Between Two Fires

The walls of God’s kingdom held. And though the devils despaired of breaking the walls and burning the deep architecture of Heaven, yet were the angels stoppered in and could not come safely out; and so, unchallenged in the middle lands, the wicked ones delighted in what they wrought there. So they resolved among them to hold the plains and the mountains in their fist, and not to suffer the cities of men to live; but rather to reign there, on the thrones of their second Hell, with the first as their footstool and the angels of God trapped above.

They would weave sackcloth to mask the sun.

They would confound the father to kill his son, and then would they kill the father.

They would replace the beasts with clockwork things and the birds with dead hands that flew.

It had already begun.

And the angels of God stood at the walls of Heaven and sorrowed at the misery below, and fell out amongst themselves, some saying it was better to perish at once, in hot struggle for man’s sake, lest the Lord return to find the earth empty of men; others cried that if they left their walls, He would return to find Heaven bereft of angels and smoldering, and Lucifer instead on His throne.

And the world was imperiled unto its death.

For now a call had risen up from he who held Peter’s Chair in the west.

And a call had risen up from he who wore the sultan’s crown in the east.

And men of great valor gathered in the city by the river and swore to take Jerusalem, and if they could not hold it, to put it to fire and sword.

And the valorous men of the deserts gathered in their tents and swore to hold Jerusalem, else to put it to fire and the sword.

And so were readied the armies of Armageddon, yet not at the hour long foretold.

And the dead stood with the living, and the living knew it not.

And the Lord made no answer.

THIRTY Of the Priest’s Brother

Robert Hanicotte stood in the stables, breaking up a leaf of hay for one of the cardinal’s six black Arabian stallions. This one bore the name Guêpe because he was small and wasp-waisted, mean like a wasp; not as fast as the others at a straight run, but capable of breathtaking turns and giddy leaps. He was not the cardinal’s favorite, but Robert loved him more than perhaps anything in this city. He would never let the old man know, though, or permission to ride him would be used as leverage.

He put his head against the horse’s shoulder and took in his nutty, masculine smell, his own dark hair blending perfectly with the animal’s coat. Guêpe wanted to move away from him, but not enough to stop eating.

“You’re like me,” he said, “small and beautiful and captive. We can neither one of us leave this place.”

A nightmare had chased Robert from his master’s bed; his older brother, Matthieu, the priest, had been laughing in a river with a soldier. Little black devils stood on the banks hurling rocks and spears at them, but they laughed on and on, Matthieu saying, “These are just our bodies! You can only reach our bodies!” At last Robert was pulled into this dream when his brother spied him in the bushes. He was suddenly ashamed because he realized he should have been helping but had chosen instead to hide. Matthieu stopped laughing now, and, looking remarkably like St. Sebastian, what with all the horrid little barbs stuck in him, pointed toward Robert and said, “But you’re theirs, aren’t you? All of you, inside and out.”

“No!” Robert yelled, but now his brother and the soldier left, walking out of the river and ashore, leaving him alone with all the black devils. They looked at him, now, and the dream went dark until he could see only their yellow eyes burning like a hedge of malign stars. He understood that they would come now and take him to Hell.

He had woken up sweating, frightened at first, and then angry and not terribly surprised that Matthieu had found something else to make him feel guilty about.

“Boring old man,” he said under his breath, meaning both his brother and this flaccid cardinal who could sleep only on his stomach, his ridiculous white ass pointed up to the top of the canopied bed. Robert was nearly thirty-five now, but taut and lean, not yet showing his age; Cardinal Pierre Cyriac was an out-of-shape sixty, and Robert intended to throw himself from a tower before he let his body look like that.

He heard a sound in the streets below, outside the high walls of the house, beyond the little grove of Spanish clementines the cardinal had planted every May only to have the mistral kill them each December.

A woman crying, now shouting, “No! No! No,” banging a fist on wood to punctuate each word, and another woman, crying more quietly, trying to hush her.

Another plague death, as like as not, all the more stinging because the disease was actually loosening its grip on the city, only killing scores a week instead of hundreds. Robert hated this time, less because he feared death than because the cardinal did; and because the cardinal did, he had forbidden his concubine to go out into the streets without him. He wanted to watch every move the younger man made, to assure himself that he kept a safe distance from strangers, that he did not go to the baths, that he did not linger too long in the market and risk bringing it home. He had sneezed once a few days before, and the old man had looked so coldly at him that he thought he might have him thrown from the house if he sneezed a second time.

He did not.

The Arabian had finished his hay now and would not suffer himself to be caressed further tonight. He didn’t mind the saddle, but he seemed to hold men’s hands in contempt. Robert slapped him briskly on the shoulder, earning himself a displeased whinny, and walked back toward the house, Guêpe nosing the door of the stall for a second leaf, which did not come.

Robert thought he might reread his boring old brother’s last letter, in which he fell all over himself in thanks for the wine he had been sent. It was sweet, really, how easy it was to please Matthieu. And, however dull his company, he had been a comfort during the time of their youth in their monstrous father’s monstrous house.

He would ask the cardinal for another small barrel, from the pope’s personal vineyard this time, to be sent north when next His Holiness sent an envoy to Rouen. Lots of envoys were going north these days, asking for money and tradesmen and men-at-arms for the crusade.

What was the name of his brother’s sad little town? St. Martin-something? It was a bother, but it would be worth it. He could see Matthieu’s hands turning the tap, Matthieu’s eyes lighting up when he saw the color of the vintage coming out of the spout, Matthieu’s sad, grateful smile exaggerating the lines around those eyes. It made him feel warm enough to face going upstairs. One more goblet of something strong and he would crawl in beside the belly-sleeper, moving as lightly as a mosquito on the skin in hopes he would not wake him and be handled.

The marketplace off the rue de La Vielle Fusterie was nearly deserted. It was still too early. The military men who had been filling the city stayed up late doing what soldiers do in towns where they are not known, and they had set Avignon’s hours back even further; he had passed two squires heading back across the Pont St. Bénézet who looked as though they had not yet gone to sleep. Now that the monks had all died, nobody rose before Terce anymore, and most waited for midday.

The cardinal had left the house, and now Robert had sneaked out for a vial of the cedar oil he loved to smell on himself—the pope had called for a grand feast tonight, another whoring feast, and he hoped to make good impressions all around—but the oil merchant’s stall was empty. It was hard to know who was dead and who was simply out of things.

The swarthy little man who sold wine from the pope’s vineyards was doing a good business, his loader rolling barrel after barrel under the emblem of the crossed keys, but the other wine sellers had closed up shop. Nothing was coming from Beaune or Auxerre but fantastical stories, and most of the vineyards near Mont Ventoux had also gone still. This year’s harvest was dying on the vine, and last year’s was nearly gone.

There just weren’t enough people left to work.

Except in Pope Clement’s vineyards.

He was a man who got things done.

Robert missed his days, only three years gone, working as cubicular to Pope Clement, who wanted no more from Robert than his help getting dressed, the lighting and snuffing of candles, and a little conversation when he couldn’t sleep.

Everything had gone to hell since the Holy Father had made a gift of him.

With no oil to show for his walk across the bridge, Robert was determined to find some satisfaction. In the early evening he would have to look at the old man’s disappointed smile as he failed to express a profound enough opinion on some religious matter, the smile that reminded him he was prized for his beauty, not his competence. He would have a few more hours until then, while the cardinal signed his papers and rattled his rings in the palace. The cardinals did little work, as far as he had ever seen, their duties spiritual rather than temporal; it was the apostolic secretaries and chancellors, and even the pontiff himself, who shouldered the real work at the palace.

Cardinals mostly discussed things, like some troop of self-important gossips in bright red robes and wide red hats. Sometimes one would go off as legate to this or that city, and could be gone a year or more, but in Avignon they sat on cushioned benches and talked about whether women went to the same Heaven as men, or if the queen of Naples had really strangled her boy-toad of a husband. They talked about Cola di Rienzo’s thuggish uprising in Rome, as if they still had any business with that city that the papacy had divorced, or as if they meant it when they talked about the pope returning there, or as if they even had an Italian among them anymore now that Colonna had died of the Pest. They sat drowsing through canon lawsuits, saving their better selves for the evening’s diversions. They waited for the pope to die so they could wall themselves in to squabble about which one of them would take his hat, and what favors he’d do to get it. They welcomed important men to their gardens and received gifts. They dallied with lovers far too attractive for them.

As much as he held them in contempt, Robert envied them more.

He often looked at his hands and wondered how they would look in fine white gloves, and rings of emerald and tiger’s eye over those gloves.

Since the marketplace had more cats than people in it, he would have to find another way to kill the hour or two he dared to stay gone from the cardinal’s house.

So he went to the apartment of the pope’s second falconer, a red-haired, smiling boy whose moss-stuffed bed crunched with dried lavender; he had a woman in that bed but, seeing who was coming up his stairs, woke her, sent her on her way, and put two shirts down over the stain they had left.

The cardinal’s man was a rarer guest.

And a prized one.

“I know you value yourself highly,” the cardinal said, as Robert counted his teeth with his tongue to prevent him from fully hearing the old man’s words and letting his face betray his thoughts. “But I don’t want you speaking tonight unless you are spoken to, and then it shall be to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ followed of course by a few respectful words. Yes, my lord. Yes, Your Eminence. No, I have enough bread.”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Have you eaten anything?”

“No, Your Eminence.”

“Well, get some figs or something in you. It won’t do for you to seem greedy at table. Vincent, bring some figs.”

The boy who had been watching all of this while waiting to help the cardinal undress gladly left the room.

Three… four… five…

“Furthermore, the tables of the Grand Tinel shall be full of knights, and highly placed ones. You won’t be sitting near any, but try not to…encounter them. They’ll hear your proclivities in your speech and hate you for it.”

The cardinal had imitated Robert at proclivities in your speech, and it stung. Despite his stately way of stamping out syllables, the old Limoges cunt had the same proclivities.

His father’s face leapt into his head, and he nearly squinted.

Twelve… thirteen… fourteen

“Why are you pushing your lower lip out at me like that? Are you one of the Holy Father’s camels?”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No, Pierre.”

The older man pinched the younger man’s cheek just a little harder than was friendly.

“Not until the hat’s off.”

“No. Your Eminence.”

