Blood Ties

by C. C. Humphreys

  It took a while, because of the noise of his heart, for the other sound to penetrate. He saw Anne, still only two boat lengths offshore, stop staring at him and look suddenly past him, above him. Her arm dropped, fingers reaching to her mouth. Then her shout joined the other shouts, the ones that were coming from the hill on the edge of the town.

  Jean turned. He had no eyesight for distance, saw only shapes on the hilltop. But the voice carried well on the offshore breeze.

  ‘They are there, on that boat!’ shouted Gianni Rombaud. ‘Raise the harbour boom!’

  Jean saw some dozen horses, spurred by their riders, plunge down the steep hill. They were a short ride from the jetty, a short run from its shore-end to the boom’s winch. He looked back to the Sea Feather. It would not clear the harbour entrance in time.

  Sprinting for the stone steps, he reached them just ahead of the horsemen. He heard them dismounting, then their riding boots clattering off the pebble-embedded pier as they followed him along it. Stopping ten paces short of the boom winch, Jean turned around.

  His son was where he expected him to be, at the front. Gianni slowed when he saw Jean turn, his men forming a wedge behind him. Ten paces away, he halted.

  ‘Cede the ground, old man,’ Gianni snarled, ‘for you cannot stop us now.’

  ‘You’re right, my son, I cannot. But I can, perhaps, delay you for a while.’

  As Jean spoke, he reached up behind his back and pulled the square-headed sword from its scabbard. It emerged into the sunlight as it always had done, a predator blinking into a dawn.

  He glanced around. Near the shore end of the jetty, a man in a black cloak was limping toward them. Up on the hill, he could make out the shapes of another group of horsemen beginning their descent. Reinforcements to his enemy, he presumed. On the water, the Sea Feather was fast approaching. Not fast enough.

  He looked from the ship to his son. He needed a little time.

  ‘A man dying at a crossroads told me you may be better with a blade than me. Was he right, Gianni? Did I teach you so well?’

  It was bait and Jean saw his son take it, as Jean would have taken it at his age.

  ‘He’s mine. Mine alone,’ said Gianni, drawing a heavy rapier from its sheath.

  He attacked fast, as Jean knew he would, with the invincibility of youth. It had been three years since they’d last crossed swords in practice and Jean could see that his son was stronger now, faster. He had not spent those years simply in prayer and penitence.

  The triangular-pointed blade came at him from a running lunge, chest high, straight, a young man’s attack. The square-pointed blade moved square to meet it; met air – the run was a feint, for young men know what old men think of them. Gianni’s tip moved outwards and, as his back leg caught up with his front his hands joined and, double-handed, he swept the weapon over and down in a half circle to Jean’s exposed shoulder. Jean had to lunge backwards, taking his body out of line, his parry a slope to guide the other’s weapon away.

  But Gianni had not put anything into the blow. His father had exposed his back, given ground on the first pass. Suddenly, joyously, he knew he could take him. He let his blade slide off the square tip then, jerking it to a sudden halt, he flicked it sideways. It did not have the force to cripple, but honed metal bites nonetheless and this did, into Jean’s outstretched leg.

  Father and son looked at the cut in shared wonder. It was Jean who recovered first, withdrew his leg, stepped back two paces, came on guard. He stood with his feet parallel now, the hilt grasped two-handed and held straight out before him.

  ‘You have learned, Gianni. I am proud of you.’

  ‘Pride before the fall.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  A man limping along a jetty. Horses flowing down a hill. A boat still too far away. Gianni looked and saw it too.

  ‘Enough, old man. Your sword or your life.’

  You can only take so much from a cub, Jean thought. Even your own.

  So he bent, dipped his finger in his wound and reached up to taste his own blood.

  ‘Now that brings back memories,’ he said, and on the last word he attacked.

  Swords rose to clash, metal on metal crying like the gulls that circled overhead, while the years of anger and misunderstanding coalesced in sunlight and sparks on their blades. Two men became animal and the young stag challenged the old.

  To Gianni’s guards, to Anne and Tagay on the boat, it was a blur of steel as swords sped through the air, met with shrieks, screamed in parting, renewed assault and parry, feint and counterfeint. Not one watching could see who led, who followed in the dance.

