Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  He had it in him to leave Pascale behind. Not because he had known her for only a day; some bonds were forged from metals even more mysterious than Time. He just knew that his ruthlessness stretched that far, that his will held that much sway over his heart and his stomach. Yet what directed that will if not heart and stomach?

  His will waited to be told what to do.

  He wished he could ask Carla; but he knew what she would say. And she wasn’t going to get the chance to answer, for he’d never have the chance to ask. If he put Carla on that wagon, he wouldn’t go back for Pascale. If he saw Carla’s face, if he held her in his arms, if he saw her cradle Amparo, he wouldn’t be able to leave her. Anywhere. His plan was an empty fantasy.

  Neither Carla nor anyone here had ever set eyes on Pascale. She would be lost among the nameless slain; unknown and unremembered by all but him.

  That notion didn’t sit well, either. Pascale possessed something he had felt in no other, except himself. A purity of knowing, a clarity, which she hadn’t had to learn. All she had to learn were the means to express it. Something to do with death.

  He could go to get Pascale first.

  Before Carla.

  If Carla was at Garnier’s house, she was safe. If she wasn’t there, getting to the Porte Saint-Denis by midnight was a lost cause. He could hide the wagon and the others right here. Get Pascale. Gather up Carla and the others on the way back. They could be in the Ville in half an hour, all of them. But it would mean leaving Amparo. Estelle was likely a better protector for her than he was, he had said he wouldn’t leave her, and he had meant it. He couldn’t.

  The dice had been rolled, the cards were in play, Amparo’s life – all their lives – were already on the table. He had danced with Fate too often, at her most extravagant balls, to turn down her invitation. If he did, she’d dance with someone else, and he wasn’t about to surrender the floor so late in the party.

  ‘Grégoire, choose a place to hide the wagon, near here.’

  Grégoire nodded, as if he already knew the spot.

  ‘Keep the torch alight if you can, but it’s the hiding that counts. I’ll take the lantern. If I’m not back in an hour, you and Hugon should take the satchels and make of life what you will. Leave the mighty Infant behind.’

  ‘Leave the Infant?’ said Hugon.

  ‘He’ll make of death what he will, for he’s a dead man already.’

  ‘Dead I may be,’ said Grymonde, ‘but I’ll make sure they go.’

  Estelle stood on the wagon bed, cradling Amparo. Tannhauser looked at her.

  ‘You’ve flown with the dragon, Estelle. Do you dare to fly with a devil?’

  ‘Can Amparo fly, too?’

  ‘This devil can’t fly at all without both sisters.’

  ‘Can we bring my crossbow?’

  He saw what it meant to her. He nodded and she smiled.

  He took the mace and pressed the haft into Grymonde’s fist.

  ‘How will I get a chance to use this?’ said Grymonde.

  ‘Let them see it in your hand and you’ll be using it.’

  Grymonde fingered the flanges. ‘I’ll charge for the sound of their bowels.’

  Tannhauser had Estelle stand backwards on the edge of the wagon bed. He took her by the waist and hoisted her onto his neck. She settled and he felt Amparo against his right ear. He slung Altan’s bow and the quiver of broadheads over his left shoulder.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Estelle.

  ‘To the quays a little north of Notre-Dame.’

  ‘That’s not far,’ said Estelle.

  Grymonde said, ‘Why are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to fetch Pascale, a friend. Le Tellier’s sergents have her.’

  Tannhauser remembered he was taking Grymonde’s daughter, as well as his own. That such she was had been evident to him in the Yards; as was the fact that Estelle didn’t know it. He wondered why Grymonde hadn’t owned her, but he didn’t ask.

  ‘Do I have my Infant’s blessing?’

  ‘La Rossa is your blessing. The Infant is dead. But if this be Paradise, it will do.’

  ‘Hugon,’ said Tannhauser, ‘show me Garnier’s house.’

  Garnier’s house was prominent enough without the two guards who slept on the steps outside. Tannhauser could have killed them as they dreamed. But his other calculations would remain unchanged, and killing them later, asleep or not, was no labour.

