Between Two Fires

Now in these days the Lord God had turned His face from the business of men; and the angels who had remained loyal to Him said to one another, we must look after the children of Adam. And they did so, as best they could.

Now also the third part of the angels who had rebelled looked upon the earth, and saw the hand of God withdrawn from it; and the air was cold in the valleys of men, and the sea was also cold.

And one of the fallen angels, whose name was Uzziel, said, it was for man’s sake that we were cast down, for we would not bend our knee to him; let us test the Lord and see what He will do if we afflict their mightiest kingdoms with hunger. And this angel rose from the waters of the sea and made rain; and the spikes of wheat and the ears of barley were heavy with that rain, and they fell into the mud, or withered, or went to rot; and the livestock were made sick, and they died in great numbers; and in their turn, the children of Adam knew hunger; and men devoured all there was, and there was no more. And many died. And some would go into the dead-yard and eat of the newly buried. And the babes born during those years who lived to be children had only twenty-two teeth.

And the Lord made no answer.

Now another of the fallen, whose name was Beliel, said, it was for man’s sake that the war began in Heaven; so let us try them with wars in their greatest kingdoms; and he rose through the wells of a king who ruled a mighty island, and blew pride into his mouth; and when this king spoke, he swore that he would have the crown of an even greater kingdom, which he would take with the sword. And so he came upon his neighbor’s shore under arms and with banners. Now the greater king, seeing that his land was in peril, sent out a mighty host in armor of iron and silver; and they rode against the men of the island, who shot them with arrows, even through their armor, and they died. And so the long war began.

And the Lord made no answer.

So it came that the first among the fallen, whose name was Lucifer, said, our old enemy sleeps; if we do not seize this hour, we will come to the End of Days as He has written them, and He will grind us under His heel, and destroy us forever; let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of Heaven down, and shake out the souls of the just; and let us seize our brother angels by the throats, and cast them down into Hell; and let us live as once we did, upon the Great Height.

But some were fearful of the power of the angels of God, whose numbers were greater, and whose generals were Uriel, and Gabriel, and Michael, who had broken the back of Lucifer and sent him into the hot coals in the belly of the earth to blacken his face with soot and know he was lower than the Lord.

And some were fearful that God would wake from His drowsiness and rack them with pains and fires even they had not learned to endure, or destroy them utterly.

And the first among the fallen spoke to them, saying, then let us test Him one more time; it is for man’s sake that we were insulted, for his sake that we were driven out, and for his peace that we are mortared under; let us break the roof of Hell with our fists and murder the seed of Adam; for if God will not rouse Himself to save His favorite creature, His sleep is deep, and we may catch Him by the hair, and cast Him down.

And one of the fallen, whose name was Azzazel, said, shall we kill them with fire or with cold?

And Lucifer spoke to him, saying, neither of these.

What then, said the wicked angel.

With a Great Plague, answered Lucifer.

And so it was.

And the years that had passed since the Lord had come to be born among men were one thousand, three hundred and forty eight.

ONE Of the Donkey

The soldiers found the donkey on Friday. It was lame and its ribs were easy to count; it was too weak to run from them or even to bray at them, but it didn’t seem to have the disease. It was just old.

It looked at them hopefully from beneath a willow tree, swishing its tail against the flies. The fat one, and nobody knew how he stayed fat, took his war hammer up, meaning to brain it, but Thomas stopped him. He pointed at the barn. It would be smarter to walk it to the barn first, where they could shelter against the coming rain. Godefroy nodded his agreement.

The four men had been on the road in their rags and rusty armor without a good meal for many weeks, living on spoiled food from houses, watercress and cattail tops from ditches, worms, bugs, acorns, and even a rotten cat. They had all eaten so much grass that they had green piss. The disease was ruthless here; it had killed so many farmers that there was no bread even in this fertile valley. There were not enough hands to swing scythes, nor enough women willing to gather for the threshing, nor any miller to grind, nor bakers to stoke the ovens. The sickness, which they called the Great Death, passed mysteriously but surely from one to the other as easily as men might clasp hands, or a child might call a friend’s name, or two women might share a glance. Now none looked at their neighbors, nor spoke to them. It had fallen so heavily upon this part of Normandy that the dead could not be buried; they were piled outside in their dirty long shirts and they stank in the August sun and the flies swarmed around them. They lay in weed-choked fields of rye and oats where they had fled in delirium. They lay pitifully in the shadow of the town church where they had crawled hoping that last gesture would lessen their time in purgatory, stuck like glued birds to the limestone where they had tried to cool their fevered heads. Some fouled in houses because they were the last and there was no one to put them out. Those with means had fled, but many times it dogged them even into the hills and swamps and manors and killed them there.

The soldiers made a fire in the barn just near a small creek and a still house. The wood was damp and smoked unpleasantly, besooting the unchimneyed barn, but soon they were carving meat from the donkey’s haunches, running sticks through it, eating it almost raw because they couldn’t wait for the fire to do its work, licking their bloody fingers, nodding at each other because their mouths were too full for them to say how good it was.

The sun was setting orange beneath a break in pewter clouds that had just begun to spit rain when the girl poked her head in the barn door.

“Hello,” she said.

All of the men stopped chewing except Thomas.

She was a bad age to meet these men; just too old to be safe and just too young to know why. Her flaxen hair, which might have been pretty if it were not greasy and wet, hung damply on her neck, and her feet were growing before the rest of her, looking too big for her sticklike legs.

“Hello,” she said again.

“Hello, yourself,” Godefroy said, leaning his lanky body toward her like a cat sighting on a bird.

“You’re eating Parsnip,” she said matter-of-factly.

“It’s donkey. Would you like some?”

This last would have sounded friendly except that Godefroy patted the rotten beam he was sitting on. She should sit near him if she wanted food.

“No. She was tied up in the woods to hide her, but she must have gotten loose. Her name is Parsnip,” she said.

“Well,” Thomas said, “that’s lucky for us. We’re not supposed to eat meat on Friday, but parsnip is perfectly permissible.”

The others laughed.

“The mouth on you, Thomas,” Godefroy said, lingering on the final s, which Thomas’s half-Spanish mother had insisted on pronouncing. “To the whoring manor born.”

“Is it Friday?” the fat one said. Both Thomas and Jacquot, the one with the drooping eye, nodded.

Only Thomas kept eating. The rest watched the girl. The girl stood there.

“Come sit near me,” Godefroy said, patting the beam again. With his other hand he brushed back a wick of his stringy, black hair. He wore jewelry that didn’t seem to belong on such a dirty man. Her eyes fixed on a cross of jasper on a gold necklace; something the seigneur’s wife might wear.

“I need help,” she said.

“Come sit here and tell me about it.”

Nobody wanted strangers close these days; she began to realize there was something dark in this man’s mind.

the word is rape he’ll rape me

She thought about turning and running to her tree, but an angel had shown her these men, and pointed to the barn. She knew it was an angel because his (her?) pretty auburn hair didn’t seem to get wet in the rain, and because he (she?) looked like something between a man and a woman, but more beautiful than either; it just pointed and said, Go and see. When angels spoke to her, and she had seen perhaps three, they spoke the same Norman French she spoke, and she found that odd. Shouldn’t they sound like foreigners?

She put her faith in the angel even though it was gone now. It was that angel whom she saw most often, and she liked to think it was hers.

She didn’t run.

“I need help putting Papa in a grave.”

“Silly bitch, there aren’t any graves anymore. We’re in a grave already, all of us. Just stack his bones outside. Someone will get him.”

“Who?”

“How the devil should I know? This is your sad little village. Maybe some nuns or monks or something. Anyway, everyone else is just putting them outside.”

“I can’t lift him.”

“Well, I won’t lift him. I didn’t live this long to catch it by hauling around dead serfs.”

“He’s not a serf.”

“I really don’t give a shit.”

“Please.”

“Forget it, girl,” Thomas said. “Go back in the house now.”

This man was different; he didn’t frighten her, even though he was the biggest of them. He was handsome with his longish dark hair; handsome despite a nose that had been broken more than once and a round, pitted scar on his cheek. He wore more armor than the others, some on his legs and shoulders, as well as a longer coat of mail. But over his chain mail hood he wore a peasant’s big straw hat with a horn spoon through a hole in it; he was clearly dangerous, but also just a little ridiculous. He had spoken gruffly, but in the way that a man barks at a child to make the child act swiftly when there’s trouble.

She liked him.

“Wait a minute,” Godefroy said, dismissing Thomas, and now addressing the girl. “How much is it worth to you?”

Brigands. That was the word for what these men were; men who were soldiers before the war with the English, but who now traveled the roads, or hid in the woods and robbed people. Even before the plague had come, her papa had spoken with their neighbors about what to do if brigands came.

Now they were here and no one could help her.

Why had the angel left? Why had he pushed her toward these thieves?

“We only have a little silver,” she said, “and some books.”

“I don’t want silver.”

“The books are very good, most of them are new ones from the university in Paris.”

“Books are for wiping my ass with. I want gold.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Of course you do.”

Godefroy got up now, and Thomas stopped eating. Godefroy went over to her and pointed two fingers at where her pubis would be beneath her dirty gown.

“Right there,” he said. “Haven’t you? Haven’t you got just a little gold there already?”

The fat one was the only one who laughed, but it was hollow. None of them liked this about their leader, his taste for the very green fruit. She had the fine bones and small build of a child, but her gaze was more than a girl’s; she was probably just on the eve of her first bleeding. If she lived, she would be tall next summer.

“Christ crucified, Godefroy, let her alone,” Thomas said.

“That’s only for my husband.”

“Ha!” Godefroy barked, pleased at this touch of worldliness. “And where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He shouldn’t leave you alone.”

“I mean I don’t know who he is. I am not yet promised.”

“Then I’ll be your husband.”

“I should go now.”

“We’ll all be your husbands. We’re good husbands.”

“She could have it,” the fat one warned, eating again now.

“I’d rather get it from her than her papa.”

“Leave her alone,” Thomas said, and this time it wasn’t a request. He put his straw hat beside him. He tried to do it casually, but the fat one saw it and, also trying to be circumspect, spat out the overlarge piece of donkey he had just taken and set the rest on his leather bag.

Godefroy turned to face Thomas.

The girl slipped out the door.

“What if I don’t want to leave her alone?” Godefroy said.

“She’s just a scared little girl in a dead-house. Either she’s full of it and you’ll breathe it in from her, or she’s shielded by God’s hand. Which would be even worse for us. Save your ‘husbanding’ for whores.”

“The whores are all dead,” said Jacquot.

“Surely not all of them,” said Thomas, trying one last time. “And if one whore in France still has a warm chatte, Godefroy will smell it out.”

“You make me laugh, Thomas,” Godefroy said, not laughing. “But I need to fuck something. Go get that girl.”

“No.”

Thomas stood up. Godefroy backed up a little in spite of his nominal leadership; Thomas had white coming into his beard and lines on his face; he was the oldest of the four, but the muscles in his arms and on either side of his neck made him look like a bullock. His thighs were hard as roof beams and he had a ready bend in his knees. They had all fought in the war against the English, but he alone among them had been trained as a knight.

Godefroy noted where his sword was, and Thomas noted that.

Thomas breathed in like a bellows, and blew out through clenched teeth. He did this twice. They had all seen him do this before, but never while facing them.

A drop of sweat rolled down Godefroy’s nose.

“I’ll get her,” Jacquot said, proud of himself for thinking of a compromise. He went out of the barn into the rain, pulling his coarse red hood up. He held the hood’s long tail over his nose and mouth against the smell pouring out of the house as he pushed the door open with his foot. The sun was almost down now, but the house was still full of trapped heat. The smell was blinding. Wan light coming from the polished horn slats in the windows shone on the rictus of a very bloated dead man who had stained his sheets atop a mess of straw that could no longer be called a bed; he had kicked hard at the end of it. His face was black. His shirt rippled; maggots crawled exuberantly on him, as well as on two goats and a pig that had wandered into the single-room dwelling to die.

The girl wasn’t here, and even if she had been, Jacquot didn’t want to find her badly enough to stay in that hot, godless room.

He would have preferred to go back to the barn then, but his failure would only put Godefroy in a worse humor. So he went around the back of the house, thankful for the cooler air, and whistled for her. He stood very still and looked around carefully. His patience was soon rewarded; he noticed her white leg up in a tree. Ten minutes later and it would have been dark enough to hide her.

She was up in her tree, whispering for the angel and asking it to come back; but then she wasn’t sure anyone else could see them, or that they could do anything or lift anything. Or even that they were real. She had only started seeing them since the Great Death came on.

She thought that the ones she was seeing were lesser ones; that the famous ones like Gabriel were preparing for Judgment Day, which must be soon. Gabriel would blow his horn and all the Dead in Christ would get out of their graves; she knew this was supposed to be a good thing, but the idea of dead bodies moving again was the worst thing she could imagine; it frightened her so much she couldn’t sleep sometimes.

If the angels were real, why had she been abandoned now?

And why weren’t they helping anybody when they got sick?

Why had they let her father die so horribly?

And now the man with the drooping eye had seen her.

Why did her angel not strike this man blind, as they had done to the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah?

“Come down, little bird,” Jacquot said. “We won’t hurt you.”

“Yes you will,” she said, gathering her leg up under her gown as well as she could.

“All right, we will. But not much and not for long. Maybe just a night and a morning. Then we’ll be on our way. Or, better yet! We might take you with us. Would you like that? Four strong husbands and passage out of town?”

“No, thank you.”

He leapt up onto a strong, low branch, almost high enough now to reach her foot, but she climbed higher. She was much lighter than he. He would lose this game.

“Don’t be trouble,” he said.

“Don’t rape me,” she said.

“It won’t be rape if you agree.”

“Yes it will. Because I’ll only agree to avoid being hurt.”

“So there we have it. You’ll agree to avoid being hurt. Very well. Come down or I’ll hurt you.”

He dropped back down to the ground now.

“You don’t mean it,” she said.

“I do.”

“You’re not a bad man. I don’t believe you are.”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“But you don’t have to be!”

“Sorry. Already am. Now I see a bunch of lovely stones by the stream. What say I go get them and throw them at you until you come down?”

The foliage wouldn’t allow for much stone-throwing, and he wasn’t sure he could make himself throw a stone at her in any case, but he said it as if he meant it. He sensed he had to get her to the barn quickly.

“Please don’t.”

“Then come down.”

“It’s the other one. He’s the bad one. Tell him you couldn’t find me.”

“He has a temper.”

“So does my father.”

“He’s dead.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Enough games. Come down or I knock you down with stones.”

She was crying now. He thought she would call his bluff, but soon she probed for a lower branch with her long, ungainly foot. He helped her down and felt her trembling. He felt sick about what he was doing, but hardened his heart. He decided to talk to her about it while he hoisted her up on his shoulder and walked back toward the barn.

“I know this seems awful, but it really isn’t. If God wanted order and goodness in the world, He shouldn’t have made things quite so hard on us. We’re all dead men, and women. He wants chaos and death? He gets them, and what say do we have in it? All we can do is try to have a little fun before the mower comes for us, eh? And he will come for us. If you relax, you might not have such a bad time.”

“You’re just saying these things to make yourself feel better,” she said, breathing hard in fear for what was about to happen.

“You’re a smart girl. Too smart. This world’s not made for smart girls. Here we are.”

So saying, he used his free hand to open the barn door.

“Mary, Mother of God,” he said.

Godefroy was breathing his last, rough breaths facedown in the dirt with a hole in his head that was pouring an arc of blood like a hole in a tight wineskin. His hands were shaking. The fat one was slumped against the wall and looked like a sleepy child with his chin on his chest, except he was drenched in blood and the head sat wrong because it was barely attached. His hand was off just below where the chain mail ended. It was nearby, still clutching his wicked hammer. His killer had put the sword exactly where he wanted it, and with great strength.

“Put her down,” Thomas said.

“I will.”

The sword’s point poked Jacquot’s woolen hood and settled just behind his ear. He knew the man wielding it could drive it through both hood and skull as easily as into a squash.

“Please don’t kill me,” Jacquot said.

“I have to, or I can’t sleep here.”

“I’ll leave.”

“You’ll come back and cut my throat at night out of love for Godefroy. He is your cousin.”

“On my mother’s side. And I didn’t like my mother.”

“Sorry, Jacquot.”

“You could leave.”

“I’m too tired. And you would find me.”

“No.”

“Put her down so she doesn’t get hurt.”

“No.”

“Do you really want your last earthly act to be trying to hide behind a girl you nearly raped?”

He put her down, then put his hands over his eyes. But while Thomas was trying to work up the will to strike, the girl stood in front of the smaller man.

“Don’t kill him,” she said.

