The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  ‘I cannot hold them long,’ Anne Boleyn said. ‘Their summons is strong, for they have a sacred part of me.’

  The Fugger looked up and saw that everyone else was frozen: the black knight halted in mid-stride, the stag with arms spread wide, the virgin on the altar, her terror plain now that her writhings had ceased, every monk caught in their leers, all held as if in a painting by a troubled master. Only the candles still flickered.

  She spoke again. ‘Fight them. For help is closer than you think.’

  The pentangle was between the cauldron and altar. Without stepping beyond the five-pointed boundary, she leant over and dipped her hand into the broth. Steam rose as she withdrew it and followed her as she stretched out to the altar. A drop fell from the little finger into the chalice there, where they had so carefully saved the young girl’s tears.

  ‘Remember this. Remember the power of tears.’

  The faint scratching returned. He saw a slight movement from those around him, as if they were breathing in. Anne Boleyn shivered, and the edges of her gown, the jewels at head and neck, began to blur. In a voice suddenly strained, she said, ‘Tell Jean, I do not doubt that he will come for me.’ She then seemed to melt, dissolving and descending to the chamber floor, leaving only a faint trace of light and a six-fingered hand within a star of sand.

  He looked down. His new hand had gone, but something of the courage he’d felt remained. As the nightmare of the chamber returned in screaming ecstasy and pain, as a suit of black armour marched towards a girl in pure white, the Fugger knew what he must do. For he remembered the power of tears.

  Moving to the altar, he picked up the chalice there and dashed the contents through the slits of the black helmet.

  Heinrich von Solingen felt the liquid hit him. He had been burnt once before, with boiling oil at the siege of Novara. He still had the scars. This pain was a hundred times worse. It seared him, ate his flesh, filled his still unhealed head wound with molten fire. Bellowing in agony, he crashed backwards onto the sand star where a hand seemed to reach through his armour and wrap six icy fingers around his heart.

  The scratching on the panes stopped in an instant. Echoing von Solingen’s shrieks, the monks threw themselves as far from the writhing figure as they could, cowering against the glass.

  The Fugger felt a blade at his throat, a soft voice slithering into his ear.

  ‘Who are you, that you come between me and my will?’

  He was turned around by the stiletto point of the weapon, gouging the flesh under his jawbone. Yet when he looked up into the furious eyes of the Archbishop of Siena, though he saw his death in them, he remembered the offset black eyes of a moment before and his courage held.

  ‘We have met before, Giancarlo Cibo. For I used to keep a gibbet in France.’

  And then the Archbishop of Siena remembered the moonlit crossroads, the tiny detail of a gibbet keeper who perhaps had heard his name.

  ‘Well,’ he said simply, ‘you’ve come a long way to die.’

  As he pulled back the knife to strike, a moment of wonder stayed the weapon in the air, and it was in that moment that a stone crashed through the back wall of the kaleidoscope chamber and struck Cibo on the shoulder. As he fell over the Fugger to the floor, both heard the furious voice from beyond the shattered panes.

  ‘Fuck! Missed his head!’

  A demon, besmeared with mud from crown to toe, eyes and bared teeth the only gleam of white, stood outside the kaleidoscope whirling something above its head. Then a second stone smashed the remaining pane of glass behind the altar, and the demon stepped through the wreckage.

  ‘Fugger!’ Beck shouted. ‘Where’s my father?’

  Glancing around, her question was answered. She went and knelt by the old man, hesitatingly reaching out a hand to his shoulder. Abraham’s vacant eyes, though open, stared past her.

  ‘Papa. Oh, Papa,’ she whispered. ‘What has he done to you?’

  The sudden stillness brought on by the shattering of glass was just as suddenly ended as Cibo leapt to his feet.

  ‘Guards! Guards!’ he shouted as he ran from the kaleidoscope, heading for the dungeon’s door.

  Then everyone was screaming. Beck whirled to her feet, put stone to slingshot and was already aiming at the fleeing back.

