Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  ‘I suppose so. But I’m not looking after you.’

  He didn’t know whether she wanted him to or not.

  She took hold of his hand and he let her hang onto it.

  He started across the bridge, in the shadows, where he felt good.

  Antoinette looked at the violl case.

  ‘Did Carla give you that?’

  ‘She said I should learn to play it. I attack the strings with spirit, she said.’

  ‘Carla was always telling us to attack with spirit. But it’s not so easy on a recorder.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Hugon.

  ‘Blowing doesn’t feel like attacking.’

  ‘No, I mean when did she tell you?’

  ‘When we played music.’

  ‘What, you and Carla played music?’

  ‘Yes, every day. With Lucien and Charité and Martin. And Mama.’

  Hugon took another look at the girl.

  ‘Are you saying you know music, then?’

  ‘I can read music.’

  ‘How can I believe that? You’re just a kid.’

  ‘Mama taught me. It’s easier than reading books.’

  Hugon grunted. ‘Never seen anyone dance or cry from reading a book. Can you teach me? I mean, how to read music?’

  ‘I can try. If you’ve got some.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Hugon decided that this matter was best tackled some other time.

  They walked on and the girl got puzzled again.

  ‘Hugon? Why didn’t they leave you in the cathedral?’

  ‘They needed me to lug their gear.’

  ‘But why didn’t you go with them?’

  Hugon frowned. The idea of going with them had never occurred to him. He’d been well aware that going with them had been a possibility: they had expected it of him; taken it for granted in fact, though none had taken the trouble to ask him if he wanted to. But that had only served to sharpen his sense of the right time to escape, with the violl. He had had no doubt, for a start, that the older girl, Pascale, would have shot him down for the pleasure of seeing him fall.

  ‘I done my bit, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘And more. So did you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She thought about it. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Kept Carla company, didn’t you? And she needed it, believe me. I followed you from Cockaigne, see, on the roofs. I saw you. You held her hand all the way.’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes, I did hold her hand.’

  ‘And if I remember right, you were holding it when she arrived in Cockaigne. Just like you’re holding mine, now. You’re good at it.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I’m starving. Let’s find something to eat.’

  They stopped at the chain on the ground at the end of the bridge and he spied up and down the streets along the river. They were dark and empty. He heard gunfire in the distance. A volley, as they called it. He saw the lanterns outside the Châtelet, but no movement. Bastards. He was glad there was no one left around to tell how Rody had caught him; especially Rody. He’d enjoyed watching the Infant give him a seeing to.

  Hugon dragged Antoinette as he ran across the road and ducked into the Savonnerie, and on into the nameless ways and alleys east of Saint-Denis.

  He felt safer. They could take the alleys all the way to the Yards.

  ‘We’ve done all right, you and me. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘I think so, too.’ She didn’t sound sure.

  ‘As long as we don’t take anyone at their word.’

  He sensed he had contradicted himself, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Things’ll be different now, anyway. No more “Hugon, bring the wine and fetch the water.” It’ll be “Hugon, you were there, with the Infant and Tannzer. What happened? What did they do? How did they do it?”’

  ‘What did happen?’ asked Antoinette.

  Hugon didn’t think that question deserved an answer.

  But the other one she’d asked him, on the bridge, still itched him.

  ‘Anyway. Why would I want to leave Paris?’

  The night trembled with the thunder and the clamour of a thousand doomed beasts being driven to the abattoirs. Hugon could no longer see Antoinette’s face. He held her hand tight.

  ‘Like the Infant says, it’s the greatest city in the world.’

  EPILOGUE

  ENVIRONED WITH A WILDERNESS

  The massacre in Paris grew in reach and vindictiveness through the rest of that second day, Monday 25th August 1572.

  On Tuesday the crusade against the Huguenots reached the peak of its frenzy.

