The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  ‘Well, Abraham,’ he said, ‘Have you been making progress?’

  The old man in the skull cap swung his head in the direction of the voice. He heard so many in the course of his day that he wasn’t sure if this was just another golem sent to plague him or distract him from his work. But then he recognised the man as his … patron was the only word he could come up with. When had he seen him last? That night? The day before? A month ago? Time had little meaning for him in a world where the sun never rose and set. Time was just a scribble on the page of his calculations. He was given the movements of sun and moon daily, for that was important; you couldn’t hope to track down the Philosopher’s Stone without the most accurate of data.

  Cibo looked down at his former colleague and present prisoner. It was ten years since he had changed Abraham’s status from one to the other and they had not been kind to the Jew.

  Cibo remembered the energetic young scientist he’d first met, experimenting with different metal fusions to create his wondrous jewellery, using that to fund his real passion: delving into the mysteries of alchemy. How they had worked together at the beginning, sharing the delights of discovery! What progress they had made, eclipsing much of the work even of Paracelsus in Basle and Apollonius in Wittenberg. But one day Abraham had wanted to take his daughter to their relatives in Venice, unhappy she was being raised outside their faith, and Cibo could not be sure that he would ever return. He needed the Jew’s superior knowledge. So Cibo had imprisoned his body in this glass world and his will with an opium pipe – necessary coercion after the daughter had somehow escaped and Abraham had grown rebellious.

  The drug had aged the Jew, together with the heat and fumes of the crucible he constantly attended, the lack of air and sunlight. His world was only this kaleidoscope, devised by Cibo to combine with the narcotic and focus the power of his brilliant mind. Amazing things had been seen and achieved inside this magical chamber, for Cibo knew alchemy to be far more than merely a scientific process.

  Which was why he dropped the saddle bag on the table now.

  ‘I’ve brought you something that might help,’ he said. ‘Go on. Open it.’

  He wanted to turn away, couldn’t, managed a step backwards, then waited as the Jew slowly reached for the straps and just as slowly undid each one. When he reached inside and paused, Cibo shuddered, expecting Abraham to recoil in horror from the touch. Yet all he did was carefully pull out the velvet bag and place it before him on the one clear space on a table covered in charts and instruments of calculation. He made no move to go further, just sat and stared at the object before him.

  ‘Go on,’ the Archbishop’s voice cracked, ‘take it out.’

  He was obeyed. The six-fingered hand was brought into the light and the two men gasped for different reasons.

  Anne Boleyn’s hand lay on the table. It did not move, as it had in the cabin of the ship, yet it did not seem completely still. For Abraham, it was the shock of the six fingers; for Cibo, it was the look of it, changed from a mere four days before. Then, there had been a bleeding gash, for an arrow had pierced leather to pierce flesh, leaving a wound that should have taken weeks to heal in someone alive and even then left a jagged scar. Yet where the wound had been there was not a trace, not the faintest hint of a blemish to mar the rosy sheen of the skin. It was the same at the wrist, where the sword had taken it from the arm. Nothing there but pink and healthy flesh.

  The gasps hung in the air and lengthened into silence. Finally, Abraham said, almost wearily, ‘Oh, Giancarlo, what have you done now?’

  The Archbishop did not tolerate criticism. He was always right and that was an end to it. Yet somehow here, in a world without time, with a man who was the only equal he’d ever known, there was a need for some kind of explanation.

  ‘It is not what you think,’ he said. ‘It is beyond anything you could think, or even dream.’

  ‘You killed this person to take this hand?’

  ‘I did not. I saw her killed. Yes, it’s from a woman. A queen.’

  ‘Then how—’

  ‘The how does not matter. It’s the why of it. How long do you think it is since this hand was joined to the body?’

  Abraham reached out to the hand, turning it to get a perspective. Cibo sucked in his breath when he saw that, but the hand remained inert, a passive object, while the Jew examined it carefully. At last, he spoke.

  ‘It still feels almost warm to the touch, and no rigor mortis has set in. For those reasons I would say it was no less than three hours since this unfortunate lost her hand. Yet …’

  A great yawn swept over him, he seemed to lose focus, and Cibo had to wait impatiently. It was a part of the imprisonment that was necessary, chaining him to the opium, bending the scholar to his will. It led to some huge imaginative leaps but it also distracted him.

