‘There’s the reason,’ continued the O’Dowd, ‘why ’tis so elusive. But what’s it doing in a common tavern?’ He put his hand on her shoulder as she reached towards it. ‘Don’t try to handle it, Herr Foltz. ’Tis inclined to bite anyone who tries.’
Frustrated, she turned to me. ‘You could take it, von Bek.’
‘But I don’t choose to,’ I told her. ‘I might well be the only one of us who can handle the Grail – I’d believe it now, I suppose – but I’m also the only one who has no interest in it. Why not let it remain where it is, undisturbed to the end of Time?’
She fumed and was grim. ‘If you love me, von Bek, you will take that Cup down now!’
I was about to go forward at her bidding when, with a great roar, Montsorbier’s men pushed another yard or two into the cellars and were forced back. Montsorbier knew the significance of that light! I could not see him, but I could hear him, cheering his men on. There was more musket-fire, then silence. Both defenders and attackers were so blinded they could no longer see to fight. The entire warren of cellars was one shimmering mass of intense pale gold and silver. The silence was such it almost formed a sound of its own; perhaps a sound from within ourselves. There were no human voices; nobody moved.
Then, suddenly, the light was gone. The Red O’Dowd, quick to take his advantage, for he alone knew the properties of his ‘helmet’, cried: ‘Forward!’ and our own people charged as they fired. I saw Montsorbier’s white face. I saw him fall back from the pile of rubble he had been standing on. His militiamen were running. I could hear their boots striking the water of the sewers, heard them splashing and wading and Montsorbier’s angry shout. ‘It cannot harm you! ’Tis what we came for!’
Uttering some kind of hideous war-shout from the back of his throat, the O’Dowd let off his pistol in the general direction of Montsorbier. Then I heard someone screaming in the distant tunnels. It was a ghastly sound.
‘At last,’ said the O’Dowd in tones of deep satisfaction. ‘My fish!’
We were into the sewers ourselves now, chasing them back. Libussa and myself remained close to the O’Dowd, who had the lamp. We heard echoes. Montsorbier was close to weeping as he begged his men to resume the attack. A couple of twists and turns and we were in a high vaulted sewer with about four inches of water coursing around our legs. The screaming continued, though it was not from the same gallery. It was persistent and horrible.
The Red O’Dowd waved on his men. ‘Follow ’em to the surface and find how they entered. I must deal with my fish.’
The three of us took a tunnel to the left. The gallery grew wider and taller – ten men could have stood shoulder to shoulder across it – and ahead was one of Montsorbier’s men, caught in our lamp’s light, flopping and screaming still. Then he was up out of the water, as if wrenched into the dark air by a great hand, and flung forcefully against the wall. His body crashed into the filthy water. He still lived, still sobbed, but almost every bone was broken.
Something made a sucking noise.
Eyes waved on stalks overhead, peering at us with no more, it seemed, than mild curiosity. The Red O’Dowd grinned in relief. ‘Are you unharmed, my darling? What did they do to ye?’
‘Oh, Mother of God!’ said Libussa. ‘’Tis a gigantic crayfish!’
It was nothing else. Up came the Sword of Paracelsus in my hand. Instinct urged me to hack at the thing, but it seemed docile when it heard the Red O’Dowd’s voice. Slowly, with almost delicate movements of its claws, it began to eat its victim until at length the man’s cries ceased.
‘They must have drugged her,’ said O’Dowd. ‘Or lured her off. She looks fine now. What d’ye think, Sir?’
‘I’ve never seen a healthier fish, Sir,’ said I.
‘Your Mr Montsorbier’s a cunning strategist.’ The O’Dowd was admiring. ‘He’s the first to get past her.’
‘He’ll not forget this campaign.’ Libussa was amused.
The crayfish clacked her claws against the sides of the tunnel and the Red O’Dowd made a sound with his tongue which seemed to imitate her. In this way they conversed for a minute or two.
The O’Dowd sighed deeply. ‘She’s not harmed. They doubtless sent one of their number in ahead. They’d have packed him so full of opium it made the fish drowsy. A good scheme, eh? He’s a clever man. Poison your advance guard and in turn poison the fish. Ha!’ The Irish giant rubbed at his beard. ‘Well now, there’s not much to be doing here. The cellar wall shall have to be built up and strengthened, but otherwise we shall simply wait and see. I cannot stop your Montsorbier from poisoning my fish, but I can be better prepared for him in future.’
