Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  Grégoire sat up and screamed over Juste’s shoulder.

  Tannhauser met the boy’s eyes. The pain he saw there he expected. The utter bewilderment – the unspoken ‘You?’ – laid waste to his heart.

  He looked away.

  He had aimed to split the boards beneath the leg and had done so. He levered the axe head free and propped the shaft. Grégoire clung onto Juste, oblivious to his friend’s dire wounds, and Juste let the good leg fall, and clasped him to his chest with his one good arm, and cried with him. Another musket ball whirred by. Tannhauser dug out the half-stone of opium. He stooped for the wineskin and pulled the stopper with his teeth. He slipped the opium through Grégoire’s deformed lips and pinched his nose and poured wine down his throat. Tannhauser dropped the skin and clamped a hand over his mouth.

  ‘Swallow, lad, swallow. We’re with you. We need you.’

  Grégoire swallowed and he let him go and the boy coughed but the stone stayed down. Tannhauser corked the skin. He put a hand on Juste’s head. He felt the sobs.

  ‘We need you, too, Juste. Hold him fast.’

  Tannhauser took the amputated leg by the foot and threw it out of sight. He took the torch from between the spokes. He saw his shirt behind the bench and grabbed it. He spun the shirt twice around his open left hand and turned his back to Grégoire and lifted the stump. The second bone had been severed clean, level with the fragments of the first. The stub of the calf muscle had contracted under the skin; so had the vessels he had to cauterise. Tannhauser held the knee joint tight and applied the torch to the stump.

  He said an Ave, steadily, to time himself.

  He couldn’t hear it over the screams.

  ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.’

  Grégoire kicked him frenziedly. He prayed for Grégoire to pass out.

  ‘Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’

  He rolled the burning sponge of the torch over the raw surfaces.

  ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners . . .’

  He pressed deep on the contracted tissues to seal the vessels.

  ‘. . . now, and at the hour of our death.’

  His own hand started to burn through the shirt.

  ‘Amen.’

  Grégoire fell limp in Juste’s embrace.

  Tannhauser withdrew the torch and the smell of burned flesh hit him. Smoke rose from the stump. Pitch flared and died in the wound. The scorched shirt smoked, too. Tannhauser dropped the torch and slackened the strap. The slight ooze congealed as it appeared. A thin, blackened bone poked forth from the seared skin and muscle. It was ugly, but the job was done. He wrapped the shirt over the stump and tied it around the thigh by the sleeves. He heard a pistol shot from the north.

  Another.

  Pascale.

  Amparo. Estelle.

  Carla.

  Whatever had happened would be over before he got there.

  He heard hooves at the canter and looked up the street at a horseman charging from the crossroads. He took the halberd and advanced to meet him.

  Unless seasoned by war, the horse would likely refuse at the corpses choking the street, or even sooner, for though he couldn’t smell the marsh of blood, horses could, and it unnerved them. They were wary of the sharp end of a pike, too, if they spotted it. He reached the edge of the dead and wedged the butt into a rut beneath the nearest, who was headless. He picked the head up by its saturated locks. He tilted the blade towards the horse and turned it in the light of the fallen torch to catch some winks from the steel. At worst he’d let the poor creature impale itself; with luck, he’d come away with the mount he needed.

  The rider wasn’t Garnier. He wasn’t big enough. A breastplate. A helm. A brandished sword that flapped too much. He didn’t sit like a man who had ever lived in the saddle, much less at the charge. Tannhauser let out his own reading of Grégoire’s snarl and slung the severed head down the street as he might have slung an axe.

  The shout and the stench of gore, and the sight of corpses, missile and blade, caught the horse all at once and it baulked and swerved to its right for the side street. Its hooves pranced and slid in search of a new gait, and the severed head slammed into the rider’s breastplate, and Tannhauser dropped the halberd and ran.

  The rider reeled back, and in lurching forward to right himself tilted steeply to the off side. He might have kept the saddle, but he wasn’t used to the weight of his gear. As he tumbled to earth among the groans of the disembowelled, Tannhauser hurdled his legs, intent on the horse, but in its terror the horse was too quick. He watched its tail flutter down the side street. He turned and saw the first of the crowd who had advanced on foot behind their champion, and who now had to decide whether to die for him.