  The men knew. It went both ways, giving and receiving, a blow no sooner thought of than delivered.

  He is good, thought Jean, and he is now trying to kill me.

  He is still good, thought Gianni, and once more he stands between me and my God.

  I am old, thought Jean, and I have not done this for a while. Time sides with youth. He could fight all day while I … I cannot even fight until that boat passes by

  So I must do something, Jean thought.

  And did.

  It was a trick. An old one – simple, dirty. He had meant to show it to Gianni years ago, but the boy had run away before he could.

  Just as well.

  Jean did not have to pretend to be tired. But he let each parry get weaker, counter-attacks rarer, let his son’s ringing blows force his own sword ever closer to his body. Parrying two-handed, his breath coming in huge whooping gasps, stepping back and back, his foot finally reached the edge of the winch. Seeing this, with a grunt of triumph, Gianni stepped in close to drive his blow hard into his father’s injured thigh, and Jean’s parry barely halted the cutting edge a finger’s width from his flesh. Then, with sudden force, he thrust his blade along Gianni’s and straight down. His cross guards brought the rapier low and Gianni had to step close to retain it. Leaving only his left hand on his sword, Jean pulled his right back into a fist and hit Gianni hard, twice, straight on the nose. Eyes watering, he reeled back, tried again to disentangle his blade and bring it up. But Jean stepped closer still, keeping the blades tight and, reaching up with the hand that had struck, he grabbed his son’s left shoulder, pulled down hard, then snaked his arm around the young man’s neck. In a moment their two heads were conjoined and an executioner’s sword pressed at Gianni’s throat.

  For moments it was all each could do to breathe.

  Finally, Jean spoke. ‘It’s over, boy. Over.’

  Gianni tried to move and felt the razor edge nick his skin. He could, however, speak.

  ‘Kill him,’ he said to his stunned men, ‘kill him now.’

  Jean sighed, then turned again to the water. The Sea Feather was drawing level. Anne was reaching out to him, Tagay barely keeping her aboard. They looked close enough to touch and they were just about to pass the neck of the harbour.

  Gianni had cut himself, straining against the weapon, so Jean removed it and shoved him away to sprawl on the jetty’s stones. Jean knelt, watching as the tiny rivulet of blood crept down the runnels of his sword.

  So much blood, Jean thought, so much down the years. The guilty, the innocent, the simply unlucky, their life force pooling in these same channels, long wiped away, some vestige of them yet clinging, a trace of every departed soul. Not least that of his queen, Anne Boleyn, her smile a memory now. Her blood running here, from neck, from wrist, like his son’s ran now. His sword had tasted more than just its share of blood. It had tasted enough.

  As his son’s men came for him, weapons thrust cautiously ahead, he stood and, as he had done once on a battlefield and once in a slaughter yard and once at a crossroads in the Loire, Jean Rombaud bent, unleashed still powerful shoulders and flung the sword high up into the air. It spun in a gentle arc, rising over the bow of the boat, over the upturned face of his beloved daughter, into the sunlight. Seagulls shrieked and dived for its whirling brightness, but it plunged, square point first into the waves and was
gone before any could do themselves harm upon it.

  He raised his arms up to the blue sky as the first man lunged at him and, meeting no resistance, lunged on. Others followed, the sky turned red, and Jean Rombaud fell to a dozen swords.

  ‘No!’ screamed Gianni, just before the ball from a Spanish musket went past him, exploding the head of a lieutenant busy with murder. Two pistol shots followed and two more of the assailants jerked back in pain. The others paused, looked back along the jetty at the two men sprinting toward them, the sun bouncing off the weapons they carried – twin scimitars and a long-handled battle axe.

  ‘A Haakonsson!’ the Norsemen cried as they crashed into Gianni’s men who scattered, desperately defended themselves, desperately died. Just two survived and only because they hurled themselves into the harbour.

  She arrived as the last man fell, the smoke still curling from the muzzle of her musket.

  ‘Tell me – do they live?’ Beck panted.