  ‘Fugger! This time I won’t miss! Down!’ she shouted, but he was too slow, and Cibo had made the portal and turned the key before she had a clear target. As the door swung open the first man to rush in took a stone in the face, falling backwards and crashing into the two men following him, bringing them all to the floor.

  ‘Grab my father!’ Beck cried. ‘We must get out of here!’

  Beck filled the leather with another stone as she ran. Cibo just managed to duck as it smashed into the lintel beside the doorway.

  ‘Get them, fools!’ He was pulling and slapping at the guards as they tried to extricate themselves from their wounded comrade.

  ‘How?’ the Fugger shouted at Beck. He was bent over the old man, forcing him to his feet. ‘There is no way out except the way in. And however you got in.’

  Beck loosed another stone. A fourth guard who had tried to pass the heap on the floor fell back. Five more crowded the corridor behind him. She had lost half her stones in the dark passageways above. She only had three left.

  ‘Not possible,’ she called over her shoulder. The chimney entrance she’d come through was at the top of the long rope she’d brought and tied there. She’d find the climb difficult, but for her father and a one-handed Fugger it would be impossible. And she wasn’t leaving this chamber without them.

  She threw. Heard another cry. Two left, she thought.

  Then the Fugger remembered, and the memory filled him with instant hope, even as it drowned him in terror.

  ‘The water! Over there, behind the kaleidoscope.’

  Beck ran, threw back the heavy wooden cover, looked into the maelstrom of foam. She whirled, fired a stone straight through the middle of the glass chamber, heard a cry.

  ‘Bring my father!’

  The Fugger scooped the man up, supporting him under his arm. He rose without objection, allowed himself to be pushed around the altar and through the shattered panes towards his daughter. Then the Fugger looked back. Under the still-writhing armoured form he saw the hand. He stepped back into the chamber and reached for it.

  It was then that Heinrich von Solingen managed to wrench off the helmet. The face that appeared was a mask, a gargoyle, burnt and pitted and still smoking, skin peeling off forehead and cheek, eyebrows gone, eyelashes dissolved, one eye sealed shut. Through the other, a fierce blue gleam fixed upon the Fugger, and a mailed fist clamped down on his handless wrist. A voice emerged from the wreckage of the face.

  ‘I will find you. Wherever you go, I will be there. In the end, you will beg me for your death.’

  The Fugger felt the metal grip begin to crush. He cried out in dreadful pain. Then it seemed that the hand beneath the armour, the hand of a dead queen, opened, and with a howl of agony von Solingen fell back on it, clutching at his heart.

  As Beck screamed ‘Now, Fugger, come!’ three guards finally burst through the doorway of the dungeon. He picked up the stiletto Cibo had dropped and made to step around the altar.

  ‘Please.’ The whisper came from right beside him. ‘Please don’t leave me here.’

  The Fugger looked at the girl lying there in her virgin white linen robe, saw her freckled face, the desperation in the weeping brown eyes. He reached out his one hand to her.

  ‘Come then,’ he said gently, helping her climb down and move around the altar as if they had all the hours in the day, stepping carefully over the coloured shards at the back of the kaleidoscope, just as the first armed man came through its entrance.

  A stone sailed over their heads, striking the guard full in the face.

  ‘That’s it! None left. Let’s go!’

  The Fugger stared into the foam. For a second there was only the roaring, the terri
ble churning of its surge.

  ‘It’s our only chance!’ Beck had manoeuvred her father over the hole. She had swiftly tied the slingshot around their waists, binding them together. ‘Go on!’

  With the barest of glances back at the armed men now running out of the glass chamber, and with only a little scream of terror, the girl leapt and in an instant was sucked away.

  ‘I’ll stay.’ The Fugger turned, dagger in hand, to face the enemy. He suddenly felt that this was a fine place to die. A dry one, anyway.

  Beck didn’t hesitate. ‘You won’t,’ she said and, giving the Fugger a hard shove, she and her father followed him into the water.

  The Fugger managed, ‘But I can’t sw—’ but the last word was lost in the torrent.

  Cibo gazed down into the water.

  ‘After them!’ he said, and when none of his men moved, he screamed, ‘Obey me, fools!’