  Though the weak of stomach and faint of heart had by then had their fill, and the ranks of the killers were thereby somewhat reduced, those that woke with the dawn and took up arms for Christ were of the most ambitious and committed sort. Thus unencumbered by the feeble, they managed to exceed in pitilessness and depravity all that had gone before. Militia captains seeking prestige, and winning it, led the gangs with flag and drum, and priests blessed the blood on their swords in the names of their patron saints. Rape was anointed a sacred instrument. Women were beaten to death with their own babies. Children were baptised in the blood of the parents whose slaughter they were forced to witness. Men were buried alive in dunghills.

  The apathy of the supposed forces of order – royal, military and civic – emboldened confraternities and criminals alike. The King dared not unleash his guards on his own most fervent supporters, for beyond them he had few left. The envoys who conveyed his disapproval of his capital’s ruin were mocked and ignored. Those despatched by the Bureau de Ville found themselves in danger of their lives. The Military Governor did his duty and defended the walls, though no structure in the city was in smaller danger of assault.

  Catholics, too, continued to fall under the tide of vengeance and crime, but the powers at the Châtelet minded their own affairs. These latter were more Byzantine than usual, for the struggle for Marcel Le Tellier’s throne was fierce. In the absence of witnesses to rack, reliable or otherwise, the responsibility for Le Tellier’s murder was pinned on the Cockaigne Infant – the notorious Grymonde – who was captured and killed on Monday morning, by the commissioner who later inherited Le Tellier’s mantle.

  Grymonde’s body – curiously bloated with water, as some pointed out, for one said to have died in a desperate sword fight – was cut into quarters and the segments displayed at the principal city gates, though, in the circumstance, the audiences were smaller than usual. His enormous head was impaled on a pike outside the Châtelet, and while some wondered how a man with no eyes could have accomplished a crime so daring, or have fought to the last with such defiance, this very riddle nurtured and sustained the legend of the King of Cockaigne.

  Later, his conqueror had the skull boiled clean and the brain sucked out of the spine hole. The skull made a fine conversation piece for the rest of his long career, and he willed it to the School of Law at the University of Padua, a bizarre whim blamed on advanced old age. For all that anyone knows, the Infant’s skull resides in the vaults of that august institution to this day.

  On Wednesday, his authority having proved too puny to tame the anarchy, the King assembled Parlement, and claimed that all that had occurred to date had been by his own express commandment, ‘to prevent the execution of an unfortunate and detestable conspiracy’.

  The results of this stratagem were most agreeable. His people discovered, briefly, that they loved him after all. Poems were written to his courage and wisdom, and to the angel that had guided him. Sacred processions, displaying the Blessed Sacrament and the relics of Sainte-Geneviève, rendered thanks to Almighty God for the defeat of the Huguenots. The King had a gold medal struck, depicting himself as Hercules slaying the Hydra of heresy. The distant elites, Les Messieurs, made money. In Rome and Madrid and elsewhere, the news was received with rejoicing, and Giorgio Vasari was hired to paint frescoes in the Vati
can to commemorate the affair.

  On the whole, then, the outcome was considered a good one.

  And in its way the counsel provided to the King proved sound.

  While the massacre did not destroy the Huguenot movement, the blow crippled them, almost fatally, and they never recovered. Its principal leaders were gone, and with them the means to finance further conflict. Thousands of Huguenots renounced their faith, appalled that God could allow his children to be butchered with such impunity. They sought baptism and went on with their lives. Many more fled to other countries, where the bonfires were reserved for unbelievers of other stripes.

  The destruction of Protestant power in France did nothing to prevent another twenty years and more of civil war, for in such matters the elites are endlessly inventive. They found other ways to persuade the people to slaughter each other and continued until the Valois were no more and the first of the Bourbon kings could hardly afford a pot to piss in. This new king starved Paris by siege to bring it to heel, and though he failed, for Paris is ever stubborn, he killed more than thirty thousand of its citizens. When peace within the kingdom was finally secured, he led the nation into a new war with Spain.

