Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  As Tannhauser rode by a cross street he saw a gang of men battering down the doors to a pair of adjoining houses with axes and pike butts. Youths, who Tannhauser took to be students, threw stones through the windows and yelled threats and taunts to those inside, alternately urging and daring them to open the locks. They glanced at Tannhauser, and he looked at them, and they turned away.

  At the end of this street he could see the high rim of the city walls. The smell of burning intensified. He came to the corner of the street where the printer lived.

  He stopped and dismounted.

  He peered around the edge of the building and saw a bonfire in the middle of the road. The best of the blaze was over. It was largely composed of books, whose ashes now formed a great black pile. As the embers caught a breath of air, sudden streaks of luminous red striated the blackness, and random bursts of flame erupted skyward. In the centre of the pile was a charred and trussed body, by its size probably a man’s. A militiaman stood on the far side of the fire, downwind of the smoke, scratching himself. A second emerged from the open door beneath the sign bearing the name of Daniel Malan. He was carrying Tannhauser’s wheel-lock rifle, which he examined in the sunlight with puzzlement.

  Tannhauser turned back. He tied Clementine to an iron rail outside a shop.

  He looked at Grégoire and Juste.

  ‘I will be back shortly, but to you the time will seem long. If anyone comes by, especially militia or students, I want you to be prepared to escape. Keep your distance. Do not let them surround you. Do not let them get close enough to grab you. Do not trust anyone. Treat all as you would a poisonous snake. If they ask who you are, tell them you are guarding my horse, and that I am engaged on a mission of great importance for Captain Garnier. If you see that they intend to take Clementine, let them do so and run away. Do not worry for Clementine’s safety, for no one will harm her even if they steal her. Unlike the rest of us, her value is beyond question.’

  Tannhauser unlimbered Frogier’s bow

  ‘Can’t we come with you?’ asked Juste.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am a very fair archer. In Poland I’ve shot hare, ducks, deer, boar –’

  ‘Your job today is to avoid becoming the quarry. Now – see – you have three choices of escape from here, four if you count running towards the fire. Grégoire, you know this district well enough, don’t you?’

  ‘I see six choices,’ said Grégoire.

  ‘Good. You should be able to outrun and outfox any I’ve seen on the street. But don’t try to be too clever. If you have any doubts or fears, I order you to run, even before they get close. Trust your instincts.’

  ‘We’re not cowards,’ said Juste.

  ‘I know you’re not cowards so let me hear no more of such nonsense. Make Lucifer your guide – he will detect evil intentions before you do. And when you run, he will follow. Remember, Clementine is safe but Lucifer is not, for he is worthless. They will kill him for the fancy. You must run to protect him.’

  The boys looked down at the wretched little cur and then at each other. They seemed agreed that the dog’s life was worth more than both of theirs put together.

  ‘I repeat, if you have to run – if you want to run – run. You can either circle back here to see if it’s safe –’

  He looked about the surrounding streets.

  ‘See, you can spy from there, and there, or that alley there.’

  They nodded, the notion gaining the appeal of a dangerous game.

  ‘Or you can make your way back to Engel’s stable. If either you or your bodies are not here when I return, I want to know where I can find you.’

  Tannhauser pulled five arrows and nocked one to the bowstring. The others he held in the same hand as the bow, Tartar-style.

  ‘We have no weapons,’ said Juste.

  ‘If you have weapons you will fight, and if you fight you will be killed. Your weapons are your brains and your feet.’

  Tannhauser walked through a light blizzard of charred paper, the bow and arrows by his left thigh, his eyes slitted against the smoke, his stomach soured by the familiar smell of burning flesh. It always made him salivate, the worse so when he was hungry, as he was now. He felt a rising nausea. The burning man was most likely Daniel Malan. He was not the first man Tannhauser had seen roasted on a pyre of his own books. It was the kind of jape that appealed to certain minds. Thus had Petrus Grubenius met his end, at the hands of other fanatics, led by Orlandu’s father. The body was face-down and only half-consumed. His hands had been tied behind his back and thence to his ankles. The blackened skin of his back and his thighs had swollen and split. Rivulets of molten grease trickled into embers and crackled briefly into flame.