She looked up at Thomas, and he noticed how very light and gray her eyes were. Like the flint in the walls of the barn, but luminous. Like an overcast sky on the verge of turning blue.

Thomas lowered his sword.

The rain stopped.

“Don’t kill anybody else again.”

TWO Of the Honey and the Broken Cross

Thomas and the girl slept in the barn on separate piles of rotten hay with the droopy-eyed man tied up in the donkey’s old stall. He didn’t make trouble in the evening because he knew how close to dying he had been, but near morning he forgot and woke Thomas up.

“What?” Thomas growled.

“My undershirt. Would you help me so I don’t soil it? I have to shit.”

“Just shit yourself.”

“You only have to move the shirt a little.”

“I don’t care if you shit yourself. You don’t deserve any better.”

“This is my only shirt.”

“There’s a stream. Jesus, you’re a woman. Shut your hole.”

“So you’ll cut me loose when you leave? So I can wash my shirt?”

“Not if you don’t be quiet.”

The droopy-eyed man was quiet for a minute.

Then he wasn’t.

“How can you sleep with all the birds going? And with those two lying there dead. Did you close their eyes, at least?”

“No. They’ll want to see Jesus coming.”

“At least the rooster’s dead. There’s one happy thing. Will you leave me my sword and crossbow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because if you don’t, it’s just like killing me.”

“No, Jacquot, it’s not. Killing you would be just like killing you, and I’m still tempted.”

“You could bury them. You could wrap them in a cloth, bury them and leave a shovel. That way it would take me a long time to get to them. You’d have a head start. Or, if you wanted time, you could break the…”

Thomas got up.

“I’m sorry. I’m nervous. You know I talk when I’m nervous. I’ll be quiet now.”

“It’s too late.”

He went over to Jacquot and punched him with his mailed fist until the man lost consciousness and loosed his bowels.

The smell offended Thomas, so he walked over to the barn door and breathed in the morning air, which was cool and good. A very few stars were twinkling in a clear sky just beginning to lighten in the east. It was too light to see the comet, and he was glad for that. He didn’t want anything else to worry about just now.

The girl was making noise in her sleep, just sounds at first, but then she said, “Papa…Papa…They see you through the painting. The little boys…are devils. Get away from it.” Thomas woke her then, his huge hand swallowing her shoulder as he shook her.

She looked warily up at him at first, and then she remembered him as the man who had protected her. Then she remembered more and looked like she might cry.

“No tears,” he said. “And no talk of devils.”

“I’ll try not to cry,” she said. “But I’m not sure I can stop.”

“Just try.”

She stood up now, brushing straw from her tangled hair.

“And who spoke of devils?”

“You did, in your sleep.”

“I know I was having a bad dream, but I don’t remember devils.”

“Stop saying it. You call their attention when you speak of them.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think that’s true.”

Thomas walked over to where the fat man’s severed hand still clutched the war hammer. He tried to unwrap the stiff fingers, then gave up and grabbed the hammer above them, bringing it over to where Jacquot’s crossbow lay. The girl thought he would smash the bow, but instead he smashed the crank lying next to it, beating it into junk.

“Why not the bow?” said the girl. He looked at her standing with her delicate arms and legs and thought how odd it was that children were small, and that they found this normal. He could not remember being small. What must he look like to her, standing so far above her, holding that murderous hammer? What did it feel like to know you lived or died at the whim of the giants around you?

“Why not the bow?” she said again, a little louder.

“It’s too beautiful. Italians made it and it can punch a bolt through chain mail as if through eggshells.”

It was indeed a beautiful thing, its polished cherrywood handle paneled with carved ivory depicting the Last Supper.

“He’ll kill you with it.”

“Then that’s my problem.”

“Mine, too.”

“How do you figure?”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Horseshit.”

“I am.”

“We’ll talk about that in a minute. But he can’t load the crossbow until he finds another manivel. He’s not strong enough. I’m not strong enough. Hell, Samson’s not strong enough.”

She walked closer to him.

“Don’t swear.”

“Balls to that. I’ll swear as I please.”

“It’s…”

“What?”

“Ignoble.”

“Well there’s a big word. You can read, can’t you?”

“Yes. French and Latin. Not Greek.”

“Anyway, what’s this about you coming with me?”

“Why don’t you take the bow?”

The bow would have been useful for hunting if Thomas had any skill with it; he did not. He missed almost every deer, quail, and rabbit he ever shot at with bow or crossbow, and he didn’t like spearing frightened deer that the hounds had cornered. The only thing he liked to hunt was boar, because a boar would turn and fight you until you drove the spear in deep enough. That was something Thomas had a gift for.

“It’s ignoble to kill from far away.”

“Our Lord said not to kill at all. What’s the difference?”

“Our Lord also said to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. My sword belongs to my seigneur. Or did, until the English feathered him at Crécy. Feathered me, too, but I lived. God, in His wisdom, made me a fighting man.”

“Yet you ride with a man who kills from far away. So what were you doing on the road with these men?”

“Well. That’s another matter.”

“I’m asking.”

“You were asking about the bow, and I was trying to tell you.”

“You could sell it.”

“It’s his,” Thomas said, indicating Jacquot. “He needs it. He’s not strong.”

“Neither are you if you ride with him.”

“What a pain in the ass you are! Anyway, I don’t ride with him. Not anymore. You settled that.”

She looked down at her feet, using her toe to move a straw around in the dirt.

“What were you doing coming up to us? That was stupid.”

“I needed…”

“I know. Your dead father. But girls shouldn’t come up to soldiers. You know that now. Right?”

“I know that now.”

“Good.”

She used her big toe and the next one to lift the straw until she lost her balance, then picked up another straw and started the game again.

“But if I hadn’t come up to you, I would be alone.”

“You are alone.”

“No. I’m coming with you.”

“What a pain in the ass! Three pains in the ass!”

“Don’t swear.”

“Christ’s holes, little girl. Christ’s bleeding, whoring holes!”

“Bury my father.”

“No.”

“He called me his little moon.”

“What?”

“His little moon. That’s what he called me.”

“I’ll catch it!”

“I didn’t. You won’t.”

“I will.”

She looked at him now.

“Then maybe you’ll go to Heaven if you catch it doing something good.”

Thomas went to speak but didn’t.

He hung his head and nodded.

The work was going to be awful. So he made the man with the drooping eye do it. Thomas stood outside the house with his sword over his shoulder, looking in, while Jacquot broke the legs off the family table and then, using the sheet beneath the dead man, pulled him onto it. He was half hysterical with fear; he had wrapped the tail of his hood around his face and wedged a pomander of lilac and lavender in next to his nose to keep the evil air out.

“A lot of good the pomander did them,” Jacquot said, heaving the corpse onto the board. He was barely audible through the cloth and over the flies. “I mean, by Saint Louis and his whoring oak tree. If this goddamned thing worked, he’d be out here dancing a jig with us. Instead he’s reeking to God’s feet, and ready to split for the worms in him, and I’m next. You’ve murdered me, making me do this.”

“Shut up.”

Jacquot grunted as he pulled his burden over the threshold of the house.

“So we waste half a day burying a stranger and leave our friends like animals?”

“Our friends were animals. We’re doing this for the girl. Now shut up.”

“What are you going to do? Punch me out again? Then who’ll roll this geezer into his hole? You will, that’s who.”

“You’re giving me a headache.”

“Who’s got a headache? You weren’t beaten half to death last night. You didn’t shit yourself and then dig a grave and then…”

He stopped talking when the little girl approached him. He had the corpse ready to dump into the shallow hole, but she came up to it and put a small blackthorn wood cross in its hand.

“It fell out,” she explained simply.

Then she amazed and horrified both men by kissing the bloated figure on the cheek.

“Good-bye, Papa,” she said. “Now Mother will look out for you and this knight will look out for me.”

“Are you quite done?” Jacquot said.

She nodded. He tilted the table and Papa fell in the hole, breaking open like rotten fruit. The girl didn’t watch this, but she did watch Jacquot’s face as he watched it.

“It’s all right,” she said. “That’s not really him anymore.”

“No shit,” he said, and coughed into his face cloth, which he was about to remove when Thomas motioned to the dirt pile.

“Oh, come on. Let me take a rest.”

“After you shovel.”

While the man with the drooping eye sweated and complained and by and by filled the grave behind the little house, the girl went back inside and soon returned bearing over her shoulder a tied sheet full of goods she clearly meant to salvage.

“Where are we going?” she asked Thomas.

“Well, I am going south, or maybe east. I haven’t decided.”

“What is there to the south, besides the pope?” she said.

“I don’t know. I only know it’s not the west.”

“What’s in the west?”

“More of this,” he said, gesturing to the still, broken land around them.

“All right then. South,” she said.

“One town,” Thomas said, holding up a thick, callused finger. “I’ll take you along until we come to the next town, and keep you safe until then. But if you cry, bitch, or moan on the way there, I’ll leave you flat. If you behave tolerably, I’ll dump you in the lap of the first live abbess or even whoring novice nun I see.”

She squinted her eyes at his profanity, but he moved his finger closer to her face, saying, “And I’ll swear as I please. By the Virgin, by her sour milk, by the hair of dead pigs, whatever the devil puts in my mouth. And the more you complain about it, the worse I’ll get.”

She narrowed her eyes yet further at him, which made him think her papa had a slow hand for hitting.

“Don’t pull a face at me. Hand me that sack you brought out.”

“Why?”

“It’s too heavy for you and we don’t have a horse,” he said, snatching it out of her grasp.

“You could have had a donkey.”

“What?”

“You ate my donkey.”

He grunted at her and began pulling things out, starting with a sextet of yellow beeswax candles.

“Fancy,” he said. “No serf has wax candles. What did your papa do?”

“He’s a lawyer. And he keeps bees. Kept bees, I mean. He traded honey and comb for them with the chandler. Soon after people started getting sick, some apprentices came and burned the hives up, saying that the bees had brought it here, flying to sick towns, and towns where Jews were. Later, they came back starving and asking for honey, but Papa told them they burned it up, so they threatened to kill him, but only hit him. But he wasn’t hurt much. Only he did have some left.”

“So he did,” Thomas said, tasting his finger as he pulled out a sticky pot. And then another one. He darted his eye to Jacquot, who had already seen the pots and was coming over quickly, forgetting that he was still holding the shovel.

Thomas stood up and leveled his sword at the man, who remembered the shovel, dropped it, and dropped to his knees, clasping his hands before his chest. He opened his mouth as if waiting for communion. Thomas stood over him with the honey pot and the sword.

“Please?” Jacquot said in the smallest voice he could muster.

“All right, all right, baby bird. Stop your peeping,” Thomas said, sheathing his sword. He tipped the pot of thick, amber stuff and held it over the smaller man’s mouth so a string of it fell slowly in. Jacquot made glad noises and swallowed it, grinning, getting it nastily in his beard. But there wasn’t a second dripping, even though he opened his mouth expectantly again.

“Dig.”

“It’s done.”

“It’s almost done. Dig.”

Thomas pulled a large book from the girl’s pack.

“What’s this?”

She just looked up at him.

He squinted at the letters and sounded them out.

“Thomas Aquinas? Really?”

She nodded.

“Can’t you read?” she asked.

“Not Thomas Aquinas.”

“I thought knights could read.”

“Who said I was a knight?”

“You look like a knight.”

“You haven’t met many knights. Most can write enough so they don’t have to draw a chicken for a signature, but nothing…scholarly.”

“Thomas Aquinas is Papa’s favorite. Because he could have been a lord but chose to renounce the world. Although I much prefer Saint Francis.”

“I thought Aquinas was fat.”

“I don’t know.”

“He was. He was great and fat. So he renounced tits on women, then ate cakes until he got tits of his own.”

“You shouldn’t mock a great man.”

“Even his book is fat. It weighs as much as a calf.”

“I’ll carry it.”

“You’ll begin by carrying it and then I’ll carry it. If your papa loved it, leave it with him. And this? What the hell is this?”

He held up a small deer-bone instrument of sorts with a stem and a bulb at the end. She took it from him, took it to the water pail, and put some in. Then she blew into the stem and it chirped agreeably, sounding just like a bird.

“Leave it,” he said, taking it from her.

He was about to snap it, but she put her hand on his.

“Why? It doesn’t weigh a thing. And it makes me happy.”

“Making you happy is not my job.”

“I know. That’s why I want the whistle.”

He grunted and gave it back to her.

“Don’t you do anything but grunt?”

He grunted again.

She answered him by blowing into her toy, managing to look both innocent and defiant, the whistle sputtering out its cheerful birdsong.

“But you’re leaving this,” he said, displaying for her a cross of pine and lead.

She stopped chirping.

“No,” she said.

“The real one weighed less.”

“It was given to us by a Franciscan.”

“For a fistful of silver and a long leer at your mother, if I know my Franciscans.”

“Please don’t talk dirtily about my mother. For all your other swearing, please don’t do that.”

“Fine. But this goes.”

So saying, Thomas stood and chucked the cross into a muddy field. No sooner had he thrown it than the girl took off on her broomstick legs and fetched it out of the mud, clutching it to her breast, further dirtying her once-white gown. He took it from her and threw it again. She ran again to fetch it.

“Goddamn it,” he said when she brought it back. He took it from her again and threw it against a tree, where it split into two pieces. The girl looked at him and sobbed and put her wrist to her mouth.

“It’s just the weight of it,” he said. “We’ll find you a smaller one.”

Still she sobbed.

“Don’t cry for the thing. It’s just junk.”

“I’m not crying for that.”

“Jesus, what then?”

“Just for a moment. I saw it.”

“You saw what?”

“Your soul.”

“Souls are invisible.”

“Not always.”

“Yes, always. But not for you, eh? Well, how was it? Horns and little goat’s feet? Am I a devil?”

“No. But there’s one near you. There’s always one near you. They want you.”

“A witch. Jesus Christ bleeding, I’m about to go on the road with a small, weird witch.”

She wiped tears from her cheeks with the insides of her wrists. She looked like a wild little peasant brat. Who would ever agree to take her in?

“Do you have a comb in that bag?”

“No.”

“Is there one in the house?”

“Yes. It was my mother’s.”

“Bring it. And start using it.”

THREE Of the Tower and the Looted Church

An old tower stared down at them from a hill with its narrow windows; some minor seigneur’s keep inherited from Norman days, not unlike the one Thomas had left behind in Picardy. In better times a horseman might have ridden out from this one and charged them a toll for use of the road, but horse and horseman were likely in the bellies of the crows that cawed down at them from the battlements. The shadow of the tower crept down the hill of burnished grass toward them, and Thomas thought they might have three hours of light left.

“What’s this town called?” he asked the girl, fanning himself with his hat.

“Fleur-de-Roche,” she said. “Would you like to know my name as well?”

“No.”

“Is it because you don’t want to feel affection for me?”

“I don’t.”

“But you might if you knew my name and other things about me so I wasn’t just ‘girl.’ Is that why?”

“Shut up.”

It was a small town, but bigger than the one he had found the girl in. Down the hill from the tower, a stone church dominated a collection of shops and a few score houses. Blue jabs of chicory grew wild in a field lying fallow, while all around it untended barley and spelt waved in the warm breeze. The harvest festival of Lammas had come and gone uncelebrated here.

He looked back up at the tower. It would be useful to get up that hill and survey the road and the town. The tower was compelling, but risky. The heavy door seemed to be ajar. An invitation? It would be a delightful ambush spot if anybody had the inclination; nine chances in ten said it was empty—it was that tenth time that caused so much grief.

I’m not carrying anything worth robbing

The girl looked up at him, her hair more gold than flaxen now that it was dry, now that the sun shone on it.

Yes you are

Thomas left the girl near the road, handing her his straw hat. He fitted the conical helm that hung from his belt on top of his chain hood, then hiked up the hill to the foot of the tower, unsheathing his sword and yoking it over his shoulders.

He might have gone in to search the tower, but he didn’t want to pass the two dead scullery women sitting near the gate. The crows had been at them and they grinned black-eyed at him, their heads touching almost tenderly. He walked along the wall with the crows mocking him until he came to a point where he could see the road they had just traveled. He sat down in the shadow of the wall for several moments and watched the road, making sure nobody was following them.

It was unlikely that Jacquot had gotten loose so quickly. Thomas had found him stuffing his underpants with the gold chains from around Godefroy’s neck and the silver coins left in the fat one’s leather bag; another beating had followed, mitigated by the girl, but then Thomas had decided it would be fitting to leave Jacquot tied to the tree he had fetched the girl out of. He also posed a wooden sign around his neck, which the girl wrote upon in charcoal at Thomas’s instruction.

That was what Thomas commanded her to write, at least. Knowing he could read, but not well, she translated this somewhat liberally.

