by Tim Willocks
A thousand yards to the boom. Tannhauser reckoned the current at no more than three knots; with pole and rudder, under ten minutes. He rolled his neck. He butted the pole to the quay and pushed. The barge slid out into the current and passed the skiff.
Grymonde’s eyeholes bored into him across the water. They were tunnels of absolute darkness. His smile was horrible. He waved a roll of brown paper.
‘You may hear that laughter underwater, my friend. We have the caul.’
CHAPTER FORTY
Ghosts of the Unrepentant Damned
CARLA STEERED TOWARDS the fire that floated down the black and silver river ahead, towards the wild and bloodstained ferryman whose figure quavered and warped against the flames he had kindled from wood and human bone. He passed beneath the Pont Notre-Dame and the flames filled the stone archway entire, and Carla could see nothing beyond them, as if fire were all that lay before him and all that he could promise those who followed in his wake. In Malta, he had followed her into the fire, on the promise of a piece of music. He had done the same here, in Paris.
Carla realised she was the fire. She was his fire.
Her love for him caught in her throat. She swallowed.
‘Grymonde, blades in, let her run.’
Grymonde had claimed the role of sole rower and she hadn’t argued with him. His strokes were few but with each the water plumed from either side of the bow. He pulled his oars across his lap and bent over them and growled words she couldn’t hear.
The boat freighted so much pain it was a wonder it didn’t founder. The two boys lay in the bilges side by side, as if through proximity they might assuage each other’s hurts. Pascale had lost her sister and her father, and bore other unseen wounds that she didn’t yet know she had sustained. Carla knew little of the lives of Agnès and Marie, but little was enough. Estelle sat at her feet with Amparo in her shirt. Both seemed happy in the spell each cast upon the other, yet Estelle, too, had witnessed and taken part in abominable cruelties. And Amparo, her baby? She had done more than any to bring them together, to bind them together. What had she felt and seen?
Carla’s love for her baby caught in her throat.
Her love for all of the children.
The skiff handled well as she took it under the arch. Despite the run-off, the current was steady. Mattias and his flames sailed under the Pont au Change.
‘Grymonde, three strokes, then blades in.’
As they ran the next bridge Carla saw a woman’s body caught up in the pilings. She was naked, gashed, her mouth agape in an expression of unreckonable disillusion.
The paddle wheels of the watermills churned three boat lengths beyond, closer than she had expected. Mattias steered the barge between the two most southerly wheels. She followed and rode the spume and the river opened out before them. The shimmer of moonlight that divided it ran clear to the boom. Most of the barrier’s length was hidden by the islands. From the Right Bank torches and lanterns crept out along the low black line of chained boats.
‘Grymonde, pull.’
Carla steered to draw parallel with the barge. Mattias held the tiller between his knees and poled without hurry. He glanced over his shoulder and waved. The prow seemed a waterborne volcano, the flames roaring upwards from the banked rim of glowing char. She glimpsed a writhing figure on its farmost slope, blackened and hairless, his flailing arms smoking from the scorched tatters of his sleeves. The cruelty repelled her; Mattias’s cruelty; but she had raised no objection when she might have and the cruelty was hers, too.
Carla turned away.
The beach of the City, below the Conciergerie, was strewn with the corpses of the massacred. Their murderers stood among them, legs caked to the knees in bloody mortar, and they bawled curses and brandished their knives like the ghosts of the unrepentant damned. By the clock tower above it was a half past midnight. In the shadow of the prison she saw a turmoil of Huguenots, a score or more, encircled about their collective waist by a rope held by a militiaman. As the skiff passed by, the desperate throng buckled and reeled and arms and cries reached out towards her.
Carla turned away.
‘Carla, look.’
Pascale pointed at the shore. A young woman ducked the rope and broke free and ran down the beach. She beckoned them with one arm and pointed to the water’s edge further downstream. In her other arm she held a tiny child. There was a shout and two of the ghosts sprang after her. Carla pushed the tiller to starboard and the skiff swung landward.
