Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  He flicked Le Tellier’s blood and sheathed his sword.

  He had to make sure that Dominic would join the pursuit. With those two dead, along with as many more as he could cut down, there’d be few among the survivors who cared enough to continue to hunt him. If any were feeling spiteful, there were still plenty of Huguenots left in Paris.

  Tannhauser considered his resources for a fight on the open road.

  His resources were him.

  Under a full moon? Find a spot, strike from their flank. Scatter them like quail. He could double back towards the city and ambush what was left of the covey.

  He picked up Le Tellier’s head by one ear and drew his dagger.

  ‘Orlandu.’

  Orlandu turned from the window. His face was paler than ever.

  ‘In the lobby you’ll find two cuirasses. Collect them and wait. Helms, too. Take that mace with you. Playwright, give me your belt.’

  He laid Le Tellier’s head on the desk and cut two parallel incisions in the top of the scalp. He worked the blade through one incision and out of the other, and scraped the strap of skin so formed away from the surface of the skull. He lifted the flat of the blade and the skin strap became a kind of handle. Christian proffered his belt. Tannhauser threaded the belt through the skin strap and buckled it. As he lifted Le Tellier’s head, the wrinkled brow smoothed. Christian gagged.

  ‘Your master looks ten years younger, wouldn’t you say?’

  Tannhauser took the crossbow and herded the pimp through the ante-room and along the landing. He stopped.

  ‘Garnier escorted Carla to his home.’

  ‘Yes, sire, precisely, in person.’

  ‘You told him. In the street below, before he left.’

  ‘Told him what, sire?’

  ‘That I’d slaughtered those scabs at the printer’s house. That’s how you got him to come back here so promptly.’

  ‘No, sire. I told him only that we knew who had killed his men, not that it was you. That’s why he hurried back. Marcel told him it was you.’

  Tannhauser kicked him down the main stair.

  He followed, dragging the mattress.

  He flipped the loop of the buckled belt over one arm of the main chandelier that hung in the hallway. He steadied the suspended head on the tilted apparatus. The neck drained as it gyrated back and forth. The whole face was hauled upwards, the eyes whited, the mouth stretched up around the bloody gag in a crazed smile. The shadows thrown by the candles gave it the aspect of a comedic mask sculpted by a maniac.

  It would be the first thing anyone entering the house would see.

  Tannhauser stepped back and collected Altan’s weapons from the baluster.

  He saw Orlandu, holding the armour with one arm, looking at him.

  ‘Will that make Dominic scream and run? Or fill him with rage?’

  ‘First one, then the other,’ said Orlandu.

  Tannhauser hefted the cask on his shoulder.

  ‘Playwright, pass me the mattress, and bring that basket.’

  ‘You want Dominic to come after you?’ said Orlandu.

  ‘Dead men settle no scores.’

  As Tannhauser reached the foot of the steps – as if to do so were to cast a spell – Grégoire pulled out from some invisible nook large enough to conceal a horse and wagon, and rolled down the street towards him. He grinned and Tannhauser grinned back. Clementine snorted in the traces. Lucifer trotted between her front hooves.

  Tannhauser regretted not telling Grégoire to bring some other horse. Yet who better than Clementine to drag a cartload of demons through the halls of Hell?

  ‘Is it good?’ asked Grégoire.

  ‘High sides and thick boards. I’ve never seen a finer war wagon.’

  He loaded the cask and the mattress. Grymonde emerged from the stockyard, using the spontone. His other hand was held by a boy Tannhauser hadn’t seen before. The boy was wet. Estelle came behind them. Amparo sat inside her shirt in the goatskin, cradled against the tiller of the armed crossbow Estelle carried in both hands.

  Tannhauser saw Orlandu take stock.

  ‘Orlandu, my crew. Grégoire, Grymonde, Estelle, and her sister, Amparo.’

  ‘Amparo?’ said Orlandu.

  ‘They’re your sisters, too.’

  ‘My sisters?’

  ‘Carla gave birth to Amparo this afternoon.’

  Tannhauser wanted to dwell deep on the tiny face peering over the rim in the moonlight, but he couldn’t dawdle. He took the bolts from his own crossbow and Estelle’s.

