Giuseppe was backing the stallion out of the stall, bridling him. Lucrezia left and returned with masks and costumes. Handing them over, she said, ‘Welcome to the best team in Siena – the Scorpions!’
Humming a hymn of battle, the party flung open the doors of the stable and marched out to the street where the rest of the contrada’s members, numbering some hundred and fifty, were already gathered under the crimson banner with its black and menacing emblem, its wicked sting curving above them.
The Fugger barely had time to mutter, ‘I thought I was the mad one,’ before a young woman’s hand was once more thrust into his and he was dragged into the middle of the parade. A clash of drums and cymbals, a chorus from a dozen trumpets, a shout of ‘Scorpio!’ and the procession lurched off.
Reports came in to Heinrich and Franchetto from spies cast like a fisherman’s net over the city. There were many sightings, but always something wrong in the detail. The Jew was monstrous, as Jews often were, with gold teeth and a hump. The young man was a Biblical warrior with a curved sword, the madman missed a leg as well as a hand, while the virgin had turned whore and plied her trade in a house near the Palazzo Marescotti. The fugitives were said to lurk under the banner of the Wolf, the Snail or the Scorpion, bound to their contrada by an oath of death.
On any other day, time would yield them up. It was not that big a city, and the reward was enormous. But time, Heinrich knew, was what the pursuers didn’t have. Many of those attending the Palio came from beyond the city walls. They would be drunk and happy for the first few hours after the race, then drunk and quarrelsome, finally drunk and morose and wanting to go home. To try to funnel them through the one gate while Heinrich observed each face would be to provoke a riot that not even Franchetto and his men, in the full flow of their brutality, could control.
With a hunter’s sense, Heinrich put himself in the position of the hunted. They would know of the beaters, the armed gangs who swept through every neighbourhood offering inducements to betrayal, both violent and financial. Only the sick or the guilty remained behind on this one day, and quarry would be too easily flushed out. Within the thousands on the street, then, lay the security of the herd. The wolf pack could snap at the edges, but most would remain safe within the centre of the drove. It was like the retreat from a battlefield. Keep together, present a solid block, you had a better shot at survival. Flee on your own, and you would be chased down and butchered.
They are here, or will be soon, he thought as another passer-by paused to acclaim the horrific wonder of his ‘mask’, then realised his error and moved swiftly on. Heinrich had looked in a mirror just once and knew what it was people saw. His face was one vivid wound, a scarlet gash from brow to chin, raw and weeping. He could still see, now that the fused lashes had been prised apart, but the missing eyebrows gave him the look of a skull.
All the more reason to find them, he thought. They will also pay for this.
He was standing with his back to the Palazzo Pubblico, the opposite end to the tower, looking across the Campo as the crowds swept in, each contrada preceded by its banner and its huge war cart constructed to resemble the individual symbols. A giant Swan nuzzled at a Scorpion, a Caterpillar duelled with a Unicorn, each entrance to the square greeted by mighty cheers and equally raucous boos, swelling as each cart was taken from the overcrowded square. Already at least twenty banners waved above their yelling partisans, which left at least ten more contrade to go, though where such numbers would fit he could not see. Huge numbers crammed the central space, held in a ring of fences and armoured troops; others packed every terrace, balcony and colonnade opposite them. Between, an outer ring was kept clear for the main reason everyone was there: the race.
With a burst of crowing, the Rooster contrada entered the Campo, at its head the tall, strutting figure of the Duke Franchetto, resplendent in his brown, crimson and emerald feathers. Heinrich decided to note where he settled. Then he would join him so they could co-ordinate the search of the square from within.
A sudden explosion of greater noise within the hubbub, screams of panic and abuse. Just to Heinrich’s left, a baker’s cart burst out of a side alley, sending vast wheels of bread rolling in all directions, pastries flying through the air, tarts sliding underfoot. Once collapsed, though, the cart did not stay still, for something was moving under its fallen awning and the whole structure was advancing steadily across the ground in a crush of flour, sweetmeat fillings and splintered wood, scattering people on every side. The baker ran along beside it, a switch in his hand, raining blows down on the moving bulge, a curse for every strike.