‘Grymonde, give me your best.’
Grymonde heaved and howled and the skiff leapt forward. Three more ghosts joined the pursuit, as if the murder of an unknown woman and her child were the greatest prize on earth. Waterlogged bodies congested the shallows. Carla had made an error. She carried that prize in the skiff and had put it at hazard. She had seconds to correct her course. Her hand clenched the tiller to steer away and her womb clenched harder in reply.
If you don’t try, you will be damned, too.
Carla held steady.
‘Grymonde, larboard blade in.’
The bow ploughed through the floating dead and slowed.
The woman splashed into the shallows. The ghost on her tail lunged with a sword and stabbed her in the back. She staggered and twisted and struck the blade away and the ghost stumbled and went down on one knee. Love and desperation gave her the strength to wade on, her mouth gaping for air. She saw Carla. She held out her baby at arm’s length. Carla aimed the bow to skim past the dying woman.
‘Pascale, take the child.’
Carla felt the scrape of sand on the hull. Pascale straddled her bench and leaned out and called to the woman. The woman faltered, thigh-deep, and pulled the baby back into her breast for balance. The ghost gained on her and raised his sword. An arrow hissed into his chest and he spun and fell.
The skiff was close enough now for Carla to see the woman’s face. She saw her try to extend her child, saw something burst inside her. She saw her eyelids fall shut. She saw the wash from the skiff lap into her chest. She saw the woman fall backwards into the river, a foot short of Pascale’s hands, her baby still cradled in her arms.
Pascale plunged over the gunwale, her legs wrapped under the bench, and her head and shoulders vanished under the surface. She stayed under so long, Carla almost reached out to pull her in. Pascale reared back up, her empty fists clenched above her head, and she screamed through the water running down her face, all her grief and all her rage unleashed, the sound of her soul being torn from its moorings in whatever she had ever known or believed about Life Her-own-self.
Carla couldn’t afford to heed it.
A second arrow hissed to her right. A thud and a curse and a splash.
The ghosts were wading out behind her.
‘Grymonde, pull.’
Carla turned the skiff for the fire barge.
Pascale glanced past her and bared her teeth and leapt from her bench, treading on Juste and Grégoire. The tiller jerked in Carla’s hand. A ghost had seized the rudder.
Carla twisted, her belly cramping, half-rising to her feet and pushing with all the strength in her thighs to right it. The rudder shifted, then heaved back hard against her. Pascale landed on the seat to the other side of the tiller on her knees, and her arm came over and down with a flash of steel. Carla heard screams – Pascale’s, the ghost’s – and she glimpsed a pierced and spurting neck and face, the blade plunging down into the hole of the opened mouth. The tiller sprang free. She saw Mattias raise his bow and shoot. She heard another body hit the water in her wake. He raised up and drew again, then relaxed and lowered without loosing. Carla took it that they were clear.
She looked astern. There was no sign of the woman or her babe. The remaining ghosts vented their indignation on the roped and clamouring innocents. Spear and sword, boots and knives. Then the night enshrouded the just and the damned in the same impenetrable darkness, and Carla turned away.
Pascale wiped her dagger on her skirt and
sheathed it. Blood was splashed across her cheeks, her lips, her throat. She didn’t look at Carla. She returned to her bench and put her face in her hands and wept. Juste and Grégoire cried with her. Estelle looked up at Carla, her lip trembling, too. They had put on a sterner front for Mattias, but that was no surprise. She felt obscurely accused and though none deserved it anger flared in her chest, as if the core of some hidden force had opened inside her.
‘Pascale, that woman died in hope. She died on her feet. She died fighting for her child. She didn’t live, but she won.’
Pascale kept her hands over her face. She stopped weeping.
Carla heard Alice’s voice.
They’re all your sons and daughters, now, love.
You are the mother.
You were always the mother.
