Blood Ties

by C. C. Humphreys

  He could not look away. His mother had been of the Bear clan, one of eight clans within his tribe of the Tahontaenrat, and therefore so was he. So it was as if it were him there, tied to a stake, surrounded by snarling enemies, him who jerked up his bloody paws, who tried to grab the leaping dog and fling him to one side. He felt the teeth that crunched into the arm, felt the jaw lock, the agony of snapping bones. It was he who bent and flung the animal high up into the air, jaws rending as they released their grip. The hound flew backwards, almost reaching the crowd, bear’s blood spraying from its muzzle. It fell badly, something gone in the back, but it still tried to crawl back toward the bear, front paws scrabbling, teeth snapping, till a keeper pulled it aside and, in plain sight, slit the dog’s throat.

  ‘One!’ cried the crowd, as the bear crouched, fired by the pain, watching for the next of the hounds that strained and leapt. Two were released then, one coming straight for the throat, one going low, the high one buffeted to the side while the other sought to sink its jaws into the exposed belly. Its half-grip the bear tore loose, raised the animal and sank its teeth beneath the snapping jaws. When the other dog rejoined the fight, leaping on the bear’s back, biting an ear, Tagay put his own hands out, as if he too were thrusting the dying dog aside, reaching up behind to grip, to throw down, to stamp on the writhing body.

  ‘Two! Three!’ they shouted and Tagay knew that it would soon be over, for he saw the King’s flushed face turned in anger to the noble who had just taken his money. The King did not like to lose.

  ‘Silence! Silence!’ Henri shouted, a cry instantly taken up by his steward, his guards. Gradually, the crowd quieted, until all that could be heard was the growling of the dogs and the deep-throated hmm hmm hmm of the bear.

  ‘Release them all!’ Henry said softly into that silence and the crowd swayed forward to get closer to the orgy of death unfolding. The houndsmen struggled to keep hold of each dog, gripping each studded collar as they were unchained, for they had to be released as a pack. The bear stood on its hindlegs, head swaying side to side, its flanks heaving with effort, streaked in its own and its victims’ blood.

  It was him, Tagay, swaying there, waiting for his death, brought to bay by his enemies. He was of the Bear clan. And if he had to die, he would die fighting with that clan.

  Tagay had a new sword at his side, purchased by shame. Drawing it, he stepped down from the King’s high table.

  Anne leant over the two-storey drop below her, her fingers splayed on the slick tiles. Jean perched a few feet away, his feet pressed against a buttress which concealed him. He didn’t look down.

  She did. She had to – for it was all there as she had seen in her dream. The nobles spread out around the stake to which the noblest creature there was chained. She had watched each hound released, turned away from the sight if not the sound of the suffering, turned back when the crowd chanted. The voices demanding silence drew her eyes again, but still she was not sure what she was looking for.

  Then she saw him stand up. He’d been there all the time, she realized, separate from the mob, aloof from it, yet intricately linked to the action. She saw that now as he stood, as if he lifted a golden chain, like the one that had bound the bear of her dream, this chain linking the animal and the man over the heads of the mob. She saw his hair, blacker than hers, as long, falling to his shoulders. She saw him draw the sword, even heard it clear its scabbard in the silence that still prevailed. She saw him lift his head and, in that moment, recognized a face she had never seen.

  The man stepped forward, moving toward the bear pit. Somehow she knew exactly what he was going to do.

  ‘No!’ She screamed it out, standing straight up now, swaying on the edge of the abyss.

  ‘Anne! Get back! Lean away!’ Jean hissed. He wanted to move toward her, to pull her back. But he had glanced down just the once, and found his legs would no longer obey him.

  Everyone below heard her cry. All faces lifted to her. There was an instant murmuring, Henri’s voice rising above it.

  ‘Who is that? Who is that woman?’

  Tagay’s mind had been so concentrated on the journey he was about to take to certain death that he was the last to look. When he did, he saw the woman with the long black hair swaying high above him. He only saw her there for a moment because the moment he saw her, she lost her footing and plunged over the edge of the world.

