City of Crows

by Chris Womersley

  There. Her son was down there with them, his arms flailing, mouth opening and closing, his cry reaching her a moment later. Mother! Mother! Something was happening, but what was it? Charlotte grasped the trunk of the chestnut tree for balance. She felt sick. A glint in the air but she barely had time to wonder what it might be before something punched her mightily in the shoulder.

  A blast of pain and she stumbled. A cheer, followed by ragged laughter, the rocky ground under her knees, stones digging into the palms of her hands, blood soaking into her clothes like wine into bread. Her life; all of her poor life. An arrow, she realised. The thing she’d glimpsed was an arrow. And she plunged headlong into darkness.

  5

  Charlotte found herself lying on her back on hard, ice-cold stones. Her shoulder and left arm ached dully. A grey darkness. Moan of wind, a chill breeze across her face, the distant wails of men and women. She was unable to move. Each breath was an effort. She recalled, but only dimly, someone leaning over her and muttering. Nicolas. Where was her son? She croaked his name, then felt around her in the surrounding darkness. Nothing. She crossed herself. ‘Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum . . .’

  Slowly, she moved one part of her body, then another. Feet, legs, her head. Blood heavy all over her clothes. How long had she been lying here? It felt, strangely, like days or seasons, forever. Time seemed to have broken free of itself. She raised herself stage by stage, onto one hip, then to her knees. She had no sense of the size of the space she found herself in until, gradually, her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Perhaps a tunnel of sorts, a chamber, the intimation of flickering light in the distance. Lamenting voices again echoed up from somewhere. Distant laughter, and not genial, crumbling as if into dust.

  Feeling carefully around her as she did so, Charlotte got to her feet. She felt both weightless and heavy. At her shoulder, a wall slimy with moss, the space between the stones filled with a gritty mortar. With her hands held out in front of her, she began walking towards the pale light until she found herself in a large underground chamber lit by several flaming torches, one of which she managed to prise from the wall. The room was vast, its dimensions untroubled by her torch’s light. Her shuffling footsteps echoed in the space. Rats and mice skittered here and there across the floor in front of her. There was a blundering movement high overhead, of bats or moths. Chipped columns wider than any oak tree she’d ever seen rose up and up and out of sight into the darkness.

  Finally, as she stared in wonder, she made out something far above her. It was a mechanical contraption of some sort, with dangling ropes and chains. A huge metal wheel, perhaps. She stared upwards for a long time, craning her neck. Suddenly, the machine whirred and moved, lowering a wooden drawbridge, across which hurried a number of – what? People in rags? Or were they merely the undulating shadows cast by the torches? Wraiths? There, the shuffle of feet, a voice. She called out – timidly at first, and then, when there was no response, louder still.

  No answer, only the echo of her own voice. Hello . . . hello . . . hello, grinding of gears, the creak of wood against wood, there . . . there . . . there. The people far above – if, in fact, they were people – had vanished and the two sides of the drawbridge lifted apart. One of these sides swung around ponderously and was eventually lowered at a different location, where it was joined by another bridge similar to the first. Again several figures crossing, the sense of hurrying movement high overhead, grim laughter.

  Charlotte clasped her shawl tight about her and held out her torch, trying to see anything in the gloom that might identify this monstrous palace. Cobbles and bricks, rotten timber beams, old bolts and joints. There were rusted steel grilles in the walls and floors. With her toe she nudged a rock into one of these grilles and waited, in vain, for the sound of its landing. Nothing. In various places along the walls, iron rings were fixed with broken lengths of chain attached to them. Scattered here and there over the floor were piles of animal pelts, hanks of hair, bones large and small, hundreds of teeth, pieces of rotten clothing, ancient weapons and large splotches of wax. A deep fear settled in her bones, and Charlotte shrank back against one of the vast pillars. Where was she? Where was her son?

  She walked on and, after some time, heard what sounded like a fete. Voices, music, laughter. With her torch held out in front of her, uncertain whether she wanted to meet the inhabitants of this ghastly place or not, she shuffled across the vast expanse of the chamber. The sound grew louder. She ventured along another passage until she found herself in yet another massive room. The scene inside was horrifying and compelling, a bleak carnival, like nothing she had even dreamed before. The room was lit by several torches sprouting from the stone walls and jammed into the floor, and the air was filled with a thick and putrid miasma. A stench of pipe smoke and death.

