by Tim Willocks
‘If you can’t make good on your boast, tell me, and I’ll find the priest.’
‘Give me the pick filed like a scimitar. Guide my fingers to the keyhole.’
Tannhauser did so. Grymonde knelt and put his left hand on the lock case to gauge its size. He explored inside. He spat, as if on the locksmith who had provided so puny a challenge. He removed the pick.
‘Let me feel the others.’
He selected one of several picks with L-shaped ends. He explored again.
‘Give me another of the same.’
Grymonde inserted the second pick. He was reaching past the wards to trip the lever and the bolt. Tannhauser had seen his father forge lock parts, though he’d never picked more than a padlock. Grymonde inserted a third pick. He twisted the rods and the bolt scraped and clicked.
‘No rust on that one.’ Grymonde stood up and pushed the door open and sniffed. ‘Have you found the priest yet?’
Tannhauser climbed the spiral stair. Since morning the number of steps seemed to have doubled and the walls become narrower. He pushed himself. He reached the exterior walkway and crossed to the wicket at the foot of the north tower. He set the lantern at his feet. Sweat had long since overwhelmed the ribbon and he took it off and used the ends to wipe his eyes. He rolled his neck. He opened the wicket and shouted up the stairs.
‘Pascale! It’s Mattias!’
He waited. The timber staircase was pitch-black. Would he have to climb the damned tower? He didn’t think he could and still have the energy for what might come. He bent from the waist to loosen the knots in his back. He straightened and stared into the bore of a horse pistol. The sweat on his back ran cold.
Pascale lowered the pistol and stepped into the light.
‘You’re the first to make the chance to have me,’ he said.
‘The chance?’
‘Come here, girl.’
Pascale skipped down the last of the steps and into his chest. He put an arm around her. She seemed so small. In his mind, she had assumed a much greater stature. He thought of what she’d been through. He gave her a moment. She didn’t take more. She stepped back. Her eyes, like her hair, shone like obsidian.
‘I saw Flore,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Pascale nodded for answer.
‘Are the others fit to travel?’
‘Yes. Where are we going?’
‘Home.’
Pascale smiled.
‘The risks are as bad as staying here, maybe worse, but the prize better.’
‘I don’t give a damn for the risks.’
She was ardent. She was alive. Her vigour raised him.
‘I found my wife and our new baby. They’re waiting for us below.’
Pascale blinked and there was an instant of bitter disappointment before she hid it behind another smile. He understood, though the understanding surprised him. To him she was a girl, at least as far as that went. She was entitled to see herself otherwise.
‘When I told Estelle I was going to find you,’ said Tannhauser, ‘she asked if you were one of us. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I said you were. What I meant was that you’re one of me.’
‘I hope so.’
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t change any of it, if it meant changing this.’
She made a gesture that encompassed them both and he saw the mixed stains on her hands. Ink, gun black, blood. He felt he had opened the darkest door in her soul; a door that should have stayed closed; yet the light that blazed through it to illuminate the obsidian dazzled him.
‘A few minutes ago, before I knew you were here, I decided to leave you behind.’
She took it without a flinch; but the light flickered.
‘For your wife and baby. I would have done the same.’
‘Carla told me to find you, despite the peril to her babe.’
Pascale thought about it.
He said, ‘Carla believes in what’s best in me.’
‘I believe in it all.’
‘Call the others.’
Pascale reached for the dirty white ribbon in his hand. It seemed a poor token of aught but bloody toil. Perhaps that was why she wanted it. He gave it to her. She made the gun safe and noted his approval. She skipped back up the stair.
‘Pascale.’
She turned. He had hurt her. She didn’t want to let him know it.
‘I was not much amazed to find the first two sergents afloat on their own gore.’
Pascale wasn’t sure how to take this.
‘That’s how hard I reckoned the iron in your soul.’
Her spirits lifted.
‘But running down the third in the street? Call it the most beautiful.’
Pascale beamed. She sped up into the gloom. He heard her call to Juste.
