The Cross and the Black Read online

  Chapter Two

  In his cell Claude lay on a thin arrangement of blankets on the ground. His eyes were scalded to the pitch darkness. The oblong slit for a window yielded no light, not even stars. Hell looked preferable to the black aether of his bed. At least fires burned, albeit cleansing, painful fires, but lap and lash for life they did. Like charcoal crumbling, he felt his feet segment into the dark, his shins, his thighs, his belly …

  The door opened and a smoky clove scent swarmed inside.

  “I keep holy for Lent,” Claude said, without the strain of protest, to the stocky bulk of his master Serge. His clothes reflected dully a muffled white in the dark.

  “You weren’t home when I returned from the Guild.”

  “May St. Dennis strike me dead. Jules and I watched the dyers at the river all day.”

  “Oc.”

  Moments quivered tautly until Serge, with as much as a florid shrug, drew away from the door and slipped into the bed.

  Thoughtlessly, Claude began fondling Serge as duty commanded. Duty also commanded taking care of Serge’s morning ablutions, and cooking, and washing, and mending, and rubbing him stiff to a fatal spill. That or the streets.

  Pulling and tugging on Serge, Claude dreamed about the apothecary kissing him and taking him in the mouth, unlike Serge too cowardly to give him a brotherly kiss. He yawned and stroked away. All the things he did for a roof over his head, three meals a day, and a paltry thirty sous a month. At least, Serge would never consent to be his clyster pipes like the stupid one. Oc, the stupid one, who took him without paying. For free! He stopped paying attention to Serge, gathering the thought faggots to burn up a bright consternation.

  It was too dark. That Serge was seething with the rage of a dispossessed lion, Claude could not see or care to see. Serge shifted and cleared his throat repeatedly, all the while Claude’s mind resounded with ‘for free, for free.’ He folded his arms on his chest and frowned through a mental sludge of blasphemies.

  Serge wagged his thighs to rouse Claude. “Ahem.”

  Claude came to himself and an erection wagging at him for attention, like that nuisance child tugging at his tunic for alms. “You want a log? Get a wife.”

  “I did arrange a wife, Mireille Bonace. Today, we discussed the marriage contract.”

  Claude shot upright to sitting. He could feel in his chest the rusty start of time’s gears, like a grinding wheel. The

  Claude muttered, “Deo Gratias. Good news indeed. So good, you’re here, ripe with good cheer and lust.”

  “’Twas you who touched me!”

  Claude cradled his head and wished for a bolt to blot out his master. A wife? How can I didn’t know?

  “She would not do with an unwholesome servant in her employ. You can’t stay here anymore,” Serge said.

  “Dilated you to her keepers on your she-cur of a servant? ‘He steals into my bed and rides me like a stallion of the apocalypse.’” Rolling out of bed, Claude laughed helplessly at the violence of its image. “Now you shall be married and I return to the streets.”

  “What’s this to do with me? You have friends wide and vast.”

  Claude spun on his feet and shoved his face into of Serge’s. “God damn you.”

  Serge looked away.

  The craven goat. Claude staggered backwards and wiped his face as he fought to retain composure. Then he stumbled around in the dark for clothes.

  “I might arrange something with Seyr, if you stop being womanish,” Serge said.

  “Oc, womanish. You’re the one who’s to be married.” The words rolled out of Claude, who now felt dizzy in a vague sense of loss. Serge was supposed to be the glum carpenter, who stared blandly at gewgaws or rainbows. This dull Serge had suddenly become his most needed cornerstone. Feeling for his pile of clothes on the floor, Claude felt clammy and bursting around his diaphragm. It was as if he had been thrust into the murky misty heat of a bathhouse. He wrestled his arms into the sleeves of a woolen coat, kicked feet into shoes. A wife? How?

  “Auguste has need of an apprentice,” Serge said.

  “Or another servant for his wife and nine whelps.”

  “Claude … where are you going?”

  Claude paused to consider the stupidity in the question. But all he could think of was this wife, a Serge without him, and the home without him. “I’m off to find a good rider.”

  Claude banged the door of his room, banged the door to the house, slumped onto its cold hardness, facing that same starless night.

  Gears, rickety and rusty, turned in his heart, rattling against the tightness in his chest. Restlessness rolled in like the morning fog over the Garonne. What to do now? Look for Clovis again among the vagrant shacks on the riverbank? Certainly Claude would have to be more reasonable about fees and expectations. Shrugging off the murkiness of that prospect, he pulled his cloak tighter around himself, and then went to find those who could stop his time.

  Fire to fire, hope to hope, he stumbled onto the banks of the Garonne. Fires burned from the man-made sand banks bracketing the river gates and Tournis Island. Gleams floated like lilies, eyes unblinking to the sky and moon, ears deaf to men howling for sweet wine. Over the city walls inking into the purple void, down the length of the river, a gale coursed and swaddled his lanky body. Claude made for Le Rue de l’Empire. Over there congregated the congresses of strange flesh away from the eyes of the night’s watch and the Capitouls—Toulouse’s aldermen and moral guardians.

  Pilgrims picked at the ground with walking sticks. Journeymen bellowed to the air, they were still male and still in God’s favor. Students escaping Latin and curfew in search of lucky die and cream thigh. And Claude saw him imperial above the hoi polloi

  Gold things on the stranger’s fingers. Silver things on the shoes gleamed and beckoned to Claude. A lovely toque on the head, much better than his old hat, if only because this toque existed and the hat did not. A lovely toque on the gentleman who must be used to silk and velvet. A lovely toque, which he did not possess and would never possess.

