Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  Pascale stood at the foot of the ladder and was using a sword to hack at the leg of the man wedged in the trapdoor. Tannhauser feared a spasm or a kick might knock the blade into her face.

  ‘Pascale, stop.’

  She looked at him. He climbed the stairs and motioned her to step back and she did. He speared the man beneath the floating ribs, then manoeuvred the body until it dropped to the foot of the ladder. He retrieved the arrow from the dead man’s gut and returned it to the quiver with the rest.

  ‘Get rid of the sword.’

  ‘I want to keep it.’

  ‘You don’t know how to use it and it would take you years to learn. None of these fools had learned either. If you must go armed – and I wouldn’t give this option to many – take the captain’s dagger.’ He pointed to the gutted hulk. ‘It’s not too long and will suit your build. I’ll show you some moves you can count on. Take those white armbands, too, if they’re not too bloody.’

  As Pascale bent over the captain’s body, Tannhauser saw Flore in the bedroom doorway. Her eyes were on Pascale. As Pascale rose with the captain’s belt and dagger, she looked at Flore and seemed to detect some censure, though Tannhauser saw none and wondered if it did not reflect some scruple within her own conscience.

  ‘They killed Father. They were going to kill us, too.’

  Flore said, ‘I don’t want you to hurt yourself.’

  Pascal wound the captain’s belt twice around her waist and buckled it. As if to emphasise her stand, she stooped by the two dead students and tipped them over the rail.

  ‘Their blood’s no use to us any more.’

  ‘Hike up your skirts and tie them around your waist,’ said Tannhauser, ‘or you’ll carry a gallon of the stuff into the street. If you want to spare your shoes, go down the stairs barefoot, but take care not to cut yourself on fallen blades. Pascale, bring the pistols. Flore, the wallets. And bring some cloths that we can use to wipe ourselves down.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Flore.

  ‘Whatever comes next.’

  Flore looked down into the stairwell at the sodden carnage. She stifled a sound in her throat. There was hardly a square inch of the floor not coated with gore and whole swaths of the walls were thus arrayed. The smell of blood had been overwhelmed by the stench of those who had befouled themselves as they died. A business of flies, convened from a variety of species and hues, snarled in rising number to propagate and feed.

  ‘We were born here,’ said Flore. ‘We slept here every night and we woke up here every morning. All our lives. Mama died here and now Papa, too. And now here is gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Here is gone. But we are not.’

  ‘Will you carry me down the stairs?’

  ‘Of course. Let me sort my gear.’

  Tannhauser slung his rifle across his back, the bow and quiver over one shoulder. He was carrying too many weapons, perhaps, but he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the spontone. Against the multiple foes in prospect, it was superior even to dagger and sword.

  Pascale reappeared, skirts high, shoes in hand, and his wallets and holsters draped across her narrow shoulders. He held out his left arm and Flore swung up to sit on his hip with her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms around his neck. Pascale picked her way down the stairs in bare feet, showing an admirable indifference to the semi-liquid gore that splashed her ankles and calves. Tannhauser descended behind her, using the spontone to steady his steps.

  There were no militia left in the house. He left the girls inside and checked the narrow street and saw no one. He stepped out and threw the three broken arrow stumps into the fire. He took off the leather apron and spread it over the body of Daniel Malan, still smouldering on the embers of his burned books.

  He went back to the workshop and there he and the girls washed the blood from their hands and their feet and their weapons. The sisters did not speak and, though he was tempted to utter some reassuring platitudes, neither did he. Each girl in her way evinced a surprising calm, drawing on some inner well of strength as if both had been expecting so dire a moment their whole lives. Perhaps they were simply too stunned. The girls put on their shoes.

  The street was still empty and Tannhauser hurried the girls past the fire. The sisters looked at the corpse beneath the smoking printer’s apron.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Pascale.

  There were tears in her eyes but she wasn’t crying. Tannhauser kept them moving. They reached the end of the street, where Clementine was waiting but the boys were not.