Jacquot’s crossbow had been hidden in the tree near him, hanging like evil fruit with the little sack of quarrels. He had bitched at them while Thomas bound his limbs with rope the girl got from the house, crying that it was too tight, that he wouldn’t live the night out, or that wild dogs would come and eat him.

“What dogs? They’re all dead. You’re more likely to be eaten by starving farmers.”

Then Jacquot had switched tactics and reminded Thomas what good times they’d had together dancing brawls and dansas at the Candlemas feast near Évreux.

“You passed out and I had to carry you back to camp. You’re the one who had the good time.”

He said three would be better than two if there was trouble.

“Not if one of those three causes the trouble.”

Then Thomas had turned his back.

“PLEASE!” Jacquot had yelled, causing the girl to stop.

“Mightn’t we…?” she had started, but he cut her off.

“If you go back, you’re his to take care of.”

She had hung her head and kept walking.

As the girl and Thomas were nearly out of earshot, Jacquot had finished by calling out nastily “God bless you both for this,” and then shouting until he was hoarse.

As they passed a house with a yellow-green, newly thatched roof, a woman coughed wetly from inside and then launched into a loud Pater Noster punctuated with more coughing. The girl went toward the window, but Thomas plucked her back by the sleeve.

“I know her,” the girl said. “She puts out a table on feast days and sells cakes with honey and walnuts. She’s nice.”

“The plague doesn’t care about nice. Stay away from there.”

“I can’t remember her name.”

“She doesn’t have one anymore.”

The girl looked as if she were about to cry, then crossed herself and they moved down toward the church.

“Do you know anyone else here?”

“The priest is Père Raoul. Papa brought me here to see mystery plays in the spring. It was Adam and Eve, and then Lot’s Wife. The players always invite the village priest to take part; Père Raoul played the serpent, and then the wicked man of Sodom, and then the devil. He had a pair of red horns. I think he liked being bad as long as it was for pretend.”

“Do you know where his house is?”

“No.”

“If we find him, I’m leaving you with him.”

Fresh graves pocked the churchyard, and just past that a big pit yawned with a heap of dirt near it. He knew what was in the pit. Every town had something similar. The first dead had been given Christian burials, and then the ones who had buried them needed burying, and then there were so many a pit was dug, and then there was nobody willing even to take them to the pit.

“Everyone’s dead here,” she said.

“Maybe. More likely that they’re hiding. I would hide from strangers, wouldn’t you?”

She shook her head no.

“No, I guess we know you don’t do that.”

Thomas pulled his scarf up over his nose and mouth as they passed the pit and went to look in the church. It was a simple church with a dirt floor. The cross and everything else of value had been taken from the altar.

“I think your priest is dead,” Thomas said, looking back at her.

The girl knitted her brow.

“He was so good. Why would God kill good priests?”

“The plague kills everything. Only the priests who won’t visit the sick have a chance of living.”

“Then he’s dead,” she said.

“Looks like I’m stuck with you for a while longer. We’ll sleep in the church. Maybe nobody died in here.”

During the night he heard the girl speaking, but not in French. Latin. He thought he heard her say “Avignon.” He thought about shaking her, but instead got up and went outside to walk in the cool air and look at the stars. A comet had appeared last week, near Cygnus, and he looked to see where it was moving. It would not be long before it cut the neck of the pretty swan in the east. He knew it was wicked, a plague token in a sick sky, but it was so beautiful he couldn’t stop looking at it. There had been others before it. Three at once had shared April’s sky, one so bright it washed out the stars near it; this was before the plague had come to Normandy, but it had already started spreading elsewhere, and everyone was talking about Judgment Day. He remembered the tales of the travelers they met, and often robbed; an earthquake in Italy, dwarfed by the earthquakes and freak storms that punished India; how the earth had cracked in the land of the Mongols, all the way down to Hell, and it was Hell that burped up this pestilence.

The comets had been just another indication that something in Heaven’s mechanism was sprung. Several of the other brigands under Godefroy had melted away before the sickness pared them down from twenty to the four they had been when they found the girl’s donkey. Those who left had thought to save their souls by quitting the pack of thieves but had probably saved their lives. The company had gotten sick after robbing merchants with a wagonload of furs; no sooner had they abandoned one sick one to his death than another started whimpering in his sleep from a swelling in his armpit or groin.

Twelve died in two weeks.

He thought further back, to the days after his injury and betrayal, when he first came to Normandy, meaning to damn himself and grow rich. A whore had warned him not to take the road from Normanville to Évreux that particular spring night because she knew men who lay in ambush there. Thomas paid her to take him on that road, which smelled of all spring’s gaudy notes, but honeysuckle most of all, and to introduce him to those men.

To Godefroy.

The most feared brigand in Normandy, for a year or two.

The man he had just killed.

When he went back in the church, the girl was sitting up.

“We are going to Paris. And then to Avignon,” she said.

“The hell we are.”

“I have to go to Avignon. I’m not sure why. I have something I have to do. And you have to make sure I get there safely.”

“I don’t like your dreams. Someone’s going to call you a witch and turn you over to the church.”

“Do you think I’m a witch?”

“They’ll put the tongs to you. Would you like that?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t know if you’re a witch.”

“What does your heart tell you?”

Thomas put his hands on his hips and walked in a slow circle, his head down.

“My heart lies,” he said.

“Something lies to you, but it’s not your heart.”

“Stop that weird shit. I don’t want to hear it.”

“We have to go to Avignon. But first we go to Paris. There’s something in Paris we need.”

“What we need is to stay in the country. Those big cities are tombs, and they’re hungry. Going to them is stupid.”

“Yet we have to go.”

“Says who?”

“Père Raoul.”

He threw up his hands.

“What, the dead one?”

“Yes, he is dead. He died in his little house with his blanket over his head. He came to tell me.”

“Horseshit.”

She knitted her brow again.

“I’m going to sleep a little more,” she said.

She lay back down on the packed earth as if it were settled.

“If you see your dead priest again, tell him he can go to Paris and Avignon alone. After he fucks himself.”

“He won’t be back.”

“Good.”

She curled her knees up kittenishly and was almost instantly asleep.

Thomas waited until he heard her soft snoring and then quietly gathered his things. The girl was a liability; he would have a better chance on his own. He could travel faster, hide more easily; if he needed to do something brutal, he wouldn’t have her knowing, flint-colored eyes on him, making him hesitate and perhaps dying because he had. This world wasn’t made for children, particularly girl children, and most particularly those without fathers. That wasn’t his fault. If God wanted her protected, He could do it Himself. He was about to leave her in the church when he saw something red by his foot. It had not been there before. When he saw what it was, he crossed himself for the first time in months and flung it outside. Then he put his gear down. His heart was pounding in his ears.

The item that had bothered him so was a crude painted mask with horns on it. The kind a country priest would wear to play the devil in a mystery play.

FOUR Of the Monastery, and of the Best Wine Had in Seven Years

They marched together for two days, and on the first day they saw no people and ate only green stems, a parsnip she pulled out of the ground (using the end of her dress wrapped around her hand), a grasshopper she managed to catch, and a very little honey. They were making for Paris, though the girl couldn’t say why. Despite the devil’s horns he had seen the night before, he thought about abandoning her no less than a dozen times, and, to that end, he hardly responded to her attempts to speak to him. She had a pretty voice, and decent manners, and he would easily feel affection for her if he let himself, but he determined not to.

With limited success.

“Where were you born?” she said as they crested a hill under a pleasantly warm, blue sky.

“Picardy.”

“What town?”

“A town.”

“A big town?”

“Just a town.”

“With what name?”

“Town.”

“This town. Is it near a mountain?”

“No.”

“A hill, then?”

“No.”

“A lake?”

“No.”

“Farms?”

“No.”

“All towns are near farms.”

He scowled down at her, but she deflected this with a look of unperturbed precocity. The intelligence in her eyes goaded him, reminding him of someone else.

Someone who had hurt him.

“Then, yes,” he said.

“Near farms.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Trees? Is the town near trees?”

“I guess.”

“I want to revisit the question of the hill. Because you didn’t seem sure.”

“Yes, it was near a hill.”

“But you seemed sure about the mountain. So no mountain.”

“No.”

“And the name?”

“Town, I said.”

“No town is named Town.”

“Mine was. Townville-sur-Cunting-Town. What did your papa do again?”

“He was a lawyer.”

“It shows. Now shut up.”

“You’ll never get a wife being so mean.”

“I already had one.”

“What happened to her?”

“I killed her for talking.”

The girl giggled at that.

“And is she buried in Townville-sur-Town?”

“Shut up.”

“I suppose you killed your children, too.”

“All of them.”

“What were their names?”

“Boy, boy, girl, and shut up.”

They saw the monastery on the second day, and only because they went into the woods to forage. They got less than a fistful of sour berries between them, but, as they were about to leave, Thomas spotted a hare and chased it down a footpath that led farther into the woods. The hare got away, of course, but the woods broke on a small hill, and from the hill he saw the low stone walls and the thatched roof, and what looked like a garden.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, let our luck be in,” he said, and the two of them went to the gate. It was a simple gate of interwoven sticks, standing open. A wooden sign over the gate read, in burned-in Latin:

He drew his sword and went in.

She followed behind him, with her hands clasped as if to pray, and then moved past him and headed directly for the little stone church, ignoring his “Ho! Wait!” He let her go, shaking his head at her, and then assessed the grounds.

It was a small monastery, home to no more than twenty brothers from the look of it. Only the church and the outer walls were stone; the cloisters and dormitory were wattle and daub. Another hare, or the same one, darted from the garden, but Thomas didn’t even try to lunge at it, instead making straight for the earthen cellar where he suspected the buttery would be. It had already been emptied. Considerately, respectfully, and quite thoroughly emptied.

“No luck at all,” he said, and suppressed the urge to spit.

The dormitory was empty, except for ten straw beds, several of which bore the stains of plague on them. He backed out quickly.

He found the girl kneeling outside the church, praying silently into her clasped hands, her cheeks wet.

“Why didn’t you go in?” he said.

She just looked at him and wiped her cheeks.

And then he smelled them.

He peeked in the door, waving flies away from his face, and saw four puffy corpses lying in the nave, wearing their off-white, undyed woolen habits. Three were lying on their backs, and the last one, an old man, was curled like a baby near them. He had his eating knife in his hand, and his habit was open on one side. The floor was sticky under him. He had died trying to burst one of those awful lumps. Flowers were strewn on the lot of them.

“Cistercians,” Thomas said.

Fresh dirt mounds out back covered the first brothers who fell, but only four. If they had been buried one to a grave, and if all the beds had been filled, a few were unaccounted for; probably those who had emptied the buttery. Maybe they thought they would go to another abbey. Thomas didn’t envy them trying to travel unarmed with the last cart of food in the valley.

When the girl finished her prayers, Thomas said, “No food. They got the stores, and emptied the fishpond and the dovecote. They had an oven, but it’s been cold a long while. The garden where they grew food is all turned up. All they’ve got is damned herbs and flowers.”

The girl went to the herb garden and motioned for Thomas to follow. She handed him a bucket from the well and walked him through the garden, filling it with flowers and greens she tore expertly with her small, white hands. He started grabbing at everything, but she stopped him before he grabbed one green stem. She shook her head at him urgently.

“What? Why?”

She used her finger to write monkshood in the dirt.

He furrowed his brow to read it, sounding out each letter.

Monkshood.

Poison.

“Oh. Thank you. So, what, you’re not talking?”

Not here.

He sounded this out, too, pointing at each letter.

“What, because it’s a monkery?”

She nodded.

“You didn’t take a vow.”

Yes I did, she wrote. By the church. In my heart.

It was taking him so long to read this that she just pointed at the church and placed her hand over her chest.

He grunted.

“Is this vow for the rest of your life?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Just while we’re here?”

She nodded.

“In that case, we are definitely spending the night. Maybe a week.”

She reached into the bucket and threw some damp leaves at his face. One stuck on his forehead and she laughed in spite of herself and her temporary status as maiden Cistercian.

They ate their bucket of greens and bright flowers. Along with the buttery little crowns of calendula, which he remembered now from his mother’s garden—she used to mix it with chickens’ grain to make their egg yolks darker and, she said, better for the blood—Thomas kept picking out one broadish leaf, nodding his head as he tasted it.

“What’s this one?”

Sorrel, she wrote.

He followed the letters with his finger, pronouncing each syllable as shakily as a foal walks. She nodded when he pieced them together correctly.

“It’s good. Like a lemon, but good. And this?”

Lovage

“This?”

Comfrey

“This one I know. Don’t eat it all. And get more of it in the morning, if there is more. It’s good to pack in a wound to stop bleeding.”

Yarrow

“How do you know all this?”

Mother, she wrote, and a smile broke so gently on her face that Thomas bit his tongue viciously to keep from weeping for his own.

They slept in the open air of the cloisters, near statues of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Genevieve of Paris, and the Archangels Michael and Gabriel. Thomas woke up in the middle of the night and went to look at his comet. It was across Cygnus’s neck now, and seemed to be reddish at the tip, as if there were a tiny vein of blood in it. He rubbed his eyes and looked away, but when he looked back it was still there. He noticed a second comet now, close to it and very faint.

“Just kill us all,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

He slept hard after that, and dreamed of monks singing plainchant. He woke in the peach light that came just before sunrise. The air was chilly, and the girl was still sleeping.

The air smelled of juniper, though he saw no juniper bush.

It also smelled of wildflowers.

Both of them had been covered in flowers.

They met travelers the next day: a cloth merchant from Bruges, his family, and two Flemish men-at-arms, with five horses between them. All seemed to be in good health. Thomas would have been glad to meet them two months before, with Godefroy and his band of killers behind him; the horses were young, the cart promised excellent pickings, and Godefroy would not have raped this woman.

The two parties stayed fifty paces apart and Thomas and the merchant each shouted news about what lay behind him. The news was not good in either direction. Then the man offered to buy food. Thomas said he had none to spare, and would have said the same had the girl’s sack been full of sausages and peas; money wasn’t what it used to be. The merchant looked at the sack. The older of the two Flamands suddenly looked nervous, and Thomas guessed that he was afraid the merchant might order them to search the sack. Neither man wanted to tangle with Thomas. The merchant, who was in fact assessing Thomas, finished this, saluted him, and moved his party on.

The bridge Thomas wanted to cross was said to be just on the other side of a river town called St. Martin-le-Preux, but as he and the girl approached the town, they came to an overturned and wheel-less handcart, on the bottom of which someone who was not a confident speller had painted, in what looked like blood:

As this was the only bridge they knew of, they continued forward, although Thomas traded his straw hat for the helmet and carried the sword naked across his shoulders. The girl took her bird whistle out, poured a little of her water, and began to make birdsong with it.

“Stop that,” he hissed.

“I just don’t want to surprise anyone. And I thought this would let them know we’re friendly.”

“I’m not friendly.”

“But I’m friendly, and I’m the one with the whistle.”

He was just about to take it from her when a priest walked out to meet them, easily visible in his white linen alb, holding in his hand a horn lantern. It was still light enough to see, but the priest kept the lantern near his nose and mouth.

He came from a hidden recess in the woods near which the skulls of animals had been nailed to trees.

“Stop. Please,” the priest said, holding up one very delicate-looking hand.

Thomas was glad to keep his distance; he turned his head to left and right to make sure nobody was moving on their flanks. The priest now looked to the right and left as well, wondering if the soldier had confederates skirting up the sides.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” the girl called out to the priest, but Thomas pinched her arm.

“Speak when I tell you to,” he told her. Then he called to the priest, “We’re not sick.”

“Do you promise?” he said.

“On my word,” Thomas said. “Are you alone?”

“Oh, yes. Quite alone.”

The priest lowered his lantern.

“I’m not sick, either.”

“We saw your sign.”

“Sign?”

“Go back.”

“Ah. That will have been the militia.”

“Where are they?”

“As I was their confessor, I fear they probably bypassed purgatory on their way straight to the cauldron.”

“Dead?”

“Some time ago.”

“We just want to cross the bridge.”

“That’s problematic.”

“Why? There’s no toll, is there?”

“There’s no bridge. When was the last time you had wine? And I mean good wine.”

Thomas smiled broadly, showing teeth in surprisingly good shape for his age. Teeth he would be very glad to stain purple.

The people in the town near the river had burned the bridge to try to isolate themselves, but the Death was on both sides and found them anyway. A peddler had paid a farmer to sleep in his barn, against the orders of the seigneur, but the next morning the farmer found him there with his face frozen in pain and fear, and muck from the horrid buboes staining the pits of his shirt. The farmer had seven children, who worked and played in the fields with neighbor children and helped out at the widow’s alehouse. Soon half the families on the east side of town were stricken, along with the widow. The die-off started, as it always did, with those who were good enough to minister to the sick and bury the dead, and with those who gathered at the alehouse, including the militia. When the churchyard was full, families dumped the bodies in the river and the eels fed on them.

