Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  He had used the sergent’s bow Pascale had found at Irène’s, and he left the tiller for at most five seconds, to lay the weapon on the step of the redoubt and return two arrows to the quiver. He felt the larboard sheer at once and turned.

  The tiller had swung hard over behind him. He grabbed it and shoved. The rudder moved as if through mud and then stuck. He heard a thin yell. He saw a small white hand snatch the mermaid’s tail. The hand held on.

  Tannhauser let go of the tiller and it swung over as he lunged head and shoulders across the stern. A boy clung onto the starboard side of the rudder. He coughed up gouts of river water, fighting too hard for life to be merely panicked. The barge must have overtaken him and the lad had seized his chance. He was naked as far as Tannhauser could see, and kicking his legs with what strength he had left to push himself from the water. The only result was to swing the rudder even harder over and increase the sheer.

  Tannhauser knelt on the thwart and reached down to haul him aboard.

  In Tannhauser’s experience, when facing a smoothbore musket ball at much over thirty yards the safest man to be was the target. The use of muskets – the infliction of fear aside – was in massed volley fire against a massed foe. Dominic’s men had placed themselves well and shown patience. Their six muskets were massed in volley and the barge was massy enough. The sudden sheer had denied the stern the protection of the redoubt.

  Tannhauser grabbed the boy by his left arm and right armpit. As he hauled him up and over he saw the sparks from a row of flashing pans and clasped the boy tight and dived sideways for the deck. He felt the ball poke him hard in the stomach and landed heavily, his wind robbed by either or both. He rolled onto his back. He felt blood spill down his flanks; but he knew it wasn’t his. The boy was a dead weight. Tannhauser lifted the boy from his chest and raised his head and looked down across his gore-clogged body hair. The musket ball sat in the quag of blood on his belly. He set the boy aside and rose to one knee and the ball dropped and skittered away.

  The tiller.

  His eye stopped him in mid-turn before his mind knew what it had seen.

  He knelt back down.

  On his neck, below the angle of his jaw, the boy had a strawberry birthmark.

  Tannhauser saw a mother’s hand quicken to cover the mark, as if she feared he would read it as a sign of evil. This boy had given him a smile at the gates of Paris. And the gladdest sight it had been in many a day. He picked the boy up by the shoulders. The boy’s head flopped and twisted, its weight an obscure obscenity to Tannhauser’s sinews.

  ‘You were gone. Why did you come back?’

  Tannhauser didn’t know why he felt so pierced. There were more dead boys in the river than fish. He had dragged the like from Grymonde’s path without giving them so much as an Amen.

  ‘I don’t know you, boy. How did you know me?’

  The cesspit of disgust, whose earliest contents were the stuff of his earliest memories, and which he rarely dared admit he carried inside him, overflowed into his throat. He knew the boy. He envied the boy. For the boy it was over and done.

  He lowered the boy down. He let go of his shoulders.

  He stood up and pulled the tiller.

  It didn’t move.

  He shook it back and forth. It was stuck, solid. He bent over the stern and ran his fingers down between the sternpost and the rudder. A musket ball the bore of his thumb was wedged between the eye of the upmost gudgeon and the wood of the rudder, its upper rim shaved square by the arm of the pintle. The ball was still warm. He tried to pluck it free and broke a fingernail. The hot lead had squeezed into the gap and welded itself to the iron. The rudder was jammed to larboard. He grabbed the back of the rudder with both hands and heaved and shoved. Timber crunched; and resisted. He fingered the lead again. It was further deformed, but just as surely fixed. To whittle it out with a dagger would take more minutes than the current would give him.

  The Right Bank wheeled across his vision. A mass of moored boats on the beach. The church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. The square where he had scolded Juste. The conical towers of the Louvre. He was set to drift broadside into the boom with the fire in the prow pointing in the wrong direction, towards the Left Bank, not the Right. He would have to break the boom within a half of its length from its anchorage by the palace, and without anything to deter an attack from the wharf. Anything except himself.

  He gave Fortuna her due and abandoned the rudder.

