by Tim Willocks
Tannhauser recalled the words Guise had shouted in the Rue Béthizy.
‘It is the King’s command.’
‘Right you are, sire,’ agreed Hervé. ‘Kill them all.’
Tannhauser further recalled his own words to Retz.
‘Kill them all,’ repeated Hervé with relish, mimicking what he imagined was a kingly tone. ‘And leave not one of them alive to spit on my mother’s grave, or rape our wives and cut the throats of our children.’ He grinned toothlessly.
Tannhauser mastered an urge to kick him in the throat.
‘I quote his very words, sire. As you know better than me.’
‘Coligny and his captains are dead.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t hear the cheer we raised when we got the news, sire. Coligny and the provincials were a very good beginning, but as Captain Crucé said: “Lads? The rest of them are up to us.”’
‘The rest of them?’
‘The rest of the Huguenots, sire. I can see you’re not a local man, sire, so let me tell you, there are more than you might think. Thousands and thousands of ’em. No man sleeps more than six feet from a prostitute or three feet from a rat, and such is the sorry state of Paris that Huguenots outnumber the whores.’
‘You believe the King wants to kill all the Huguenots of Paris.’
‘All is all, isn’t it, sire?’ asked Hervé. ‘Anything less than all isn’t all at all.’
Tannhauser rode on with Grégoire and Juste at his stirrups.
‘You can count on us, sire! And gramercy for the contribution!’
The Place de Grève was so congested that Tannhauser was obliged to ride around the edge. Charcoal cook fires flourished, into one of which he tossed La Fosse’s list. Hawkers did a brisk trade in food and wine. The number of whores had increased. As a military force the militiamen were a joke. They milled around their district pennants in ill-disciplined clusters. They made a lot of noise. Apart from the white armbands and crosses, no two men wore the same gear or bore the same weapons, which latter they tended to carry as if they were brooms. Fifty Swiss could have driven them into the Seine.
Tannhauser surveyed their faces. He doubted there were two score men among the lot who had ever deliberately taken a life. Hervé the plasterer may have dropped a pallet of bricks on a workmate’s head, but he’d never shoved cold steel into someone’s gut. The militia looked like what they were – five hundred cobblers and candlestick-makers, gossiping in the square about the injustices of life and the particular evils inflicted by the Huguenots. It was Sunday morning, they’d been up half the night, they missed their wives and their beds, and they had no orders. They stank of fear, anger and hatred. They stank of stupidity and bad leadership. Like everything else in the city, they stank of shit.
Despite La Fosse’s list and Hervé’s enthusiasm, he found it hard to believe that a serious attempt could be made to kill the Protestants of Paris. Nothing he had heard from Retz or Arnauld suggested that the King had any such intention, or that any such order would have been conceived, let alone issued. The King had been squeamish enough about killing Coligny. Tannhauser was certain that no such notion had entered the mind of anyone else at the Louvre, any more than it had entered his own, for the simple reason that it would serve no useful purpose and would create a political and financial catastrophe. Retz and Catherine were as amoral as circumstance demanded, but their political guile was not in doubt. For a decade they had outfoxed the best diplomats of half a dozen countries and two empires. The idea of exterminating a large portion of the city’s best educated and most productive citizens – for what? Something as stupid as a spite they didn’t even feel? – would strike them and anyone around them, including even Guise and Anjou, as worse than madness.
Beyond that, the project, in practical terms, was unrealistic. It could be done, but to identify, arrest and execute so many would take days, even weeks. It would need real troops, not this self-glorified rabble. It would require the consent of the governor, Montmorency, a moderate Catholic, along with that of numerous lesser officers, military, civic and legal, who would be no keener than he to stain their reputations with the blood of thousands of decent citizens and their families. It would require that the rule of law be utterly abandoned, with the complicity of Parlement, the magistrates and the lawyers who outnumbered the soldiery. It would require the absolute corruption of an entire society. It would require the most civilised city in the world to embrace an extreme of savagery and shame that, for all the quotidian cruelty of its streets, had to be far beyond its ken. Such insane violence stood at the limit of even Tannhauser’s imagination. And he doubted anyone in Paris had witnessed near as much bloodletting as he; though such ignorance had a double edge.
