The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  A murky passage was indeed revealed, leading he knew not where. He hesitated, but the splintering of the other frame left them no choice, and Beck ran to join them. Pausing for a second once more to raise the slingshot, she found her head was close to Jean’s. She heard him whisper, ‘The hand. We cannot leave it here.’

  It had fallen to the floor when Heinrich had jerked back the table, and lay now an arm’s length from it, resting on its fingertips, as if waiting.

  Heinrich’s cry of ‘To me!’ brought yet another crash, and the door shuddered inwards. It would not last much longer.

  Beck hesitated.

  ‘Please,’ Jean whispered. ‘All is lost without it.’

  She said sharply, ‘Take him! Go!’ and as Haakon set off down the passage the main door burst open and two men fell through it to sprawl on the floor. A third brandishing a sword leapt over them and it was he who died, Beck’s stone taking him between the eyes. He was dead before he began to fall backwards, and an outflung hand struck Franchetto in the face as he tried to enter. He clutched his nose with a cry, temporarily blocking the doorway.

  Beck dived for the hand, aware as she did so that a shape was rising from behind the table. Something sliced down through the air towards her. She twisted, folding in on herself, landing at the same time as Heinrich’s sword bit into the floor an inch from her head. Her right hand snatched up that of Anne Boleyn as she fell over it, and she used the motion of the roll to keep going and end up on her feet.

  Franchetto stood in the doorway, clutching his face, screaming. Two men started to push past him. Heinrich was between Beck and her only means of escape but he was bent over his sword, his back slightly to her, trying to pull it from the floor where the force of his wrong-handed death blow had lodged it.

  Stepping forward on her left foot, she lifted her right back and kicked him hard between the legs. He crumpled, and she leapt over his falling body, running down the passage into the darkness, the two men just behind her. She ran into something in the dark, was picked up, placed to the side. There was the sound of two blows. In the entrance to the passage another man had appeared. There was no width in the passage to use her slingshot so she merely pitched the last of her stones at the shape. There was a yelp of agony.

  In the gloom, she could just make out Haakon stooping to pick up the prone Jean.

  ‘Come on!’ he cried, setting off. ‘I think this way is out.’

  Another door opened on to the small courtyard, full of barrels and sacks, that Haakon had observed on his night missions. Five hunting dogs snarled and snapped, straining at their short chains. A dozen paces across, a gate gave on to a lane. Their horses were there.

  ‘Here, take him!’ Haakon passed the body to Beck and it was her turn to be surprised at the weight.

  She looked into the ravaged face, whispered, ‘Oh, my love! What have they done to you?’

  ‘Come!’ the Norseman yelled, stacking the last of the heavy barrels against the door just as the first shoulder hit it from the other side. He took Jean back and they ran for the lane, where a familiar growl greeted them.

  ‘Fenrir! Foe!’ Haakon shouted, and the dog followed the pointed finger and ran into the yard they’d just fled. A sound of crashing followed by a confusion of snarling and yelling erupted there.

  Beck was in the saddle, Jean passed up to be cradled before her. Haakon was on the other horse in a trice, and pausing only to cry ‘Fenrir!’ he kicked first the side of Beck’s mount, then his own. They sped down the darkling lane as the first bloodied man ran shouting from the yard.

  The night gatekeeper at Wittenberg’s main portal later tried to excuse his failure to keep it shut by telling of the strangeness of the vision, as well as the suddenness and force of the vision’s appearance. But the Hochmeister did not believe his tale of a naked Valkyrie bearing a dead warrior in her arms, accompanied by a huge headsman and a giant wolf. It sounded like the product of a wine-clouded mind, and since the gatekeeper already had a reputation for drunkenness, he was brutally flogged before being dismissed from his post.

  The Hochmeister was so hasty in his anger he did not even hear of the other group, some thirty armed men who had again forced the gate and, preceded by baying hounds, disappeared urgently into the night.

  NINE

  THE HEALER

  They rode hard through the rain-driven night, but dawn revealed their lead to be much diminished, for the hunters were riding only one man to a horse. Judging from the howling of their dogs, they were now less than a league behind.

