This had been her fear, that she would come as fast as she could and it would still be too late. Watching her beloved’s body carted like dead game through the street, Beck’s mind went back to each delay on the road, searching for that moment when she could have moved quicker, ridden harder, been here just a day, an hour, one bell’s ring sooner to prevent this atrocity.
Too late! Because it had taken too long to join their relations in Venice. Her father’s weakness had made travelling slow work, and when they arrived they discovered the Jewish ghetto had been sealed off on some Christian suspicion. No one went in for a week. Once inside, she had finally found Abraham’s cousins and their husbands, who were more than willing to welcome the relation they’d never met, for he was reputed to be the best jeweller of the scattered family and the trade was thriving with the exquisite gold from the New World. They were less willing to let Beck go.
At first things had been friendly. They’d persuaded her to stay the one extra night to attend a feast of welcome. But she had been too long out in the world, in the freedom her male attire had given her, to enjoy being segregated with the other women, wearing a borrowed gown. Unwisely, she had opened her mouth to complain of the restrictions, to tell of how she would need to be away the next day to pursue her ‘mission’. To the women of a people whose mission was simply survival in a Christian and malevolent world, this was incomprehensible. To the men, it was a threat to the order that allowed them to survive in that world.
Too late. For the next day the door had been bolted and only opened to bring her to where the men met. Abraham was there, better by the day, once again becoming the strong father she had loved, but also the strong father who now demanded obedience. He had told the others of their adventures, of the escape from Siena and of the mystery of his child’s ‘mission’. He had observed his daughter and at least some of her relations with the Gentile.
‘The days in the wilderness are over now, Rebecca,’ he had said. ‘We are back where we belong. And, at last, I will have the joy of seeing you married to a good man, in the faith of our people.’
It had been said gently, but there was no mistaking the command within the wish. It was to be. Seeing the resolution of those around her, Beck had managed to bite back on the words that would tell of the good man she had already met, the man she had to join. Common sense now told her to seek silence and plot escape.
Too late. For it took a week, a week of dutiful womanhood, of ceremony, family life, forgotten skills with a needle retaught to hands that craved not thread but a slingshot’s cords. Within days, the women had told her that a husband had already been found, that her father was making the arrangements. She’d smile and bow her head while pressing the needle into her finger, using the pain to hold back a scream.
They hadn’t trusted her. All remembered how ‘she’ had once been ‘he’, for it was when Abraham had first smuggled her out of Siena that she’d adopted the guise of Beck and had maintained it for a year in Venice. They remembered how ‘he’ had joined ‘his’ cousin Daniel’s street gang, the Sicarii, Jews who fought back against the Christian oppressor with slingshot and knife. Her relations would not be fooled again.
But at the Shabat feast, she had put on a display of such contentedness that even the most suspicious were convinced. She was the best dancer there and led everyone time and again onto the floor. And when the men had drunk enough sweet wine, when the last aching limb was lowered onto mattresses, she had slipped from under the arm of a snoring cousin, reclaimed the boy’s clothes waiting for use as cleaning rags, quietly picked the lock of the back door. The Sicarii had used the canals as their roadways; a stolen skiff and a dozing Venetian guard had seen her clear of the ghetto walls. A jeweller’s house had yielded up a gold chain that was turned into coin for the road, more clothes, the first horse, and the materials to make a slingshot. Armed, anxious, barely sleeping, buying a new horse when one tired, she had at last made fast progress to Munster, the on-the-road rumours of that town’s siege driving her even faster.
But it was too late. For now she stood there, all her hopes black ash in her mouth, watching her love hung like a deer’s carcass, the prize of some hunt. While the man who was his friend stood uselessly by.
She shrugged off Haakon’s arm and said, ‘Why are you leading me away? Didn’t you just see him leave?’
‘I am trying to think like Jean. I need time for that.’
‘Time?’ The fury in the raven eyes made him wince. It was aimed at him like a stone from a slingshot. ‘The time it takes to watch him die on a pole? Are you his friend? Or are the wages not high enough, the risks too great … mercenary?’