‘Did you never realise it could only be the Grail giving off such a light?’ asked Libussa.
‘Sir, there were piles of old armour and weapons, at least a hundred years out of date, when we arrived.’ The Red O’Dowd continued to be puzzled. ‘I suppose I should feel honoured…’
There came a keening shout and several of Montsorbier’s party, cut off from the rest, were rushing at us from a side tunnel, blades raised to strike. To defend myself I raised the Sword of Paracelsus, hearing the battering of the eagle’s wings within the globe. I parried and thrust two-handed, so fast it seemed to me the sword itself did the lion’s share of the work, and when it was done there was more fresh meat for the crayfish. As I sheathed the sword, the Red O’Dowd looked at me in some wonderment and Libussa, too, wore a strange expression. ‘There were five of them,’ she said.
‘I learned my fighting techniques with the Tatars,’ I boasted.
‘You quartered ’em all in the space of ten or fifteen seconds,’ said the Red O’Dowd. ‘I’ve fought Tatars, Sir. Even they take longer than that, with all their skill. You’re a master swordsman, Sir!’
‘I assure you I’m no such thing.’ I scarcely remembered the encounter. The evidence of it, however, was grisly.
‘Then ’tis a master sword,’ said she very softly.
I was in no doubt on that score. We waded slowly back along the sewers until we climbed through the breached wall. The Red O’Dowd’s men already worked to shore it up.
‘The fish was a little drowsy,’ he told them, ‘but she’s fine now.’
Libussa looked at the shelf where we had seen the helmet. In the darkness it was impossible to tell if it was still there. The Red O’Dowd chuckled. ‘I told you that helm’s elusive. You never know where she’ll reveal herself. Or when.’
He lived so casually with his marvels I was forced to wonder if it was my idea of reality that was lacking.
Until now, I thought, it had been far too moderate.
Chapter Seventeen
In which madness is apparent in more than one of us. ‘The Grail draws all threads together’. An attempt at amnesty. Klosterheim’s fury. A fresh attack. Intervention from the heavens. Imitation of Lucifer.
KLOSTERHEIM HAD COMPLETED his meal in the taproom; his plate was piled high with clean bones. ‘Montsorbier was sure he’d succeed,’ he said casually. ‘He recruited every creature in Mirenburg which Hell had abandoned; every wretched laudanum swallower, every low pickaroon who resisted Lord Renyard’s rule. Enough scum, he thought, to flow over everything and drown you in filth.’ He looked upon von Bresnvorts’ contorted corpse. ‘This one lacked character. He was bound to fail.’ Klosterheim nodded to himself. His body rocked for a few moments, then he took himself in charge and glanced up at me, still chewing.
‘Did Montsorbier have a further plan?’ I asked. ‘You must see it’s now in your interest to reveal it.’
Klosterheim sighed. ‘I am abandoned by all! Even human allies desert me!’
‘’Tis you, Sir, who turned traitor, when you thought your ambitions better served elsewhere. You were never a real rival to your master Satan.’ Libussa bristled with angry contempt. ‘You’ve played every side now. And every card you’ve put on the table has been too low! All you held were Pride and Foolish Dreams, when you thought you had Aces and Queens. Is th
at not plain to you?’
‘He fully expected to win.’ I presumed Klosterheim spoke of Montsorbier. ‘He had the whole collection bottled up, he said, and the bottle perfectly positioned. Aesthetical, he said, as well as supernatural, a perfection and symmetry. But as for myself…’
‘The Grail draws all threads together.’ Libussa spoke under her breath.
‘I have great power,’ said Klosterheim dreamily. ‘Power I’ve not yet deigned to use. I did my best to be like the rest of you, but in doing so I lost my way. My main fear’s that I lack a core. My soul’s been in and out of this body so many times it might have grown threadbare. I thought it might regenerate if I joined the commonality…’
‘What, Klosterheim? You sought to emulate Everyman.’ I laughed.
Klosterheim pursed his lips. ‘I should not have let von Bresnvorts kill his aunt. It put everything out of kilter…’
‘Your mistake was to slay the Goat Queen, Sir. You indulged your hellish bloodlust at the very moment you might have saved yourself! You let the Beast overwhelm you. In that sense you emulate Lucifer. He knew what it meant to be both more and less than human.’ I was grim. By slaughtering the old woman he had lost the sympathy I once felt.
