s scared. A little horse.”

“We’ll catch him,” Thomas said. “Can you ride?”

“Just a donkey.”

“That’s something. I’ll teach you.”

He sat up against his tree, rubbing the back of his head and looking at her. He remembered being thumped now. Why didn’t his head hurt?

And the girl. Was she just a cat’s whisker taller? Was there the hint of a curve in her hips?

“You’re different,” he said.

“So are you.”

She handed him a few sloe berries to eat.

He ate their flesh, then spat out the pits, making a face.

“They’ll be sweeter after a frost,” she said.

“You know what we’ve come to do now, don’t you?”

“Yes. Mostly.”

“I won’t like it, will I?”

“Why should you? I don’t like it.”

“Oh shit,” he said.

“You’re not that different, are you?”

He shook his head, smiling.

“But you’re ready,” she said. “We’re both ready.”

He looked at her for a long while.

“What?” she said.

“I know what’s different about you.”

“What?”

“You’ve got tits.”

She shook her head slowly at him.

“It’s true. Just little ones, but they’re there.”

She threw a sloe berry, which hit him exactly in the middle of the forehead.

“I think you spout vulgarity all the time because you’re afraid to see the big part of yourself that’s good.”

“And I think you’re changing the subject. We have to hide those.”

“I will,” she said.

She came nearer to him now and showed him a piece of parchment rolled up in a ribbon of cloth-of-gold.

“What’s that? The deed to a manor?”

“It’s an invitation.”

“To what?”

“To dine with His Holiness at a great feast of warriors.”

“An invitation for the dead one over there, not for me.”

“You are the dead one.”

Thomas blinked at her, not understanding her game.

She went over to the dead comte and unbuckled his polished helm, pulling it off him. She brought it over to Thomas.

“How am I supposed to eat if I keep a whoring helmet on all the time? Or speak? Or…”

She held up the helmet to him.

The last of the light reflected in its fine steel, the color of smoke and lavender; the helmet also reflected a face back at Thomas.

But it wasn’t his face.

She took him down to the stream and asked him to kneel.

She took water in her hands and asked him if he forgave the dead man whose face he now wore.

He paused; and then he said yes, and she poured water over his head.

She asked him if there was anyone else he carried anger for.

He paused again, and she waited.

“My wife,” he said.

“Do you forgive her?”

“I can’t.”

She looked at him gravely.

“You can,” she said. “If you choose to.”

“No,” he said, his eyes turned to the side.

“Then go back to Picardy,” she said, and she let the water fall from her hands.

He looked down at his reflection in the stream; it was too dark for him to see clearly, but he could make out the outline of a bearded man with long hair. He was himself again.

The miracle was spent.

Delphine went back to where her makeshift pot of soup smoked and began to eat. She poured some for Thomas, and they ate in silence, although she looked at him the whole time.

She took his bowl and the helmet and walked to the stream to rinse them.

“Do you want to try again?” she said.

“Tell me she’s dead. Tell me the plague took her and she died in a fever saying she was sorry. Maybe then.”

“It doesn’t work that way. That’s not forgiveness, it’s justice. And wretched justice at that.”

“Why does it matter?”

“It just does,” she said.

“Whatever we have to do in that city—and I’m frightened of that city, I’m not ashamed to tell you—it’s going to get us killed, right? Isn’t that enough?”

She furrowed her brow, thinking.

“No,” she said, and handed him the clean vessels.

“What do you want me to do with these?”

“Put them somewhere, I don’t know. I’m not your wife.”

He tossed them down.

She started walking toward the road.

“Wait,” he said. “Delphine.”

She looked at him with that drowsy look he had come to dread; the look that meant she was about to speak words that weren’t her own.

“Go back to Picardy and ask the bishop to pardon you, if he’s still alive. He’ll send you on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, or maybe on crusade, if there’s anyone left to make war on in the east; and back you’ll come to the bishop, and you’ll say words you don’t mean and he’ll say words he doesn’t mean, and you’ll get your castle back. If you can find anyone to run it. And be a seigneur, if anyone’s alive to grow the wheat. And you won’t have to forgive anyone or be merciful, or thoughtful or courteous, because devils will rule here. They’ll kill the good ones first, and when all the good men are dead, they’ll come for men like you, who were almost sound, but not quite; the bowls that leaked. And when you’re gone, the worst of men will find themselves in the teeth of their masters, because those that fell have no love for man. And they’ll take good and bad alike to Hell, because there won’t be anyplace but Hell anymore. Not without love. Not without forgiveness.”

Thomas stood and looked at her, and she at him, and night came on with a strong wind in the trees.

“We all fall short of perfection. You. Me. Père Matthieu. We all disappoint someone. Can we forgive only those who sinned against others?”

He closed his eyes and saw the priest’s swollen, stung face, smiling weakly at the thought of his brother.

If you see Robert, tell him

Tell him

I don’t know

Do you forgive her?

TWENTY-NINE Of Marguerite of Péronne

Thomas de Givras married Marguerite de Péronne on a sleeting Candlemas Day, 1341. The daughter of a minor seigneur of the lagoons, she still brought a decent dowry: a cedar chest, three mares, two tapestries, ten gold livres, and a much-coveted recipe for pâté of smoked eel. Her true dowry was twofold. First, her connections—her mother’s sister had married into the family of the great Enguerrand de Coucy. Next, and more troublesome, was her beauty. Many lords and not a few merchants had sought her hand, and yet her father had held out, hoping to thicken his descendancy with a drop or two of royal blood. It never came. By the time he lowered his standards, Marguerite was twenty.

Bad luck spoiled two near-matches. One knight of Abbeville died from a bee sting. The other, the very handsome son of a Ghent textiles merchant, hanged himself following an argument with his true love, a laundress, regarding his impending nuptials to a Frenchwoman he had never met.