  Putana, Claude cursed, rubbing his chapped lips like a genie’s lamp.

  A beggar littered with unwanted benedictions on every drunken, pleading step around the stranger.

  “A denari or two for some wine, Senher. God have mercy on you, Senher. St. Joseph's eye is over you, Senher. Our Heavenly Mother have watch over you, Senher,” the beggar said.

  Virtue, consequences, pride whooshed away with the winds of initiative. Claude skipped behind the beggar, bumped him into the stranger. Just as the beggar fell jerkily into the stranger, Claude stumbled affectedly into them as well. And they all tumbled down like the walls of Jericho. Claude ended atop the heap of grumbles and bones and was rather pleased to see the toque flat on the ground.

  Without a shrug of scruple, he swiped it and wore his prize. Velvet and the cool feathers caressed his fingers. A smile rose on his face in anticipation for daylight to crown him beautiful.

  The drunkard still fondled and slobbered his way on the stranger’s body. Shoving the beggar aside, the man growled, “That is mine.”

  Claude flicked his head back, eyelashes lowering, and he considered the pathetic twosome.

  The stranger at last rose to his feet. “I shall have that back now.”

  “Ah, your wife would tame you with her spindle for gifting your hat to one of your many whores?” Claude removed the hat. Its dark beauty held his eyes momentarily. “What do you want for it?” The stranger reached for it, but Claude stepped back, shook his head in disapproval, and purred. “See how constipated you look. The Dona will understand … she had better understand. A handsome lad was more deserving of it. At least, ’tis not your runnions who keep it now.”

  With that Claude spun around and leaped eastward towards L'Église de la Dalbade. He held to his hat, his bouncing heart, his forceful breaths while black blocks fell aside and tossed themselves out of the way. God would incline his magical hands on him this time. Lady Fortuna’s che
eks would be his to kiss this time.

  In the grand square of La Bourse, approaching a thicket of familiar men, he slowed down. A friend, Jules, wanted to fix a date for a rendezvous.

  “Wednesday, Wednesday,” Claude said, out of breath then leaned gratefully on Jules’s shoulders.

  “Whose cock granted you that fine hat? I know ’tis not the apothecary,” Jules said, taking a slight pride in the fact of Claude resting on his shoulders.

  Claude looked up and there was the stranger headed for him. He pointed. “His.” The men laughed with great mirth, echoing, “Berdache!” the word for a male whore. He reminded them who had the bigger girth before picking up and running again.

  Northward on Grand Rue he divided another pocket of men. One screamed at the offense. Another barked, “Claude Severin, you owe me three sous.” And then fresh youth joined the chase.

  The gritty air stung his nostrils. His tired body forced him to halt and settle into a dark nook in the Romanesque façade of a Carmelite Monastery. Footsteps ran past him. Claude collapsed against the wall. His lungs burned. On the slightest pressure, his legs trembled like resonating cymbals. Surely the darkness and the silence were his triumph over the stranger.

  A figure divided from the dark and sallied towards him. “’Tis been awhile, I have been on a hunt.” His voice was effortlessly rich.

  It shook Claude to breaking out of the nook and walking backwards away from him. “You may offer me wine for your hat? No money? No worry. Bend over, and l shall bore you. You would only know my name.”

  The stranger laughed in fits and starts then uproariously. “And what’s that?”

  The howls and barks of unseen beasts quaked the gloaming around, and Claude shivered. “What is what?”

  “Your name?”

  The feeling, just a feeling, hinted something taken aback. Claude clenched on the toque and staggered away from the stranger, little strides, unsure steps into the boundless dark. “You’re not getting your hat—“

  As death sure of its prey, the stranger swaggered for him, and Claude fled blindly into the chasmic night.

  Rue des Croix Vieux, Rue de St. Claire, Rue de la Madeleine, streets blurred black, right turned left, left turned left. The hat was his. The hat would be his. On the morrow, glad tidings would reign. Serge would tell him, he was jesting about sending him out. He would allow Serge to keep his wife as long as he could remain free, unblemished by purpose and forethought as his servant.

  Claude limped up the steps of L’Église de St. Nicholas. Huffing and puffing for air, he leaned on his knees. Iron sharpened iron in his lungs. Frozen and hooded, faces stared dark but victorious. The prize was his. His hands, too tired and too jittery, bounced the hat over his head.

  A figure approached, his hair a black veil.

  Claude’s heart pumped mutiny and lye. His hands were welded his knees, his legs felt like iron weights. His eyes beheld Lady Fortuna lapping her wanton kisses on the stranger’s face.

  “My woman won’t be doing unspeakable things to me with her spindle. Bless St. Joseph!” The stranger removed the hat from Claude’s head. He smiled with the Devil’s luck about him and sashayed away, losing himself among persons and shadows.

  Braggart.

  Serge had proclaimed once, after Claude had rubbed him to spilling, St. Joseph was the patron saint of unfulfilled men shafted with stubbornly virginal wives, of hen-pecked men, of cuckolded men … of useless men. Never mind St. Joseph was the patron saint of his carpentry guild. That man was not his saint. He was Claude’s.

  The pockmarked carpenter was right. He was getting married to a woman of virgin skin and virgin mind. Good fortune but not Claude’s good fortune. He crashed to sitting on the cold, cold ground. Time's gears clanged louder and louder still; it had moved forward again, and he would be left behind.