  ‘Yet?’ Cibo barked finally.

  Abraham carried on as if there had been no pause. ‘Yet the severing wound shows signs of healing, indeed it looks like it has healed entirely. That’s not possible.’

  ‘We may have to change our opinion of what is and is not possible, Abraham. For it is two and a half weeks since this hand was struck off, in the same instant as the head. If only we had that here as well, maybe we could ask her to explain herself. As it is, we have to make do with what we possess.’

  Cibo had started to speak slowly. He couldn’t stop staring at the hand. The light of the torches outside the chamber, filtered through the glass, was making patterns and colours weave across it and it didn’t need to move to pull his eyes. The light and heat seemed to be sucked into it and it took a huge effort for him to say, in a thick voice, ‘Put it away. Put it back in the bag.’

  Moving very slowly, Abraham did as he was told, and a weight and a shadow seemed to leave the room. They both breathed out. Cibo’s knees gave, so he pulled up a stool and sat down heavily to stare into the haggard features opposite him.

  I look as old as you, Cibo thought. I can no longer shake off the hardships of travel with my former ease. And my illness …

  The lack of a cough again made him strangely angry. All the more reason to proceed swiftly with their experiments, for it was possible that rejuvenation and cure lay ahead.

  ‘Do you see what we have here?’ he said. ‘It could be the bridge we have been searching for, the link between the planes of existence. How often have we tried to create a homunculus, a replica man, from the remains of another?’

  The reply, as ever, was infuriatingly slow. ‘It was your desire to do that. I never thought it was necessary.’

  ‘You never dared to think it. You hesitated from reaching for the one thing that could lead us truly on. We both know life and matter are inextricably linked. Well, I have seen the miracle confirmed. This hand could pluck out the Philosopher’s Stone for us. It may be the key to freeing man from the shackles of flesh, to the true transformation of spirit.’

  Cibo could sit no more. He got up and began preparing the pipe for the opium, mixing the powdery lumps with a little liquid, cramming the paste around the hole at one end of the thick, hollow, teak cylinder. When he was ready, he pulled Abraham gently by the elbow and made him lie down on the cot, his head raised up on a blanket and turned to the side. He placed the mouth of the pipe to Abraham’s and touched a taper to the side of the glowing crucible. It flared instantly. Holding the flame just above the opium paste, Cibo continued in a soft voice.

  ‘Today we begin the quest that will lead to the last discovery worth making. Tell me what you need and it will be brought to you. Dream it and it is yours. I will ransack the world for you.’

  He lowered the flame. Abraham sucked, and Cibo pushed the lumpy liquid to the hole, watching it catch, transform to smoke and disappear, watching it transform the concern on the Jew’s face to contentment. Five breaths he took, until the paste had been burnt away. Then Abraham curled up, bony knees reaching up to bony chest.

  It was when Cibo was halfway through his ascent of the dank st
airwell that the pain seized him. He bent over, a great wrenching cough seeming to take possession of his whole frame. Weakened, he leant against the dripping wall. Something was at his lips, on his chin, and he reached a hand up to touch; they came away warm and sticky and he needed no flickering torchlight to tell him what was there.

  ‘Hurry, Abraham,’ he murmured, wiping the blood away on his robes. ‘Hurry.’

  But Abraham could not hurry. The opium that bound his will bound his intellect too. Experiments were conducted at a slower pace. So it was two weeks later that Cibo, a daily visitor to the only place where his coughing seemed to abate, finally lost all patience.

  ‘Enough!’ He rose above the Jew, who sat at the table, the hand laid out before him at the centre of the chart showing the stars that had governed at Anne Boleyn’s execution. ‘Enough,’ he repeated. ‘We have tried your way. Now we will try mine.’

  ‘Three weeks we’ve been in Siena. And how many times have we seen him?’

  It was a question Beck already knew the answer to, but the Fugger gave it anyway. ‘At least a dozen.’

