The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  Trace the body, look for wounds. Head? Battered yet intact. Guts? There was always that smell when they were pierced. Groin? Seemingly unswollen. And he’d have remembered the entrance of metal anywhere. He’d felt it before, after all. It was a distinct sensation.

  All in all, and considering the odds, he wasn’t doing too badly. So now, fall to listening. Anyone breathing out there? Anyone watching him for a trace of life, blade poised, waiting to snuff it out? No? Then open the eyes.

  No. Close them again, dismiss what they’ve seen. There has to be another explanation. Move the hands, shift the legs, measure the space. No. It can’t be.

  ‘Jesus!’ Jean Rombaud blasphemed solidly for a minute. He was imprisoned. Worse, far worse, he was in a gibbet cage. Hung up like a common thief, left to rot and die. It wasn’t possible, he was still unconscious, dreaming …

  The cage was swinging wildly now in his panic, grating, screeching. That would do him no good. The last thing he needed was to draw attention to his position. He was outside the village but he didn’t know how near it was. He did know how the villagers would treat him if they found him. At best jeer, pelt him with muck, make bets on his endurance; at worst … well, it had been a hard winter, and the salted mutton would be running out.

  ‘No,’ he said again, firmly, and managed to still the lurching cage. He had been put there silently by men who did not want witnesses. There was time to think, in these few hours before dawn. This could not be his destiny, to die from torment or starvation, or more likely from a cannibal’s knife, in a cage in the middle of France.

  He used his limited movements again to explore his confines, glad he was slightly smaller than most men, for he had little enough room, none to raise his arms above his head to where the lock held the front and back of the cage together. Yet even if he could twist himself to get a hand through the slats and up, the lock looked rusted but solid.

  He bit down on his despair. This couldn’t happen. He wasn’t a man who gave much thought to death, it would come when it must. But swifter, surely? Not like this, not when …

  Then the memory of what had led him to this place came scrabbling back and, cursing again, he reached out to squeeze the slats, find their weakness, force himself through them. These men had stolen from him, and thus from Anne Boleyn, the most precious part of herself, bound by sacred vow to the care of Jean Rombaud. His oath to his Queen would surely give him the strength to snap mere metal!

  Long after the certainty that it was futile, he squeezed and pushed and beat upon the unyielding iron, till the blood ran from his fingers. As his struggles became weaker, the executioner did something he’d not done since the day he’d laid his wife and child in the plague pit, picked up his sword and took again to the mercenary’s road. He wept. His tears fell from the cage, splashing droplets onto the gibbet midden below.

  Salt-blinded as he was, he didn’t notice the first stirrings amid that filth, of something beginning to work its way up from within, from the very depths of muck, rotting clothes and bones picked clean, didn’t see what looked like a worm break through the crust, to be followed by another worm, then a third, then five. Fingers they were, joined to a hand, an arm, a shoulder. Then a head burst out of the earth and a voice, mud ridden and muck-choked cried out, ‘DAEMON!’

  Jean set the cage swinging again, his face turned from this vision spewed from hell. He’d long since forsaken the Church he was baptised in, disgusted by what he’d seen done in the name of God on battlefields and in the palaces of the Princes of Religion. Tales to frighten children he’d called their stories, their rules and penalties. Well, he was no child and he was terrified now.

  The demon worked its shoulders clear, then, resting a moment to glance up at Jean, threw back its head and shrieked: ‘He’s got my legs! I’m trapped. The foul fiend nips my ankles. Help me! Help! Pull me up, why can’t you? Ohhh!’ It gave a piteous wail and cried ‘Dae-mon!’ once again.

  As if answering a summons a raven, a blue-black brute, flew down and circled the gibbet, cawing a series of short cries, descending in darting runs to flap round the head of the embedded demon. The two of them made hideous harmony, alternating in pitch and volume, and Jean suddenly, forcefully, realised that all the tales he’d denied, all the visions that had merely troubled a few sleeps since his priest-ridden childhood, they were all true. There was a hell, and he was descending into it.