Tannhauser stood on the prow of the cosmic ship, a hundred feet above the Parvis. The still point of the turning world. The cork in the neck of Inferno. Beyond lay the sea of Time and Fate, its surface lent a false serenity by night and the moon. He leaned on a gargoyle and looked out across the city.
The rooftops formed a geometric fantasy in black and luminous greys. Lamps in the watchtowers burned along the rim of the enormous city walls, but within the latter’s ambit few windows dared a light. Hundreds of thousands hid in the dark and wondered at the world they thought they had known and which, like that, was gone.
He saw faint yellow blurs, randomly dispersed on the Right and Left Banks. The torches of the murder gangs. He saw a much brighter glow, closer and moving this way, on what he reckoned was the Pont Notre-Dame. On the Parvis below he saw Grégoire conversing with Clementine. He picked up the lantern.
The Mice emerged, philosophical as ever. Pascale was behind them.
‘I left your rifle on the charcoal barge. I’m sorry.’
‘It was the right move.’
‘I left you the wrong message, too. Tybaut’s rooms are on the Left Bank. I didn’t know about the key until Agnès and Marie said Juste had it.’
Tannhauser had hung the tower key around Juste’s neck. If he’d remembered, he might have saved himself a decision he regretted making.
Juste appeared, loaded with bags. When he looked at Tannhauser, he tried to conceal the pain in his heart, but couldn’t. He wouldn’t let Tannhauser take the wallets. Tannhauser squeezed his arm.
‘Is Grégoire here?’ asked Juste.
‘How would we get out of the city without Grégoire?’
‘I don’t expect we could,’ said Juste.
‘I’d not have found you if not for him. Nor my wife and babe.’
‘Carla’s alive?’ This news moved him. He seized Tannhauser’s hand. ‘I told Flore, about the hôtel, about this morning. I didn’t see any baby. I think I knew she wasn’t your wife. But she was cut up so badly.’
‘You’ve nothing to answer for. The failing was mine. And if not for that turn, we’d not have found Pascale or Flore alive.’
Juste looked down and nodded, the scars of his sorrow reopened.
‘Whatever that encounter has cost you,’ said Tannhauser, ‘I’d say it was a bargain you’d strike again.’
Juste swabbed his nose on his sleeve. ‘I’d pay anything.’
‘Then no more woe until we’re done.’
Tannhauser herded them across the walkway.
‘Tell me, how did you get past the guards on the cathedral door?’
To acknowledge the thanks of the children she had brought into sanctuary, Carla could manage no more than a distracted nod. When Tannhauser helped her up from her chair, the weight she laid on his arm was heavy. Feeding Amparo seemed to have drained her, though she smiled a dreamy smile as she looked at the babe.
Such bliss alarmed him. He had seen something like it in men on the verge of dying. How much blood had she lost? Doubt assailed him. The wagon; the streets; hours – days – on unknown roads. Here he could have her in a bed in the priest’s quarters in ten minutes; and a surgeon summoned, thoug
h they’d probably try to bleed her more.
‘Tell me, love, are you bleeding?’
Carla shook her head.
‘You’re not fit for the road. We’ll stay, all of us.’
‘No. We must go, while Death is on our side.’
‘Death takes no one’s side but his own.’
‘If we fear him, he’ll turn on us, you know that better than anyone, and the judgement will go against us. Alice says we must go.’
The cards again. Alice says? He put the back of his hand to her brow. It was cool, clammy, not fevered. The madwoman’s quilt of his own philosophy embraced her points readily enough, yet the moral logic bore down on him. He was proposing to hazard the lives of his wife and baby in order to save his own neck; yet he would have died for them on the instant to give them a single breath. It was a riddle. Carla seemed to have solved it, but he had not.
‘Carla, if you stay here, you and Amparo will survive.’
‘We didn’t need you to survive,’ said Carla. ‘Our survival wasn’t the reason you did what you’ve done. You did it to be with me. With us. I left Amparo with a beggar girl on a roof. Yet here we are. And here you are, with us. You can’t leave us, because we won’t leave you.’