  ‘Your son does.’ Haakon pointed with his axe to where Gianni still lay, clutching the thin line of blood at his throat, staring at them, mad-eyed, disbelieving. Then the Norseman began pulling at the pile of the fallen. When his body was pulled out, Beck sank down with a sob, cradled his head in her lap.

  ‘Oh, Jean, my Jean. What have they done to you now?’

  Within the sheet of blood that was his face, eyes blinked slowly open.

  ‘Heaven so soon,’ he whispered. ‘That didn’t take long.’ Then his brow wrinkled. ‘But what are you doing here before me?’

  ‘You live! My love, oh my life! We must get you aid! Quickly …’ She turned to the others. ‘Haakon! Fugger! Why will you not move?’

  It was the Fugger who went to her, laying a hand gently on her shoulder. Jean’s eyes flicked to him.

  ‘How fare you, Jean?’

  ‘I am dying, Fugger. You?’

  The German couldn’t help smiling. ‘I am well. My Maria is safe. And your Anne – she was on that boat?’

  A tiny nod. ‘Both Annes. They seek their rest in a New World. Haakon?’

  He could not see him, but the size of the shape that blocked the sun seemed familiar.

  ‘Yes, little man?’

  ‘Look to Beck, Norseman.’

  ‘I will, old comrade.’

  ‘Look to Beck?’ she cried. ‘I will look to myself, as always, Jean Rombaud. You think I need a man’s protection because I am so womanly, so weak, that I … I …’ Her throat tightened as the tears came.

  The words were faint now, so only Beck could hear them. ‘You are a warrior – and my own true love.’

  She whispered. ‘And you are mine.’ As she bent to kiss him, the first of her tears ran from her face and onto his.

  He tilted his face up to them. They were like grace falling from heaven and, feeling that grace at last, Jean Rombaud died.

  She rocked him, began to keen, Hebrew words on a low note. Maria had joined her father and now the two Fuggers, Haakon and Erik turned to stare at Jean Rombaud’s son.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ There was a note of pleading in Gianni’s voice. ‘He opposed the will of God.’

  ‘Your God, Gianni,’ the Fugger said softly. ‘Your interpretation of His will.’

  The voice changed, hardened. ‘He served the Devil in serving that English witch.’

  ‘He served his own truth.’

  ‘No!’ Gianni howled, glaring back at the eyes before him. ‘He cursed us, all of us. And only I can lift that curse.’

  ‘And only I can help you.’

  The new voice came from the limping, black-cloaked man they’d run past on the jetty.

  Thomas Lawley moved to Gianni’s side now, bent, helped him from the ground. ‘Come away, Gianni. Come!’

  Shaking off the supporting hand, Gianni made to turn. Then he looked down, saw his dead father in his mother’s arms, took a step toward her. In a voice drained of defiance, he said, ‘Mother?’

  Beck’s eyes were filled, the figure of her son appearing as if through a veil. She shook her head once, to clear her vision. When she had, she simply looked for a moment, with the glance one gives to a stranger. Then she bent again and resumed her low keening.

  This time Gianni accepted the tug of the arm. The first step was hard, the second a little easier. Soon he was pulling the limping man down the jetty, away. He had seen the caravel slipping across the waves, bearing his family’s curse. And he had seen other boats still tied up in the harbour.

  They watched them leave, turned back to the two on the ground, to the living and the dead.

  ‘We must bury him,’ said the Fugger.

  Haakon shook his head, bent to touch Beck on her shoulder.

  ‘I have another idea.’

  They were ready near sunset. They had staunched his wounds as best they could, washed his face, wrapped him in a new cloak. Erik had placed a scimitar between his hands.

  ‘It may not be his own sword,’ said Haakon as he rested a hand on his son’s shoulder, ‘but Rombaud was a man with an eye for a fine cutting edge.’

  He bent again to the prow of the skiff they’d laid him in, using his knife to carve the last curl of a giant ‘R’ there.

  ‘A rune for journeys,’ he said.

  The Fugger placed a flagon of wine near Jean’s feet. ‘You’ll want a drink when you awake, old friend. It will not be as good as that from your vineyards. But it gives you something to compare your next vintage to.’

