Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  ‘Thank you, madame. Have you ever fired this gun?’

  ‘No, but I know something of the lore. You’re standing a little too straight, and your stance is a little too narrow. If you bring your right foot further back, and bend your front knee, you can turn with the recoil instead of resisting it, which may well cause you an injury.’

  Pascale did as suggested and nodded.

  ‘Let the line become the circle,’ said Carla. ‘Then it won’t knock you backwards.’

  Pascale enacted the motion. ‘Let the line become the circle.’

  ‘I quote Mattias. As also: “But you have to be quick.”’

  ‘I am quick.’

  They both turned towards a shout from the quay.

  ‘They’ve been spotted,’ said Pascale. ‘Go to the parlour.’

  Carla had already begun that retreat to spare Amparo the smoke and noise, or the worst of it. Pascale bent to sight down the barrel.

  ‘Aim low,’ said Carla.

  ‘I will, for their balls. When you return bring the lanterns, if you please.’

  Carla placed her back against the parlour wall inside the doorway. She saw Hugon squatting over the open violl case as if it were piled with treasure. As of course it was. He glanced up, neither frightened nor guilty. The grotesque events in which he was swept up seemed not to make much impression on him. He lowered the lid and locked the brass hooks and reached for the straps.

  ‘I can see how you stretch the strings,’ he said, ‘but how do you tighten them?’

  ‘You mean tune them, so that they are in harmony with each other.’

  The rifle shot shook the house. Powder smoke rolled into the room.

  ‘Hugon, open the window. Bring that lantern to the kitchen, and that sack. Fill it with whatever provisions you can find.’

  Carla took the other lantern. She saw the Mice. They sat at the table playing some game with their hands. They had the gift of excluding the outer world entirely from their own. No doubt they had needed it to survive. Carla had exchanged not a word with them, yet they had won her affection. She glanced into the kitchen. Pascale was still standing. She was swabbing the bore of the rifle with the rammer. She had set the table with a powder flask and a sack of ball, and three large pistols.

  ‘Thank you, madame. The towel and the circle helped. I killed one, and sowed confusion in the others. Please, put the lantern on the table.’

  ‘There’s gunpowder on the table.’

  Carla set the lantern on the stove and went to the window.

  Two large shapes ran at a confused knot of militia, though running was not quite the notion. At another moment it might have been comical. Mattias held Grymonde by the back of his belt and hoisted him forward, while Grymonde lifted his knees unnaturally high and propelled himself in great, ungainly leaps. Each must have been more painful than taking another arrow. He howled at the militia, though this time she heard no anguish, only a rage so intense it sounded like joy.

  Amparo let out a short cry. Carla looked down at her. Her eyelids were half-open and two tiny points of light gleamed out. Her tongue poked through her lips.

  ‘My beauty can’t be hungry yet.’

  Whether Amparo needed feeding or not, the pull was overwhelming. They might never get another chance to share the pleasure, and it was as agreeable a delight as either of them had ever known. She heard Alice’s coarse laugh. Carla took her left breast out and put Amparo to her nipple and the delight of all three was enjoined.

  Estelle burst through the door from the quays and Carla heard Grymonde more distinctly. She doubted anyone else could have found either word or meaning in the sound. No sound like it had ever been made but there was no one else alive who knew him as she did. All his shame, all his pride, all his regret, in that sound. Grymonde screamed his mother’s name as he plunged into the fire.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Quays At Saint-Landry

  AT LEAST THE quays were paved.

  Tannhauser couched the spontone beneath his left arm, though no knight before had made such a charge nor reined so wild a beast. The blinded Infant dragged him along and it was all he could do to steer him away from the water. Tannhauser expected with every step to see Grymonde fall but the man roared on, less a raging bull than some Minotaur deranged and at last broken free from the gaol that had so long bewildered him.

  The crew of the farther, smaller boat stood on the quay. The fishing skiff was still crammed with men. As they passed the skiff, the first Pilgrim to attempt to disembark leaned out and rested both hands on the stones. Tannhauser stuck out the spontone on the fly and the blade of the left wing caught him in the bridge of the nose. The blow was glancing but not one that many would have welcomed. It pitched him among his shipmates in a spray of snot and gore and set the skiff rolling on the swell.