  ‘Load as you need to. If there’s shooting, hold that breastplate over Amparo.’

  He stacked gear and food in the wagon.

  He lifted Estelle in after it. He looked at the damp youth.

  ‘Who’re you, boy?’

  ‘That’s Hugon,’ said Estelle.

  ‘I take it the city needs a new chief of police,’ said Grymonde.

  ‘Le Tellier was just another obstacle,’ said Tannhauser. ‘There are plenty more.’

  ‘Where’s that little green turd, Petit Chris?’

  ‘I told him I wouldn’t kill him.’

  ‘That’d better mean what I hope it means. Let me have him.’

  Christian shuffled closer to Tannhauser.

  ‘He’s going to take us to Carla,’ said Tannhauser.

  ‘Well, I can take you to Carla,’ said Hugon.

  Tannhauser looked at him. Hugon looked back.

  ‘Hugon followed her,’ said Estelle. ‘He swam across the river, while the soldiers took Carla over the bridge. Then he swam back and Rody caught him, and I shot Rody.’

  Tannhauser took off the gold collar. He hung it round Hugon’s neck.

  ‘Don’t go swimming in this. Don’t try to sell it as it is.’

  ‘I’m not a fool. I’ll melt it down.’

  Hugon slid the shells inside his shirt.

  Tannhauser took a rope from the wagon. He coiled it round Christian’s chest.

  ‘Hugon, which bridge should we take?’

  ‘They’re all chained, except for the Millers’ Bridge, which isn’t for public use. A covered road runs through the mills, for the grain wagons. It’s guarded.’

  Tannhauser cinched the rope. He dropped the ends and turned away.

  Killing to cross the river, killing to cross it back. The gate. The road.

  For a moment, at the very moment he could not afford to be, Tannhauser felt crushed. By all of it. The blood. The atrocity. The madness. The love. And all of it his. He loved these people. These children who looked to him for a safety he couldn’t provide, a wisdom he didn’t possess. He was a man looking for his wife. That was all. Yet that was no longer true. He looked at the children. The street was deserted, but for them.

  ‘Go back to your lives,’ he said. ‘You’ll stand a better chance.’

  ‘No,’ said Estelle. ‘Our life is with you. We don’t want to come with you so you can look after us. We can do that for ourselves. We just want to be with you.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Tannzer.’

  She meant it in the simplest way but she was right. He was afraid, not just of their dying, but the guilt he would feel if he survived them.

  ‘We could wait for you here, they won’t find us,’ said Grégoire.

  ‘No.’ Estelle shook her head at him. ‘Carla needs the wagon, and she wants Amparo back, and I won’t leave my sister, and neither will Tannzer, and the dragon can’t leave me, because I am his eyes. But you don’t have to come, Hugon.’

  ‘Oh, I’m coming,’ said Hugon. ‘For Carla, and the violl.’

  Tannhauser’s spirit was restored. He resolved to be cheerful.

  ‘Aye, let’s make some music. Orlandu, Hugon, get aboard.’

  Grymonde, unaided, loomed over Petit Christian. Christian gaped up into the monstrous face. Even he knew that his life and his dreams were now done.

  ‘I know you. Blinded and with my nose clogged with cow shit. You
’re a hole in the material of the world.’ Grymonde stopped. ‘You’re the Juggler.’

  ‘He gave me to a man,’ said Estelle. ‘A rich man, in a rich house, in a rich bed.’

  ‘I saw him tell the soldiers to burn out Grymonde’s eyes,’ said Hugon.

  ‘He let the monkeys die,’ said Grégoire.

  Grymonde turned his head towards Tannhauser.

  ‘Give him to me. Give him to us.’

  Tannhauser said, ‘Feel the rope around his chest.’

  Grymonde did so. He grunted.

  ‘We may still need his tongue, to tell us things he knows that we do not. But he won’t ride with us. He’ll crawl.’

  ‘Crawl?’

  ‘I’m going to tie him under the wagon, to the axle-tree. Think about it.’

  Tannhauser watched Christian think about it.