  He took a fistful of arrows from the quiver on the sacks. He glanced at the boom as he took up the sergent’s bow and nocked. The stern would run into the boom some four boats short of the beach; with luck, five. They were all lighters, twenty-five-footers or thereabouts, a foot or two of chain stretched between them. He marked the wharf jutting out into the water, the six musket men ranked along its edge. The same wharf from which other men had fired at other fugitives not twenty hours before. They were all ramming their scouring sticks with a fury.

  Tannhauser drew and shot the rightmost musket man.

  He nocked and drew and shot the leftmost.

  Gut shots both, to the feathers.

  When the second fell, the two in the middle realised that they’d never charge another pan. As they fled he shot one in the back. He nocked as the other vanished. A fifth added speed to his escape by dropping his gun. Tannhauser shot him, and nocked, and laid the pride of the last as he turned to follow. The bodkin skewered his thighs, one to the other, and, with a wail that must have tickled the fallen angels awaiting his soul, he tripped and splashed to his grave.

  Tannhauser nocked. Between this wharf and the next a row of wide steps led down to the beach. At the top he saw torches and bands of militia, a gaudy flag aloft, red and white ribbons on their arms. A pilgrimage of woe, if he had any say in it. He flew an arrow into their midst to let them know he did. Their consternation was immediate and general.

  The stern continued its implacable arc to starboard.

  The second wharf was stage to a horde of gaping Pilgrims, the charred plasterer exciting their particular curiosity. Tannhauser shot one in the face to give them something else to talk about. Six shafts left in the quiver; he shouldered it; a dozen for Altan’s bow. Not as many as he would have liked. He glanced over the redoubt.

  The boom appeared deserted. Hundreds of corpses bobbed against the hulls. As if the barrier had been made for that purpose the massacred collected towards the centre in a morbid scum, black and undulant on the swell, as if still possessing motive and eager to be on their way. The landward flatboat was moored to the outer face of a timber jetty. The current seemed to have doubled its speed. The barge was thirty seconds from the collision.

  Tannhauser bent for the spontone and saw the rolled tarpaulin and grabbed that instead. He took the barge pole and tossed it lengthwise on the sacks and climbed up onto the char and took three steps for’ard before the furnace stopped him. He unfurled the tarred canvas to fall across the top third of the pole and the rim of the red shimmer that extended from the blaze. He turned and waded back as the canvas erupted.

  He jumped from the sacks and hoisted the pole aloft.

  The burning tarpaulin howled above his head and a shower of molten tar droplets sprinkled him. For an instant his arms and chest lit up with dozens of tiny flames. They died on the caked gore before he felt their sting. He pitched the flaming canvas over the stern and into the third flatboat of the boom as he passed it by. He grabbed the spontone and the sword and shouldered the sergent’s bow. A tremor ran through the timbers from the prow and he relaxed for the fall.

  The barge collided broadside and threw him into the sacks of the redoubt.

  Couplings moaned and timbers creaked. The prow ploughed forward a few yards more and wedged itself to a halt. The whole boom swayed. The chains held.

  Tannhauser mounted the stern gunwale. The gunwale of the fourth lighter rode almost a foot higher. He stepped up and gave himself a shove with the spontone and jumped and landed halfway
down the flatboat’s length. A man squatted by a lantern four feet away, his back to the hull, his hands over his face. He dropped the hands and Tannhauser glimpsed his terror in the yellow light as he lanced him in the neck.

  He was on the boom.

  Beyond, the river rolled unhindered towards the sea.

  Tannhauser scooped up the lantern and strode through the blood in the bilges to the stern. He was some seventy feet from the jetty, three boat lengths. In the next lighter two burning figures clambered over the side and plunged for the water. The flames of the tarpaulin were already shrinking from their height. A third figure rose to his feet in their midst, his face a confection of bubbles, the incinerating canvas draped around his shoulders like the vestments of some suicidal priesthood. He waved his arms and fire leapt into his mouth as he sucked for air. He toppled backwards to complete his role as burnt offerings.