  He ended his reign, as had his predecessor, at the point of an assassin’s knife.

  In the aftermath of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the murder spree in Paris lingered on for a month more, its wane due more to a lack of plausible victims than for want of enthusiasm. And the massacres spread, like the waves from a pebble cast into a pool, across the whole of France. Such pebbles were cast often enough in the affairs of men; in the end the pool always settled to await the next. But Tannhauser could not avoid the inner knowledge that the pebble that had splashed into Paris he had helped to throw.

  He and Carla, and the children, encountered its bloody ripples on their journey home. They survived them unscathed, at least in body. Though he knew no qualms of conscience for any he had killed by his own hand, not even the unlucky minstrel nor the Huguenot knelt and bound on the Parvis, Tannhauser felt tarnished, forever, by his conversation with Retz.

  He did not imagine that his counsel had tipped the scales in the direction they had dropped. He could not thus flatter himself. Such counsel was available from anyone versed in the nature of power and war; and that was what so diminished him in front of himself. He had been gulled by his own vanity. For the privilege of riding half a mile on lavender-scented cushions, and in return for feeling important enough to be asked he had regurgitated a pail of swill that could be heard in any tavern, or read in any cheap pamphlet written by the likes of Petit Christian. And though no one such pail could pollute much more than a few more minds, enough of them made a stream, a torrent, a sea; a world awash and drowning in shit. In that shit he wallowed deeper than most.

  No wonder his need to bathe himself in blood had been so dire.

  A truth smouldered at the core of his being.

  Tannhauser knew that he should lay down the sword.

  At any cost, even be it that of the lives of Carla and his children.

  He believed he had the will to do it, for to do it was within his power.

  But he did not want to.

  As Petrus Grubenius had said, Truth was the burden impossible to bear. Which was why men devised lesser truths, lighter truths; and made of them their gods.

  Because Tannhauser had the will, but did not want to exercise it, he told none of this to Carla, and this diminished him further. He did not tell her for he feared she would tell him he was right, and if she did, the Truth, and his will, would have had no hole to hide in.

  It was not that she disapproved of his crimes; she didn’t. Great as they were, they had never broken the boundary of her love and her compassion. Such crimes as would do so, he had no fear of committing. Yet such sophistry was too inelegant to fool him. If he told her he had to lay down the sword, he did not believe she would love him any the less, even if she would neither love him more; for he was so bewildered by her love that he believed she loved him that completely.

  Something had changed in Carla in Paris. Something that intensified her mystery, her strength. A woman called Alice, the Infant’s mother, had changed her. So had the children who sailed with them down the Seine. Amparo had transformed her. The change threw the nature of his own love into question, for his love became so deep that its abyss gaped at his feet, and the drop terrified him. He had changed, too; or perhaps he merely felt that he ought to have.

  At times his melancholy was so great he didn’t dare trust his own thoughts.

  Outside Castets, not a day’s ride from La Penautier, they encountered a band of deserters bent on easy plunder. Tannhauser slew them and his melancholy vanished, and he put the truth of what he ought to do aside, for some other time, and some other place, in a world unlikely to be this one.

  In this one he resolved to stop giving his opinions instead.

  On the night of their escape from Paris, Tannhauser rowed the skiff until the break of dawn. Orlandu and Pascale took turns to man the tiller. Carla slept exhausted on the strakes with Amparo on her breast. Estelle and Grégoire and the Mice clustered around her, and they kept each other warm.

  Tannhauser watched the sun come up. He saw no other craft on the river and the banks to either side were uninhabited. Birdsong. Wild flowers. Trees. Long light. An eerie tranquillity so sweet they might have passed through some elvish veil into the realms of legend. He looked at the children, sleeping in bare feet and bloody rags.

