Between Two Fires (9781101611616) Read Free

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