Blood Ties

by C. C. Humphreys

  His guard followed him, stood in the doorway, as the Fugger vomited again and again, long after all that came was bitterest bile. In a bed of lavender, pressing his face into the sweet-scented herb, pressing through the branches to the earth below, he sought to hide his own face and the ruined face, deep in the Tuscan earth, as he had once hidden just these horrors in a gibbet midden. Buried there, somehow his breathing came back to near normal, his eyes focusing on the purple stems he’d crushed beneath him, his nostrils filling with their fragrance, clearing the vision from his head. Another came, from that same time, when his mind had been taken over by savage secret potions, and a Black Mage called Giancarlo Cibo had tried to raise the spirit of a dead queen using that queen’s six-fingered hand. Anne Boleyn had come but only to the Fugger, she had saved him, given him the courage he needed to fight, to help Jean Rombaud, in the fulfilment of his quest.

  As he lay there breathing in the scent of purity, he saw her again as she had appeared to him, in the whitest of robes, thick black hair cascading down onto her bare shoulders. The spirit of a Queen giving him the power to act as he never had before – with courage. He had betrayed her once, for his family, betraying his best, his only friend, Jean Rombaud, with a Judas kiss.

  ‘No!’

  He buried the silent scream in the herbal bed. He could not betray them again. Not even for the daughter he loved beyond life. There had to be another way.

  Groping forward with his bandaged hand, the Fugger encountered the first step of that way. His back to the guard who had followed him out, he raised himself up from the lavender bed onto his knees.

  ‘Help me, friend, for mercy’s sake,’ he cried.

  The guard came forward, muttering. When he was about a pace away, the Fugger gripped the shovel handle as best he could, supported it with the stump of the other hand and swung up and over. The metal plate caught the man on top of the head, but the Fugger didn’t wait to see how good the blow had been. Not very, he suspected. Enough, perhaps, to see him into the cherry tree and over the wall.

  Erik had circled the Jesuit compound a dozen times, always ending up beneath a blossom-heavy tree, whose overhanging branches allowed him a perch to sometimes study the house within. As he leaned against the wall, he was feeling quite pleased with himself.

  ‘You see, Father,’ he muttered, ‘I have followed, waited, watched. I have not stormed the house. I have not killed anybody. Yet.’

  He hoped the waiting would not go on much longer. For one thing, he was starving and if there was no movement from his quarry soon he would have to leave his post and steal some food. For another, the longer he lingered there, idle, the more his thoughts turned on Maria, and the only fear he’d ever known. He had followed the Fugger because he was the only connection to his missing love he could find in the falling city. He was the father of the woman he loved and, if Gianni Rombaud was involved, the Fugger was in terrible danger. Erik had grown up with Gianni, knew better than any of the parents the darkness that had taken over the boy’s soul. He also knew his intelligence. That’s why he was so pleased he was waiting outside the compound, under clouds of cherry blossom. He had out-thought Gianni Rombaud! He would wait for him to make the first move that night – then take him in the dark.

  A sharp clang brought him from this reverie, and the groan that followed it had Erik leaping from his squat and up into the branches, pushing through the petals. There was enough light left to see the two shadows running to the tree, his tree, both stumbling through the herb beds. There, the first figure tried to leap up, but failed to get a grasp, a bandaged hand flailing as he fell back to where the second man was even now reaching for him, with curses and outstretched arms, a step away.

  A step he never took. It had taken Erik one second to leap up into the tree. It took him just another to drop down from it. The reaching hands of the guard found a huge and solid chest. The eyes came up in shock and Erik headbutted the man between them, at the bridge of the nose. He fell like a tile from a tower, instantly silenced. The other man had jumped again, even managed to get one arm around a tree branch before he slid back down, moaning.

  ‘Fugger! Fugger!’

  He raised his bandaged hand to ward off this new threat, then lowered it when he recognized the voice. ‘Erik? By all that’s holy, how …’

  ‘Time to go now. Time to talk later.’

  He hoisted the Fugger up onto the lower branch, climbed up beside him, straddled from tree to wall, then lowered the Fugger down the other side, dropping him into the soft earth there, where he began to scramble away. Erik caught him, held him.

  ‘Fugger. Where is Maria?’

  ‘Rome.’

  ‘Rome?’

  ‘Come, I will explain. We must get away. They will be after us and I cannot run fast.’

  ‘You do not have to. I have a horse. There.’

  The two men ran to where the animal was tied and the Fugger was lifted up again. Erik mounted behind, gently nudging the reluctant beast with his heels. They had gone a mere hundred paces, walking on the sandy verge till they were out of hearing of the Jesuit house, when the Fugger let out a groan.

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘Yes! What have I done? My daughter! Oh, my Maria!’

  ‘What of her? Tell me.’ Erik jerked the reins, halting the horse. ‘We do not move until you tell me.’

  In jerky sentences, the Fugger recounted what had happened, all Gianni had said and done. It didn’t take long and when he was done, Erik said, ‘And this locket? The one that will free her. He has it?’