  Tannhauser mastered his need to vomit. He hurried by.

  The two militiamen were debating the workings of the rifle, but as the dog-arm remained locked back in the safe position, it posed no threat. Tannhauser heard shouts and screams, some of them female, though these were now so routine as to arouse no reaction in the two volunteers. Beyond Malan’s house, several more doors – three, four – stood open on the same side of the street. He saw pole arms too cumbersome to use inside – pikes, halberds – stacked against the wall by each door. The butts and blades of some of them were blackened by soot. They must have used them to shovel Malan back into the flames, when he squirmed away. With luck, perhaps one had killed him.

  A rough count: twenty weapons.

  The two militia looked up as he strode towards them through the smoke.

  ‘God bless His Majesty,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Where is Captain Garnier?’

  ‘Garnier?’ said the one with his rifle. ‘I don’t know, sire. He’s not our captain.’

  ‘Is that the printer?’

  ‘That’s the bastard in person, sire. We had timely information.’

  Tannhauser let this pass. ‘And his daughters?’

  ‘Daughters, sire?’ He looked at the second man. ‘He has daughters?’

  ‘They kept that quiet, the sly young dogs.’

  ‘That rifle needs a key to wind the wheel, like a clock,’ Tannhauser explained.

  ‘I told you so,’ said the second man, to the first.

  ‘The key’s usually stored inside the butt plate. Let me show you.’

  Tannhauser smiled and stepped closer and drew his dagger from behind his elbow with his right hand. He stabbed the man with the rifle up and under the breastbone. The heart burst and he shoved him over and slashed for the throat of the second. The second was quicker than most and Tannhauser only cut his shoulder down to the bone before the man was running.

  Tannhauser pegged the dagger in the dead man’s chest and drew the nocked arrow with his thumb. At a range of five paces he shot the fugitive in the arse. The shaft pierced his left buttock halfway to the feathers as the bodkin threaded his pelvis and erupted from his groin. As the man was thrown to the ground, Tannhauser snatched his dagger and ran and fell on him from behind. He stabbed him through the root of the neck and with a stroke severed the vessels of the upper thorax. He sheathed the dagger unwiped.

  He straightened amid the smoking debris and the silence of the slain.

  He saw and heard nothing to suggest he had been observed. He put one foot on the end of the arrow in the dead man’s arse and with a sharp tread he snapped the shaft off. He grabbed the feathered stump with its red and green livery and twisted it free of its splinters. He tossed it on the fire. He nocked a fresh arrow. He retrieved his rifle and slung it across his back by its strap. The shuttering had been torn from the front of Daniel Malan’s shop. He looked inside. Bookshelves had been emptied and torn down, display cases pitched over. There was no one there.

  He glanced inside the door. The hallway was empty. He grabbed the first militiaman by the collar of his jerkin and dragged him inside and dropped him. He listened. He heard vague sounds from the rear of the ground floor. He heard others, muffled voices, from up the staircase, which ascended from halfway down the hallway
, on the left. The house was one room wide. Three open doors lay ahead, two on the right, the same side as the shop front; the last directly ahead at the corridor’s end. From the third door came a dim light. One closed door stood to the left, under the stairway, which likely led to a basement.

  Tannhauser dragged the second corpse inside. He grabbed a half-pike. He pushed the front door closed. The lock and upper bolt had been unseated from the door jamb. He shoved the point of the half-pike into the planking, and wedged the butt beneath the iron casing of the broken lock.

  He headed down the corridor of the ground floor.

  The house smelled of ink, turpentine and metals. Tannhauser glanced in the first doorway to confirm what he’d seen from outside. At the second door he listened, heard nothing and went inside. He found no one. The wooden frame of the printing press had been overturned. Tiny rectangles of type were scattered in heaps across the floor, along with job trays, tools and hand moulds. An ink-stained leather apron hung from a peg by a water butt. He took it and looped the neck strap over his head. The apron hardly reached his thighs but it covered the Maltese Cross on his chest. He moved on to the last room.

