Between Two Fires

The Lord made answer.

THIRTY-NINE Of the Gemini, and of the Unmasking

Jacquot squinted his eyes, waiting for the smoke from the pope’s twin braziers to drift in another direction. His post as papal guard would not allow him to rest his loaded crossbow, nor could he wipe his tearing eyes. Neither could he fetch the untouched quail that mocked him from the plate of the new bugger cardinal just in front of him, despite its tempting crust of herbs and his desperately rumbling stomach.

Fuck off, smoke.

The smoke persisted.

He fought the urge to turn his head away, fearing to draw attention to himself. His duty was to remain still. Thus far, his duty was proving indistinguishable from that of a pillar.

He had not worn the crossed-key insignia of the guard for very long; it was less than two weeks since he rode into Avignon with the troop of Breton archers that had pulled him from his Norman tree, all of them slavering for Jerusalem gold and the absolution that going on crusade would bring. Yet his ability to quarrel a crabapple off a stump at thirty yards had so impressed the quartermaster that the captain of the guard had sent for him.

Now this.

Cunting, cunting smoke.

He had just wondered for the fortieth time how much longer this goddamned feast could last when he heard a gasp go up from the crowd. Several pointing fingers jabbed toward the rear of the courtyard, and the cardinals turned to look as well. Now the other guards looked, so Jacquot did as well.

What he saw bewildered him.

A second pope had entered the courtyard; Jacquot’s watery eyes were unsure, but this pope seemed a perfect twin to the one who sat before him, save for his white robes and miter. A troop of soldiers in cross-key tabards, the captain of the guard among them, marched at this white pope’s side. His right hand held a crosier and a peasant girl held his left.

The seated pope, wearing ruby-littered robes of burnt orange and a miter with three crowns of gold, looked right at his geminus but remained seated. The guards around the nearer pope, like him, were all new recruits culled from those who had drifted south, and none of them had the first idea what to make of this.

The men near the pope in white had their gazes fixed. They had been prepared for what they would see. Most of those were veterans of the palace, kept farther away from His Holiness these last months, but now standing together near the pretender.

Sweet Christ there’s going to be a fight and fuck this fucking smoke.

He stepped back out of the smoke’s path and wiped his eyes in case he had to shoot.

“False pope!” the pope in white shouted, his voice echoing off the walls in the Courtyard of Honor. “You know you are a devil! Show your true form or depart!”

Now the near pope stood, his eyes wide, pointing at the other.

“A devil in white cries devil at your Father! Lord protect us!” he shouted, but his fear seemed false.

“Tell them what lord you mean,” said the little girl. Her voice seemed familiar to Jacquot. He wanted to wipe his eyes again to get a better look at her, but now the knight who had lately accompanied the pope and all but taken over the duties of the captain of the guard, a harsh seigneur with a leonine face and black teeth, growled, “Crossbows ready.”

Jacquot raised his weapon.

The bugger cardinal, his upper lip dewed with sweat, turned on his bench and looked first at Jacquot and then at his crossbow, where his trigger hand partly obscured the ivory inlay picturing the Last Supper.

“No worries, Your Eminence,” he said, knowing that a wink from his drooping eye was unlikely to inspire confidence but giving the young cardinal one anyway. He had found that steadying others steadied himself.

Peering from beneath his lowered hood, Thomas saw that the true pope had entered the courtyard of honor. All eyes had turned that way. The knight in friar’s robes did not breathe like a bull before his charge, but silently readied his sword, curling his body around it to hide it from the poor of Avignon jostling around him.

He must slide it from its sheath and leap the first table in one motion.

He must be upon the higher table before they saw him.

He must kill the false pope before they could react.

He must surprise them.

At least two at the upper table were devils.

Now, he thought.

The sword leapt from its sheath and he leapt upon the first table, kicking a plate of dark bread aside.

The lion-faced knight turned, faster than Thomas had hoped, his axe already out. Recognition flashed in his little black eyes; he did not alert the others—he wanted to handle this himself.