He understood the grievances of an Hervé. He saw the opportunities for criminals. There would be a rash of robberies and killings. Some private feuds, high and low, would be settled. Death cancelled all sorts of debts. There would be a lot of talk and bravado. No more than that. The King had shown his teeth. He had slaughtered his political foes. He had established his authority. He had preserved the faith of his fathers. Te Deums would be sung, the city would heap him with praise and his subjects would go back to making money.
Applause erupted from the mass of men in the Place de Grève. Tannhauser looked back and saw the gallows. As if to confirm the pettiness of their ambitions, a lone figure convulsed at the end of a rope, his body a blotch against the newly risen sun. He swung back and forth, his legs flailing and his torso bucking, to the accompaniment of jeers. They hadn’t even made a decent job of hanging him.
He despised the men in the square. Yet his only claim to superiority lay in his skill with arms. Like each of them, he was trapped in the squalid cell of his own feelings. The only moral high ground he might stand on was a blood-soaked dunghill.
Despair gnawed on his heart. He felt exhausted. His mind was dulled. Beyond his notion to recover his gear from the printer’s house, he had no plan. Worse, he had no desire, no direction. Without Carla to fire them, such impulses had no meaning. Rage stirred within him but then subsided. There were riddles to solve and debts to settle, but he had no appetite for either. Her death had drained his spirit. He had taken enough revenge to know that, hot or cold, it was a dish that fed only the worst in himself and poisoned what was best. He tried to summon his hatred for her killers. But the square was a lake of hate already and he did not feel inclined to piss in it.
He wanted only to be far away.
Across the river, he saw the hulk of Notre-Dame de Paris.
He rode towards the high tower of Saint-Jacques. At the Rue Saint-Martin he turned south across the Pont Notre-Dame, whose guards watched him approach and lowered the chain without saying a word.
The road across the bridge was flanked on either side by identical terraces of narrow houses, each with a ground-floor shop and two upper floors. The shops were given over to luxury trades and goods. Their signs hung out above the street on long iron rods. Hatters, wig makers, art dealers, feather merchants; importers of Italian finery for women. Though the morning was well advanced, and this was one of the busiest thoroughfares in Paris, the street was deserted. He was sure all the houses were occupied, for while militiamen might leave their wives abed, no shopkeeper ever leaves his stock unguarded, yet of human life there was no sign at all.
Tannhauser found himself back on the island of the City.
Tight streets. Alleys that even Juste would have found a squeeze. Houses on the verge of collapse, some only prevented from doing so by ingenious buttressing. A splendid new townhouse would appear wedged into the midst of the ruling decrepitude. Inns abounded. Hereabouts there was more activity, though the tension was no less palpable. He smelled cooking from taverns and rotisseries. Several establishments had stationed an armed man on the doorstep, some wearing the jackets of the sergents à verge. None appeared very sure of himself. As Tannhauser passed, they nodded, as if in the hope he had come to tell them what was happen
ing and what they ought to do.
The road continued south into what must have been the Left Bank. All that identified the end of the bridge was a squat fort, which Grégoire told him was the Petit Châtelet. At a cross street Tannhauser turned for the cathedral.
Notre-Dame de Paris loomed abrupt and massive, as much a fortress as a church, less a celebration of faith than a demonstration of power. A threat in stone. He would not have called it the most beautiful, but perhaps he had spent too much time in Italy. With the sun at its back, it did not fail to inspire his awe. But he had not come to pray. He craned his neck at the immense height of the two bell towers.
The cramped cathedral square, the Parvis, was the geographical centre of France, or so Juste assured him with the pride of a visitor who had garnered some notable facts. In defiance of the timid quietude elsewhere it was shrill and swarming with whores, beggars, hawkers, poets, jongleurs and buffoons, half of whom at least were thieves or shills. There were gangs of militia, too. They were fewer and less loud than those in the Place de Grève, but their members seemed bred from a nastier bone.
