by Tim Willocks
‘You can mix them proper for the reading.’
Carla realised the shuffle wasn’t required. She turned up the first card.
Alice said: ‘Love.’
Carla blinked. She hadn’t expected so powerful a subject to leap out. The image showed a blindfolded Cupid above a wedding couple. But it belonged to some other time and place, not this. She put it face down on the table and turned again.
‘The Wheel of Fortune.’
Carla discarded it and turned up a grim, battlemented tower.
‘The Fire.’
‘The Juggler.’
‘The Emperor.’
‘The Moon.’
‘The Star.’
‘The Devil.’
‘The Traitor.’
‘Strength.’
A woman closing the mouth of a lion. Carla paused. She discarded.
‘The Sun.’
‘The Chariot.’
Carla turned again and knew she had found her quester. A woman in a blood-red gown stood on top of a green circle, which floated on a mass of blue clouds. Inside the circle were mountains and on the mountains fortified towns. She held a sceptre and a golden globe, and behind her head was a scalloped silver halo. The woman’s balance seemed precarious, as if the earth, which Carla took the circle to be, were turning beneath her feet; but she hadn’t fallen off. Not yet.
‘This is the card. I chose a red dress to wear when I met Mattias. The circle is a kind of womb. And she certainly has a good view.’ She showed Alice. ‘Who is she?’
‘She is Anima Mundi. The Soul of the World. A bold choice.’
Carla heard note of warning; but the day had forced such choices.
‘Hold your question in your mind and mix the cards as I did. When they get heavy, stop and let me gather them.’
Carla pooled the cards on the table and swirled them about. She closed her eyes to compose her question. Her mind swam with so many, but one theme dominated. Her baby. Orlandu. Mattias. Her family. Would they ever be reunited? Would Mattias ever hold their child in his arms? She let a vision of them all together form. Other figures, mere shapes, joined the family. Mattias had tears on his face, she hoped of happiness. She felt the cards drag on the wood and stopped mixing. Alice gathered the deck.
‘Cut with your left hand. We’ll see what Anima Mundi sees.’
Carla’s hand hovered over the deck as she felt a flutter of dread. Alice sat with her hands in her lap, her body slumped, her eyes on the Soul of World. She paid Carla no heed. Carla cut the cards. Alice took the remainder and drew the first card.
‘The Judgement, reversed.’
Carla watched Alice take in the elaborate image, its many figures. She seemed to have emptied her mind, as if waiting for words to arise from the void. At last Alice spoke.
‘Weighed in the balance and found wanting.’
She turned the card right way up and Carla, her dread rising, saw it clearly. Two angels, with green wings and crimson tunics, hung from the clouds and blew on silver trumpets. Below them, seven naked men and women clambered from the vaults of a red tomb. Some threw up their arms in joy; others covered their nakedness in guilt or doubt. Carla bit her tongue, not daring to break the mood. The card told her at least one thing she already knew: she should never have come to Paris. Yet if she hadn’t, she would not be here with Alice, and here was the only place she wanted to be.
Alice drew again.
‘The Fire.’
The dark, massive tower in the painting evoked Carla’s memories of the Siege. She had waded those ramparts in gore-sodden skirts and given her heart to the dying. One side of the tower was falling, its slabs melting, sliding apart, and what Carla took to be flames leaked out from between the stones, though the artist had rendered them like streams of blood, as if such had mortared them together. A tall, black archway gave into the base of the tower. More red flowed from its threshold and pooled without. Carla was appalled.
‘And so is Limbo rendered. And all our chains of brass in piecemeal broken.’
Carla almost told Alice to stop; she sensed who the next card would be; but he could not be stopped. Perhaps in so dark a drama as this, only he could come to her aid. Alice turned towards her and their eyes met. Her face was slack and dreamy.
She drew Death and placed the card without looking at him.
‘I need nor gold nor riches, nor favour of princes nor popes, for the world is mine. And come I early, or come I late, all of you who live now will dance with me.’
Alice turned back to the draw. So did Carla. She waited for Alice to explain why the tale was not quite so terrible after all; but the old woman weighed the cards in silence.