  ‘He wears it round his neck.’

  ‘Then I must take it from him.’

  Erik slipped off the horse as he spoke. The Fugger reached down an arm.

  ‘No, Erik. There are too many of them. And they will be doubly on guard now. We need help if we are to stop them in what they are planning. It is a great evil.’

  ‘I do not care about that. Maria’s in danger.’

  ‘Erik …’

  ‘There is a barn just as you leave the town to the south. Hide there. I will return with this locket by dawn. If I am not there by then …’

  ‘Wait!’

  It was no good; the youth had disappeared into the gloom. The Fugger almost followed, until he remembered how crippled he was. He would only hinder. Cursing his helpless state, he prodded the animal toward the south.

  When the guard was found, they didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious but it had taken less than a minute to muster and dispatch the rest. It took less than thirty for the first of them to return, reporting failure in a mumble, avoiding the young man’s furious eyes. An hour later all the men had drifted back and ‘nothing’ was still all they could report.

  ‘It would be difficult enough, in a harbour town, at night, with fleets preparing to sail. But now we know he has help …’ Thomas looked across at the guard, just conscious, still trying to stem the blood flowing from his broken nose.

  ‘And what do you suggest we do, Jesuit?’ Gianni made no attempt to keep the acid from his voice. ‘Give up? Soothe the situation with words?’

  Thomas felt his own anger rise, took a deep breath to quell it. ‘I suggest we look to where he will go. Anticipate his actions before we take any of our own. He is not a well man. We still have his daughter. I think he will enlist help and then go for her.’

  Gianni was pacing around the small table where Thomas sat. The refectory hall was empty save for their party, Carafa’s men, at the large table, muttering in low voices, drinking the wine that Brother Silence dispensed. They were all booted, spurred and cloaked for travel.

  ‘So what are you suggesting? That we go to Montalcino where his “friends” are and wait for that siege to end? Then break people who have never been broken? Or make for Rome, stake out the prison, hope the Fugger decides to drop into our web?’ Gianni leaned on the table, bringing his face close to the Englishman’s. ‘I will not return to tell Cardinal Carafa of failure in the first task he has entru
sted to me. I have waited too long for him to notice me.’

  Thomas stretched his leg out, rubbed at his knee. ‘I do not know we have many other options. He must learn of this, as must the Ambassador in London. This … relic. It would have been a useful point in the tennis match, but it is not the whole game.’

  ‘But it is. It is!’ Gianni thumped the table hard. ‘You speak of games? You do not know the curse that was laid on my father by that witch of England.’

  ‘And “the sins of the father are visited upon the son”. So it is revenge you seek? Or atonement?’

  ‘I seek the glory of God, Jesuit.’ Gianni held Thomas’s stare. ‘And believe me, I would rather go to France and dig up every crossroads outside every village, beneath every gibbet in the Loire, than kneel before Christ’s representative on earth and tell him that the guilt of the Rombauds still lives in this world.’

  ‘Carafa is not Pope yet.’

  ‘He will be. And the gift I was to lay before St Peter’s throne was the six-fingered hand of that great heretic, Anne Boleyn. I will descend to the lowest reaches of Hades to find it.’

  In the silence that opened between them, a voice entered. It was a voice that none of them had heard before. Indeed, it had not been used for nearly twenty years. There had been nothing in all that time the speaker considered worth saying. He was not sure this was either. But he said it anyway.

  ‘The village is called Pont St Just, a day’s ride from Tours. To the south, there is a crossroads. A gibbet stands there. Four paces from its base, where the four roads meet, a casket is buried. Within it rests the hand of Anne Boleyn.’

  While the voice spoke, for a little after, no one moved, as if the sound held them in some binding spell. Gianni and Thomas’s eyes remained fixed on each other, the guards’ goblets of wine frozen where they had been when the voice reached them. It was croaky from disuse, yet it had carried into every part of the hall, each word clear as if it hung in the air like smoke from the fire, drifting, like that same smoke, to the open window where it reached a man perched outside and above it on the stone lintel. But Erik, like everyone else, did not move. ‘How do you know this, Brother Silence?’ asked Thomas, gently.

  He considered. Did he need to add any more to what had been said?

  ‘I was there. I saw it buried.’

  He hadn’t thought about that night at the crossroads in nineteen years. But now, in the question of their stares, he did – and remembered everything. How the one-handed man, that same man he had served wine to this evening, had leapt from a gibbet midden and plunged a dagger through his eye. How he’d fallen but not lost consciousness, his other eye open, unpierced, so he had not lost all his sight. All he had lost, in one moment of terrible pain, was his discrimination, his ability to care about anything he saw, or felt, or heard. One agonized moment, and all the events of his life, the triumphs, the cruelties, the men he’d killed, the women he’d taken, all turned into shadows dancing on a wall. Nothing worth talking about.

  He remembered everything from that moment on. Saw again the head of Giancarlo Cibo, his master, severed by the flying sword. Saw the French executioner, Jean Rombaud, take the witch’s hand and bury it in the centre of the crossroads by the light of a full moon.