  Tannhauser and Grymonde charged on.

  Five men waited for them. One had drifted out to the rim of the quay, drawn by the option of abandoning dry land. The other four were braced in an improvised phalanx, two swords raised, two levelled. Head-on was no good way to take them, but that die too had been cast. Tannhauser shouted in Grymonde’s ear and unleashed him.

  ‘For Cockaigne.’

  With a primordial cry whose ecstasy compared to janissaries rising from the last ditch, Grymonde brandished his knives and fell on the swordsmen.

  Tannhauser rushed the flanker, who dropped his weapon and clapped both hands to his eyes, and turned and hunched forward, too raddled with fear even to try for the water. Tannhauser lanced him through kidney, gut and spleen, and caught the familiar and foetid whiff of involuntarily evacuated bowels. He forked him braying blood into the boat and spun towards the melee.

  The outer two of the four sprawled some several paces distant from their stand. Both were trying to rise; both had been stabbed in the chest. The other two had been driven back almost as far but hadn’t fallen. They couldn’t. Grymonde had them wrapped in his arms and had buried a knife in the lower back of each. He churned the hilts, and the organs within, with the motion of an either-handed cook beating eggs. They were dead.

  Tannhauser punched both the wounded through the skull with the spike on the butt of the spontone. He looked downriver and saw what he least hoped to see. The men in the skiff had decided not to fight for the quays at Saint-Landry. None had put ashore. One was fumbling to unhitch the line that tied their vessel to the dock cleat. If Tannhauser lost the skiff, it would be free to harass the barges.

  As he ran back past Grymonde he glimpsed the tips of two sword blades protruding from his back above either hip but didn’t stop. He wheeled the spontone, scythe grip, and skirted the rim of the quay, the blade angled down and out above the overmanned skiff.

  The militia, nine, ten of them, hastened to squat and sway beyond its arc. The boat rocked violently. A sword swept for his ankles. He jumped it. An oar rose to block his spear. He stopped short and stabbed the one who had raised it under the cheekbone. As the texture of lettuce yielded to something like pine, he cranked the shaft, shoved and pulled, and left him to amuse his shipmates. He jumped the dropped oar and wheeled the spontone about his right hip, shortened his grip, and drove the counterspike at the head of he who struggled with the rope around the cleat. The head moved. The spike bored through his upper neck south of his ear and chiselled a wedge from his spine. Tannhauser twisted and pulled and struck backwards with the blade, and lanced another militiaman through the sternum as he flailed for balance. He cranked the broached ribcage wide and pulled the steel free in a black cascade and glanced back.

  The dock line was still fast.

  Tannhauser grabbed the socket of the spike with his right hand, clenching tight through the coating of blood, and struck long and down. He pierced a gawping Pilgrim through the throat notch. As the wounded bawled and flailed about in this barque of the suddenly doomed, the panic among those yet living was extreme. Tannhauser leaned forward and raised his voice above the din.

  ‘Any man w
ho stays in this boat will die.’

  Three men jumped in the water. One vanished as if his feet were anvils. The others floundered in their gear. Of the three left in the boat without mortal wounds, one grovelled in the bilges snorting blood and two clung to the gunnels as they pitched up and down.

  ‘You two. Look sharp. Throw these corpses overboard.’

  He stooped over the quay and speared the groveller through the loin.

  ‘Start with him. Don’t swamp the boat.’

  Tannhauser looked towards the curve in the bank where he had left his lads and beckoned. He glanced towards a splash. Today the Seine was a graveyard. The groveller had joined it. So, too, it seemed, had other would-be swimmers. He ran to Grymonde.

  The Infant leaned on his thighs over the sword hilts protruding from his belly; one to either side, where Tannhauser might have inflicted a slow kill. Tannhauser grabbed one hilt and braced the staff of the spontone against the web of Grymonde’s neck. In the cannon-ball muscle of Grymonde’s shoulder, a deep cut welled waves of blood.