  Tannhauser retrieved the crossbow he had left at the corner.

  He shot said first in the belly to aid the rest in their cogitations.

  The advance stopped. Tannhauser dropped the crossbow. He unslung the short bow from across his chest and grabbed a handful of bloodslaked broadheads and nocked and loosed. The shafts were a fair match for the pull. He nocked and thumbed and drew and loosed. He spared the torchbearers for their light was handy. He shot at the crotch of each target. The first two arrows flew high. He corrected for the third. A hero burst from the herd. His valour inspired a second to follow. Tannhauser shot the first in the chest and nocked while the man made three more strides and carved apart the insides of his thorax. The second slowed, as much from the realisation he was alone as from fear. He looked back to confirm his comrades’ shame and was doing the same for them when Tannhauser ferried an inch of steel through his colon.

  Time to show them how the janissaries advanced.

  He grabbed his last fistful of arrows from the quiver.

  He glanced back as he nocked a bodkin and saw the rider on his knees, clambering up the wall of a house with his hands. Tannhauser shot him through the arse. At this range he heard the thud as the point hammered deep into the timbers beyond. He nocked and turned and strode towards the wavering torches.

  He drew and loosed and killed and nocked. Those at the front started screaming at those behind them. The street before him roiled with terror run riot and he shot another in the back and nocked and kept walking. Torches dropped as the sharper of the thronged scum realised the virtue of the stratagem. The ribbons of the Pilgrims provided useful markers and he shot into the turmoil at chest height. The throng parted and began to spill away. The parting revealed a musket man jostled by the routed and struggling to level his barrel on a forked wooden rest. Tannhauser drew and aimed the last of his arrows beneath the muzzle and loosed. The fork and the gun tumbled without firing.

  Tannhauser drew his sword and ran for the matchlock. He spotted the second musket man, stranded by the retreat and taking aim. Tannhauser kept running, his eye on the small red glow of the match. He slashed the bowstring and dropped the bow. He threw away the quiver. The glow snapped down and he feigned left but swerved right and the muzzle jerked left as it flamed. He felt its heat. Two strides. He ran the musketeer through the belly and cut him wide on the crank and pull.

  He stood the musket on its stock and smashed the cock from the lock plate with the ricasso. He ran back to the unfired gun and collected it and stripped the match, and ran on through abandoned torches and the bodies of the squirming and the slain. He stopped by the rider nailed to the house. Blood leaked down the back of his thighs and pooled around his knees. He saw his face. It wasn’t Dominic. He tapped the shaft of the arrow with the gun barrel and set it to vibrating. The rider whimpered and his fingers clawed the wall.

  ‘Where are Bernard Garnier and Dominic Le Tellier?’

  ‘Millers’ Bridge. We heard you were there.’

  ‘You must be Crucé.’

  Crucé shifted around on the arrow, each movement exacerbating the pain it hoped to relieve. His eyes veered sidewise to plead with Tannhauser’s. He was terrified. He watched Tannhaus
er tip the point of his sword in shit.

  ‘Aye. I’m Crucé.’

  Tannhauser put the point under the angle of Crucé’s jaw.

  ‘Crucified up the arse is how you’ll be remembered.’

  Tannhauser shoved the blade up through the root of Crucé’s tongue, a gritty texture that eased as the tip burst into his mouth and pierced the palate. Crucé gargled on horror and gore. Tannhauser twisted the hilt through three-quarters of a rotation. He walked to the wagon and left him to strangle slowly on the swelling and the blood.

  He propped the musket by the spontone and threw the match in the wagon. Grégoire was still unconscious. Tannhauser turned Juste towards him and explored his wounds by hand through the neck of his shirt. They were greased and not much bleeding; they could kill him later by a diversity of crueller methods, but not right now. For now they would only hurt and disable him. He folded Juste’s arm across his stomach and buttoned the tail of his shirt up over it.

  ‘We’re not giving up, then,’ said Juste.

  The revelation seemed to daze him as much as blood loss and pain.

  ‘Give up? You and I are more outlawed now than we were this morning.’

  Tannhauser grinned and got a smile out of him. He squatted by Clementine’s head and pulled her lip down. There was no blood or foam around the nostrils or teeth. The lungs were sound, her injuries not unlike Grymonde’s. Movement was agony. Tannhauser looked her in the face. A large eye rolled towards him.