  ‘Ataentsic!’ he shouted, as the body fell.

  Jean screamed ‘Anne!’, his cry lost among the many. It was his voice she heard though, thinking of him as she plunged, that this was what he had always spoken of – the suspension of time around moments of death, the world a reddish cloud in which she span so slowly. She felt sad for the sadness her death would cause him. And she thought of her failure, having come so far; feeling, even now, Anne Boleyn’s hand pressing into her back.

  The queen for whom she was named was the final thought in her mind as her flailing arm struck the first cream and sugar turret. She was falling spine first, so it was the six-fingered hand that first encountered the puff pastry battlements, which collapsed as swiftly as any besieger’s most wondrous dream. Layer upon layer gave way so that by the time the body had carved through the castle’s sugared floors and ceilings much of its force had diminished. Anne’s side struck the table on which the edifice was perched and it collapsed beneath her.

  The collective gasp was greater than anything bear or mastiff had brought forth. No one moved, not even the animals until Tagay sheathed his sword and ran straight through the sawdust arena, passing close by the bear which rose onto his hind legs as the man came near him.

  Tumult returned, astonished voices, yelping, as Tagay plunged into the wreckage. Scrabbling through the sticky walls and collapsed towers, clouds of powdered sugar obscuring his sight, at last his hands encountered a body. Carefully, he traced her form upwards.

  ‘Live, Earth Mother, live!’ Coughing, he put one arm under her head, began gently clearing the cream with his other hand. Her face emerged suddenly, as if she had burst from a snow drift. She gasped, her eyes flickered open, unfocused, moving about. Then they settled, held on his, and it was as if he had always known them.

  She struggled up through the white storm, seeking the breath that would bring her back to the world. Then, amidst all the pained sensations of her body, she felt something pressing into her back.

  She felt her left arm could be broken, but her right seemed to work. Despite the pain the movement caused her, she managed to reach down and around, and pull the unravelling bandage from behind her back.

  ‘They must not find this. No one must find it,’ she said, just before the whiteness took her again.

  Her limp fingers released something onto his lap. Through layers of cloth, he saw the white bone of a knuckle, the joint of a skeletal thumb. As the first of the courtiers’ footfalls crunched onto the shattered sugar castle, Tagay tucked the hand and its shroud into his doublet. Then he bent and lifted the unconscious body from the wreckage.

  People swirled around him then reeled back, cursing, as expensive garments were swathed in powder and cream. He strode out of it, stopping as he beheld the rank of nobles drawn up before him.

  ‘What is she, Tagay? A Huguenot assassin dropped from the sky?’

  It was the King who spoke. Henri stood at the centre of his court. Behind him, the nobility of France jostled for precedence and a view.

  Tagay may have been treated as a mascot, little better than a jester, but he had been at the court long enough to know its language – and what delighted it.

  ‘A woman, Great Father, sick with love for me. Her parents would keep us apart.’

  ‘Well, they say love lends us wings. But is she is so desperate for your love that she tries to prove it?’

  Laughter greeted his Majesty’s question.

  ‘It seems so, Father.’

  ‘And do you love her, my Little Bear?’

  Tagay looked down at the face that lolled against his sh
oulder. ‘Beyond measure, my King.’

  There was a murmur, especially from the ladies of the court. Diane de Poitiers, the King’s favourite mistress, was standing just behind him. She laid a caressing hand to his neck.

  ‘Majesty, is it not our duty, as ambassadors of love, to help our Little Bear in his plight?’

  The King smiled back at her. It was well-known he could refuse her nothing. ‘How fares she, Tagay? Will she survive her fall?’

  ‘I think so, Father. But I would get her to a bed and swiftly.’

  More laughter, the King leading it. ‘I am sure you would, Tagay. But be gentle with her, heh? She might yet break.’

  Commands were issued, stewards sent ahead to prepare a room, physicians called.

