by Tim Willocks
As the dogs on fire spread their fever to the crowded parlour, Altan guided Carla down to shelter in one front corner of the hall. Carla heaved for breath in the sulphurous air.
Yet more dogs appeared.
These dogs were not ablaze but were almost as panicked and surely more enraged. They were tossed through the ground-floor windows at the front and rear – six dogs? Eight? – street curs of indeterminate breed, small in size but large in energy. They hurtled about and up and down in a deranged tintamarre, barking in terror and confusion. From the parlour above Carla heard the voices competing in terror – in pleas, in prayer – dog goading human and human goading dog into a lunacy of fear absolute.
Nor was Altan Savas immune. His head twitched from side to side, eyes glazed as if waiting for ranks of demons to emerge from the walls.
Carla hit him hard across the cheek. Her hand stopped dead, as when one slaps the hindquarters of a horse, but Altan blinked and his senses returned.
‘Thank you, madame.’
He stood to one side of the door, watching the hinges come loose. From the darkness upstairs came a renewed burst of distress. With a suddenness that made Carla jump, the door flew inwards and crashed to the floor. A man lunged in right behind it, off balance, carried by the momentum of his last hammer stroke.
‘Allaaahu akabar.’
Altan Savas chopped him through the nape of the neck and would have severed his head but that he pulled the stroke in order to dash on through the blood spray to swarm the second of the hammer men. In the space of a heartbeat Altan stabbed him four times, dagger and sword, in the gut, chest, throat, then stepped back as he glanced across the street. Three bodies lay on the baked dirt, pierced by arrows, one still mewling, clutching his leaking belly. Carla realised Altan must have shot them from the windows above while she was playing. Something whistled by and cracked and careened around the hallway but Carla heard no gunshot.
Altan pegged his sword in the doorjamb and belted his dagger and unslung his bow and produced and nocked an arrow with movements no less swift and precise than those of Carla’s fingers on the frets. Across the street she glimpsed a figure make an overarm throw with a sling. She retreated, face to the wall, and again came the whistle and the crack of the stone. Altan Savas swung into the gap, the horn bow flexing, the arrow coming up to the aim. He loosed from the ivory thumb ring and she couldn’t help but peer around the door.
The slinger was on his knees, his hands cupped before his chest from which blood spouted like wine from a skin. The arrow quavered in the timbers of the building ten feet behind him. He fell forward onto his face and didn’t move.
Altan had already knocked and drawn again, aiming at some target she could not see. But at the last moment he swivelled back inside and Carla flinched and ducked back into the shadows as the broad head tip of the drawn arrow swung in her direction. Altan swooped the arrow tip up above her head and levelled it again.
Or tried to.
Later she wondered if the swoop had cost his life. And so much more.
Glass crunched behind her. She was deafened by the roar of a gun.
Flame and powder smoke blasted Altan Savas in the face.
He was thrown over backwards. The arrow vanished behind her. An enormous figure charged past her and fell astraddle Altan’s body, a knife rising and falling as if to kill some fabled creature known to be immortal. But Carla knew from the way he had fallen that Altan had died the instant he was shot. The ringing in her ears faded. The enormous shoulders stopped stabbing. He stood up and looked down at his victim.
‘Hellfire. Even so, he nearly killed me.’
Despite the shock in his voice, it was the deepest Carla had ever heard.
He didn’t turn.
She realised it was his head and shoulders that gave the impression of a giant. He was over average height but not as tall as Mattias, and, apart from his feet, which were huge, his lower half was of reasonable proportion. His shoulders and head were those of a man who might otherwise have been twice the size. He looked out of the front door, his back still towards her, and she caught sight of the immense lower jawbone. A thick gold ring pierced his ear, as if in some defiant act of vanity; or to dare someone to take it. A pair of crazed dogs slithered through the weltered gore and careened between his legs, snapping at each other in their desperation to escape the deranged women and wailing children, the barking and the broken glass and the stench of burning hair.
The killer waved a two-barrelled wheel-lock pistol across the street, smoke curling from one muzzle. He bellowed into the night.