  Short of the doorway he stopped. He could hear someone grunting with effort. He recalled that wherever three men are gathered, at least one is called Jean.

  ‘Ho, there, Jean?’

  ‘Both Jeans are upstairs,’ came the reply.

  Tannhauser stepped inside and drew and aimed his arrow at a man on his hands and knees at the far end of the room. The man had his back turned and he was engaged in rolling up a rug in front of a writing desk. Two candles guttered on an iron stand. The rest of the room was stacked with supplies. Malan’s house was built directly onto the back wall of the next street. There was no rear exit.

  Tannhauser relaxed the bow and drew his dagger and moved closer.

  ‘Who else is up there? How many?’

  ‘How would I know? I’m down here.’

  The kneeler turned. Like many in the militia, he was a fellow in his twenties.

  ‘Why? Who are you?’

  ‘Is it true we’ve got two girls upstairs?’

  ‘So they say, but who are you?’

  The man rose to one knee and Tannhauser slashed his throat from shoulder to shoulder. The fellow got a hand in the way and a finger flew. His blood surged massively and he fell into his own spillage. He made no sound that anyone outside the room could have heard. Tannhauser hauled him twitching into the corridor, where his neck wound would impress itself on anyone coming through the door. He stooped over the first two corpses, and stabbed each of them in both eyes.

  He climbed the stairs. He heard distant screams from the houses next door but none from above. He did not wish upon Pascale and Flore any reason to scream, but the silence worried him. At the top of the staircase a landing bent back on itself. It passed two doors on its way to the next flight of steps to the top floor. To the left it extended to a back room with a doorless frame.

  Tannhauser glanced back downstairs towards a noise. Already the front door rattled against the wedged pike. Someone hammered with a fist. A muffled shout came from the street. Tannhauser lunged at the open doorway of the back room.

  As he got there a man appeared, roused by the hammering below. His hands were empty. His face showed no alarm until Tannhauser ran the dagger through his gut and opened him up to the breastbone. The man expelled a windy sigh that conveyed his self-pity. His breath was foul. He clung to a thread of life and Tannhauser hefted his weight on the blade, the breastbone hooked on the quillions. He shuffled backwards. The dying man staggered with him, blood and gall slithering forth down the apron, his weight collapsing forward with enough momentum to reach the top of the staircase.

  Tannhauser turned and pitched him down the steps.

  The man slid off the blade and toppled backwards in silence, his hands grasping in some final possessive spasm at the guts falling out between his legs. The assault on the front door was now pronounced and the butt of the pike was being jolted blow by blow from under the lock case. Tannhauser checked the back room. There was no one else in there. He strode to the second door. It was ajar. He shoved it open. There was no one inside. He heard the door to the street burst inward.

  He heard stunned exclamations. He heard breathless oaths. He heard them ask each other if they were enough in number, or if they should not send for more.

  Tannhauser kicked open the third door.

  A kitchen. Two men.

  The nearest had emerged from a pantry carrying a plate of apples and cheese. He was wearing a breastplate. Tannhauser stabbed him in the armpit and gouged him to the hilt. He twisted the blade but left it in place and let him sink wheezing to his knees. As the second man rose from a chair at a table, upon which lay a helmet and two short swords, Tannhauser drew an archer’s yard and let go. The man cringed and threw out his left hand. The arrow went though his palm and nailed the hand to his chest. He fell back into the chair and stared at the shaft.

  Tannhauser put the bow and three arrows on the table. He grabbed one of the swords. The bodkin-pierced militiaman bawled for help. He raised his right arm to defend himself and Tannhauser put both hands into the swing, and cut the arm off above the elbow. The sword had a better edge than he had expected. The bawling turned into formless screams. Tannhauser grabbed a dishcloth and stuffed it in the gaping mouth.

  He seized the nailed arm and dragged the man from his chair and across the room. The first man was on his knees and elbows, panting for breath and staring at the pool of blood beneath his face. Tannhauser shoved the one-armed man into the wall by the door. The manhandling had dragged the pierced hand some six inches along the shaft towards the fletching. The iron bodkin was embedded near its full length in the upper chest. Tannhauser pulled out the dishcloth. Red foam bubbled out behind it.