Though this last word was spat at him with equal amounts of venom and phlegm, Haakon’s temper held. ‘Easy, boy. I love him as well as you.’
‘Do you? And the others?’
‘The Fugger went with him into the city and has not reappeared. Januc … Januc has taken to the mercenary road again. Come, the city gates will have been closed to keep in traitors. I know of another way out.’
On the way back to the warehouse, he told Beck all that had transpired as he knew it. On hearing that Jean had surrendered himself to the danger of the siege for her sake, delaying his sacred quest, she drew blood from her lip with gnawing teeth.
‘Do not feel guilty in this,’ Haakon said. ‘He loves you, lad. I have seen the love he bestows on a true comrade. He could not let you down.’
‘And you?’ Beck tried to convert the cause of the tears that rushed to her eyes into anger at the only person there to be angry at. ‘Will you let him down?’
‘I will not. But Januc was right in this – the odds are too great now. But they want Jean alive, that is clear. Why, I don’t know. So we must follow and wait for a chance, some sign, some weakness on their part. I think such a chance will come.’
They were silent in the tunnel, Fenrir once more leading them back, though occasionally the dog stopped to growl into the darkness from which they’d come.
‘Do you think someone follows us?’ Haakon had paused again to look back.
‘I neither know nor care.’ Beck could barely stop herself running through the gloom. When they got to the horses on the other side, she made a show of adjusting the harness while she wiped away the moisture from her face, the blood from her lips and the tears that had flowed only where there was no light to see them by. In a low voice she called, ‘So, Norseman, shall we see if we can hasten our luck?’
Without waiting for a reply she was up and off. Haakon sighed and struggled onto his far less willing mount, recognising the instant, unwelcome strain in his thighs.
‘Give me a deck under my feet any day,’ he muttered. ‘Yah!’
Dancing eyes finally settled on the departing horses, then moved back to the hand that was holding the thorn branch aside.
‘Remarkable,’ he said, looking at the sixth finger, nestled in beside the little one, just as easy to move. Yet a needle plucked by his teeth from the bush, reversed with his tongue and thrust into the new flesh drew no blood, caused no pain. That was not true of the finger next to it, nor the one beyond that. They bled, they hurt. He liked the sight of the one, the sensation of the other, so he kept pricking them for a while, until he wondered if phantom digits were not the beginning of a brave new phenomenon. If they were, anything could return. Anything. Hadn’t he seen that in a dungeon somewhere?
It was not to be. Raising his other arm, he saw only the same old stump at its end. Quickly he lifted it and began to suckle on the puckered skin.
So, all hope is gone then, he thought. There is no resurrection of the flesh.
He stumbled out into sunshine, pitilessly bright now the storm clouds were gone. It was not right, this daylight land. He raised his one hand to shade himself, and the gesture drew a response from a nearby tree.
‘Hand! Hand!’ came the harsh voice.
Looking up, he saw a large black bird. Its eyes flickered over him for a moment, then returned to
the task of grooming that had been interrupted by his master’s reappearance.
‘Ah, Daemon, are you come?’
The Fugger began a little dance in greeting, and the raven swooped from his perch and circled just above the head of the shuffling man, cawing the while. Then the bird dropped onto his shoulder, head angled to the side, eyes fixed upon him.
For a moment, he was happy just to dance, until the sun intruded again, no real heat in it to oppose the chill early autumn wind. Yet somewhere, he knew, there had to be a place of both darkness and warmth, a burrow against the cold whose boundaries could be defined with one hand.
But not here, not in this place of sunshine and death where the mad were kings and fathers reached up into ceilings for instruments of pain.
‘Shall we go, O Daemon dear?’
The raven, with a croak, flew away from the morning sun, settling into a tree fifty paces ahead, head turned back, body bent forward.
‘Clever bird! You always know the way.’
Bending his face to the path, eyes slitted against the glare, the Fugger took the first step along it towards the darkness he craved.
