The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

by Jesse Bullington

  “I know I’ve been difficult, at times. Hell, most of the time.” Barousse stared into the bucket. “I’d have lost myself years ago without you and Ennio, and I’m sorry about how it’s all played out up until here. I’m sorry about your brother, son. And your father.”

  “I, uh, thank you, thank you so very-” Rodrigo did not know quite how to respond to the words he had always longed to hear.

  “Now get on with it, and focus sharp or I’ll put you off the boat.” Barousse winked, momentarily forgetting his purpose. A fish splashed his boots, and the calm passed. “Don’t stand there gawking, leave the blasted bottles! Get to the Grossbarts and send them to me. Kill the snob if he gets crafty.”

  Barousse ran back to the foyer and up the stairs, unsure why his vision had gone misty in the kitchen. Unable to dispel his grin, Rodrigo raced across the house, seeing the captain disappear on the second story. The guards almost shot Rodrigo when he burst into the room, and all his pent-up happiness burst forth in hysterical laughter at what he saw.

  Sir Jean sat stripped of all but a loincloth and the Grossbarts stood on either side of him, Manfried wearing the upper half of the knight’s plate armor and Hegel awkwardly attaching the greaves to his own knobby legs. The inebriated Al-Gassur wore the helm and sat in the captain’s chair, clumsily fitting the neck of a bottle under the jutting visor. Martyn sprawled in another chair, his ripe Cardinal’s robes hanging off his spindly arms like blood-trimmed bat wings. Fixing the codpiece into place, Hegel rapped it with his knuckle and smiled knowingly at the stewing chevalier.

  “The captain requests you in his quarters.” Rodrigo giggled. “I’m to watch the Frenchman.”

  “Watch his mouth most close a all his bits,” Manfried advised.

  “He don’t seem to say much without his iron, though,” noted Hegel, and the two departed.

  They clanked up the stairs, each thinking his brother had received the better half of the unwieldy armor that barely stayed on their bodies in its fractured state. The captain admitted them, taking notice of the Arab for the first time. Ushering them in but leaving both door and cage ajar, he motioned to several open chests. These were full of coins, with many more scattered all over the rug. The Grossbarts hid their greed and amazement far better than Al-Gassur, who licked his lips and positioned his crutch so it might catch on the floor and send him sprawling. Before he could act Barousse addressed them, bringing a thankful lump to the Arab’s throat.

  “Carry these outside to the garden,” the captain ordered them, “and quickly, for if I know Strafalaria we will be blessed indeed if we have until dusk to prepare.”

  “Might I fill a sack, as my deformity prevents me from carrying an entire chest?” Al-Gassur asked.

  “There’s a bucket there.” Barousse nodded toward the tub, which Manfried immediately hastened to before the Arab could move.

  “Why we takin’em out back stead a through the you-know?” asked Hegel, keeping an eye on his brother.

  “A ruse, dear Hegel,” Barousse explained, hoisting a chest, “a ploy to distract the populace. In Angelino’s tub we’ll not leave the harbor without being nabbed if any see us board. No, we must keep eyes elsewhere, upon the ruins of the doge’s manse, the fire of my own, the miracle of a golden rain upon the streets! Hurry, you hounds, hurry!”

  “Don’t be callin me no beast,” Hegel grumbled, lifting a chest.

  Al-Gassur pretended to tie up the hem of his gown-length tunic when the bucket crashed into it, bashing his fingers. Manfried laughed while the Arab flung himself to the ground, secretly tickled the mangy bastard had eased his deception. He groaned and rolled on the floor and before he had recovered sufficiently to stand his pointed turnshoes and hidden pockets had eaten a dozen loose ducats.

  “Quit that bellyachin,” Manfried ordered, cuffing Al-Gassur’s ear.

  “Apologies, apologies,” the Arab whimpered, clumsily filling the bucket and his sleeve with coins.

  They trotted downstairs and out the back, the baffled guards staring as they dumped the contents of the chests into the contraption’s receptacle on top of Cardinal Buñuel’s stinking corpse. The sight made all three laugh and Al-Gassur obediently joined in. Panting, Barousse turned to them and wiped his pink brow.

  “Back inside,” said Barousse, “one more load.”