  They’d seen him going to officiate at the cathedral, borne in a litter up the few steps from his palazzo past the baptistry. They’d sat in the Duomo and heard his sonorous voice declaim the Latin prayers. They’d watched him ride in his gilded carriage the three hundred paces down the Via del Pellegrini through the Piazza del Campo to the town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico, where the business of running Siena was conducted.

  ‘And how many chances have we had to get inside his palazzo?’ Beck queried.

  The Fugger sighed. They’d have this conversation at least once a day. ‘Just the one.’

  ‘Exactly. One! And who stopped me taking it? You did.’

  ‘Our David would have got himself killed, would he not, Daemon?’ the Fugger said, feeding the raven bread from a huge round of it in his lap.

  Beck snorted. Yes, leaping on the back of Cibo’s carriage would have been a risk, but she was well used to those. What annoyed her was that it wasn’t the risk that had stopped her. What stopped her was the mentioning of a name.

  ‘Let’s wait for Jean,’ the Fugger had said.

  And the woman in her, the one she hid, suppressed, tied down as firmly as she tied down her breasts, had reacted to that name, to those feelings so instantly evoked by a touch, the memory of a laugh. A couple of days, mere hours really, and one fight at his side, ending in that final look as he saved her life. Her head told her that no one came back from the galleys, that she would never see those eyes again, never be able to confirm the promise or answer the question within them. Yet her heart hesitated at his name, and she missed the chance her courage told her was there.

  ‘And that’s why I always work alone,’ she said, snatching some bread.

  They were sat once more in front of the Palazzo Pubblico, having watched Cibo being delivered there again. They were on the other side of the Campo with their backs to the fountain, the Fonte Gaia. The Fugger was enjoying the summer sun and the sound of water gushing from the mouths of the stone wolves behind him. After his initial shock, he was even enjoying the other statues on display, several of whom were women only partially clad. One was bare-breasted, an infant with questing fingers reaching out to touch an elegantly carved nipple. He’d pretended a good Germanic outrage at the decadence, for they would never have allowed such a sight back in Munster. But while Beck splashed some cooling water on an agitated brow, he looked again.

  ‘Beautiful, is she not?’

  Beck had caught him staring. Anger banished, the teasing smile and fresh water transformed the face of the boy before the Fugger. He shook his head, remembering his own watery transformation in the stream on the way to Tours, marvelling at this change in his life, fearing that still, somehow, it was merely one of the dreams sent to torment him, visions of heaven as he lay in the hell of the gibbet midden. Could he really be sitting beneath a lewd fountain in a decadent Italian town with a bright, mad boy as a companion? With a purpose once more to his life? On the road to some sort of redemption for his sins? The tentacles of the hell he’d escaped still reached out for him sometimes, in his dreams, occasionally when he was wide awake, phantasms and ghouls and sword-wielding barons bursting out of shadows to pursue him, to hew his body, to imprison him in filth. But somehow he’d retain his grip on the world and the demons would shriek off into the sky. He still found it hard to look anyone in the eye, but more and more he could talk to them directly. Even tease back.

  ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘When you smile you look like a fresh-faced girl. Doesn’t he, Daemon?’

  Beck scowled, turned away. But it was hard not to smile in Siena, for the town possessed a magic that even the occasional evil of its rulers could not overpower, in its bells, its fountains and arcades.

  The Fugger had turned back to watch the scurrying of people round the piazza. They emerged from the long shadow cast by the giant tower, the Torre del Mangia, carrying all manner of objects: weapons, bolts of cloth, flagpoles, huge cured hams, butts of wine. ‘Looks like they’re preparing for a party.’

  ‘They are. It’s the Palio.’

  ‘Ah yes, I heard the bread seller talking of it. It’s a race, yes?’

  ‘Everyone talks of nothing but the Palio, and it’s far more than a race.’ Beck smiled again and leant in. ‘It’s the heartbeat of the city, a festival to celebrate some victory over the Florentines hundreds of years ago. The contrade, the local boroughs – there must be thirty of them – each has an emblem such as the eagle, the boar, the lion, the rooster and the viper. They parade through the streets under banners and in the uniforms and colours of their band. And here in the Campo, on the first night of the celebrations, two of the contrade have the honour of fighting each other. Fifty men a side in the pugna, as it’s called.’

