Between Two Fires (9781101611616) by Buehlman Christopher

Author:Buehlman, Christopher [Buehlman, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101611616
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Iesu will you die for us?

—Yes, love, yes, love!

Do you fear the Roman whip?

—No, love, no!

And then the men called and the women answered:

Sinners, will you bleed for me?

—Yes, love, yes, love!

Do you fear the pestilence?

—No, love, no!

Then, all together:

Who will come and walk with us

In His steps?

To show Him that our love is true

Thirty days!

Behind these eight and the drummer trained a score or so who had clearly been recruited from other towns, all stripped to the waist, though less uniform in appearance. Some of them whipped themselves with tree branches; a girl walked behind bearing a bundle of sticks on her back to replace those that split.

Now the drummer beat three beats and they all stopped. They shouted “Iesu!” and flung themselves facedown into the street, arms out, cruciform, eliciting a gasp from the crowd. The ones at the rear then stood and came forward, giving a stroke of the whip or the branch to each prone figure they passed, until they reached the front and flung themselves down again. In this way, like some horrible caterpillar, the entire line worked its way toward the square in front of St. Etienne and the astonished crowd of onlookers, then collapsed all at once.

All but the man beating the drum.

He set this aside now and looked at the crowd.

“I am Rutger the Fair,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. Fair might have been a name from his youth; it seemed a better word to hang on an urbane womanizer than on this handsome but shocking man of thirty or so, graced with the broad, muscular chest of a woodcutter or a swordsman, brutally scarred from months of flagellation. His carelessly shaven (or intentionally cut) scalp would have sat well on a madman, but his deep-set eyes shone with intelligence, even wisdom. A goatish beard of blond and gray erupted from his chin. He seemed less a cleric than the antidote to clericism. If Christ had been German as well as a carpenter, and if He had survived His scourging, and if He had shorn His head with a broken bottle, He might well have looked like this man.

“I come to you, Auxerre, from the land of Saxony, where the plague is not yet come, and shall never come; I stand before you to offer you either the cup or the sword. The cup is that of forgiveness, and the sword is that of wrath.”

Now the boy came up from behind the crowd, bearing a pewter goblet and a small sword. He stood by the man, stomping his feet twice.

“God demands a tithe. If one in ten of you turn from your lives of false comfort and walk with us for thirty days, your town will be spared. Or if three of you will sit the cross for three days, your town will also be spared. But if you stay here and do not show the Lord your love, you will all die the death of the stone under the arm, or the stone in the crotch, or the death of the spitting of the blood.

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