  The big mare had pulled the rein tight and was stepping this way and that and rolling her eyes and tossing her head, disturbed by her abandonment, and by the smells of blood and burning, by the sounds and silences of terror and death, by the great drifting fog of human madness and evil which, to her animal senses, must have permeated the whole of creation thereabouts. She was glad to see Tannhauser. He took the time to murmur endearments in Turkish, a language he believed all horses loved. Clementine was comforted, though no more so, and likely less, than her huge heart comforted him. He thought of his great Mongol horse Buraq, now enjoying his last years out to pasture at La Penautier.

  Tannhauser said, ‘Call her the most beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Flore. She looked into Clementine’s big blunt face. ‘Yes, Clementine, yes, you are the most beautiful. Can I touch her?’

  ‘Hold out your hand, so she can take your scent. Let her touch you.’

  Clementine nuzzled Flore’s palm. Tannhauser seated the wallets and pistol holsters on the mare’s enormous back. The horse had dumped a pile of dung and the dung had been scattered. Some broken lumps lay several yards down the street, as if someone had thrown or kicked them. He worried about Grégoire and Juste.

  He produced the two apples from his shirt. They looked delicious and reminded him he was starving. He handed them to Flore and Pascale, who misread his intentions and, before he could stop them, fed both fruits to Clementine. They called the better bargain. The horse’s pleasure was so intense that the whites of her eyes bulged beyond their rims and the girls laughed with a delight that on that street ought not to have been possible.

  ‘Do you ride?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Pascale. ‘We never had the opportunity.’

  ‘You’re off to a bold start, then, for she’s the tallest horse I ever sat on.’

  He wondered how to mount them without soiling his hands on their feet.

  ‘’Tis a pity Grégoire isn’t here.’

  ‘You mean your lackey?’ asked Pascale.

  ‘His back would have served you for a mounting block.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  Tannhauser didn’t answer. He climbed into the saddle and reached down and one by one helped the girls swing up behind him onto Clementine’s back. Then he swung his right leg over her neck and dropped to the ground. Pascale shuffled forward onto the saddle and Flore held onto her waist. He gave the rifle to Pascale and showed her how to rest it across the pommel. He took Clementine by the bridle.

  ‘Why don’t you ride with us?’ asked Flore.

  ‘I can fight better down here. If trouble occurs, I’ll set Clementine to a canter and she’ll carry you clear. Anyone who gets in her way will regret it. Hold onto her mane and grip with your knees. Now, tell me, who will take you in? Who can shelter you?’

  The sisters stared at him as if no betrayal could be more foul.

  ‘You must know someone. Friends, relatives, neighbours.’

  ‘Half the men you killed on the stairs were our neighbours,’ said Pascale. ‘They’d known us all our lives. Some were Father’s friends. Perhaps you should have asked them.’

  ‘Have you no Catholic kin? I can’t drag you about Paris, not today.’

  Flore said, ‘On any other day we wouldn’t ask you to.’

  Their way was marked by more cadavers, now of every age and gender, heaped in the gutters and draped bleeding from windows and doorways, l
ike merchandise in some improvised market of the damned. They passed blood-boltered bands of militia and students, who cast glances up at the girls, suspicion in their eyes and lechery in their balls; but none dared beard Tannhauser, and this was as well for them, for he was in the vein and keen to be provoked. They saw thieves emptying houses, frantic with greed. Some worked in the wake of the militia, plundering the recently slaughtered. Others committed their own murders, without regard to creed. Some streets were so awash with fresh spilt gore, so choked with ongoing butchery – families hacked in sunder, children before their mothers, fathers before their sons as they knelt and begged for the lives of their kinfolk – that Tannhauser dared not take them, and he had Pascale navigate some other route to their goal.

