by Tim Willocks
Hugon blinked, amazed. He avoided Grymonde’s glare.
Carla smiled. ‘You should learn how to play.’
‘Me? Could I? It’s possible?’
‘I could give you your first lesson.’
‘Now?’
The boy lit up with such hope that Carla almost said yes.
‘Enough,’ said Alice. ‘Bring us some tea and all will be forgiven.’
She flapped a hand to drive them away and they left.
‘Hugon is an outsider, but a decent soul. He’s different from the rest, but too young to know why or how. He suffers for it. When he becomes a man, he’ll suffer more.’
‘I wasn’t being kind. The violl spoke for him.’
‘This woman heard it, too. But there’s many can speak who will never be heard.’
Shade cooled the room. Very gently, so gently Carla felt nothing inside, Alice tried the tension on the cord, but didn’t pull on it.
‘Grand. When you feel the urge, a push will help, but no hurry. There’ll be a bit of bleeding, or what might seem more than a bit, but that’s usual. Then, when you’re ready, this old girl will give you a bath – and you can bathe that little treasure.’
After some time the pulsing in the cord stopped and Carla’s throat tightened. The toils of the pregnancy, the throes of the labour, were already memories. She would have endured a thousand times worse to cradle her daughter for even a moment. She let go of the cord. One connection had ended and others had begun, too many and too deep to be imagined, yet already known in her every fibre. She stared at Amparo’s face as she suckled. She wondered if she would ever want to look at anything else. She felt a strong cramp in her belly; after what she had been through, it didn’t deserve to be called a pang.
‘I’m ready to push.’
Alice lumbered over with a bowl of water, linen cloths draped over one arm, and set them down. She caught her breath and leaned over and nodded and Carla bore down. A membranous reddish-blue mass bulged from inside her, accompanied by trickles of blood. Alice massaged Carla’s belly and guided the afterbirth with a gentle tug on the cord. Carla pushed with another contraction. As the mass emerged further – a large flat disc nearly an inch thick at the centre – Alice rolled it up and over on itself in her hands. The manoeuvre made its passage easier and the afterbirth slid free. More blood drenched the towels, a cupful or so, but, as Alice seemed unimpressed, neither was Carla.
‘Did I tear?’
‘No, you’re sound as a bell. Do you want to see this?’
Carla leaned forward as Alice laid the afterbirth on the towels. It was the size and shape of a dinner plate and the side through which the cord entered was white, like the caul, and marbled with blood vessels. Alice turned it over to display the inner face, which was raw in texture and the colour of red wine. She pored over it with a finger.
‘We must examine this maternal face of the cotyledon exactly, to make sure all the lobes are intact. If one or several are missing, they are still attached inside the womb and may bleed or turn putrid. But as you can see, this afterbirth is unbroken, the surface even, each lobe complete and fitted to its neighbours without a flaw.’
Carla nodded. She had not examined an afterbirth before. She was amazed that she could have generated so peculiar a thing and that it had been her connection to her baby.
Alice blew her cheeks.
‘And with that we may declare the miracle it performed complete, and yours, too, and give all due thanks to our Mother Nature, for it’s her genius we honour here. That said, you may pray to any God or idol that you wish.’
Carla looked at Alice. Her features were drawn. The day had taken its toll on her, too, more so than Carla had been able to see; or than Alice had allowed her to see. The grey winter of her eyes shone with the bloom of another spring; yet conveyed, too, some knowledge that this would be her last. Carla opened her mouth to speak but could find no words to convey what she felt. Alice curled her lips, as if to fend off displays of excess sentiment, but Carla needed to make some gesture.
‘Here, hold Amparo.’
Carla made to offer the babe and saw that she was asleep, her open mouth still at her nipple, her lips yellow with the first milk. Once gain, Carla was entranced.
‘Let Amparo nap on your breast, the little treasure needs it. You don’t think she slept through all that to-do. My joy can wait while we’ve seen to the cord and so forth. And then we’ll call for a jug, for this old girl is parched something terrible.’