  Their excitement at more carrying turned to seething anger when they saw the massive anchor against one wall of the foyer. Much shoving, cursing, straining, and tugging followed, but finally the iron behemoth lay beside Buñuel’s corpse in the coin-filled receptacle.

  “Crucial,” Barousse gasped, “crucial. We. Don’t fire. Too soon. Hell.”

  “At your word.” Hegel shrugged at Manfried. “But now lets get some a them sausages and wine.”

  Barousse licked his lips. “Wise enough.”

  Manfried circled the contraption and then went around the side to the kitchen door after foiling Al-Gassur’s attempt to lag behind. Hegel reminded the men watching the back door of what befell thieves, and Barousse added that shortly all would set sail with far more riches in their coffers. In the dining room, Sir Jean’s attempt to bribe Rodrigo had earned him a bloody nose. Despite his manners and fine clothes Rodrigo was not of noble or landed stock, and so naturally he hated those who were.

  The guards likewise despised Sir Jean for his fortuitous birth and homeland but, unlike the frazzled Rodrigo and the belligerent Grossbarts, their fear grew with each insult the noble weathered and each blasphemy Martyn spoke. The guards and Sir Jean both believed the day would end with all of their necks in nooses unless a miracle transpired.

  XXI. The Conflagration of Desires

  An hour before sunset fifty pikemen relieved their compatriots outside the captain’s gates. Two of Barousse’s men nervously waited until a spokesman for the doge arrived, offering them amnesty if they peacefully admitted the doge’s force if and when such an order came down. This was the offer the mercenaries had agreed would buy their surrender after hearing of the cardinal’s murder, wanting no part of the inevitable massacre. The leader of the doge’s pikemen insisted they were positioned only to prevent escape, but to prove their loyalty Barousse’s men hastened to inform him of Buñuel’s passing. Not caring a jot for some French brat and doubting the doge did either, the pikemen demanded admittance at once. A guard hurried to unlock the gate when an arrow fired from one of the house’s windows struck his traitorous leg and he went down howling. Then everything soured and to this day Venetians whisper that in the time that followed the eyes of God averted from Venezia.

  Hearing a scream from the front, Barousse released the lever on the trebuchet, and the Grossbarts cheered as the anchor, coins, and cardinal soared into the setting sun. Rodrigo hurried about the second floor, having already doused every room of the first with oil. The mercenaries who had guarded the chevalier took shots from the room formerly occupied by the Grossbarts, Sir Jean and Martyn watching the catapult from the terrace.

  Sir Jean stared in shock, his urge to flee around the house forgotten at the sight of Barousse’s nerve. The trio of crossbowmen with them on the terrace let out three shouts and three shots as pikemen flooded around the stable side of the house. Martyn fled inside and Sir Jean followed, terrified he might be caught between crossbow volleys or cut down by his rescuers before they identified him.

  From the window one of the guards hurled an oil lamp at those swarming the front door, setting several ablaze and then catching a bolt between his eyes. He pitched foreward on the sill while the other two mercenaries retreated to the hall, the doge ordering an abundance of archers to make up for his earlier error. The two remaining guards saw Rodrigo rushing down the hall, laughing nervously.

  The ground quaked under the Grossbarts’ feet from the counterweight’s impact, the hastily constructed catapult ripping apart and collapsing behind them. With the first step toward the house Al-Gassur realized he would be overtaken by the pikemen, so, snatching out his dagger, he cut the binding o
n his mock-lame leg, threw the crutch over his shoulder, and dashed after his masters.

  On the raised terrace Barousse’s crossbowmen fired a second round but similarly armed members of the doge’s force responded in kind. Two of the mercenaries collapsed, riddled with shafts, but the third had ducked inside for a lamp to hurl. Coming up the terrace stairs with Hegel in the lead, the Grossbarts were each struck with several bolts. The quarrels bounced off Manfried’s shoulders and Hegel’s legs, their purloined plating saving their lives, Al-Gassur in pursuit but far enough back to avoid the volley.