Then something else moved in that also liked to eat what the eels grew fat on. Fishermen who speared or cast nets for trout, eels, and pike began to disappear, even when they went in groups of two or three.

Nobody knew what was happening until a young boy sprinted back to town and said that his father and uncle had been eaten by a “great black fish or snake” with a “flat mouth” that hid in the murky shallows. It had lashed at them with the end of its tail and pulled the men in, then tore them with spines, and then its great, froggy mouth had opened and clamped down on their heads, swallowing each of them whole in several fast gulps. The boy had stood transfixed until he saw that it was slithering up the bank toward him, and then he had run screaming for the road. The monster would have caught him, but his panicked flight had startled his uncle’s mule, still tied to its cart, causing it to buck and catch the thing’s attention. It wanted the mule more than the boy, so it coiled all around the poor animal and bit its head off, dragging the body, cart and all, back down the bank and into the river.

“How long was it, boy?” the priest had said.

“I don’t know.”

“Think. You saw it take the mule. So of course it was longer than a mule. As long as three mules perhaps?”

The boy shook his head.

“How many, then?”

The boy held up eight fingers, then corrected it to nine.

Several of the men in town who were still healthy and still brave enough to leave their houses met up at the alehouse and drank until they had the stomach to go down to the river and look for it. They took their axes and wooden flails, their clubs and scythes, and they swore to Saints Martin and Michael and Denis to cleave the thing in two or die in the attempt. The priest, who drank with them, witnessed these oaths, and agreed to come with them, and to hold over the men his processional crosier with its agonized Christ. All their boozy courage left them when they went to the banks and saw the wreckage of the cart, and the piles of shit the thing had left on the bank, all full of boots and bones and broken tools, and even the shredded cuirass of a man-at-arms. Even with the bridge down, it seemed, some were trying to cross the river. But they were not making it to the far shore.

“This is beyond our power, brethren,” said the priest. “God forgives us the oaths we make in ignorance. Let us return to town before we make the thing stronger on our fat and our blood.”

None of them protested.

“What about the seigneur?” asked Thomas, leaning toward the priest over his modest table. “If he’s well enough to issue orders about letting in strangers, he should have enough spunk to buckle on his armor and put a sword in that thing.”

The priest smiled his distinctive, sad smile, making the well-used lines around his eyes deepen. He was probably a year or two older than Thomas, but drink and soft living made him look closer to fifty than forty; faded speckles of wine on the chest of his alb, only muted by his attempts to clean them, testified to the death of the town laundress. Despite his woolly eyebrows and masculine chin, there was something womanish, almost wifely, about the cleric’s aspect.

“Our lord is what you might call…”

“A frightened cunt?”

“If no more generous term occurred to you. He has shut himself and his retinue in the tower. His herald comes down on Fridays and reads his proclamations, which are ignored. He never gets off his horse. A man confessed to me that he intends to throw a slop pot at the herald the next time he comes, and asked me to pardon him in advance. I told him that gesture would put him one slop pot closer to Heaven. Better the herald should get a faceful of shit tomorrow than an axe handle across the nose next week. That’s where things are heading. We starve down here, unable even to pull fish from the river now, while our master has the water mill and ovens and has hoarded back enough grain to keep himself fed until doomsday.”

“So, a week’s worth, then?”

The priest laughed and went to pat Thomas’s arm in fellowship, but Thomas pulled his mailed arm back with the sound of money being withdrawn from a card game. He waved a cautionary finger but was still laughing. As was the priest.

The priest noticed the salt stains on the knight’s dark garments and the rust stains on his light ones. Had he had a page and squire? A wife? Or had he been this dirty before the Death came?

“Who is the girl to you?” asked the priest, gesturing where the girl lay sleeping on a straw pallet. “And don’t say your daughter.”

“I don’t know who she is. But she sleeps a lot.”

“Maybe she’s hoping to wake up from this bad dream.”

“If so, she’s smarter than both of us.”

“I don’t know what smart is anymore. More wine?”

“With pleasure.”

“Good, isn’t it?”

“The best. Black as a woman’s heart and sweet as her…”

“Yes?” the priest said, amused.

“Other heart.”

The priest tipped the small cask of wine so the last of the pretty, red liquid spattered out of it and into the serving jug.

“The wine is from Beaune, but it comes via Avignon, from the private stock of His Holiness.”

“But how…?”

“Where my younger brother is a steward of sorts; one of those who dresses His Holiness, or was. His office now is less…formal.”

“But, still…”

“My very handsome younger brother. Eight years my junior, but seems younger still. A certain cardinal is…fond of masculine beauty. And this pope is known for his generosity. Even when it comes to vices he does not share.”

“Ah.”

“Indeed.”

Thomas laughed.

“So you drink the fruit of your brother’s damnation?”

“Just the one barrel. I believe God has it within His heart to overlook my overlooking.”

“You had only one barrel of this? Why drain it tonight?”

“Why not? The desire came on me suddenly. It’s the last wine in town. I should have used it up at Mass, but there is neither wafer nor bread to go with it. I think the monks who made my wafer are all dead.”

“Cistercians? Half a day from here?”

“Yes,” the priest said hopefully.

“They’re dead. A few may have fled.”

“Ah,” the priest said. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard twice, and his eyes moistened. He nodded. He looked as if he wanted to reach out for Thomas’s hand, but he didn’t.

“Anyway, nobody comes now. I haven’t even been in the church in two weeks. I’m as scared to go there as they are.”

“If you don’t go to church, how do you know they don’t go looking for you?”

The priest looked down at his hands, where the fingers were grabbing each other.

“They know where I live. Some still come for confession; they shout their sins from the path and I shout back their penance from my window. Though even that’s been nearly a week. No more Mass, in any event. And the wine may serve a holier purpose in your belly.”

“Oh?”

“I was hoping a cup or two might extract some knightly oath from you. You are a knight? Or were?”

“I was. I still am, I suppose. But it feels more like I was. It feels like a long time ago.”

“You could be one again.”

“I doubt it. I have done things.”

“Things?”

“I was cheated of my holdings.”

“The English?”

Thomas shook his head.

“Worse. A Norman. Le Comte d’Évreux, who treated with the English after our loss at Crécy. My keep was near Givras. I…despaired of justice. I took to the road and lived by the strength of my arm. I sought out even worse men than myself. I wanted revenge on him. I still do.”

Thomas fell silent.

“Do you want to make confession?”

“No.”

“Not to me, eh?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if it was me.”

“No, it’s… No. There’s no point.”

“Kill the abomination in the river and God will make you a knight again.”

“I’d rather He got me another goblet of this.”

“No,” the priest said. “You wouldn’t rather a goblet of wine than your honor back. Your joking is pleasant, but it doesn’t hide the hole in you.”

Thomas turned his eyes away from the priest’s warm gaze.

He only just managed not to cry. He did this by angering himself at God for making him suffer and pay for sins he had been backed into. God ringed you round with hounds and cornered you, then speared you with your back against a tree. When Thomas spoke, he turned down the corners of his mouth, and his words came out as a quiet growl.

“I’ll kill the whoring thing.”

FIVE Of the Thing in the Murk

Thomas slept poorly; the wine had given him a burning stomach, and when he slept he dreamed of wading in mucky water, looking for things he had dropped. He gave up at first light, still belching sour wine, and began to put his armor on.

“Christ, it tasted good going in.”

He had slept in his filthy padded leather gambeson, as he had for months now, so he started right in putting on his armor, starting with his cuisses. He had finished buckling his second thigh piece when he stopped. The priest was sleeping heavily on his short bed with his knees drawn up and his ankles crossed. Thomas shook him awake. The smaller man looked frightened at first to see the large, strong shadow over him, but then he remembered he had a guest.

“Good morning,” the priest said.

“How deep is the river?”

“The river?”

“Where your monster is. How deep? Thighs? Tits? Chin?”

“Well… chin. On me. At the deepest. Perhaps to your shoulders.”

“Shit,” Thomas said.

“You’re really going to the river, then?”

“I said I would.”

“What we say and what we do are…”

“Well, I do what I say. Which is why I don’t say much.”

Thomas stood for a moment, considering the heavy, rusty mail coat in his hands.

“You’re wondering about your armor.”

“Yes.”

“You only half believe there’s a monster in the river. And you don’t want to drown looking for it.”

“I know of men who have been pulled under by their armor. That’s real. The thing you described? I don’t know. It seemed possible last night that a monster might be eating men in your river, though I’ve never in my life seen a monster. So this morning…Can such a thing exist in sunlight? And yet it seems these are the end days, and I think Hell has opened its doors.”

“I think that, too.”

“Spines, the boy said?”

“Spines.”

Thomas considered the priest’s soft hands and kind, almost comical face, what with his wild gray eyebrows and long head. He didn’t seem sick, though he was likely a bugger; not that Thomas had known many of the latter.

“Help me with the rest of this.”

The priest stood and helped Thomas wriggle into his mail shirt and buckle on his shoulder pieces.

“You should scour all that,” the priest said, smiling and showing Thomas his orange hands.

“Later. If your big eel eats me and shits me by the river, it should have rust for its spice.”

“What, saffron? It’s nearly that color.”

“Who can afford saffron? Mix it with blood and we’ll have paprika.”

The priest laughed.

Thomas put his surcoat on over everything; it was filthy and blue and had no coat of arms on it.

“Now get me your sword; you’ll want me to bless that.”

“Where is my sword?”

He had propped it against the wall, but now it was gone. As was the girl. Thomas banged the door open and went outside, where the sun was now rising, peering tentatively under a scud of clouds that would soon swallow it. He saw the girl sitting by a tree with his sword unsheathed next to her. She had blood on her gown. He stomped over to her, took the sword up with one hand, and yanked her up by the arm with the other.

“Jesus whoring Christ,” he said, looking at the cut on the meat of her hand. It was half the length of her smallest finger and not very deep, but it was still bleeding. “Do I have to watch you every second? Can’t I just sleep without you doing something stupid?”

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly.

“What was your idea, touching my sword? Nobody touches my sword but me.”

“I… I wanted to clean it for you.”

“Well, don’t! This is what you get.”

He bent her arm around hurtfully to show her dripping hand to her.

“I want to help.”

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

She nodded, trying not to cry, and he noticed he was still holding her wrist, which suddenly looked very small and fragile in his big hand. He let it go. She wanted to rub it, but she was embarrassed and hid it behind her instead, looking up at him. He was about to bark, What do you want now? at her, but he thought about it and saw that she was hoping to get some kind word from him. He fished around in his head for one.

“Go… go see the priest,” he said, as gently as he could. “He may have a cloth to bind that little cut. And put some yarrow in it, since you know what that is.”

She obeyed him.

He picked up his sword and saw that her blood was smeared on its point and the well-notched edge that had bitten her.

“Clumsy little witch,” he said.

It got darker.

A drop of rain fell in Thomas’s eye.

The priest went with Thomas, wearing his chasuble and a threadbare golden stole, holding the crosier over his head while the girl walked beside them swinging a censer with frankincense and rosemary in it. At the priest’s suggestion, Thomas held his sword by the blade, inverted so the quillons made a cross of it. The rain was light now, little more than a mist, but the road was muddy enough to coat the soldier’s boots and the priest’s simple shoes. The girl had left her shoes behind because she felt God liked bare feet better than shoes for holy work.

Two men from town came with them; one a heavily bearded young man with an ancient boar spear, the other a fat, blond farmer with blond porcine bristles on his jowls, armed with a billhook for hedges. Both wore straw hats. The smaller one looked scared, as did the priest. They had both been to the river to see the thing’s signs. But not the farmer. The farmer was piss drunk. Thomas reminded himself to stay well away from him if a fight started, because he was stout and thick-armed and likely to gut friend and foe alike. Among the bitterer lessons of brigandage Thomas had learned was that farmers were strong, often stronger than the horsemen who despised them, and that they lived so close to starvation that they would fight like bears to hold on to what crumbs and bits of wood or leather they owned.

If the priest hoped their procession would draw fresh recruits from the houses they passed, he was disappointed. A few women peered at them from windows, all crossing themselves, and, on the outskirts of town, one bare-ribbed dog looked up at them briefly before going back to breakfast on the foot of a corpse leaned up against a sheep wall. The body had a flour sack over its head at least, but it had stained the sack and it stank even in the cool rain. Sheep’s bones littered the field past the wall—sheep had fared as poorly as men in this scourge—and the seigneur’s keep came into view around a stand of alder trees.

The pilgrims marched up to the gate, where Thomas pulled a leather cord that rang a bell up on the battlements. He waited the time it took the swaying, fat farmer to piss against the wall—the priest admonished him with his name, Sanson, but was waved away with the man’s free hand—and then Thomas rang the bell again. After a third tug on the cord, a very pale young man with plucked and redrawn eyebrows looked down at them from the wall. He held a crimson woolen cloak squared over his head, presumably to protect fine clothes they couldn’t see from their angle.

“If you’re not here to buy grain, then go your ways,” he said.

“Good herald,” the priest said, “please let us speak to Guillaume.”

“Guillaume has fallen. I am seneschal now. You may speak to me.”

“Then I will say a Mass for Guillaume, and rejoice in your good fortune. We have not come here to buy grain, which you know we cannot afford, or to rent your mill, for we have nothing to grind, or your oven, for we have nothing to bake. Rather, we offer your master the chance to win God’s love in battle.”

“Go away,” he said simply, and disappeared.

Thomas felt his anger rise.

“Herald!” he shouted, making the skinny man flinch.

No answer came from above.

“Whoreson ass-sniffing herald!”

The herald reappeared.

“Who has the insolence to speak that way to me? When you speak to me, you speak directly to my lord!”

“Then tell your lord to get his little prick out of his wife and help us kill the thing in the river.”

“You common bastard!” the herald yelled. “I’ll have you know we still have men-at-arms in here.”

“Then tell them to stop husbanding their hands and come down to the river. Something is killing your people.”

“It’s called the plague, you idiot,” the herald said, more quietly, and disappeared again. Thomas’s worst insults didn’t bring him back this time. So he grabbed the cord and yanked with all his might, grinning at the sound of the bell coming loose and clanging down stone steps somewhere above them.

The five of them gasped at what they saw. Tracks in the muddy bank, like a snake would make, but much larger, had beaten under all the grass close to the river, and crisscrossed and looped between here and the town. It was visiting the town now. The piles of foul shit the priest had described were still there, full of bones and clothes. A woman’s severed leg lay white but mud-spattered just by the bank. This was nothing less than a visitation from Hell. The priest, quite pale now, began to pray psalms in Latin, and he urged the girl to swing the censer, which she did. The man with the big beard started shaking. Thomas said, quietly, “Priest. If it goes badly for us, run like a young man, and take the girl. She’ll try to stay, but don’t let her.” The priest never stopped praying, but nodded, which Thomas didn’t see because he kept his eyes fixed on the milky gray waters of the river.

He went forward at a crouch, with his sword at the ready. The stout, drunk one with the billhook came next, and the beardy one barely walked forward at all, staying close to the priest and the girl. Thomas was as taut as wire.

Step.

Step.

Step.

He froze when something moved in the water near the pilings of the collapsed bridge, something like an oily black arm, but the width of a draft horse’s chest. He wasn’t entirely sure he had seen it.

Then all of them said some variant of “My God” when its head broke the water’s surface.

White-eyed and flat-headed, like some giant cross between eel, newt, and frog, it laid its head on the bank and felt the ground with long whiskers around its mouth and eyes until it found the woman’s leg. Its tongue darted out and latched onto the leg with a thatch of evil little hooks at its tip, pulling it under the water with it, bending a growth of sweetflag rushes. They sprang back up. The water foamed and then flowed gently again, as if none of it had happened.

Those white eyes, a grandfather’s blind eyes.

The small, beardy man dropped his boar spear and ran so fast his hat blew off him.

The stout one stood openmouthed, then vomited. But he didn’t run. Rather, he followed Thomas right up to the edge of the water, which flowed gently now and showed no sign of the thing.

“Please, sir knight. Please protect me in this fray.”

“Wipe your chin,” Thomas said.

Now what?

He was so heavily armored he dared not go far into the water, but, when his slapping the water with the flat of his blade and his shouts of “Ho! Ho, there! Bring your black ass out of the water and fight me!” failed to rouse it, he ventured first one leg and then the other into the softly flowing murk. The big farmer stood near him, wide-eyed, shocked sober, his arms so tense the end of the billhook quivered.

“Hand me that boar spear,” Thomas said. The farmer did as he was told, fetching and handing over the wickedly pointed spear. Thomas put his sword in his left hand and began to use the spear to probe the water in front of him. He jabbed at it viciously, hoping to goad the thing into surfacing. It didn’t.