‘I have the flaw,’ said Klosterheim seriously.
‘We all have it, Sir.’ Libussa looked towards the cellar, whence came a great banging and scraping as the men shored our defences.
The Red O’Dowd, dusty and soaked to the knees, came up the stairs and into the taproom. He wiped his face with a cloth, calling to us. ‘Can we expect ’em back soon, gentlemen?’
‘While the Grail’s here.’ Klosterheim offered him a corrupt grin. Perhaps because all initiative was now taken from him, Klosterheim had gone quite mad. He pulled more cold bones towards him. He had gathered them off every table.
The Red O’Dowd was impatient. ‘Well, I cannot give ’em what’s not mine. ’Twas here before I came – that and the fish and the spring. ’Tis an implicit feature of the tavern.’
‘Eh?’ mocked Libussa. ‘Is this inn a shrine? A chapel on the site of a Christian miracle?’
‘I would remind ye, Sir,’ the O’Dowd spoke with dignity, ‘that you give offence to some of us here, who remain good Christians, even though we lack the benefit of priest or Church.’
‘God’s gone from this world, Sir,’ she said.
‘That appears to be the case, aye,’ he agreed. ‘Yet I was brought up in a certain religion and see no reason to abandon it, for the virtues remain. And, besides, ’twas Christ taught us, not His Father.’
‘So you remain a good Catholic, O’Dowd!’ Klosterheim selected the largest bone. Half-cooked meat hung from it. He nibbled. ‘Well, we all button ourselves into rôles, eh? We’re both anachronisms, Sir.’
The Red O’Dowd misliked any affiliation suggested by that ex-servant of Hell. He glowered at Klosterheim. ‘You may be abandoned by Satan, Sir, and I abandoned by God, but that does not put us in the same cart, nor even upon the same road.’
‘There’s only one road now, Sir.’ Klosterheim grinned around his bone. ‘Or shall be in a day hence. And it’s my road, O’Dowd, not yours.’
The great Irishman was dismissive. ‘Your Time’s past, Sir. And I’m not pleased with you. You helped bring disturbance to my house and I’ll see you tried and punished when this business is settled!’
Klosterheim fixed insouciant eyes upon his feast. ‘I’ll kill you first,’ he muttered.
There was another shock against the tavern’s front. Lamps and candles danced on every wall. ‘Muskets to positions!’ yelled the O’Dowd. There came a weird wailing from the street, and brighter light. O’Dowd turned his furious face from the window. ‘They’ve fired the chandler’s!’
Musketry still sounded from the various positions and wretched leprous creatures still collapsed one on the other. It was as if every prison, plague hospital and grave in the world had been opened and its contents disgorged upon us. That they were living men and women and not undead ghouls was both a comfort and a dismay. Montsorbier recruited the hopeless, the powerless, the weak. What could he be promising them? The same as Robespierre? A heaven on earth? It made me wonder if, without dreams, mankind would continue at all! What ancient genius invented the myth of the improving future?
They rushed mindlessly now upon our walls. They screamed, they giggled and they wailed. O’Dowd leapt from taproom to gallery to roof, half mad with horror. His tavern had never been attacked thus. He had thought his wars over. Now he realised peace had been merely a lull.
Libussa and I took up muskets and went to the shutters, firing into the Mass. Montsorbier was nowhere in evidence. This attack lacked a sense of strategy and seemed merely a vengeful display of power. Montsorbier had doubtless decided to destroy us if he could not capture what he thought we guarded. Klosterheim within had grown increasingly amused. With every wave, with every shaking of our walls, he laughed as if he had some secret denied the rest.
Then, of a sudden, there was stillness again. Peering out, we saw only the dead and the dying. Ragged, pale creatures, many with ghastly wounds, dragged themselves over the piled corpses of their comrades. Framed against the flaming chandler’s Montsorbier appeared with three or four of his men. He was obscenely elegant, the dandified sans-culotte. Hand on hip, he paced back and forth, back and forth, studying our tavern.
The Red O’Dowd was grimmer than ever, all his elation gone. He growled: ‘We’re forced to parley now. Soon our shot and powder will be low and I’ve lost more men than I ever reckoned reasonable. I’ll not die or let any more of my people die in defence of a public ordinary with a declining trade. I’ll find another hostelry for my old age.’
‘You’ve changed your tune mighty quick, Sir,’ said Libussa.