When they saw Tannhauser and his bloodstains, they gave him the nod.
The Parvis was flanked on the south side, along the river, by the hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. Several Hospital Sisters moved among the throng of the maimed, the poor and the monstrously diseased that milled around the gate in the hope of acquiring admittance or food. With expert eyes they picked the truly needy from the many fakers, though even the most fortunate of the bunch were models of wretchedness. One of the latter such petitioners spotted Tannhauser, or the Hospitaller’s cross on his chest, and detached himself. He appeared to have only one leg, though in Paris one could never be sure, and he moved at remarkable speed, his body almost horizontal to the ground, using a pair of short sticks in cankered hands. Before Tannhauser could swing Clementine to swat him aside, the stocky little dog exploded from between her hooves and went for the beggar’s leg without a bark of warning.
The beggar scuttled away, his sticks clacking on the flagstones. The dog stopped, his chest puffed out, gold braid gleaming, and watched him retreat. He wagged his obscene pink tail. He barked in contempt. Grégoire and Juste looked at Tannhauser.
‘As you see, he’s extremely intelligent,’ prompted Juste.
‘Perhaps even more intelligent than Clementine,’ added Grégoire.
‘I doubt any of the three of us are that,’ said Tannhauser. ‘But in Paris, a dog that runs off beggars must be worth a tidy sum. I wonder how much the Hôtel-Dieu would pay? The Hospital Sisters would adore him. Imagine all the time and labour he would save them. Imagine all the soup they’d no longer have to boil.’
Grégoire and Juste exchanged glances of panic.
‘Or,’ said Tannhauser, ‘we could donate him, as an act of Christian charity.’
The dog returned and halted between the two boys. He looked up at Tannhauser, tongue lolling, as if in expectation of some reward.
‘But master, as you see,’ said Juste, ‘we cannot possibly sell him to anyone, or even give him away as an act of Christian charity, until all his hair has grown back.’
‘It’s true,’ agreed Grégoire. ‘The sisters would never take in a bald dog.’
‘A fair point,’ conceded Tannhauser. ‘I can think of no religious order that would accept a bald dog. Until his hair grows back, then. Give him some affection so he knows he did us a service.’
The boys petted the dog and exchanged winks of triumph and relief.
‘What have you decided to call him?’
Juste said, ‘He’s called Lucifer.’
‘That would certainly dismay the gentle sisters.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘I worry I’m neglecting your moral education.’
‘Master, I have never learned so much so quickly. Grégoire, too, I’m sure.’
‘Master, it’s true. You are a fine teacher.’
‘You can learn a lot from a dog, too,’ added Juste.
‘Keep your eyes and ears open,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Much of what you hear will be rumour, fantasy and lies, but pick up what fact you can. Say little, preferably nothing. Today every step we take, every word we speak, might betray us.’
The dog yapped at Tannhauser.
‘That’s a big name for a small dog.’
‘He is small,’ agreed Grégoire. ‘But he survived the fire.’
There was food to be had in the square and Tannhauser dismounted and bought a warm loaf for the boys. They tore it apart with such ardour he bought a pair of roast pigeons, still hot and threaded on sticks, to go with it. He watched them eat. The lads were so hungry it wasn’t until the food was half gone that Grégoire thought to give a morsel to Lucifer, beyond which point the dog enjoyed the best of both their rations.
Grégoire pointed out a corral in a side street and there they left Clementine. As they approached the façade of the cathedral, Tannhauser scanned the multitude of arcane figures and hieroglyphs with which the grand portal had originally been adorned. Many had been erased by hammer blows inflicted by priests who, though ignorant of their meaning, had learned that they spoke from the Hermetic rather than the Christian tradition. Other icons had been smashed by Huguenot fanatics.
Tannhauser entered through the portal of the Last Judgement.