  The silence extended so, in it, he remembered everything thereafter. How Rombaud and the others left, and the villagers came, thought him dead, took him when they realized he wasn’t and might be worth a ransom because of his rich clothes. A barber-surgeon removed the dagger lodged in his head. Somehow, to everyone’s surprise, it didn’t kill him, though death came close in the weeks that followed. But when he’d recovered and still wouldn’t speak, when they couldn’t find out how to profit by him, they turned him out onto the road. It led south, by diverse paths and ways, till one of them crossed that of a monk returning from pilgrimage, a kind man, who took him for charity and because his size was some protection on the road, taking him all the way to his order’s house in Livorno. He stayed on when the order was abolished and the Jesuits took over the house, and he had just carried on silently doing what he had done ever since a dagger had entered his eye and changed his world. He tended to the gardens, and served the travellers and pilgrims who rested there. If their plates needed food, he piled food onto them. If their goblets were empty, he filled them with wine. And if they needed to know where Anne Boleyn’s hand was buried, he told them.

  He bent forward, poured wine, waited. He assumed that more words were coming, now he’d decided to speak. He didn’t mind waiting for them, he was comfortable with silence. It was the name he’d lived by for nearly twenty years, once he’d stopped being Heinrich von Solingen.

  There was nothing Erik could do. The Fugger had been right, there were too many of them; Gianni, and the locket, always in the thick of his men. He’d clung to the lintel and listened to the extraordinary tale. He’d followed them to the harbour and right up to the ship, considered stowing aboard. No opportunities came and, anyway, a voice began to work in his head, an unfamiliar voice speaking of caution rather than immediate attack, telling him of a better way than discovery at sea and a watery grave.

  So he watched the ship sail on the night tide, then rode for the barn on the outskirts of Livorno. Briefly, he told what had passed.

  ‘Then hell has broken its bounds.’

  The Fugger sank down into the stale hay, his legs losing their ability to support him. The glimpse that had merely reminded him of his old enemy had been enough to spur him, vomiting, into the night. The thought that Heinrich von Solingen had triumphed over death – for it could only be him – took away all the little courage he had mustered. Erik, on learning who it was, merely whistled.

  ‘So I have seen the Bogey-Man.’ Von Solingen had been the stuff of nightmare in all their childhoods, a goad to good behaviour. ‘Well, I am glad I saw him leave on a ship.’ He leaned down to the Fugger, his face flushed with his excitement. ‘They all left, Fugger. Every man including that German monster. Do you know what that means?’

  The Fugger barely shook his head.

  ‘It means they sent no message to Rome. No punishment for your escape. Gianni must be too busy with his great work. It means Maria will still be alive, till their return. It means we have time to break her out of this prison.’

  Erik smiled. This was the thought that had occurred to him at the docks, why he had let the ship sail without him. Action delayed could lead to more glorious action.

  The name of his daughter seemed to revive the Fugger. He struggled to his feet.

  ‘First, Jean must know of this, that the evil he nearly died to oppose is again upon the earth, incarnate in its most awful servant. Poor man, all he wants to do is have the rest he has earned. Yet I fear his sword must wake again in his quest.’

  When the young man had helped him onto the horse then mounted behind him, he spoke one word.

  ‘Montalcino.’

  SEVEN

  THE RUIN OF ALL HOPE

  They came through the woods just after dawn, for though the spring foliage was not yet far advanced, the trees would still shelter their approach. The rigour of a night spent in a ditch had stiffened Jean’s body, and each step was a jolt through his sinews, no matter the softness of the forest floor.

  The track widened into a small clearing, the trees around it mainly sweet chestnut. The ground was covered in last year’s husks, the once green-furred shells now brown and cracked.

  Anne paused, looked around them, smiled. ‘You were ambushed here once. We pelted you with chestnuts till you surrendered to us. Do you remember?’

  Jean turned, dug the point of his stick in anew, leaned again. ‘I don’t. Who was “us”?’

  ‘All of us.’ Anne took the rope-wrapped bottle from around her neck, uncorked it, handed it to her father to drink. The morning air was chilly, but the sweat still showed on his face. ‘Erik, Maria … Jojo.’ She used Gianni’s childhood name, but it did not keep the shadow from her father’s eyes. She continued hurried
ly. ‘You made us gather all our “weapons”, and Mother made them into a pie. Remember?’

  ‘Your mother used to make wondrous pies.’

  Jean turned back to the path. He didn’t remember, didn’t really want to. More and more, it seemed impossible to separate the good memories from the bad.

  ‘Let’s rest here a little, Father. I’m tired.’

  He didn’t look back this time, no smile for her caring lie. ‘No.’ He drank, handed back the bottle. ‘We go on. Whoever’s there may still be asleep and that will give us our chance. I’d like to be back in Montalcino by midnight.’

  Midnight! They had set out late and it had taken a day and a part of both nights to arrive here. And he wanted to be back inside the day!