  Then the demon ceased its wailing. The raven stopped screeching and landed on its shoulder. The two of them tipped their heads to one side and four eyes regarded Jean. Then, like a cork from a bottle, the whole hideous shape popped out of the hole in the ground and stood, feet splayed, upon the midden. The skull of the gibbet’s former occupant, which had perched precariously atop the midden, now rolled down and lodged between the creature’s ankles, seeming to make a third set of eyes to gaze upon the prisoner.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said the demon, after a moment and in quite a reasonable tone, ‘and who is our guest for tonight, Daemon?’

  A mud creature stood there, black with filth, its eyes reflecting the moon the only flicker of light. Garbed in some sort of tattered dress, a shapeless sack hanging from shoulder to ankle, one arm bare and one encased. Wild, spiralling locks hung from the encrusted head, falling in shanks down to the shoulders to meld with a rat’s nest of a beard. The bird was as clean as its perch was filthy.

  In the silence of their stares, Jean regained his defiance.

  ‘Be gone and torment me not. I am not for you yet.’

  The two heads swivelled to look at each other, then back to him. The raven gave a cry and took to the air, while the mud beast leant forward and spat.

  ‘Do you hear that, Daemon? Orpheus tells Charon when he chooses to cross the Styx!’ It threw its head back and laughed, a ghastly rattle. It then reached up to the cage and said, in its formerly reasonable tone, ‘It’s for me to decide, you know. Daemon and me’ – it bent down to pick up the skull – ‘and my friend Felix here makes three. What shall we do with him?’ Fingers moved the fleshless jaw up and down as if in answer.

  Bowing to the skull, the creature began a strange shuffling that Jean realised was a dance, of sorts. Humming a tune, it moved across the midden, back and forth, words and laughter emerging.

  ‘He wants to be left alone. But that can’t be. Such a long time since we had a visitor! Last one was you, dear Felix, and how boring were you? They did for you before you arrived, few breaths, no stories to pass your passing. I like a story with my supper, and if I can’t have one at least I can have … but this one looks healthy, this one looks good, he won’t be leaving till I tell him he should! A rhyme. A rhyme! I still have the gift, oh yes. Papa would be proud.’

  Jean listened and calculated as he did. The creature was mad, that much was sure, but there were bits of sense within the ramblings, even a way of speaking that sounded less than brutish.

  ‘You dance well,’ he called down, ‘but your partner lacks something in the leg.’ The creature had stopped its swaying to listen. ‘Why don’t you let me down? I can cut a finer caper than your Felix.’

  The creature dashed the skull to the ground then rose up next to the gibbet and hissed, in a whisper as devoid of mirth as its dance had been full of it, ‘Death is all you have coming. The time is God’s to choose. I am God’s helper. I keep his clock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick … tock.’

  The creature sank silently back down to the midden and began to collect up the bones that lay there.

  Jean knew now he was at the mercy of no demon, but one who sinks as low as any human can. To be a gibbet keeper was to survive on scraps dogs would shun, with an occasional coin thrown from a justice’s hand or prised from a victim’s family to swiftly end a loved one’s suffering. It was life, but barely, and Jean knew the best he could expect was that same swift slitting of his own throat.

  And yet, how could he accept such a death? Was this a fitting end to his career, a last cruel joke in a life that had witness
ed many? No. While he had breath, and a tongue in his head, there was hope.

  ‘What are you doing with those bones?’

  The keeper started, as if he’d forgotten his prisoner was there.

  ‘Soup,’ he muttered without turning around. ‘Do you believe me?’

  ‘No.’ Jean shifted in the cage. ‘Why would you want old bone soup when you have such fresh meat hanging by?’

  The keeper made a snuffling sound that Jean realised was laughter.

  ‘Is that what you want? A swift release provided by my little trusty here?’ He patted a small scabbard at his side. ‘But that would be a sin – isn’t that what your friend the Archbishop would say? Ooh …’ He broke off and gazed up at Jean. ‘An archbishop, eh? What illustrious senders-off you had. We don’t usually get such company here. Why should you interest His Holiness, I wonder?’