  ‘I don’t believe you, old girl. You can get up for us. Come on.’

  He stuck his left hand under the angle of her enormous jaw and grabbed a fistful of her mane with the other. He lifted her head and twisted her neck along its axis and snarled in her ear and heaved as he straightened his legs. Clementine turned with him and drew her forelegs under her chest and a spasm spurred her on and she rose to all four feet so fast she almost lifted him off the ground. He thanked her and slapped her, and ran a hand under the girth strap. She was clenched tighter than an oyster. He lowered the stirrups.

  ‘Juste, one arm round my neck. Foot in the stirrup.’

  He hoisted Juste by the waist and Juste got a foot in the stirrup and his hand on the rim of the saddle. Tannhauser gave him a shove from below and the lad rose and landed. Clementine didn’t move.

  ‘Shuffle forward. More. Here.’

  Tannhauser gave him the reins. He stacked the spontone blade-down against his leg.

  ‘Grégoire will ride behind you. Pull his arms round your waist.’

  ‘Will he scream again?’

  ‘If he screams, we know he’s alive.’

  Tannhauser hung the wineskin from the saddle. He went to the wagon and donned Altan’s quiver and strung the horn bow around his chest. He took the match and blew it yellow and cocked it to the arquebus and aimed it into the darkness that ruled the far crossroads. He couldn’t see a target, but if any had stayed it would keep them on pins. Between here and there half a dozen abandoned flames spiralled skyward from the ground. Dark mounds heaped the dirt down fifty yards of street, like the droppings of some monstrous beast. It occurred to him that he’d got this far without firing a gun. He wasn’t against the practice in principle, but the world would be nobler without them.

  He pulled the match and threw it in the blood, and smashed the lock apart on the rim of the wagon wheel, and dumped the gun. He cut the string on Juste’s bow. There were no more reasons to delay. He feared Grégoire’s screams more than Juste did.

  He took Grégoire by the shoulders and sat him on the edge of the wagon. The boy’s head flopped forward and Tannhauser put a hand on his chest. The ribs poked through his shirt; his heart fluttered like a bird’s. Tannhauser slipped his arm around him and the other under his thighs. He gauged the move and picked him up and carried him to Clementine and tossed him upwards and across, and managed to part his thighs and land him astride. The stump caught and Grégoire flailed and cried out. He hadn’t the strength to do either with any vigour; and it was too soon for him to be feeling the virtue of the opium. Tannhauser crammed him against Juste’s back, and Grégoire clung on.

  Tannhauser mounted behind them and took the spontone and the reins in his left hand. He held the shaft across Juste’s chest to stop him falling off. Grégoire was pressed firm between them. He grabbed the torch from the bracket.

  ‘Lucifer!’ said Juste. ‘Look, Grégoire! He’s back!’

  The bald dog checked the street as if to confirm that all was quiet. He cast a dubious glance at the horse, as if assessing her frailty, then took up his station

  ‘You see, Grégoire?’ said Tannhauser. ‘Despicable though he is, Lucifer holds true to his hardy, stout and resolute mates.’

  ‘Lucifer isn’t despicable,’ said Juste.

  Tannhauser gave Clementine a good kick with his heels. She didn’t move.

  ‘Clementine,’ called Grégoire.

  The mare stumbled forward in an ungainly walk. Tannhauser tapped her on the haunch with the torch and she broke into an agonised trot. Grégoire’s punishment was hardly less arduous. The boy muffled a cry each time they landed. Each time Tannhauser felt the shorn limb flap against his leg. He kept them moving.

  They passed two dead in the marketplace, staked out by their own swords. The printer’s daughter, now his own, stamped her name once more on his heart. The lamp he’d left by the stable still burned but he kept a course straight north, to the west of the lamp. Beyond the market was the wharf where produce was unloaded. He reached the river and turned east and followed the curve of the bank. He saw lights and knots of men on the edge of the Place de Grève, where earlier he’d seen their dead carts unload. They were watching something on this side, but not him.

  Tannhauser dropped the torch in a vegetable garden.