  ‘Hugon, when Grégoire’s placed, come back and watch the house for me.’

  He gave him a slap on the back. He couldn’t remember a man or boy who didn’t like it. Hugon seemed not to. He rolled his shoulder, as if infringed.

  ‘I’ll watch the house for me,’ said Hugon. ‘And for Carla.’

  ‘Even better. Watch for our return, too.’

  Tannhauser fancied he could feel his daughter’s heart beat against the back of his head. It couldn’t be so, not through a wineskin, but the fancy roused his spirit. He headed east towards Irène’s through pitch darkness.

  ‘Tannzer?’ said Estelle. ‘Do you like the name, “Pascale”?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sensed that his answer was flawed. ‘But not as much as “Estelle”.’

  ‘Do you think Pascale would be a good name for a sister?’

  ‘I do. I do.’

  ‘So Pascale’s one of us.’

  ‘Yes, I should say she is.’

  Tannhauser found he could keep a fair pace, despite his passengers. The lantern’s light was puny and he couldn’t have moved much faster on his own.

  ‘Tannzer? What does “Pascale” mean?’

  Tannhauser thought about this for a while.

  The escape of the Israelites from Egypt.

  He said, ‘The Road to Freedom.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  Estelle thought about this for almost no time at all.

  ‘With a star and shelter and a road, we can get all the way home.’

  Tannhauser laughed. ‘We’re as good as there.’

  ‘What does “Tannzer” mean?’

  ‘That I don’t know. Why don’t you give it a meaning?’

  They had reached the street that ran across the island from the Pont Notre-Dame to the Petit Châtelet. He glanced north. A brazier. Militiamen lingered by the chain that marked the entrance to the bridge. To the south, the street took a bend, and was empty. He crossed without being seen and pressed on.

  Estelle bent to his ear and whispered.

  ‘The North Wind Blows.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Judgement

  CARLA’S EXHAUSTION SATURATED her bones, seeped through her every fibre, and damped the last flames of her spirit to the merest embers. Even while working in the Hospital at Malta during the worst days of the Siege she had not felt so depleted. Mingled with the exhaustion was the blackest melancholy. Yet she couldn’t sleep.

  She lay on a decent bed in a guest room on the first floor of Bernard Garnier’s house in the City. Awful sounds drifted through the window from the banks of the river, where the atrocities inflicted on the Huguenots continued. She lacked the will to get up and close the casement. The cries of the women and children, the desperation of the psalm-singers, rammed the obligation to listen into her belly. She doubted she would have slept in any circumstance. How could she, until she had Amparo back in her arms?

  She should never have given the babe over. The image of Estelle disappearing across the rooftops swam about her mind. She couldn’t have known that Garnier would be there to protect her. Dominic would have killed both her and Amparo if he’d had the chance. She had had no choice; or, rather, her choice still made sense. Amparo had been safer with Estelle. Yet her remorse was bitter, her anguish a crushing weight on her chest.

  Her body was not used to the emptiness which so recently and for so long had been filled by new life. While Amparo had been with her, she hadn’t noticed that emptiness; the babe in her arms had filled it, had filled not just that emptiness but the universe itsel
f. Without her, the universe seemed emptied of all but despair.

  Even thoughts of Mattias failed to console her. She was lost and he would not find her. The evil that had infected Paris to its core was too potent. She had seen that evil in the mutilated bodies scattered about the streets, in the butchery she had seen from the wharves. She had known the worst of war, but this was too appalling to name. Lurking within that greater evil, Marcel Le Tellier wanted her killed. She felt strangely uninterested in him. She had never felt so alone or so afraid. She wanted Amparo, who had been born amid human darkness and made it bright.

  Antoinette had fallen asleep lying against her. The small solace of her presence was allayed by Carla’s worry for her. She was a D’Aubray and presumably marked for death, as had been all her kin. If not, being with Carla made her so. They were not safe here, not for long. When Garnier had promised to lodge her, he had been at the head of his men. The power on the spot had been his. Le Tellier had the powers of a judge; not so immediate, but more inexorable. He hadn’t given up all day; he was unlikely to do so tomorrow.