Robert Hanicotte entered the Grand Tinel for what must have been the thirtieth time in his life, but the great, barrel-vaulted room never failed to take his breath away. So many torches burned on their iron sconces and so many candles of the best wax glowed on the trestle tables that it was possible to make out faces even at the far end of the hall, where the pope would soon occupy his throne, near which a quartet of servants stood, and over which a canopy of crushed velvet the color of a shadow on wine hung, tasseled with braids of cloth-of-gold. He craned his head up to look at the false night above him; a cloth of gloaming blue covered the barrel ceiling, studded with gold stars only man would have measured out so uniformly. The steward showed him to his bench, next to the cardinal; eighteen of them were here, like vicious jabs of red in the mostly blue room. He took his seat facing the door he had just entered and watched the other guests file in.

The room got louder as it filled with knights and minor kings. He noticed that very few ladies came with these men, which made him wonder what entertainments the invitations hinted at. The youngest of these was a big fellow, handsome in a soft-chinned way, attended by a page in Spanish red. What made him stand out, however, was his quiet manner. His sobriety and bearing belied his youth.

The steward guided him right, toward the pope’s cathedra and high table, and on they marched. He kept expecting them to stop, but this man was placed only two seats down from the pontiff.

“Your Eminence, may I ask who it is that just entered, seated very close to the Holy Father?”

The cardinal smiled his weary smile.

“The man sitting just next to the pope is a Valois, cousin to the king. But he’s too old for you to ask after, isn’t he?”

“I was just…”

“Yes, I know what you were just. The one who caught your eye is the Comte d’Évreux, future king of Navarre. A sycophant and a coward with a capable younger brother everyone hopes he’ll promote by dying. Any more questions?”

Robert looked down.

“Are you hungry?”

“No, Your Eminence.”

“Good.”

“Brothers, friends, honored guests,” the pope began, standing before his cathedra of carved oak and gold leaf. “I welcome you all to the Feast of the Warriors of Our Lord.”

As per the commands of his physician, the Holy Father sat between two great copper braziers, the brightest fires in the room, which cast twin shadows on the walls of the Tinel, shadows that moved forward as he did.

Robert loved to hear Clement VI speak—his every word seemed an artisanal gift selected especially for the listener and, with the weight of his office behind him, seemed also to suggest an intimacy not only with the man, but with God. Robert was too far away to see the lines at the corners of the pontiff’s eyes, but he knew the power those lines had to punctuate the Holy Father’s frequent smiles. His hands scooped the air as he spoke, like an Italian’s hands, but gently, as though they were playing in water. When Pope Clement turned his attention on you, he seemed at once to overrule every churchman who had made God seem stern, and to forgive them their misunderstanding of grace. He also seemed to know your foibles, and that your virtues so far outweighed these that the Lord scarcely noted them. He forgave his own foibles with equal abandon. Clement was a pope of light penance, short pilgrimage, and stunning feasts, and his smile illuminated a far wider path to Heaven than you had feared to find.

If Robert stared at him with filial love, he was not alone.

Clement’s voice flowed into the Tinel like mulled wine.

“For gathered in this hall are men beloved of the Lord for the charity of arms; when men take up the sword to further their own ends, they spill Christ’s blood anew; but when they take up arms for His bride, the church, they heal His five wounds, and this is the profoundest charity. For too long now have Christian kings warred amongst themselves, each seeking to enrich his realm by impoverishing another. It is no accident that this killing Pest has followed wars, and that wars have followed famine; at each turn have we been shown, to greater and greater degrees, the displeasure of the Father whose Son lies abandoned, His Cross and His Crèche tread upon by those who will not drink his offered blood. I speak, of course, of the Turk, whose bloody crimes against the friends of peace are reviled in every decent land. In my left hand, I hold a letter from Edward, king of England and ruler of the Aquitaine. In my right, I hold a letter from Phillip, by God’s grace king of France. Both letters, sworn to in the presence of bishops, pledge the crowns of England and France to a mutual peace, with one aim: Jerusalem, City of the Lord. Jerusalem, the holiest stone in the earthly crown. Even now the shipyards in Marseille ring with hammers. Let the believers in the lies of Mahomet tremble. We shall take Jerusalem back.”

At this, the knights beat their goblets on the painted tables before them. One shouted, “Deus vult!” and another joined him, and soon the Grand Tinel rang with “God wills it!” When the echo faded, the pontiff continued.

“The first ships will sail for Cyprus on Christmas Day.”

Again they cheered.

“And,” the pontiff said, stepping forward and opening his hands, “another matter concerns us. Our late words in defense of a certain quarter were, we now believe, in error. Many men, wiser men than we once thought, have said that we cannot drive the rat from the granary while the mouse steals in the pantry. I tell those very few of you who wear crowns or sit near them to ready yourselves and your kingdoms in secret; soon we shall recall our bull, Sicut Judaeis, in defense of the Hebrew race, and issue another which shall grant any Christian whatsoever the right to turn his hand against any Jew, and to take from such whatever goods he desires, even his house and chattel. Very soon now, from the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours, the murder of a Hebrew shall no more be a sin than the hunt of a stag. Remember this word, stag. For some of you shall soon have cause to love this word.

“In His holy name, and to His holy purpose, let us pull the weeds, both far and near, that have too long choked His garden.

“Yet I shall speak no more, for hunger makes men deaf.

“Let us eat.”

Robert was disturbed at the thought of harm coming to the Jews of Avignon, who seemed a docile and clever people, and who were undeniably among the greatest artisans of Provence.

Yet he allowed the warmth in his heart to etch a small smile on his face. The pope’s words had so affected him that he felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, a part of something immense and wonderful.

THIRTY-ONE Of the Feast, and of the Hunt of Stags

The page of the Comte d’Évreux had turned so pale that the Valois Duc sitting to their right asked if the young man was well.

“Yes, my lord,” the page said. “I have… I have not slept as well as I should have, for excitement at the chance to see the Holy Father.”

“Eat a good piece of beef, boy; it will feed the blood. And throw a bit of wine on top of it, but not too much,” the great man said.

“We are undeserving of such kindness, my lord,” said the Comte d’Évreux, getting a hardy slap on his shoulder from the older lord just before they both looked up to see the feast that was coming from the dressing area.

It seemed that every creature that flew, swam, or walked had found its way to the trestle tables in the Grand Tinel. Swans with their necks twisted together as if in love floated amid armadas of game hens and quail, sails of swan, dove and peacock feathers jutting above them; these fleets cut through blue-plated “waters” of crabs and prawns and every imaginable fish, repeated every two yards so that each diner might reach his preferred dish. Before the diners ate, however, the steward walked both lengths of trestles, inclining over each plate a strange little coral tree hung with shark’s teeth and the horns of narwhal; the pendants were said to shiver in the presence of poison. They did not shiver. The pope rang a small bell calling for the meal to start, and conversation died in the room as the sounds of eating rose up.

For Thomas, this had more than a whiff of the feast in the devilish Norman castle about it. He ate, though, and ate well. A serving boy filled his wine goblet, and he felt Delphine’s hand on his wrist. He looked at her, with her shorn hair, wearing the livery of the dead Navarrese page, her nascent breasts bound tight beneath it. Her gray eyes speared him. She shook her head.

“What? Why?” he said.

She leaned close and whispered, “Just don’t.”

He whispered, too.

“Poison?”

“No.”

“Will it damn my soul?”

“I…I don’t think so.”

“What, then?”

Exasperated, she said, “Just drink it, then.”

He didn’t for a long while.

Then he forgot and drank.

It was good.

He heeled a drop from his lip just in time to see a viol player, who was introduced as the best in Aragon, stride into the middle of the hall, just at the end of tuning. He began, filling the room with his sad, exotic rhythms and complicated changes. Thomas knew the music, as well as the man. It was the very same one from the castle of the night tourney. As he had at that feast, the man went from guest to guest, and Thomas felt his insides go cold at the prospect of being recognized.

The musician did look Thomas directly in the face, but no longer than he had at the Valois Duc; he must have seen only the smug, youthful face of the Comte d’Évreux. When the man passed, his hips rolling with the music he bowed out of the viol, Thomas breathed out in relief and drained his goblet.

Delphine stepped on his foot and he glared at her.

She glared back.

Other musicians followed as the diners wrecked first this armada, then cross-shaped heaps of the finest pastries, nougats, and marchpanes Thomas or Delphine had ever seen. The tables were at last cleared of all but wine, and other entertainments commenced. A dancing bear capered to drum and fife; acrobats piled up on one another and tumbled. The steward apologized for the absence of a jester; a truly magnificent one had been expected from Dijon, but must have been delayed.

“I hope this will not dim your ardor, however, for, as baser men have said without error, a man may amuse himself without smiling…”

At this, the servers extinguished half of the torches lighting the hall.

“We should go,” Delphine said, though she knew there would be no way to leave early without drawing unwanted attention. She was fighting a full bladder; she had not wanted to go through the kitchen and into the latrine tower, as other guests had, for fear of exposing her sex.

“We can’t yet,” Thomas said, and she nodded, casting her eyes down.

The steward spoke again.

“Now let the forests of Provence grow beneath the stars, and let God’s friends have a foretaste of the delights that await them in the kingdom they have worked so hard to serve.”

Servants wheeled out a number of trees whose leaves had been replaced with very thin, masterfully worked leaves of gold; golden and silver fruits and other precious objects winked in their midst. Now tapestried couches were rolled out and placed in nooks of the golden forest such that they were partly or fully hidden.

“Let those among you with cooler blood seek gifts from the branches; let those with hotter humors enjoy the hunt…”

At that, the viol player returned and played a march that summoned forth a line of twenty women, all of them nude save for magnificent stag masks with golden antlers. Their bodies were perfect; lithe and firm, no one of them seemed younger than seventeen or older than twenty-five. They all struck poses beneath and among the trees, some leaning, some on all fours, one hanging upside down from a branch.

Thomas stared at this spectacle, a slow smile creeping onto his face.

Delphine shuddered.

Now the knights and cardinals began to file around the table.

Servants scooted back their benches.

“Come on, man!” the Valois Duc said, as drunk as any man still walking, “unless you mean to spend the whole night at whispers with your page.”

Thomas followed him before Delphine could speak again.

He walked out into the dim hall, afraid and excited.

He entered the grove, melting in with the red-robed cardinals and resplendent seigneurs; a white-gloved hand plucked a pear of emerald-studded gold from a tree. A younger knight rubbed the backside of a “stag” who wiggled, and then led him off to the near-privacy of a couch. One girl’s nude bottom now rubbed against Thomas’s hip, and she turned her stag mask to him; the hall was so dim he could see nothing but blackness in the holes cut for her eyes.

A wall of strong perfume hit his nose, eastern scents he could not name as cardamom and sandalwood and patchouli, but which pleased and thrilled him.