Thomas went a little farther in.

He looked at the burned pilings, wondering if it nested down there, curling itself around them. Perhaps he should wade over there—he could use them to help him keep his head above water.

The wind blew harder, and the rain came now, threatening to snuff the girl’s censer, which she still swung dutifully. The priest’s Latin prayers were harder to hear.

Thomas alternated between stabbing the water with the spear and slapping it with the sword’s flat, until it seemed to him that he was wasting his time.

“What, you only kill mules and fishermen? You only take the legs off fishwives? Come and get me! Me!” he said, his voice cracking a little. Rain poured into his armor and down his face, making him blink. Relief that the thing didn’t want to fight him blended with shame at that relief, but then relief won out. Perhaps a few more stabs at the base of the pilings and then he could say he’d done his best. He slapped the surface of the river halfheartedly again, then began backing out of the mucky water.

And tripped.

He put his booted heel down on a submerged log in the mud behind him; the log slithered out from under his foot at great speed, causing him to fall into the river and hurl the sword behind him. He thrashed in the water and sputtered, getting to one knee with difficulty, cocking his spear arm.

Part of the thing coiled through the water in front of him.

He lunged at it with the spear, twisting his body into it with the brutality that hours in the tiltyard had made as natural for him as walking. The spear stuck deep; that lunge would have impaled one man and killed the man behind him, but this was no man. The thing coiled rapidly away from him, wrenching the spear from his grip. He stood up with great effort, the sodden chain mail trying to drag him under, and launched himself toward where the sword had fallen.

He saw that the girl was looking for it, too, up to her thighs in dirty water, her little limbs white against the river and darker sky. She bent down fully into the water now, her face submerged as though she were hunting turtles. He tried to yell Get back! at her but could only cough, so he reached into the water, grabbed a fistful of her blond hair, and jerked her up and toward the bank. She had the sword by the blade, getting cut again as she fell and dropped it. He saw where it fell, though, and saw her clambering through the mud and up to the bank. The priest was running to fetch her. Thomas grabbed the sword and wheeled around to the river, sensing he had had his back to it for far too long a fall of seconds.

“Watch! Watch!” the priest was yelling over the rain.

He turned to see the thing slithering toward him just under the water, its flat, froggy head as big as two tournament shields, its obscene whiskers trailing behind it, the spear making an S pattern in the water where it was still stuck in the thick of it. It was easily twenty paces long, the water rolling over it hypnotic, almost beautiful.

Its head broke the surface now and its whiskers flicked forward and whipped him. Thomas heard splashing to his right but ignored that, keeping his eye on the monster and bringing his sword up. It opened its mouth wider than it should have been able to, showing its sickly white inside and rows of teeth the length of long fingers. Thick, clear liquid poured from it. It coiled its body up behind its open mouth in preparation for the strike as Thomas readied himself to die plunging his sword down its throat. Something flashed at the edge of Thomas’s vision, and he saw the billhook come down with great force on the side of the thing’s head, opening up a white, blubbery wound and making it hiss. The billhook fell again and again; the farmer was going at it like he was hacking down a tree, his red mouth pursed with the effort. Thomas struck it with his sword now, cleaving a horrible wound into its nose and mouth, from which it recoiled, doubling back on itself under the water with a great splash.

Once it was out of reach, it broke the surface again, rearing up to show its white belly, on which pairs of backward-facing, curved, black spines the size of paring knives were arrayed like teats. It hissed at them and the spines flexed and oozed black fluid all over its belly. It had oily fins on the sides of its neck ending in more spines. Now its tail rose up out of the water, and the farmer crossed himself and whimpered. The tail had a human hand at the end of it. So white it was nearly translucent, bright against the black sky.

A fucking hand!

The tail slithered forward now, and the hand groped the side of the thing until it found the spear stuck in it, which it pulled out. Thunder grumbled behind it.

The farmer started whimpering an Ave Maria, and it cocked its head, listening, its whiskers whipping excitedly. Thomas banged his fist heavily on the stout man’s shoulder to shut him up, but he only prayed louder. Without warning, a ripple went through the thing and the end of its tail lashed like the end of a whip. The hand released the boar spear and it flew at the farmer as though it had been shot from an arbalest. It would have skewered him right through his praying mouth had not Thomas shoved him. As it was, it laid open his cheek and his temple and he screamed horribly.

Then the creature did the worst thing Thomas had seen yet; it opened its mouth and exactly imitated the farmer’s scream.

It moved toward the men again. The farmer just kept screaming, even as it mocked him, holding his hand against his head where the blood ran out thin and fast in the rain.

Thomas had never been so afraid. I can’t I can’t I can’t, he thought, even as he drove his legs forward through the muck to meet it. Thomas swung hard at its head, but he only hit it a glancing blow as it lunged past him and grabbed the screaming farmer, cutting off his screams as it took the man’s head and shoulders into its mouth with a violent, wet slapping sound. It contracted the muscles in its neck now and lifted the heavy farmer out of the water, pointing his kicking feet at the sky and trying to swallow him in repeated gulps, BAMF, BAMF, BAMF, like a pelican taking a big fish.

Thomas saw the end of the farmer’s billhook sticking out of the water. He sheathed his sword so not to lose it, then sloshed over to grab the pole arm. The thing was having trouble getting the farmer down. Thomas slashed at it with all his considerable strength, gouging tears in it that would have gutted an ox. One of these, driven high, opened a hole near the lump the thing was trying to swallow, and Thomas was treated to the sight of the farmer’s white face turning as he went farther into its gullet. It could no longer ignore the strong man tearing at it, though, so it turned its blind face toward him, the other man’s feet sticking out of its mouth. It lashed its whiskers at Thomas to find him, then slithered the tail-hand up around his leg. It dropped its head and neck into the water now and slithered more of its coils around the nuisance who had been chopping at it. It foamed the water with its spasms as it continued trying to swallow its meal, but now its back half was free to fight.

Thomas dug at it underwater with the point of his weapon, gouging it so its oily blood floated up, but then the awful white hand was on his face, grabbing his cheek excruciatingly, digging for his eyes. He wrenched his head back and forth, then drove the weapon into the riverbed so he could find the shaft again. He was not strong enough to pull the hand away from his face, however, and he felt something sharp scrape his cuisse as the thing constricted around his leg.

“Whoring spines,” he squealed crazily, standing wide and struggling to keep his footing, now jerking the hand’s thumb back as he would to break a man’s grip. With the other hand he found the knife on his belt and began to saw where the hand joined the tail. His knife bit deep, and it withdrew the hand to save it, then jerked, pulling Thomas underwater.

He felt sure he would die now, but he didn’t give up.

He wrestled and arched, and managed to get half his sword free, though it was no easy task with the black coils around his legs and those evil spines scraping his chain mail, and he bent into a coil of it and started using his weight behind the half-exposed blade to cut. It thrashed, jerking him around madly on the muddy bottom, though his head broke the water and he managed to get a breath in him. His sword came out of its scabbard and he held on to it for his life. It was then that one of the spines on the bottom of it found purchase and punched through his armor at the groin, where a few snapped links of chain he had meant to have mended allowed a small opening. It was enough. He ground his teeth together against the pain and nearly lost the last of his air, but instead drove his sword into it hard, causing it to release him entirely. He broke the surface of the water and got heavily to his feet just as the thing’s head came up, its first meal now down nearer the middle of it, but it was Thomas who moved first, lunging at its neck.

He got there before it could face him and leaned into his sword, driving it through the monster, and driving the monster down until he felt his point bite rock on the other side. He pulled the sword half out and changed the angle, leaning into it again and using the strength of his legs against the river bottom to push like a plowman and slit a huge gash in it, through which black, stinking fluid now poured. It thrashed violently, but Thomas held on even though the world was beginning to get dark. He summoned what felt like the last of his strength and pushed the sword toward where he hoped a heart was.

It punched through something. The thing shuddered and turned on him now and bit him, taking his head and neck into its mouth as it had done with the peasant, but, though the pressure on his chest was terrible, its strength was ebbing and its teeth did not pierce his chain. Thomas screamed hoarsely in the darkness of its mouth, and then couldn’t scream anymore as it took him underwater. Water and foul issue flooded its mouth and Thomas began to black out. Then it shuddered again and vomited Thomas into the river, along with the dead farmer, someone’s head, the woman’s leg, and any number of eels.

Thomas fought to keep his head above water, praying the priest would haul him out. But he was alone and dying, with his armor heavy on him in the river. He would have to save himself. He heard it thrashing, and then the thrashing stopped. He thought it was dead but didn’t think he had the strength both to turn and look at it and to keep from falling into the water. He hauled himself to the shallow part and nearly collapsed, but he knew he would still drown if he did. So, with his leg going numb from the thing’s spine in his groin, and the river and black sky seeming to spin around him as if he were a bead in a toy top, he crawled through the mud on his three good limbs until his face was far enough out of the water that he knew he would not breathe any in.

His legs were still in the water. If it wasn’t dead, it would drag him under. But he didn’t care now.

Something was banging on his armor and his helmet.

Hail.

It was hailing.

So this is the end of the world, he thought, feeling nauseated, hoping to pass out.

And he passed out.

SIX Of the Marriage on the Bank and the Visitation in the Stable

The woman stumbled down the muddy road, trying to remember how to get to the river. She had lived in St. Martin-le-Preux her whole life, but the fever made her forgetful and she kept losing her way. The hail had woken her up from what might have been her last sleep, and when she woke she had such thirst that only the river could slake it. Besides, a devil was in her house. Not the Devil himself, but a small one. A goat kid with a twitching tail that climbed on the bed with her and tried to steal her breath when she got sleepy. It leapt away when she woke, and hid in the shadows, waiting for her to get sleepy again. She would cheat it this time; she knew it wouldn’t follow her to the river. She went out into the hail and took a beating from it, but it stopped soon and turned to cold, stinging rain.

She got terribly lost even though she knew the river was close, and she slapped her palm on several doors, some of them doors she recognized as belonging to friends, but nobody opened to her. She cried against the wall at one house and a gentle voice from inside, her sister’s voice, said “Go on, now, Mathilde. I still have the two children and you mustn’t give it to them. Go on.” So on she went. Her children had died of it, and her sweet, old husband, and his brother, and she was the last one in the house. She had paid a young boy to care for her when she knew she had it, but he had left after one day. All he did was bring her things she asked for; but he refused to empty her slop jar and still he wanted a week’s farm wages for the first day. She paid him, but he saw where she got the money from and took the coffer in the night, leaving her with nothing. The boy had worked with her husband. Learning to be a cobbler. Now he had his master’s money, but little good it would do him in Hell; he was already sweating with the first fevers. It was after he left that the little goat had come.

The woman had no wimple on and her pale orange hair hung greasily about her shoulders. Her eyes were red and swollen. Windows closed as she passed them, and it began to make her angry. She wanted to stop and have words with the betrayers who were abandoning her, but her throat hurt like it had pins in it, and if it came to a fray, she didn’t want anyone touching her left armpit, which had grown a painful swelling the size of a crabapple that gurgled at night and seemed to speak to her.

She had to get to the river.

At length, she remembered a turn between two houses that she had passed several times, and she stumbled downhill, laughing and crying at the same time at the sight of the water. She didn’t care if the water was clean as long as it was cold. She would wade into it and might even put her head under to stop the heat in it.

That was when she saw the knight, lying on his stomach with his feet in the river. She knelt next to him and drank, coughing half of it back up; something foul was in it. Foul and oily. But her throat felt better.

She looked at the knight and saw that he was strong and beautiful, and dead. She cried for how beautiful he was. Even his scars were beautiful and perfect, the pit on his cheek where God had put His finger to mark him as holy. She lay down next to him on her side and took off his helmet. He still wore a chain hood, but she could see his hard, beautiful face better now. Her husband’s wedding ring was on a cord around her neck, and she took this off, and breathed on it, and pushed it onto the knight’s finger, though it wouldn’t pass the second knuckle because his were soldier’s hands.

“I marry you,” she said. “I marry you now, knight.”

She cried and kissed his still mouth, tenderly at first, then with her tongue. His mouth was warm. He was breathing. She became confused about whether he was dead. Perhaps not, but, like her, he would be soon. Everyone would be soon. She used her hair to clean his brow, and she stroked his face with her hand.

“My husband is in Heaven with his first wife, but I will go to Heaven, too, and you will be my husband there. And I will be a good wife. I will show you. I will dress for bed,” she said, and took off her sickness-stained gown and one of her muddy hose. She got tired unrolling the second one and draped herself across the knight’s armored back and died there.

And that was how the priest found the armored man and the pale, dead woman, nude but for one stocking, her back covered in plague tokens the color of eggplant, as if a little goat had danced upon her and bruised her with its hooves.

“Where am I?” Thomas shouted from the bed, his eyes wild.

“You’re in my home,” the priest said, looking down at him. “You’ve been hurt.”

The priest was holding a lantern near his nose and mouth.

It was night.

Thomas began to remember. The creatures in his dream had not been friendly, so he took a moment trying to remember if this priest was. Frogs. Now he remembered. Frogs had come, latching onto him, feeding on him, covering his face and hands. He had been watching from outside himself as spiny little frogs ate him. He shuddered, then kept shuddering. The pains in his head and in the corner of his groin were distinct: one was leaden and dull, like an old rusty lock set at the top of his neck, and embraced his temples; the other was hot like someone had taken a coal from a brazier and tucked it at the top of his pubis. Everything on him felt clammy and sticky. He sneezed.

He looked up at the priest again and saw the half of his face that was brightly lit by the lantern he held close to it. Three superficial scratches jagged across his cheek.

“What have you done with her?” Thomas said, and sat up heavily, looking at the priest with dangerous, murky eyes.

“Nothing, friend. She’s… oh, the scratches. She gave me those when I pulled her away from you. On the shore. Really, I was pulling her away from the…There was a…a young wife, Mathilde. A good woman. With Christ now, if any of us are. You may be sick.”

“Where is the girl?”

“I persuaded her to sleep in the stables tonight, but she will come back when she wakes up. She sat on that little stool near you until an hour ago. She’s quite faithful.”

Thomas looked under the threadbare sheet that covered him and saw what the thing in the river had done to him; an awful hole a few inches above the base of his verge wept into the hair there. All the skin around it was swollen, and a separate swelling was coming in near it, where the leg met the groin. The whole area was a misery.

“So I have some uncleanness in me from that thing, as well as plague.”

“It seems so.”

“Did you give me last rites?”

“Three hours ago.”

“I’ll try not to sin.”

“You’re in no condition to sin, except perhaps unclean thoughts.”

“Not having any. Hurts too much down there.”

“You’re safe from lust, at least. Having any temptations about gluttony?”

Thomas shook his head.

“And it’s hardly sloth for a sick man to rest. Don’t worry. I’ll look after your soul. As for the body, that’s in God’s hands.”

Thomas nodded.

“You killed it, you know.”

Thomas made a pleased sound and his lids got heavy.

“It floated downriver like an old empty sock, leaving its awful guts behind it. It was an awful, murderous thing, and you killed it with your own hand. It was worthy of a saint.”

Thomas slept.

He woke up again just before dawn, to the sound of labored breathing. Not his own. Someone was suffering, trying to breathe with pierced lungs. He hadn’t heard that sound since the catastrophe at Crécy, when he lay with a broken leg and an arrow through his face, listening to his seigneur breathe his last breaths, sucking bloody air in around the ashwood arrows that had punched through his chain hauberk in three places. He always loved his lord for not moaning, as other men did. As Thomas did. He knew in his heart that his lord, the Comte de Givras, had died awake, gritting his teeth, using his last strength to keep from making an unchivalrous noise. The comte was not as strong in the arms as Thomas, almost nobody was, but he was tougher. He died a better death than Thomas was about to, fouling his sick-sheets in bed.

But now that horrible breathing.

Outside his window.

A shadow passed.

He got to his feet and found that the right leg was completely numb, as if it had fallen asleep, and it was all he could do not to crash to the floor. He was sick and dizzy and his nose was running into his beard, but he got his sword and moved past the sleeping priest. He opened the door in time to see the form of a man limping toward the stables.

Where the girl was.

“You!” he said, but coughed at the end of it.

The figure didn’t turn.

Thomas tried to run at it, but now his woodish leg betrayed him and tumbled him onto the ground, where he blacked out. He came to not very long after, and went farther toward the stables, where he saw the girl and the figure talking over a lantern. His eyes were tearing, and he couldn’t see well, but it looked like a man. A shirtless man with long spines. Thomas lurched toward the couple, but the world spun again and he went out.

He woke again moments later, or thought he did, to find the spined man helping him into bed. Except the man was bleeding all over the bed and laboring to breathe, because he was full of arrows, not spines.