EIGHT
SALOME
‘The problem with these so-called Lutherans,’ declared Giancarlo Cibo, ‘is that they are so obsessed by sins they do not know how to commit any.’
Five days in Wittenberg and he was already intolerably bored.
‘And this is the best our gold can buy?’ Franchetto threw another damp log onto the meagre fireplace where it gave out more smoke and little heat. This was the most spacious room in a house that would have fitted comfortably into the Siena palazzo’s stables. ‘Do they not know who we are?’
‘They know as much as they need to know, brother. Two scholars seeking knowledge. Catholic princes are not popular in these states, you might remember. This is the heart of the Reformation. This is where Luther began the schism, where he runs it from.’
‘Luther!’ Franchetto spat, and stretched his back. He was almost upright again. ‘If we came to Germany to return it to the Church, what better way than to stick a knife into that fat chest?’
‘As always, dear brother, I admire your unquenchable thirst for blood and despise your stupidity.’ The elder Cibo leant forward so his whisper would be heard. ‘Germany is lost to the Pope and the Emperor. Luther has survived every attempt to assassinate or dissuade him. He is beyond our reach. And anyway, we are not here on crusade. We are here for this.’
Beside him, on the table, sat the hand, its fingers resting on their pads, the palm raised slightly. He reached out and touched it. It was strange how he’d been unable even to look at it before and now he needed it always within sight. Obviously, it was to do with how he felt. There was less blood around when he had it near, less coughing, and this alone told him it was the key all alchemists had been seeking. He just needed Apollonius to open the door with it. The door to life eternal.
Apollonius! His real name, Cibo remembered, was Hans Dreschler, a cobbler’s son from Breslau. But somehow this child of ignorance had become one of the greatest authorities on the hermetic sciences. Even Abraham, with a mind unopiated, could not rival him. And Wittenberg had long been the centre of esoteric knowledge. It was said that the ancient ways of power, lines of potent energy, met in that place as nowhere else on earth.
However, Apollonius was not a man to be rushed, and he exemplified the national characteristic of dourness. Though Cibo had been in touch with him over the years, exchanging knowledge and modes of experiment, his arrival and this new element he sought to introduce had not provoked the wonder and instant action he was expecting. Its six fingers, and the fact it had survived unblemished the death of the body, caused the German merely to shrug. That it had once graced the arm of an infamous queen simply made him nod, and then only once. He’d asked the exact time and place of death, and had then told Cibo he would do some astrological calculations and speak to him when they were confirmed. As for Cibo’s prisoner, he did not know what questions to ask him yet. Once again, he would contact him when necessary.
Giovanni, the brothers’ steward, had failed to wile away the wait. He had gone into town and returned with the best whores the place had to offer – large, lumpen creatures of vast stupidity and no invention. Franchetto had had three, one after the other, and had not cared that they yawned continually as he bent to his task. The Archbishop had taken the smallest, who still had mountains of flesh he found distasteful in the extreme; but she knew nothing of pleasure or pain, had hurt without thrill for him and had not even been able to pretend she enjoyed being hurt back. He had longed for Donatella, his Sienese mistress, and her exquisite technique. And he had beaten Giovanni with no restraint to encourage him to do better next time.
The brothers awaited him now, shivering before the smoking, heat-free fireplace; so when the door opened they were disappointed to see a scrawny youth.
‘A messenger from Apollonius,’ announced Heinrich von Solingen.
The youth was pimply, no more than nineteen, with the thick, wheaten hair of the region. He stooped, had a slight lisp and an insolent look in the eye, and the Archbishop instantly understood why Apollonius had displayed no reaction to the remains of the famed seductress of England, Anne Boleyn.
‘Hans … I mean my master, sends his respects, and this.’
He handed over a small scroll of parchment, then stood close to the fire, picking at his face.
Giancarlo Cibo unrolled the paper and glanced swiftly down the list of questions written there. They were all to do with the actual moments of the execution, those few vital seconds when death and life conjoined. Only one man could answer them.
‘Thank your master. Will you take some wine with us?’
