Porthos saw the look of fear in Planchet’s face and did not trust Athos with the answer. The older musketeer, with his nobility, sometimes had a veritable infatuation with telling the unnecessary truth.
“Well,” Porthos said briskly, “I thought you might do something foolish and I checked at Monsieur de Treville’s, where I was told you’d borrowed horses.”
Since he had actually checked, after Athos had spoken to him, and while they borrowed horses, Porthos felt in the clear with his conscience.
He saw the relief in Planchet’s features and just managed not to smile reassuringly at the boy.
Instead he frowned at D’Artagnan. “Only listen. It is not because of you that we are in danger. The Cardinal hated some of us before you were ever born, or at least before you were out of your swaddling clothes. No. Listen. It is because of us that the Cardinal hates you. Did not your father tell you to respect the Cardinal and the King alike? So you see, if you didn’t do it, it was because of us, and as such, it is our fault.” He looked at D’Artagnan and met with that peculiar confusion that he often saw in his friends’ gazes, even when he thought he was being his most lucidly clear.
“The Cardinal learned to hate you because you were our friend,” he said, trying to make the whole perfectly inescapable. “And you first went up against his guards because you were fighting by our side. So you see—it is because of us that he sent assassins after you—if he sent assassins after you. It is possible they muddled the whole affair.”
Aramis made a sound of dismay. “How do you mean muddled the whole affair?” he asked. “Do you think his eminence just sent men to wait on this road to murder the first voyager that passed and D’Artagnan usurped the appointed death of another of the Cardinal’s enemies? Porthos!”
“Well, it’s unlikely,” Porthos said, with a grunt. “But then it is possible he sent them to kill one of the inseparables and they chanced on D’Artagnan before another of us.” He realized the unlikelihood of this argument and sighed. “Or something. The thing is, though, the thing is, that these”—he swept a hand around—“were definitely linked to the Cardinal and as such, I don’t see why we are not to take their money and jewels. After all, we would take them of people we defeated in honorable combat.”
“But this was not honorable combat,” Aramis said.
“No, it wasn’t,” Porthos said. “On their side. Making us all the more entitled to their bounty.”
“But—” Aramis started.
“He’s in the right of it Aramis,” Athos said. “Though perhaps not for the reasons he gives.” He flashed Porthos a smile that left Porthos feeling yet more bewildered. “You see, I knew something was wrong—and that there was a possibility these were not highwaymen but paid assassins—from the moment Porthos said there were exactly ten coins in each purse. That sounds uncommonly like a fee paid to them to dispatch an enemy. And from the letter”—he waved the paper at Aramis—“and from the fact they attacked D’Artagnan, we must assume the money was paid to each of them by Richelieu, and that it was meant to compensate their trouble in killing D’Artagnan.” D’Artagnan made a snorting sound at that and Athos gave him an amused look. “Which means, we should take it—we are more entitled to it than anyone else—to compensate us both for D’Artagnan’s wound and suffering and the risk we ran in thwarting the plan. And besides…” Athos permitted himself one of his rare smiles, though it was at least halfway a grimace. “And besides, you must warrant that Richelieu being involved, it is our duty to thwart his plan. And what best way is there to thwart his plan than with his own coin?”
Porthos grinned at Athos. Sometimes for all his philosophy and Latin, Athos could be a very sensible man. “Indeed,” he said. “And now, I wonder how far we are from a hostelry where we can let the horses rest and get a room where D’Artagnan can sleep for a few hours before we must start on our way in earnest.”
“I know a hostelry,” Aramis said, surrendering to their argument without ever admitting it. “Down this road another quarter league. We’ll walk the horses till then.” He looked around, bewildered, realizing that their number of horses had been added to by the four horses of the dead henchmen. “Only D’Artagnan must ride. We’ll go to the hostelry and make our plans there.”