‘Bastard! Assassin!’
The stick rose and fell but did nothing to halt the cart’s progress. The awning got caught on another cart, skewing it, slipping gradually off, and from under it a huge, snarling animal appeared, more wolf than dog, its grey-white pelt bespeckled with flour. It paused to catch the switch in its vast jaws, wrench it from the baker’s hands and snap it to kindling. Triumphant, it let out a long howl. Then it resumed its relentless march forward, pushing through the outer rim of spectators and across the race track, seeking to enter into the heart of the central crowd itself, dragging the cart with it.
Heinrich had heard that howl before. Where had it been? A sudden throbbing at his temple made him reach up and touch the swollen skin there. Then the memory came. The ambush in the hills outside Toulon had been preceded by the same howl.
‘The dog! Grab the dog!’ he yelled at the half dozen men-at-arms beside him. Two got themselves bitten in their enthusiasm to obey the order while a third, more sensibly, gathered up the awning and threw it again onto the animal. It took the unbitten four to hold it down, but eventually there were no more stirrings from beneath.
‘A young man, no more than a boy really.’ The vendor was shivering under Heinrich’s questions. ‘He left that cur with me, said he’d be back later, gave me two scudi for my trouble. Two scudi! Look at what it’s cost me. Three nights’ baking, a month of living at the least. Holy Mary!’
‘You! Get a stick and collar on it. Now!’ Heinrich ordered.
It was a struggle, and one man was badly mauled, but finally the hound had a rope round its neck and a long stick wedged in, attached through a loop and twisted tight, allowing the men to keep the dog thrust before them. They forced it to the ground, waiting for orders.
Heinrich looked across the crowd and saw that the main entrance to the Campo was closed off, that all the contrade were in position inside, the horses already being led to the starting point up to the right of the Palazzo Pubblico.
‘Now.’ He bent down until his eyes were level with the strange, rectangular, maddened ones of the dog. ‘Let’s just see who it was you were trying to find.’
Gathering his six armoured men behind him, he signalled the two who held the stick tight to loosen their grip. The dog immediately rose and plunged, snarling, into the central crowd, causing the impenetrable barrier of humankind to give way, opening a channel that the soldiers quickly widened to a breach. Heinrich, taller by a head than most of the Italians round him, immediately saw the direction in which they were moving and it puzzled him. They were making for the huge black, red and gold Rooster, the richest flag in the square. Towards Franchetto Cibo. But when his banner started waving back and forth, Heinrich saw another revealed behind it. On it a black creature of scales, claws and hideous fangs dripping poison.
The dog was making straight for the sign of the Scorpion.
Years of lonely vigil at a gibbet had left the Fugger unprepared for the Palio crowd. The heat, the panic of being trapped by walls of bodies, the close confines of the heavy leather Scorpion mask meant that he was soaked in sweat long before he entered the square. And the sight of so many armed men engaged in an obvious search did nothing to calm him. What was worse was the knowledge that many in masks were also thus engaged, that a hundred spies or more moved among the crowd. Every mask that loomed towards them could conceal an enemy. Only Maria-Ther
esa soothed him a little, never relinquishing his hand.
Beck was faring better, mainly because her concern was so focused on her father. Abraham was frail and here, pushed and buffeted by the crowd, he was beginning to sway alarmingly. His forehead was heated and slick, his tongue swollen, he complained of cramps. He said he lacked the medicine he depended on from the kaleidoscope.
There was nothing for them to do but wait as Lucrezia had decreed. Once the race was over, mayhem would be loosed upon the streets, and under the cover of that revelry the fugitives would be able to disappear underground. That was her firm belief and nothing, not even the appearance by their side of the Cibos’ Rooster contrada, would change it.
‘Soon, soon!’ she shouted into the Fugger’s ear above the noise. ‘It is a huge build-up, then the event is over in a moment. A little like my first husband!’