  Tannhauser studied the coupling between the two craft. A length of half-inch chain was looped around the larboard stern cleat, the horns wedged through two links. The arms of the chain then twisted into a single strand, two feet long, before they parted again to hook the horns of the bow cleat on the next boat. Behind that cleat, the links were secured by a padlock. Both cleats were cast from iron and secured by bolts fore and aft of the central pillar of the horns.

  Tannhauser laid up the sergent’s bow and the sword. He hung the lantern and set himself and drove the chiselled spike of the spontone’s counterweight into the wood, two inches short of the forward bolt. He levered upwards and a wedge splintered away. Two minutes; if it took him three he’d deserve to drown. Smoke and sparks drifted back from the inferno in the charcoal barge. He chiselled and pried; short, fast strokes; thin wedges that came up easily with the grain. He excavated the shaft of the bolt until the spike broke through the bottom of the timber. He levered up the front edge of the cleat plate; the forward bolt was free. He shoved the spike deeper and levered again, hoping sheer force would unseat the second bolt. He felt some cracks give in the wood but the shaft of the spontone bowed too severely and he relaxed and pulled it out.

  The second bolt was obscured by the twisted chain. He stepped up and across and into the bow of the third boat for a better angle. The fire around the smouldering acolyte had subsided to the last folds of the sheet. He chiselled under the aft edge of the cleat and pried up a good splinter and ripped the fragments clear. He felt the footsteps on the strakes before he heard them.

  He turned as the spearhead of a halberd lunged from the tar smoke. He trapped the shaft in the winged jaw of the spontone and twisted it aside. The halberd point crunched into the bow and he dropped the spontone and moved in, drawing his dagger. He stabbed the halberdier up beneath the left ribs, and again through the neck and vented his throat. Warm gore sprayed Tannhauser’s chest as the corpse fell and he squinted through the haze.

  At least four more men advanced along the second lighter; more loomed behind them in the first and on the quay. Others waded out into the shallows, either side of the boom, though by the bow of the landward boat they were thigh-deep.

  Tannhauser flicked and sheathed the dagger and left his chisel where he’d need it and claimed the halberd. He stepped on the burned acolyte and the body bucked and twisted under his tread. He steadied himself against the hull with the halberd and stomped on the melted face, and his heel slithered as bones crackled and the face sheared away from the skull. He stomped him through the chest and the ribcage stove inwards into the lungs. The draught pumped from under the corpse blew a final flaring from the canvas, and flame spiralled up around Tannhauser’s hips. He saw the next Pilgrim stop, one foot on the stern, his face slack at the spectacle that confronted him.

  Tannhauser charged and speared him under the sternum and followed him over the gunwales as he pitched him backward into his mates, which latter crowded each other and clucked the usual self-defeating advice. He tugged the spear free as he landed and rotated from the hips and twirled the shaft and cut sidewise with the axe at the foremost Pilgrim. The blade cleaved the side of his skull to the nose through the socket of the eye and the eyeball popped. Tannhauser cranked his head apart like a half-split log. The Pilgrim following caught the brained man round the waist, as if afraid the fall might harm him. Tannhauser split his skull to the nostrils with an overhead swing.

  He was vexed by these poor imbeciles. Their very lack of skill offended him. Their lives weren’t worth the seconds of his time required to slaughter them.

  A pike lunged up from the water and he swayed back and let it pass his chest and chopped down over the gunwale and axed the oaf who wielded it above the ear. The stroke wasn’t clean but the heavy blade peeled the side of his head like a turnip and unhinged one side of his jaw in a cascade of blood and bad teeth.

  These dogs weren’t foes, they were victims.

  He straddled the dead and bore down on the fourth Pilgrim as he backed away. A fifth jumped into the stern, and a greater fool than the rest he must have been for his spear was encumbered with a flag. The fourth attempted a parade-ground lunge with a half-pike, and Tannhauser swayed aside and shortened his grip and stepped in and clove him square through the web of the neck. The axe trimmed the top three ribs from their jointing to the breastbone and sundered the mediastinum. He wrenched the blade from the carcass in a catastrophic fountain. The fifth was clambering onto the stern, his flag draped around his head and shoulders by the frenzy of his retreat. Tannhauser swung the axe and severed his right foot through the instep.