  ‘Let him crawl,’ said Estelle.

  Grymonde saw it, too, borne aloft by pain and opium. He started laughing.

  Christian stared at the filth coating the street. ‘Excellency, please –’

  Tannhauser threw him beneath the wagon. He held his breath and squatted. He ran the ends of the rope around the front axle and knotted them. He stood up and breathed. Lucifer gave Christian a sniff and pissed on his head.

  ‘My Infant,’ said Tannhauser.

  ‘I am here.’

  Tannhauser took his arm. He guided the blind giant backwards onto the rear of the wagon bed. He took the spontone from his hand and laid it on the boards.

  ‘Sit here, in the breach, my Infant. Our children are behind you. If anyone tries to enter this breach without calling his name, he is yours.’

  ‘He is mine.’

  ‘You said the cards are in play.’

  ‘I did. They are. Carla drew them.’

  ‘Which cards?’

  ‘That’s for her to tell. But I have better. You know what she said to me?’

  Tannhauser’s shoulder ached as the biggest hand he had ever seen grabbed it.

  ‘I wagered everything I am on Mattias’s love a long time ago.’

  ‘Thank you, my Infant.’

  ‘We’ve all taken our throw. Now the dice are yours.’

  Tannhauser took up a position by Clementine’s head.

  He looked at Grégoire. He thought of Juste.

  ‘Audentes fortuna juvat.’

  Grégoire snapped the reins and the war wagon creaked into motion.

  As they rolled towards all peril and the River Seine, Grymonde roared.

  ‘Bring me the jawbone of an ass.’

  PART FIVE

  DIREFUL SLAUGHTERING DEATH

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  If This Be Paradise

  THE MILLERS’ BRIDGE lay barely a hundred paces from the torture chambers and prisons of the Châtelet. Tannhauser saw no activity at the fortress gate. The police had kept their distance from the massacres. The intelligent move. If they took no responsibility, they couldn’t be held responsible, whatever the political outcome. The militias had assumed control of the bridges. Should the police see one unguarded, they might not care to get involved; such might even be their orders. The incompetence of their rivals could only please them.

  The Millers’ Bridge was closed to the sky by the upper floors of the watermills that were built along its length. Near the entrance he saw a brazier, figures in outline. Three. A hanging lantern revealed no more. Nightwatch in a city where no one but their comrades dared to step outside the door. A dull duty, to which would be assigned dull men. He couldn’t give them the chance to flee to the Châtelet. Nor could he let them escape down the tunnel to the City.

  He had left the wagon in a side street. As he walked back, he looked west down the river. Level with the tower of the Louvre, he saw two distant boats on the water.

  The river would take him farther and faster from Paris than the road north. Carla would be more comfortable. They could sail all the way to the English Channel. Better, they could hire rowers out of Elbeuf to take them up the Eure to Chartres. Let Carla get her strength back. A day or two on horseback to the Flèche, and hence the mighty Loire, and Saint-Nazaire, and a ship to Bordeaux and home.

  The vision gripped him.

  Garnier and Dominic likely wouldn’t know where he had gone – or how – before morning at the earliest. Beyond morning, with tempers cooling and the political realities closing in – and with the price that it might cost them written in blood across the walls of the Hôtel Le Tellier – they might not pursue him at all. Once he was away from Paris, their power shrivelled, along with their reach. They would need to call on the power of other authorities, whose questions might prove awkward; or even fatal. Tonight they had the city to themselves; he would be just another body; but to ask the Crown to arrest a Knight of Saint John, on nothing but their word, at the dawn of a new religious war, would be a folly beyond even Dominic’s stupidity. The risk of exposing their own criminality and treason would be extreme. The wise move, though he didn’t count on it, would be to forget him.

  He would not forget them.

  But he could return some other time to collect those debts.

  He recalled the barges moored at the back of Irène’s. Hide Carla and the children on board. A bargeman and his blind slave. Grymonde’s face alone might repel the curious. If not, Tannhauser had fought on the water; he doubted whoever was patrolling in those boats had.

  ‘Hugon, those boats I see yonder, do they guard the river traffic?’

  ‘No. It’s a boom.’