  She had never before seen such a large assembly in a single place. Dozens of people of all ages and stations jostled for space. No one paid her the slightest attention, so absorbed were they in their various diversions. Babies played among the bones and rags on the floor, demure ladies fanned themselves. There were crippled beggars on crutches, riders on horseback. Nobles and peasants, lepers with their warning clappers. Some men crouched on the floor nearby playing cards and passing a jug of wine or beer between them. Hooting and weeping. Merchants with baskets strapped to their backs, old men, courtiers. A group of women divided an orange among themselves as they chatted serenely, three or four boys wrestled among the rubble, lovers wandered arm in arm beside the walls. And the air all around rang with a fearful din.

  A cough at her back and Charlotte wheeled around to find an inordinately tall gentleman standing beside her. He was thin-faced, with a black cape draped across his shoulders. With a bony hand he swept a wing of long, grey hair back off his high forehead. This gentleman obviously occupied a position of some authority among the assembly. Large rings glinted on his fingers and he nodded indulgently at passers-by when they paused to smile, doff their caps or be otherwise acknowledged by him. He wore an expression of forbearance, much like a schoolmaster overlooking his unruly flock and barely keeping any disciplinary blows in check. Every so often one of the revellers bumped into him, whereupon he would shove the offender away forcefully into the crowd, prompting further angry exclamations or drunken laughter.

  ‘What is this place?’ Charlotte murmured, probably not even loud enough for anyone to hear her.

  But hear her the tall man did. He looked down at her, but paused before answering, as if uncertain of the true meaning of her question. ‘Merely a pause on our long journey, madame.’

  ‘Is my son here? Have you seen my son?’

  The fellow shrugged and gestured vaguely at the heaving crowd. The question appeared to interest him not at all.

  Charlotte persisted. ‘But where are you going, monsieur? Who are all these people?’

  The man sighed. His cool breath smelled of bones and soil, as if he carried a graveyard within. He cast his eyes over the crowd. ‘There. See that woman, the one with the scarf about her neck? She was set upon the other night in Rue de la Poterie in Paris. Six men bent her to their will, one after another. She begged them to spare her, as if they would care. Put a knife right up inside her when they were done. The bloodstains are probably still on the road if you wish to look. Then they tossed her baby into the river.’

  Charlotte followed his gaze and spied the woman in question, who winced as she wandered through the crowd with a hand pressed to her belly. The lower part of her dress was stained with blood and she carried a bundle in the crook of her arm. Even in the dim, flickering torchlight, it was plain to see that her cheeks were wet with tears.

  ‘Did she survive this attack, then?’

  The gentleman paid no heed to her question. He was too busy pointing out others in the gathering and enumerating the gruesome fates that had befallen them. Fever, rape, murder, execution, madness. The man who fell from a window,
a child trampled by a horse. There a girl whose leg rotted right off her body, there a man poisoned by his wife.

  Charlotte looked again at the crowd and this time she saw their injuries: the swollen necks, the blood glistening on faces and hands. A man tugged at a knife embedded in his chest, a woman fiddled impatiently with dirty bandages wrapped around her head. Some appeared to be unhurt and yet their faces were pallid, their lips blue. Some wept or picked at scabs in disbelief, other beat their chests and tugged handfuls of hair from their heads. Anger and resignation. Fear, despair, hysteria and, for others, exultation. Such a fearsome reverie.

  She closed her eyes and crossed herself. ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . .’

  But when she opened her eyes again, the infernal scene was unchanged. The tall gentleman had by this time stopped talking and was instead watching with desultory interest as three men nearby squabbled over a purse. Among the crowd was a familiar face: that of the boy who had been on the bier in the forest earlier that day.

  ‘Ah!’ the gentleman exclaimed with arch delight. ‘Are we not so aptly named?’

  Charlotte felt sick and her surrounds began to liquefy and whirl. She reached out to steady herself but could gain purchase only on the strange man’s clothing, which she grasped as tightly as she could. So many. Of course there were so many. The Wild Horde. Of course.