She put one hand on her thigh and the other on the bed and shoved herself to her feet. She stood still for a moment, her breathing crackly. She spoke without turning.
‘You couldn’t have chosen a lovelier name. Your other Amparo is shining.’
Alice checked that the cord was done and tied it with string and cut it with a knife. She smeared some ointment on the stump and Amparo slept through it all. Alice cleaned up the blood and gave Carla a sponge bath, which almost sent her to sleep, too. The pleasure of giving Amparo her first wash they shared, and still she did not awake, though she moved her lips and her eyes shifted beneath their tiny lids, and her hands fluttered, as if she were dreaming her first dream in this new world.
‘Shouldn’t she cry more?’ asked Carla.
‘We’ve given her nothing to cry about, yet. But we will.’
Grymonde returned from below with a loaded tray.
‘Tea for the Countess of Cockaigne and a jug of fine wine for its Queen.’
‘Keep your voice down, the little one’s napping.’
Grymonde had brought honey to put in the tea and Carla took some. Alice quaffed a large cup of wine without taking it from her lips. She gasped. Grymonde refilled it.
‘They’re roasting a pig in the yard,’ he said. ‘Can you smell it?’
‘Did Estelle come back?’ asked Carla.
‘La Rossa? I haven’t seen her. There’s too much other game afoot.’
‘Whatever’s going on in the yard – or anywhere else in civilisation – interests us not in the least,’ said Alice. ‘And we’ll thank you to have that rabble mind their noise.’
‘I think she should be told,’ said Grymonde.
‘If there’s something ought to be done, then go and do it. If not, keep your peace, and let us have ours until it’s worth interrupting.’
‘There’s something you think I should be told?’ asked Carla.
Her state was such that she was pressed to think of much that might disturb her. The sounds of revelry rose from the yard. With a stab of guilt she remembered Antoinette.
‘Is it Antoinette? I’ve neglected her all day, is she –’
‘Antoinette is thriving,’ said Grymonde. ‘If she stayed a week she’d be running the place. No. This wayfaring husband of yours, Mattias? Is his name Tannhauser?’
‘Speak of the wolf and he will come,’ said Alice.
Carla held Amparo closer. She didn’t know what to feel.
‘Yes. Mattias Tannhauser. He is a Chevalier of Saint John the Baptist.’
‘That drives the nail home.’
‘What do you mean?’
A rumble of summer thunder rolled across the Yards.
Grymonde ignored his mother’s glower and shrugged his black brows.
‘I’ve strong reason to believe the man is here. In Paris.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Pope Paul
THE RAID ON the Hôtel D’Aubray had been contracted five days before, through the mediation of Pope Paul at the Blind Piper. Thirty gold écus and all the plunder they could carry, not for simply killing all who dwelled within – though the deaths of the two ladies had been emphasised – but for leaving a gaudy show behind them.
‘Cut their tits off,’ Paul had said. ‘Something bold and bloody, let your lads off the leash. Give Les Messieurs some tittle-tattle. Make them sweat in their fine silk sheets.’
Paul had admitted that so public and vile an outrage made the venture more than usually dangerous, w
hich was why the Cockaigne Infant had been his first call. The hazards were reflected in the price.
Grymonde had knocked it up to fifty, a sum which told him that the malice footing the bill festered somewhere far beyond the Yards. The money answered all other questions and Grymonde hadn’t asked them. It was to claim the last twenty in gold, and to try to learn more from the fat bastard, that Grymonde went to visit Paul now.
As he strode down the hill in the wane of the day, towards Les Halles and the Blind Piper, he reflected that, for the first time in memory, the Yards comprised the safest streets in Paris. There were no Huguenots here, nor was there aught worth stealing but for that which had been stolen from elsewhere, and which no man who valued his life would dare even covet. Furthermore, the gangs of villains and vagrants, the beggars and feral children, whose usual haunts were any shadow dark enough to hide them, had deserted their posts. They had flown in search of pickings, which, thanks to the King, could be found all over the city, regardless of creed. A chance to forget their station at the bottom of the manure pile.