He began to stiffen against his silk and woolen tights, pushing at the bottom of his red cotehardie. The stag noticed and lined herself up to grind the center of her on that. She was very good at it. Had he been nude, he would have entered her; the tip of his verge had nearly entered her even through the cloth.

It felt so good, and it had been so long since he had enjoyed that sort of pleasure, that full release was imminent. With some effort, he pulled back from her, another knight laughing at him and clapping at his now-obvious excitement.

“With your permission, my good comte, I shall take your place,” he said. “I had an eye on that one the moment I saw her long legs.” So saying, he fumbled up his outers and down his inners and slid into the girl with a frisson, not even bothering to four-leg her to a couch, but taking her against a tree, the golden leaves of which were soon rattling against one another.

Thomas saw that some had taken gifts and returned to their tables, so he reached up for a whitish something-or-other that turned out to be a finely etched ivory comb trimmed with golden angels. He took it and hurried back to his spot, just as he saw Pope Clement, magnificent in his red and cloth-of-gold robes and triple crown, enter the grove. With each step, a golden cross flashed on the toe of one of his slippers. He smiled at Thomas, and Thomas smiled back.

The knight bowed and said, “Thank you, Your Holiness.”

“It is only a trifle, my son,” the pontiff said, his words like warm honey. “Greater wonders await us all.” And then he took a stag by the ear and led her in.

Thomas was half sure the pope had watched him leave, but he did not turn back to look.

Delphine knew she would never make it to the sumptuous apartment near St. Peter’s where they were lodged, so she ran to a dark alley and squatted, pissing for what seemed like half a day.

Thomas turned his back and shielded her from view with his body.

“You didn’t touch any of those deer, did you?” she said.

“No. Wanted to.”

“Uck,” she said.

“Uck, yourself. You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know more than you.”

“Like what?”

She stood up and wiped her hands now, trying to walk like a boy.

“Let’s just say ‘more than you.’ Anyway, I suspect more than I know.”

So saying, she looked down, pulling Thomas’s gaze down to his thigh, where something moved.

It was a maggot.

THIRTY-TWO Of the Night Vintners

“What are you doing here?” Robert Hanicotte said.

He had come for his nocturnal visit with Guêpe and had nearly leapt out of his skin to see the small girl in her dirty gown hugging her knees in the back corner of the Arab’s stall.

“You’re going to get stepped on,” he said. “Besides the beating you’ll get if the stablehands find you.”

“Why don’t you beat me?” she said. “You found me.”

“I just might,” he said, but not even the horse was convinced.

She was an odd-looking little bird: long-legged with outsized feet and short hair. A peasant girl, but not from here. She spoke to him in his own Norman French.

And the horse liked her. Goddamn if he didn’t seem to like her.

Her words were lucid, but her heavy-lidded eyes looked half asleep.

“Robert Hanicotte,” she said, causing him to start at the sound of his last name, which nobody had bothered to say for some time, “your brother died bringing me here.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Robert-of-the-bushes.”

Matthieu’s name for him when he hid from his chores in the bushes behind their house. Matthieu, eight years older, who had done what he could to deflect their martial father’s scorn from the younger and even more feminine brother.

She had used his childhood nickname.

He shook this off. Nothing he wanted to hear would come from this girl’s mouth. He just wanted to be left alone.

“How dare you come to me and tell me my brother is dead? What can you know about it, you dirty little thing?”

He turned his head to shout down the stables for the napping boy who was supposed to be watching the horses.

Only when he turned his head, she was standing where he looked.

“Saddle that horse,” she said.

He opened his mouth but said nothing.

“Père Matthieu opened his mouth like that when he wanted to speak but had no words. Now saddle your wasp. I have something to show you.”

“I… the cardinal won’t like it.”

“The cardinal serves a devil.”

“How do I know you’re not the devil?”

“If you were not deaf to your own heart you would know.”

He opened his mouth again.

“Robert, you’re in danger.”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t know anymore. But I know my words are true.”

“Where… where are we going?”

“To the pope’s land.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Delphine sat before the handsome, perfumed man as he cantered the horse through the steep streets of Villeneuve, just across the river from Avignon. It was in this city, away from the press of workers’ houses, Jewish ghettos, market stalls, and ordure, that Cardinal Cyriac kept his great stone house with its tiles and garden and fountain. Most of the cardinals lived here. This was a city of ivy and warm stone and plane trees. Delphine closed her eyes so the beauty of Villeneuve would not distract her—it was going to be so hard to turn this man, she would need to be a clear vessel for…

For what?

For God

God is gone

For His angels then

But Robert had agreed to come with her, and she had not thought he would. He might yet do what she wanted of him.

What they want of him

I’m scared of them, too, almost as much as I am of their dark brothers; they’re so bent against each other how can man matter to them?

I’m going to die soon

Delphine shook her head against her doubt.

There are far, far worse things than dying

And I’m about to see them

The horse stumbled on loose stones and jarred her eyes open just beneath the massive tower Phillip the Fair had built to menace the city of the popes some forty years before; Villeneuve was in France, not Provence, while Avignon had just been bought outright by the pope himself, making an earthly sovereign of him. The tower had been built by a bullying king to bully a weak pope; now both were dead and France and Avignon were in bed together, for good it seemed. The tower’s murder-slits were dark, unlike many windows behind her; sleep was not coming easily to the city of cardinals, where important men could afford candles to burn against their nightmares. The people of Villeneuve did not know how close those nightmares were to birthing themselves in the world.

They rode across the torchlit bridge into Avignon, then took the northern gate toward Sorgues, and toward Châteauneuf.

Delphine had walked this way with Thomas after his transformation; she had seen the handsome ramparts and great square towers of Châteauneuf by day. She had seen the vineyards that provided the last wine in Provence lying still and had not thought to return by night. Unlike Sorgues, which lay dead and open, no part of it still working save the papal mint, Châteauneuf was alive—alive enough to shut the Porte d’Avignon at night as it had even before the plague struck. Delphine’s business was not in the city, however.

It was in the vineyards that aproned it.

They steered Guêpe off the Grand Chemin de Sorgues and onto the small paths between the lieux-dits, bearing names like Bois Renard, Beau Renard, and Mont Redon; these were among the most beautiful vineyards in the world.

But something was very wrong here.

Robert started to speak, but she pinched him to keep him silent, pointing at the rows of vines lying under the nearly full moon.

“What?” he said.

She got off the Arab and led him to a fence.

Robert dismounted, too.

“Tie him,” she whispered, and Robert did.

She pointed again.

“I still don’t…” he started to whisper, and then he did see. The harvest was on. These vines were Grenache, an October grape, sweet, the latest to go in the basket. Now the backs and heads of men and women bobbed like so many black shadows in the moonlit vines. They hunched to gather, then shuffled to the next plant, shearing clusters of grapes off with the curved iron knives of their trade.

“So what?” he said. “There’s moon enough to see. Perhaps they fear a frost and work night and day to save the crop.”

She led them closer, creeping quietly down the row.

To Robert’s surprise, however, she led them past the gatherers altogether, following three women with huge baskets of grapes on their backs. The women made for a stone farmhouse, just outside which a dozen workers tromped in a wine press.

The women dumped their grapes in as men in knee-length sackcloth switched out empty juice bowls for full ones, handing these off to men on ladders who funneled them into a giant tun.

The men seemed to be smiling, or making some other face that showed their teeth.

Robert did not care for this at all and did not want to know more.

“Let’s get back before we’re caught,” he said.

“Do you see?” she whispered.

“I just want to go back.”

“They’re not singing,” she said. “And they’re not humming and they’re not talking. Have you ever seen wine treaders tread in silence?”

He was fuming now.

This child who did not speak as a child was bewitching him.

He turned to leave and ran directly into a man bearing grapes on his back. Robert began to excuse himself, and then the smell hit him. He had walked directly into a dead man, whose lower jaw was missing and whose eyes had collapsed in on themselves. The dead man pushed by Robert, and then, as if it had struck him that something wrong had just happened, he turned. His black stub of a tongue worked and he pointed at them.

Neither Delphine nor Robert had to tell the other to run.

The dead man now drew air into his unsound lungs as best he could and made a dry, horrid sound like something between a busted cornemuse and a dying calf.

The treaders stopped treading and the gatherers stopped gathering.

All of them turned now to look at the fleeing man and girl who had intruded upon the vineyard. Whether by instinct or at some command, the treaders climbed out of their vat and the gatherers dropped their baskets. But not their knives. Now they ran, too, some of them falling as they blundered into vines.

They were gaining.

Guêpe bucked and reared at the smell of them, or perhaps at the sound of them rushing through the leaves and butting against one another, and his rope threatened to come loose—if he ran off without them, Robert and Delphine would be

hung like pigs with cut throats to bleed out into the vats

caught.

It was the girl who grabbed his reins, calming him while Robert fumbled with the knot.

“Hurry!” she said.

The rope came loose.

Robert mounted and nearly bolted without her, but he wheeled and scooped her up just as the dead swarmed over the fence. She would never forget their faces—even as their bodies rushed to do violence, what remained of their faces betrayed sadness, even apology for the murder they were being compelled to commit.

Their knives were out, and the first ones grabbed for the reins. Guêpe jumped one way and then another avoiding the flashing knives; he back-kicked one man whose head fell mostly off, causing him to flail his arms wildly, and then the horse found his footing and bolted down the Grand Chemin de Sorgues.

Behind them, the sound of threescore corpses shouting through blasted lungs and throats rose up, and, above them, the moon flirted with slow, ragged clouds as though everything below her had not spun wild.

The bridge was nearly deserted as Robert and the girl cantered across. She did not have long left to convince him.

“If you insist on blinding yourself to what you have seen, you’ll have peace for a time. But they will come for you; and then you, too, will stomp in the wine press. Or you will go to Marseilles and sew sails with those who do not flinch when the needle pricks them. Or they’ll strip your flesh from your bones for sport; you have no idea how much they hate you, though they smile.”

“What do you want from me?” Robert said.

“The… Holy Father trusts you.”

“Yes.”

“Arrange an audience with him for my lord the Comte d’Évreux. A private one.”

“Why does he not send the request himself?”

“Because the meeting must happen, and it must happen in the next days. There is no time to filter the request through secretaries.”

Robert sighed heavily, pushing the air out, still shaken by the night vintners. He shook his head, though she could not see him behind her.

“Something about this smells.”

“Yes,” she said. “It does. And the stink is coming from the palace.”