A bigger roar, and all faces turned to the balcony of the palace as the Archbishop emerged, preceded by his guard of twenty wielding their halberds. The horses, in the colours and symbols of their respective contrade, the jockeys in bright coats and caps, bare-backed and struggling to contain their spirited mounts, were gathered below to be blessed. The Scorpions, like all the others, surged forward, pushing the crowds up against the barriers and soldiers that marked off the race track. The Fugger, Beck, Abraham and everyone else found themselves picked up and swept along, their feet dangling under them. And the Fugger, perhaps half a head taller than those around him, saw through the slit-eyes of his mask another mask more grotesque than any in the crowd around him, all the more horrific for being made, not of leather and cloth, but of flesh and hair. Heinrich von Solingen was moving towards them, against the tide of the crowd, with a force of armed soldiers behind him. He was not thirty paces away.
‘Beck! Beck!’ The Fugger struggled to make himself heard above the tumult, but in vain. Lowering his head, he whispered fiercely to the girl beside him, ‘He comes! The enemy! Somehow he knows us!’
For Maria-Theresa, there was no hesitation, no politeness. Sharp elbows in ribs opened a channel to her mother, who listened and spoke quickly to those about them. A little passage was forced through the human wall and Beck, the Fugger and Abraham were pushed into it, heading away at an angle from their pursuers, up towards the tower. They were halfway from the crowd’s periphery when they heard a sound within the greater noise that caused their step to stutter. A long, hunter’s howl.
Beck’s and the Fugger’s eyes met.
‘Fenrir!’ they both said, and as they did the Fugger saw von Solingen turn towards them again, leading his phalanx of men unerringly to where they were.
Urging Lucrezia and Giuseppe to redouble their efforts to get them through the crowd, Beck and the Fugger thrust as hard as any. But they did not have the force of a wolf before and armoured men behind, and the gap between them narrowed.
It was hard to detect little shifts in such a crowd, but Heinrich had fought so many battles where noting the slightest change, the merest gap opening, was the key to winning. And here, even in the sea of shapes and colours, he saw a group move from the protection of the Scorpion banner and cut away at a different angle from the rest of the surge, away from the focus of the race. It was odd, and oddity was what he was looking for in this uniformity.
But his were not the only experienced eyes looking for shifts in the crowd. Franchetto Cibo too had seen his brother’s bodyguard moving towards them. He too had seen the movement within his Scorpion rivals’ ranks.
‘Follow me,’ he called to his lieutenant, and with ten men at his back and his short whip rising and falling brutally, he began to march steadily to intercept.
Before the Palazzo Pubblico, the blessing was concluded and the horses led off to the starting point under the tower. The Archbishop leant out over the balustrade. Stretched across the front of the balcony was the ancient, tattered relic, the prize for all this, the cloak that was the Palio itself. A remnant of it rested on top, and all in the square were focused on that, for when it fluttered from Giancarlo Cibo’s hand, the race was on. Reaching the top of the little flight of three steps, he carefully picked up the fraying square cloth. As Archbishop, he was impartial to the rival factions. As a loyal son of the Roosters, he had worked out a little signal, a slight hesitation before he let the cloth fly. It would not be much, but in the crazed five-minute sprint through the streets that was the Palio, a second’s forewarning could make all the difference.
I’ve got them. Heinrich had seen the three figures, different somehow from the rest. The way the small one tried to hurry another limping one along, the way one kept looking back, his strange shuffling gait interrupted by his constant turning.
Got you. Ten paces away now, the hound before him, breath heaving between bared fangs, almost pulling his men off their feet in its eagerness. His mind was already turning to the ingenious tortures available to him within the Archbishop’s dungeon. He didn’t like a lot of what these Italians did, but they were masters of cruelty, he had to admit that.
One of those Italian masters, Franchetto, moving in from a different angle, could see the German a little closer to the prize than he was himself. National pride required him to redouble his efforts, and he laid the whip about him even more enthusiastically. Pride, and the thought of his coffers filling with his brother’s gold. He would be first. He had to be first.
A little square of cobalt-blue cloth was raised above the crowd. A slight hesitation and a horse surged forward, hitting its stride just before the cloth fluttered free, just before the rope dropped across the track. Fifty paces along the first stretch, the fleeing Scorpions pressed themselves against the race track’s wooden barriers.
