The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  They mounted again, Jean ahead, the Fugger struggling with the most docile horse in the middle, Haakon at the rear, Fenrir at his stirrup. They followed the main road south for a while, then Jean turned his horse onto a trail just perceptible in the weak moonlight. It twisted up into the hills, and as they climbed they became aware of the noise from the distant town. Looking back, they could just see that fire had spread from the square and was consuming a considerable section of the crammed streets.

  ‘Look, Daemon,’ the Fugger whispered to the bird nestled on his shoulder, ‘they got their cleansing flames after all.’

  After a few minutes, the trail widened to a farm-cart’s width, and Haakon pushed his nag up beside the Frenchman’s.

  ‘Is now the time to remind you of your promise?’ he said.

  Jean grimly indicated the path ahead. ‘You believe I think of anything else?’

  ‘Not to your lady,’ Haakon grinned. ‘Your promise to me.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘If I should prove myself worthy, you would honour me with the tale of your quest. Have I fulfilled my share of that bargain?’

  It was Jean’s turn to smile.

  ‘You might have stopped me dying on a heretic’s blade back there, I suppose. But do you truly want to hear this tale now, on a hard night’s ride?’

  ‘I can think of no better time. Besides, and I have thought much about this during our short acquaintance, you are a very dangerous person to be around. And I suspect you have more hazards in mind for us. So now might be the only time.’

  Jean laughed. That was twice in a day, and this man was responsible both times. The horses had their heads and would follow the dark trail better than he. So he sat back in his saddle and for the second time told the tale of his promise to Anne Boleyn.

  NINE

  AMBUSH

  The moon was on the wane, but still gave off enough light to show them the path. They rode without break through the nights, rested for a few hours each morning, then rode or walked out the day before a short evening rest. A final night ride ended with them, near dawn, wearily tethering and feeding their horses on a small knoll overlooking the main road to Toulon.

  ‘They will not have passed here yet,’ Jean told them.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ The Fugger was bent with exhaustion, and had fallen to the ground as one dead. It was many years since he’d straddled a horse and he’d forgotten which parts of the body were required. They were reminding him in fire now.

  ‘The man we hunt is no fool. He will not want to kill his horses and leave himself a long walk, not in this country.’ Jean looked about him, scanning the little valley in the growing light. ‘A man on a horse might outrun the brigands who thrive here. A man on foot, never. We have three hours at least, by my reckoning.’

  He threw himself onto the ground beside the Fugger, covering the both of them in one cloak.

  ‘You’ll take the first watch, Haakon?’ he said.

  The big Norwegian was laying out a blanket.

  ‘No need. Fenrir!’ he called, and the huge hound came and curled up beside his master, who threw the blanket over the two of them. ‘Fenrir will tell us when someone approaches. Horse!’ he instructed, and the beast growled an acknowledgement. ‘Otherwise every rabbit and wolf will have us reaching for our weapons.’

  Despite the immediate duet of snores around him, Jean lay for a while watching the morning star wink into nothingness. The point he had chosen overlooked a narrowing of the road to the width of a farm cart, the surface showing the signs of a wet spring, deep ruts filled with glutinous mud. A horse would have to be led through it. It was the perfect spot for an ambush.

  That thought disturbed him just a little before deep exhaustion took him and he began to snore too.

  Almost opposite Jean’s rise, and slightly higher, was another hill crested by a few stunted pines arched over by the force of the wind that blew up from the sea. Downwind, and thus beyond the sensitive nostrils of Fenrir, a body shifted very slightly on its bed of pine needles. Two eyes glared down at the intruders.

  Three. I can take three.

  Fingers reached out to the weapon stretched over a rock, checked each stitch that held the leather pouch in place, continued down the tightly coiled ropes to the knots and loop at the ropes’ ends, an arm’s length away. Satisfied, the fingers moved on to the twin piles of stones. Two kinds had been gleaned from the riverbed nearby. The larger ones were the size of a gull’s egg; heavier to heave, they would travel slower and arrive with a force designed to stun. The smaller, a wren’s egg of a stone, would kill any approaching Goliath, if the aim were true. There were ten stones in all.