He crossed himself with Holy Water but spared himself the misery of genuflection. After the bright sun it seemed dark inside and Tannhauser waited for his eyes to adjust. The first thing he saw was a wickerwork crib in which lay three babies, none above a month old. Tannhauser felt a lump of pain in his chest. He turned away.
The rearmost pews of the cathedral were colonised by prostitutes, of either sex and to suit every taste. At least two were currently in flagrante, bending over the benches in front of the panting clients while various of their colleagues watched, though whether this was out of boredom or because they had been paid to do so, he could not tell. At the far end of the church a service was taking place behind the rood screen, but the distance was so great that neither business interrupted the other.
‘I was born in that crib,’ said Grégoire.
‘Your mother’s loss was our gain.’
Tannhauser surveyed the vast and enchanted interior, in which each stone had been carved and placed to embody its own several and particular meanings. Petrus Grubenius had believed that the whole structure had been built, on the principles of sacred geometry, as a single gigantic alchemical vessel – that is, not only as a crucible, though it was that, or as a text which transcended words, though it was that, too, but as a cosmic ship on a voyage to the time beyond Time, and whose spiritual pilot was Hermes Trismegistus. Tannhauser felt that boys might by stirred by this notion.
He said, ‘If we accept – as Petrus Grubenius did, and as do one or two adepts within the Hospitallers – that the Mass is a manifestation of the Magnum Opus, and that the seven sacraments symbolise alchemical processes, whose goal is at once the transmutation of matter into spirit and of spirit into matter, then Notre-Dame de Paris does indeed become our Mother, the sacred centre, the womb from whence we might be reborn into enlightenment.’
Grégoire and Juste looked up at him with perfect politeness. He appreciated it. He needed, for a moment, to feel that he was more than he knew himself to be.
‘The mysteries of which the best of us once were masters will never be understood again, not in all the world’s turning. We’re doomed to grope in twilight, forever trying to persuade ourselves it is dawn. We come here in desperation, kings, killers, babies, whores, hoping to breathe some essence of the Divine, but the most we can take away is an inkling of how much we have lost. Yet, I’m certain that these babes see farther than the wisest man. That’s the root of your distinction, Grégoire. Once, you too saw so far.’
‘But, master, I can’t remember seeing anything.’
‘Your mind has forgotten but your spirit has not. Now, can you tell me how to climb the north bell tower?’
Grégoire took him to a door but the door was locked.
‘Can I help you, my lord?’
Tannhauser turned to look at the speaker.
The speaker had done so over his shoulder, for he was a burly young brute and he was busy pissing against the cathedral wall. The general stench suggested he was no lone offender. As he finished and put himself away, Lucifer trotted over towards him.
Tannhauser tapped both boys on the shoulders.
‘He’s your dog. You look out for him.’
Lucifer sniffed with scorn and cocked a leg. The burly one took a half step backwards, to get a good swing into his kick.
‘Sirrah! That’s our dog!’ shouted Juste.
‘Don’t hurt him!’ added Grégoire.
The burly one looked at the boys and mimed his regret that they enjoyed protection. He looked at Tannhauser. Cherubic but brutal features, a face not merely shaped by, but born to, a world of vice. The corruption ran so deep he could have been as young as fifteen or ten years older. Tannhauser recognised him, and vice versa, but he couldn’t place the face. The cherub smiled.
‘If your Excellency wants a bit of privacy with his boys, in the stairwell there, I can arrange it. I can arrange all sort of things that might please you.’
Tannhauser considered himself within his rights to kill him there and then, even, given that he judged them within the narthex, inside Notre-Dame during Sunday Mass. But, as if the greasy tone of the pimp’s voice were a trumpet call, two wretched children tottered from the shadows. Vermilion daub made harsh gashes of their mouths, and their eyes had been driven deep into their skulls by something more hurtful than pain, something more lasting than grief, something more degrading than terror. They were the same twin girls that the same pimp had tried to sell the day before. The pimp, whose business it was to recall both faces and predilections, held his palm out behind him.