  He rounded the shoulder of the bend and saw the barges. He saw no sign of Carla or her party on the quays. He saw lights on the water. Oars rose up to be shipped as a rowboat slid up to the bank on the far side of the coal barge. Five or six men on board. A larger boat, a fishing skiff, wasn’t far behind them. It was dangerously overmanned but they hadn’t chanced more than fifty yards.

  Tannhauser stopped Clementine and she blew her nostrils as if glad to oblige. He swung down and walked her to the dark lee of the houses and gave the reins to Juste. He could think of no intelligent advice. The lads wouldn’t have known what to do with it.

  He advanced through the narrow gardens in the shadows.

  Pascale didn’t need intelligent advice. She had taken Carla and the others to hide at Irène’s. And it would work. The militia had nothing to accomplish on the quays. Let them go and find the Devil’s faeces heaped in yonder streets, and let them ponder their futures. He liked the look of the skiff. If there was a mast and a sail in the bottom – and from its cut there should be – he could sail them all the way to Bordeaux.

  He wanted it.

  He slowed his stride. The first boat tied up and the militia clambered out as the skiff slid past them to dock tight behind the coal barge. They were thirty yards away, blinded by their lanterns and idle talk, and unaware of any threat. He stopped. Let the skiff tie up. Let them muster and leave. He saw hands thread the rope of the skiff through an iron ring. He had to get the lads off the quay and hide them. He turned around.

  A hiss. A whisper. Very close.

  ‘Tannzer!’

  He turned back. An enormous head loomed from the dark, almost in front of him.

  Estelle wasn’t on his shoulders.

  Tannhauser felt her take his hand.

  In Grymonde’s hands, he saw knives.

  ‘My Infant. You and Estelle should be indoors.’

  ‘Perhaps, but, as you have noticed, I am not.’

  ‘Wait here, stay stealthy.’

  ‘If I find no role in your design, I have one in my own.’

  ‘Estelle, tell me, what is the Infant’s design?’

  ‘I’ll push him straight at the soldiers, then run away and hide at Irène’s.’<
br />
  ‘Opium’s designs are best enjoyed in peace,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Wait here.’

  ‘You’ll have to kill me.’

  ‘My Infant, you don’t have any eyes.’

  ‘Did it take a man with eyes to crush the Philistines?’

  Grymonde neglected to whisper and heads turned on the quay. Lanterns were brandished. Swords. A shouted challenge. The lights in the second boat bobbed.

  Tannhauser wanted that skiff.

  A flame lanced from a nearby house. The sound of his own rifle. A figure lurched from the cluster of disembarked militia and fell into the river.

  ‘Estelle, run and hide now. I’ll do the pushing.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Something of the Lore

  ‘I KNEW HE would come.’ Pascale stood watch at the open window of the kitchen. ‘The militia are out of the first boat. He’s found Grymonde’

  Carla watched her heft Mattias’s rifle and lay the barrel across the ledge. Carla had seen what a long gun could do to an unprepared shoulder; and to unintended targets. She didn’t want her to shoot Mattias. But she wasn’t going to infringe the girl’s authority, not least because any such advice would be rebuffed as surely as that she had offered Grymonde. She had no right to argue with any of them. Her own decisions had been just as reckless. The folly they held in common was the power that had kept them alive. Folly and Mattias, who didn’t consider himself reckless at all.

  It was Carla’s job to protect the stillness at the eye of the storm.

  Grymonde was right: the eye was Amparo.

  The kitchen was dark but for a faint glow that crept from the parlour, where they had left the torch and the lanterns, along with Hugon and the Mice. Carla groped about the cold stove behind her and found a hemp towel. She wadded it and took it over.

  ‘Pascale? Cushion the butt with this. When you shoot, keep the shoulder tight.’

  Pascale was terrified. So was Carla. Carla knew that terror was too exhausting to be borne for long, and she had learned how to let it rave alone in some locked and far-flung cellar of her mind. She had never seen anyone transmute terror into so focused a state of elation as Pascale. Nature had cast her eyes with a very slight prominence; along with the gap between her teeth, they held her short of prettiness; and their present clarity of purpose was itself frightening. Carla had noted it when they had arrived here via the street and Pascale, with an effort that should have been beyond her strength, had dragged a dead sergent to the cellar door and rolled him down the steps. She had shoved a dead woman down after him. Pascale took the wadded towel.