The Advantages of Inns and Taverns; The Languages of Monsieur Porthos; The Livers of Geese
TEN days later D’Artagnan had to admit to the undisputable superiority of the method of travel which involved money and the ability to command inns and taverns for one’s comfort over traveling alone, on a horse of odd color and with no better patrimony than a letter.
They’d sent Monsieur de Treville’s horses back at the first stop and proceeded on the well-rested attackers’ horses. After that, given the sudden wealth from the attackers’ purses, they’d been able to command fresh horses at every stop, and did not have to worry about injuring their mounts or themselves by riding too long on tired, stumbling animals.
In a way, that might not be the best of ideas, D’Artagnan thought, as they dismounted in the yard of a hostelry just inside the walls of Nérac.
They’d come fast indeed, climbing into the Haut Pyrenees with very little account for their rest, much less for D’Artagnan’s wound, taken the rolling hills between the Lot and the Garonne at a dead gallop and finally crossed the Garonne near Barbaste.
Now they were in Nérac, the town of Henri IV, where his castle loomed over the city like some ancient temple—or at least like the memory of times past. That those times were pleasant seemed to make no difference, since they were well and truly lost. As was the memory of the Gascon King who had thought Paris to be “well worth a Mass.” As was—D’Artagnan sighed heavily—the younger D’Artagnan who had cantered through Nérac last spring, alive to all the beauties of the place that was often called the Gascon Athens.
Back then, his head had been full of nothing but what the town must have looked like when Queen Marguerite made her court here. His nose had been full of nothing but the smell of flowers from the great garden by the river.
Now he returned tired and heavy with fatigue. His wound remained red, as though outraged at the treatment D’Artagnan gave it, riding these long days into the hills of Gascony. Its inflamed, suppurating depths discharged blood and pus onto the ligatures that protected his shirt.
Sometimes, when they finally stopped for the night, he would find that his shirt had become glued to the dressings and he would change in silence to avoid his friends’ attention to his state.
His friends suspected it or suspected that not everything was as it should be with him. Not that D’Artagnan expected otherwise. One thing it was to lace ones doublet tight and to ride all day and not complain of fatigue or pain. Another and completely different to manage the easy banter he normally exchanged with his friends. And yet another, even more difficult, to not flinch as he dismounted, and not exclaim when someone ran into him in the dark corridors of one of the inns.
These last two were entirely beyond D’Artagnan’s willpower and he knew they had long since given him away. But as long as he refused to discuss it, as long as he refused to let them see the wound itself, they could not tell him he must stop. After all, his pretending to be well was the equivalent of his telling them he was well. To challenge it, they would perforce need to challenge his word. And that was reason enough for a duel.
Not that—D’Artagnan thought, as the stable boys took the horses away and he stared at the stone facade of the spacious inn—he could now win a duel against them. But perhaps because of that, and because of their friendship for him, none of them would challenge his word or ask about his health.
The stones seemed to blur together in his vision and the grapevine trunks that stood, stark, beside the inn yard, seemed to writhe like brown snakes. He blinked and wondered if he had a fever.
It wouldn’t be surprising considering the pace of their travel. He should delay. He should rest. He should reveal his unhealed wound to his friends and wait a wh
ile longer.
But he couldn’t. He was less than three days from his home, at the pace they’d been going, and he must hasten home.
When he’d left from Paris, in high enough spirits, though afflicted by grief and filled with filial regret, he had thought to hurry home to console his mother and take up the unwanted burden of his father’s duty. In his mind, if distantly, had been the Greek and Roman poems and treatises he’d studied—the duties of the loyal son, the duties of a nobleman.
Those had been reason enough to hasten home, but not to brave this type of ride with an unhealed wound. But the wound, the wound itself and the manner of receiving it—those were reason to break with all reason and logic and to hasten to his mother’s side as soon as possible. Because the fact that someone had attacked him by the roadside—whether by order of the Cardinal or not—joined to his father’s sudden and violent death to make D’Artagnan fear that there was some awful plot afoot and some terrible crime in all this. It made him fear that his mother, herself, was in danger. Or else that his domain was at the center of a dispute.