  The guards looked at each other, looked away, looked anywhere to avoid their master’s raging eyes.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, softly now. ‘Then bring me Gianluca.’

  The wounded guard, the first who had come through the door, was dropped at Cibo’s feet.

  ‘We need a marker.’ The velvet voice was quiet, reasonable. ‘We have to know where they come up. You’re volunteered.’

  He reached down and, with a strength surprising in an older man, tipped the soldier into the water.

  A flailing arm waved from the foam as if in farewell and was gone.

  ‘Search the river banks, all the secret pools. And remember this: I want them alive!’

  With that, the Archbishop of Siena returned to the centre of his ruined kaleidoscope. He reached under von Solingen and, eyes averted, plucked the hand from the centre of the scattered sand pentangle. Dropping it into the velvet bag, he threw it onto the altar, then gazed at the gibbering monks, his growling mistress and his groaning bodyguard writhing among the shards of broken glass.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Giancarlo Cibo said to no one in particular, ‘I want them very much alive.’

  SIX

  MIRACLES

  Like most criminals she knew, Lucrezia was very religious. And like many from the street, once she was done in the church reciting the paternoster, the creed and three aves, once the candles were lit and the foot of the Virgin kissed the requisite nine and ninety times, she had begun on other measures. She was the one people usually came to in such circumstances, for she was the cunning woman of the Scorpion contrada and she knew just what these measures should be.

  ‘Fetch them,’ she had said.

  The two young men she most suspected of abducting her daughter had been seized by three of her burly brothers and brought before her. They had pleaded innocence, as they would. Nonetheless, she had made them lay their fingers upon the shears she stuck in the edge of a sieve; yet it had not turned to accuse either, but pointed resolutely to a third, unknown party. A neighbour’s son of eight, an albino in whose strange eyes the future could often be discerned by one who had the far sight, as she did, again did not accuse the two – no vision of them had appeared to cloud his orange-tinged orbs. And so, even though she knew how they had lusted after her sweet Maria-Theresa, she had let the young men go.

  The word had then been put out through all the clans of Siena, and even though this was a busy time and one of great rivalry between them, being the very eve of the Palio, a missing child was a missing child; also, many had had dealings with Lucrezia, for she could make stolen goods disappear quicker, and for more money, than anyone in Tuscany. So information and sightings had come in gradually all day. One rumour said the girl had fallen in love with a boy from the Viper contrada, they’d been married in secret and were enjoying their nuptials even now. Lucrezia had dismissed that report because she knew her Maria-Theresa. She had raised her to be as innocent and pure as she, her mother, was worldly and corrupt.

  Another report had been more disturbing. A girl had been seen by a guard at the Archbishop’s palace entering the secret side gate just before midnight. This guard had told his cousin. Many girls entered the palace, for their holy Archbishop was renowned for his appetites, but most girls did so willingly, for the rewards therein. This girl, said the guard to his cousin, had wept piteously but hopelessly before the German, Cibo’s shadow, who had dragged her inside.

  The more she had thought about the palace, the more distressed Lucrezia had become. She rarely slept the night before the Palio anyway, but now, sickened by worry, she only had to close her eyes for a vision of evil to overwhelm her.

  Lying there beside her fireplace, going over and over the steps she had taken and the few that were left to try, Lucrezia realised where she must go. There was only one place in Siena where this answer could be sought. It was holier even than the Oratory of her contrada in the Via Camollia.

  She set off through the dark, near-silent streets, thinking of her destination. It was where her beloved Vittorio had proposed to her, and where he had died in her arms. She had not visited the Fountain of the Willows since that day ten years before. She had been planning on bringing her Maria-Theresa there, now that she was coming to womanhood. There were secrets that they had to share.

  It lay just within the north wall of the city, on slopes too rocky for dwellings and thus unspoilt by humanity. The stream that gushed out of the rock was renowned for the purity of its water, its healing strength a miniature waterfall falling twenty feet down into a small pool. The pool was shaded, almost concealed, by three willows. It was deep, but no one had ever explored its depths; for it was said a siren lived down there who would drown any who violated her domain.