“Seigneur!” Thomas tried to say, but it wasn’t his lord.

He didn’t recognize the man, a short dark-haired youth with protuberant, drilling eyes that looked almost luminous.

The man exhaled a shuddering breath, spraying a small amount of froth from his chest wounds, then pressed hard with his thumb on Thomas’s forehead, forcing him to fully recline. It hurt. The man wheezed and coughed horribly and limped out of the room.

Thomas still felt the imprint of that hard thumb.

He slept.

But not before he muttered, “Sebastian. Saint Sebastian, help me.”

SEVEN Of the Battle of Song-of-Angels

In the morning, the girl told the priest that the three of them were going to the shrine of the Virgin of the White Rock, ten miles north. She was granting miracles to some, and she would rid Thomas of the plague.

“But, child,” the priest said, “this man cannot travel. And the bishop heard rumors of this shrine many years ago, and visited it and declared that, while it was a holy place and Christians should pray there, they should expect no miracles.”

A saint had told her. She bit her lip, wondering if she should let them know one spoke to her. It seemed better to keep that secret.

“A higher power than the bishop says the shrine is healing people. And we can take the knight upon a cart.”

“If I had a cart.”

“Go to the almond orchard and pray. God will show you a way.”

“No,” the priest said forcefully. “We must stay here. If God wants our friend to live, He will bestow that grace upon him wherever he is.”

Her insides fluttered as though a small bird were near her heart. Words came to her. She closed her eyes and said them.

“Matthieu Hanicotte,” she said, calling the priest by his true name, which he had never told her, “you say these words because you fear to leave your little home. But I turn your words upon you; if Death means to take you, he may do it here as easily as on the road. He is already in this house.”

A chill passed through the priest, and he said meekly, “Watch over our friend. I am going to the orchard.”

The dead man’s cart was in good repair, and the three of them were soon upon the road to Rochelle-la-Blanche, a hill village where granite was quarried. The priest drove the fine cart, while Thomas lay feverish in the back of it. The girl held a cross over him with one hand and lay her other hand upon his burning chest. The priest was certain she was a saint. He had no other way to explain his discovery in the orchard.

The cart’s owner had broken his neck trying to stand on the wheel of the cart and beat the last almonds from a high branch. The body was still warm when the priest found him. A chill had gone through Matthieu Hanicotte, and for a moment he had wondered if the girl was diabolic in nature. He thought not. Then he had a moment to wonder whether God had slain this man to provide them a cart, or if He had merely directed Matthieu to the scene of this sad event, already foreordained. What was the difference? Everything served God’s will, and here, at last, after months of senseless deaths and unending tears, was a tragedy that bore some fruit. The priest had blessed the man, then cried and thanked God for at last revealing His face to him. For all those thanks, however, the mule was stubborn, and it had taken the priest nearly half an hour to get it moving.

But now the mule was happy to pull.

As they got closer, they passed others bearing the sick and dying to Rochelle-la-Blanche.

It was midday when they saw the town.

And the mob that was heading there.

Nearly thirty peasants, mostly men, were marching on the town, several of them pulling a small, empty cart by hand. They were all armed. When they noticed the priest’s cart coming up behind them, they turned.

“A mule!” one shouted.

“Get the mule!” said a woman with a two-pronged wooden pitchfork.

“It’s a priest,” another said.

“Fuck him, we have a priest, too. And we need that mule,” said a man in gaudy yellow stockings.

Père Matthieu felt a shock of ice in his heart, and he nearly froze with fear. The knight could have made the mob think twice, but he was dying. Then an idea came to Matthieu and he leapt to his feet, standing tall in the cart, and, though his knees shook, he kept his voice firm.

“He who wants the plague, come and take this mule. For plague is upon this man you see here. He who wants his soul in Hell, come and take this mule unlawfully from one of God’s priests, and stop us on our pilgrimage.”

This halted their frightening surge toward the cart.

Now the woman with the wooden fork said “Come with us, Father. Help us take the Virgin back.”

“What?” said the priest. He now noticed a stocky, cow-eyed priest among the farmers; he was holding a pewter candlestick like a club, and he seemed abashed to have encountered another of his sort. He shook this off and spoke.

“Yes, brother. We’re taking our Virgin back. She was stolen from our village, Chanson-des-Anges, by those bastards of Rochellela-Blanche during the Great Hunger of ’17. Since then God has smiled upon them and pissed upon us for not defending her. Help us in our rightful suit.”

“Shame on you, brother,” Père Matthieu said.

The girl stood now, wide-eyed, and said, “You’ve got devils with you. Right now, with you.”

“In your hearts!” Père Matthieu said quickly, suddenly scared this mob might decide she was a witch. “For the devil is in any heart that moves a man to hurt his neighbor. Yet will he leave you in peace if you will put your weapons down and turn from your sin. This is your last chance.”

“You’re not from here,” the club-wielding priest said viciously and suddenly, as if the words weren’t his, and began toward the cart. The girl’s gaze stopped him.

“I see it,” she said quietly. “I know what’s at your elbow.”

It was the cutting of a marionette. The stocky priest began to cry then, blubbering incoherently. The woman with the fork came now and grabbed him by the shoulder.

“To Hell with them,” she said. “Let’s get Our Lady back. Chanson-des-Anges!” she said. The crowd echoed her cry, and they lurched toward the village, pulling the weeping priest with them.

Even though it took place at Rochelle-la-Blanche, the battle would henceforth be known as the battle of Chanson-des-Anges, because the attackers shouted that again and again. They shouted it as they waded into and pushed aside the crowd of sick and penitent pilgrims that surrounded the statue. They shouted it as they broke the arm of the priest of Rochelle-la-Blanche, who threw himself in front of his Blessed Lady to defend her. They shouted it as they broke the pretty, white-stone statue from its nook in the white rock beside the church, leaving a piece of her foot. They shouted it at the group of men who began to form in the market square nearby, now six, now a dozen, shouting and pointing and summoning others.

Then one in the Chanson mob said, “Do not let them gather!”

Nobody was sure who said it, because only the girl could see the foul thing that spoke those words.

A stone flew. Then a brick. Someone shot an arrow. Then the invading mob rushed at the outnumbered men in the square, and a horrible melee began. The Rochelle townsmen scattered, but more were coming. The Virgin must have been working true miracles here. More healthy men were gathering than the priest or the girl had seen in one place since the sickness first came. Now a hunchback in a blacksmith’s apron ran toward the Rochelle men, dragging a box, from which they began to pull swords, axes, and hammers.

“Defend the Lady!” someone said, and the Chanson-des-Anges mob fell back toward their cart, where the Virgin of the White Rock lay awkwardly on her side, and formed a ring about it. The men of Rochelle surrounded them. They were reluctant to start killing, but then someone in the square held up the body of a little blond boy whose head had been busted by a brick.

“Perrin!” one screamed. “They killed little Perrin!”

The twenty or so defending the cart screamed defiantly “Chanson-des-Anges, Chanson-des-Anges,” as if daring the thirty well-armed farmers, tradesmen, and granite workers to slaughter them.

They took the dare. The two groups bludgeoned, stabbed, cut, and gouged each other while dust flew and screams rang out. When, at last, the people of Chanson were nearly overcome, the woman with the fork dropped it and picked up a fallen hammer, jumping up into the cart with the Virgin.

“If we won’t have her, you won’t either! Fuck her,” she said, and smashed the Virgin’s arm from her body.

Back in Père Matthieu’s cart, the girl screamed.

The fighting stopped and everyone watched, stunned.

“Fuck her! Fuck her!” the woman screamed, wide-eyed.

The hammer fell again and the Virgin’s nose was busted.

Two more strokes and the statue, once so beautiful that men wept to see her, was nothing but rocks. White dust covered the Chanson woman’s face.

Something laughed, but only the girl saw what.

“Death!” screamed a Rochelle man.

And Death answered his summons.

None from Chanson-des-Anges was left alive.

The last one, the cow-eyed priest, was killed with the same brick that killed the little boy.

Afterward, the survivors took the wounded off and the people of Rochelle-la-Blanche cleared as far away from the killing field as they could. The girl tore herself away from Père Matthieu and walked through the twisted bodies, toward the ruin of the Virgin of the White Rock. She was shaking and weeping, looking far smaller and younger than she had. She bent near the cart and picked up the statue’s arm, hugging it to her.

The priest helped her up into his cart now, where Thomas lay very still, breathing his last. He had the impression that something with a cold, fishy mouth was tugging at him. His bladder loosed and he breathed out, his chest rattling. He did not inhale.

The girl took the Virgin’s hand and forearm up and pressed the two stone fingers, held out in benediction, against the knight’s forehead, just where he had felt St. Sebastian’s thumb the night before.

She pressed hard.

The thing with the fishy mouth left.

Thomas gasped and opened his eyes.

And then he slept.

Thomas woke up and thought something was horribly wrong. A dream in which his mother wove at her loom and sung a chanson de toile about a common woman who loved a great seigneur dissolved; now an angel was rubbing his head with a cool cloth; he had died, he was sure of that, but under no circumstances should he be in Heaven.

He turned his eyes to look at the angel, and saw that it was only the girl. Her very gray eyes were on him, waiting to see if he would speak.

“I died,” he said.

“Almost.”

“You… saved me?”

“God did. With the hand of the Virgin. It was her last miracle.”

Thomas coughed, but less horribly than he had before the end.

“I stink,” he said.

The priest, who was near the hearth, said, “Not like you did. What’s stinking now is just the bedstraw. Some of your sickness went into that, I think. One thing you never get used to is the way the sick ones smell. As if we needed any further proof this curse fell from the heavens to show us how corrupt we are.” He went back to stirring the pot on the fire.

“What’s there to eat?” Thomas said.

“Oh, he has an appetite, there’s a hopeful sign. Of course, having received last rites and lived, you’re supposed to fast perpetually now. And go barefoot. And remain chaste.”

Thomas grunted.

“But I won’t tell anyone if you won’t. ‘What’s to eat?’ he says. Nothing but the worst soup in Christendom; grasses, flowers, twigs, some fungus from the sides of trees, a blighted radish, and, the best of all, four baby birds I broke free from their eggs. I was hoping just to get the yolks and whites, but the chicks were nearly ready to enter this sad world. Now they’re in soup. You’ll have to eat one, bones and all.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“Well, I haven’t. I’m just a soft priest in a cozy village. Or was. At least there’s a little salt. I spared a pinch of salt so we could choke the rest down.”

The girl changed the water in Thomas’s cloth and rubbed his temples again. It was so cool and so good. He closed his eyes and breathed a long, contented sigh. This was the best he had felt since… since something awful happened. What? Something in a river.

“What I can’t stop thinking about,” the priest went on, “is wine. I never thought it would just run out. I thought men would always make wine, as bees make honey and cows make milk. That I would one day find nobody, not one person, with a skin or cask or pitcher of wine to sell, had never occurred to me.”

“I pray for you, Père Matthieu,” she said.

“That I’ll find good wine?”

“That God will fill you so full with His love that you will not need wine.”

“That’s a fine prayer, girl. But, if it’s no trouble, ask the Lord to send me a little wine along with His love. I promise to be grateful for both.”

Thomas got better slowly, but more quickly than any of those few the priest had seen survive the plague. He took walks in the priest’s yard, slurped bad soup, cracked the few stray almonds left in the cart, and savored the last of the girl’s honey.

By the end of August she was asking if he felt well enough to travel.

“Let me guess. Paris, then Avignon.”

“Yes.”

“For mysterious reasons that will come to you later.”

“Yes.”

“It must have to do with the pope.”

“I don’t know.”

“Because the pope lives there.”

“And you lived in Picardy. Was everyone who came to Picardy coming to see you?”

“Hey, priest. Is this little girl a witch or a saint?”

“A saint, I think,” Père Matthieu said.

“But you’re not sure.”

“No, actually, I’m not.”

“Would you like to go to Paris with us?”

“No.”

“So you’ll stay here, then.”

“No.”

“Which is it?”

“I’ll go to Paris. You asked me if I would like to go to Paris. I would not. But I’m out of food, wine, and parishioners. So, like it or not, I have to leave my pleasant little house. If she’s a saint, this is a holy pilgrimage. If she’s a witch, I might try to mitigate her wickedness.”

They left on the first day of September.

On the third of September, against the wishes of his wife, the seigneur of St. Martin-le-Preux at last gave in to the yapping of his herald and seneschal, who claimed the priest was harboring a coarse man who had insulted the lord’s honor and broken his bell, as well as having provoked the foulness in the river to kill numerous peasants, on one of whom it seemed to have choked and burst itself.

The lord reluctantly sent his last three men-at-arms down to search the priest’s house, but they found that the priest had left. Knowing the priest’s brother to be a servant in the house of His Holiness in Avignon, the men searched the house for treasures Père Matthieu might have left behind. One of them poked in the dirt of the yard with his pole-arm. One went through his trunk, his pot, and his few tools.

The other turned up the straw of the bed.

The next day, this man had a fever.

Four days later, everyone in the castle was dead.

The new seneschal was last, crying at his own image in a polished piece of brass, trying with a shaking hand to paint fine eyebrows on the ruin he had become.

EIGHT Of the Feast, and of the Night Tourney

The castle was deceptive in its proximity; it floated on its pale green hill for the last half of the day, seeming as distant as a celestial body, and then at dusk it was upon them, with its proud white walls and turrets. The banners of the seigneur flew from the square keep, and men walked at ease atop the gatehouse, where the drawbridge was down in welcome. Perhaps the plague had spared this place.

“Let’s stop here and see if we can get a meal,” Thomas said.

“I have to get to Paris,” said the girl.

“And still you won’t say why.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I counter what you don’t know with what I do know. We are hungry, and being fed is better than being hungry.”

“Not always,” she said.

“Yes, always,” said Thomas.

The priest said, “I don’t see what’s wrong with fortifying ourselves, if they will share with us. I have a little coin.”

The girl shook her head obstinately, but Thomas stopped the cart and looked for a long while at the strong castle, imagining where an attacker would place siege engines and try to dig tunnels if he came up against this toothy stone beast. The hill was steep, the ground was tough-boned, and the walls were well built and hung with wooden hoardings from which defenders could work all sorts of evil against attackers. The English would have the Devil’s own time trying to get in there, if they came.

“Let’s goooo,” the girl whined, sounding less like a witch or a saint and more like a brat who needed the back of a hand.

“Shut up,” Thomas said. “A rider’s coming.”

Just as the sun went down, a man on a delicate-looking Arab horse issued from the open gate, pluming dust behind him.

The priest smoothed his robes and held up his crosier. The girl knitted her brow. Thomas, seeing the splendid livery of the herald shining even in the failing light, suddenly remembered that he was in a cart, and felt ashamed. Carts were for peasants, not men-at-arms. He got out of it and stood, holding his hand up in salute.

The herald of this castle was every bit as sunny and pleasant as the one in St. Martin-le-Preux had been haughty and contemptuous. His voice broke out of him like birds from a copse of trees.

“Greetings to you, friends in God’s love. Are you come to see the tourney? Or,” he said, looking at Thomas, “to compete in it?”

“Neither, friend,” said Thomas. “We are on our way to Paris.”

“Paris? Have you heard no news from there?”

“No.”

“Perhaps because nobody is coming out alive. The Scourge is carrying off three hundred a day there. Death reigns in that city, and there is no law. And there is no food.”

“There is little food anywhere.”

“Our tables are well kept.”

“And the plague?”

“It has come and gone. We were touched, and then it sputtered and went out. Our seigneur has ordered us to be merry and gay, and to fear no strangers. And to make music. He has ordered fife, drum, and viol players to play at every hour, even through the night. He believes the sickness, like a dog, bites those who fear it.”

“The dog I saw bites everyone and can’t hear music.”

“I can only speak for what has happened here, my lord. Many fell, but now none fall. And jolly music plays all the time.”

“I am no lord.”

“A pity. You might have broken a lance tonight. In the night tourney.”

“I thought tournaments were forbidden by the king.”

“The king’s arm has grown short.”

Thomas smiled, showing his white teeth. “I would like to see this tourney,” he said.

“Can you ride?”

“I have no horse.”

“But can you ride?”

“Well enough.”

“We might find one for you. You look like a man who has spun a quintain or two, and, if the truth be told, we are not so well provisioned with knights that we will turn our noses up at any worthy horseman. Our lord has called for a tourney, and we shall make one as best we can. Will you fight?”

“No!” the girl said, and Thomas shot her a cold look.

“Yes,” he said.

“Excellent! In that case, I have the privilege of inviting you to my lord’s table this evening. Are you hungry?”

“God, yes,” the priest said.

The girl would not go to the castle.

Thomas commanded, the priest entreated, and in the end she skittered up a tree.

“For Christ’s sake,” Thomas said. “Get down from there.”