Tannhauser looked up into the vast hull of the cathedral, the ship built by those who knew for those who are. The arcane wonders writ deep through its fabric, and married to the smoke and dance of hundreds of flames, filled him with the Primordial Awareness it was raised up to contain. That awareness was of pure confusion, its terror and its beauty. Being was Confusion. The Humid Way and the Dry Way in simultaneity. Blood and water, stone and glass, the crimson and the white; the knowing and the not-knowing; the Wrong and the Right; Christ and Satan; the Mass and the Magnum Opus: one, all one, here in Notre-Dame de Paris, simmering in the flux of its sacred crucible.
Yet whatever metal might be melted into oneness from the ore of their souls, its quality could only be proved when it was cast. The substance born in the crucible was always in doubt; doubt was its very essence. The only certain yield was the worthless slag into which it would boil down if left untested. These songs of woe would be in the alloy, too, and sacrileges and sins beyond number; but who would have known that charcoal can turn iron into steel? The doubts and the riddles could never be resolved within the crucible; only with its emptying. Confusion was eternal and embraced it all.
He looked at Carla.
Carla stroked the bristles on his cheek.
He kissed her. He turned to the ragged crew.
‘Juste, see the Mice to the wagon. Lower one side and lay the mattress.’ Tannhauser saw Hugon, who clasped Carla’s violl case across his chest. ‘Hugon, guide the Infant. Estelle, show Pascale to my weapons. Bring them. The lantern, too.’
As Grymonde lumbered by he turned his eyeless face on Tannhauser.
‘Can you make good on your boast and get us to the Porte Saint-Denis?’ His smile was horrible. ‘Or should I find a priest?’
His chuckles drifted up into the vault as he shambled on.
‘Carla, hold our nightingale tight.’
Tannhauser slipped his left arm behind Carla’s thighs and picked her up.
‘So it’s the fire,’ she said.
‘A good husband knows when to do what he’s told.’
Carla started to laugh and winced as her insides clenched.
‘Are you comfortable?’
‘I will be if you don’t make me laugh and continue to do as you’re told.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Take us home.’
He carried her towards the portal.
‘Grégoire said Hugon followed you here. What happened to your escort?’
‘Ensign Bonnett? I don’t know. I told him I didn’t need him.’
Tannhauser’s mind saw a runty blackguard fall backwards from a barrel.
Bonnett would know him in an instant; one of few. If he’d abandoned his orders to escort Carla, he would report to Garnier to explain himself, at once. Garnier had bigger troubles than the fact that Carla was praying in Notre-Dame. But it was possible Bonnett had seen Tannhauser, either before or after he killed the guards. Tannhauser reached the portal as Hugon manhandled Grymonde outside.
‘Hugon, did you see Carla’s escort leave?’
‘No. I went back for the wagon, didn’t I?’
The Parvis and the square were empty.
Tannhauser sat Carla on the mattress.
‘Lie behind the board, at least until we cross the Millers’ Bridge. Pascale, Juste, the Mice, you must lie down, too. Juste, put that armour plate between Carla and the board.’
Carla lay on her side, her back to the sideboard. Tannhauser bolted it up.
‘Front or back?’ asked Grymonde.
Tannhauser chose Frogier’s bow.
‘The back. This time I’m riding. Estelle, my crossbow, three bolts.’
He ran his eyes over the crew. A woman, seven children and two infants.
Petit Christian puked shit onto the Parvis. He was naked from the armholes, half-flayed by stones and potholes. Some species of animal bone jutted from his gut.
Tannhauser could think of no further use for him
‘The playwright stays here. Who wants to kill him?’
Grymonde hopped back down.
A crossbow’s sinews thrummed.
Petit Christian bucked and writhed. His last cry sprayed Paris with its own filth. He slumped on the rope like some obscene blood sausage hung out to cure.
Estelle retreated on her heels from between the back wheels.
‘I think I got him right up the arse.’
Grymonde laughed from the belly.
‘The bolt completely disappeared.’
Grymonde flapped a hand for Hugon to seat him.