While Robert Hanicotte eased back in next to the belly-sleeping cardinal, Thomas sat on the edge of the linen-covered bed in his lodgings. He had not slept, worrying about the girl. He had stirred happily at the sound of footsteps once before, but those had belonged to a chamber boy bringing up a brazier of hot coals.

At last he heard her small, bare feet on the steps, and the door creaked open.

They looked at one another. His hands were folded like the hands of a father waiting to scold, but it was not his place to scold her, whatever she was. She was much more powerful, now, than she had been in that long-ago barn.

“You don’t like me to be away,” she said.

He shook his head.

She smiled.

She smelled like night air.

“It’s good and warm in here,” she said, putting off the harder thing.

He nodded.

“It’s going to be tomorrow,” she said.

“What is?”

“What we came for.”

“And what is that?”

“We’ll save the pope.”

Thomas laughed a little at that.

“It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that. An orphan from Normandy and a thief from Picardy saving the pope. The whoring pope.”

“You know when you swear that I’ll say ‘don’t swear,’ and then you won’t for a while. Why not just not swear in the first place? But I suppose that’s asking a horse not to whinny. Anyway, you’re not a thief. And as long as you’re with me, I’m not an orphan.”

Thomas grunted.

“He doesn’t look like he wants saving. The Holy Father, I mean,” Thomas said.

“The man we saw wasn’t him.”

Thomas stood up and went to the window, looking up where a faint, reddish stain seemed to corrupt the moon. Subtle, but there.

“Who was he, then?”

“You know.”

“The Devil?” Thomas said, with neither sarcasm nor disbelief.

“No. But one of his marshals.”

She drew in a breath to say the next thing.

“And he’s raising the dead. Lots of them.”

Thomas’s hand twitched, but he still could not cross himself.

“How do you know this? Dreams?”

“Yes. And I saw the unclean risen tonight, harvesting in his vineyards. And those girls…”

“Girls?”

“The stags in the Grand Tinel. They were readied before the great hearth in the dressoir, out of sight. They were perfumed and then filled with warm olive oil and honey, and then they were all backed up against the fire to heat their loins. Hot brass was put in their mouths and hands to warm those. So nobody would notice. That they were dead. The knights and cardinals had intercourse with the dead.”

Thomas turned around now, his massive silhouette blocking the moonlight, but not the cool breeze that blew in the window.

“The devil in the pope’s robes… does he have a name?”

The girl said something so faintly he could not hear.

He asked her to repeat it, so she wiggled her finger to make him bend down.

She said it in his ear, whispering as if the wall itself might hear her.

The wind blew the dead leaf of a plane tree into the window.

Thomas closed the shutter and lowered the bar.

“And what are we going to do with this… Baal’Zebud?”

“Zebuth.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You know that, too,” she said.

And his hand was already holding the pitted spear from Jerusalem.

THIRTY-THREE Of the Pope’s Garden

Robert Hanicotte held the bright little flower in his hand, noting its fragility; he had seen this variety before, of course, jabs of them clustered in vivid yellow in this garden or that, but he had never had a mind for herbs and flowers. He struggled to remember its name.

“Tansy,” the pope said. “Crush it, Robert.”

He did as he was told, then put his nose to the palm of his hand.

Pope Clement smiled at the face he made, which betrayed a reaction somewhere between revelation and distaste.

“That’s it exactly. Its fragrance rushes at us, strikes us, and leaves us uncertain how to feel about it. So much power in something so tiny. Orange blossoms are similarly potent; I had the pleasure of smelling some brought from Naples when Queen Joanna was here; but they simply please where tansy bewilders. You seem bewildered, young Robert. What is it that you wanted to see me about?”

The air was cool in the garden, whose high walls thankfully sheltered it from the wind whipping through the alleys of Avignon and blinding its citizens with grit.

In the distance, in the duller section of the papal gardens where food was grown, women gathered onions and turnips bound for the pignotte, where the pope showed his magnanimity by feeding Avignon’s poor. An easier task now that the plague had thinned them so; it had raged mercilessly in the poorer quarters, leaving some streets entirely empty of the living.

A lion roared.

A second lion, in a cage neighboring the first one, paced discontentedly and then curled up at the rear of his enclosure. The cardinal had been meaning to ask where the new one came from; it was larger than Misericord, the good-natured male the pope had received from the king of Bohemia before his death at Crécy, and Misericord did not like his neighbor. The new lion had too much black in its mane and its eyes were set too wide—something one might not notice without a well-made lion next to it, although Misericord was never precisely next to the new one; he tended now to sulk in the farthest corner of his cage.

Robert glanced over at Cardinal Cyriac, who was waiting politely out of earshot, watching a snow-white peacock trundle its carriage of feathers almost over his slippered foot. The cardinal did not like the intimacy between the great man and the man who once saw to his candles, not least because he feared that the boy (hardly a boy, but boyish in body and energies) would ask to be removed from his household. He knew he had been less than generous toward his concubine of late, but seemed unable to stop himself; intellectually, the boy had something about him of the dog who feared so much to be kicked that kicking it seemed obligatory.

“Your Holiness, I had a dream that troubled me. I should perhaps not let such matters disturb my peace.”

The pope floated his hand before Robert’s gaze, which was focused somewhere left of the Holy Father’s foot, and lifted that hand gracefully, taking the younger man’s attention with it until he found himself looking into the pope’s ocean-blue eyes. It was a gesture he knew from his days as cubicular; this pope did not insist on the same sort of deference other powerful men did.

He wanted men to look into his eyes, which were powerful instruments of persuasion, benevolence, or, more rarely, blame.

“Dreams are sometimes folly and sometimes fact. If we could choose between the two, we would not need our Josephs and Daniels, would we?”

Robert shook his head.

A manicured bush full of some exquisite blue-and-white flower moved in the cold breeze behind Clement’s head. He was waiting to be told about the dream.

So Robert told him.

He omitted the fact that he had awakened in his clothes with his stockings wet from dew. The dew of the vineyards.

The pope tilted his head just a little, a paternal smile coming to his lips and his eyes.

“Are you sure this was a dream, Robert?”

“What else could it have been, Papa?”

Something tickled his hand, and he lifted it to see a fly with a body of brilliant gold rubbing its forelegs. It flew off again as if it had never been there. The smell of tansy welled up again in his nose.

“I hate to pronounce the word,” the Holy Father said, “but I think you can guess it.”

Witchcraft.

The word leapt into being and disappeared again as swiftly as the fly had.

The pope’s eyes gleamed just a little as if in confirmation.

“It is no secret that we move in strength against the Arrogant One’s hold on this world. Is it so unlikely that He would seek to stop our enterprise? And is it unlikely that He would seek to blacken our good name with His sorceries? The girl in your dream will have shown you her own villainies to confound you.”

“Do you think they mean you some harm, Papa?”

“It would serve the Cruel One’s purpose; I am turning mighty wheels against Him. Surely He trembles at the thought that we might seize from Him the city of Christ and David. Surely He dreads the check He will suffer when we remove from us His agents, the Jews.”

“I believe,” Robert said, nodding, “I believe the little girl in the dream is pretending to be the page to Chrétien de Navarre, the Comte d’Évreux.”

The pope’s eyes registered something.

The older man stepped closer.

Robert watched the white silk glove rise again, the weak sun flashing in the sapphires of the pope’s rings as he laid his hand upon his former cubicular’s shoulder. He was struck again by the majesty of this man, with his robes the color of aubergine, the pure white zucchetto on his head; he felt the warmth of the man even through the silk glove, even through his own vestments. His father had seemed mighty to him, but he only laid hands on Matthieu and Robert to strike them or yank them out of his way.

He wanted to cry at how deeply accepted he felt.

“You are perceptive and brave. And you are loyal, Robert. You have our gratitude,” the pope said, the smile lines around his eyes deepening. “And you will have much more than that.”

Robert’s breath caught in his throat with excitement and gladness.

“Cardinal Cyriac,” the pope said, calling the red-robed figure to him. “It is our pleasure to elevate this faithful servant, though to what position we have not yet determined; be as a father to him, and know that we shall return your every kindness to him tenfold.”

Dismissed, the cardinal and the young man walked out of the garden, passing by the cages of the pope’s zoo.

We shall return your every kindness to him tenfold

The cardinal moved his lips as he silently repeated the pope’s words, trying to plumb them for their true meaning. He glanced past his self-satisfied lover, whose expression was not so bold it could be called a smile, and at the enclosures of the Holy Father’s bestiary. Something was wrong with the lions. It took him a moment to register what it was.

They were both in the same cage now.

The new, black-maned one sat kingly on its haunches while Misericord hunched miserably in his corner with something like fear in his demeanor.

A chill passed down the cardinal’s left side.

Those cages don’t communicate.

He blinked his eyes, sure they must have deceived him earlier.

He looked back at the black-maned lion, which yawned, curling its tongue lazily. When it noticed him looking at it, it did a very curious thing.

It stared directly at him, its mouth standing open, and moved its tongue over its teeth as if counting them.

THIRTY-FOUR Of the Arrest

The lodgings at which the pope had placed the Comte d’Évreux and his page sat practically in the shadow of the hulking palace, quite near St. Peter’s church. The series of slanting and hunch-shouldered workers’ houses that had occupied the place before had been pulled down four years earlier, the lumber carted to the palace and cheerfully burned in its kitchens and beneath its baths—it was as though the palace had eaten them. Pope Clement had continued his predecessor’s policy of building up a stone Avignon to replace the wooden one, and the Elysium House was a fine example of the new extravagance.

Thomas and Delphine had sequestered themselves in their room, having excused themselves from the midday feast that an English duke was putting on in the courtyard. The sounds of revelry had been floating up to them for nearly an hour, and, as the revelers emptied pitcher after pitcher of the pope’s wine down their gullets, more and more often the Valois and English lords who had once faced each other across battlefields now united in good-natured mockery directed at the window of the man they took for the Comte d’Évreux and his Navarrese page. This was precisely what Thomas had feared—though he bore the face and body of the dead man, he did not share his memories, and the world of high-placed men, though embracing all of Europe, was as small and incestuous as a village.

He was dangerously near betraying himself as an impostor.

“Is my lord of Navarre taken ill?” shouted the young William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, in the boxy, snub-nosed French of English nobility. “For I should have liked to have a wrestle with him.”

Delphine used the tip of her comb to trace the hem of a woman’s dress on the wall hanging near the window. It was the simple comb of her mother’s, brought from Normandy—she had flung the ivory comb from the stag orchard into the muddy street the instant Thomas had given it to her.

“No, my lord Salisbury, he will not wrestle you. He was only wont to wrestle his little brother until Charles grew a moustache. Now he wrestles other men’s wives.”