  So Beck had plunged into the woods, up a path that had rapidly become little more than a deer track. Haakon had followed, cursing all the way, his wood madness from the road to Munster returning almost instantly. Only his love for Jean kept him going, his need to get his broken friend away from the fiends who had broken him. But after an hour’s galloping deeper and deeper into the dense foliage it was not his madness that told him that they could not go on much further, it was his sense. Their horses were breathing spasmodically, their flanks bedaubed with the continuous foam of exhaustion. Behind them, the hounds’ barks drew ever nearer.

  Beck was following Fenrir. It was all she was capable of doing. They had stopped just long enough for her to put on her boy’s clothes and to swathe Jean in a blanket, neither covering seeming to have the least resistance to the never-ending rain. The only sign that Jean was alive were the groans he would let out when her horse lurched over, round or through some obstacle. Then his eyes would start open and a shudder would rack him, until the next merciful faint carried him away again. His pallor was deathly, the only colour provided by the blood oozing steadily from between ragged lips. She felt sure that at any moment she would look down and he would be gone, and the bitterness of that, after all they had gone through to free him, made her colder than even the water and wind. So she tended not to look down but focused as far as she could on the tail of the wolf dog ahead of her.

  Fenrir was driven by the instincts of the hunt, as both chaser and chased. The forest floor was criss-crossed by little pathways, mainly for the use of small animals. Somehow, he always picked one that could accommodate a horse as well, his muzzle lifted to the wind, discerning the different scents.

  His last turns had led them upwards, climbing a large hill within a grove of silver birch. The horses’ heads began to droop, more foam appearing on chest and shuddering flank. Fenrir gave them a very brief respite at the next slight crossroads. He stopped at the junction and began to whine. He seemed to want to go straight ahead, but something kept forcing him back onto the other path, the one that looked wider and went downhill.

  Haakon pushed his exhausted horse up beside Beck’s and called down, ‘Which way, Fenrir? Come, we must choose!’

  ‘I do not think it matters now, Norseman. Listen!’

  The baying was close. The pursuers had arrived at the last crossroads and chosen the uphill route.

  ‘How long, do you think?’ She was almost too exhausted to speak. Jean slumped against her as if dead already.

  ‘Not long.’ Haakon gazed at her for a moment. ‘We may have to make other plans. Fighting plans.’

  ‘There are thirty of them at least! How do we fight?’

  ‘The same way as if there were three or three hundred. Fight as if you do not care whether you live or die.’

  ‘But I do care.’ She was looking into Jean’s face when she said it.

  Fenrir, who had made several more attempts to run up the path ahead, suddenly sneezed ferociously three times, gave a little yelp and leapt onto it, almost as if he had broken through some invisible door. Instantly, he was bounding along it, his barks beckoning them on.

  ‘Well, maybe he thinks the same as me,’ muttered Haakon. ‘The top of a hill is a better place to die than the base.’

  Two more minutes of riding and they reached a clearing, backed by a rocky outcrop. The hut was so carefully blended into the foliage they could not see it at first. Only a plume of smoke gav
e away its position, and that could almost have been mist clearing from the boughs of the oak and linden that had been bent together to provide the roof of the structure. Walls woven out of coppiced branches spread between the trunks of both trees, and on closer viewing were seen to perch on top of a platform suspended off the forest floor. It was as if the structure hung from the trees, like a massive fruit.

  ‘What is this?’ said Beck, shaken from her torpor.

  ‘A good place to die.’

  Haakon had dismounted and was moving forward, stringing his bow. The barks had got that much closer. Their enemy would be at the last junction all too soon.

  ‘Is that what you have come here to do?’ The woman’s gentle voice seemed to come not from within the structure but from the very trees themselves.

  Beck and Haakon looked at each other, then Beck stepped forward to the base of the oak and said, ‘We’d prefer to live. But others may not give us the choice. Can you shelter us?’

  ‘It seems I cannot even shelter myself, since you have found me. It’s hard for wolf or dog to find the way up here, but yours did. Its need must be great.’

  ‘All our needs are. Those that pursue us would slaughter us without mercy. They have already nearly killed one of us, by slow and foul means.’

