Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  ‘Now, open that jar and let’s set to.’

  The earthen jar was painted with pitch and sealed with plaited willow twigs coated in wax. Carla cut the lid off and a sweet aroma rose from the neck. She was starving. The jar was filled to the brim with liquid honey and halved pears. She loaded the small bowls.

  ‘This smells delicious, but of more than just honey and pears.’

  ‘There’s some quinces diced up in there if you dig deep. They’re choice. And don’t skimp on the honey, pour as if our souls depended on it. We want to finish this jar before my son gets back. It’s a miracle it’s survived this long.’

  ‘Where has Grymonde gone?’

  ‘This old woman has learned not to ask.’

  ‘But he’ll be back?’

  Carla felt safe here; but Grymonde would make her feel safer.

  ‘That big bowl is for you, in case you puke.’

  ‘I’m still leaking.’

  ‘The floor’s seen worse. Just let us know if it shows green or bloody.’

  ‘May I stand to eat? It feels more comfortable.’

  ‘Please do, it will help the babe along.’

  ‘Really? That is, I would stand on my head if you so counselled, it’s just that previous midwives instructed me to lie in bed all day.’

  Alice confined her opinion on said practice to a grunt and a curl of her lip.

  ‘Wait until the surgeons get their hands on us, as of course they’re scheming to do. The gravediggers and priests will make a fortune.’

  Alice grabbed a bowl and they ate, Carla passing compliments while Alice supped and sighed and smacked her lips. Carla felt a surge of deep tenderness for the old woman, so deep she didn’t know what to do with it; so deep she again felt tears begin to trickle down her cheeks. Alice pushed her empty bowl across the table and Carla refilled it and poured more honey. A tear fell into the bowl and she apologised. She set the jar down and took a sip of rosehip tea.

  ‘Our Mother welcomes all her children’s tears, love. They remind her we’re worth all that we’ve cost her. And happy tears most of all. Here, let’s heat that tea up.’

  ‘No, it’s good cold, to wash down the honey.’

  Carla drank again and composed herself. She wasn’t used to so many sentiments.

  ‘Play for her,’ whispered Amparo.

  Her voice was so clear that Carla turned around. She saw no light or emanation, and was disappointed, but her eyes fell on her violl case stacked among the rummage.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Alice.

  ‘She told me to play for you.’

  ‘The fiddle’s yours, not plunder? As if we needed any more.’

  ‘Grymonde took nothing from me. I don’t understand why. He’s so –’

  Carla hesitated. She didn’t know how to continue.

  ‘My son is mad, bloody and beautiful. His affairs are his, and yours are yours, this woman doesn’t pry. But his dominion stops at that door, so if he troubles you, let us know.’

  ‘I’m not his prisoner, at least I don’t think so.

  ‘We’ll leave it at that. Are you fit to play?’

  ‘Until the next pang comes, yes.’

  ‘You can’t say no to an angel, love. And the rest of us would fain listen, too.’

  As Carla took the violl case the next pang came and she was glad, for its passing would give her time to play. She leaned on the case and rode the spasm. Its strength was greater yet, and lights danced behind her clenched eyelids, but it took less from her than the one that had almost laid her low in the yard. She realised how frightened she had been, despite her bravado. She stretched. She undid the ties on the case and took the violl and bow and sat on the edge of her chair.

  Her stomach bulged across her thighs and as much as she spread her legs the baby had shifted so far down, and her muscles were so tense, she could hardly bow at all. She lifted the instrument clear and closed her thighs, and rested the violl against the outside of her left thigh and twisted sideways towards it. The position was imperfect but easier.

  ‘Amparo came from Spain. She brought this Follia with her, from the dances known to the bull drovers she grew up with. It isn’t a piece in the usual sense. It has no fixed form or theme, though it belongs to the key of D minor. We never knew where it was going to take us. We never played it the same way twice.’

  She felt suddenly bashful, which was unlike her. But though she had played for princes and rogues, she had never had an audience like this. She turned her head. Alice was watching her. She nodded. Carla took courage from the angel at her back.

  ‘Amparo said it should be played as if you’re trying to catch the wind.’