Had he seen his betrothed, he might have only toyed with the rope.

Beautiful or no, Marguerite was on the waning end of her twenty-third year. Worse, it was widely rumored that she numbered among the nearly two hundred girls in Picardy to have been deflowered by the troubadour Jehan of Poitou, who was keeping count, if not naming names, in his verses. Even if this was true, she was a lucky catch for a foul-mouthed knight of low birth like Thomas de Givras. The father’s agreement had been woven from three cloths: his desperation to see her avoid the nunnery; his love for the Comte de Givras, who had proposed the match; and the girl’s own preference.

At first she had been wary of the match, disappointed to receive no letter from Thomas, rightly suspecting that his education stopped at the tiltyard.

It was October when he came to visit.

As soon as she saw what a costaud Thomas was, thin of waist, thick of chest, with his hair still dark on the fine head he had to lower to enter a room, his face still clear of the arrow-pit she would never see, she was dressed for the oven.

When she saw the impish humor in his eye, she was cooked. If he had few letters, he was neither stupid nor dull.

She was well matched for Thomas in this way, too.

It was common for her to take the Lord’s name in vain twenty times between confessions.

She did it the moment she laid eyes on her future husband.

“My God,” she said, too low for anyone to hear.

And then she said it again.

On the cool October day of their meeting, Thomas had gone with a riding party that included the Seigneur de Péronne, the Comte de Givras, and Marguerite. From the moment she spoke, he was intimidated by her learning—this was no kitchen woman, as his mother had been; this Marguerite de Péronne not only knew Latin, she told jokes in it; following a hawk’s near-refusal to come down from its tree, she said something to her paunchy, well-dressed abbot of an uncle that nearly made him tumble sideways from his palfrey. She sang, too, and not out of duty. Her voice was unfiltered joy. On the ride back, at any time the men ran out of words to say about the king or the war or the quality of the horses, she lit up her father’s birch woods with snatches of carols, and sometimes looked at her suitor to see if he was moved.

He was, and that was good.

For at that young age, she still told herself she would never lie beneath a man who did not love a song.

On the day after their wedding, Thomas took his new bride to the top of the old Norman tower he had just received from the Comte de Givras. The February sky, gray, though no longer spitting ice, stretched above them, and the brown fields and few houses of Arpentel stretched below. His wife was smarter than he would ever be and prettier than he thought wives were made, and yet she was happy with him. Her pleasure in the marriage bed had seemed to touch even her soul, and her verdant eyes had rarely left his; three taps of her ring would always remind him of the three times he took her. “Once like a bull, once like a fox, once softly as a lamb,” she said. He would be faithful to her. They would have many sons. He had risen. By God and by the grace of his beloved seigneur, he had risen.

His mother, a widow and a sort of handsome, dark-haired giantess, had worked in the comte’s kitchens. She had told Thomas his father was a German knight on pilgrimage to Spain, ironic since she herself was the bastard of a Spanish knight, Tomás de Oviedo, whom she remembered in her nightly prayers though he was ignorant of her existence. She wedded young to a joiner’s son who was already hurting from the kidneys that would fail before her daughter was three. She never married again. She came home smelling of grease and flour, bearing bones, cheese rinds, second cuts of meat, and stale bread from the comte’s table, keeping Thomas and his older half-sister fed when others went hungry. Thomas had been such a large and physically gifted boy that the comte had taken him on as a page, and soon squire. He took to sword, lance, and horse so naturally that it was clear he had chivalry in his blood if not in his pedigree. After his accidental knighting at Cambrai, Thomas had distinguished himself at tourneys and in the comte’s personal affrays; he had proven invaluable at training younger men and had endeared himself to the comte, despite the latter’s godliness and his own coarse humor.

By the time his mother died, Thomas’s sister was married and he was a necessary part of the comte’s retinue. The gift of Arpentel and its crumbling, square tower to Thomas had enraged one better-born knight who, at a Michaelmas feast following Thomas’s departure, got so far into his cups that he told the comte he felt himself more deserving of land than that “fatherless Knight of the Hare.” The comte had kept his temper. The Comte de Givras never raised his voice. He coolly told the other man, toying with the mustachios that were his only concession to vanity, “If you covet Sir Thomas’s land, fight him for it. To the death. I shall grant you the title if you win.”

The man had found reasons that this would not do.

“Then hold your tongue. Wine makes men fools, and I myself have said foolish things in my cups. But if you wish to be welcome at my table, and in my house, you will never again let me hear you slander a fellow knight in his absence. Try me on this and you will think men lucky who sleep under roofs, let alone in towers. Am I understood?”

He was.

“It seems painfully obvious to me,” Marguerite of Péronne, Lady of Arpentel, had said to her new husband on that morning, “that the Comte de Givras is your father.”

She stood there, stunning in her fox-fur mantle, her greenish eyes alight with mirth, and he was no more sure whether she was jesting than if she had said it in Latin.

He had laughed at her, and she had never said it again.

And he had never thought about it again until Crécy, when he watched the great man die a man’s death.

Wouldn’t he have told him then?

No.

Not a man who would not cry out.

Was it a promise to his mother? To God?

He would never know.

But now he thought she was right.

Marguerite, who saw through everything.

Marguerite, who knew how to cut her losses.

She had chosen the son over the father.

Over him.

Over honor.

And she was right.

When Delphine saw the knight’s eyes soften, she reached her small hand out, and he took it in his large one. And she led him down to the stream, and, with its cool water, washed his head and his feet, and helped him wash the anger from his heart.

His own face slipped from him once again, and fell in the water; and again he assumed the aspect of his dead rival.