‘Judgement, Fire and Death,’ said Carla. ‘For a moment I was afraid I’d draw something dire. But I have a formidable champion. And he too rides a wild horse.’
She pointed at the skeleton, delirious in his white ribbon and bright yellow robe.
‘See, he charges back towards the Fire.’
‘Choosing Anima Mundi as your quester was bold enough – and she for her part hasn’t minced the matter – but to claim Death as your champion might be rash.’
‘I jest to ease my dread, and, please, forgive me for disturbing your muse.’
‘Tell me your question.’
‘I want to see my husband’s face when he holds our child. I want to be with my family again. What must I do – how should I be – in order to get there?’
Alice looked at the draw. She pursed her lips. She raised and dropped one brow.
The pang seized Carla with no warning. Its power was immediate and it knocked the breath from her. The pain was excruciating. She held onto the table without a sound. She doubled over and the pressure on her hips was so great she sank into a squat. She heaved for breath. The contraction bent her to its will. She let go of the table and went onto her hands and knees. She let out a groan that rose from the ground of her being. She waited for the intensity to crescendo, but it continued to rise. Her elbows sagged and her belly touched the floor and she pushed her arms out straight again to raise it. She breathed and groaned again. She sensed Alice lumbering about. Death galloped through her mind on his crazed black horse, and his grin was so ridiculous she would have joined him in laughing had she been able. She groaned again. She imagined she sensed the pang waning, then realised it wasn’t, then realised it was. She felt a rumour of nausea and readied herself to vomit. The nausea passed. The pang passed. She panted on all fours on the kitchen floor.
She heard Alice’s breathing and felt her hand rest on her back.
‘Stay where you are, love. All’s well.’
Carla would not have believed anyone else in the world.
‘Let’s see how far we’re along. Steady now, naught to be afeard of. Breathe.’
Carla nodded with gratitude and made herself breathe steadily. She felt Alice take the skirts of her gown and roll them up around her waist. She kept her eyes closed.
‘You’ll feel my fingers and a cooling lotion. Oils of almond and lilies.’
Carla felt Alice’s fingers slip inside her. There was no discomfort, rather, she felt soothed. The fingers were strong, decisive; they knew their work. They probed more deeply.
‘Grand,’ announced Alice. She withdrew her hand. ‘Life Her-own-self is proud of you, so let her be your champion. Are you able to get up?’
She heard Alice’s heavy breaths, each itself a labour.
‘Yes, perfectly, I’m fine. I don’t need help.’
Carla felt a tug of embarrassment that she had succumbed so abjectly. She knelt upright and used her hands on the table to stand up. She brushed her skirts down.
‘The matrix is taken up and dissolved entire,’ said Alice. ‘The womb gapes by a good two fingers and the head is well down. We couldn’t hope for better signs. But don’t be pushing yet, not for a good while. You need to preserve your strength. It’s time we settled down in the birthing room. Can you climb a set of stairs?’
�
�Of course.’ Carla was more concerned that Alice had to climb them, but didn’t say so. She smiled. ‘I don’t believe we finished off those pears.’
‘Carla, you’re a woman after this old woman’s heart, and being as it’s a stony one, rarely has she found it in her to say as much. We’ll make some tea and do for them pears, and then we’ll birth a fine strong babe.’
‘And the cards?’
Alice flapped a hand at the fateful draw.
‘This old she-wolf couldn’t have read them better herself. Claim Death for your champion. Charge towards the Fire.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the Land of God
TANNHAUSER TOOK FOUR arrows in his left fist, along with the bow, grabbed two more in his right, and nocked a seventh arrow to the string. He listened to the militia clatter through the front door. He listened to the momentary quiet as they took in the sight of the eyeless, the limbless and the disembowelled. He listened to a hum of murmuring, their whispers concealing everything but their fear. The bold spirit with which their enterprise had begun had fled them as soon as they crossed the threshold. Tannhauser wondered if he had overplayed his hand, but after taking a moment to rally, and invoking the names of various local saints, the militia charged up the stairs through the bloody fog.
