The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  The reek was not his only source of irritation. Four bells had just sounded, and he would be under way before the fifth without the full complement of gutter filth needed to man his oars. The magistrates in the town had been too generous of late, or had dropped their usual requirement on bribes, because far too few men had been sentenced to the fleet, and those who had were of a poor quality. And even these he’d been forced to pay a high price for in order to snatch them away from his rival captains.

  In the end he had to turn, yet again, to Maltese Gregor. He hated dealing with the man, mainly because he knew him to be a German peasant through and through, yet one that could buy and sell the captain a dozen times. More. It was an unfair God that allowed such men to thrive, forcing men of the class of de la Vallerie to seek their favour. The man was obsequiously polite, of course. Too polite, for there was always a glint of humour in his eyes that showed he knew too well who had the upper hand in the relationship.

  Pacing irritably, he was about to give up on the scum when he noticed a dog cart being wheeled down the dock and recognised the man walking behind it as the one he had lately been cursing. The cart stopped at the gangway and Gregor, catching de la Vallerie’s eye, took off his hat and made an elaborate formal bow.

  ‘Greetings, my Captain. I trust the morning finds you well.’

  ‘You’re late, Gregor. I was about to start beating the drum.’

  ‘Ah, and when have I ever let you down, my Captain? Well, just that once, but that wasn’t my fault, as you know. But here, I more than make amends. See what I have brought you.’

  He drew a cloak back from the cart and there, sprawled and tangled in a heap, lay two men, one large, one smaller.

  The captain came down the gangplank.

  ‘They look dead, Gregor.’ He prodded the bodies with his stick, then stepped back, raising his handkerchief. ‘And they reek. From what gallows did you pluck this scum?’

  ‘Your Excellency’s nose is as sharp as his sword, as usual.’ Gregor’s eyes twinkled at him. ‘How fortunate France is to have such men to defend her. Alas, the town used up all its noble volunteers when the army came through last week. But look at the muscles on these two, eh? Your ship will out-row any corsair with men such as these on your benches.’

  ‘And these? What are these weapons they are lying on?’

  Gregor spat. ‘They tried to ambush us with them. I was going to take the dogs to the magistrates to be hung, when I remembered your need. Yes, it’s unusual, the sword, is it not? An executioner’s.’

  De la Vallerie had picked it up, weighing its balance with a few strokes in the air. He was proud of the collection of weapons he kept in his cabin. Some day they would line the walls of his great hall – once he’d won enough booty in war to buy one.

  ‘How much for the sword?’

  Gregor smiled. ‘Oh, it is a valuable piece, my Captain, but not as valuable as you are as a customer. Take it for three ducats, and I’ll throw in this assassin’s axe as well.’

  The captain grunted acceptance. He didn’t have time to haggle with the rogue. A man stood close by, naked to the waist where a whip hung. He was heavily muscled and on his distended belly danced a tattooed snake. His thick black hair and beard almost met, obscuring a face where one eye glittered and the other was covered with a leather patch.

  ‘Corbeau, take them below. Chain them up. When they wake, shave them.’

  ‘Yes, my Captain.’ The brute half turned, then turned back. ‘Slave or criminal?’

  ‘They are thieves, not Turks. Leave them their tufts.’

  It took two men to carry Haakon aboard, while Corbeau himself hoisted Jean over his shoulder. As they disappeared up the gangplank, the money was counted out and handed over. Gregor had been promised gold by Heinrich and had felt cheated when his old comrade offered none, just staggered off into the night without so much as a farewell. Still, sixty or so ducats was not a bad night’s work. And he had lost five men in the skirmish, so that was five less to pay. Fifty to him and a debt forever cancelled.

  ‘Bon voyage, my brave Captain. Take some infidel heads with that sword, eh? The hopes of Christendom go with you.’ He bowed and laughed all the way back to his brothel.

  It was only at the moment just before he fell asleep, his head drowsy with celebratory wine, that he realised he’d forgotten to visit the Dominican monk, the one with the gold, bound for Tuscany.

  ‘Oh well,’ he yawned, ‘it couldn’t have been that important.’