  Barousse did not share their armor, thus the two bolts striking his shoulder and the third hitting his thigh embedded in flesh. Ignoring the wounds, he knocked his remaining guard over as he burst into the house, causing the poor man to fall onto his lamp. The lamp shattered, engulfing him in liquid fire. The Grossbarts sprang over the flailing man as he burned alive, and Al-Gassur did the same moments before the pikemen reached the terrace. If the Grossbarts noticed their manservant had miraculously regained his missing appendage they did not mention it, instead tearing out from behind the now-flaming staircase and following the wounded captain up to the second story.

  With Barousse’s guards hurling oil lamps from the second story onto the invaders at the doors below, the walls of the entire house soon crawled with fire, arrows whipping through the smoke-clogged windows. Al-Gassur overtook his masters on the stairs, his crutch bouncing in their sooty faces. The railings beside them cracked and hissed and their boots smoked as they reached the distraught group of Rodrigo, Martyn, Sir Jean, and the two remaining guards waiting at Barousse’s locked door. The Frenchman wore the quarrel of one of the doge’s men through his bicep from an attempt to flee out the front, and his golden tresses were singed from his subsequent reentry through the burning doorway.

  Fumbling with his keys, Barousse shook the smoking walls with his laughter despite his grievous wounds. One of the guards swayed from the heat and pitched backward over the railing before any could stop his plunge. Throwing open the door, they saw several pikemen had braved the inferno and rushed up the stairs behind them. Barousse turned to battle them but the Grossbarts dragged him inside and slammed the door, knowing he had the only key to the cage in which they all now huddled. He unlocked this, and they pushed inside at the same moment that Al-Gassur brushed against the smoldering door, his oil-spattered clothes immediately catching fire. The others dived away from him as he charged Barousse’s oversized tub and hurled himself into the water, his mustache crackling along with the rest of him.

  Al-Gassur had always equated asexuality with practicality, but when he opened his eyes under the surface the stinging salt water filtered the woman floating before him into an angel of all his repressed longing, an embodiment of femininity that melted his heart as it solidified other regions. Barousse charged after the errant Arab and hoisted him out of the water by his hair, the woman darting away to a dark corner of the pool. Sir Jean attempted to make a spectacle out of his wound but his vocalized pain merely earned him a cuffing from Hegel. The chevalier swooned when the remaining guard carefully removed the bolt from his arm. Hegel grinned and put his pick’s tip under Sir Jean’s chin, helping him find his feet again.

  Manfried had followed the captain, viciously kicking Al-Gassur as he yowled on the floor. Necessity had driven the Arab to do what Manfried had longed to every time he entered the room. Barousse snatched a sheet from the bed and scrambled over the rim; up to his waist in the water, he whispered to the woman.

  Timber collapsed outside the door, the pikemen hacking their way in, screaming as the floor gave out and they plummeted into the inferno, the one who had snatched the railing suffering longer than his countrymen before he too let go, the flesh of his fingers welded together. Martyn stomped around the room screaming damnation, his spit hissing on the smoking carpets.

  “To the Virgin!” Hegel bellowed, hoisting a satchel from those piled on the table and shoving it under Martyn’s left arm.

  Barousse shielded Manfried’s view but then she stepped past him in the bath, her body swathed in wet, translucent linen. Al-Gassur crawled after the last guard and Rodrigo, who disappeared behind the statue of Mary. Hegel seized his brother’s arm and pressed a satchel to his chest.

  “This ain’t Gyptland, brother,” Hegel intoned, his eyes locking with Manfried’s.

  She took another step toward Manfried, the waters parting for her, but he found the strength to turn away. Sir Jean and the guard had followed Rodrigo down the shaft, with Martyn close after. Al-Gassur reached for a coin on the floor but it burned his fingers, and somewhere in the room bottles began exploding, flames belching and broken glass snowing down on them, each shard radiant in the blaze that consumed the walls. Then Hegel hurled a sack full of ducats at the Arab, who heard the chinking of coin and grabbed it along with his fallen crutch before vanishing into the passage.

  The captain shouldered one of the satchels but six remained, and these the Brothers clumsily threw past Mary into the chute. A fearsome tearing sound arose behind them, and they saw the entire massive tub pitching upward for an instant before being swallowed by the house, the floor between them and it collapsing. Hegel dived behind the Virgin and shimmied backward into the shaft, but to his disgust he saw Manfried turn to something out of his periphery. Hegel descended only a rung before he envisioned that treacherous woman undoing both Barousse and Manfried.