Tannhauser retreated into Daniel Malan’s bedroom.
The bedroom was windowless and stifling. Tannhauser felt something drop on his boot and looked down. Clots of blood were draining from his apron. He wiped sweat from his brow. Their most aggressive men would be at the front, possibly one at the back to keep the rest honest. Their most dangerous should be on the roof. He heard them find the man whose privates were pinned to the floor. He heard oaths of vengeance. He heard one suggest they let the unknown killers be, for clearly they were barbarous and many. He heard that man shouted down, though the shouters were few. He heard their curses and prayers as they dashed through the shower of gore still draining from the actors.
The stairwell enjoyed good light from the windows overlooking the street. The militia were forced into single file as they started up the narrow final staircase. They could not see him. He was calm for there was nothing left to do except the things that were going to be done. At last, and for a moment, life in Paris was simple.
During his youth at the Enderun janissary school he had been trained in the Turkish bow style, using a thumb draw and loosing down the outer side of the bow. It allowed for a faster nock, especially for the second and third arrows in his right hand. Since he didn’t have a thumb ring, the modest draw weight of Frogier’s bow was a boon.
In the vanguard of the assault force was a heavy-set customer carrying a sword and wearing a helmet and breastplate. Behind him came a second man in helmet and cuirass who extended the shaft and winged blade of a spontone ahead of the first, as if in some primitive battle formation. The bodkins would more than likely pierce the plate, but at this distance there was no reason to gamble. When the first man reached the second step from the top and raised his foot, Tannhauser moved to the doorway and at a range of six feet from his knuckles he shot him in the face.
The bodkin bored through the inner angle of the first man’s right eye and knocked off his helmet as it burst from the left rear quadrant of his skull. Sixty pounds of bow strength exploded through the holes in his head and threw him into the arms of the second militiaman, who dropped his spontone. Tannhauser shot this second man below the helmet, too, a right-cheek hit, angled downward, which erupted below his left jaw with such force that the arrowhead was buried in the plaster and lath of the wall beside him.
Tannhauser nocked again and stepped out to the wooden balustrade.
Below him there were seven men, crammed into a line that stretched from the landing by the kitchen to the two who blocked the top of the stair in a tangle of limbs. They were all of them bespattered with the blood of the slaughtered actors and they all knew they were cursed by it. In a poor position from which to attack, they were too afraid of cowardice to run, until it was too late; which very moment had arrived.
Tannhauser cocked the bow over the rail and leaned into the stairwell and shot the farthest in line – the seventh, by the kitchen – between the backbone and the right shoulder blade. The bodkins had greater penetration than a musket ball. The crimsoned shaft erupted from his chest. The shooting angle was so steep that to miss the vitals was difficult. His next arrow punched the sixth man through the breastbone and hammered him belching gore to his knees. He shot the fifth through the root of the neck at so vertical an angle that the shaft slid into his body as far as the fletching. As he nocked and drew again he heard the creak of the roof ladder behind him. The fourth man in line scrambled over the pierced and groaning bodies of his comrades. Tannhauser dropped him with another steep shot through the upper back, into which the arrow’s feathers vanished altogether.
Tannhauser stooped towards the Italian spontone that the second man had dropped when his head had been skewered to the wall. The spearhead was a twelve-inch double-edged blade, much like a broadsword’s, but at the base were two scalloped and sharpened wings for cutting and trapping. A kind of trident with truncated side blades. The shaft was hexagonal and shod with three strips of iron. The butt was socketed into a spiked steel counterweight, its narrow tip bevelled like a chisel. Tannhauser grabbed the shaft in a double overhand grip, still holding the bow and his last arrow in his left.
He saw the nearest of the three surviving militiamen wrestle to escape downwards past the man below him on the stair, who, to his credit, remained eager to reach the fight.
Tannhauser turned and marked the man coming down the ladder from the roof: another helmet and cuirass, and the creaking was no wonder for he was hefty. He saw Pascale slip from her room, her gap-toothed mouth twisted in a snarl. The man on the ladder jerked and bellowed and dropped his sword as she slid the butcher’s knife between the rungs and under the rim of his breastplate and sawed the blade in and out of his lower gut. The man grabbed at Pascale’s forearm and fumbled for his dagger.