Carla had never known the feeling before. She had never felt entitled to be Orlandu’s mother, though he had grown inside her, just as Amparo had. She hadn’t earned the role; she had betrayed it. Now it was there, the knowing. Alice had healed the wound that could not be healed. She was a mother. They were all her sons and daughters. The weight of the notion was fantastic; yet in its weight she felt its power and beauty.
‘Pascale.’
Pascale dropped her hands and looked at her. Carla took a breath. She had become so accustomed to the girl’s courage that the naked despair in her face appalled her. Pascale was hardly more than a child. Her failure to save the unknown child must have evoked other failures more awful still.
‘Pascale, you are a braver girl than ever I was.’
Pascale didn’t speak.
‘So be more than brave. If we sailed the five rivers of Hades end to end we’d not find such desperation as crowds the shores of this one. Yet in the middle of all this – all this – you gave that woman hope – you – and she took it into her soul with her dying breath. Tonight there is no more precious a gift. Not even life.’
‘Tonight life is worth nothing.’
‘Listen to Carla, girl.’
Grymonde feathered and leaned and dipped and pulled. His agony must have been immense. The holes in his face were incandescent with moonbeams and a strange peace.
‘Don’t abandon your hope or you’ll leave the lot of us short, and we’ll not find any more on these dark waters. As to life, it’s naught but a burst of flame, so let’s burn bright.’
Pascale wiped her face and turned towards him. ‘You mean like Hervé?’
Grymonde’s laughter doubled him over the oars. Agnès and Marie giggled.
‘I adore a woman with a sharp tongue.’
‘I want to row,’ said Pascale.
Grymonde drew his oars across his lap and Pascale looked at Carla and she nodded. Pascale slotted her oars into the rowlocks. Her arms were thin but all sinew. Her strokes were shorter and weaker than Grymonde’s but they were faster. They gained on the barge.
The sand on the shore of the Right Bank was blackened with gore and carnage but there Carla saw no ghosts. Many boats had been beached there but none had dared put out to take on the fire barge. She saw laggards climbing the stairs to the wharves, and on the wharves milling bands of militia. A horseman. Shouts. Surges of movement.
All were being marshalled towards the boom.
The boom was no more than a furlong away. The closer they got, the more formidable it appeared. Lighters made up the greater part of its length. Their flat bottoms lent less resistance to the current and provided better footing. At least one spearman stood in every boat, in some, groups of three or four. Closer still. She saw that the men in groups weren’t holding spears, but long poles. They intended to hold the fire barge at bay.
Mattias pushed onward. The firelight glimmered from his sweat. He drew the pole from the water and stowed it. He turned to Carla and pointed to the approaching break between the Île de la Cité and the tiny island off its tip. She nodded. Mattias put his fingertips to his lips and flung his arm out towards her. Carla was too moved to return the kiss. She swore she saw him grin. He turned back to the tiller and swung the burning prow towards the centre of the boom.
Carla steered for the break. The western end of the City was surrounded by a defensive wall. A watchtower overlooked the fork in the river and she saw a helmet move on top. The tiny island was low and flat, and too regularly flooded to be inhabited. Beyond it was a second, somewhat broader, with a short channel in between the two.
‘Pascale, let her run.’
Pascale raised the oars.
‘Carla, look,’ said Estelle.
The girl was pointing at the fire barge, now dead ahead of them and set on an oblique course to plough into the boom, right of centre. Mattias loosed an arrow and Carla watched one of the pole men fly backwards from the left half of the boom. The men either side of him dived for the deck. Carla turned away and piloted the skiff into the break.
‘No, look again, in the water.’
Estelle cupped her hands to her mouth.
‘Tannzer!’
Carla ignored her and turned the skiff again, from the break into the channel. She pulled the tiller over and the skiff bobbed short of the channel mouth where the two arms of the Seine rejoined each other. The boom spread before them, a hundred yards distant and as many broad. It ran from the Tour de Nelle on the Left Bank to the Tour au Coin on the Right.
The volcano slid into view beyond the island.
The fire barge had abruptly changed course.
Carla saw Mattias.