  Outside of the Hell whose flames had welded his destiny to theirs, and theirs to his, their faces, for a moment, were innocent of all cares. He felt as though he was seeing them, each of them, for the very first time. They were so small and so young and so fragile, and as he watched them sleep his chest filled to bursting with the ache of their inexpressible beauty.

  He had reached the end of his own rope. He motioned to Orlandu and they pulled in to the shore. He tied up and none of the sleepers were roused and he left them in peace. He unloaded his wallets and the sacks, and he and Orlandu collected wood and built a fire without speaking. They two had shared many fires together. This one felt particular and it felt good. They smiled. Tannhauser explored the sacks and laid out the fare and found they had more than enough for a decent breakfast.

  It looked right welcoming.

  He looked at Orlandu, who nodded in agreement.

  He woke Carla and helped her onshore. He kissed her and won a pale smile. He took her to the camp and the look on her face was enough to fend off his weariness. Carla sat cross-legged and took out one breast and fed Amparo, who was keen and altogether brimful with life. Still no one spoke, for it seemed that they were walking through a dream and none dared break its spell.

  It was broken soon enough, as was the tranquillity, though the morning was by no means the worse on that account. Estelle had never seen a forest before, nor a campfire beneath a tree, nor a greensward spread with cheese and bread and sausage. Neither had the Mice. Neither had Pascale. They fell on the food as children will, like starving lions. They chattered and the Mice laughed. Pascale made tart remarks at Orlandu’s expense, and was delighted to be paid back in kind.

  It was a sight to remember. Yet the truest among them, if such there could be, was missing. Without him there would have been no feast. Without him, it would be no right feast at all.

  ‘Leave something for Grégoire, even if you leave naught for me.’

  They jeered him roundly but promised to preserve a full share for their shipmate.

  Tannhauser returned to the boat.

  He wasn’t alarmed to see that the boy hadn’t moved. Opium entitled him to sleep even sounder than the rest. Tannhauser wondered if he shouldn’t leave him be while it lasted. He’d witnessed the agonies of those who’d lost a leg. They got worse for a long time before they got better. On the other hand, the feast would do the lad’s heart a power of good, and he’d need that as much as the food.

  Grégoire liked his food.

&nb
sp; Tannhauser climbed into the skiff and saw that Grégoire had moved since they had docked. The boy clutched something in his hand, some crumpled rag. Tannhauser stooped and saw the once-white ribbon in the boy’s fingers. The package from the market in the Grand Hall. The cloth-of-silver christening robe. What a lad. Tannhauser worked his arms beneath him. The body was limp but not cold. He lifted him to his chest.

  It wasn’t until he stepped ashore that he realised Grégoire was dead.

  He wasn’t breathing. His lips, and the wide strip of exposed gum, were blue.

  More than that, he could feel in his heart that the boy’s ghost had flown.

  Something in Tannhauser flew after him.

  He knew that neither the something nor the ghost would ever come back.

  Why had he died? There was no blood in the boat. Was his blood poisoned by the wound? The opium would have killed him much sooner if it was going to. He would never have woken up, yet he had roused himself to take the gown from the satchel. How could so small an effort have killed him?

  It made no sense to die now, here, when it was over.

  Tannhauser wanted to shake him.

  He remembered the boy with the strawberry birthmark.

  He remembered Juste.

  Grégoire’s last act had been an act of loyalty.

  Of love.

  Tannhauser carried Grégoire into the forest.

  He circled around the camp and its revellers. None of them had really known Grégoire. He had been too busy ferrying them about the bloody streets of his city. They didn’t need to see another dead child. He would tell Estelle he’d seen the dragon fly him away. The Mice might believe it, too. The others would understand. He stopped beyond the edge of the sounds of joy they made. He was in a small glade and the morning light was gentle and green. He laid Grégoire on the grass. He knelt on one knee beside him.

  ‘You were the only one who didn’t have to die. The only one with no good reason to come with me. The only one I chose when I didn’t have to choose.’

  Tannhauser stopped. His voice broke and he didn’t care.