‘I’ve always done so, Sir, in the face of fact.’ He replied without shame. ‘One of us must parley.’
‘I’ll go out,’ volunteered Klosterheim from behind us. ‘I’ve nought to lose by it.’
‘That’s why ye’ll stay, Sir.’ The Red O’Dowd was savage, sincere in his plan to bring Klosterheim to justice. ‘Let Herr Foltz go. He’s most neutral, I think.’
Libussa nodded. ‘Very well, Mr O’Dowd.’
I was amused by his mistaken assumption yet feared, too, for her safety. However, I would not argue, since I had every respect for her cunning, her ability to strike the best bargain with Montsorbier. She would keep her head better than I could, I felt sure.
Klosterheim left the table and came up near the door where we stood. ‘Everyone conspires against me now,’ he confided, ‘yet you forget, ’twas my plan from the outset. You’re here, all of you, to aid me in the fulfilment of my destiny.’ He resumed his chewing.
‘You never had a destiny, Sir,’ said Libussa, ‘save what you concocted in your soul’s poverty. You’re self-described as an anachronism and that’s what you are. You’ve served your turn, Sir. You’re as worthless as one of that decrepit mob. Lucifer has rejected you. Now mankind rejects you. Have the good taste, Sir, to accept a fact!’ As she spoke she seized a white scarf from the O’Dowd’s hand and tied it to the spontoon he gave her. ‘I’ll make Montsorbier call his mongrels off. You, Sir, will keep your place and hold your tongue!’
Klosterheim’s fleshless skull went a shade whiter. His dead eyes revealed a flicker, faint and swift, as when damp coals promise to ignite. ‘You cannot treat me thus, Madam, for ’tis I inspired your ambition!’
‘My blood inspired me, Sir. While you proved useful I let you think what you wished.’ She seemed almost as mad as Klosterheim at that moment, ready to reject any debt, moral or otherwise, which by her own admission she had owed him.
‘You’ll never be the Anti-Christ!’ He grimaced. ‘Not now. I renounce you!’
Her smile was cruel triumph. ‘Can the Baptist renounce the Messiah? You continue to add folly to your pride, Klosterheim. You’ve betrayed too much. In us and in yourself. Find some other Salome to make, at least, a dramatic end
ing to your tale!’ Then she had opened the tavern door and was crying: ‘Truce! Truce! We’ll parley now, Montsorbier!’
I watched her move between the mounds of corpses, clambering over near-dead bodies, holding up the scarf like a victor’s banner. She could never know defeat, thought I. Montsorbier gave the order to stay his men and hooked his thumbs in his sash, calmly awaiting her.
When Klosterheim uttered a strange noise I turned. He made a kind of choked keening. He was shuddering with impossible emotions. It was almost grief! ‘All conspire,’ he grunted. He stumbled back. His dark eyes were fully on fire at last. ‘All betray me. Everyone I sought to serve! Why?’
The Red O’Dowd flung back his great head and shouted with laughter. ‘You sought to serve mankind? Faith! ’Tis a claim I’ve often heard, Mr Klosterheim, but none more ludicrous than yours!’
Satan’s ex-captain rounded on the Irishman. ‘What can you know of it, Sir? What?’
The O’Dowd looked down on that furious skull. ‘Only the little I need to know, Sir. I’m a common man. I’ve listened to them: the Whigs, the Tories, the Jacobites and the Jacobins, the ranting ministers and the masons and those that call themselves the Children of God. And each of them, Sir, when they fail in their attempt to gain power, claim to have been betrayed by those they would “save”. Well, Sir, I’ll tell ye direct – I’d rather be saved by one of those cancerous creatures out there than I’d entrust my fate to your kind!’
Klosterheim appeared to resume his old composure. His body ceased, gradually, to shake. His colour returned to its normal grey. He shrugged and went back to the table. He began to eat again, if anything even more voraciously.
Our attention was drawn to the street. Above the circle of swaying towers and tenements which rimmed the district, the stars glowed the colour of rust and worn velvet; meanwhile Libussa continued to talk to Montsorbier. Both were bargaining. Both were determined.
Then, as we watched, they appeared to reach agreement. Libussa nodded. Montsorbier removed his hat and settled it upon his head again. The Duchess of Crete turned, holding high the spontoon, and approached the tavern. Behind her, Montsorbier began to instruct his men, pointing this way and that.
The City in the Autumn Stars Page 35