  Double what I need. There’s only these three, and the two who come.

  Five. I can take five.

  The Archbishop was in a foul mood which a beautiful dawn did nothing to alleviate. Mortification of the flesh was something he preferred in short, intense shocks, such as might be provided by a scourge or the long fingernails of Donatella, his mistress in Siena. It was not the drawn-out, numbing pain of three nights’ hard riding with little food and no wine, no luxurious cloaks to sleep under – all left behind by Heinrich in the Bishop’s palace when they’d fled Tours.

  ‘How much further, dolt?’ he called to the broad back ahead of him.

  The only satisfaction to be had was to goad his bodyguard. Yet even that pleasure had palled, for Heinrich had learnt to say nothing in response. Cibo liked to keep men around who hated him, who were forced to endure his ceaseless baiting yet could sometimes be prompted into a foolish response to be punished in some ingenious way. Fear and hatred were far easier to inspire than love, he’d always found – and far easier to control.

  ‘Not far,’ came the sullen reply, called over the shoulder.

  Cibo scrunched down in his saddle, his many pains agonising him, his cough wrenching small gobbets of blood from deep within him. His cough had lessened since the crossroads, that was sure, but it never ceased completely.

  Heinrich von Solingen smiled at the sound. ‘Hate the master, love the cause’. The phrase came again to his mind, oft repeated, like a Latin chant in a cathedral.

  A dog howled, almost wolf-like in its drawn-out note. It was coming from a couple of rises ahead. People could be about, yet Heinrich had no fear of brigands, not at this time of the day. He’d been a robber-knight himself, before he became Christ’s warrior and began the long penance for his thousand sins in the Archbishop’s service. He knew that dawn for brigands inevitably meant lying drunk somewhere. No, a dog simply showed they were drawing close to some outlying village, the beginning of the descent to the port of Toulon. Still, just in case, he put on his helmet and loosened his sword in its scabbard.

  ‘No, not far,’ he said again, hoping to hear the cough.

  ‘Kill the bodyguard, leave the Archbishop,’ Jean had told Haakon when the Norseman had convinced him he could hit a target as big as Heinrich from forty paces. Now, watching the two men lead their horses into the trap, he hoped Haakon was as good as his boast, that no arrows went astray. He needed Cibo alive – at least until the hand was again in his possession.

  ‘Then again …’ Jean had wondered if there was a gibbet short of a tenant nearby.

  The two men had, as Jean predicted, dismounted to enter the gap, their horses treading carefully over the ruts. They were at the head of the small passage made by the two hillocks, and fifty paces ahead of them the road emerged and opened, the mud cleared, a rider could mount and be off on the last stage to Toulon. Here, though, was as fine a killing ground as either of the two mercenaries had seen.

  The German bodyguard had stopped as he entered the pass, also noting the land, sensing its potential. Cibo, focused on avoiding the worst of the mud, suddenly found himself shoved into the rump of his bodyguard’s stallion, and was about to let out another stream of insults when he noticed the quality of Heinrich’s attention.

  ‘What—’ he began to say.

&
nbsp; ‘Ssh!’

  Jean, seeing the enemy hesitate, hissed ‘Now!’ and turned to watch the arrow’s despatch. He saw Haakon rise up, draw back the small hunting bow to full stretch, then suddenly leap in the air as something struck him. He tumbled forward, the arrow deflecting to the right, thumping into the Archbishop’s saddle bag, just missing the man.

  Jean had half stood and now jerked his sword up in a defensive reflex. This saved him from the fate of his felled comrade, but only just, as something smashed into the blade, crashing it into his face, knocking him backwards and into the lee of the rock again.

  ‘Mount, for the love of Christ!’ He heard the cry from the defile.

  Peering cautiously out, he saw both men trying to achieve just that, their horses circling in sudden terror. As he looked, he saw the German’s horse rear, whinnying in pain as a rock struck it on the mouth. It jerked its rein out of the grasp of the bodyguard and bolted down the road.

  ‘Haakon!’ Jean yelled, to no avail. The man was not moving.