‘Quickly, boy, while I can still stand.’
The sight of a giant face with no eyes, and no lids or brows thereto, howling at him with laughter, kept Tannhauser entranced for a moment. Estelle handed him the crossbow and four spare bolts. He took them. He almost told her not to make a habit of this, but judged the moment for it wrong. Carla would teach her comportment and other wiles. She’d be a proper lady in no time. He smiled at her.
‘Good shot.’
Estelle took this as a permit to join Grymonde in his abandon. So did Hugon. One by one, so did the others. The Mice. Grégoire. Pascale, too. All except Juste.
Tannhauser glanced at Carla. She was watching the Mice. The sound of laughter seemed to do her good. It did them all good. He ducked and cut the playwright down. When he stood up, Carla was laughing, too, a hand on her belly. Juste was still sombre.
Tannhauser armed the crossbow and stood it by the front wheel. He dug Frogier’s bow and quiver from the back of the wagon.
‘Juste.’
Tannhauser offered him the weapons. Juste took them.
‘That’s a sixty-pound pull. If you can’t make a full draw don’t let it throw you, you’ll have power enough. If it comes to shooting, the range will be close. Aim at their balls, before you raise and draw. Loose quickly or you’ll shake. Don’t shoot with any of us in front you.’
He saw Carla watching him. He grinned.
‘Set an example, love, lie down. Estelle, Hugon: helmets on. The rest of you: lie down. No armed weapons. No shooting unless I say so. Where is that hellhound?’
‘We have a hellhound?’ said Pascale.
‘A real one,’ said Juste. ‘He’s called Lucifer.’
‘He brings us luck,’ said Grégoire.
The scorched dog emerged from a study of Christian’s corpse. He trotted to his station between Clementine’s front hooves.
‘I think I know that dog,’ said Hugon.
‘Well, he’s ours now,’ said Juste. ‘That’s the bastard who set him on fire.’
The accusation stoked Grymonde’s mirth anew.
Tannhauser took the crossbow and climbed onto the bench beside Grégoire. Tannhauser noted that the big grey mar
e was saddled as well as harnessed. The boy was entirely undaunted, but when had he been anything but?
‘To the Porte Saint-Denis?’ asked Grégoire.
Tannhauser hesitated. Notre-Dame might have been the safest place in Paris, but it was also the centre of the labyrinth from which they had elected to escape. He heard giggles and glanced back at the press of bodies. To take any distraction into combat was an error. To take ten was demented. He found Carla looking at him.
She seemed to read his mind. She nodded.
Tannhauser turned back to Grégoire.
‘Aye. Let’s find out what metal we have made.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Short Weight for the Blind
HE TOLD GRÉGOIRE to get him a glimpse of the Petit Pont on the way west. When he did, he saw that its brazier and chain were unguarded. The militia were in motion.
They rattled into the maze of the old city.
Bonnett would expect him to stay with Carla, in the cathedral; he would bring Garnier there, from the Place de Grève and across the Pont Notre-Dame. They could stay ahead of them – unless Bonnett had used the missing guards as messengers, to alert the other bridges; or the killers plying their knives on the strand.
Grégoire turned north towards the Pont au Change.
Tannhauser saw only the same three guards as earlier. He canted the crossbow on his left hip. If he didn’t get a smile and a wave, he’d kill them. As they rumbled past, the shopkeeper and his men waved and smiled. Tannhauser saw them take in the new passengers. He didn’t believe the smiles. The wagon skirted the Palais and the warehouses loomed.
‘Grégoire, stop. Have you room here to turn the wagon round?’
Grégoire sized up the junction. He nodded. Tannhauser climbed down.
‘Turn and wait back there, by the warehouse wall, so we can take either route.’
Tannhauser ran towards the river.
He stopped at the last turn and peered towards the Millers’ Bridge.
The dead cart blocked the street. Men stacked sacks of flour either side of it, from warehouse to river bank. He heard a deal of belligerent rowdiness brewing up beyond. He chanced two paces of moonlight to grab a glimpse of the Conciergerie clock tower.