  Affecting calm, Jean said, ‘Why were they interested in me? Oh, now there’s a story.’

  The keeper stopped scrabbling and tipped his head to one side, bones and skull cradled in his arms.

  ‘A story?’

  ‘Aye. I heard you say you like a story over supper. Well, there’s a tale in me, if you choose to hear it.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we do like stories, Daemon and I. Do you speak any Raven? No matter, he speaks some French and, of course, German. Don’t you, beloved?’

  The raven swooped down upon the crossbeam, opened its beak and said, ‘Save the eyes! Save the eyes!’

  ‘You see! And I can translate the rest. We would like to hear your tale.’

  Jean forced a smile. ‘And what price do you offer for this night’s entertainment?’

  ‘Some food, some wine, and a swift good night if you so choose. But only if your tale pleases us.’

  ‘I do not drink bone soup.’

  ‘And neither do we,’ the keeper cried. ‘Do you think the Fugger has lost all his civility? I have eaten off silver trenchers in my time. And now I have cold root stew. I have wine. I may even have some old, old bread.’

  ‘A meal, then a swift passage from one hell to another? That is not a fair return for this story.’

  ‘And what would young Orpheus want? Nothing less than your lover back from Hades, I presume?’

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that.’ Jean leant his face against the slats. ‘Only the chance to carry on the story.’

  White eyes flashed at him from the darkness.

  ‘You mean, this story has no ending? The Fugger hates stories that don’t end. Hates them! All stories must have an ending, and all endings must be sad.’

  ‘Well, that will be for you to judge. You can make it end the way you want. For you are in it, and Daemon too.’

  ‘You hear that, Daemon? A story that includes us. This we must hear.’

  ‘A bargain, then. If my story pleases, you will set me free to continue it, for this story is so powerful it cannot be allowed to die here with me. If it does not … well, maybe I’ll take some of your wine and a little relief from that friend you keep at your side. Is it a bargain?’

  The Fugger leapt up from a squat, grabbed the cage and thrust an arm through the bars to support himself. He hung there, swinging, causing the metal hook to grate in its socket. His face was matted with filth, but within that grime eyes shone out in the moonlight. They fixed on Jean now, and a whisper came.

  ‘A bargain made! But know this, young Orpheus. Daemon and I, we have heard all the tragedies, yes we have, seen a hundred men and more wedged in where you are now. Every one with a story of love lost, murder unavenged, maidenheads plundered, and not one has ever gone free. Not a single one. Daemon thinks I would listen to his tale from our Lord’s own mouth and, like Pilate, wash my hands.’ The eyes lowered and he continued softly, ‘Maybe he’s right. So far am I sunk in sin, so great my degradation.’

  He dropped down then and crouched, muttering, on the midden, reaching into its filth and scrabbling around until there emerged from within it an encrusted flagon and a sack. He uncorked the bottle with his teeth, drank, spat out something, drank again.

  ‘So sing us your song, young Orpheus, pluck at our hearts. But beware! We like a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. A proper story. And then, who knows? Do you understand the challenge?’

  ‘I do,’ Jean replied. ‘And if I finish my tale and the key is not in the lock a moment later, may God have mercy on both our souls.’

  ‘Amen,’ sighed the Fugger, stretching out on the midden, settling himself into the soft earth to hear the tale.

  But how to tell it? Jean thought, hopelessness growing within him with the creeping dawn light. A story told to a madman and his bird through the bars of an iron coffin, an impossible tale of the killing of a queen and a last request to her killer to do an impossible thing. A sane audience would think him mad; a mad audience … well, perhaps it was the only one that could think him sane.

  He wondered where to begin. At his lodgings in St Omer, stubbornly sober despite the endless wine, receiving the summons? With an explanation of why he was chosen, his skill with the executioner’s sword?

  He was not good with words, his trade rarely required them. But then, suddenly, it came to him. Once upon a happy time he’d lulled his precious daughter, Ariel, to sleep with little stories. She’d always liked them best when they were simple and true in the telling. So, taking a deep breath, he began.