  Beck walked back to where she had laid Jean on the ground. She gently lifted his head and poured the last of the water from her flask between the ruins of his lips, watched as most of it ran down the side of his mouth.

  A shadow fell across her. She had heard no sound of her approach, but a tall woman in a simple brown woollen shift, iron-grey hair woven in a single tress reaching to the backs of her knees, stood above her now. Her face was heavily lined, but full, strong teeth gleamed from a mouth that was wide and looked well used to smiling. She had none of the bent-back brokenness of most older women after a lifetime of care, and her soft brown eyes were kind.

  The dogs’ yelping was so close now. Maybe they had reached the grove of silver birch.

  ‘Will your dog follow me, if I bid him?’ The woman spoke to Haakon.

  ‘He will obey no one but me. What would you have him do?’ Haakon was standing at the head of the little path they had just come up, an arrow notched. ‘No, old woman, do not get too near him, he’s …’

  But she had already gone over to Fenrir. The dog stiffened at her approach, his head still pointed down the path. He showed his teeth, gave a little growl in his throat, but then it changed into something like a whimper as she bent to him and began whispering in his large velvet ears. When she arose, a little flask hung from the hound’s studded collar. A single drop of some viscous liquid oozed from the neck onto the forest floor.

  ‘Take him down to where the two paths cross, where he was first reluctant to come up. This liquid was there in large measure and dogs hate that. This little’ – she pointed to the leaking flask – ‘they love. Send him along the other path and they will follow him. He will come back to you?’

  ‘He will always find me, but—’

  ‘Then take him now. Or they will find us.’

  Haakon looked at the two women and down at the slumped body of his friend. This clearing was the only place in the forest where he did not feel the madness descend. It was not a place to die after all. It was a place to live.

  Without another word he led the dog, who was trying but failing to dislodge the flask at its neck, back down the path.

  ‘Now, my dear. My name is Hanna.’ She spoke softly, touching Beck’s arm. ‘Shall we get this poor man into my house?’

  Inside, the structure was much larger than it appeared from the outside. It was a single room, but spacious; in one corner, a fireplace and chimney were built into the rock face of the hilltop. There was a table, benches, some chairs, all woven of the same coppiced wood that made up the walls. Flowers and plants were everywhere, fresh in bundles, dried in wreaths and posies. Beck immediately saw the arrangement of glass over the fireplace, and a little shiver shook her. Something similar had stood in the centre of the kaleidoscope that had become her father’s prison. But this gave off no acrid metallic gas, rather the fragrance of ripe berries.

  ‘Juniper,’ said Hanna, looking up briefly from the examination she’d begun of Jean, and noticing Beck’s curiosity. ‘It was a little early to start on them, I had not finished all the gathering. But my stocks were low and something told me I might need some.’ She raised Jean’s left arm and felt along the bone. ‘Broken. As well as the right leg. Several ribs, most of the fingers and toes. Then there are the wounds. So, essence of juniper to cleanse those, then a nettle poultice. Marshmallow and comfrey for the breaks and … cypress for all the bruising.’

  There were several tubs of flowered rainwater in the hut, adding to the sweet profusion of smells. Hanna dragged one over beside the bloodied body and fetched down a bolt of white linen from the eaves that she quickly cut into pieces. Dipping one into a tub, she began carefully to daub at the blood caked over Jean’s body.

  ‘I will help,’ said Beck, reaching for a cloth, only to mistake the distance and fall forward slightly.

  ‘You will sleep, child.’

  ‘But he is my … my friend. I must see him well.’

  ‘And the best way to do that is to let me explore him in my own way.’ Hanna rose to lead Beck over to a truckle bed, laying her down upon it. ‘Drink this,’ she added, holding up a cup of cool liquid so refreshing that Beck was suddenly joyously awake and the next second the complete opposite.

  ‘What is it?’ she murmured, her coldness dissolving under the blankets that were being tucked around her. She was snoring lightly before she could hear a reply.