  At moments an uncanny silence would fall across the quartier, and the girls would take deep breaths and believe it all done. But like much else, each silence proved itself false. The echoes would return, of looting, torture, dying and rape. Rats skittered back and forth in the spoil as if deranged by its sudden abundance. A pair of dogs, panting in the heat, made sport with the rats. And, as before, all this havoc in a city that seemed near derelict, for those who were not doomed stayed indoors; the limbless, the demented and the blind had flown; the whores had retreated to their cribs; and once the butchers had moved on, the streets were given over to the corpses of the newly slain.

  The Écurie D’Engel was open. Tannhauser relieved Pascale of the rifle and helped the girls dismount in the outer yard. He closed and barred the gates to the street but opened the hatch in the upper half of the wicket door. He pointed to a water butt.

  ‘Fill a bucket for Clementine.’

  He went inside the building where he found Engel, if such was the hostler’s name, hanging by his neck from a rope tied around a roof beam. The hostler was naked, his face turned away into the shadows. The blackened fingers of his left hand were trapped between the rope and his throat. His feet and legs below the knee were grossly distended and the colour of pickled beetroot. Tannhauser reckoned him dead since at least yesterday evening. The stable was silent and a quick tour revealed that all the horses were gone. There were any number of explanations for the scene but none of them concerned Tannhauser. The absence of Grégoire and Juste did, but the possible reasons for that were even more numerous and most of them were grim.

  He mashed up a bucket of chaff, bruised barley and beans, and took it to the yard. Pascale and Flore watched Clementine eat. He went back inside and found a wagon sheet and spread it below Engel. He sawed through the rope and the body dropped and folded over stiffly without spilling any noxious contents. He rolled it up in the sheet and dragged it outside and unrolled it behind a heap of garbage down the street. When he returned with the sheet, the girls did not ask what it had contained. Despite the chaff, which he’d included to slow her down, the mare had made short work of the barley and beans. Tannhauser led her to a salt brick and as she licked it the girls pointed out small, amusing details of the mare’s expressions and behaviour.

  Tannhauser was touched by their smiles.

  He had been wrong to let Pascale kill the actors. He wondered why so obvious a conclusion had eluded him at the time. His capacity to reason was impaired. He tried to reason now, to make a plan, but a plan required some notion of an outcome that was plausible and desirable, and such he was incapable of formulating. All that was clear to him was that since his arrival in Paris every decision he had taken had been in error. He felt as if he was standing at the edge of the world, with nowhere left to go but over its rim.

  He sat down on a bench and put his head in his hands, like a man who had come to the end of something he once thought had no end. If he had not sat down, he would have been crushed to his knees by the measureless weight of his despair. He had mourned before. He had mourned many he had loved. This black humour was more than grief; or failure or guilt. He squeezed his skull as if he might expel the poison. His hair was clogged with crusts and clots that broke down into a paste beneath his fingers and released a thin fluid that trickled down his neck. He was a man of blood in a city of blood in a world of blood. He trembled from his core. He waited for the fit to pass, not knowing if it ever would.

  The sisters came and sat down on the bench beside him, Pascale to his left and Flore to his right. He did not look at them. They had been orphaned and exiled from their own lives. They had been plunged amongst sights and sounds that should be reserved for the damned. Each girl folded her hands in her lap and said nothing. They were good girls. After a moment, and in the same moment, they both started to cry. They cried quietly, without fuss, as if they didn’t want to disturb him, but needed to be near.

  Tannhauser wanted to be alone. He did not want to have to care for them. Their muffled tears scalded his conscience. He wanted to invite Carla’s spirit into his mind and his heart – her image, her face, the sound of her voice – for she would know how to comfort them and he did not. He did not dare. His own grief stirred, shifting down inside the void within him like some stunned beast threatening to awake, and he was afraid. More than any of the men he had killed, more than all but a tainted handful of men in the city, this bloodbath could be laid to his account. So could the murder of Carla and their baby.