‘Better not.’ The youth swallowed a yawn. ‘He doesn’t like it when I am away too long.’ He ambled to the door, turned back. ‘Can I tell him when you might have the information?’
‘Soon,’ said the Archbishop, looking at Heinrich. ‘Very soon, I think.’
‘Oh, he will be pleased.’ The boy smiled briefly and was gone with another yawn.
Cibo gestured to his bodyguard. ‘These are the things we need to know.’
Heinrich read them, then grunted. ‘He will not want to tell us.’
‘How boring for all if he did.’ Giancarlo smiled at the German. ‘Break him, Heinrich. Break him, body and soul.’
‘With pleasure.’
The German left the room. They could hear his footsteps fading away on the cellar stairs at a slow and even pace.
Jean also heard the footsteps, the steady, deliberate tread of them, and knew it was about to begin. In a strange way, he was glad. In the five days of waiting he’d had nothing but his regrets for company. These ate into his mind more than the cords did into his ankles and wrists, burnt his throat with a gall fouler than the soup they poured down it twice a day, chilled his heart more than the dankness of stone could his body. Now at last he would be out of limbo and into hell. No matter how much the priests had tormented his childhood with visions of the eternal flames reserved for sinners, he’d always felt they were preferable to the endless nothing set aside for those who had done nothing with their lives. At least he had something to atone for. Perhaps, in the way he dealt with the hours to come, he could seek that atonement.
There were voices beyond the thick oak, then the searching of a key in the lock. When the door swung open, Jean blinked and turned his head away, keeping his eyes open but down to take in the light a little at a time. In the complete darkness of his cell, even the small flicker the lantern gave out was sharp as sunshine reflected off the sea.
The lantern was set down and a brazier fetched from outside to place beside it. Within their now tolerable glow, Jean gazed up at his captors. There were the two who fed him every day, hefty, muscled brutes with the permanent half beard and broken-nosed look of the Tuscan. And there was Heinrich von Solingen. From the wound of his face, his eyes shone, as if he was about work he love
d.
He set down the sack he was carrying and metal clanked on metal within it. He turned towards Jean, an approximation of a smile upon what used to be lips. A whisper slipped through them.
‘I am going to destroy you, Frenchman.’
‘You are going to try … Scarface.’
The word was added quietly, as an afterthought, almost a dismissal, with no hint of insult in the timbre to colour it. Its very simplicity produced the reaction. The German swung back his boot and kicked hard at Jean’s face. Limited though his movements were, he was able to turn just enough to take the blow on the shoulder, on top of bruises from beatings at Munster, causing agony to rip through him. Yet with the agony he felt a sudden triumph. He now knew what sort of torturer Heinrich von Solingen would make. An angry one. Calm torturers were more effective, for anger was a weapon to be turned back at whoever felt it. As it was the only weapon to hand, Jean grasped it gratefully.
‘Tie him to the wall!’ cried the German, and his assistants grabbed Jean, slipping off the wrist straps and stretching his hands to rebind them to the two iron rings embedded in the stone, once used to hang sacks of provisions beyond the gnawing of rats. His feet were splayed, ropes lashed around his ankles, then around the two heavy barrels that were the only furnishings of this cell.
‘Strip him,’ came the guttural command, and the meagre cloth that had covered him since the dungeon in Munster was wrenched off.
‘Shall we start below or above? Or in the middle? Any preference, Frenchman?’ A slight quaver in the voice contradicted the studied calmness of the German’s words.
This is a man who finds it hard to master himself, Jean thought. But he did not reply. Words, he could see now, were blades he could cut with. And they would only stay sharp if he used them sparingly.
He did not know what they would ask him. He did not know much anyway. He only knew he would tell them nothing, for this little was all he could still do for Anne Boleyn. And he was discovering there were different ways not to tell something. The first way, Jean decided, was to stare above the man approaching him, above the glint of lantern light on metal. There, on the stone-flagged walls, he could see a courtyard in Montepulciano and the dark eyes of Beck looking up at him from beneath her close-cropped hair.
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