  THREE

  THE EXECUTION

  Mist encased the small boat and, along with water like spoiled milk, seemed to force against the bow, preventing swift progress to their landing. The boatman was as reluctant as his vessel, muttering warding words against the witching hour and this midnight mission. Jean thought limbo must feel this way: body and will suspended, approaching a place one could never quite reach.

  When they did, even he, who rarely made the gesture, aped the boatman and crossed himself. He had spent much of his life in such places, his trade demanded it: prisons and the cells within them where light never reached, where there was only the stench of the doomed, the cries of the despairing. But this fortress! All the evil and unhealth of a realm seemed to be lodged within it. It squatted over the water like some giant, venomous toad, and as they passed under the walls Jean felt he was being sucked into its maw.

  ‘The Bloody Tower!’ the boatman muttered, crossing himself again. Languages were useful to a mercenary and Jean had picked up enough English on campaign to understand both meanings.

  The boat, entering under a portcullis raised slowly ahead of them, scraped against a wooden dock where the boatman paused just long enough for Jean and his meagre baggage to be placed ashore before pushing off, eagerly seeking the open water, never looking back. Unseen hands had raised the iron grille and now let it drop. Jean knew he was expected, but he was still left there long enough for a deeper chill to settle within him, while the water lapped against the dock, seeming to speak in various tongues, echoing in the low roof overhead.

  Eventually, there were heavy boots on stone, metal jangled, and flickering light barely pierced the gloom.

  ‘Rombaud?’

  ‘Monsieur.’

  ‘Follow me.’

  The phantom officer led Jean through a maze of passages and finally up a long spiral staircase. The room at the top dazzled with its sudden light, its warmth. He’d been expecting no more luxury than a palliasse in the corner of a cell or a nest under the scaffold. Here there was a truckle bed, a good fire snapping in the grate and a sheepskin on the stone floor, even some wine, bread and cheese on a table.

  ‘I am grateful, Monsieur,’ he said to the officer he now saw to be a tall, sandy-haired Englishman whose voice had seemed to come from someone far older.

  ‘Tucknell is my name and all this is not my doing,’ the man replied in that French the English always seemed to use, entirely without song. ‘You may thank the Queen—’ He broke off and flushed in a way that revealed his youth still more. ‘I mean, Anne, your … she’s no longer Queen, of course, as you know, or you wo
uldn’t be …’ He paused, then looked down and added, ‘Wouldn’t be here, I suppose.’

  Caught out by this unexpected emotion – he really was no more than a boy – the officer made to leave. Jean stopped him with a raised hand.

  ‘Monsieur, would you be so kind – when am I to meet my client?’

  Startled by the word, Tucknell looked at the executioner as if for the first time.

  ‘In the morning, after her prayers. It is … you will do your work the morning after.’

  A nod, and he was gone.

  Jean ate and drank. The wine was excellent – it had been heated and flavoured with honey and some unknown herb. The sheepskin rug was more comfortable than the bed and it could be pulled closer to the fire. Wrapped in his cloak, surprised by this good fortune, he swiftly fell into a deep sleep. It was largely dreamless until near dawn, when someone seemed to be dragging him down a dank corridor. There was something unsettling in the grip and when he awoke the hand he’d been pulled by ached.

  Tucknell brought him some food and small beer soon after, then returned to lead him back down those twisting stairs and out into the light.

  It was the laughter he heard first. Then he saw her, in a patch of bright sunlight, emerging from a chapel, leaning on the arm of a priest, four ladies in attendance. It was no distance across the small lawn and Jean’s reaction, as always in this situation, was practical. He studied her neck, clearly visible in the low-cut dress she wore.

  Long, slender, no trouble there, of a strength that would almost have suited a man better. Her hair was thick, a horse’s mane of it barely tamed by the French hood that held it. It was of a lustrous black, though with silver threaded through like filigree. Its length would be a problem for his sword and he reminded himself to suggest a coif.