  At that moment, Michel – his face as grey and greasy as the afternoon on which he died – emerged from the throng and it seemed to Charlotte that he glimpsed her only momentarily before melting back into the crush. She called his name, reached out, then lost sight of him.

  ‘My husband,’ she whimpered.

  The tall man took her hand to steady her before lowering himself onto one knee so that his great face was level with her own. He was kindly, concerned, so very sympathetic. ‘Your husband?’

  She nodded. It was only then she realised she was sobbing and, judging by the tears already on her cheeks, had been for some time. It happened, this weeping, for often she woke salt-lipped from dreams in which all her children still lived.

  The man smiled. ‘There is always something to say, isn’t there? Apologies, tokens of this or that, last words, reminders, confessions. Ghosts, apparitions, dreams. The call of the endless dead. For they certainly are many.’

  ‘And my poor children? Are they here?’

  The man glanced around, then returned his gaze to her. Charlotte composed herself. ‘My daughters Aliénor and Béatrice died of scarlet fever in the same summer. Their older brother Philippe died in his infancy. The midwife told me it was for lack of milk. Such a tiny thing he was, like a kitten.’

  ‘Why don’t you join us, then?’ the man asked. ‘Come with us and you can spend time with them again, and see your husband. Did you tell him you loved him in time? Did you tell your children?’

  ‘But what of Nicolas?’

  A deep and melancholy shrug. ‘One boy.’

  ‘And are you . . . Who are you, monsieur? Are you the Devil?’

  An indulgent smile and a shake of his head. ‘Oh, no. I am merely the sexton, gathering my dead.’

  ‘Then why would you tempt me so?’

  ‘It is no struggle, surely, when the offer is as sweet as this? I seek to help you, madame. Can you not see for yourself how joyous they look?’

  Charlotte cast her eye over the assembled mob and, yes, she was compelled to acknowledge they appeared happier than many living people she had seen, as if they had been released. ‘But where are you taking them? What is it like there?’

  ‘Oh, madame. You have listened to the curé, I am sure. How to describe it? A grand palace fit for kings and queens. There are numberless rooms, huge lush gardens and sunshine. You would finally know what it is to be liberated from earthly concerns, free of disease and further death. No mourning, no weeping, for it is where all former things have passed away. Beautiful wine, meat, nectar.’

  It sounded beguiling. Charlotte’s shoulder pained her and her heart tolled heavy in her chest. She gazed around. ‘Is it somewhere nearby?’

  ‘No. All those things are much further along. First one must pass through here with me, madame.’

  ‘But my children? Are they . . . ?’

  The man arched an eyebrow and waited for her to finish her question. He glanced around, evidently wearying of her and her womanly hesitations. Then, when she faltered once more under the burden of her sobs: ‘Are they what, woman? Happy? Warm enough on cold nights? Staying clear of those terrible wolves and bears? Is there sunlight and sweetmeats? Angels? Do they grow old or remain exactly as they were when they died? Do they think of you? Long for you? Do they know how often you think of them, how much you pray for their poor, childish souls?’

  Foolish questions, all of them, but yes, that was exactly what she wanted to know.

  At that moment she heard a woman’s voice at her ear, felt a hand pulling at her sleeve. ‘Come with me, chicken. Come. I need you.’ Then, directed to the strange man: ‘Leave her alone. I need this one.’

  There followed an urgent conversation between the fellow and the newly arrived woman but Charlotte was unable to determine the nature of their business. When finally they reached their agreement, the man turned his attention to the crowd as it congregated around a man and woman – husband and wife, perhaps – engaged in a shrill quarrel. The woman struck the man on the chest, much to the crowd’s delight, before she turned her anger on them with her fists balled, calling them sluts and purse-cutters, among other things in languages Charlotte didn’t understand.

  ‘Be on your way, then, Madame Picot,’ the cloaked man muttered as he lumbered to his feet. ‘I am certain we will meet again one day. The time has come to gather my flock.’

  He is Hellequin, Charlotte thought, and she was overcome with wonder and fear. The strange fellow raised one of his hands and, although he did not speak, the clamour subsided and the assembly turned their gleaming faces towards him. Their attention thus commanded, he nodded a curt farewell to her and mounted a large horse that had materialised from the gloom.