  ‘Where are the two girls?’

  ‘Upstairs.’ He saw his stump and sobbed. ‘They’re upstairs, sire. Upstairs.’

  ‘With Jean?’

  ‘Jean? Yes, I’m Jean. I have five children.’ He swayed.

  ‘How many men are upstairs with the girls?’

  ‘Two, sire. Jean and ah . . . Yes, Jean is upstairs, but it’s not me, it’s another Jean. Jean and – give me a minute, sire, I’ll remember, Jean and –’ He coughed red drool. ‘Students, sire. I didn’t know ’em until this morning. I only came in for a bit of breakfast, sire. That’s all. A bit of breakfast.’

  ‘Is that why your clothes stink of smoke?’

  ‘Please don’t kill me, sire. I haven’t even seen the girls. Please don’t kill me.’

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  Jean did so. ‘Jean and Ebert. Yes, Ebert. Please, sire, don’t kill me.’

  Tannhauser crammed the rag back into his mouth and stood back. He mustered a second swing and cut off Jean’s nailed hand at the wrist. The blow knocked the bodkin loose but did not dislodge it. Jean took a deep breath to scream and sucked the rag down his throat. Tannhauser pulled the arrow from Jean’s chest with the hand still impaled. The bodkin was not deformed. He slid the severed hand free of the shaft and pitched the arrow onto the table. The hand was sweaty and hot. He tossed it through the door and into the stairwell. Blasphemies erupted from those who saw it land.

  Jean was strangling on the dishrag but had no means of pulling it out. Tannhauser pushed him out of the door. The ceiling of the landing was the full height of the stairwell, plenty of space for the third swing, which clove Jean’s skull through the vault as far as his eyebrows. It was not a blow Tannhauser would use with his own sword; there were better strokes with less risk of damage to the blade, but the scalp bled to spectacular effect around the lodged steel. He left the sword in place and tilted Jean backwards over the rail. Tannhauser wasn’t sure if anyone had yet dared start to climb the staircase. If they had, the bleeding body dropped on top of them.

  The consternation below reached a new crescendo. He heard someone call for cannon and someone else for cavalry.
If only they had armour. If only they were decently equipped. If only their heroic service were better appreciated. He heard the militia retreat as far as the street.

  He returned to the kitchen where the man with the apples and cheese had died. Tannhauser recovered his dagger from his thorax and wiped and sheathed it. He pushed two apples into his doublet. The cheese was fouled with gore. He rolled the dead man flat on his back, dragged him out onto the landing and kicked his legs apart. From the kitchen table he grabbed his bow and arrows, and the second bastard sword. With a ditch-digger’s thrust he planted the sword through the dead man’s genitals, the tip biting deep into the wooden planks beneath. He renocked the bloody shaft to the bowstring and headed to the third floor.

  At the top of the stair, which was narrower than the one below, he found a shorter landing and only two doors, both of them closed. In the ceiling at the rear a trapdoor hung open. An ingenious folding ladder, which was attached to the trapdoor, hung down from the loft. He looked up. All was dark and quiet. He couldn’t see a way out onto the roof, but there had to be one.

  He stopped by a large wicker basket filled with laundry. He heard two male voices from the farther of the two bedrooms, the one at the front of the house. Jean’s screams had not disturbed them, nor had the shouting below; but they’d been ignoring screams and shouts all morning. He unslung his rifle and checked the pan. Since the day before, someone had primed it. The wheel was cocked. He laid the rifle in the laundry basket.

  He imagined what to expect. A cramped bedroom, the same size as the kitchen. Furniture, beds, clutter. Obstructions of every kind. Two innocent parties. Two young, untested hostiles. A fair chance of panic. He hadn’t found his pistols.

  He unslung the quiver and put it with the rifle. He unbuckled his sword belt and added that, too. He drew the lapis lazuli dagger and took the bow and bloody arrow.

  He stood at the first door and listened. Nothing. He turned the handle, threw the door open, drew the arrow. A ransacked bedroom. A man’s shoes. The fragrance of orange water. Daniel Malan’s room. He stopped at the final room.