Strange, but though Grymonde had been born here, and slept most of the nights of his life here, and had never even had cause to go outside the city walls, he always believed his own station lay elsewhere, above and beyond the manure pile altogether.
Today had taught him otherwise.
Today he’d been gnawed from within, as if by La Rossa’s rats.
Now the cards on the table gnawed at him too.
The irony was that Grymonde was well used to being gnawed from within. He was poxed to the core. There were bodies in yonder pits sporting better-fettled insides than his. He’d been dying for years. The vast weight of his bones, his head; the gross corrugations of his scalp; his disfigurement; the pain in his joints and hands, his swollen tongue; all these he could endure, or ignore, or even use to advantage. Even the fact that his cock had long since failed to serve any purpose other than pissing had its benefits. The price of fornication had always been a piece of his soul, a fact all whores could thank for the existence of their trade, for money could be replaced. These things he could grasp: deformity and wounding were part of Nature’s way; he’d seen enough babes fall blighted from the womb to know that. His horror of this morbid affliction, be it malady or evil spirit, lay in the things he could not grasp but even so knew.
His heart was getting larger, like some great black crab growing inside his chest. He could feel it clatter against his ribs where once it had not. Sometimes the crab stifled his breath. His kidneys were corrupt; they cramped on him; in the middle of the night he would rise to piss like a horse. Headaches; bellyaches. Lately some new ague had infected his eyes, for at times they’d quake in their sockets and he would see double. Men believed him mighty; but he was not.
He was a dead man in handmade boots the size of charcoal barges.
This slow rot was familiar enough; but the rats that had worried his insides today were not, for they ate at an organ he had forgotten he possessed. His conscience.
He had tried to glut their appetite with barbarity and had failed; and then, when blood had all but choked him, by lending a hand to his mother, and to Carla and the babe. As always, Alice had been right, and as always he had not listened, for the gnawing had returned with a vengeance since he had raised with Carla the name of Mattias Tannhauser.
Grymonde heard distant thunder.
Summer rain started to fall, but the street got no cooler.
He padded by the Cemetery of the Innocents, its stench a challenge to even his filth-hardened nostrils. Paul’s tavern, the Blind Piper, lay on its far side.
Inside the great necropolis, Gobbo and the others Altan Savas had killed were already rotting. Though they had enjoyed no such ceremony, a funeral here meant a drop of variable depth, through the hinged floor of a coffin, into one of the huge pits – each sixty feet deep and over a thousand corpses-strong when full – through which the burials rotated like crops. There the deceased would rest until his flesh had putrefied and settled, along with that of his thousand companions, into a fatty potage through which his bones would rise to the top. In principle, these bones would then be dredged and stacked in the charnel houses that lined the cemetery walls, and which afforded a degree of privacy to fornicating couples and sodomites; in practice they went for bone flour, and the fat to scented soap for Les Messieurs, whose power to profit from the poor reached even beyond the grave.
Not for the first time, Grymonde thought: We’re killing the wrong people.
He saw the Blind Piper through the rain.
He paused before crossing the street.
It was easy enough to pretend he knew nothing; it was close to the truth. As for seeing what stood before him, he didn’t need his gut to tell him that the Piper was a den of treachery. The Blind Piper was to treachery as the Vatican was to the Laws of God. What his gut knew was the gnawing, and what stood before him was his conscience; which Carla had awakened over the corpse of a demon Turk.
Return to the Hôtel D’Aubray? Go back to the beginning?
He sensed that he should. When the bear wanted to hunt the hounds, he started from the site of their last kill. This hound might find the bear sniffing there. But why should Grymonde go? The justification was too thin. He owed nothing to anyone. But owing had naught to do with it.
He wanted to serve Carla.
He had never served anyone. It felt good.
Grymonde craved information. If Paul wasn’t always the first to know whatever was worth knowing, he was always the second. Paul had sent a runner with word of the Louvre massacre before it had happened. Claiming his gold gave Grymonde a reason to be here.