“That is too much, my lord,” laughed another Frenchman, though it was hard to hear him over the horsy guffaws of Sir William, who displayed a foreigner’s overappreciation of French wordplay, as well as an Englishman’s amusement at French adultery.

“I but jest. If our good Chrétien would poke his head out his window, he would see that I am all smiles.”

Thomas felt vertiginously insulted and also pleased that the Comte d’Évreux was being insulted.

“Leave him be; he is ill from the other night’s excess.”

“Then how does he propose to face tomorrow’s excess?”

A messenger had come the day before, crying the news below every window: Since the plague had killed so many cardinals, a new one was to be created tomorrow night; the celebration would be held outside, in the open courtyard of the palace, and open to all.

Now Delphine traced the legs of a knight, skipped chastely past his middle, and rejoined the outline at his belly. Past the tapestry knight, a young girl and her father bent in the field, their faces turned away, gathering sheaves. She traced them, too. It soothed her to keep her hands busy while she waited for a helpful thought to come. For once, Thomas would have been grateful to see the heavy-lidded gaze that meant she was about to use words that were somehow not hers. Neither of them knew quite what to do while waiting for an invitation to see the pope, an invitation that might not come at all.

He shuddered at the thought of trying to stab the false pope in camera, let alone in front of a table full of knights and a company of guards.

It doesn’t matter.

I’ve come here to die.

“Give us at least your head, my lord of Navarre, so we may know you are not dead!” shouted up the English duke.

“You’d better,” said Delphine, now tracing a little dog.

Thomas smoothed his unfamiliar, closely shorn hair and wiped at his beardless chin before thrusting his head out the window to general applause. He waved a hand at the celebrants.

“Come down,” one said.

“No,” Thomas said. “Our friend is quite correct; I ate more than a young man should at the warrior’s feast, and have paid an old man’s price for it.”

The table below erupted with laughter.

“Where’s Don Eduardo de Burgos?” another shouted. “He’ll purge it out of you with jerez!”

Thomas swallowed hard at this.

“But,” he continued, waving the last comment away, “with temperance and prayer, I should be whole by this evening. If my lord the earl does not throw me to the ground too roughly.”

They laughed again.

“Well, get back to your sickbed,” said the Valois, “and no more excuses tonight. Though you should send your page down for a bowl of this stew. It’ll make a man of him. Oysters, ginger, and pepper.”

Thomas made as though to vomit, provoking a cheerful “Hoooo” from the table, then withdrew his head and closed the shutter. It was struck by what sounded like a plum.

Delphine raised an eyebrow, impressed.

“Now go get us a bowl of that stew,” he said.

The soldiers came an hour later.

Delphine had eased out of the bindings that flattened her modest unboyishness and sat upon her pallet near the window. The spear was around her neck. Thomas was scraping at the bottom of his bowl with a crust of hard bread, eager to get every drop of the spicy stew.

The sound of boots on the stairs froze them both.

They looked at one another.

These were not the light footsteps of the chamber boys, one of whom, Isnard, had made fast friends with Delphine in her role as page, nor was this a solitary messenger.

The knock, though expected, startled Delphine when it came.

She squeaked like a mouse.

The knock came again.

The hand that knocked wore mail.

“Who is it?” Thomas barked, sounding lordly.

“Servants of His Holiness,” said an unimpressed voice. “Now open this door.”

This was no invitation.

They were discovered.

Delphine confirmed her fears by peeking through a hole in the wooden shutters; two men wearing chain mail and the cross-key emblem of the palace stood in the courtyard below the window, one of them chasing off a kitchen girl who had been clearing up. Both men carried poleaxes.

Delphine clutched the case that held the spear.

“I’m sick,” Thomas said. “My neck is swollen and my throat hurts.” He sneezed loudly as punctuation.

“Amazing how many people we knock for feel the plague coming on. Open the door or I’ll break it down. And you won’t like your trip to the palace if I do.”

Thomas took up his sword and Delphine shook her head at him, wide eyed.

“What, then?” he whispered.

“I don’t know, but not that!”

The man outside the door flung himself against it; it was a new door, and solidly built.

“If you make me axe through this whoring thing, you won’t walk out of here. Open this door!”

Delphine’s eyes got heavy.

After the man yelled, she noticed a light coming from beyond the window. She put her hand over the spear and opened the shutter.

The courtyard was gone.

The window now gave on the bank of the river, outside the city walls, and it was as if the window had lowered; the drop from the ledge would be easy, not five feet.

An axe hit the door.

The man in the hallway was swearing.

Thomas would fight to defend her, but maybe not if she left.

He was to let them take him.

“Let them take you,” she heard herself say.

Let them take me, Peter.

Come on, Delphine.

His ear’s off! His ear!

She closed her eyes.

What about Thomas!

She smelled flowers.

Another one.

Stronger than mine.

It would protect her.

WHAT ABOUT THOMAS?

Come on, little moon.

She rolled out the window.

Thomas still had his sword in his hand, though sheathed.

Something like a wing flashed near the window, a very large wing, and Delphine opened the shutter.

It had been dark in the room, and the bright daylight dazzled him.

An axe hit the door.

“I’m going to break your goddamned legs, do you hear me? I’ll drag you there by your balls if you make me chop this whole door up!”

Thomas drew his sword.

“Let them take you,” the girl said.

Her cheeks were wet with tears.

She turned her face from him.

She rolled out the window then, but he never heard her hit the ground.

He thought he heard wings.

Thomas launched himself into the man who came through the door, thinking to bowl him down, hoping to find a smaller man behind him. He hit the big soldier, but not hard enough.

I thought I had him

I’m in the comte’s body I’m not as strong

The man reeled back against the wall but gathered himself and gave the Comte d’Évreux the back end of his axe, breaking teeth.

His body but I feel it GOD

He fell.

He looked for his sword, but could not find it.

GOD

They hit him again.

He was not dragged to the papal palace by his testicles.

He was taken in a cart.

After they broke his legs.

THIRTY-FIVE Of the Doctor

The boy who served the pope’s physician woke from his little bed at the other end of the room and brought a candle over to his master, who whimpered and thrashed in the grips of another nightmare. How many nights in a row had he seen him disturbed by one of these? He knew the physician, Maître de Chauliac, to be a good man, and wondered what devils could trouble one so kind.

This was the worst nightmare yet.

He leaned close to look, but made sure he did not let the candle drip on the man’s full cheeks or big nose. That would be like a story he had told him about a curious woman who drove away an angel. Was it an angel? Maybe just a boy with wings. The maître told him too many stories to keep them all separate.

“Maître?” he said, but very quietly.

He had learned not to wake him in these times, but he dearly wanted to end this particular dream. Did men die of dreams? He would try to remember to ask the doctor in the morning. Not tonight, though. He stood with the candle ready to light him to whatever the maître might ask him for.

Wine, the boy thought.

The worst ones always wake him and he asks me for wine.

But if I pour the wine and he does not wake, I shall have to put it back in the jug and clean the goblet so the little bugs don’t get in it.

Pour the wine, Tristan.

He took a little enameled goblet from its shelf and poured wine from a pewter jug with three rooster’s feet. He was fond of that jug, as he was fond of the smell of wine. Not lately, though. Something was off, like a hint of rot. Had they waited too late to get the grapes in? He had worked as assistant to a baker, and thought to work his way up to being a butler and minding the pope’s fruit cellar at the foot of the kitchen tower, so good was he at ferreting out rottenness. His mother said he had the nose of a dog. But the great doctor had seen what a clever boy he was and pulled him from the kitchens to replace his former boy, who had died of the plague.

Actually, three of the doctor’s assistants had died of the plague, but the good doctor had not caught it himself.

Not yet, he would have corrected. Or he might have said insh’allah, a word he had learned from Arab texts. It meant something like So God be pleased, but Tristan didn’t understand why he didn’t just say that.

“Tristan.”

The doctor was sitting up now, his big, friendly eyes looking bugged and haunted. He rubbed a hand over them and they regained some of their reason.

“Tristan, help me dress.”

“Yes, maître. Are you sure? It is still long before morning.”

“Just get my clothes together, please.”

The man and the boy went into one of the grand, vaulted hallways of the palace, and the physician stopped, considering. He looked left, in the direction that led to the pope’s bedroom and adjoining study. The boy waited with the candle, looking very much like a small dog waiting for its master to open a door.

“Is the Holy Father well?” Tristan said.

“No, Tristan. I do not think he is, though I cannot say why. He seems in good health, but…he is changed.”

“Is it to do with the wine?”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought, perhaps the wine… it smells funny.”

He looked at the boy and narrowed his eyes, considering and rejecting this premise.

He turned on his heel now and went back into his room.

Tristan watched, fascinated, as the doctor sorted through the writs in his desk, many of which came directly from the pope. When he found one that seemed to suit his purpose, he fetched one of his chirurgical knives and, as delicately as though he were cutting live flesh, lifted the two separated parts of the wax seal from it. He then fetched a fresh sheet of parchment and wrote something in a very careful hand. When he had finished, he rolled it and, to the boy’s astonishment, heated his knife in the candle flame and used it to graft the two halves of the seal together again.

“I see your mind frothing with questions, and yet, recognizing the delicacy of the situation, you don’t ask them. Instead, you watch for yourself and come to your own conclusions. I think you have a future, Tristan. I think you will make yourself very useful.”

Now they left again, the boy hurrying to keep up with his master’s purposeful steps. He turned right this time and opened a door to a set of stairs the boy knew about but had been warned never to follow.

“I know you wonder why I’m going to this ghastly place, let alone taking you. The truth is I cannot say. Except that the people who work their art down here are the sort of men who might need two pairs of eyes on them to do the right thing.”

A man groaned in the darkness ahead of them.

The dungeon.

This is the dungeon.

They put thieves and sorcerers here.

It had not occurred to Tristan, who had the deepest confidence in Maître de Chauliac, to be afraid until just that moment.

“We don’t fix men down here, good doctor, we break them. I think you’re on the wrong floor.”

The dungeons, which had sat in such a state of disuse for the first years of the aptly named Clement’s reign that old carts and tools were stored here, had recently come to life again. Sournois, formerly a blacksmith, had been singled out specifically by this changed and un-clement Clement to head up the new “nether wing” of the palace, which was where the enemies of God’s peace would be stored and, when necessary, put to the question. The man hanging from his arms with his ruined legs dangling looked to have been asked a question of some gravity indeed—a question whose answer he could not or would not share.

The doctor noted, with some revulsion, that the man had neither nipples nor fingernails, and that his shoulders were out of joint.