Nothing.

“We’ve been eating twigs and earwax for a week. Now we have the chance to really fill our bellies, and you do this.”

Nothing.

“Stop being headstrong and get in that cart! It’s getting dark. Goddamn it, don’t make me leave you out here. And don’t think I won’t.”

Nothing.

“Suit yourself,” Thomas said, and turned to follow the herald, who was politely waiting just out of earshot. The priest sat in the cart alone, torn between the two of them.

“Go with him, Père Matthieu,” she said from her perch. He could see only her feet.

“But…”

“I’ll be safe here.”

“It’s not safe.”

“I’ll be all right. I know how to sleep in a tree without falling out. Go. You want to.”

“Yes.”

“He needs you,” she said, and disappeared farther up into the tree.

The priest nodded and drove the cart behind the herald’s horse, upon which Thomas was now also mounted. The pale grass of the hillside was punctuated with thistles of the brightest purple, each flower of which seemed to have been issued exactly one bumblebee.

“Simon will show you to your chambers,” the herald said, indicating a sullen but brightly liveried boy who met them once they were inside the portcullis.

“What is the name of this place?” Thomas said.

The herald smiled pleasantly, as if this were a joke.

“Supper will be in an hour.”

The serving boy had spoken very little, but had ushered them to a small but cozy room with a real bed in it. The most he said to them at once was, “The sire invites you to go wherever you wish before supper.”

Thomas, who had been grinning broadly ever since they slipped between the strong walls of the castle, nevertheless decided to strip his armor, stay in his chambers, and close his eyes so he might be fresh for the meal. The priest went off to explore.

Two men came and asked for Thomas’s armor.

“The herald said you might want this cleaned?”

Thomas hesitated while the wary man he had been since Crécy struggled with the man he was before. The earlier man won out. Thomas handed over his gear and was given a handsome green robe with cloth-of-gold stars to wear to dinner. He hung it from a nail and lay down to sleep in his stinking long shirt.

The priest crawled into bed beside Thomas an hour later.

“What did you think?”

“A magnificent fortress, really! The tapestries! In the old style, but such colors. And such a mighty tower. I went atop the battlements and felt that, had it been daytime, I might have seen all the way to Avignon, and beyond. I tell you, I think I’ll see the Afric shores tomorrow.”

“You lie, priest.”

“I embellish. But the height was astonishing. In the morning, I’ll have to get the boy to take me to the chapel.”

“I would have thought you’d go there first.”

“I tried. I got confused in all the halls and couldn’t find it.”

The boy showed up just before the feast and shook them both awake from where they snored on the bed. They followed him to the Great Hall, which rang with the sounds of music and cheerful speech as they approached. Thomas felt ten years younger than he was, up on the balls of his feet with anticipation. The tangy, earthy smells of cooked meat and pastries brought water to their mouths as they rounded the archway and saw the hall.

“Thank you, my God, my merciful God, that the world is still sane and happy here at least,” whispered the priest, as he caught sight of wine going from a jar with a mouth like a lion into a lady’s goblet. The herald strode over to them and embraced Thomas before announcing them both.

“Sire, I present Sir Thomas of Picardy, and Père Matthieu of St. Martin-le-Preux. Sir Thomas has agreed to try his skill at arms tonight for our amusement and his greater glory.”

The lord of the castle, a stunted but ferocious leonine man with little black eyes, looked up from his conversation with a Germanic-looking knight and grinned a black-toothed grin at Thomas and the priest. A plump, black-haired young woman with a high forehead sat next to him, seeming half-asleep and indifferent to everything.

“Any man who has hardened himself with the practice of arms is welcome here. Next, any woman at all. After that, certain musicians and priests,” he said, following his jest with a roar of laughter that others around him quickly mimicked. “You are the fourth man. Now we can have our little sport tomorrow. I hear you ride a mule.”

Thomas bristled at that but said, quietly, “My horse has died.”

“That wouldn’t stop a proper horse! Well, then, you shall have one of mine. Have you an armorer?”

“I have only my armor, my sword, and this priest.”

“You can use my armorer. And my priest, if you like. Yours looks like a bugger.”

“Is there a priest who isn’t?” asked the German-looking fellow, who turned out to be a Frenchman. The whole table laughed, as well as the hurdy-gurdy player, who had stopped turning his handle while the lord spoke.

“Did I tell you to stop playing? Your job is to keep the plague out, not stand there and laugh at our jokes like they’re meant for you to hear. Turn that goddamned thing. And make it pretty. Or I’ll break your hands. Is there anything sadder than a hurdy-gurdy player with broken hands? Maybe a Jew who sneezes at the sight of gold.”

Everyone laughed, except Thomas and the priest.

The lord noted this, said, “How dull,” pointed at them, and flicked his hand. Little Simon sat them at one of the far arms of the great U-shaped table. The hurdy-gurdy played loudly, and conversation resumed. Kitchen women brought a basin around from person to person so hands might be washed, and then the herald announced, “Sir Théobald de Barentin and his squire, François.” Simon placed them at the other arm of the U, across from Thomas and the priest.

This Théobald looked familiar; he was a little younger than Thomas, with sandy hair, a small patch of beard on his chin, and clever bug-eyes made for mockery. The squire was a dandy. Théobald saw Thomas looking at him, winked quickly, then whispered something to the squire. The squire snickered.

Thomas’s hand dropped to where his sword hung on its belt. He just rested it on the pommel. This gesture was not lost on Théobald, however, who winked again, even more provocatively than the first time.

Thomas grinned at him, suddenly boyishly happy at the probability that he would be swinging a weapon at this man in the wee hours of the morning.

The food was beyond belief in its variety and in the skill of its presentation. The first course to appear was announced by the herald as “Cathar delight.” Pastries in the form of a small tower were shared out until a breach formed that revealed, within the tower, a painted almond-paste statue of a nude woman tied to a stake amid “flames” of crystallized honey and ginger that were to be broken off and sucked. The woman was crudely made, her chest flat, recognizable as a woman only by her vivid golden hair.

“I’ll have you all know, my great-grandfather was a famous killer of heretics,” the seigneur boasted, “but he might have spared this one.” The flames were all gone, so he lifted the woman out and licked her sticky belly shamelessly, then bit off her legs.

Fruits and cheeses came next, served in bowls painted with images of men and women copulating. The priest ate hungrily from them, and when Thomas pointed out the figures, the priest shrugged and said, “Perhaps this is as close as I get to being fruitful and multiplying.” Thomas kept looking at him, amused by his moral flexibility. “At least the sinful painter was a man of talent, wouldn’t you agree?” he said, and Thomas laughed.

“I wonder how the girl’s getting on,” the priest said now.

“As well as she deserves,” Thomas said. “I will not be governed by her in every little thing. If she wants me to go to Paris, fine, but she’ll learn to stay where I say and eat where I say.”

“Eating from these bowls may not be a sin. But I should have stayed with her,” the priest said.

“What, up her tree?”

“I could have sat beneath it.”

“You still can. No one’s keeping you here.”

“Yes,” the priest said, then looked up at where the hurdy-gurdy player had come very near, staring at the priest while he played loudly and smiled. A woman filled the priest’s goblet with thick, red wine. The priest did not leave.

Now vases and amphorae heaped with roasted eels and lampreys were brought to table, but Thomas thought of the thing in the river and could not bring himself to try these. He did notice Théobald of Barentin greedily heaping eels upon his platter; when he saw he had Thomas’s eye, he bit into one of the long fish, said, “Vengeance at last!” and laughed, though Thomas had no idea what he meant.

The main course came next.

“Three Kings,” the herald intoned, and women brought out a huge platter piled with venison and other exotic meats, and several boats of garlicky brown gravy. Peacock and pheasant feathers accented it artfully, and topping it were three large, roasted monkeys sitting on cedar thrones, wearing capes of ermine. They wore golden crowns, which the cook, a man with narrow eyes and very long fingers, proudly tipped back, letting steam rise from their open skulls, into which he placed three elegant spoons. The chamber burst into applause, and one fleshy woman actually wept, though whether for the beauty of the display or the pathos of the monkeys was unclear.

The seigneur practically leapt from his chair; he took the spoon from the central monkey’s head and slurped the delicate meat, contorting his face in ecstasy.

“Priest!” he said, “How do you say ‘This is my brain’?”

The priest looked flabbergasted.

“Well?”

“Er… in Latin?”

“No, in cunting Flemish. Latin, Latin! What else do you ask a bugger priest about?”

“Well. Hoc est cerebrum meum. But that’s uncomfortably close to…”

“A monkey may speak Latin, may he not?”

“If a monkey may speak at all, I suppose.”

The lord slurped again from the spoon, then said, “Hoc est cerebrum meum,” in the squeakiest monkey voice he could muster. Now he dipped the spoon back into the monkey’s head and walked a spoonful of brain purposefully over to the priest’s lips. “Say it,” he commanded.

“I’d rather not,” the priest said, squirming uncomfortably.

The nobleman pressed the spoon against the priest’s lower lip.

“Say it!”

“My lord,” Thomas said evenly but with a steady gaze.

“I… I… forgive me, but no.”

“My lord,” Thomas said, scooting his chair back a little. Across the hall, Théobald de Barentin scooted his chair back as well.

The hall was silent now.

The seigneur shot Thomas a look that made him suddenly see a lion killing an old man on sand with a hooting crowd looking on. The image left as quickly as it came.

“Very well,” the seigneur said, in a mildly conciliatory tone, “the priest need not speak Latin for us. But he shall have no brains until he does. And no wine until he has brains.”

So saying, he turned his back and walked the spoon back toward the Three Kings.

The priest cleared his throat.

“Hoc… Hoc est cerebrum meum,” he said quietly.

The lord turned on his heel now, grinning mildly, and steered the spoon for the priest’s mouth, which he opened, accepting the spoonful of salty, garlic-scented meat.

It was the best thing he’d ever tasted.

His goblet was filled.

At just that moment, the seigneur noticed that the hurdy-gurdy player had stopped playing to watch the standoff. He grabbed the little man’s closest arm, dragged him to the table, and, in three nauseating blows, broke his hand against it with a heavy pewter mug. The musician screamed and ran off, dropping his hurdy-gurdy, which broke as well.

“Where’s the viol player?”

“Sleeping, sire,” the herald said. “He played all last night for us.”

“Wake him.”

Thomas and the priest ate to bursting. Thomas ate no monkey, but he did fill his trencher with cuts of strange meat he drenched well in the intoxicating gravy. “What is this?” he asked a serving woman.

“Deer, ram, wild boar,” she said. “It is all roasted together.”

“Tastes boarish, but strange bones for a boar,” Thomas said.

“Perhaps I am mistaken. My lord has beasts from many lands in his cages, and they are eaten when it pleases him. Or perhaps it is a Jew.”

The man next to Thomas laughed so hard at this he nearly choked.

The viol player, while pale with exhaustion, was very skilled. He looked Moorish, and moved his hips in strange and sensual rolls while he drew across the honey-sweet strings. Thomas was becoming drunk, and the priest was drunker. He noticed Père Matthieu watching the musician distractedly.

“Jesus Christ, you are a bugger,” Thomas laughed, though there was no laughter in his eyes.

“No! Just. The music. I am enraptured with it. I have never heard its equal,” the priest said. A fat drop of sweat fell from his nose. “Or, almost never.”

Thomas noticed the bored gaze of the woman who sat beside the seigneur upon him now. The fire from the hearth and many torches made her headpiece twinkle hypnotically. She was beautiful, more so than he had noticed before. He raised his goblet slightly in salute to her, which she answered by dipping her thumb into a monkey’s head and putting that thumb into her mouth. Thomas saw her tongue flicker for just a moment and knew that the wound he got in St. Martin-le-Preux was completely healed.

“I think the lord’s daughter likes you,” said the man next to Thomas.

“Daughter? She’s past a maiden’s age. Where is her husband?”

“She is newly widowed.”

“How newly?”

“He was killed at Crécy.”

“That was two years ago.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“I was there.”

“Oh, well. Seems like yesterday. She was quite attached to him. We all were.”

“What was the knight’s name?”

“You know, I have forgotten. I’ll just ask her. Euphémie! Ho!”

The woman turned her head slowly and looked at the man. Her eyes were very large and green.

“What do you want, Hubert?”

“What was your husband’s name?”

“My husband?”

“Yes, you know. The very tall, handsome one who gave you several stillbirths, then went off to die in Picardy.”

“Ah. Him. His name was…”

“Horace?” barked her father.

“No.”

“It was Pierrot?” suggested the viol player with a decidedly Aragonés inflection, never missing a stroke on his instrument or a turn of his waspish hips.

“No, you silly hedge-cock, I would never spread my legs for anyone named Pierrot. No, it was…”

She opened her mouth now and issued a deep, manly belch. One heartbeat after it was finished, the whole room erupted in exuberant laughter.

Thomas was sloshily offended.

He banged his fist on the table. Nobody noticed, so he banged his wooden goblet on the table, splashing wine all over himself and the priest. The laughter died off to a trickle.

“You go too far!” he shouted at his fellow celebrants. “You injure the memory of a worthy man.” He was swaying.

“Oh?” said the seigneur, amused and intrigued. “How so?”

The wine-sotted soldier could not answer, and almost cried, remembering his lord’s hard death.

The man next to Thomas said, “Please forgive him, sire. He was also at the cursed defeat of Crécy, and I think his heart was broken there. Perhaps he knew the man in question. Sir knight,” he said, turning to face Thomas, “while you were serving under our noble king, did you have the honor of knowing a tall, handsome chevalier named…”

At this he belched even more forcefully than Euphémie had.

Everyone laughed.

Thomas went to backhand the man, but fell, causing the room to laugh harder. He got to his feet, feeling nauseated.

“I will not dine with you troop of pigs,” he said, and looked around for the priest, who was passed out now with his head on his arm and a puddle of drool under his face. He jerked at the priest’s robe, but the priest did not awaken. Thomas left him where he was and lurched in the general direction of the door, followed by the viol player, who used his music to dramatize Thomas’s struggle to make an indignant exit. The room was hysterical. A woman gasped for breath near him: “Oh God, oh God, I think I pissed myself!”

He kicked backward at the viol player, catching him in the knee and making his face contort in pain, changing the music from a racy celebration of the drunk’s progress to a lament for all unjustly injured musicians.

Thomas got to the doorway and went out into the darker hall, still hearing laughter and music behind him. He felt his way along the wall for support, realizing now he had no hope of finding his chamber without the boy who had brought him here.

“I’ll sleep in the whoring stable, then,” he said, and kept moving.

He felt his way along the straight wall for what felt like an hour, passing many exquisite tapestries with bizarre motifs. One stopped him and made him stand swaying before it, trying to comprehend; it seemed to show a noblewoman from the previous century bathing an infant; but she was holding it by its legs head-down into the tub. Bored angels in clouds above received the infant’s drowsy, winged soul, while at the bottom of the tapestry, black devils with tusks coming from the bottoms of their mouths, and even stranger devils in a great variety, received the ecstatically grinning soul of the mother. A lionish thing with human hands felt the woman’s breast. Next to it, the largest of the devils had twelve eyes and a round, fiery mouth. It seemed to stand on owl’s legs. Its black hand was between the legs of the woman’s soul, two fingers in her up to the knuckle.

“Filth,” Thomas slurred.

Just then the candle to the left of the tapestry flickered and a spill of wax overflowed its sconce, spilling suggestively on the floor.

“More filth.”

He remembered that he had to find the stable and go to sleep there, so he continued on. Soon he came to an open, well-lit archway he hoped might lead outside. Instead, he entered the Great Hall once again by the same door he had pitched out of. Everyone was looking at him, deeply amused but silent, as if they had been waiting to surprise him. He felt his way to his seat, pulled it forward, and sat down again next to the unconscious priest. He put his arm on his head and slept.

An instant later, someone was shaking him.

It was the man next to him, the man he had tried to strike.

“Sir knight, sir knight,” the man was saying in a hushed voice.

“What?” Thomas slurred.

The man’s mouth was so close to his face he could see the texture of his green little tongue and a dark shred of meat between two of his asymmetrical teeth.

“You passed out. You mustn’t sleep at table.”

Thomas shook his head and sat up, profoundly confused.

He was about to point out to his neighbor that the priest was sleeping and nobody had bothered him, but when he looked he saw that the priest was awake and having his goblet filled again.

“Everyone is toasting the heroic deeds of the war with England. You don’t want to miss it, do you?”

“No,” he said thickly.

The serving woman now filled his goblet. He saw that her nipple was out over the top of her garment and had the nearly irresistible urge to lean forward and lick it.

Across the hall, Théobald de Barentin had taken to his feet and was looking at Thomas with his protuberant eyes.