YOU FUCKING THIEF YOU WANT DEATH AND HERE IT COMES

The devil-knight leapt upon the cardinal’s table, just where Thomas had planned to jump. It squatted and slashed with its axe, but Thomas ducked and turned so it bit through his habit and glanced off his backplate, continuing his turn so the point of his sword wheeled around and into the lion-knight’s face. It continued through the back of the head. The stabbed knight screamed, but it was also a roar.

Thomas yanked out his sword.

The impossible gash in the thing’s head smoked.

It staggered back from the table, shaking furiously, like a wet dog.

It was growing larger, popping its armor.

Screams from the courtyard behind him.

Cardinals struggled to stand up, but some were too paralyzed with fear to move and weighed the shared benches down.

“Shoot him!” the new cardinal screamed, pointing at Thomas.

Now a crossbowman stepped forward.

Cheeked his weapon and triggered it with a flat but potent whack audible even through the chaos of crowd and devils.

The bolt shot true.

It struck Thomas in the chest, and he staggered back, stunned.

His cowl fell away.

Another bolt flew from farther down the table; this one clipped his neck, but got no cords.

The first one, though.

He looked down at the goose-feather fletching where the quarrel stood from the dimple in the comte’s armor, the dimple Thomas’s final axe-blow had made in their fight by the stream. It would have clanked off otherwise, for such was the art of the Milanese at curving and hammering their armor.

Dead dead I’m dead now

“Thomas!” the crossbowman said desperately. “I’ve killed you!”

Thomas saw his drooping eye.

“Jacquot?”

“Jesus Christ, forgive me,” Jacquot said.

The old cardinal near him disliked his words so much he unhinged his jaw and bit Jacquot’s face, dragging the skin from it and leaving his lidless eyes staring in disbelief.

Blood all over the young cardinal, his silk gloves.

Jacquot fell.

Thomas did not fall, though he expected to.

Through the bone the point tickling the heart I feel it

Panic in the courtyard.

It seemed everyone shouted or screamed at once.

People fled, running for the gates.

I can’t I can’t I can’t

Thomas gathered strength in his mighty thighs and leapt up on the cardinals’ table. Cardinal Cyriac grew larger. Blood on his face like a dog at the stag. Growing new eyes. Growing bird’s legs beneath his robes.

Thomas ran past this monstrosity and made for the pope.

The thing that had been Cardinal Cyriac reached for him with one of its hands, snagging the sleeve of his left hand.

He turned and lopped the hand from it.

It screamed in rage.

The girl’s blood hurt it.

Three more loping steps to the pope’s cathedra.

Almost there.

The pontiff in orange stood with his hands out, magnificent, smiling.

Thomas’s legs pumped.

Something awful behind him, the smell of sour milk and burning.

If he stopped, if he slowed, it would break his neck from behind.

The smoke from the braziers in his eyes.

ARE YOU SURE?

Yes.

Are you?

His sword fell and struck the pope’s miter, cleaving the three crowns, and cleaving the head.

The crowd screamed in outrage.

His sword went all the way to the chin and the man’s eyes rolled back white and dead, the wound smoking. The arms, though. One of them (not an arm so much as a fly’s limb) grabbed the sword by the blade and yanked it. It spun in the air and away, over the walls of the courtyard. Thomas saw it for an instant, moonlight on it.

You’ll never hold a sword again

Another head was growing from where the first one had split.

A wicked seraph.

A fly’s head, but golden.

Baal’Zebuth.

One of the fallen.

A biting fly.

Shrieks of fear and horror.

The spear!

He pulled the spear out of its sheath.

The thing that had been the pope slapped him now with the arm that was still a man’s arm.

Not in the face.

In the chest.

It hurt.

The peeled head smiled in its two halves.

Dizzy.

Intomyheart!!! but i can still do this ican still

He blew out of his nose, bloody now.

This is what i’m for i do this i drive it home i’m strong

strong please

He hammered down the spear in his fist with all his might, his hips in it.

It moved so fast.

It was as though it wavered in the air.

He missed.

Then something irresistible grabbed his arm.