‘The Turk is dead. We’re in. Bring up the carts.’ He glanced at Altan’s corpse and murmured, ‘If there’s enough left to pull them.’ He bellowed again: ‘I want to be gone by first light.’
He shoved his bloody knife into the back of his belt and looked down again at Altan. He shook his head as if counting his luck. He belted his pistol and stooped and took the ivory ring from Altan’s thumb. He looked at it curiously, then tried to slip it over his own. It didn’t fit. He slid it over his little finger and seemed pleased with the trophy. He turned and looked at Carla.
His features were not deformed in design, yet his nose, his lips, the heavy ridges of his cheekbones and brows were so huge, so overgrown, that the effect was grotesque. His eyes were deep-set and dark. Strangest of all, he gave off something of the air of a monstrous boy. Perhaps it was the disproportion of his head; perhaps something inside him. The Infant of Cockaigne.
‘Six. Six of my young lions your Turk has killed.’
Carla remembered a principle that Mattias had pressed upon her, and how hard it had been to accept it. To appear weak invites the fate of the weak, and that fate is to be crushed without pity by the strong. She closed her senses to the blood gluing her shoes to the tiles, to the foul smoke, to the chaos, animal and human, echoing around her. She took a deep breath.
‘Monsieur Grymonde, I regret he didn’t kill you all.’
Grymonde’s mouth opened. He put his fists on his hips. He didn’t reply.
‘I am Carla, whom you call the lady from the south.’
Grymonde sought some adequate response. He failed and scowled at Altan.
‘And who was he?’
‘Altan Savas was my protector, and my husband’s brother-in-arms, and in both respects to be reckoned a man among men.’
‘Where is he, this brave husband?’
Her last coin was her courage. She wagered it.
‘Harm me further and he’ll give you cause to curse the day you were born.’
Grymonde twiddled the ivory ring on his finger.
‘I already have such causes. Why not another?’
‘That ring is not made for any gaudy purpose. It enables the drawing of the bowstring, though few can boast the strength to draw that one.’
Grymonde stooped and levered the horn bow from Altan’s grip. He hefted it and grunted. By the way he handled it, Carla knew he was no archer, and he was canny enough not to accept her challenge. He slung the bow across his shoulder and grinned.
‘The lady from the south has sauce, I’ll give her that.’
Carla’s baby shifted inside her. Her womb cramped.
‘Your arm, monsieur, if you will.’
She stepped from the shadows and Grymonde saw her figure for the first time. The deep-set eyes swam with sudden emotion, as sudden to him as it was to her.
‘The Devil take my eyes, you’re quick with child.’
Though she didn’t need to, Carla took hold of Grymonde’s arm and leaned on it. His hand looked big enough to hold a gallon of pears. He gave off a smell so strange that she was lost for a compari-son. His skin was filmed with a greasy exudation and was coarse without being pocked. She did not break his gaze. At this moment there was only one ally worth having, and that was Grymonde. If by small increments she could appoint him her defender, her defender he would become. The more her defender he became, the harder he would find it to retreat fr
om that role.
‘Help me outside. I want to take some air.’
She took a step towards the threshold. Grymonde supported her weight and stepped with her. She felt Antoinette clutching her skirt. They were outside.
As if chewing on an unforeseen dilemma, Grymonde said, ‘You’re pregnant.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Our intention was to kill the lot of you.’
‘Clearly you don’t want to kill me, or my unborn babe.’
Grymonde pursed massive lips. She did not blink.
‘So why would you? Are you not master here? The king of thieves?’
‘Do you mock me or appeal to my vanity?’
‘I speak for what I see in your heart.’
‘I am not ruled by my heart.’
‘If I may be so bold –’
Grymonde laughed.
‘– I don’t believe that’s true.’
He stared at her, and she wondered if she had gone too far.
To mask his abashment he turned to rally his decimated crew.
‘Gather round, gather round my bold and faithful blackguards. It’s time to reap the harvest we have sown. And no appetite here’s so gaudy it won’t be gorged.’