  And, with that, the assembly moved off, his horse snorting, bridle clanking, cloak fluttering in the wind. Horns sounded and weapons and implements clattered as the crowd – still grumbling, still laughing and cursing and jeering and weeping and praying – trailed behind him across the chamber in a shuffling, chaotic procession until they disappeared from sight.

  Charlotte remained where she was, a woman’s murmuring voice still at her side, a tugging still at her clothes. These things sensed rather than seen, like seasons or weather, the tides of blood. An old woman with a crown of yellow flowers took her hand and led her in the opposite direction. The riotous clamour of the Wild Horde faded away behind her.

  Soon the floor began to slope slightly upwards. Charlotte felt a fresher breeze upon her cheek. She glimpsed a thread of light near the floor, of sunlight this time, and she pulled ahead of the old woman. She came to a wooden door, its construction and purpose determined easily by feel alone. Charlotte ran her palms all over this door’s splintered surface, searching for its latch. There. She fumbled with it. With effort, for the mechanism was stiff and unyielding, she lifted it and put her shoulder against the door’s considerable weight. But it would not move. The old woman joined her and together they heaved, this time with all their strength. The door opened, at last.

  6

  In the winter months the prisoner yearned to be on the water, and when on the sea chained to his bench, rowing for hours and hours every day, he wished to be back here in the port prison, in the turbid dark, among the dead and almost dead, far from the overseer and his terrible lash.

  He heard the slopping of water in the distance, and the cries of the Mediterranean seagulls, their sound so different to the gulls of his own infinitely more civilised country. Even after all these years, the noise of the birds startled him; on his first few mor
nings here, when he was woken by the cries of the atrocious creatures, he was horrified in his mistaken belief they were, in fact, the hellish shrieks of unwanted babies being disposed of by the angel makers, dozens of them all at once, so many that the docks below must surely be greasy with their infant blood. But that was many years ago, at another port to the west – what was its name? What was its name? Or was it here, after all? He thought on this for a long time, most pleased to have something to ponder, for it filled the long days. What was that place? Famous, he knew, and yet its name pranced mischievously in the outermost shadows of his memory, enjoying its diversion, darting away, reappearing to leer at him before vanishing again. Bah! He shook his head and cast off the thought. Let memory play its foolish games.

  He crouched on his stone ledge in the darkness with his heels drawn up under his arse for warmth. The prison provided a threadbare straw mattress to sleep on, but little else – a paltry blanket, a thin cloak, whatever meagre comfort or sustenance one might buy after the poor-box donations had been distributed among his fellow convicts. There were deals to be done, of course, but any trade with these men was akin to dealing with actual devils. Turks and murderers. No, he thought. Better to make one’s own way.

  The stone of the wall beside him was cold and slick with moss. The chain bolted to his ankle clanked whenever he changed position. The vast room reeked of sweat and shit, of unwashed men, of their scabrous bodies and drooling sores. There was the incessant chitter and squeak of rats.

  He removed his cap of red cloth and ran a hand over his bristly scalp, over the notches and the scars, the fresh wound over his right ear. It was still tender, this most recent one, and encrusted with just-dried blood. He busied himself picking at it, his mouth puckered with pain and concentration. Finally, he tore away the scab. In the meagre light afforded him by the barred window set high into the wall, he inspected it lying in his grubby palm. He sensed the line of blood that trickled down his shorn scalp. Some warmth. At least my blood is still warm. He was most fortunate; the surgeon at the hospital had told him this many times as he bandaged him and treated his wounds with camphored brandy. Several others on his bench were killed in the skirmish. Bourdin didn’t survive, nor the fellow next to him, Sevignon, whose whole arm was severed by grapeshot. The water all around them was soupy with bobbing bodies, lengths of timber, clothes and barrels, pieces of burnt sailcloth. And, oh, the hideous screaming, the wailing of dying men. Was it good fortune to survive such an assault, or bad? Never mind, he thought. Never mind. Never mind. Never mind. The name of the place would come to him eventually. Patience. At least one learned patience in the dungeon. It came with other, much less savoury lessons, naturally, but he steered his mind away from those for now. He pressed a hand to his left cheek to stay its twitching.