A ridiculous thought, when one considered his entire domain was little more than a bastide and some fields. But yet…But yet what else could he think?
“I think we’ve overshot our mark, and we’re in Spain,” Porthos said loudly, breaking into D’Artagnan’s revery.
Startled, the young man brought his swimming vision to focus on his friends who stood before a corpulent man in a clean apron. Aramis and Athos were a little aside and seemed to be conferring, leaving Porthos to his own devices—something always a little chancy. And Porthos, staring at the man, had just expressed his opinion loudly.
“Porthos! We are not in Spain,” D’Artagnan said, hastening forward. “Nérac is not Spanish. Why, it is the birthplace of Henri IV.”
Porthos turned back. His red eyebrows were furrowed over his eyes which were, in turn, squinting with the effort at understanding. “But we must be,” he said, “because this man does not speak French at all. And what he says sounds very much like Spanish.”
D’Artagnan turned his attention to the man who spoke to him, volubly. Through D’Artagnan’s swimming senses only two words struck home, but those were enough. It was lenga and Gascona.
D’Artagnan felt tears prickle behind his eyes at the words—it was enough to tell him he had come home. To the man he said, in the native Gascon dialect, “I’m sorry. My friends are strangers. We need your most spacious room and dinner sent up to it. Also water for washing.”
And before the man could answer, he turned to Porthos. “He speaks the Gascon language, Porthos,” he said, softly, reminding himself that Porthos barely spoke his own native French and therefore could not be held responsible for knowing or speaking any other language, or even showing respect to it. “Not Spanish. No more French.”
Porthos frowned. “Ah,” he said. Then frowned again. “But we’ve been in Gascony for some time, so how come…”
D’Artagnan shrugged. “It is just that as we go farther into Gascony we will find more people whose main language it is and who speak hardly any other. Though in my village, down in the foothills, they speak some Spanish as readily as some French. But mostly they speak Gascon. The language of my people.”
Porthos frowned on him slightly, as though trying to understand what any sane man might want with more than one language, but before he could find his way through the thicket of words in his own mind, the host spoke again, in a fast dialect—so fast that D’Artagnan, away from home for many months, had to strain to follow it.
“I don’t think you wish to say here, sir,” he said, speaking quickly. “I don’t think our inn is very healthy, and I would be loath to see something befall you.”
D’Artagnan frowned. In his limited experience he had never had a tavern keeper or inn host warn him away from his own place and the idea struck strangely.
“Athos,” he called to the older musketeer, who had approached. “This man says we shouldn’t stay here because it isn’t healthy.”
“Not…” Athos said, then looked straight at D’Artagnan. “D’Artagnan, I scarce understand what he’s saying, save for my knowledge of Latin which patches over some of my ignorance of the language, but…Are you sure he didn’t say that you are not healthy enough to stay in his hostelry? Because, D’Artagnan, you look like you’re suffering from some dread plague.”
D’Artagnan nodded and swallowed. This made sense. No hostelry owner wanted someone to die of some plague in his hostelry. At worst it would cause authorities to close it. At best, it would make all other travelers avoid it, lest the vapors of the illness should linger and make them sicken in turn.
And as sick as he felt, as much as words seemed to reach him through a veil of low-level buzzing like a hundred angry bees, he might very well have misunderstood what the man said. “Look,” he told the man. “I am not ill. I just have a wound that is troubling me. I must get a room here as soon as possible, and ointment for my wound, or I might die of fatigue.”
The host hesitated. He looked at D’Artagnan, then from him to the three musketeers who had clustered behind him, partly in the confusion of those who do not speak the tongue, and partly waiting for a decision.
“Your friends,” he said. “I reckon they are all fighters, fast and fierce with their swords, are they not?” And then, with a deep sigh, as though exhaling the troubles of his soul. “I guess there would be no harm in letting you have the lodging.”