  He had an urge to tell the girls his troubles, to use them as his confessors, but he quelled it for the weakness that it was. It would undermine their faith in him, and they needed it. Fragile though it was, such faith was all they had. He forced himself to speak; to say anything.

  ‘In the desert –’

  He sensed the girls lift their heads and look at him. He tried again.

  ‘In the desert, south of the Atlas Mountains, is a desolate region that the tribes thereabouts call Mur n Akush, or the Land of God. I travelled with a band who are forever on the move, who are born and suckled on the move, who die and are buried on the move, who live and love and write songs on the move, who have been moving thus for generations without number, and who will do so for generations without number to come. They chart inexhaustible variations on the same prodigious journeys, along the same ancient yet invisible routes, and no sooner have they completed one vast arc across the surface of the earth, than they turn about and begin all over again.’

  He carved illustrative figures of eight with his soiled hands.

  ‘In their tongue they call themselves “the free and noble people”.’

  The sisters wiped the tears from their cheeks.

  ‘In a sense the band, or their clan, has always been, and will always be, on the same one journey, whose beginning is lost to memory, and whose destination will never be reached. Each night they make a new camp, beneath a new arrangement of stars, and each morning they set off in a new direction, for even though the routes they follow may be ancient, the deserts are never still but always changing, and no foot ever falls twice on the same road. In one sense, then, these travellers are always at home, for they never leave that place in which they were born. In another, they find themselves arriving – always – at a place where no one has ever been before.’

  The sisters thought about what he had said, each for a moment lost within herself.

  ‘Were they good to you, the free and noble people?’ asked Flore.

  ‘Without them I would have died.’

  ‘Did you find God in the Land of God?’ she said.

  ‘I always find God in the wilderness. All right men do. Girls, too.’

  ‘I’d love to go to the wilderness,’ said Flore.

  ‘We are in the wilderness,’ said Pascale. ‘And God is not here. Only the Devil.’

  Tannhauser said, ‘Then it’s the Devil’s tune we’ll dance to.’

  ‘If you’ll let me, I’ll dance it with you.’

  Tannhauser scratched an armhole.

  ‘Why did you tell us about the desert?’ asked Flore.

  He felt their eyes on him. He didn’t answer, because he didn’t know.

  Flore said, ‘Is it because you think we should keep mov
ing, like the tribesmen?’

  ‘We need to find a safe place.’

  ‘Isn’t it safe here?’ said Pascale. ‘Clementine likes it.’

  ‘Sooner or later the militia, or the police, are going to shove on that door.’ He nodded towards the street. ‘If it’s barred on the inside, they’ll want to know who is here. If they don’t get an answer, they’ll take the door down to find out.’

  ‘They’ll listen to you,’ said Pascale.

  ‘I can’t stay. My son is across the river, in the Ville. He’s gravely wounded, why or by whom I don’t know.’

  ‘Then let’s go to him,’ said Flore.

  ‘The white bands on your arms will persuade only those who want to be persuaded. There are no Catholic girls on the streets. The only reason for you to be at large is because you’re not who you claim to be.’

  ‘Yesterday we were girls carrying water,’ said Pascale. ‘Why are we so important today?’

  ‘We’ve become fast friends since then, you and I. That’s why.’

  ‘I mean why are we important to the militia?’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘Then why do they want to murder us?’

  ‘They’ve a grand plan for the purification of the world, to which end you must die.’

  ‘But they don’t even know we exist.’

  ‘Such riddles have baffled greater philosophers than we. Our task is to survive and, if we can find the appetite, start life afresh.’

  ‘You said “a safe place”. That means somewhere you can leave us behind, doesn’t it?’ said Pascale. ‘Even though you say we’re friends.’

  Tannhauser stood up. He went to the water butt and dipped a bucket and bent forward from the waist and emptied the tepid water over his head. He scrubbed the blood from his hair. He rubbed his face. He rinsed again. He wanted a bath. He straightened up.