Jerked it behind him, the pain dazzling.

Ripped it off.

His arm off still gripping the spearhead.

He looked around and saw it.

The other devil had it.

The lionish one, his wound almost gone.

i never had a chance did i

DO YOU KNOW WHAT WE ARE

ONLY ONE IS OLDER

ONLY ONE IS STRONGER

AND HE HAS LEFT YOU TO US

I’LL SHOW YOU

YOUR HEART HAS TWELVE BEATS LEFT

TRY TO LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO WATCH THIS

Delphine saw Thomas run for the false pope and her hands went to her mouth. She wanted to run toward him, help him, save him, but she knew she would never reach him. Could not stand against them. She kept her place near Pope Clement, holding his hand to strengthen him. He was shaking, but he did not run.

Delphine screamed with hope and joy when she saw her Thomas cleave the wicked one’s head,

So strong he’s so strong

but the nature of her scream changed as the thing in the orange robes changed. She screamed Thomas’s name over and over again and fell to her knees watching his arm ripped from him, watching him fall on the table like a pile of laundry, then roll onto the flagstones.

Dead.

She screamed, “NO!”

She screamed, “PLEASE!”

They came.

She begged her Father in Heaven in Latin, then in Hebrew, then in Aramaic to stop them, but they came.

Six wings, six wings, and two wings.

Twelve-eyed thing, Fly-headed-thing, Lion-thing.

Tall enough now to look in second-floor windows.

They stank and a noise came from them, and heat.

Everything they walked past or over began to smolder.

They were coming toward her, toward Clement. One latched onto the brickwork of the palace and flung it over on a group of knights who had moved forward to fight, finishing some of them; the devils waded into the remainder, throwing them aside, treading on them, killing them like blind puppies.

Getting closer.

Clement’s shield bearers began to fall away and run.

Not Delphine.

The twelve-eyed one, its mouth an O of fire, held its regrown hand over a dead man clutching a spear; the corpse jerked to his feet, his head lolling on a broken neck and his tongue out. The dead man now convulsed and threw his spear where the devil pointed.

At Clement.

The throw was true, but Delphine threw herself in front of it.

It went through her, into her abdomen, through her viscera, out the other side.

The worst pain she had ever felt.

Behind her, men grabbed the pope and ran with him for the palace.

She fell, bleeding so fast she could hear it spatter.

The twelve-eyed one picked the dying girl up by one arm like a poppet while the other two came near.

Careful not to get her blood on it.

The moon, blood red over them, wheeled madly as she dangled.

God, the stink of them.

Those twelve eyes drilling into her face.

The fiery hole singeing her hair, her gown, blistering her face.

WHAT ARE YOU WE’LL FIND OUT NOW

For the first time she knew the answer.

She smiled.

She looked sleepily at it, almost gone.

You know what I am.

OH.

THAT.

The lion-faced one used the knight’s arm like a pick.

The fist still holding the spear.

THEN YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THIS.

It whipped the knight’s arm, driving the spear into her side.

She clenched her teeth, still smiling.

It bit her legs off and flung her into the middle of the courtyard.

And she died.

FORTY Of the Coming of the Host

Robert Hanicotte shook his head.

His mind was going.

His silk gloves were spattered with blood.

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

An abomination chasing them.

So that’s what was in the Jewish quarter.

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

Robert’s screaming turned into laughter.

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

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

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

No. I must run! I must live!

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

He was pressed in, smothering.

He turned to see where it was.

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

It picked her up, meaning to assimilate her.

That was a mistake.

Her goodness was lethal to it.

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

It was unraveling.

The light in the middle of it went out.

It toppled, gratefully.

Its dead all sighed at once, released.

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

And then.

And then.

A light came from the girl.

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

She split down the middle and the light got bigger.

A wing came from her.

It was not hers.

It came through her.

An angel of God was born into the world.

Her blood on its wing.

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

They could not.

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

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

It was one of the strongest.

Zephon

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

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

The horrid noise that broke minds was itself broken.

Another came.

