Forty-Three: Of October’s End, and of November

Thomas regains his body and pain on a corpse cart in Avignon. When the cart tips bodies into a pit, Isnard and a man pull Thomas free. Townsfolk call the devastation an earthquake as dogs bark and ravens gather. Thomas asks after a girl and the page; no one has seen them.

Thomas surveys the destruction: Villeneuve has slumped into the Rhône, the river’s course cuts Avignon, and the palace and walls are shattered. He searches tirelessly among wreckage for the girl, working Jibreel to haul beams and clear rubble, but finds only dead, including Cardinal Hanicotte crushed at the chapel door. He sleeps among workers, tosses his mail into the river, and keeps looking in vain.

Thomas sees the changed Pope Clement blessing the dead and publicly repenting. Clement ends talk of crusade, forbids pogroms, and commands Guy de Chauliac to organize Christian and Jewish physicians for the wounded. On his last day, Thomas finds his broken sword in a gutter, kisses it for the trace of the girl’s blood, and leaves it behind.

November comes. With the plague shifting toward England, Thomas sells his horse and chooses farm work over soldiery. He learns quickly, earns good pay amid labor shortages, and gathers three friends to travel with him toward Normandy and, eventually, home.

In Normandy, a girl awakens after months lost, finds her father long dead, and clings to her donkey, Parsnip. Seeing four ragged laborers sheltering in her barn, she asks for help to bury her father; the tall, graying one—Thomas—quietly weeps and assists. They share roasted chestnuts, and she departs with them at dawn, riding her donkey while Thomas walks nearest, protective and kind.

On the road, the girl probes Thomas’s past; he names his town Givras. When she asks him to guess her name, Thomas leans close and answers with intimacy born of recognition: “Little Moon.”