  The Pilgrim dropped his flagstaff and fell to the thwart on his knees, his arms reaching astern to the landward lighter. He screamed to his comrades to pull him clear.

  Tannhauser shook sweat from his brow and rolled the ache from his shoulders and chest. He looked at the advancing comrades and they saw him and stopped amidships. Six of them. He employed the gunwale as a chopping block and severed the flag-bearer’s right arm above the elbow. The six watched it fall in the river. Tannhauser changed his angle and severed the left arm. The Pilgrim screamed himself breathless and slid downwards. Tannhauser rammed one boot into the flag that shrouded his shoulders and trapped his chest against the transom. He looked at the six again.

  ‘This is the Devil’s causeway. Take a kinder road.’

  The front man turned and pushed his way back past his fellows.

  Some sound made Tannhauser glance backwards.

  The skiff floated alongside the third lighter, lit by the ochre pandemonium floating on the water beyond. Grymonde held fast to the lighter’s gunwale with one hand. Carla was looking up from the tiller. Pascale had boarded the boom. The girl had assumed Tannhauser’s job and was levering the spontone to pry out the cleat. She was using the long blade, not the chisel, and, though he couldn’t see it, the imagined bend in the steel made him cringe. He had seen the damage a snapped blade could inflict.

  ‘Pascale! Stop!’

  She turned and looked at him through the smoke.

  He waved his hand in a circle, over and down.

  ‘Use the other end! The spike! The blade may snap like a sword!’

  He made the inverting gesture again, in greater earnest. It didn’t matter. With the axe of the halberd he’d have the cleat out in a minute and the carnage he’d left along forty feet of deck would buy them more than that. He flapped his hand down.

  ‘Just stop! Leave it for me!’

  Pascale stepped back from the cleat and raised and planted the spontone.

  A voice rose behind him, above the caterwauls of the amputated flag-bearer.

  ‘Let us take poor Jean away, for the love of Christ.’

  Tannhauser turned.

  Beyond the six, the jetty, the wharves, the square, were mobbed with Pilgrims, spear points gleaming by torch and moon. A dozen or so spilled down the steps onto the beach. At the top of the steps, eighty feet away, a hulking figure appeared in a cuirass. Garnier looked at Tannhauser.

  They all looked at Tannhauser, scores of them.

  Tannha
user took his boot from poor Jean and indicated his gaudy shroud.

  ‘Is that not the sacred banner of Saint-Jacques?’

  ‘Aye, we’ll not leave it to you nor the Devil.’

  ‘That’s what we fight and die for.’

  Tannhauser levered his cock out with one hand.

  ‘Die for this.’

  He pissed on poor Jean and the banner of Saint-Jacques.

  Such a silence fell upon his audience, near and far, he wondered if Garnier could hear the splash. Tannhauser shook his cock and put it away.

  ‘Good as an hour’s sleep.’

  He stooped for the half-pike and the six retreated a step towards the jetty.

  ‘Poor Jean stays here, with me and the Devil. So does the banner.’

  Tannhauser raised the half-pike at arm’s length and nailed Jean and the flag on his back to the transom. He looked at the six. None met his eyes. He looked at Garnier, who apart from putting his fists on his hips had not moved, and looked disinclined to do so. The other soldiers of Christ were content to follow his example. If they would swallow an insult like that, they were no more of a threat than the bodies in the river.

  Tannhauser turned to start for the cleat and frowned. He saw Juste clamber past Pascale and charge down the smoking hull towards him. She shouted after him and Juste half-turned to shout back, then kept on coming. What was the boy up to?

  Tannhauser called out. ‘Juste, stay there. I’m coming.’

  He strode forward, his hand raised to forestall him, but the lad came on, pale with the blood he had lost, pale with bravery and fear, as if possessed by the need to fling himself like a bag of sand against the malice drowning the world. As if that way lay redemption. He was beautiful; and the world was not.