Uriel

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

The light in the courtyard of honor redoubled.

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

And another.

And another.

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

The chapel named for it.

St. Michel

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

Michael I’m seeing the archangel Michael.

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

And still the angels came, a host of them.

Their light casting wild shadows.

And yet the people were not safe.

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

On Robert Hanicotte.

Darkness and pressure.

The uncompromising weight of stone.

A noise like a squeal escaped him.

This was it.

Something had his hair.

A hand squeezed his as his life left him.

He thought it was Matthieu’s.

I’m sorry, Robert-of-the-bushes.

I’m sorry.

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

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

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

Two angels and a devil had tumbled into the water.

Three angels came up.

Forgiveness, then, was possible even for the worst.

FORTY-ONE Of the Knight’s Death, and of the Judgment

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

That’s how the poor bastards sing

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

Is this it?

When does even this stop?

Is this how it was for the ones I killed?

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

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

Blood in my white beard.

Vomit under it.

I’m ugly.

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

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

YOU CAN FORGET THAT

YOU’RE OURS

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

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

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

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

That’s not its job

It’s just a clerk

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

No door.

How will I get out?

Will I get out?

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

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

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

“I think so,” he said.

His voice a little boy’s voice.

He looked at his hand.

A little boy’s hand.

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

His son.

He was his very young son, as he looked the last time Thomas had seen him.

He was scared.

With great difficulty, the thing moved close to him and sat on its stool. It smelled like the bottom of a well. It looked like it wanted to cry.

“Thomas de Givras,” it said, looking down at him paternally, “I damn thee.”

“Where…where will I go?”

“Out.”

“How?”

“Don’t you think I’m tired of that question? Can’t you think of me?”

“May I just stay here with you?”

“I’d like that,” it said. “But they wouldn’t. And I’m more frightened of them than you understand.”

Someone yelled in another room, in another language, and then began to beg in that language.

Hell’s first floor, he began to grasp, was begging.

An utter loss of dignity, if not hope.

Not yet.

“Please.”

“Well…”

“Please?”

“No.”

Silence.

It just aimed at him with the holes it had for eyes.

“How… how do I go, then? Since I must.”

“Through me, of course.”

“How?”

“You’re a smart boy. How do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

A bell sounded, deep like a church bell.

The begging in the close room turned to screaming.

“I’m sorry. It’s time.”

So saying, it grabbed the boy by a skinny arm.

Mouths opened not just on its stomach, but in many places.

“No! No!”

It ate him.

It hurt.

This scene played out innumerable times, with every sort of variation, but always ending the same way. Each time, he tried to reason with it, or to fight it, or to otherwise avoid the excruciating finale. He told himself not to try, that the end was inevitable, but even after he resolved to give up, still he ran away from it, or tried to use the table to block it, or any other ploy he could devise, because it hurt just that much. At length, when he gave up trying and even speaking, the interaction shortened to nothing more than its reading off his name and sentence

Thomas de Givras, I damn thee

and then chewing him down alive.

He shivered and let it.

I damn thee

He cried and let it.

I damn thee

And then he just let it.

Eventually he even stopped yelling, and that was when they decided he was ready for something worse.

FORTY-TWO Of the Harrowing

He forgot his name. How long he had been there stopped meaning anything. He went from one torment to another, starting with bodily pain and going on to heartbreak; he was skinned and then made to drag his skin behind him, then made to sew this skin back on himself, with the dirt and gravel it had picked up now under it; he was shredded slowly, crammed with thorns and made to eject them, crowded in with naked throngs and scalded, made to fight for cool water or a glimpse of sky, and when they saw that he liked fighting, they made him fight again and again for everything, for years, until even his rage was broken, and he wept and succumbed when confronted; he was murdered and betrayed by those he loved, and then made to murder and betray them, then desecrate them, cannibalize them, regurgitate them. Nothing was left out.

No weakness was overlooked.

For pride in his strength he was made a plaything. For his carnality he was rendered sexless.