The Lunatic be damned.
Grymonde crossed the street and pulled open the tavern door.
That morning, after his mother had banished him to give her and Carla some peace, Grymonde had led his young lions back out to the richer quartiers of the Ville.
The King’s general order to exterminate the Huguenots he had learned of only while on their journey to the Hôtel D’Aubray. If the Swiss Guard had recently slaughtered the Protestant nobles, the environ of the Louvre would still be too hot, so he headed east again towards the quartiers of Saint-Martin and Sainte-Avoye, where merchants and nobles alike had lately been feathering new nests.
Anarchy appealed to Grymonde, in principle.
‘The unlawful liberty or licence of the multitude’ was how the on high defined it, excluding, with characteristic cunning, their own vile liberty and licence, having taken care to enshrine the latter in statute. He did not blame them for their rapacity, nor even their mindless wars for which all and sundry were forced to pay in anguish and coin; but he did resent being called a criminal – a title he otherwise bore with pride – by the most corrupt and pitiless criminals alive. But such was life. It was a fool who hobbled his stride with notions of good and evil; only the deluded ever tried to live by them. Mother Nature took account of neither. In her timeless ledger good and evil counted less than the rains and the winds that bore them. For him, as for wind and rain, the day was the thing.
By the time they reached the walls of the Fille-Dieu, his regulars had been swollen by so many new volunteers that they numbered forty or more. Most were adolescent, some even younger; most boys, but with a sprinkling of bold girls. He stopped them in a mass and climbed on a cart.
‘Listen close, my young lions. The King has decreed that all the Huguenots of Paris must die. But unless their pockets be heavy and deep, Huguenots be damned.’
He saw perplexity in the faces of even his lieutenants. He grinned.
‘The King and his lordly counsellors have delivered the sword of confusion into our hands.’ He flexed his massive fingers in a mime of wielding such a weapon. ‘And we will use it to cut their bollocks off.’
A ripple of uncertain laughter, which Grymonde encouraged with his own.
‘Our purpose is to take whatever we want from whoever’s got it – from them as don’t know what it’s
like to go to bed hungry, from them as never thought there’d be a price for their greed. None of these swine are friends to us. In famine and siege we do their starving. In their wars we do their dying. When their debts fall due we pay them with our toil. Should we live the lives of saints we’d die as villains in their eyes, and so, let us prove ourselves more villainous than their direst fears. Bare your teeth and let them feel your bite.’ He sniffed the air. ‘Can you smell their money?’
The tatterdemalions answered with a fierce and reedy cheer.
They loved him. Grymonde loved them.
‘Let your hearts be stone. And on that stone sharpen your knives.’
‘Kill the cunts! Kill ’em all!’ cried Papin, as another hurrah was raised.
‘Fall upon their lives with the spleen of tigers.’ Grymonde clenched a raised fist. ‘Let their lamentations be your music. Let us fill our horn of plenty with their blood.’
‘All praise to the Infant!’ shouted Bigot.
‘No, lads, no. Bigot’s been spending too much time in church. Do not praise this man but, rather, praise us all. For Cockaigne is us and we are Cockaigne and together we’ll abide in plenty. Now. Band yourselves in groups of seven, a magical number. From each band let one declare himself its captain – or if a girl hath the necessary temper let herself so declare – and let that captain appoint a fast runner. Let these bands be as swarms of stinging bees that swoop and gather honey, and should one band fall into a hard encounter, let the runner be sent to summon new strength. The bourgeois militia are out there and they’re no friends of ours either, so beware. If you must fight, sting and run, sting and run. We come to prosper not to die. And steal only the finest stuffs, else we’ll scarce have room enough to freight it in our carts. Are you feeling nimble?’
A wild roar of ‘Aye!’ and obscene boasts.
‘Are you feeling cruel?’
The cries grew even wilder.
‘Share and share alike!’ roared Grymonde. ‘No tomorrow!’