  Carla’s gambo violl was as much a part of her as the fingers that played it. And yet, as she bowed an arpeggio from treble to bass to prove the tuning – as she’d done ten thousand times before and more – the vast and bottomless sound that rolled through the room stole her breath away.

  She heard Amparo sigh.

  She heard Alice murmur.

  The violl spoke from where Carla stood, teetering on the rim between death and life. The instrument was as close to her heart as any other living thing; and that it was a thing alive she knew as surely as she knew her own name. During her solitude – and not then alone but always: in love and in confusion, in grief, in gladness, in desperation, in shame – the violl had affirmed, and acclaimed, all that was most true in her spirit. Before the chord could fade she plunged after it, running pell-mell along the rim, chasing the wind.

  Notes in abandon flew with her and came from she knew not where. They blew through her being in shifting gusts, like wasteful seas, like falling blossom, like hail, like startled doves; like peals of thunder. She wept. She smiled. She dissolved. She knew not who she was. And in that not-knowing she knew a oneness with all that she had never imagined. Wood; skin; strings; sound; child; quinces; woman. Pang. She leaned forward into the pang, into the violl, sawing the bow, faster, stronger, no longer chasing the wind but riding it. She threw her head back and cried out in ecstasy. The Follia cried out with her, and the rim itself dissolved, and life and death merged to avow the oneness.

  The Follia had no end; that was its nature.

  And so, when Carla at last stopped playing, she didn’t know it.

  ‘Carla, are you all right, love?’

  Carla felt a hand on her shoulder and opened her eyes. She found herself bent over her lap, one arm cradling her belly and the other her gambo violl. She roused herself and looked up at Alice. The old woman’s face was drawn.

  ‘Alice, I’m sorry, I’m fine. If I alarmed you, forgive me.’

  ‘Hush, now,’ Alice’s own voice was hushed. ‘Let’s not chase it away.’

  She meant the Follia, and she was right. Its shade still lingered, like incense.

  Alice took the violl. She tried to stoop to pick up the bow from the floor but had to pause halfway. She leaned on the violl for support. Carla retrieved the bow and they straightened up together. Their faces were inches apart. They had not been so close before. Carla’s condition had mewed her up within it, within herself and her need to birth her child. She knew it, because now she saw how frail Alice was. She had seen the signs but not felt the fact of it; and the old woman’s fundamental force was so great it masked her infirmity. Carla knew too, that if Alice hadn’t chosen to reveal it, she wouldn’t have seen it.

  Carla put her arms around her. Her belly pressed against her.

  Alice laid her cheek on Carla’s breast. Her voice almost cracked.

  ‘All my days I waited to hear the Song of the Earth.’

  Carla stroked her hair. It was thin and dry. Carla didn’t speak. Alice raised her head and for the first time put a hand on Carla’s belly. Her touch was unexpectedly delicate yet Carla felt her body giving up its secrets. Alice nodded and her former indomitability was restored. She stepped back and handed over the violl.

  ‘He’s well on his way. Or she’s on hers.’

  Alice lumb
ered back to the table, once again radiating largeness.

  As Carla stowed the violl, she realised that Alice had said ‘I’.

  She closed the case and turned and saw Alice take a slim deck of cards from a shelf. She sorted through them, selected one, and laid it face-up on the table. She spent some moments in its silent contemplation. She closed her eyes and splayed the rest of the cards face-down and mixed them, moving her whole body back and forth as she circled and crossed her palms. She stopped and opened her eyes and gathered the deck back together and cut some from the top with her left hand, and set them aside. From the stack that remained she drew a card and laid it on the table, below and to the left of the one she had selected. Though its image must have been familiar, she absorbed it with the raptness of a trance. She turned another to the right of the second card, and studied this, too, and then a fourth to the right of the third to form a line. She set the deck aside, and put her palms on the table, and leaned over the cards for what seemed a long time.

  Whatever Alice may have been reading in the cards, Carla could not read her.

  Carla waited. Another pang came. She leaned on her knees and rode the wave. The power was intense, yet it no longer frightened her. The power was hers now. The birth was no longer something that was happening to her; she was no longer in Nature’s fist; the birth was something she and Nature were doing together. The spasm passed.