He was made to live each oath he’d spoken, no matter how ridiculous, lapping Christ’s wounds, drowned with Christ in shit, boiled in Mary’s sour milk, sodomized by the cocks of the Apostles, until he had been stripped of his capacity for laughter, or even the capacity to disbelieve the outrageous. They took his humor from him not because they themselves were humorless—they most certainly were not—but because it so offended them that man had been given this, too.

Hell was mutable and hard, banal and shocking, painful and numbing, burning and frozen, but mostly it was real.

He had become the butt of every joke he told.

Hell was real.

He was back in Paris.

Île de la Cité.

He lay against a wall, bloated, fat, dead of plague but not dead. He could not move except to blink. He could not close his mouth, which stood painfully open. To his right, a stack of empty, broken wine barrels. Arrows lay near him, stuck in mud, or lying with their points broken off from having struck the wall behind him.

An arrow hissed down at him from a crenellated wall, punching an agonizing hole in his gut. It burned. He yelled through his gaping mouth.

“That’s it, Phillipe!” a man said to his companion on the wall.

More arrows flew, some missing, most piercing him. The last one went in his tongue and through the back of his throat.

“I work better with obstacles.”

He shrieked.

Then he saw the light.

Coming from farther down the street.

The light in this infernal Paris had been dim, as on a rainy day or just after sunset, but now a proper light was coming.

The guards on the wall looked at its source, then began firing their arrows at it. They lost the lie of their human shapes, tails snaking out behind them. More devils came, leveling cruel, barbed weapons. A wheel of sorts made entirely of severed arms and legs rolled up and formed itself into something worse, taking up arrows with which to stab whatever was coming.

But it never got to.

He could not believe what he saw.

But then it made perfect sense.

He remembered that day, before they met the woodcarver.

The cart.

The girl drove it.

He tried to remember her name.

That girl.

Who was she?

Then he remembered her name and just as quickly forced it from his thought. It was not a name to be remembered here. It was a name that would kill with sadness and failure.

The devils spat at her and leapt, but none could touch her, nor the mule, nor the cart; a dome of daylight as golden as if culled from the spring of one’s twenty-first year surrounded the intruder, and no unclean thing could tread where it shone.

She descended now, ignoring the hail of missiles and threats falling around them both, but powerless to harm.

She walked toward him.

It was the she of the girl’s dreamy eyes, the maker of the words she had spoken that were not her own.

The thing that had been Thomas croaked through its open mouth but could not speak. This was the meeting of their souls, then—his withered, hers in glory, hers somehow not just her.

He had never seen a sight that looked so beautiful; he had forgotten what beauty was.

Another betrayal

These are false shapes sent to bring memory

And memory is pain

The only truth here

He shut his eyes against them and waited for the next tortures to begin. He sensed her drawing warmly closer, kneeling before him.

The arrow in his mouth came out, painlessly.

She pulled the others out, too, each one a candle flame of misery, now extinguished.

He wept at the relief, the pure ecstasy of relief.

Her small hand lay across his eyes and it felt good.

Beyond good.

Her hand went to his chin and shut his agonized mouth.

They were so devious, so low to do this.

She whom he had loved as a daughter, and more than that, if that were possible, had come again to give him hope.

He grew angry.

This was the best illusion of her they had sent, but it was not the first. How many times had they sent her to beckon and then abandon him, how many times had his limbs refused his commands to stop as he choked the life from her or violated her or butchered her like a lamb?

He opened his eyes, and still she remained.

I SEE THROUGH YOU YOU CUNT

He spat in her face and she smiled.

I understand.

Go away.

Not without you, Thomas.

What did you call me?

Your name. Would you like to hear it again?

I’m not falling for it.

I’ll wait.

Horrid things raged behind her, bit at her, yet none came within the light that pooled around her and around the cart. He watched her for a day and a night, or what seemed like it in this place where time had been beaten beyond recognition.

At once, everything shook.

The horrors around them stopped raging and turned to see.

A sextet of Hell’s princes, each as tall as a castle’s outer wall, came down through the roof, bearing the smoldering body of an angel beautiful beyond imagination, drooping as dead as a martyr in their arms as they gnashed their teeth and descended with him through the ground and to the deepest, safest, most secret vaults of Hell.