  ‘A boom.’

  Tannhauser’s vision dissolved, as those of beauty will.

  ‘The boats are chained end on end, all the way across the river,’ said Hugon, ‘from the Tour de Nelle to the wharf of the Louvre.’

  Grymonde grunted. ‘They had that boom up by noon. Tonight it’s either the gate at Saint-Denis or some room that smells of piss.’

  Tannhauser armed the crossbow he’d used on Baro.

  ‘Hugon, watch at the corner for my signal. Grégoire, bring the wagon up steady, as if you’ve got business at the mills. The rest of you, lie low.’

  Tannhauser drew his sword and walked towards the bridge.

  Naked to the waist and boltered with gore, he no longer bore any resemblance to the wanted man the militiamen might have heard of. He looked like no knight, ever seen or ever imagined. Make them think him one of them, gone mad with blood. The moon was behind him. The noise of the watermills buried his footsteps. The brazier had dulled their eyes, a day of dominance their wits. He could have fallen on them before they knew it, but he wanted to flush all five. He smelled roasting meat. Pigs’ ears. Or cheeks. He waved his sword in greeting.

  ‘What news, mates, what news?’

  Tannhauser now saw four.

  Their first reaction to the sight of him was fear. Two grappled for halberds.

  ‘Those viands smell good. Pigs’ ears?’

  ‘Aye. Not much to go round, as it happens.’

  ‘I’ve plenty to trade.’

  Their spears drooped. The wolf was among the sheep. Tannhauser chose the order in which to kill them. The fifth man appeared and stuck his head over the shoulder of the fourth from behind. Tannhauser changed the order. He smiled.

  ‘All this killing has given me an appetite.’

  The fifth smiled back. Tannhauser’s lunge took him well inside the length of their spears. His weight drove his sword blade through the gut of the fourth man and a good six inches into the gut of the smiler behind him. He panicked the others with the crossbow while he booted the dying from his blade. One ran. Tannhauser shot him in the back at close range, triggering with his right forearm. The pole of a halberd swept towards his knees and he blocked it dead with the stock of the bow. He ran the second guard obliquely through the throat; on the pull he severed the veins and arteries of his right neck. The first, and last, was the one who had tried to sweep him. Tannhauser dropped the bow and grabbed the spear shaft, and jerked him in and stabbed him in the belly and twisted
. He let go of the pole to lend more weight to the ricasso with his left hand, and sundered him to the pubes and let him fall.

  Tannhauser beckoned to Hugon.

  The smiler was still crawling. The one he had shot was panting blood on his knees. Tannhauser cut their throats. He flicked his sword and sheathed it. He heaved the bolt from the dead man’s loin. He reloaded the crossbow and propped it against the wall.

  He dragged a pair of the dead down the passageway. Their bodies slithered through the flour dust, grease and water that coated the bridge. Lanterns burned at regular intervals, but he could not see the far end of the bridge. The noise of the wheels resounded from the ceiling. He reached the first of the watermills. In a gap between the buildings the bridge was open to the river. A chain windlass permitted the wheel to be raised or lowered, depending on how high the river ran. Ladders gave access to the gears that caused the water to turn the stones. The gears were uncoupled, or the cacophony would have been greater. He saw the paddles churn below. He slung the corpses in the water. They were tossed and battered in the spume like bloody dolls and disappeared.

  He repeated the chore.

  He collected the last guard, and dumped him.

  He paused and leaned against the windlass. Sweat trickled down his face and through the blood that stiffened the hairs on his chest and belly like manifestations of some scabrous disease. He was close to worn out. His feet and knees ached, his back. His fingers were stiff. Too many bodies. He thought of Carla. She had to be more exhausted than he. He rolled his neck.

  As he turned away he saw a miller in a dusty apron, staring at him from the wings of a double door. Tannhauser stared back and the doors closed.

  The wagon rattled onto the bridge.

  Tannhauser stopped it out of sight of the street. He stacked the militia’s pole arms on the wagon bed, shafts first. He added the lamp. Tannhauser expected at least three more militia at the far end. The lanterns above meant that they would see him before he’d see them.