Yes, this was the man in de Chauliac’s dream.

“I’m in the right place. What is that man’s name?”

“This geezer,” Sournois said, standing up and patting the man’s soft belly proprietarily, “is no less than a Norman comte and a future king of Navarre.”

“The Comte d’Évreux,” de Chauliac said.

“That’s the one,” Sournois said, sticking a thumb in the man’s navel and pinching a handful of fat hard enough to make the barely conscious young fellow groan again.

“Get him down.”

“And put him where?” the gaoler said, growing suspicious.

“In whatever you intended to remove him with when you were through. He’s clearly not walking anywhere.”

Sournois got closer to the doctor, but the doctor did not step back.

“I have it from the Holy Father himself that this man is to stay where he is. He’s coming by personally before the feast tomorrow. Might even come tonight.”

The doctor was aware of a cold sweat beginning under his robes.

He will not come yet please not yet insh’allah.

“And I have it from the good Clement that he is to leave with me. You might recognize that seal,” the doctor said, handing his parchment to the other, who recognized his name on the outside and snapped the seal.

He frowned and stared at the writ with confusion and distaste.

“It says that you are to release your close prisoner to me so that he does not die. Which he most certainly will, and soon, if he keeps swinging from your ceiling.”

“But why’s it in Latin? It’s always in French for me. I read a little French.”

“Perhaps His Holiness forgot your lack of education. Shall we wait here for him so we may remind him? Frankly, I don’t know if I can save this man, and I would much rather have him die in your care than mine.”

Sournois put the writ in his pouch.

“To hell with that,” he said, and went to fetch a handcart.

Thomas was cold.

He hurt so badly in so many places that a strange sort of numbness had settled into him. His chief complaint was the cold, which felt as though it would never be out of him.

He did not know who the man was that wheeled him out of the oubliettes and through a door meant for horses and carts, but he sensed that he would have died had he remained. Not of his injuries. Something had been coming for him, and he had just escaped. Had he remained, he would not only have died, he would have died spectacularly.

Horribly.

The man with the fly’s head would have bitten him.

He shivered.

He looked up at the man wheeling him, and the man looked down at him with kind eyes. He wanted to ask him who he was, but he didn’t have the strength.

When he saw that Thomas was still shivering, despite the garments that had been laid across him, the wheeling man stopped and removed his robes, revealing a long shirt that bore the irremovable stains of surgeries.

He placed this around Thomas, and Thomas smiled.

A doctor, then.

He might yet get home to Arpentel and see his wife.

“Don’t speak.” The man smiled down at him. “You have only one task, and that is to live. See that you do it.”

He wanted to tell the doctor to get the arrow out of his tongue, but then he realized that was another doctor, another time. He wanted to ask him if angel’s blood was made of egg whites, but that was wrong, too.

And no wife was waiting for him.

He wrinkled up his face as if to cry, but didn’t let himself.

He lost consciousness.

When he came to again, a girl was looking at the wheeling man.

He was looking wide-eyed at her, as though he saw something Thomas did not see.

Delphine? Was that her name?

Her hair was short.

“Remember this, boy,” the doctor said to a young man Thomas had not seen before, who also stared wide-eyed at Delphine.

What were they seeing?

Delphine put her fingers to her lips, and the man and the boy left.

Now she looked down at Thomas, smiling.

Those gray eyes.

She cooled his brow with her sleeve, which had been dunked in the Rhône.

“I’m going to die,” he managed.

“You already did die, remember? You’re the dead one.”

He felt his spirit coming loose, like a ship from its moorings, but she lifted his head and pointed.

“Hold on,” the girl said, “just for a moment.”

She put her hand behind his head and lifted so he could see.

Something was coming out of the river, lit by the moon.

A man.

A man in rusty armor, carrying a sword by the blade, cruciform.

A heavily muscled man with a graying beard and a scarred face.

Him.

He weakly shook the ruined head that was not really his.

Thomas de Givras stepped dripping from the river, eyes closed, a sleepwalker.

Delphine got out of the dripping revenant’s way, and he came to the cart. Thomas was afraid. Was he already dead?

He watched himself bend over, getting closer.

Dripping on him.

He felt very dizzy; the world was going black.

He was being kissed now by his own mouth, not as lovers kiss, with tongues, but as true lovers kiss, sharing breath.

He breathed out of the comte’s lungs and into his own.

The ship of his soul lurched away from his false body.

And into his true one.

He opened his eyes.

The body of the comte twitched now, once, then twice, only now it was under him. His mouth, his actual mouth, was on the dead man, and he pulled up. He breathed in, his strong lungs filling with air, his hands clutching, ready to grab weapons or levers or to brace against the pillars of the temple. He was strong again. He ran his hand through his full beard, and tugged on his longish hair.

He laughed, and Delphine laughed, too, shushing him as he put the doctor’s robes on over his cold, wet armor.

She now bent and kissed the cheek of the dead man in the cart.

“Give the river back its due,” she said.

Thomas tipped the body into the water, and it floated for a moment, and then the darkness took it away.

THIRTY-SIX Of the Arming, and of the Vigil

“Isnard!”

The chamber boy at Elysium House peered out the window and down at the street, the darkness of which still resisted the prying of the low morning sun between the close buildings.

“Here, Isnard!”

He wrinkled his nose and put down the piss-pot he had been about to chuck. Was that his new friend, the page? And had not that page served the arrested knight?

“Diego?” he called down in a carefully measured whisper.

“Yes!” Delphine said.

She, too, was an expert whisperer.

“What are you doing here?”

He looked behind him to make sure no hand was reaching to yank his ear for idleness.

“I need a favor.”

“What is it?” he said. “And be quick!”

Why was Diego in his nightclothes?

“My master’s things—have they been taken?”

“No. The room is as it was. The carpenter is coming tomorrow to fix the door.”

“And my master’s horse?”

“In the stables, eating twice his share of hay. The English lord means to take him.”

“Open the door for me.”

“What? I can’t!”

“Yes you can. Open the door, and help me fetch out my master’s armor and horse.”

He looked behind him again.

“A horse? They’ll hang me for stealing a horse!”

“It’s not stealing. The horse belongs to us.”

He considered this.

“All the same, they’ll kill me! Then they’ll turn me out, and my father will kill me again!”

“They won’t turn you out. You speak French, Italian, and Provençal. How many times have they used you to translate? Just let me in, and I’ll do most of it.”

“They’ll see you.”

“Not if you distract them.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Fall down the stairs with something loud. A pan or something.”

This was beginning to sound fun.

He would get a beating, but some things were worth a beating.

And he liked the little Spanish page with the French accent, even if he looked a bit like a girl.

“Why should I?”

“If you do, I’ll give you this ivory comb I found in the street.”

He licked his lips.

An ivory comb.

“It has angels painted on it.”

Isnard liked angels.

In fact, he thought he’d seen one last night.

Delphine and Thomas rode past the tanners and parchment makers on the banks of the canal fed by a branch of the river Sorgues, smelling the stink of their industry. He rode Jibreel and she rode her little palfrey. The horse felt good under his hips. He thought this might be the last time he ever rode a horse, but he didn’t mind. He had died this morning, and he knew what it was now.

Tonight would bring more death, probably his.

He was ready.

This would be worse than Crécy, but sweet where that was bitter.

The fine armor he had worn in another body mostly fit him, though the chest was tight and the belly loose. The breastplate and leg armor were all Delphine could get out of the house, so his own rusty chain sat beneath them. He had also left behind the Navarrese surcoat and rode with his breastplate gleaming, though dented, and his head bare—nobody would take him for the Comte d’Évreux now.

They left the city by the Imbert Gate, but they did not travel far. In fact, they called at the first large building they found, just by the river.

The Franciscan brotherhood lived in a large, proud building, as befit the large, proud city it served; this did not sit well with all of the brothers, whose attraction to the order had more to do with Christian poverty than ecclesiastic pomp. And yet, here was the capital of Christianity, and here they could do the most to protect their order from charges of heresy. Better to let the popes build them fine churches than to be burned on humble pyres. They allowed the rich to bury their dead in the churchyard, as though the Devil were too simple to find a bad onion in good soil; and when the affluent tried to buy back their wasted lives, showering the monks with money from their deathbeds, the brothers used their wealth to spread the word of the impoverished Christ.

They never closed their doors to anyone, and their hospitality during these months of pestilence had exacted a heavy toll.

Only seven brothers remained of forty.

Brother Albrecht, an Alsatian with the beginnings of cataracts, welcomed the knight and his daughter.

He helped them stable their horses.

He showed them to a room where they could sleep through midday, and then showed them to the altar of the Virgin, where they could pray.

They told him they wished to have strong bodies and pure hearts.

They were going to the feast in the Courtyard of Honor.

Some lad of dubious merit was to be given a cardinal’s hat.

It seemed curious that the knight wished to borrow a friar’s habit, but Brother Albrecht was used to the vanities of the worldly—many men asked to be buried in the brown of St. Francis (as though a feathered stone might fly!). Brother Albrecht felt the man’s chest and cheeks (was he preparing himself for the day he would need his hands to read faces as well as hearts?) and found no harm in him, but rather a long-buried goodness. So what if he wore rusty armor beneath his shiny breastplate; so what if his beard was unkempt and his fingernails long? Who refuses a gold coin because it has a little mud on it?

He gave him the new habit Brother Egidius had never gotten to wear, having caught the Pest the day it was given to him.

God knew they had more habits now than living men to fill them.

“You’re not going to do anything to shame the order, are you?”

“No,” the big man said.

“How about you, little one?”

She shook her head, smiling.

She had been smiling since she got here.

Brother Albrecht understood.

Blessed Francis just called some to him.

It was getting dark.

Delphine took Thomas’s sword from its sheath.

“What are you going to do, break it so I won’t hurt anybody?” he joked. She gave him that dry, tight-lipped head shake he knew so well. Then she did something that made him gasp.

She cut her hands on the blade.

Quite deliberately.

She smeared her blood up one side of it and down the other, massaging it into the runnel, on the point, on quillons and pommel, and into every notch it had gathered in the tiltyard and on the field and in the furtherance of theft.

As if it were a holy oil.

It is.

He gasped again, but this was a gasp of recognition.

Jesus whoring Christ, do I have to watch you every second?

You bleeding all over my things doesn’t help me, you, or anybody. Understand?

The thing in the murk had not been bothered by the billhook or the boar spear; it recoiled only when struck by his sword. His sword had killed it.

Her blood killed it.

Her blood in its heart.