His (her?) pale skin.

His wings smoking like paper about to catch.

Lucifer is fallen.

Mammon is Lord here now.

At last she saw a kernel of trust come into Thomas’s eyes.

Are you ready?

He nodded.

Barely perceptibly, but he nodded.

She blew into his hands to warm them back to life. She kissed his feet. She kissed his forehead.

She smelled of cedar and of the sea.

You’re Him.

There is no him or her.

Why did you not come as I would know you?

I came as you would follow me. I came as you would love me in innocence.

Why me?

That question has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. But you were the last one. The last one I could still save.

And yet this is Hell. I’m here.

Not for long.

I’m damned.

Not anymore.

Night lay behind her head, but true night, with stars in their proper places, and no comets to trouble them. He was in the cart. She looked down at him.

I want you to answer a question, Thomas.

Yes.

Do you want to remember?

His eyes welled with tears and he shook his head, his mouth contorting to sob.

Not Hell. I mean me. Us.

You?

Her. Delphine.

I don’t know. What are you?

I was two things together. Then one. Now two again, apart.

I don’t understand.

You don’t have to. You just have to say yes or no. But it will be harder for you if you remember. Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them. Love is loss of self, loss of other, and faith in the death of loss.

Those gray eyes.

Those gray eyes through every part of him, loving what was strong and what was weak indifferently.

Yes.

I say yes.

She got in the front of the cart and took up the reins.

The cart rolled down a road near the beach.

Night was harmless here.

Someplace warm.

Provence.

Galilee.

No place at all.

He saw the stars above him, and something passed before them.

A seagull.

Just a seagull.

He slept.

FORTY-THREE Of October’s End, and of November

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

“Ready?” a man said.

A boy answered, “Yeah.”

Provençal, but Thomas understood that much.

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

Feeding time.

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

He grunted loudly.

Provençal again, but beyond him this time.

I thought the big one’s arm was off.

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

What do we do?

Help him, idiot.

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

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

“Thank you,” he said.

“French?”

“Yes.”

He recognized the boy.

From Elysium.

“Isnard?” he said.

“Yes, sir. How do you know me?”

I had a different face then!

“I don’t know.”

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

“No.”

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

The boy crossed himself.

Thomas grunted.

Angels had come.

The war in Heaven had turned.

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

Earthquake?

Was that what had happened?

No.

But it was what men could stand to remember.

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

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

“Isnard, have you seen a young girl?”

“Lots of them.”

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

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

“How bad was it?”

The boy lowered his eyes.

The man began spreading lye on the dead.

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

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

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

Was it just last night?

So much happened since then.

But what?

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

But Hanicotte was at the center.

A stone devil had him by the hair.

A stone saint had him by the hand.

Thomas slept in a field with other workers.

He ate food from the pignotte.

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

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

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

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

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

It had fallen in a gutter and broken.

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

He hoped he would prove so useful.

He wandered north.

November came.

The plague left France for England.

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

Money was lord here now.

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

And, eventually, he would go home.

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

Three of these came with him to Normandy.

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

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

It was August no more.

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

She was hungry.

The clay and wicker beehives were burned.

Two pots of honey were all she had.

And Parsnip, heehawing by the willow tree.

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

But she knew what she had to do first.

She had to approach the strangers.

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

The men in the barn were none of these.

Just peasants.

She poked her head around the door.

“Hello,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tall one walked nearest.

The one with the dark hair, just graying.

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

She liked him very much.

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

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

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

“Thomas. And not a ‘sir.’”

“May I ask where you come from?”

He turned a mirthful eye to her.

“A town.”

“Yes, but what is the town called?”

“Town.”

“No town is called town.”

“Mine is. Townville-sur-… Town.”

She laughed.

“Is it near a mountain, this town?”

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

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

“I already do.”

She smiled impishly.

She liked games.

“Then tell me.”

He bent toward her.

This would be a secret.

Little Moon.