  ‘Go now, and attend to your love, Little Bear. And we will send to inquire how the lady is later.’ The King turned back to his court, raising his voice. ‘Well, dessert has been overthrown by love. What a pity. But as we are discussing little bears, I believe we have another to attend to here.’

  They had all forgotten in the new excitement. They returned to the killing ground behind them as Tagay went the opposite way, bearing his burden toward the palace, shrugging off the grasping fingers of the Marquise who angrily tried to delay him. As he entered through one of the great doors, he heard the hounds’ baying begin anew, heard the deep-throated grunt of the chained bear.

  ‘Die well, brother,’ he said quietly. ‘Die well.’

  SEVENTEEN

  THE GREY WOLF AND THE BEAR

  Her sleep was almost unbroken, through the night and long into the morning. Tagay had allowed the doctors to set her arm, her only serious injury, though her left side was badly bruised. Then he had dismissed them all. It was he alone who attended her when her eyes started open, soothing words accompanying the cordial or broth he fed her. Soon she’d sleep again and he would watch and wonder, eating and drinking nothing himself.

  For when a goddess fell to earth, had not the hour come to fast?

  It was the bell that woke him, striking somewhere within the palace. He could not have slept for long, but in that time her eyes had opened and were fixed upon him. He was at her side in a moment.

  ‘I met you in my dream,’ she said.

  ‘And I met you in mine.’ He raised the glass of cordial to her lips.

  She shook her head. ‘Tell me how that can be.’

  Her eyes were pools of cool darkness. He had to look away before he slipped into them.

  ‘In my land, it is said that dreams are the rulers of all life.’

  ‘That sounds like a land where I could live.’

  He looked up at her then, risking her eyes.

  ‘Where lies this place? What is it called?’

  ‘We call it many things. But the French, who seek to possess it, have named it Canada, which is the name we give to a big village. It lies far away, across the water, beyond the setting sun.’

  ‘Tell me of it.’

  ‘I have never seen it, for I was brought here inside my mother. All I know was told to me by her, and by a chief who was also brought, my uncle, Donnaconna.’

  ‘Then tell me that.’

  So he did and as he talked Anne watched him. Listening to the words, to the feelings behind them. His voice took on a cadence, a rise and fall, almost as if he were singing a song of the ways of his people and of the place they lived. She took most of it in, for in his attitude to the world there was a similarity to her own, a recognition of something other that underpinned everything, living on mountaintops, in the depths of forests, in streams at twilight. Sometimes though, she found she was just listening to the way his voice sang. It was only when he spoke of the bones of his ancestors that she came fully back to her own world and its peril.

  ‘Do you have what I asked you to keep?’

  He pointed to a pillow beside hers. There, re-wrapped carefully in its cloth, she saw the hand.

  ‘My people also keep safe and honour the bones of our ancestors.’

  ‘She is not my ancestor. She …’ Anne hesitated, unable to decide where to begin, how much to tell. ‘She was a woman of power, who entrusted herself to my father. He seeks to protect … this. To hide it from men who would misuse it, abuse her memory. But it is so …’

  She faltered. How could she explain the danger she was in? She had groped her way in the darkness, had followed the warnings of her dreams to this point. Ahead of her now, nothing was clear. Then she remembered one more thing that she could speak of.

  ‘And I am named for this woman. We are both called Anne.’

  ‘Anne, yes. I learnt your name, for you told it to the doctor who tended you.’

  ‘I did? I do not remember that.’

  He rose and bowed. ‘You called yourself Anne Rombaud. And my name is Tagaynearguye.’ He smiled, for there was confusion on her face at the string of syllables. ‘I am known as Tagay. Before you were Anne, I thought you were Ataentsic, daughter of the Sun God. The Goddess who fell to earth.’

  He made to withdraw his hand but she held it.

  ‘No Goddess,’ she said. ‘And my father is no God. He is a man called Jean Rombaud.’