A rabble of youths congregated from every direction, some from behind the Hôtel D’Aubray. There were more than the nine that six dead should have left, but some were too young to be counted men, even in this crew. Their clothes were improvised from multicoloured rags and hides. Most walked barefoot in the filth as if to go otherwise would be unnatural to their breed. Their faces were scarred, ingrained, with the violence of utmost poverty. Some were scorched and stank of naphtha and burned hair. All wore strips of white cloth tied around one arm. They dragged with them half a dozen two-wheeled carts of the type one saw at markets.
They were in a state of high excitement, sweating with uncontainable energies, sniggering to mask their shock at their slaughtered mates. They were alive in the midst of death and wielding fire in the night, come to spill blood and spread fear, to seek plunder, to scratch some proof of their wretched existence on the cheeks of the world, to hold their betters at the tips of their knives, their every waking dream come true.
Yet their jubilation was muted as they awaited Grymonde’s permission to explode.
Carla had lived among armies. She had a sense of the diverse and powerful forces required to bind men together and to hold them to a common purpose. That force was Grymonde. His army was a crowd of tatterdemalions, hardly better knit than a common mob. Carla saw only one among them who appeared much over twenty years old. He seemed disinclined to smile. He had an ugly V-shaped scar branded into his forehead to mark him a thief. All except he held Grymonde in awe.
‘Send for a chair,’ said Carla. ‘If you’d be so kind.’
‘What?’ said Grymonde.
‘A chair, I feel faint. And a cup of wine. You’ll find both in the kitchen.’
‘Joco! A chair and a cup of wine from the kitchen.’
Joco, the one branded a thief, gestured to two lesser minions.
‘Papin. Bigot.’
As they two ran into the house they had to wade through the pack of dogs which had gathered in the hallway to lap up the blood. The dogs snapped at their bare ankles and the other tatterdemalions laughed.
Joco sneered at Carla. She felt his hatred. He saw what she was doing and it galled him. The more Grymonde took her part, the less would he feel able to retreat from that choice in front of his gang, especially if challenged. If she was to gamble on such a throw, she had to gamble all. She arched one brow of scorn at Joco to provoke him further. Joco bared his teeth at her. He threw his hand out towards Grymonde.
‘Are we here to slaughter these pigs or to wait on them like slaves?’
‘The pigs are ready for slaughter because I killed the boar.’
‘If it’s the baby that troubles you,’ said Joco, ‘I can cut it out of her stomach before we rape her. It’s been done before.’
Sniggers and exaggerated groans. Grymonde’s eyes silenced them.
‘Poor Joco is sad because poor Gobbo, his brother, is dead –’ began Grymonde.
‘Have you seen what they done to him?’
‘Gobbo is dead because he did not do as he was told. If Joco does not do as he is told, he will be dead, too. So will you all. Is this but a game we play here?’
Grymonde looked about him, enormous palms outspread and quite the performer. His audience was spellbound. None dared answer. At the climax of his turn he rested his gaze on Carla and she realised that the question was for her. She sensed his bizarre glamour. It might in another circumstance have repelled her, but she needed it. She needed to embrace his charm, for men love few things more than to believe they have it. And it would help her charm him. She dared. She smiled.
‘Perhaps so.’
‘Perhaps so, says the lady. Why not? What brave man – or lady – does not love a game? None more than me. But if game it be, let all be warned – and let these dead comrades testify – it is a dangerous one.’
‘What right game is not?’ said Carla.
Grymonde clapped his hands in delight. The sound was like a gunshot.
‘The Lady Carla shames you all. Papin, give the chair to Joco.’
Papin had just braved the dog pack with a chair, Bigot was close behind carrying a pewter cup. Papin proffered the chair in his hands to Joco. Joco ignored him.
A smouldering dog, the one Altan Savas had hacked, its body gaping open behind the shoulder, hobbled over the threshold on three legs. It leaned against Joco’s calf, as if in the blind hope of procuring comfort. Joco kicked it in the chest. The dog skittered and whimpered and fell panting on its side. The boys laughed.