  Alice sat down in her chair and beckoned Carla to stand beside her.

  The first card Carla saw was Death. She looked away.

  ‘Now then,’ said Alice. ‘What shall we two witches make of these?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Burning Man

  AT THE BOTTOM of the spiral staircase Tannhauser locked the door and hung the key around Juste’s neck. The twin girls were sitting on the pew he had specified and were drinking from wooden bowls. There was no sign of roasted fowl. The girls waved at him and smiled their tormented red smiles, no doubt as so ordered by their pimp. The soup had smeared the paint on their mouths. Marooned in the black circles daubed on their lead-white faces, their eyes were full of fear. The fear had been there the first time he had seen them at the Saint-Jacques Gate. Fear always. Pain often. Humiliation without cease.

  Tannhauser turned away.

  Tybaut was not to be seen.

  Tannhauser left the cathedral by the central portal and stopped.

  Fresh blood shimmered on the Parvis in a large, irregular pool, its surface as tense as a globule of crimson quicksilver. It crept outwards, with sudden excursions along the joints between the flagstones. Four men had contributed to the globule’s creation, their throats cut with unusual thoroughness and depth, as if by someone who boned meat for a living. Their corpses were slung in a heap from which their all-but severed heads lolled out at extreme angles, their black garments gleaming wet in the morning sun.

  Tannhauser watched as the bearded captain he had seen from the tower cut the throat of a fifth Huguenot, whose hands, like those of the already murdered, were tied behind his back. He did so with the kind of skill that makes a difficult job look simple: a single stroke, rotating from the hips, using a knife sharpened so many times its blade was worn to a crescent. A primeval moan erupted from the collective belly of the assembled, Catholic and Protestant united, at least for a moment, in their awe of indecent death.

  The captain was a man of enormous size, and when the brief but spectacular fountains of gore had spent themselves in the lake, he dragged the corpse away with one hand and hefted it by its belt onto the pile.

  Tannhauser felt Juste bury his face against his back. He looked for Clementine but the big grey mare was not to be seen.

  The audience for the murders was composed of militiamen and their prisoners, along with those beggars and civilians of a ghoulish nature who had elected to stay behind in surprising numbers. The bearded captain looked at Tannhauser. Tannhauser returned his gaze. The captain sucked his moustache with his lower lip. He wore red and white ribbons entwined around his arm, as did a fair proportion of his men. He looked down at Tannhauser’s feet. Tannhauser knew the freshened tide of blood was about to lap his boots. As it did so, he didn’t step out of the way. A murmur rippled through the militia.

  The captain raised his arms for silence, as if resenting the loss of attention.

  ‘We’ve promised ourselves that for once in their greedy, thieving lives the lawyers wouldn’t get away with it. Nor will the heretics and traitors who deny the True Presence, and who’d sell our city to the English and the Dutch for a handful of double farthings. And so here we are with the first batch of vermin, though God willing it won’t be the last.’

  A hearty cheer went up from his men. From the sixty or so victims awaiting their turn rose a cacophony of lamentations. The captain grinned.

  ‘Do they have to be Huguenots, captain? Or will any lawyer do?’

  The captain frowned and he was good at it.

  ‘Steady now, men, this is serious work. The King’s work. God’s work. And who are we but His strong and humble hands, we who have sworn to accomplish His will?’ He crossed himself with the bloody knife. ‘So. Who’s next? Come on, come on, the sooner we get through this lot the sooner we’ll be on to the next.’

  A sixth man was shoved to his knees. The captain stared at him. His face distorted with recognition and malice. He leaned over, almost nose-to-nose.

  ‘You remember me, don’t you? Course you do. Bernard Garnier? Falsely charged with murder in sixty-three? And persecuted ever since for debts thus incurred? You should remember, you turd, you’ve pocketed enough of my money.’

  Vulgar laughter. The bound man closed his eyes.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Garnier. ‘We’re saving this bastard till the end. Set him over there where he can watch. And take his shoes off. If he closes his eyes, stab him in the feet, and if he keeps on muttering his Huguenot filth stick him again. Now, bring his wife and children up, so he may watch me bleed them.’