  Hanna had worked her way halfway down Jean’s body, gently cleaning away the caked-on blood, wincing at the depth and multiplicity of cut and burn, when she reached what she thought was a blood-sodden bandage. Unwinding this, she realised that it was a container; in it lay a six-fingered hand. Though surprised, she felt no revulsion. She nodded at it, to it, before briefly wiping the little traces of Jean’s blood from its rosy whiteness. Placing it to one side, she returned to the task of trying to save a life.

  When Haakon returned an hour later, having watched Franchetto, Heinrich and thirty horsemen ride past and having followed them for a short distance to make sure they were well and truly sidetracked, he found both his comrades unconscious. Beck looked like a boy of twelve, wedged into a mountain of skins and blankets, an actual smile transforming the usually scowling features. Jean, though scarred and bruised in the face, such of it that could be seen, could at last be recognised again. He lay on a bed of soft fir boughs, his body wrapped from toe to top of head in strips of white cloth. Haakon saw that each glistened with moisture and when he touched them they were warm.

  ‘Augh! What is that smell?’

  Hanna laughed. ‘By themselves, each plant has a lovely scent. They seem to combine … unfortunately. But each is necessary in its differing powers.’

  ‘Will he live?’

  Hanna got up and stood beside the tall man, not at all dwarfed by him. He could have been one of her sons. ‘He is badly hurt. I have set his arm and leg and bound his ribs, but much else is hurt besides, inside and out. Yet he already seems to have survived what would kill most men. He must have a good reason.’

  ‘He does.’ Haakon gave a huge yawn, and rose. ‘Well, I will sleep for an hour, then resume my watch.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need to sleep.’

  ‘No, why so little? They will not return for some days.’

  ‘How can you know this?’

  ‘I see it in the flames’ – she gestured to her fireplace – ‘just as I saw your coming.’ There was confusion in his tired eyes, so she shrugged and continued, ‘Friend, you need sleep as much as these two.’

  ‘Nevertheless—’

  Hanna raised her hand. ‘As you wish. But have a taste of this. It will make your little sleep go further.’

  Haakon was too exhausted to
argue. He took a long pull at the same elixir Beck had sampled and, finding it good, drained the flask. Then he curled up into a sheepskin on a bench next to Beck.

  ‘Wake me at mid-morning,’ he managed before his eyes shut.

  ‘Of course,’ said Hanna, then added in a whisper. ‘I can always try.’

  But she wouldn’t. The three would sleep through the day, the sunset and probably another dawn again. Sleep’s Balm, Hanna thought, as powerful as anything in my chest of herbs.

  She picked up her tabby cat, Philomen, who had slept through all the excitement with the privilege of his great age, and put him on her lap. Laying another piece of applewood on the fire, she sat back and watched the red slowly creep over it in a series of incendiary flowers. There were answers to seek within the flames. As the heat took the applewood and held it up in crimson and yellow arms, she thought about the savaged man, the strange hand he carried. And what she had said to the tall one had been true: she’d know when the hunt was about to return. She’d see it in smoke and fire.

  ‘Scots pine,’ sniffed the tracker, a stocky Bavarian from Heinrich’s own manor, handing him the flask. ‘We use a lot on bitches in heat to keep away the boar hounds, until we’re ready. Then we wash away all but a trace. They love that.’

  As a result of their need to rest and Fenrir’s steady pace, it had taken the pursuers the rest of the night and until sunset of the next day to catch up with the wolf-dog. Two of their hounds had snuck up on him as he slept in a thicket and had lost their lives as a result. But they had dislodged the flask, before Fenrir finally fled the increasing odds.

  Heinrich cursed. ‘So we have been chasing a decoy?’

  ‘Someone has helped them trick us, yes,’ his fellow German grunted at him, moving just out of range of his leader’s reach. His right hand might have been bandaged but he was just as vicious with the left.

  Heinrich had taken a step towards the latest man to fail him, but stopped at these words.

  ‘Helped them? Of course. They could not have taken him much further. The prisoner was barely alive.’ He paced for a moment. ‘They’ve gone to ground. Back there. You’ – he pointed at one of his men – ‘ride back to Wittenberg directly. You should meet the Archbishop on the road. We will rendezvous at the crossroads just before we entered the forest. The rest of you scum, mount! We ride.’