‘Got you!’ yelled Heinrich and Franchetto simultaneously, hands descending just as the cloth fell and the Rooster jockey, cruelly spurring his horse’s flanks, stole his lead. Just as Beck yelled ‘Under!’ and half-dragged, half-pushed her father beneath the wooden rail. Just as Fenrir, delighted at the sight of his friends, burst free of the men who held his leash. Just as the Fugger wriggled out of the cape that Heinrich had grabbed and followed his companions. Just as Maria-Theresa, Lucrezia, Giuseppe and three others from the Scorpion contrada also burst through onto the race track.
The screams of those who watched them dash almost under the hooves were lost in the noise of the race. The Fugger saw the massive animals bearing down on him but panic spurred him on, and he even managed to push Abraham none too gently in the back. The horses were all blinkered, but two scented the dog at their feet and reared back, ending the hopes of the followers of Snail and Broadsword. Somehow the group made it across, just as the bulk of the horses crashed by them. One of Franchetto’s guards was foolish enough to follow and had his brains dashed out by flying hoofs. The rest had to wait, furious, for the horses to pass.
Sprawled breathless against the opposite barrier with the race still crashing by, it was Beck, pulling her father after her, who urged them on. ‘Through! Through!’ She was up and pushing at the spectators before her who, stunned, opened up a slight gap through which they fled.
The crowd was thinner here, for most were trying to push towards the finish line on the other end of the Campo, where the horses would re-enter. The Scorpions found a channel and surged through it, but not before the Fugger, glancing back, saw the last of the horses pass, revealing the tortured face of von Solingen and a huge man garbed as a rooster. Both now urged their men across the track.
Maria-Theresa struggled to Beck’s side, the Fugger’s hand once more held in hers.
‘The entrance. It’s up that alley beside the palace. Come!’
They had gained maybe fifty paces on their enemy who even now, united in a band of some twenty men, were ducking under the barrier. The scattering crowd would not hold them up for long. Three of the contrada had picked Abraham up and were running with him, the old man almost unconscious, urged on by Beck, Fenrir at her side. Maria-Theresa alternated between pulling and being pulled by the Fugger. Lucre
zia and Giuseppe ranged ahead trying to clear a path with shouts and blows.
‘This way!’ yelled the Scorpion leader, her voice carrying above the crowd. ‘It’s a few paces down the Via di Salicotto!’
They entered the alley at the palazzo’s side, only for Maria-Theresa to let out a wail of anger. ‘The storm drain! The entrance to the cisterns, it’s under that!’ A huge cart in the shape of a giant goose was straddling the lane, blocking all progress beyond or down.
‘Shift it!’ barked Lucrezia, and the Scorpions put their shoulders to the cart and heaved. It gave slowly. Too slowly.
Fenrir bared his teeth and let out a long, low growl.
‘Well, well, well,’ said Heinrich von Solingen, breathing heavily. ‘It looks like this hunt is over. I win the prize.’
At the centre of his men, Franchetto Cibo pulled the Rooster mask from his face and said, ‘But I win the money. Know that, German.’
Heinrich nodded, and whispered through burnt lips twisted into a parody of a smile, ‘Just as long as their bodies are mine.’
He took a pace forward. A sound, naggingly familiar, made him stop, twitch and instinctively duck.
‘Remember me?’ Beck stood under the whirling rope of her slingshot. ‘This time I really won’t miss.’
Two of Franchetto’s men raised crossbows.
‘If he fires at me,’ commanded Heinrich, ‘kill the old man.’
The guards began to move down the alley. Long stiletto daggers appeared in the hands of the Scorpions. Even Maria-Theresa had a blade. Like the others, she knew it was hopeless, but she was not going to subject herself to this man’s attentions again. She would die there. It was better than the alternative.
‘You know,’ said a voice familiar to some of the people in the alley, ‘I didn’t think it was possible for you to get any uglier, German. But it seems I was mistaken.’
The French Executioner Page 25