  Seizing on the fleeting cover offered by the galloping animal, Jean sprinted for Haakon. A stone clipped him as he weaved, a glancing blow to the shoulder that drew forth a gasp of agony. Someone was hurling projectiles at them with more power than he’d felt with anything that didn’t have gunpowder behind it. There was no explosion though, no gunshot, and as he ran he caught a very quick glimpse of where they were coming from – the hill opposite, amid the stunted pines.

  He rolled behind Haakon and over him, snatching up the bow as he went. The quiver, with half a dozen arrows in it, was placed behind a nearby rock. Swiftly fitting one of the arrows to the string, he released it at the pines. He was not aiming at a target but he hoped to delay the onslaught of stones.

  Who is up there? he thought, reaching for another arrow.

  His own horse gone, Heinrich was just three paces behind Cibo’s. He made two of them before a stone the size of a wren’s egg crashed into the side of his head. He didn’t stumble so much as drop straight down at the Archbishop’s feet.

  With arrows flying from his left and stones from his right, fleeing on the horse was no longer a safe option for the Archbishop. At the cry ‘Down!’ the horse, used to responding instantly to his master’s commands, lay on its side, providing shelter from the stone thrower above while Heinrich’s body sprawled before him gave him some protection from any arrows.

  And then he saw one of those arrows fly up towards the trees, a stone hurled back in reply. There is more than one set of brigands here, and they quarrel over the prize, he thought. This brief respite from being the target allowed him to reach into his saddle bags. The crossbow he pulled out was designed for hunting small birds rather than humans, but it could be loaded quickly, it was a weapon, and he was no longer toothless prey.

  As Jean raised his head to loose yet another arrow at the trees, a crossbow bolt ricocheted off the rock in front of him. It had come from the direction in which he’d last seen his intended victims. A quick peek told him that although the German was down, maybe dead, the Archbishop had managed to bring his horse to the ground and was hiding behind it. He knew he wasn’t good enough with a bow to hit a lying target, or one hidden in trees. What devil is up there anyway? he thought, putting his back against the rock and closing his eyes in momentary despair. He had fought in enough wars to know a stalemate when he saw one.

  Missiles round, short and long had all whirred in the time it took the Fugger to draw three deep breaths, skitter around the edge of his hillock and over to the back of the other.

  ‘Oh Daemon, oh my dear, what can we do?’

  The bird landed beside him and began to pick at a worm that crawled along there.

  ‘Yes, yes, you are oh so right. Let the warriors fight it out, eh? Wait till it’s all over, nice and safe, eh?’

  The raven looked up and said, quite distinctly, ‘Hand.’ Then, its prize in its beak, it flew up to dine among the trees on top of the other hill. The one from where the stones were being hurled.

  ‘Hand!’ the Fugger muttered to himself. ‘Daemon reminds me.’

  He had no choice. Even a brain less educated than his could see that he was the only one not trapped in the crossfire. And if he could not envisage grappling with a muscular assassin amid the stunted pines, at least he could cause some form of distraction. Long enough for Jean to figure out what to do.

  Moving carefully upwards, he became aware of an almost constant noise, either a very faint roaring or the buzzing nearby of a hive of bees. Yet when he saw the source of the noise, he was perplexed. A dark-haired man, no, a boy really, stood in the trees facing downhill, every now and then whirling what looked like a small roped basket above his head. And as he watched, the boy hurled one end of this basket while keeping hold of the other, and a stone whipped down the hill.

  A boy, he thought as he moved up quietly behind him. Perhaps even I can take a boy.

  The last stone hurled had altered the precarious balance for it shattered the bow Jean had raised towards the Archbishop. Cibo saw this and fired a bolt that passed before Jean’s face, forcing him to fall back under cover. Both men’s weapons were thus unavailable to react to the sudden appearance of the assassin from the pines tumbling down the slope, wrestling with a screaming Fugger. Over and over they fell, crashing finally into the stump of a dead tree with a force that winded them both.

