Between Two Fires

Between Two Fires is a powerful horror story set in medieval times. Its strength derives from its unhinged willingness to physically and morally test its main characters while playing with the religious beliefs of the time, displaying the horror of their tensions and contradictions.

The book opens with a tale about fallen angels, telling us how the great plague of the 14th century was a test intended not for men, but for God: a test to see if He would really allow his children to die horribly and haplessly. He does indeed, so the demons can only conclude that the world is unprotected and they can unleash all kinds of horrors onto the people.

The first chapter has a little girl, an orphan (her father’s corpse is swelling and rotting in her house) coming to a nearby group of soldiers to ask for their help in burying him, since angels have just told her that was a good idea. They’re brigands, however, so it doesn’t go as well as she expected, leading the girl to question why God has not protected her from misfortune, especially if His agents led her directly to it. His inaction before unjust violence will bother the characters throughout the novel, who will struggle to make sense of it. Hell, even Lucifer is puzzled by God’s indifference here: it’s one thing to argue that the injustice perpetrated by men is for men to deal with, as it relates to free will and accountability, but it’s more difficult to justify God’s absence before the injustice caused by natural disasters, disease or, even worse, by the Devil himself.

Right after one of the brigands catches the girl, he tries to justify his horrible actions, blaming God for them, “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. Does he want 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?” Luckily, for the girl, one of the brigands is not too fond of rape and dispatches his colleagues.  This soldier is called Thomas and he will travel with the girl around a ravaged France, guided by her mysterious directions.

They’re mysterious because, as Thomas quickly finds out, the girl is weird. There’s the fact that she talks to angels and can see Thomas’ soul. But the weird thing about her is that her innocence stands out in that environment: she’s surrounded by violence and death, by rot and decay, and she still asks Thomas to spare her assailant and even to stop swearing all the time. Thomas is a crude brute, he makes sense in that world, being a product of it. The girl, on the other hand, is off because she stands against it.

The narrator mocks her innocence, however. When he’s burying her father – maybe the angels were indeed right, she just didn’t account for the violence that her wish would incur –, the narrator employs the tender term she uses to refer to her father (“papa”) to contrast the sweetness of it with the state of the corpse. The juxtaposition is almost cruel, but this reinforces how the whole situation was hurting the girl: “He tilted the table and Papa fell in the hole, breaking open like rotten fruit.”

When the narrative doubles down on the gore, it’s all about the emotional impact the violence has on the characters, and how it tempts them to partake in it as well, to respond in kind. This makes the girl’s refusal to do so even more heroic. By all rights, she should have become just like Thomas, a vengeful knight who never hesitates to kill horrible men. But the girl, the most Christian of all characters here, never hesitates to extend the other cheek and forgive her enemies.

This is a medieval world where medieval beliefs correspond to the actual truth. Evil is demonic in nature, infecting the heart of every man. Cruelty and brutality don’t seem to come naturally to people, there must be always some hellish forces at play. When a priest riles up a crowd against Thomas and the girl, for example, she spots a demon on his shoulders. When someone in a mob urges for violence, the narrator remarks how nobody “was sure who said it, because only the girl could see the foul thing that spoke those words.”

It’s a belief that removes agency and responsibility from people, since their darkest thoughts and vilest actions are now due not to the wickedness of their hearts and troubled personalities but to the influence of demons – but this makes the “Christian forgiveness” much more painless as well, since we’re forgiving a man for the fault of the devil. When the girl stares at that priest with a demon on his shoulders, for instance, the creature leaves terrified and the narrator remarks how it was like “the cutting of a marionette.” The malice in the priest’s words was not his choice, but the result of a demon pulling his strings.

This is narratively significant because if evil is demonic in nature, goodness, in turn, must be divine. The girl’s purity becomes holy. It comes as no surprise, then, when she starts to lead Thomas to miracles, for this is also a world where a person on their deathbed can be completely healed by getting near the image of a virgin, and where relics sold at the market really belonged to Jesus and have special properties. It’s all true: the good… and the bad.

It doesn’t take long for Thomas to come across a catholic priest in need of assistance, called Matthieu, who wants a knight to take care of a monster that is killing the few people that are left in his God-forsaken town. The monster’s design is shocking in how it mixes animal and human traits: it’s a giant snake with whiskers and a human hand at the end of its tail, it’s a beast that can imitate a man’s screams to mock its victim before devouring them.

The ensuing fight between Thomas and the creature is vicious and brutal, but the moment that follows is even more fascinating: it’s a small chapter told from the point of view of a dying woman – stricken with the plague – who in her final moments of madness, spots Thomas lying bloody and unconscious in the riverbed, and, believing him to be dead, performs an unusual rite of marriage:

“‘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.”

The image of this fallen knight, who fought bravely to defeat a monster and barely survived, being embraced by a sick woman, whose desperate need of affection endangers precisely this complete stranger that she intends to love in her last moments, is as dark as it is ironic. Between Two Fires excels at working with these two elements.