The armorer at the night tourney would not touch it.

Christ, what the hell is on this thing?

I killed something foul in a river.

Hey, Jacmel, you want any of this?

He kissed the bloody sword now, and put it in its sheath.

She took the spear from its case and gave him that, too.

He threw his dagger to the floor and wedged the spear into the sheath at the back of his belt. He smiled to think he had just shoved a relic worth the whole of Avignon into a piece of greasy leather near his ass.

She bent him down and kissed his cheeks.

Daughter witch page saint prophet angel what are you what are you You

Delphine

“What are you?” he said.

“Two things, I think. But soon I’ll be just one.”

He shook his head to keep from crying.

He could not, he would not watch her be hurt.

Not if it meant his soul.

“Am I still not to kill anyone?”

“Not men.”

“What does that mean?”

“We won’t be facing men.”

THIRTY-SEVEN Of the Visitation at Villeneuve

Robert Hanicotte spent the night before his elevation in a state of bliss only mildly tempered by the memory of the things he had seen in the vineyard. He ate the game fowl and sausages and even drank the wine, sweet from its late harvest, and with just a hint of something

dead feet corpses’ feet

else. The something else was easily forgotten, though it tended to bob back up again, requiring further attention at inattention. So much of life demanded a kind of truce with perceived facts—one could not allow the suffering of the kitchen women, for example, to spoil the taste of capon. Neither would those women trouble themselves about the gnawings of a rat at the summer sausage; just cut that end off and serve the rest.

Silently.

He did not know, now, what he had seen at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but it did not bear further thought. He had done the right thing warning His Holiness about the little witch.

goodness came from her she was benevolent like Matthieu her priest you betrayed one of your brother’s flock

I don’t know if she was good or evil I can’t know that

Another thought that he had to step on from time to time was the knowledge that he was completely unfit for high ecclesiastic office. Oh, he had been a priest briefly; the pope liked to discuss biblical matters before bed, so it pleased him to seek cubiculars from among the monasteries and minor clergy. Robert’s good looks inspired even those not given to love men to a sort of instant warmth and familiarity, and his years under a tyrannical father had clarified his mild, pleasant manner. His bishop had sent the newly minted priest south with Clement in mind. Now so long had passed since his studies that he dreaded the first letter he might be asked to draft or, worse, the first Latin discourse he might be expected to give.

He might have despaired were it not for the example of Pierre Roger de Beaufort, the pope’s dull-eyed, fatling nephew, as one of the last batch of cardinals created before the plague rose up. The boy was eighteen years old, and had to be reminded hourly to shut his trapezoidal mouth and breathe through his nose. Robert could do as well as he, please God, at least that well.

He left the pallet he had set up in the study—he would not bed next to the belly-sleeper again—and walked down the spiral stairs to the garden. He had fought with the cardinal after the departure of their guests, making it clear to him that further indecency between them would be unbecoming to his new office. The old man wanted to throw him out on his ear, and would have but for his fear to displease Pope Clement, who had taken precipitate steps in Robert’s favor.

The Holy Father loves me

That is not him and you know it

I don’t know and I don’t care

He heard one of the Arabs whinny and wondered if it was Guêpe; he wanted to go and see, but what if the little witch was there again, waiting to reprove him (at best) and perhaps to wither his manhood with some spell?

He shuddered at the thought and steered instead for the olive trees, running his hand through their slender, silver-green leaves and considering the pitted fruit hanging there. He wandered near the huge stone well, running his finger along its lip. He looked at the sky. The moon had a red edge now, much talked about in the city, like the rim of a drunkard’s eye.

He did not pretend to understand the caprices of celestial clockwork; if these were, in fact, the end times, there was nothing to be done about it.

Something passed in front of the moon.

Quickly.

Not a bird.

He felt chill now; the cold hadn’t taken long to work through his sleeping-gown and cloak. His feet might as well have been bare for the thinness of his slippers.

He looked toward the house, drawn to the warmth of the still-glowing hearth and the candles in the lower rooms. He would find another cup of wine and try again to sleep.

A small silhouette now eclipsed the doorway. Young Vincent, the serving boy, waited for him.

“Père Robert,” the boy whispered, agitated.

While Robert had not held up the wafer in more than ten years, Père was the best title the boy could hang on his master’s concubine.

“Yes?”

“There are men in the house.”

Robert’s blood ran cold.

“What men?”

“I don’t know. It was too dark to see them well.”

His mind raced.

He remembered the squire whose duty it was to protect the cardinal.

“Where is Gilon?”

“He drank a pitcher to himself tonight; I could not wake him. But I have his sword.”

He saw it now.

It was nearly as big as the boy.

“Put that down,” he said.

He thought of the stable boy, a big lad, and he hurried to the stables, clutching his coat around him.

The horses whinnied and tramped about their stables; something had agitated them.

He found the boy, who normally slept like the dead at this time of night, sitting wide-eyed on his shoeing bench; despite the darkness, he could see the boy’s outline, and saw that he was gripping a pitchfork.

“Come with me to the house,” Robert said. “Vincent thinks he saw something.”

The boy shook his head in the near-darkness.

“I command you to come with me.”

“Command as you like,” the boy said in a choked voice, “but I saw something, too. And I’m not going near that house.”

“You’ll force me to tell the cardinal.”

“You can tell the Devil for all I care. And I think I know where you can find him.”

“I command you…”

“Get out!” the boy said, standing now, leveling the pitchfork.

Robert got out.

Vincent was gone.

Robert found the sword the boy had left behind and picked it up, feeling ridiculous. He barely knew how to hold it, let alone swing it at someone. He put it back down.

He walked into the house now, going to the dressing area near the kitchen hearth and taking up a carving knife. He clutched it to his chest and stood there, unsure what to do. He listened. Hearing nothing, he made for the stairs, taking them slowly, quietly.

He heard a floorboard creak, but not from the staircase; it had come from the cardinal’s bedroom.

He tried to think of where else he might go and hated his own cowardice; he could go the falconer’s apartment, but what would he say? I think someone may have broken into the house, but I decided to leave the cardinal and save myself?

There was nothing for it but to go and see.

He crept down the hallway.

The door stood open, the light from a candle casting a wavering glow.

He edged up to the door and peeked in.

A man, or something man-shaped if not man-colored, stood over the cardinal. Impossibly, it had its arm down the cardinal’s mouth all the way to the elbow. It looked up at Robert, its mouth full of dirty teeth, its eyes black but somehow luminous; were there twelve of them?

No, six.

Now two.

Its skin blushed from sickly white to baby pink and then began to sag and wrinkle.

It was becoming more like the cardinal every instant.

It spoke with the cardinal’s voice.

“Go back to bed, my darling. Don’t leave the house. Be sweet and you’ll get your hat tomorrow.”

The cardinal’s eyes stared dead at the ceiling, his crammed mouth open so wide it bled at the corners, his soft neck wrinkled back on itself like gills.

“Please don’t make me tell you again.”

The cardinal twitched under the thing.

Robert dropped the knife and walked away.

He lay on his pallet listening to soft noises coming from the other room.

By morning, he had convinced himself he had not heard them.

The cardinal came to him near first light, asking if he’d had a bad dream. Yes, he most certainly had. The cardinal pulled him gently into his bedroom and he allowed it.

He allowed everything.

Everything seemed normal.

Except that Cardinal Cyriac now slept on his back.

THIRTY-EIGHT Of the Rings of Lazarus, and of the Bathers

The large, hooded friar and the short-haired girl packed in with the poor of Avignon, who flowed toward the palace like a second Rhône of cowls and mantles and hats of many colors. If many wore the clothes of the wealthy dead, all of them bore their own hunger; it made them forget their fear of the Great Death, or, at least, to concede no more to it than rags held over faces while they pressed in together toward the pope’s table. They had already tasted the pope’s generosity at the pignotte, but there they got vegetables and bread, and not enough for all; here, in the square outside the hulking palace, beneath the little pointed towers that jabbed up like goats’ horns, the smell of roasted meat maddened them and brought water to their mouths.

“At sunset,” the criers had cried, and now they watched the sky in the west; the sun’s departure was sweet to many of them already, as it called them every day to lay down hammers, scythes, and buckets and go to their hearths to eat and tell stories, but this was the first public feast since the Pest had fallen on the city.

This would be something.

As the last pale blue in the sky darkened to indigo, the herald bearing the crossed keys blew a trumpet note, and the doors leading to the Courtyard of Honor swung back.

The crowd surged in, managing not to trample one another, but edging as close to the front as possible for the first pick of the feast. Words came first of course, words in Latin, censers swung with strange and heady smoke, words in French about how the coming war would be seen from Heaven. Words about Cardinal Hanicotte and how the Lord knew his own and called them forward to be raised.

Now a commotion rose up.

Two men in yellow hats, bearing yellow circles sewn on their breasts, pushed forward, crying for help; they removed their hats. One of the men had dried blood on his head and a face streaked with grime from where he had hastily tried to remove plaster dust with his hand. They were Jews, they said. Children of Abraham and loyal citizens of Avignon. An abomination had risen. Something wicked had broken into the ghetto and was pulling down houses.

“It is made of men! A monster made of men!”

The crowd gasped, and, in the silence following their gasp, sounds of distress and terror sounded in the distance.

The crowd began to mutter.

“If we call God a different name, we share the same Devil! Help us against him, Your Holiness! We beg you!”

At this, both men went to their knees and extended their hands in supplication.

The people in the courtyard began to yell, “Yes,” and, “Help them!” and, “Please!” and they moved and rippled like a living thing wanting to react to threat.

The Holy Father stood and calmed them, calling forward a small group of soldiers and speaking privately to their sergent, whose eyes bugged at what he heard; but then he lowered his head and nodded.

“Those are not enough!” the man with the bloodied crown despaired. “You have not seen it!”

Cardinal Cyriac stood and said, “If the Devil is here, soldiers of the church will give chase to him. If these were the hysterics of a deceived people, they will wish for the Devil.”

One or two in the crowd laughed, but most were too disturbed by the sincerity and horror of the plea they had heard.

Now the soldiers marched off toward the Jewish quarter, bringing the men with them.

A woman’s scream, far away but distinct, rose up past the new wing of the palace.

“If the Devil is in their quarter,” said the pope, “perhaps this will be the argument that leads them to recognize that their Messiah awaits their recognition and stands ready to help them against him whose bidding they have foolishly done for so long.”

Musicians came with drum and cornemuse, covering any further noise from beyond the walls.