  Lucrezia pushed through the drooping branches. A moon, three days from full, pierced the canopy with light, falling on the ancient statue, an armless maiden in a toga with hair bound up in the Roman style, moss- and creeper-covered. Lucrezia knew this was what many saw as the spirit of the pool, but not her. The nymph she prayed to and had often seen from the corner of her eye was naked, a girl barely come to womanhood, who ran across the water’s surface as lightly as the Lord Jesus had upon the sea of Galilee. She had heard many prayers and granted not a few. She was the only one who could help Lucrezia now.

  She sat at the water’s edge and crumbled the bread she’d brought, throwing it out in an arc towards the middle of the pond. Large carp with fat, burnished bellies floated to the surface, snatching at the offering, dragging it below in flashes of gold. Then for the first time she took off the ring her beloved Vittorio, second husband but first love, had placed on her finger at this very place; she took it, kissed it, then threw it into the centre of the water. As the ripples coursed back towards her, she began to pray in a tongue long since vanished from the land but kept in the hearts of those who had the far sight, the tongue of the people who first lived by this pool and the one the nymph, young as a girl, ancient as the earth, must surely speak.

  In the pool’s moonlit surface, Lucrezia saw her face change to what it had been twenty years before, when she was as young as her Maria-Theresa. She asked, in that original tongue, for the chance to teach her only daughter the wisdom of this sacred space.

  She was puzzled when the waterfall that flowed for ever, even if just as a trickle in the worst of droughts, suddenly stopped. Yet there was no time to marvel for in five beats of her heart water exploded again from the rock and with it a body. It crashed into the water before her, showering her in spray, and she leapt back with an oath of terror. For a face was once more staring from the mirror of the rippling pond, the face of herself as she had been twenty years before, yet different. The face of Maria-Theresa.

  The miracle in the water spat at her and she heard her daughter cry, ‘Mama.’ She swiftly had her arms under the flailing body and pulled it from the pool, to flop upon her like a tickled carp.

  It was just in time. The space vacated was immediately filled by another falling shape, screaming and corkscrewing as it came. It hit the water flat, arms spread wide, straight onto its belly.

/>   ‘Holy God in Heaven!’ screamed the Fugger. ‘That hurt! Help me or I drown!’

  Mother and daughter reached down together and dragged him to the pond’s edge where he managed to claw his way onto the bank. He rested there, sobbing.

  ‘Never again,’ he gasped. ‘I will grow old and dirty and happy. No more swimming.’

  It was then that the water stopped once more, for several seconds this time, until an eight-limbed creature shot out of the wall above them like a ball from a cannon, soaking them all. Beck was pinned under the unconscious weight of her father, but hands loosened the slingshot ties binding them together, pulling them clear just as she was beginning to enjoy the feeling of no air in her body.

  Beck fell back, gasping until she became aware that her shirt, and the bindings underneath, loosened in the pell-mell water descent, had flopped open. As she struggled to readjust her clothing, she looked up and saw the eyes of the Fugger, staring in shock at the folds she had closed too late.

  It didn’t take long for the last body to come through, and though he was grappled onto the bank to lie beside the others, Cibo’s guard was undoubtedly dead, his skull stoved in by one of the collisions in the rocky passages above that the others had miraculously avoided. Yet he was no more speechless than the rest of them, for the normally loquacious Lucrezia could only stare at her daughter and sob, while Maria-Theresa did the same back. The shaking terrors went on for several minutes, during which time Abraham awoke, to a similar speechless sense of wonder.

  Finally, Maria-Theresa managed to say, ‘Mama, these people saved my life. But I think they are in great danger now.’

  Lucrezia Asti loved nothing more than a purpose in life.

  ‘Come.’

  Clutching her miracle to her side, she led them out through the willow branches. She held them aside for the others to stagger through, then glanced back once to the waterfall, bowing her head in gratitude. As the green curtain fell she heard, within the swish of foliage, the faint but unmistakable sound of a girlish laugh.