‘I’ll shove that chair up her, one leg at a time,’ said Joco, ‘but I’ll not wait on her.’
Papin looked to Grymonde.
‘Papin. Bigot, you, too.’
Grymonde waved them over. He took the chair in one enormous fist and with an elaborate twirl set it down for Carla. With a bow he indicated that she sit, which she did. She laid one hand on her stomach. With the other she smoothed her braid and pulled it down across her breast. With another bow, Grymonde offered the cup of wine.
She took it.
‘Thank you, monsieur.’
‘You have your chair, your wine. May we proceed?’
Carla pointed at the burned and bleeding dog.
‘That poor creature did you a service. You owe it more than cruelty.’
Grymonde pulled back his vast shoulders. He frowned.
‘Did you hear that, Joco? We are in debt to a dying dog.’
Joco twitched. The door was open but he knew not how to walk through it.
‘I am in debt to no dog though much is owed me. Gobbo’s share, too.’
Grymonde stooped to pick up a sledgehammer. His palm enclosed close to a quarter of the shaft. He altered his grip for the balance.
‘A double share? On what grounds? Did you and Gobbo write wills before going to war? Like the soldiers of David?’
‘David who?’ asked Joco.
‘Carla, the noble lady from the south, is right. This dog served us well. Just as the foxes served Samson against the Philistines.’
The hammer swished down as if it weighed no more than a fly-whisk and crushed the dog’s spine just behind the skull. He looked at Joco.
‘Do you know who Samson was?’
Joco grimaced with effort. ‘Didn’t Jesus raise him from the dead?’
‘No, no,’ said Papin. ‘That was Lazarus. Samson kicked the Jews out of the temple, then pulled the roof down with his bare hands.’
‘And the Philistines crucified him right next to Jesus. Didn’t they?’ said Bigot.
A babble of competing theories arose. Grymonde looked at Carla.
‘Now you see why these poor children need a father.’
He put his free hand on the head of the hammer and rammed the butt into Joco’s gut. Joco folded over,
too winded to make a sound. The babbling stopped.
‘Now I will show you all why you must obey him.’
Grymonde swung the hammer into Joco’s ribs where they met the backbone.
Carla didn’t flinch at the crack and the woeful groan. Others did.
‘Now we will watch Joco eat the dog.’
Grymonde seized Joco by the back of the skull with one hand and dragged him on his hands and knees and crammed his face into the carcass of the dead dog.
‘Eat the dog, Joco, before the maggots get here. Bite. Chew. Swallow.’
Joco struggled and Grymonde stubbed the hammer into the small of his back, pinning him, forcing his mouth open and into the scorched mass of pink and blackened flesh, the burned hide sloughing off in sheets and reefing up around his nostrils until he had to open his mouth to gasp for air.
‘Chew, you turd. Swallow that tasty morsel. Eat I say.’
Joco gnawed a charred mouthful and swallowed.
Carla saw Estelle, the rat girl, watching Grymonde. Clotted in soot and blood, she looked like a rag doll recovered from the ruins of a sacked town. She was the only female in this bestial company and Carla wondered why she was included. Earlier, the girl’s awe of Grymonde had been evident. Now, in her eyes, Carla saw that she adored him. Her love made the scene that she witnessed all the more perverse. Estelle turned her head and looked at her. Her eyes changed.
They burned with hatred.
Carla realised the girl was jealous. She saw her as a rival for Grymonde.
Carla felt her baby move inside her. She felt his curiosity, the lust for adventure she had helped instil in him. She put her hand on his backbone, to calm him, to send him to sleep, to let him know that this was not the time to be curious, that he should wait inside her for adventures less hazardous than these. A contraction clenched her womb and tightened its grip. It tightened for longer than any she had known before it. She felt vast natural forces rise within her, yet seemingly from far beyond her – from the earth, from Time – forces capable of any extreme without regard for her wishes or feelings, without respect for the bounds of her body or the peril around her.