There’s a great chapter at the beginning of the book that sets the tone and themes of the story while cementing its episodic structure. Thomas, the girl, and Matthieu (who decides to accompany them, after sensing the girl is special) come across a town seemingly untouched by the plague, where the lord believes that a constant state of festivity keeps the sickness away. It starts in a quirky manner, with them discovering that the lord has commanded everyone to party forever and has invited Thomas to join a tourney that will take place at night.

Thomas and the priest start to drink and eat, enjoying the surprising feast, but the girl refuses to stay and decides to wait for them at the edge of the town – after this chapter, the girl’s rejection of anything becomes an ill omen. The escalation of violence is gradual. First, it is disguised as a joke, when the lord bullies a musician that has become physically incapable of continuing to play nonstop. Then comes the verbal aggression, when some knights start to mock Thomas, doubting his post and status, tapping into his pride and anger. We also discover that the priest is a drunk, who is willing to accept humiliation for just one more cup of wine, a weakness that the lord promptly takes advantage of (the demons will always play with these characters’ vices to both tempt and torment them, sometimes to shocking effect.)

When night falls, it’s already too late: the notion of space and time have become a blur to Matthieu, and Thomas, and soon stranger events start to happen, their hosts gain monstrous traits and the characters find themselves again in the middle of a horror story, surrounded by unspeakable evils.

The novel has an episodic structure, meaning the party will move from one terrifying event to the next as they venture through France. And their journey is a gruesome one: all sights are ghastly, all the fates people meet are violent, all safe havens are a trap. Holy places are littered with decaying bodies and hungry flies.

There’s a brief scene, early on, that represents this feeling of hopelessness well. The group is emotionally broken because of recent events, and just want a place to rest, somewhere where they won’t witness death in its cruelest form. And they spot a barn. They go in, hoping that it is deserted, hoping that the family that owned it is long dead, posing no threat to them – Matthieu chastises himself for wishing this, but wishes nonetheless. They enter the barn and the narrator describes:

“The priest walked in first and found a naked man on all fours, stuffing hay into his mouth. An abundance of hay and grasses were knotted into his white beard and hair. His ribs were showing, and he was grimed over and wet, whether with rain or the sweat of some fever was unclear. His eyes were wild, though. And he was not frail. He picked up a rusty scythe with a broken shaft from a pile of farming tools and started towards the priest.

Good God, he means to eat me.”

They hoped for solace, just a brief moment of peace, and found madness, famine, and death instead. There’s no respite for the characters in Between Two Fires, and even children are not safe from harm – on the contrary, they seem the most common targets, for the demons seek to break people’s spirits before breaking their bodies. There’s a chapter that takes place in Paris where the horror comes from the juxtaposition of this gruesome violence with some strikingly blasphemous imagery, making for a truly memorable scene.

Evil here is at its cruelest form when it dresses itself as good. When it comes in the form of holy images and prophets. When it disguises its violence as justice, inflaming the people to war with a rhetoric that paints them as heroes. One demon comes in the form of a monk who approaches Matthieu to try to convince him that the girl is evil and he must strike her down. “Killing in God’s name is a holy thing,” the monk says, repeating the rhetoric of the time, which justified the crusades.

There’s an early scene that says a lot about who Matthieu is. They need a cart to help carry an injured Thomas, and so the girl directs the priest to an orchard, where he indeed finds one lying beside the body of a man.  “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,” the narrator says. The priest concludes that it was God who spoke to the girl, to give them what they needed, but this leads him to question the morality of his interpretation, since it would mean that they are more important and valuable than that poor man, who had to die for the cart to become available: the claim that someone’s good fortunes are due to God’s will implies that everyone else’s misfortunes are due to its absence. Between Two Fires is always returning to the question of God’s indifference, struggling to understand it. “If God’s mind is unknowable, how does his will differ from luck?” a woman asks a priest. “Shall I pray,” she concludes, “for luck?”

But Matthieu is not a typical priest, who is faithful and obedient, but a questioning one, full of doubts and compromises, which is only natural since his religion condemns part of his nature. There’s this great bit where Matthieu starts to tell Thomas his story and we move to a flashback chapter showing his past, but when we return to the characters in the present in the next chapter, we find out that Matthieu has actually just lied to Thomas, changing a key factor of the story we just read out of fear of being judged and rejected by the knight – a fear that Thomas confirms to be justified right after.

Thomas and Matthieu are not your typical virtuous heroes who would never turn cruel, especially Thomas, who was already a brigand when he came across the girl. Even though he has grown to be a new father figure to her, and really cares for her, he seems to be one wrong step from becoming everything she fights against. This is why when it comes to Thomas and Matthieu, the demons are more interested in turning them, in making them sin – and sin against her, if possible – than in simply killing them, because it will hurt the girl more. And there’s a real danger that the demons are going to succeed: we buy the tension in these scenes because the narrative so far has really been merciless, it can really go there.

The girl is also an endearing kid, smart and with a big heart. It’s fascinating how she’s the character most connected to God and also the one who openly voices against typical Church dogma. When they are talking about original sin, for instance, she argues: “She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature.  Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.” Matthieu doesn’t find any rebuke to that.

Between Two Fires is an excellent horror novel that successfully builds a hopeless atmosphere, develops a fascinating group of flawed characters, and discusses the place of God in a world where injustice prevails.

June 28, 2024.