  ‘Fighting? Are they gladiators? Have we returned to the bloodsports of ancient Rome?’

  Beck smiled and held up a hand, with fingers bunched.

  ‘Almost. But these gladiators fight with fists wrapped in cloths. People get hurt, few die.’

  ‘Few?’ The Fugger rolled his eyes. ‘These Italians claim they are so civilised, that we Germans are the barbarians. Then they punch each other to death in the street.’

  ‘Yes, Fugger, but more die in the bullfight.’

  ‘They have a bullfight as well? Is there no end to this Roman depravity, oh Daemon?’

  The raven cocked its head at the mention of its name, stretched its huge wings, then went back to pulling at something wedged between the street stones.

  ‘Oh yes, there is an end. It ends in the horse race. That starts and finishes here in the Campo, twists through the streets, each contrada with its own horse. Then, of course, the real bacchanal begins, for winners and losers.’

  ‘And when does this pagan ritual commence?’

  ‘The second of July.’

  ‘That’s two days away. Will we get an invitation?’

  ‘Everyone’s invited. It’s the biggest party you’ll ever see. Everyone dresses up. You see that man carrying all that rich cloth and silk? A Sienese would rather starve for a week than be underdressed on the big day. It’s a race, orgy, fight and feast, all in one.’

  ‘What about these Italians, Daemon? What are a modest German and a good French raven to do?’

  ‘Join in, of course.’ Beck’s smile was back. ‘And if you can keep your head clear, there’s a lot of money to be made. Purses dangle, men and women too drunk or too lost in the throes of lust to notice when they go missing.’

  The Fugger feigned shock. ‘You are not suggesting a life of crime, young master?’

  ‘Not a life of it. A night will suffice. We are going to need more money if we are to …’ Beck broke off and stared at the town hall opposite.

  ‘Are to what? Are you still not ready to tell Daemon and I why you need to get into Cibo’s palace so badly?’

  ‘It’s better that no one knows, not yet. Just know that my need is g
reat,’ Beck sighed. ‘I have tried assault, I have tracked that man throughout Europe in the hope of catching him unawares. Perhaps with the money we can make at the Palio I can bribe my way into his palace. People always need more money at this time. Besides—’ She broke off again. ‘Fugger, are you listening to me?’

  He wasn’t. Fenrir, who had been dozing in the sunshine at their feet, now rose, a low growl in his throat. Someone had emerged from the shadow of the tower. Someone all too familiar. ‘Von Solingen,’ he whispered. ‘Turn away. Hide your face. He has seen you before.’

  The Fugger need not have worried. Heinrich von Solingen had barely been able to focus in that street fight in Toulon, and he was not completely recovered now from the stone Beck had hurled with such force at his head. It ached, and his vision was still somewhat blurred, along with much of his memory. But his master required his recruiting skills, and his master had to be obeyed. So it was that he accompanied Giovanni, the Archbishop’s manservant, whose silvery Italian tongue he was to back up with his Germanic brawn. Between them, they had men to hire. Special men.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ said the Fugger as the little Italian set down the box he was carrying right in front of the fountain not a dozen paces away then stood on it while two servants began to dispense wine from a cask, gathering an immediate crowd. Von Solingen waited behind, arms folded. Giovanni began to speak.

  ‘Honoured citizens of Siena,’ he declared in a shrill voice that carried across the Campo, ‘Your benign, gracious and all-loving Holiness the Archbishop – who, as you know, is a son of our fair city just like yourselves – the Archbishop wants to make this Palio even more spectacular than any that has gone before.’ A small cheer greeted this statement. ‘To begin with, he will reach into the heart of his magnificent wine cellar and produce barrels of nectar of which this is a mere taster.’ Another, larger cheer came and more wine was dispensed. ‘But more than this, he is planning an event in this very square as a prelude to the race, to dramatise that most glorious episode of our city’s history – the taking of the standard bearer’s hand at Montaperti, which turned the tide of war against the Florentine foe and delivered us the victory we celebrate at the Palio.’