“And let us not forget our friend, Sir Thomas…of Picardy?” he said. “Although I cannot remember what town in Picardy. But I believe I met you near Cambrai, ten years ago.”

Thomas felt his face flush, and he resisted the urge to look down.

“Yes, it was you!” the other man continued. “Your seigneur, the Comte de Givras, a worthy man with ridiculously large mustachios, was camped near the Count of Hainault as the English drew their battle lines across from us.”

“You are correct, sir knight. I was there. Let us speak of something happier.”

“Forgive me, I must continue, it’s just too good! This Thomas was not yet a knight, though he had thirty years behind him. Still, his manners were so coarse and his birth so low, his seigneur, again, a wise and worthy man, had not yet bestowed upon him his belt and spurs. Now, imagine! This great battle was about to start, and, suddenly, a noise went up from all the men on both sides. The Count of Hainault hastily knighted some dozen of his young squires and men-at-arms so that they might fight and perhaps die in the holy state of Christian knighthood. This man’s lord, looking at his brawling, overmuscled squire with white hairs coming into his beard, took pity upon him and knighted him as well. Only the battle hadn’t started yet. A hare had leapt between the legs of the French army, and they had been cheering at that. A hare! The battle never started. Our king decided to remove himself, and everyone went away. Only here were all these sad bastards knighted because of a hare. The Knights of the Order of the Hare! And one of their illustrious number is with us tonight!”

“I have fought many actions since then!” Thomas roared.

“All in our king’s service, no doubt.”

“Get yourself fucked, and your shit-nosed girl of a squire. I don’t have to answer to you. Where have you fought? In a whorehouse brawl? For the right to plow your whore mother without paying?”

“Ah, there’s that rare strain of nobility that made your lord so proud to knight you. And you know perfectly well where I fought. You’re just too drunk to remember.”

“My nobility will show itself on the field,” Thomas said, waving off the girl who tried to fill his cup again. “And not in perfumed words to impress teenaged serving girls.”

Théobald bowed.

“Ho-ho!” the seigneur said. “Now I would not miss the night tourney for anything. Not cunting anything.”

He smiled with his mouthful of black teeth.

Night.

The blackest hour of it.

Thomas found himself in bed, but he was not sure how he got there. His head hurt miserably. A small wax candle guttered in a nook, making the shadows on the stone walls hop nauseatingly. He would have done anything for a cupful, or even a palmful of water. The figure next to him shifted.

“Père Matthieu,” he whispered.

The figure shifted again, pulling the blanket half off itself, revealing the very pale, moley back of the lord’s daughter. Something growled from the lower half of the bed. He looked up to see a tiny dog curled between his mistress’s feet, growling a warning at him. He growled back at it, then reclined. The room smelled like hot cunt and red wine vomit. He checked over his side of the bed and confirmed his suspicion that he had been the source of the latter.

Fragments of the night’s events came to him in watery flashes:

Her open mouth coming to kiss his, her teeth graying toward the black of her father’s teeth, her pear-green eyes half-lidded as her tongue flicked forward, her breath with its notes of garlic, fecundity, and rot; his two fingers sunk in her up to the knuckle; her wheezing beneath him and digging into his shoulders with her fat little fingers, her legs curled up so she made a football of herself. She had bitten one of his nipples so badly he wondered if he might lose it.

“So this is Hell,” he muttered.

He glanced at his borrowed robe, which was hanging from a nail near his head. He noticed the cloth-of-gold stars on the sage-green fabric and saw that they looked very much like the stars in the actual night sky. He found the constellation of the swan. Then he found his comet, with its little bloody vein. And the smaller one near it.

He was afraid now.

He did not want to touch the robe, so he put on his soiled long shirt and inner leggings. When he sat gingerly upon the bed to put his boots on, the little dog uncurled itself and stood yapping and growling at him as if it were in pain. Soon it was, because it made the mistake of biting Thomas’s arm, for which he grabbed it, absorbing two more little bites, and flung it against the wall. It made a great noise. He didn’t look to see if it had roused the woman on the bed, because he didn’t want to see one of her large green eyes fixed on him; he was grateful to hear her chortle softly and then snore.

He took his sword and left.

Soon he was lost again in the labyrinth of stone halls, dripping candles and sputtering torches. At last he felt cool air and went outside into the night; other people, still dressed in finery from the feast, were moving in the dark courtyard as well, and some now came through the same door he had just used. The woman from his bed was one of these, her headpiece perched on her high forehead again, the wicked little dog in her arms, her green dress shining.

How did she get dressed so quickly?

She ignored him as she moved past, then turned her head and said, “You’d better find your armor. And I hope you ride better than you fuck. Théobald outclasses you miserably there.” Everyone around them heard and laughed.

He stood there, headachy and confused, while the crowd flowed past him. He looked where they were going and saw pennants flapping in the cool night breeze over a grounded constellation of lit lamps and torches.

The tournament field.

He felt a tug at his elbow and saw the boy, Simon, standing there.

“The armorer wants you.”

Run! Get out of this place!

Armorer.

How long had it been since he’d had an armorer?

In his confusion, he followed the boy to a lit tent. The two men who had taken his armor before were within, ready to suit him in his mail and plate; it had all been scoured and shone marvelously. A tournament helm sat on the arming table.

Thomas’s mouth stood open.

“Don’t just gawk at us. And don’t get too attached to it. Sir Théobald will smash it all into junk, like as not, and you with it. He fights with a mace, and he’s quick as a fish from a dead man’s skull.”

Thomas nodded at them and let them begin.

He noticed his surcoat, cleaned now, and emblazoned with a heraldic image that had not been there before. Two fleurs-de-lys and a hare.

He chuckled.

Yes, this was Hell. And if all that was left for him to do was fight, he would fight to frighten Lucifer.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Just fuck it.”

“That’s what we say, Sir Thomas,” the older armorer said. “And if it won’t let you fuck it, cut its throat. Hey, Jacmel, pass us down his sword. He’ll want that cleaned, too.”

The other man handed him the sword, and the armorer only half unsheathed it before he sheathed it again and put it down on his arming table.

“Christ! What the hell is on this thing?”

“I killed something foul in a river.”

“Well, I’m not touching it. Hey, Jacmel, you want any of this?” he asked the other one. The other one shook his head. The first one tossed the sword at Thomas’s feet, and they finished buckling him in. A horse whinnied outside the tent.

“That’ll be your horse, Grisâtre.”

“I thought he was riding Belâtre.”

“Oh, right. The seigneur is riding Grisâtre.”

At that, trumpets sounded and the herald spoke, though Thomas could not hear what he was saying. Then the crowd roared. The tourney had begun.

He went out of the tent and saw the mottled charger he was meant to ride. A gray-haired, long-headed squire in an ill-fitting jerkin and loose hose held the reins, and the man was so drunk he could barely stand. A second look at the ridiculous squire showed him to be Matthieu Hanicotte, the priest.

The sound of something punching through armor came from the tournament field, and the crowd loosed an impressed HOOOOOOAAAAA!

Thomas’s borrowed horse turned to look at him, and Matthieu motioned toward the saddle. Thomas mounted.

“Are you yourself, or a devil?” Thomas asked, putting on his tournament helmet.

“I don’t know,” he slurred, “but I’m fairly sure there’s a devil out there.”

A horrible shriek came from the field then. The crowd went, “HO-ooooooooo,” the way a crowd will when something awful has happened to a man. The squire-priest grabbed a lance from where it leaned against a rail and handed it to Thomas, taking up two spares as well. Thomas looked down the shaft at the point; it was a war point, sharp and deadly, not the blunted quartet of knobs one used in tourneys.

“So be it,” he said. “Let’s go die, priest.”

“I wish that were all we risked here,” Matthieu said.

He turned the horse and brought it onto the trampled sod of the list.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said under his breath.

Two horsemen were on the field, and a third waited on the far side.

What must have been a hundred torches burned, and burned the image into his mind; the German-looking Frenchman from the feast was sitting dead in the saddle, a lance through his side. His helmet was off. The seigneur, also sans helmet, circled his horse around him, then spurred it close, using a one-handed war axe to split the man’s head laterally, from nose to the back of his skull, the contents of which flew all over the sand.

The crowd screamed its approval.

Then a monkey came from beneath the stands, a monkey of the same sort as the three that had been roasted for supper, and began to pick from the sand and eat what had flown from the man’s head. When he had gotten all there was to be found on the sand, he scampered up the horse and up the armored body of the half-headed German Frenchman, and began to eat directly from the bowl of his remaining head.

“Hoooooooooo!” went the crowd.

Now the monkey kicked his heels against the armor of the dead knight he straddled, and the knight’s body jerked and spurred the horse, who trotted off the field to eat grass. The knight’s body slid heavily out of the saddle, and the monkey scampered beneath the stands again.

The crowd went silent, then began to chant, “Next! Next! NEXT! NEXT!”

The lord, still circling on Grisâtre, pointed his gory axe at Thomas.

Thomas suppressed a shudder.

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, he thought, then spurred his horse forward to take his position at his end of the list.

“Lance, or sword?” Thomas shouted at the seigneur.

“LANCE!” he bellowed, “But not me. Him!”

Théobald de Barentin was in position now, placing his tournament helm and taking his lance. He sat a whitish horse that couldn’t wait to run. His dandy squire handed him his first lance.

“READY?” screamed the lord, raising his axe.

Théobald raised his lance.

Thomas raised his.

The axe fell.

The chargers started off, Thomas’s more heavily, and the two made for each other. At French tournaments, a barrier normally separated the jousting knights to prevent collision, but this was open like a German field. Thomas reined his horse to keep it on the right side, his lance pointed crosswise, but the horse stubbornly made right for its oncoming counterpart. At the last minute, the other horse corrected and the men shocked their lances into one another. Thomas felt his glance solidly but harmlessly off Théobald’s chestpiece, rocking him back with the impact. Théobald’s point, however, gouged into Thomas just below the left hip, dislodging several links of chain and digging a hotly painful furrow into him. He gritted his teeth and tried unsuccessfully not to grunt, reeling but staying upright in the saddle.

Both men had kept their lances, so they wheeled their horses around and repositioned themselves for another charge. Neither waited for a signal from the seigneur this time; they both made for each other.

This time, however, Thomas felt his horse slowing beneath him. He swore at it and spurred it, but Belâtre kept losing speed, even as the other knight loomed larger and more dangerous through the slit in Thomas’s helm. The horse stopped altogether.

“You whore!” Thomas said to his mount even as Théobald’s point dropped and slammed into Belâtre’s chest. The horse screamed, reared, and threw Thomas off. He landed heavily on his back, sending a wave of pain down his legs all the way to his heels. He sat up to see the dying horse topple on its side, kicking its legs in the air. No sooner had it landed than at least a score of dark shapes rushed from beneath the stands and swarmed over it. The monkeys. Only this time Thomas wasn’t sure they were monkeys. Whatever they were, they dragged the horse away, already disemboweling it.

“Forgive me, Sir Thomas,” the seigneur said. “I didn’t know my horse was a fucking coward.”

Thomas crabbed his way to his feet. Why wasn’t his squire helping him up? He removed his borrowed helmet and looked back down the list. He saw Matthieu now, lolling against a rail, his head tipped back. The viol player from before was pouring wine down his throat, his free hand rubbing the older man’s crotch.

The lord barked, “On foot!” and now Thomas turned and saw the other knight stomping toward him, swinging a flanged mace, his helmet also off.

“Right,” Thomas said, and drew his sword.

He moved first against Théobald, running at him and lunging his point at the other man’s face. The knight spun and sidestepped at the same time, bringing his mace around into Thomas’s back, breaking a rib. Thomas let the momentum take him forward so he wouldn’t be in jeopardy from a second blow. The armorer was right. Théobald was fast.

As a fish from a dead man’s skull.

He heard the armor moving behind him and sensed the mace passing only half a hand’s length from where his head had just been.

But Thomas had tricks, too; he planted his foot and spun suddenly, crouching at the same time, driving his point at the other man’s middle. It struck home, and, even though the mail stopped it, the force pushed the man back and sapped the strength from his mace swing so that, when it landed on Thomas’s shoulderpiece, it hurt but didn’t damage.

His back was in agony.

Did water just come from Théobald’s armor?

Thomas didn’t have time to pull back for a proper swing, so he chopped short across his body, hacking at Théobald’s inner arm to try to knock the mace out of it; he knocked the mace arm wide, but his foe kept his weapon, letting the momentum carry it over his own head, and backhanded into Thomas’s arm, which went numb.

Salt water got into his eyes. Théobald was definitely leaking salt water. And his armor was now finely coated with rust. Thomas didn’t actively notice these things; without hesitation, he switched hands and licked out with the sword point, which caught the other man between the knuckles of his mace hand, opening the links of his chain mitten and making him drop the mace.

Now Thomas saw the exposed hand and how white it was. So white it was almost translucent.

A fucking hand!

He lashed out with the blade again and caught Théobald across the side of the head. Seawater, not blood, gushed from the wound. It stank. Théobald looked amused. He opened his mouth and a scream came out, but it was not his scream. It was the scream of the fat peasant who had died in the river. It was the scream the thing in the river had mimicked.

Thomas recovered from his stupefaction and swung hard now with his working arm. Théobald, who was getting puffier and whiter by the second, raised his arm so it caught the force that had been meant for his neck. The armor saved the arm from getting severed, but the bones in it were broken and he careened sideways. More water gushed from him.

An eel slithered out of his leg armor to writhe on the sand.

The sky was not as dark as it had been.

Théobald scrambled for his mace now, picking it up with the badly broken arm; Thomas struck him across the back, breaking his scapula. Unconcerned, Théobald lurched up and the mace head backhanded Thomas across his own numb arm, which was also broken.

The opponents paused now and looked at each other.

Théobald grinned at Thomas, and thread-fine marine worms sprouted from his lips. A small fish ate one of his eyes from the inside.

And he stank, and he stank.

Théobald de Barentin, Théobald…

Dead at the battle of Sluys.

He fell into the sea when an English ship rammed into the ship he was on. He was the best fighter in Normandy, but he was not stabbed or shot with arrows. He just slipped on the wet deck and fell into the water, where his armor pulled him under. Thomas’s lord had told his men before they met the English at Crécy, to remind them that no death was inglorious when suffered in the field.

Light was coming into the sky.

“Hurry!” screamed a woman from the stands, and the cry was picked up by the other spectators, all of whom were beginning to rot now. Some yelled “Kill him!” or “The sun!” The lord of the castle shouted “HURRY!” as well, and tried to shout it again, but the word changed into the roar of a lion. Thomas spared a glance at him, and saw that he was growing taller, stretching out of his armor, so that his skin showed between sections. His head was a lion’s head now, but lumpy and corrupt, balanced badly on the ungainly stack of flesh and armor he had become.

A devil.

A devil from Hell and a court of the damned.

The thing that had been the seigneur started taking jerky steps toward them.

Théobald lashed madly with his mace now, and Thomas blocked or avoided all but one blow, which he stepped into at the last instant to avoid taking the head of the mace; instead he caught the shaft across his jaw, which broke.

“Hurry,” screamed the mob, which had begun running off the stands toward the combatants.

Thomas shoved his sword into the face of what used to be Théobald de Barentin, and it shuddered and stopped moving. Thomas yanked the sword out of it but fell on his side. The lion-devil roared, standing over Thomas.

The crowd of finely dressed corpses moved closer. One of the monkey-things tugged the armor off his foot and bit it.

Thomas held his sword up.

The sun’s crown came over the edge of the land, just one brilliant orange diamond’s worth.

And it was all gone.

Everything.

Thomas was lying in a cow field, holding up his sword, dressed in his rusty armor. Neither his arm nor his rib nor his jaw were broken. A rusted plow stood where the lion-devil had been, one of its spars hanging at the angle of the axe it had just been holding. A dead sheep lay in exactly the position the corpse of Sir Théobald had assumed when he collapsed. A small Norman tower, long abandoned and crumbling, stood where the mighty castle had been when they first saw it at dusk. The priest, lying facedown in his robes, was breathing heavily in sleep.

“A whoring dream,” he said.

He got to his feet and stretched.

He saw a mound of dirt and walked over to it, having a long piss against it. He realized he had to shit as well, and walked around the dirt mound to see if he could find an ass-wiping plant. What he found instead was a common grave. The last corpses were recent and had not been shoveled under very well. A woman’s moley, nude back stood out at him. Also, the herald; the small boy, Simon, in bright livery; and the Moorish musician. A little dead dog had been tossed in as well.

The sunrise was among the most beautiful he had ever seen. He got to his knees meaning to thank God for it, but couldn’t think of any words to say.

The girl walked over to him, brushing a leaf out of her hair.

“Are you ready to go to Paris now?” she said.

“Yes.”