His steel back plate didn’t leave much choice. Tannhauser swung his hips into the rise of the spear, powering the blade of the spontone through the crack in the man’s arse and up through the bone ring of the pelvis to rupture the bladder and bowels. Tannhauser hoisted and with a shriek to break glass, the gutted man toppled sideways into Daniel Malan’s bedroom. Tannhauser freed the spear and looked over his shoulder.
The fighter on the stair had struggled up past both the escapee and the man still nailed to the wall by his face. He clambered over the corpse of the very first of the slain, a rapier poised to thrust, but yet out of range Tannhauser rammed the spontone’s spiked steel counterweight through his right eye. He dropped the pole and the fighter tilted sideways as his head was dragged down by the weight. The fighter grabbed the pole and tried to pull it from his skull but the blade snagged in the planking. He tried to jerk his impaled head from the spike, grunting and convulsing, his good eye rolling, but the skull bones gripped tight to the steel and he flopped from side to side like a gaffed fish.
‘Christ, the captain’s down,’ called a voice from above. ‘Where are the rest of you?’
Tannhauser looked up through the trapdoor and nocked the last of the arrows in his hand. Sunlight from the unseen roof hatch fell across the lower half of someone holding a sword by his leg. He didn’t seem inclined to dare the ladder. Tannhauser shot him just below the buckle of his belt. The strength of the bow and the stiletto head propelled the arrow through a dozen coils of intestine and beyond all chance of revocation. The man clutched the feathers in his belly. He screamed, more with horror at the knowledge of what was inside him than with the pain that hadn’t yet arrived. He staggered and his left foot plunged though the trapdoor and he hung there suspended and squalling, the point of his own sword now impaled through his thigh.
Tannhauser had three unused arrows in the laundry basket. He laid the bow alongside them. He grabbed the pole of the spontone and j
erked the speared man up from his knees and levered him sideways over the balustrade, the shaft rotating in the wound, the cheekbones and the side of his skull cracking open as he screamed and the weight of his body plucked him from the spike. He fell to join the already damned below.
Tannhauser checked his rear before reversing the spear to be sure he didn’t harm Pascale. She had armed herself with a sword. He was about to warn her to be careful when she shot him a furious glance and he held his tongue.
The wounded and the dead were heaped in a puling, squirming pile that jammed the lower end of the stairway with their bulk, their spasms, their tangled limbs and groping fingers. There were only two unharmed militiamen left, hedged in between the blood-soaked barricades below them and above. The skewered wretch, choking on his swelling tongue, still clawed the blood-drenched plaster to which he was affixed. Tannhauser stomped on his face with his heel and the arrow that nailed him snapped off at the wall and the body flopped backwards.
Tannhauser trod on him, one hand on the timber rail that had proved so stout, and struck down and out with the full six-foot length of the spontone at the next man, who was pressed against the wall of the stairway, shaking from the knees with his arms clutched over his ears as if to block out the cries of woe that echoed around him. The weight of the pole drove the spontone through his armpit to the depth of its wings and breached the lungs as if his chest had been a wicker basket. Tannhauser hauled the spontone free and let the tip drop and used the pole to vault down across the corpse.
There remained only the runner. He was crawling over the morass of bloody bodies, his legs jellied with terror, shouting to the Holy Virgin for deliverance. Tannhauser stabbed him through the nape and detached his spine from the skull.
Tannhauser leaned on the pole. He wasn’t breathless but he took a breath. While there was still a deal of writhing and groaning to be quieted, by his own strict reckoning he had brought down eleven men in less than a minute. He speared three bodies that still showed signs of life and a fourth who did not but who roused his suspicions. Then, for the sake of so little extra effort, he impaled the rest of them, too. He retrieved four arrows in usable condition and the fletched stumps of three more whose bodkins were too strongly lodged in sinew and bone. Male screams from above drew his attention. He turned.