  The captain returned to his quarterdeck and shortly afterwards Corbeau came to the foot of the stairs to tell him that all slaves were safely chained in position. De la Vallerie glanced around the harbour at both fleets streaming out, boats of every shape and size, oared and sailed, weaving round each other as they caught the tide.

  Removing his handkerchief from his nose for the briefest of seconds, he called down ‘Valletta’ and waved his new sword in the air. Executioner’s, Maltese Gregor had said. Well, there was sure to be an occasion to try it out before the trip was over.

  The cry was taken up by the men on the deck, the first time they’d heard the ship’s destination. Soon the vessel had moved out of its berth and joined the stream heading towards the open sea. They were using short oars to avoid collisions, so progress was slow.

  ‘Valletta!’ De la Vallerie sighed to himself. ‘Another stinking port, ripening under a June sun. And with those oh-so-holy knights to deal with as well.’

  He hated religious warriors. There was no fun or booty to be had with them. Thoroughly depressed, he went to his cabin to begin drinking.

  PART TWO

  HOLY WAR

  ONE

  AT SEA

  Beck was not used to obeying orders.

  ‘Anyway, the Frenchman’s weren’t clear,’ she had muttered to herself, trying to shift her twisted limbs in the small, rotting water barrel. ‘He told me to flee the battle, not the war.’

  The enemy was behind her, and Jean’s plan was still good: the shadow would seek the form. Heinrich von Solingen would pass this way, and go to the boat his master rested on. She would follow, stow away, or catch another vessel bound for the same port. The chase was on again, and anything could happen at sea.

  Yet when the bodyguard had lurched past her, his sword dragging behind him, screeching on the cobblestones, she hadn’t moved. Half of her had yearned to be off in pursuit but the other half had held her.

  ‘Comrades,’ she’d thought. ‘Enemies I have always had, comrades never. I have to know what happened to them.’

  She didn’t narrow ‘comrades’ down any further than that.

  A few minutes later, they had wheeled Jean and Haakon by on a dog cart. She had moved from shadow to shadow, keeping pace with the procession, following them down to the docks where she’d watched the whole transaction between a naval officer and the fat man who had been one of their assailants. The unconscious bodies had been taken aboard. Her nostrils had told her what manner of voyage they were embarking on.

  ‘May God protect you, Jean Rombaud,’ she’d whispered.

  Water had filled her eyes but she’d immediately turned away from the galley, clamping down on this unaccustomed desolation. Anger was easier to understand and direct. Remember the cause, she’d thought, and brought Giancarlo Cibo into her mind’s eye. He was still here somewhere, and his shadow, Heinrich von Solingen, was weakened from her stone. She could still find and kill Cibo, steal his seal of office as she’d planned to do in the ambush. The forgers of Venice still waited to do her will. She would just have to beat the news of his death back to Siena.

  She had spent a futile hour walking the dockyard, keenly watching the departure of every ship. But the fleets sailed with no clue given as to the whereabouts of the enemy. Reluctantly, she returned to the barn.

  ‘A galley?’ the Fugger wailed. ‘Oh Daemon, oh no!’ The bird flew down to sit on his shoulder, while Fenrir began to whine and scratch at the stable door. ‘Then there is no hope, no
ne, for they are doomed. No one returns from that hell. No one.’ He fell onto the floor, his body contorting, his groans filling the small barn.

  Beck had given way to sadness once. No more. ‘He said you had a rendezvous arranged.’

  ‘We have, we have, but what good is a rendezvous when only one side comes? Ayee!’

  ‘Listen. Stop that moaning and listen to me, will you?’

  The writhing Fugger stilled.

  ‘You told me a little of your meeting with Jean last night.’

  The Fugger came to his knees, swaying. ‘So?’

  ‘So, if a man can escape the certain doom of a gibbet, he can escape anything.’

  ‘But a galley?’ came the wail. ‘A ship of death?’

  Beck knelt beside him, grabbed his shoulders, sought and held the dancing eyes with her own.