  ‘Do you want me to piss or shit?’

  Tannhauser dragged the sword out and dropped it.

  ‘Did I get them all?’

  ‘All four.’

  ‘I’ll have the next Immortal then.’

  ‘I’ve none to waste.’ Tannhauser grabbed the second hilt.

  ‘Waste? Do I have to list my wounds? Do I even have the time?’

  ‘What are a few more leaks to the mighty Infant?’

  Tannhauser pulled the second sword. He stooped and cut the white armband from the nearest corpse. He dropped the sword and took the armband. He glanced at Irène’s. Carla waved from the window. Pascale stood at the back door with his rifle. He gestured to them to wait. He stuffed the armband into the shoulder wound and hoped it would stay packed. Grymonde didn’t notice.

  ‘I allow you your jest,’ he said. ‘Forgive me if I don’t laugh.’

  ‘You’ll be dead before the opium starts to work.’

  ‘You’ve been promising death for hours.’

  Tannhauser returned to the skiff. Clementine plodded towards him by the barges. The sparks had gone from her hoof strikes; they landed as if each one broke another string in her heart. Two small shapes, shrunken almost into one, sat on her back.

  ‘This young rascal is still alive, sire. Blood coming out of his eyes.’

  Tannhauser looked down at the speaker.

  ‘It seems a bit harsh, sire. Some might even say unchristian.’

  ‘Do you want to get out of that boat or not?’

  ‘Indeed I do, sire. I already feel right queasy.’

  The oarsman whose face was split in two screamed and struggled, but they got him over the side without falling in. Tannhauser saw the mast, yard and furled sail in the hull.

  ‘Drop your knives in the boat. Get up here while I’m feeling kind.’

  ‘Gramercy, sire, and your kindness is well known.’

  They clambered up. Tannhauser motioned them a few steps downstream. The speaker tossed three small purses at his feet, much as a dog might offer a dead rat. From the sound they made when they hit the flags, they weren’t worth very much more.

  ‘Waste not, want not, sire.’

  Tannhauser stabbed the quiet one in the stomach and the speaker sprang forward. Tannhauser pulled the spontone and stepped back to skewer him, but the speaker grabbed his dying associate and guided him backwards off the quay. A splash. The speaker turned and dusted his hands.

  ‘That’s that then, sire. Job done. Anything else I can do to oblige?’

  The man wasn’t bright enough for drollery, nor guile.

  ‘Do you know where Captain Garnier is?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t, sire. Ensign Bonnett sent us.’

  Tannhauser levelled the spontone. The man seemed amazed he was to die.

  ‘That’s Hervé the plasterer,’ said Juste.

  ‘Right you are, young master,’ said Hervé.

  Tannhauser had a fair memory for faces, but Hervé’s had left no shadow on his brain. He put the spontone flat on the ground and added Altan’s bow and quiver. He took Grégoire by the waist and lifted him from the saddle. The boy was floppy but conscious. His face contorted with agony, but he lacked the strength to cry out. His screams had gored Tannhauser to the bone; right now they would have reassured him.

  ‘Hervé, hold him, gently, as if he were the child Jesus.’

  Hervé took him in his arms. ‘Poor lad. I did warn him about that dog.’

  ‘Lucifer didn’t bite his leg off,’ said Juste.

  ‘Perhaps not, young master, but he does have the evil eye.’

  Tannhauser lifted Juste down.

  ‘Lucifer took us to Cockaigne,’ said Grégoire. ‘He found the baby.’

  ‘Raving, sire. I’d say it looks quite bad.’

  ‘Silence,’ said Tannhauser. ‘The lad needs peace.’

  Tannhauser bent to the girth strap. Clementine’s belly was so distended he couldn’t get a finger under. He unbuckled it and Clementine staggered with relief. He removed the saddle and blanket and spread them on the quay. He took Grégoire and laid him flat on the blanket and rested his mutilated leg over the saddle. Juste sat cross-legged beside him and held Grégoire’s hand. Tannhauser gave him the wineskin.

  ‘See if he’ll take a mouthful. You, too.’