  Haakon rowed; Beck sat in the stern; Erik followed in a second boat with the Fuggers. A calm sea was burnished red by the setting sun. When Haakon shipped his oars, Erik brought his vessel alongside, held the two together. The Norseman climbed over, leaving Beck holding the body.

  She whispered, ‘I have nothing to give you, Jean. Nothing except this promise – you will never be forgotten. We will tell your tale often and we will tell it in the courtyard of the Comet. For I will get it back – that I vow to you. Farewell.’

  She kissed him, then took Haakon’s hand and climbed over into the other boat. She looked down at their expectant faces.

  ‘No words,’ she said, ‘for he was not a man of words but of deeds. And such deeds.’

  She took the torch Haakon had lit for her. At her nod, Erik released the skiff which immediately began to move away. She let it drift, the tide took it and, just when they all thought it had gone too far, she stooped and threw, the shoulder that had wielded a slingshot still strong, her thirst for a target still unerring. The torch flared through the air, spinning, then plunged down, onto the straw that was his bed. It caught, instantly, and the boat, Jean Rombaud’s funeral pyre, drifted blazing into the sunset.

  PART TWO

  NEW WORLD

  ONE

  HOMECOMING

  Tagay crouched at the centre of the blackened circle, sifting ash, letting it fall like so much sooty snow. She had called him from the edge of this clearing that had once held a village; he’d pretended he had not heard. For what could he say that he had not said the day before and the one before that? He had promised her a New World. And he had brought her to a wasteland.

  ‘Tomorrow, Tagay.’ Anne spoke now from just behind him. As ever, he had not heard her approach, not a crack of twig or footfall on the charred earth had alerted him. He had always known how she was born of air. The first time he’d seen her she’d floated down from a palace roof. Yet wasn’t he a native of this land, even if he’d never been here before?

  Surely, a hunter of the Bear clan, of the tribe of the Tahontaenrat should be able to hear the approach of a white girl?

  But, of course, he wasn’t a hunter. He wasn’t anything. All he knew in life was across the other side of the ocean. And standing in the ashes of the fourth village they had found in as many days, he wished he were back in Paris now, safely drunk, about to be shown to another woman’s bed.

  He stood, brushing his hands against his breeches. They could not get any dirtier; seven weeks at sea had turned their green velvet into
a dull and muddied grey. Yet he could not take them off, nor his lawn shirt and brocade doublet, to dress as his mother had told him his people did in the summer, in a simple strip of skin around his waist. That would be as false as his dream of a homecoming.

  At least he sensed her hand reaching for his shoulder. He stepped beyond it, out of the circle of soot, his back still to her.

  ‘Tomorrow? You think tomorrow will be any different from today?’

  Anne’s hand caressed the space he’d lately occupied. ‘Yes, I do. You said yourself, your people move on when the land is tired. We just have to catch up with them.’

  He turned, yet still avoided her eyes. His tone was bitter. ‘You’ve seen the fields. The earth here is rich. The corn fattens on the stalks, though the weeds now seek to choke it. These people did not move on. These people were driven out.’

  She noticed how he no longer said ‘my people’.

  ‘Then we will find where they have been driven, Tagay. We will.’

  Before he could muster a reply, a voice shouted their names from beyond the clearing, from the path back toward the river.

  Anne was grateful for the interruption. ‘Here, Captain,’ she called, ‘ahead, in the village.’

  Jacquet appeared, moving swiftly on the makeshift crutch she’d fashioned for him when they’d first reached land. He had broken his leg badly in a fall to the deck during a storm in the middle of the Atlantic. She had set it expertly, made him a cordial from her scant supplies that calmed his impatience, sat by him in his tiny cabin nursing him through the fever that followed. He had worshipped her ever since.

  Two of his crew followed him. Young though they were they struggled to keep up.

  ‘Must you always go rushing off like that?’

  He balanced on one leg and shook his crutch at them, breathing heavily. He found it hard to be angry with Anne, so he turned his venom on Tagay. ‘You may think you are one of them, my lad, but you hardly look like it in your Paris finery.’ He gestured at the soiled, tattered remains of Tagay’s clothes. ‘They are more likely to stick you full of arrows than to greet you as a lost cousin.’