And now, at a nod from the pope’s steward, soldiers near the front uncrossed their pole-arms and let the crowd flow past them at something more than a walk but less than a run. The large friar waited patiently, letting others go before him. He favored his right side, curling around what might have been some stiffness, or some painfully withered limb, which he kept beneath his large habit. The girl he had entered with had slipped away some time ago, and no eye had followed her where she went.

Delphine made her way first into the garden, with its smells of night flowers and the calls of strange birds, and she skimmed the wall until she came to a door at the bottom of a tower.

Is it here?

Yes.

She kissed the iron lock and the studded door swung open.

The room she entered served as storehouse for the pope’s wine; candles flickered on sconces (it would not be long before the butler’s boy came to tend them), revealing graceful vaulted ceilings in the same exquisite limestone that composed the rest of the palace. Barrels hunched together, looking short beneath this ceiling, though each of them was taller than she. She stepped uncertainly to one barrel, laying her cheek against its cool oak and listening.

Quem quaeritis? the cool walls seemed to ask.

Whom do you seek?

You won’t hear anything.

Feel him.

She now crawled on top of one of the huge tuns and curled on it like a kitten settling in for a nap.

Not this one.

She did this again and again until she came to one very near the back, one that had been waiting since August.

Here

He’s here

You can’t do this you can’t this is a dream

She looked around and saw a rack of tools, pulling out a prying bar that felt much too heavy for her.

I’m too weak

No little moon not tonight

We’re coming

Our strength is yours

She lifted the bar and brought it down with great force, nearly falling in as the lid began to give. She laughed at herself and stood on a neighboring tun to finish.

She got the lid off, throwing the broken disk aside, and a sour-sweet wall of scent hit her.

The wine looked black.

Splinters floating in it.

Say “Rise.”

She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

Say it he will hear

THAT CUNT FROM PARIS IS IN THE CELLAR WITH HIM

Hurry

“Rise,” she whispered.

Nothing.

At first.

Then a ripple.

Nothing.

Another ripple.

Then a white finger.

The hand followed it.

Pinkish-white, waxy, shocking beneath its splendid rings.

She took it in hers.

God don’t let it come apart in my hand I can’t take it I can’t

It squeezed.

That night in August. He could not sleep. The braziers on either side of him lit his bedroom with a fierce light, illuminating the curls and spirals of the fresco of the oak tree that embraced all four walls. Squirrels and birds perched there, and acorns, all on the slender branches that looped over a frescoed sky of the rarest blue. Pierre Roger, known as Clement, was sweating in his silk sleeping-gown, the cord of his sleeping cap wet beneath his chin. He called for Luquin, his cubicular, to bring him a little watered wine. The young man, an angelic blond from Bordeaux, had been charged by Maître de Chauliac not only to keep the braziers hot enough so fire might be seen (this to keep the Holy Father free of plague), no matter how uncomfortable the heat, but also, and more urgently, to watch that neither coverlet nor pillow should be pushed by sleeping hand or knee into the flame.

This was the hottest night since the fires had been prescribed. Clement felt he was suffocating and said as much, but then said, “Yet I withdraw my complaint; it is not for you to choose between love for me or fidelity to my good doctor’s instruction. Is it, Luquin?”

“My first loyalty is to you.”

“And mine is to God, whom I serve through ministering to his flock. And whom the doctor serves through ministering to me. It will not do for me to defy God’s purpose by thwarting another of his servants, will it, Luquin?”

“Yet it seems to me, Holy Father, that by this argument no two Christians might honestly disagree. Could God not be served in different ways by men with different minds?” the young man said, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve.

“Ah. Not wholly unsound. But your discomfort skews your argument, for you want the fires out. The maître’s métier is fighting illness, a field in which I am ignorant; humility demands submission to those who know best. Keep the fires lit. I will go and nap in the room of the stag until I can stand to return.”

His feet probed for the floor. Luquin rushed to bring his slippers, but he waved the young man off.

“The tiles are cooler than the air. My feet shall be grateful to feel them.”

Clement shuffled through the stone connecting room with its staircase and then into his private study, fitted out with a small second bed for when he tired of the grand canopied one in the bedroom. The walls of this room gave it its name, for its frescoes sang the glories of the hunt, not only of the stag, but of all manner of game; a man in parti-colored clothes let loose a ferret on a rabbit. Fishermen dangled nets over an embarrassment of fish. A naughty-looking boy took birds at the top of a tree. Some had grumbled that the pope should look upon scenes from Scripture rather than the delights of hunting and bathing and birding, but he had said, “God made earthly pleasures, too, which may be enjoyed without sin. Shall I affront Him with pride by thinking myself above them?”

Célèste was waiting for him.

Clothed modestly, as she always was, so that they might more easily separate and look guiltless at the sound of the far door opening. Might not a young woman privately visit her uncle by marriage to discuss a matter of Christian law? And as for sounds of pleasure, castle walls treat the ears capriciously. Do you know what you risk with this accusation? Are you very, very sure?

The entrance from the bedroom was safe; Luquin knew never to enter the room of the stag, and he was not so dull as not to know why. “They call it the room of the stag because that is where His Holiness mounts horns on his nephew’s head,” as he told his friend, the second falconer, and other friends besides.

When, with one warm, backward glance, Célèste slipped barefoot down the stairs between the rooms, her kirtle smoothed (if damp), her question of Christian law duly answered, Clement lay back on the bed, enjoying the air coming in through the window. Not cool, perhaps, but mild. A breeze from paradise itself compared with the furnace raging in his bedroom.

Sleep would come now.

It began to, at least.

At first he wove a nightmare for himself. Four soldiers of low rank and rust were on the verge of raping a girl in a barn. A donkey hung half-eaten from the roof.

Flies everywhere.

He woke.

The sound of high, girlish laughter had awakened him.

But whose?

And what a dream!

Guilt for his carnal sin, no doubt, the four soldiers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John teaching him the grotesquery of his adultery with his niece by marriage. And the ass from Bethlehem or Palm Sunday, too.

He exhaled, considered returning to his proper bed.

No.

Cooler here.

Poor Luquin sweating in there, but he’ll sneak out soon enough.

He closed his eyes again.

He slipped into a pleasant dream of children laughing.

What children?

Oh.

Those.

The tittering came from the wall next to him, where four boyish girls or girlish boys played and cooled their plump feet in frescoed waters. Not his favorite part of the painting, easy to overlook.

He had never really seen them before, these puti, as they appeared to him in this nascent dream.

So vivid and so happy.

He liked them very much.

That youth’s endless pleasures must end had not occurred to the bathers, and he felt now that they were right. He saw, in the nave of his mind, one of them look at him with the shared, secret wisdom of immortality. Out of the corner of the eye, as befit the sly nature of the secret. He or she drew his or her feet out of the stream and stood on the bed next to Clement. The weight of the painted child was real somehow, somehow pressed down the bed.

More tittering.

Those watching from the wall.

Now that cherubic face bent to his, and he smiled in his half sleep, but the child’s hand took his cheeks and made him soften his mouth, the better to receive the kiss. And what a kiss. It was spearmint and fennel, it was brandied and onioned and wild, it was water and the mark water leaves when it retreats from sand.

Célèste, he wanted to say, both her name and how this kiss tasted, celestial, an earthly pleasure upside down with its feet hung in stars.

But he could not speak, for he could not breathe.

This became urgent.

He pushed the bather’s face away, and the boy-girl shrugged and returned to its fellows, one of whom bent to kiss it even more intimately.

Clement woke, gasping for air.

He looked and saw the fresco, which lay as it had been made, motionless save for the guttering of the candle that illumined it, and mute.

His lips tingled, though.

What of that?

“Célèste?” he said.

Nothing.

Only the sound of a fly.

He looked at the painting again and saw that he had been mistaken; it was not as it had been. He counted three children, not four.

He put his hand on the bed next to him and found it wet, whether from the loins of his niece or the feet of the bather he was unsure.

Enough of this.

He would return to his canopied bed and to the companionship of his cubicular.

He got to his feet in the shimmering near-darkness, and felt water under them.

As if something had dripped across the floor.

He took another step, but instinct slowed this one.

He nearly started out of his skin to see it standing near the doorway.

A child, neither boy nor girl but both, its skin pale.

Its feet wet.

It put a finger to its lips, but the man was too frightened to speak.

It pointed at the candle, which went out, though moonlight still lit the room enough for him to see it walking toward him.

Pierre Roger went to cross himself, but his arm cramped and froze in the third position, the useless claw of his right hand stuck to his left breast.

He backed up away from the boy-girl until his legs bumped against the frame of his bed.

The sound of a dog licking.

He half-turned to see one of the bathers on all fours, spiderlike, lapping at the love-stain on the sheet.

He inhaled a gasp of air, but another child, standing on the bed behind him, stoppered his mouth with a cool hand, aborting his shout in a spasm.

They pulled him down on the bed.

The one who had kissed him straddled him now, fluidly but with a boulder’s weight.

Can God make something He can’t lift? its black eyes asked him.

Now its arm down his throat, tearing his mouth.

He could not breathe.

He did not breathe again.

Until.

He sat up from his bath.

A small hand held his.

He could not see, and then he could, only shapes at first but his eyes were clearing. He could not tell who had his hand.

He needed to breathe out but could not.

His lungs were heavy and full.

He tried twice before he managed to empty them.

The dead man sat up.

He expressed thick, dark wine from his nose and mouth.

Delphine wrinkled her nose in disgust as it washed over her feet where she crouched on the neighboring barrel, but she did not let him go. His skin had the consistency of roseate wax; yes, he was a giant wax doll who had been held too close to a fire so that the features sagged and melted just a bit. She had to get him out of the barrel.

God, the stink.

The wine had covered it, sealed it.

But no more.

She felt ill.

Hurry.

She pulled, afraid that his arm would come off, but, though it did not, he was too heavy for her to lift alone.

She tried again, feeling more strength in her, and nearly got him out. He lifted his head and blinked what was left of his eyes at her. Then his eyes became whole. His features shifted and tightened.

He saw her for the first time.

Terror filled his eyes; not terror of her, but of what he had seen before.

She pulled again, with all her might, and this time he helped her. He clambered out in a great rush of wine, kneeing his way to the barrel next to her.

He covered his nakedness and shuddered, his mouth open, drool coming from it, but it was a living mouth now.

His teeth were purple.

When he spoke, he panted between words.

“I. Was. In Hell.”

“You still are.”

“Are. You. An angel?”

“No. But there’s one here. And more are coming.”

“Good,” he said, crying, looking like a pale, adult toddler. “That’s good.”

“Maybe we won’t think so. The war is coming with them.”