  ‘A ship that goes to war, with all the hazards that can present. To me, hazard is another word for opportunity. If you want something enough – you haven’t told me what Jean Rombaud wants, but I can see his desire matches even mine – then anything is possible. All you can do—’

  ‘All I can do is keep my pledge.’ The Fugger had all but ceased his twitching and was now thinking. ‘He told me of this town amid the vineyards. He knew it from the Italian wars. A man who owes him a favour runs an inn there. Montepulciano, it is called.’

  ‘Montepulciano? I know it. It is near Siena. So the Frenchman and I had the same thought: if we lose Cibo’s tracks here we follow the beast to his lair.’

  ‘Then we will go there now? We will wait for him in Montepulciano?’

  Beck rose and went to the stable door. A fireball sun beating down upon the anvil of the town made her squint. She said, ‘You must keep your pledge as you see fit. But I have an older one to honour.’

  ‘But Jean—’

  She spoke over her shoulder. ‘I promised I would walk his path as long as we headed in the same direction. But he has taken one that I cannot tread. I must return to my own.’ She turned to him, saw the twitching begin again. ‘But you and I can travel together, Fugger. Our roads are the same. With the sale of our horses we can buy passage on a boat to Livorno. From there, it’s a day’s ride to Siena.’

  The young man scratched his red beard, then slowly rose to his feet.

  ‘Well, Daemon, it looks like we follow another for the while. Lead on, brave young master. I will go and sell our livestock.’

  Bird and man departed, leading horses. The sight of Fenrir, still whining for his master, brought a strange pain to Beck’s stomach which she quickly realised heralded the onset of her bleeding. It was one of the reasons she avoided company, this monthly curse. Her disguise became that much harder to maintain.

  ‘Provisions,’ she muttered, half to the dog, half to herself.

  She fondled his ears and went outside, only to double over as another wave of pain hit her guts. All she wanted to do was curl up and sleep for a few days. Yet the pain made her think of Jean, of the greater pain he must be in now. An image came to her, of him standing over her, sword on shoulder; that laugh. It made her smile, and feel something else she couldn’t place. More womanly feelings, she decided. That thought made her straighten up and, with an old Hebrew curse on her lips to ward off the pain, she went in search of supplies.

  Maybe it was the rocking that first woke Jean, but it was the stench that kept him awake, that and the drum beat he felt inside his head before he heard it. He tried to stand but something gripped his left ankle and a hand hauled him down by the shoulder.

  ‘Eashy, comrade. Wake up and you work. You work, we work. You don’t want to do that to your new shipmates, do you? We’ve only jusht met.’

  The neck! It felt as if someone had tried to wrench his head from his shoulders and had only just failed to do so. His eyes fluttered open and a heaving world of rigging and slack sail filled it, dipping and rising, a sky-silhouetted face before him shifting in and out of vision. His guts heaved, he started to throw up, and as he did the hand on his shoulder turned his face sharply downwards.

  ‘Have shome mannersh, mate. That’sh it, down there with the resht of it.’

  When the first heave passed, Jean made the mistake of opening his eyes again. Below him swam a fish head in a sea of putrid muck, brown, yellow, bedaubed now with the contents of his stomach, spotted with patches of what could only be excrement, rolling back and forth with the motion of the ship. He tried to turn his head away but another convulsion seized him and he vomited again and again until there was nothing left in his stomach and his tortured throat filled with a bitter liquid that burnt as it passed from him. The pool below him absorbed it all into the festering expanse that he now saw formed the entire deck below the hard bench on which he sat, stretching into the distance, broken up only by the legs that hung down into it, scores of them, diverting the flow like log jams in a river.

  ‘Better, matey? No, no, you jusht resht there a moment, do ush all a favour. They’ll be calling on ush soon enough, I reckon. Unlesh the wind picksh up.’

  Jean tried to speak, but couldn’t. He gestured vaguely around and the face, so brown and wrinkled it was impossible to tell the age, a little silver moustache atop a toothless gash of a mouth, once more came into view.

  ‘Necksh a problem? Looksh like a gallowsh haul to me. Cutting it a bit fine weren’t you, my shon? Well, you’re a shervant of Hish Majeshty King Francish now. Or maybe a shlave. They didn’t cutsh your hair yet so it’sh hard to tell.’

  Sinking back onto the bench, trying to absorb this confusing statement amid all the other confusion, Jean began to observe, slowly, his immediate environment.