  Cibo could not load and fire swiftly enough to deal with three enemies. So he shouted ‘Up, up!’ and his stallion scrambled to its feet with him half-slipped into the saddle. A moment to gain control, a jab of heels into soft flanks, and the beast went straight from a standstill into a gallop, its hooves pounding the ground a hand’s breadth from Heinrich von Solingen’s head.

  Jean, bursting from behind the rock, leapt up as the horse hurtled by. For a moment he clung to the Archbishop’s saddle bags. Then something slipped from them, a long shape wrapped in hessian sacking. His hands held on to it as he fell.

  Standing ankle deep in the gelatinous mud, spitting out dirt and curses, he watched the hand of Anne Boleyn snatched away, almost from within his grasp. He saw himself bending to kiss those six fingers again and saw them pulled back, turned into a fist that struck him. He deserved such punishment and worse, for he kept failing. Once more he felt the burden of his responsibility, his own inadequacy.

  Looking down in his despair, he noticed the object in his hands. Green leather strapping peeked from the sacking, beneath an apple-sized pommel. Pulling the cover off, he once more drew his own executioner’s sword from its scabbard.

  He had no time to wonder at the reunion. There were enemies still to deal with, comrades down.

  The enemy first, for the enemy could still do harm. One glance at the bodyguard, face down in the mud, showed that he wouldn’t be causing any problems for a while, if ever. The other was a different matter, trapped under the dead weight of a stunned Fugger, struggling to drag a leg clear. Jean saw now the stone-hurling assailant was little more than a boy, strong of nose and jaw, black hair close-cropped around an olive brow, eyes of charcoal, flaming now as they watched Jean unsheathe his sword. As he slowly approached, Jean saw the boy redoubling his efforts to extract his pinned leg and, when the struggles still failed, saw him reach into his doublet.

  Pulling out a long, thin dagger, the youth yelled in a voice high-pitched yet strong, ‘Take another step and I’ll slit your comrade from arse to throat.’

  ‘Comrade?’ Jean didn’t even break stride. ‘I thought he was with you.’ And swinging his sword two-handed from his shoulder, Jean hit the dagger, knocking it twenty paces back up the hill.

  The youth unleashed curses in a guttural language Jean had never heard, then spat at him, before reverting to French. ‘Well, kill me then. Come on, I deserve to die anyway. Finish me off, if you have the guts. You footpads are always at your best when a man is down.’

  There was silence for maybe three seconds, broken suddenly by a shout of laughter.

  ‘Sweet Moth
er of God! Who is calling who a footpad?’

  Jean knew it was probably just the release after combat, but the boy seemed so annoyed. He couldn’t help but laugh, an urge that only increased when the Fugger rolled over, opened one eye and moaned, ‘I will never drink brandy again, O Daemon dear.’

  And when the raven flew down, sat solemnly on the Fugger’s shoulder and deposited a puddle of white on it, Jean’s laughter became uncontrollable.

  The mirth stopped the instant he heard the groan.

  ‘Son of a whore!’ Haakon was trying to sit up. ‘Who has broken my head?’

  He sank back. Jean could see the lump swelling beneath broken skin on the forehead, an eye already halfway to closing.

  ‘Your whoreson’s here, Haakon,’ he called.

  ‘Keep your filthy tongue off my mother,’ the youth spat.

  At the third attempt, the big man managed to stagger over. He looked at the young man before him.

  ‘You tried to kill me,’ he said in a sad voice, rubbing his eye. ‘What did you hit me with?’

  ‘This.’ The youth held up the slingshot. ‘And if I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.’

  ‘A David! A David is come among us,’ said the Fugger.

  Jean took the weapon, running his fingers down the ropes.

  ‘I used to hunt birds with one of these when I was a child. Why would you use them on men?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask your friend here?’ Turning to Haakon, the youth said, ‘I used the large stone on you so it would just stun you. Him I wanted dead, and he is. Look!’

  The youth gestured towards Heinrich and, while they all turned to look at the body in the mud, quietly rose from the ground and took one step up the hill.

  ‘No, my David,’ said the Fugger, grabbing an ankle, ‘I’ve had enough of rolling down hillsides, if you please.’