He was bent double over the stern, reaching down to the rudder. It must have fouled. The burning prow was sheering to larboard. Unless he threw the rudder hard over, the fire would block the left side of the barrier, the reverse of his intention. He would have to break the boom while open to attack from the forces Garnier was massing on the Right Bank. At the speed the current was carrying him, Carla reckoned he had a minute before he hit the boom, and half that time to make the correction.
Plumes of powder smoke and gunfire exploded from the wharf.
Carla shut her eyes.
She opened them.
Wood splinters blown from the stern of the barge by the volley fluttered down in the wake. She couldn’t see Mattias. The barge appeared unmanned and uncontrolled.
Juste had risen to his knees. Grégoire grabbed his good arm with both hands and hauled himself up to hook his elbows over the starboard gunwale.
Estelle took Carla’s hand.
The children watched, all of them, in silence.
Carla couldn’t. She looked at Amparo, tucked under Estelle’s chin.
Amparo’s eyes roved this way and that, and then settled on her face. Amparo was unperturbed. She was right. Carla ignored the crushing tightness in her chest. They could make it back to the cathedral. They would survive. And in time she would see both Bernard Garnier and Dominic Le Tellier die on their knees as they begged for her mercy. She swore it. She reached down and touched Amparo’s lips.
‘I swear it on your life.’
She had never imagined an oath so terrible.
Nor that her tongue might ever speak such words.
But she had spoken them.
She felt hands on her shoulders, yet there was nothing behind her but water.
Old hands, gentle, but strong.
The tightness vanished.
Carla nodded. ‘Thank you, Alice.’
‘We have a blind man aboard. Will someone tell him what’s happening?’
‘Pascale,’ said Carla, her eyes still on her babe. ‘Is Mattias alive?’
‘Alive and printing in red.’
Carla looked up across the water.
The barge was floating broadside into the boom, its stern to the Right Bank and close enough to the shallows to permit assault, from either side, by men wading from the beach. Mattias loosed arrows at the wharf, the sinews of his back flexing and relaxing in the violent beauty of his art. Carla threw herself inside his mind.
Mattias will take the musket men first, while they reload.
He will drive the rabble from the boom, for they fear death and he does not.
He will attempt to breach the boom in the respite.
Then Garnier will come, and that unblooded bastard has not the guts to come alone.
If the boom isn’t broken by then, even Mattias might be overwhelmed.
Pascale said, ‘Carla, tell me what to do. Or I’m going to start rowing.’
The girl was game to the backbone, her oars already poised above the water.
The other children turned to look at Carla. They were all of them game.
Carla looked down again at Amparo.
‘Your father won’t approve.’
Amparo cooed.
Carla looked at Pascale and Pascale bared her teeth.
‘Pascale. Take us to the boom.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Devil’s Causeway
FORTUNA, SO IT was said, wore a blindfold, but Tannhauser didn’t believe it. When the fancy took her she moved her pieces with far too exuberant an esprit. He saluted her for it, though he doubted she cared.
He had the barge running a few degrees to port. At fifty yards he’d alter course to strike the boom at forty-five degrees, where the two rightmost quarters of its shallow arc met. If the boom broke there and then, all the better. If it didn’t, the stern would sheer larboard under the force of the current, towards the centre of the boom, and the barge would come to rest alongside. Once moored, the prow fire would render him invisible to the wharves on the Right Bank, as too, from this approach, did the redoubt, which left him free to harry the pole men on the boats ahead.
The char had ignited before the first bridge and by the shade of red at the rim was hot enough to smelt iron deeper down. Hot enough, too, to set light to other sacks well beyond the reach of the flames. The brightness denied him sight of the central third of the boom, but across the starboard gunwale he chose the vessel he intended to board and shot its sole occupant in the chest. He looked across the larboard side and saw a cluster of four on a lighter. He winged an arrow into the middle of them. By the time he’d dropped a third there was no one left to shoot at. Some had fled for the Left Bank across the pontoons; most were lying low and likely to stay there.