  I’m on a boat. I’m lying on a bench and there’s a chain around my leg, and an oar on my thighs. There’s a steady rhythm of both movement and sound, and a drum being hit somewhere behind me, towards … that’s the prow of the ship, and I’m chained to face away from it.

  He counted the drum beats. After six there was a rattling of chains as men stood up, a whistle blasted on eight, then the grunt of many men falling back. The ship, when they fell, lurched forward, while the drum beat began again.

  He was almost directly below the sail which, even as he looked, bellied with a strong gust of wind. A voice cried, ‘The breath of St Christopher! Ship oars!’ Immediately there was a rolling sound as the oars were pulled in, to rest across the laps of the rowers ahead, as theirs already did. The rhythmic drumming ceased.

  He looked at the men, breathing hard and easing their cramped limbs around him. They were, for the most part, completely naked. Here and there a back was swathed in a sack shirt, or loins were girded in cloth, but the majority had nothing save skin to oppose the elements. Jean was still wearing the clothes he’d come aboard in but they were soiled from the effects of the hanging, the breeches especially wet and uncomfortable. He decided to try to shrug them off carefully, but his movements drew attention to him, despite the hissing of his toothless benchmate.

  ‘Well, well, so my little master has had his fill of sleep.’

  A grizzled face, obscured by hair, beard and a leather patch, loomed above him, a snake swaying sickeningly on the man’s bare belly.

  ‘Perhaps he’d want some breakfast now? A little bread and milk, some wine maybe?’

  Sycophantic laughter greeted this statement, mainly coming from a fat, bare-chested seaman to the hairy man’s left, but swiftly taken up by Jean’s toothless companion and two other men on the same bench. Only a younger, lithe man at the oar’s end kept his head down and remained silent.

  ‘And he’s soiled his pants,’ the hairy man continued, to more laughter. ‘Wants out of them, does he? Well, we can help him with that.’ He barked at his fat follower. ‘Strip him. Then shave him.’

  Rough hands descended and tore off his clothing. Jean submitted to this since it was his desire anyway, but when the same hands reached down and yanked up a lock of his hair, when shears were poised above him, he took the wrist of the fat man and squeezed until there was a
gasp of pain and the shears dropped.

  Jean Rombaud had finally regained his voice.

  ‘Touch my hair,’ Jean croaked, ‘and I’ll gut you like a fish.’

  ‘Corbeau, help me,’ the fat man gasped.

  The hairy man, Corbeau, who had begun to patrol up the central raised walkway, returned swiftly, uncoiling a short, many-tailed whip as he came. He raised this high above him, brought it down hard. The pain, as it lashed across Jean’s tormented neck, was like bands of molten iron being laid upon fresh cuts. He dropped the hand immediately and the fat man slunk back to his master, rubbing it and glaring back.

  ‘So we have a fighter on our benches, do we? We don’t like fighters here. Unless it’s us.’

  Corbeau raised the whip and brought it down once, twice, again and again. Jean shielded his face as best he could and made no further noise, letting the knotted tails do their damage. It was a lighter whip, designed for pain but not serious injury. He had been whipped once in the army and knew the difference. So he waited, and finally Corbeau, breathing heavily, stopped.

  ‘Enough, my bantam cock?’ he gasped.

  Jean just nodded and picked up the shears. For a moment, Corbeau and his corporal stepped back in fear, for any weapon in the hands of a slave could be deadly. But Jean merely wiped the filth of the deck from them and began to cut his own hair off. The fat man moved to take over, but Corbeau stopped him and they, the other slaves on the bench, indeed all the slaves within sight, watched as Jean began to wield the shears.

  He did not just cut away madly, as the fat assistant would undoubtedly have done. He’d kept his thick hair somewhat longer than the current fashion so he had some length to work with. He began with a series of short snips, then longer passages of raising and sculpting, playing with the hair, something he’d learnt to do as a youth in the army to while away the tediousness of camp or siege, to earn a few extra sous with this entertainment. He had rarely performed on himself but the image he had within his head seemed to be translated pretty exactly onto it. There were appreciative grunts all around at his artistry.