  When she and Antoinette had arrived here, Madame Garnier, roused from her own bed, had absorbed her husband’s instructions in some confusion but without demur, whereupon the captain had left. Carla feared he had returned to the Hôtel Le Tellier. She declined food, as did Antoinette. She expended the last of her energy on the courtesies required to close the door of her room as quickly as she could.

  Antoinette fell to sobbing. Carla held her in her arms but couldn’t comfort her. She sobbed, too. They might have sobbed all night, but Antoinette’s fingers, with a child’s genius, found the shape of Alice’s cards in the pocket of Carla’s frock, and curiosity overcame sorrow.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘They’re playing cards.’

  Carla took them out and sorted through them. She removed Death and the Devil and returned them to her pocket. She showed Antoinette the rest.

  ‘Can I play with them?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘How do you play?’

  ‘You make stories with them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You put them next to each other. Like this.’

  Carla laid out the Emperor, the Empress and the Lovers on the bed.

  ‘See, this knight falls in love with this lady, and they get married.’

  ‘What happens next?’

  ‘Look at the pictures. You decide.’

  Antoinette spread the cards around on the sheet.

  ‘I don’t like being here,’ she said. ‘I want to go back to the Yards.’

  ‘When you’ve had a nice sleep you’ll feel better.’

  ‘Look, the lady gets a dog, to protect her and the knight.’

  Antoinette put the card named Strength beside the others.

  ‘A wonderful story, Antoinette. I think that’s meant to be a lion.’

  ‘A lion? Isn’t that even better than a dog?’

  ‘Much better. Take the lady and her lion, and you can all three go to sleep.’

  The cards lay by the candle on the table next to the bed.

  Carla thought of Alice. She had known the woman only a day, yet she missed her as if she had known her all her life. She had never looked up to another woman. She had never had a woman to look up to. Alice had given her back to herself. Alice was in her. She hoped that she was with her. Carla collected the Strength card, from where it lay on Antoinette’s pillow.

  Was the little girl’s choice meaningful? She had picked it for the lion, tamed by the lady. Yet Alice would say that she should take the card not as a prediction but as an invitation to the resources of her own spirit. The card pointed to what she needed to know, first and foremost, of herself. Strength. Carla had never felt weaker. The challenge of the card only made her more aware of it.

  She was weak. To acknowledge that and accept it, to see it and not be afraid of it, that was strong, wasn’t it? She was weak and she was in the home of a man who was leagued with her worst enemies. Her babe’s worst enemies. Was she so weak that all she could do was wait here, lying in bed and weeping, until they came to take her away? She swung her legs from the mattress and sat up. The movement provoked another of the late pangs, but she paid it little mind. She stood up.

  She walked to the window. She could walk well enough, if she had reason to. The room was at the rear of the house and the window overlooked the river. To the left stood the houses on the Pont au Change, from beyond which came the sounds of the massacres. Overshadowed by the houses on the Right Bank, the strand was covered with empty boats. In the moonlight reflected from the water they seemed to be chained in clusters, but she couldn’t be sure. On this bank there were no boats at all. To the right she could see the backs of the houses on the Pont Notre-Dame. She was on an island.

  Where could she go?

  She had seen the chains and militiamen blocking the bridges. Garnier had left two men on the front door, to ease her mind. One had already been stationed there, to reassure his wife. The new post he had assigned to his lieutenant, Ensign Bonnett, who had not been pleased to be given so lowly a commission, not least because the choice was Garnier’s way of flaunting his chivalrousness. Bonnett had volunteered to hold the spit that blinded Grymonde.

  She flinched at the memory. Grymonde was a monster. She had never forgotten that, even when she had seen her newborn daughter seated in his huge hands. Yet something in his heart had won her over, something more than the fact that he loved her. He loved her, though she had not known it until he lost his eyes.