  Tannhauser glanced to his left as Tybaut arrived, still shirtless. His breaths were fast and shallow, both his pride and his courage stretched to their limits. His cheeks were swollen and red. He held one hand behind his back.

  ‘Take my advice, Tybaut. Go away.’

  ‘I want my key back.’

  ‘’Tis a pity you’re a pimp. I might’ve had use for you.’

  ‘Give me my key or I’ll turn your boy in for a dirty heretic.’

  ‘Go away now, Tybaut, or I will kill you.’

  Tybaut sniggered. ‘Oh yes? These are my people, not yours, you pillock.’

  Tannhauser drew with his left and stabbed Tybaut through the gut below the breastbone. Beyond skin and muscle, the resistance to the blade faded, then he felt an elastic tug as he pierced the aorta. He withdrew the dagger and returned it to its sheath. The move took hardly longer than it had taken to slap him. Tybaut grunted, winded and astonished. The wound appeared unremarkable, yet inside his abdominal cavity his life was rushing away, embalming his coiled entrails in his own blood. The colour stole from his face. A knife tinkled to the ground. Impending death filled him with a need for Tannhauser’s blessing.

  ‘There’s thousands worse off than my girls. Why’d you pick on me?’

  Tybaut’s eyes swam with bewilderment.

  Tannhauser spun him by the arm and grabbed the back of his breeches.

  ‘Here’s another godless traitor. He’s no lawyer but he’ll do.’

  Tannhauser hoisted him into the blood. Tybaut’s legs tangled one about the other in their attempt to keep him upright. He fell full length, his arms too weak to break his fall, and a groan went up from the gathered as a great shower of gore speckled their clothes.

  Tybaut’s jaw drooped open. His last sigh bubbled into the red swill. Tannhauser seized an ox-tongue spear from the nearest militiaman and spun it down and wedged the blade through the rear of Tybaut’s ribcage by the spine. In a pinch the ox-tongue would have served as a shovel. Though Tybaut was long gone, Ta
nnhauser stood over him and ploughed him with steel.

  He stabbed for his mother. He stabbed for Amparo. He stabbed for the twins with vermilion mouths drinking soup in the cathedral. He stabbed for Carla. Not one of them would have thanked him. All would have found him repellent. He stabbed the dead youth from the lava of rage and pain surging up through his heart as if from the stones beneath his feet. He mutilated the pimp in a spasm of disgust at his own impotence.

  And just like the Devil squatting on his back, and his guardian Angel watching from the bell tower, he could see himself all the while.

  He paused to blink sweat and blood from his vision. He looked down.

  The ox-tongue spear had chopped Tybaut’s ribs from either side of his backbone, exposing his core through two gaping trenches. Even in the grip of blind rage, the skill was commendable. Even by the standards established on the Parvis that morning, the sight was obscene.

  Among the spectators there was absolute silence, as if they feared that to make a sound would doom them, too, and in that instinctive calculation they were not far wrong. Tannhauser looked up. His gaze met that of a Huguenot who knelt bound and shoeless, waiting to watch the death of his kin, at the outer rim of the blood.

  The Huguenot was silent, too.

  Yet did he mouth the words ‘Kill me’?

  Or did he merely say as much with his eyes?

  Or did Tannhauser hear the pleading of his own deranged spirit?

  Neither Devil on his back nor Angel on the tower knew for sure.

  He waded through the gore, the blood riding up over his boots like red mud, and drove the spear through the Huguenot’s heart. He heard a woman’s cry from among the prisoners. The kind of cry torn from the inmost workings of a woman who has lost the man she loved. He put a foot to the Huguenot’s chest and shoved him from the blade.

  He turned and looked up at the cathedral and its vast and mysterious text. He heard the Green Lion roar and he wanted to roar himself, for he heard its message. Petrus Grubenius had tried to convince him to devote himself to its truth. A message so radical it could only be written in – and trusted to – an alchemical code so mysterial that few living men would ever read it and fewer still take it to their hearts. Tannhauser had merely taken it into his memory.