  Tannhauser studied the charcoal barge. It was filled to the gunwales with gaping sacks of lump char, stacked to within four feet of the tiller. The sacks were footed with damp from the rain. What he had in mind might have been designed by Grymonde under opium. He took one of the lumps. It crumbled easily. Not smelting quality, but that meant it would ignite more readily. The problem was to get it to ignite at all.

  ‘This lot must be worth a franc or two, sire.’

  Tannhauser sized up Hervé.

  ‘Hervé, I’m going to put you to work.’

  ‘You’ll not find a man more willing, sire.’

  Tannhauser illustrated with his hands.

  ‘Take those sacks from the rear row and empty them on top of the sacks at the front of the barge, midship. Spread a nice loose bed, two palms deep. Cover the tops of about six sacks, longwise with the barge. Understand?’

  ‘Spread it and bed it, sire. You don’t have to tell me twice.’

  ‘Take more sacks from the back and make two rows, the sacks end on end, like so, on either side of the bed, again, longwise with the barge.’

  ‘It might help if I knew what we’re up to, sire.’

  ‘I’m going to set fire to it.’

  Tannhauser took the spontone and led Clementine to a nearby garden. The boys were too lost in pain and fatigue to see him go. He stopped her and stepped back and took a short grip, the shaft over his shoulder. The mare rolled one large eye to look at him.

  ‘You deserved a better life, and a better death, but in that you’re not alone.’

  Clementine seemed satisfied with this valediction. She turned her head away. Tannhauser lanced her clean through the upper neck behind the jaws and felt the scrape of the spine along the upper edge. He whipped his arm over the shaft and threw down with his weight and pulled and severed her neck, outwards through the throat. The mare staggered sideways and her front legs folded and he stepped back as she fell towards him. An immense surge of blood swilled over his boots and he felt a twinge of nausea. He welcomed the scant evidence it offered of some remnant to his humanity. Clementine’s eyes rolled white and her chest heaved for air and the blood whistled and bubbled from her windpipe. The sounds weren’t loud enough to carry. Tannhauser blinked the grit from his eyes. For the spilling of human blood he could afford no such qualms. He wiped the spontone on the scarred and quivering hide, and turned away, and left the old grey mare to her passing.

  He stepped down into the skiff. It smelled of fish and tar. They’d had their pick from the craft on the Right Bank and someone had known how to choose. Clinker-built, fifteen feet long and four and a half in the
beam; full ends. The long yardarm and its pivot with the mast made it a lateen sail, with which he was well acquainted. The whole rig could be lowered and raised with ease for passing under bridges. Three oars. He recovered the fourth from the quay. A boathook. Two lanterns. He picked up three swords and threw them on the quay, and stowed the knives and a fourth sword safe beneath the helmsman’s seat. A built-in chest that he didn’t open. He checked the rudder. A sturdy boat, river or sea. He climbed out.

  He went to the smaller boat and found two oars and a lantern. He snuffed the lantern and added his finds to the swords on the quay.

  Grymonde hadn’t moved since he’d left him. His hands still clenched his thighs. But for the blood that trickled from his shirt and overbrimmed the tops of his boots, he might have been the stony idol of some race from ancient myth.

  Tannhauser walked past him to Irène’s. Pascale met him at the door. His rifle was propped against the wall. His saddle wallets and two holstered pistols draped her either shoulder. The twin-barrelled pistol was stuck in her belt. Pure pride kept her standing. If he’d had a heart to spare, he would have broken it for her. He mustered a grin instead. It came easily enough. She grinned back and he saw the gap in her teeth that had given him his first faint intimation of her mettle. He pointed at the Peter Peck in her belt.

  ‘Did the Devil’s Apprentice reload?’

  ‘It’s easier than setting type.’

  ‘I fear country life will disappoint you. Wait here.’

  He took her by the waist and pulled her aside and went through the door.

  Carla had Amparo in her arms, with Estelle and the Mice in front of her, ready to go. Hugon stood behind her with a satchel over either hip and a sack in each fist. Tannhauser beckoned them outside. He took the wallets and holsters from Pascale and loaded them onto Hugon, who swayed beneath the weight.