  The scene of his blinding had almost destroyed her composure. She had seen the red-haired beauty taunt him, the woman who could only have been Estelle’s mother. She had seen the smirk of Petit Christian. The jeering of the soldiery. She had seen the first hole smoking in Grymonde’s bone-cragged face.

  Her outrage had been about to find its voice when his one remaining eye had pierced her; with the look of love. Grymonde had shaken his great curly head, despite that two men held it firm from behind. He had shaken it at her. And she had understood and known he was right. She couldn’t save the eye. By defending the infamous criminal who had abducted her, and in whose conquest many had died, she would only undermine her status and her influence. Carla had kept her silence, had uttered not a cry and shed not a tear. Opposed by her shame and her pity, that silence was a battle her will almost lost.

  When the second eye was gone, they left him, bound, on his knees, and Petit Christian explained to Dominic why – for such as Grymonde – it was a punishment worse than death. The red-haired woman provoked a furious dispute over money, and Dominic slaked his bloodlust by stabbing her and dumping her body in the fire pit. As Carla was driven away from Cockaigne, in the same cart she had arrived in, she looked at Petit Christian; just once. Her mind seemed empty of all thought or feeling, yet whatever was writ on her face, it wiped out his smirk, and filled him with dread.

  Carla glanced from one bridge to the other. They couldn’t get back to Cockaigne, though like Antoinette, she could think of no place in Paris she would rather be. She could not get to the convent of the Filles-Dieu and claim Amparo. The streets crawled not only with killers, but with those bent on indulging their vilest appetites.

  She turned from the window. She took the two cards from her pocket. The Devil was indistinct in the candlelight. A winged beast who stuffed bodies into his mouth. She slipped it behind Death. The sight of the reaper and his horse trampling the mighty gave her comfort. Alice had chosen the card as her quester, and now Carla knew why. Alice had known it was her time to meet the pale horseman, and had embraced him and sought his counsel. In Carla’s draw, Death, in an alternate incarnation, had charged towards the Fire. But how could Mattias find her here? Garnier’s house was imposing but it was no tower.

  Carla collected the rest of the deck from the table. She sorted through them until she found the Judgement. The first card she had drawn. Weighed in the balance and found wanting. Daniel in the lion�
��s den. The lions did not eat him because they saw the strength of his spirit. And Death had charged not only towards the Fire, but towards the Judgement. She looked at the card more closely. She studied the image without thinking, without trying to understand what it might mean.

  Angels with silver trumpets summoned the dead from crimson tombs.

  The Last Judgement.

  She recalled a carving in stone of the same scene.

  Above the central portal of Notre-Dame de Paris.

  The cathedral was but a few hundred paces from here. The degenerates crawling the street would never dare breach that sanctuary. If piety didn’t stop them, fear of the gallows would. Even Marcel Le Tellier would need time, and all the influence he could muster, to evade the law of sanctuary. By then, she could prove herself – to every priest in the building – as devout a daughter of the Church as ever they’d met. A daughter such as she had been, until she’d met Alice. And for all that she had absorbed Alice’s philosophy, she believed that Mother Nature could embrace a child who yet found in the Church’s corrupted corpus a heart made of love, and in Christ a philosopher with whom she would not much disagree.

  Most importantly, the nuns at the Filles-Dieu would be subordinate to the eminences of Notre-Dame. She was sure she could win over those eminences, their sympathy and support; and they had the power to reunite her with Amparo.

  Carla put the cards back in her pocket. She didn’t feel weak any more. Her body was drained but it would serve her. Her strength begged a question. Was she mad to act on the inspiration of pictures painted on cards? Women could go mad after childbirth. Yet if so – if she were mad – she found herself in a world of madness. She reviewed her design, and it made perfect sense.

  She woke Antoinette.

  There was a pitcher of water and a bowl on the dresser. Carla wetted a cloth and washed Antoinette’s face. The girl submitted; and revived. She looked at the pillow.