  A rafter fell from above, driving the woman to the floor. The captain vainly tried to lift it, screaming as the smoldering wood blistered his hands. The stink of burnt skin and other meats permeating his nose, Manfried turned away from brother and Virgin to help the captain. She did not shriek or moan or cry, but smiled up at them as they lifted the burning log from her pinned legs. She scooted out and they dropped it just as the floor caved in beneath the beam.

  A chasm now separated them from the Virgin, flames riding the squealing walls around their small island of floor. The captain’s face fell, his tears popping before they reached the ground. Manfried grabbed hold of the woman, steadied his boots, and hurled her over the fiery gulf. Her head struck the Virgin’s feet and she lay still, and the captain let out a wail as he jumped after her.

  He almost made it.

  His legs dangling in Hell, his fingers splayed and gripping the smoking floor, and his eyes fixed on her countenance, Barousse struggled to lift his weighty frame. Manfried went after him, overshooting his mark and pitching into the Virgin. He knocked the statue loose of its base and it toppled sideways, tearing through the burning wall as if it were wet parchment. On impulse he reached to stop Her fall but then he felt a lady’s hand on his ankle and he saw another woman smiling up at him despite the blood running down her forehead. The captain forgotten, he knelt to kiss her when Hegel appeared out of the passage, spoiling his objective.

  Seeing her turn to Manfried instead of him, Barousse released his hold and closed his eyes. Hegel leaped at him, having moored himself to a rung with a length of rope. He caught one of the captain’s hands but flat on his stomach could do no more than hold on, staring into the surprisingly calm face of Barousse.

  Manfried lifted her up, the sheet sticking to his armor, but he looked away and pushed her gently into the passage. Hegel grunted and twisted, the captain slipping from his grasp when Manfried joined the struggle and together they hauled Barousse up. Another chunk of the floor gave way beneath Barousse’s chest and they almost lost him before all three tumbled backward into the nave. Hegel cut the rope and scampered down the rungs, Barousse shoving Manfried after him. The captain went last, the bars scalding his palms, the last view he had of his home obscured by waves of heat and smoke.

  Rodrigo moved down the narrow shelf beside the channel. The tallow he had lit from the walls before descending illuminated Sir Jean and the guard behind him, and Rodrigo handed each of them a candle of his own. Sir Jean lacked the strength to assault them or flee, panting against the wall with his bare feet dangling in the wa
ter. Martyn and Al-Gassur came next, several satchels landed behind them, and then nothing.

  When all had realized the remaining four must be cooked alive they shouldered what bags they could carry and turned their backs, only Martyn staying behind to pray in the flurry of embers coming down the chute. The stone ceiling shook and they quickened their pace, only to stop when Martyn let out a triumphant shout. In the glow of the shaft they saw the pale woman emerge alone and unblemished.

  Then Hegel dropped, shouting, “Slow on, you mecky assholes!”

  Manfried fell the last few rungs and almost rolled into the channel but Hegel helped him up. The Brothers narrowly avoided being crushed under Barousse as the captain popped out, having nearly become stuck in the shaft. Grabbing the remaining satchels he pushed them ahead down the shelf to where the rest waited, flaming debris bursting out of the chute behind them and backlighting their progress.

  The woman looped her arm through Barousse’s, smiling at Manfried as she did. They rushed through the tunnel, their lights extinguishing one by one from dripping water and splashing filth. At the very moment they reached the ladder the last tallow went out, and they stood waist-deep in the sulfurous water.

  “How many of my men are with us?” Barousse asked.

  “We’re all your men, sir,” Rodrigo answered.

  “No, no, my personal brigands,” said Barousse.

  “Me and Hegel both,” Manfried replied.

  “I know that.” Barousse’s voice rose. “I mean the men I hired to keep my manse, those that would make up our crew onboard Angelino’s.”

  “Mine ownself,” the guard put in, “being Raphael.”

  “Who else?” said Barousse.

  “Mine ownself alone,” Raphael responded, clearly struggling with his German.

  “Shitfire and brimstone.” Barousse rubbed his blackened brow with blistered fingers.