  Speaking his name, she remembered him shouting hers as she plunged from the roof. She half-raised herself from the bed, but her dizziness and the firm squeeze of her hand made her settle back. It was the hand that decided her. Not Anne Boleyn’s, for once. The hand of this man holding hers.

  Wherever he was, her father would have to come to her.

  ‘You! Why do you carry nothing? We’ll have no slackness, sirrah!’

  Jean bowed low and was rewarded with the stroke of a cane across his backside. He returned, yet again, to the site of the feast, where three other servants struggled to lift a heavy oak table. He made a fourth, heaved, and they carried it into the palace and down into the palace’s depths.

  It had been a long night, his disguise a mixed blessing. Every time he was within the walls and thought to slip away, another servant or steward would call him to help. The carnage of the festivities had to be cleared by the middle of the day for the King would then stroll in his gardens with his mistress. No trace must remain. So, like ants, the workers went back and forth.

  In a strange way, Jean began to like what he was doing. His garb made him instantly accepted by all and the strange bulge of the sword under his apron drew no comment – there were at least three other hunchbacks among the drones. There were jokes, some laughter amidst the complaints, and a stew served near dawn. The meat was tough, gamey, and he had half a suspicion that it was bear. But it was hearty, and though his concern for Anne never quite left him, it retired to a place further back in his mind, level with the aches in his body. Also, as he worked, he listened more than he talked. Learnt of the workings of the palace, the layout of its upper rooms. By early morning he had a fair idea where his daughter might have been taken.

  There was as much gossip as complaints. Much was to do with the extraordinary events of the night – the falling of the woman from the roof. He learnt of the man who had carried his Anne away, a favourite of the servant girls as well as the King. More than one, it seemed, knew him intimately. One kitchen maid, big of breast and with a sullen-looking mouth, was obviously jealous, and told of the Indian’s bad reputation. But another, a chubby footman named Cahusac, who had complained the whole night about his back and lifted little, defended the youth, saying that the story was like a romance from one of the broadsheets that could be found on any street corner in Paris.

  When the noon bell sounded, Jean drained his tankard of beer, rose quietly. It was time to begin the search. He was halfway to the door when it burst open.

  ‘Did I not tell you it was like a romance from the streets?’ Cahusac cried, waving a piece of paper. ‘Look, look! “The Pagan Prince and Wing’d Love”! It says that girl who fell is one of King Francis’s bastards. The late King and one of you sluttish servant girls!’

  There were boos, catcalls, as all crowded around him. Jean w
as drawn back.

  ‘How could this story already be on the streets?’ he asked Cahusac, who was struggling to keep hold of the pamphlet.

  ‘You jest? There’ll be half a dozen versions out by tonight. The printers work all night looking for just this sort of thing. Heh!’ he shouted. ‘Have a care there, you’ll tear it! Let me read it. I’m the only one who can, after all.’

  To cheers, he read aloud the tale as written by ‘Doctor M – Physician Royal to his Majesty King Henri II of France.’ It was the usual nonsense, Jean had read some of their like before. Love unrequited, the cruelty of Tagay, the native hostage spurning the late King’s illegitimate daughter, till she threw herself from the highest tower in the land only to float to the ground, a miracle of angel’s wings granted by the power of love, which opened the eyes of the pagan prince to her Christian fortitude and her beauty. But Jean heard all this in a blur, so stunned had he been by the subtitle:

  ‘The Tale of Tagay of Canada and Anne Rombaud of France.’

  These words now drove Jean again to the door and through it.

  How could they know her name? Safety had lain in their anonymity, yet now the name of Rombaud was being bandied through the streets of the city. If it was a pamphlet now, it would be a ballad on every troubadour’s lips by nightfall.

  He had to find his daughter. They must be gone from Paris.

  Thomas Lawley smoothed the pamphlet out on the table and looked across to the doorway of the inn where his companion kept his keen watch. Gianni had barely glanced at the text, evincing no surprise at his sister’s transformation into a miracle of love. It was obvious that she held no interest for him. He was only concerned with what she had stolen and how he could get it back.