Did the man think D’Artagnan was threatening him with his and the other musketeers’ prowess with the swords? Certainly even here, as far as they were from Paris, the uniform of the King’s Musketeers would be known. And considering what the musketeers were capable of and the—mostly true—stories told about their roguery and violence, the man might have a reason to feel threatened.
D’Artagnan started to open his mouth to tell the man that he didn’t mean him any harm and that none of his friends would raise sword towards an innocent man. But then he thought better of it.
He needed to lie down. He needed to sleep. Feeling as he felt, his brain might very well be in the grip of a fever. And if not, then he’d managed to bleed enough on horseback today for his mind to be unable to focus. In either case, leaving here, looking for a hostelry in the thick of the town and perhaps being turned away at a few others could very well mean his death.
Or, if not his death, it might well mean he would be truly ill tomorrow and unable to proceed in his journey home. And he must hurry home. Even now, who knew what perils his mother was facing and what threatened his house and family?
So instead of denying any possibility of violence, he shrugged, a movement which hurt his shoulder, and said, “We can defend ourselves well enough.”
In a land of gasconades and exaggerated threats, this might very well have seemed paltry, but it was clear that the man already had, in his mind, an idea of how dangerous musketeers could be, because he only sighed again and nodded. “Very well then.”
He called out and a dark-haired urchin emerged from the shadows and, upon instruction, led them up the stairs to a room, which took up most of the space over what—from the sounds and the smells emerging from it—must be busy kitchens.
D’Artagnan, taking in the broad, clean-looking room, with oak flooring, fresh rushes on the floor and the sort of beds that were little more than pallets—only four mattresses set upon the barest of frames—sent up mental thanks for the separate beds. In some of the hostelries in which they’d stayed they’d had to share the beds two and two and, in one of them, all four. Getting elbowed by Porthos’s giant arms in the night probably had a lot to do with how mauled he felt.
But here—he thought, turning back to the beds to discover surprisingly clean sheets and blankets, smelling of sun and wind—here he would sleep well. And tomorrow he would be well enough to go on with the travel. He must be. His mother needed him. Of this he was sure.
He heard, as if a long way off, disconnected sounds—his f
riends splashing water—doubtless in the lone washstand in the room—then banging dishes about, and Porthos’s surprised exclamation, “The paste is made from the livers of what? And what do they do with the rest of the goose?”
He didn’t remember either the water being delivered or the food being brought in. Somehow, he’d lain down on one of the beds, and he felt as if the whole world were receding before this present comfort of being off his feet and not being bounced about by a horse.
“D’Artagnan,” Athos said, as if from very far away. “Are you sure you will have no food?”
“Oh, let the boy be,” Porthos said. “He’s been looking like curdled milk all day. Perhaps he ate something that didn’t agree with him.”
“I don’t think so,” Aramis’s voice said, calculatingly. “I don’t think so. I think it’s his wound paining him.”
“But didn’t he use the Gascon balm?” Porthos asked.
“The jar was broken. He should have rested instead of pressing on.”
“He feels a duty to his house and family,” Athos said.
Aramis made a sound that wasn’t quite a sigh and wasn’t quite a tone of exasperation. “You and your duty, Athos. What you don’t understand is that such a sense of duty is really the sin of pride. You hold yourself to such a duty as if you were immortal and not cut of mortal cloth. When our Lord came to the world—”
D’Artagnan could see in his mind’s eye as Aramis lectured Athos on the path of holiness, and he wished he was awake enough to laugh. But he wasn’t, and therefore he let himself sink, deeper and deeper into the well of sleep, till he could hear no more.
Where Waking Is the Best Part of Valor;
The Very Odd Habits of Gascon Cutthroats;
The Finer Points of Treason
D’ARTAGNAN woke up with the sound of a knife sliding on its sheath and a voice whispering in the Gascon language, “Which of them?”
Death in Gascony Page 6