Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

He felt fit to join the small collection of humanity in the skiff.

  If they’d have him.

  He climbed back to the jetty and looked at them.

  Carla stood up from the stern thwart and turned towards him. Burning wood and charcoal threw a wall of flame behind her. The river seemed of molten gold and silver. The full moon hung high above her head and he couldn’t see her face. She could have been some ancient spirit risen from the deep.

  Carla raised Amparo above her head in both hands.

  Tannhauser breathed deep.

  He was forgiven, then, which, if such he needed to be, was all to the good.

  He’d come to find his wife and was taking home a daughter, too.

  Five daughters. He grinned. Why not?

  He crossed the jetty and stepped onto the bloody causeway. He retrieved a serviceable broadhead from a body in the first lighter. In the second, he stooped to return the recovered arrows to their quiver. He reclaimed Altan’s bow. Behind him he heard the perfect cadence of soldiers who knew how to march.

  Eleven Swiss Guard advanced from the Louvre to the jetty.

  He couldn’t decide if he was too tired to run or too tired to fight.

  He looked again. Ten guards.

  A rotund figure stepped forward and bowed his head. It was Arnauld de Torcy. Arnauld motioned to Stefano, who commanded the section. Stefano gestured to the slain that littered the ground thereabouts. His men stacked their halberds and separated in pairs, and set to throwing the corpses into the Seine.

  ‘Tannhauser,’ said Arnauld. ‘One day you’ll walk across one square too many.’

  ‘Is the King abed?’

  ‘His Majesty has had a trying day. There’s no need to try him further.’

  Tannhauser glanced at the guards, slithering on the gore-slaked planks as they grunted and heaved. He raised one brow at Arnauld.

  ‘A traitors’ grave,’ said Arnauld. ‘They did not act for His Majesty.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  ‘You were not sworn to.’

  ‘Our young ward, Juste, is dead.’

  ‘I saw it all,’ said Arnauld. ‘From the tower.’

  ‘Does the King know that tomorrow will be worse than today?’

  Arnauld didn’t answer. He had made his choice and he would prosper.

  ‘Good luck, my friend,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Adieu.’

  His legs tensed as the hull rolled underneath him.

  The boom was broken.

  He turned and in the third boat saw Grymonde prop his haunches on the bow, and swing his legs across the gunwale. Beyond him the burning barge drifted away as the current unfurled the greater length of the boom towards the Left Bank.

  Tannhauser ran.

  ‘My Infant, wait.’

  Grymonde’s shoulders flexed as he shoved himself into the Seine.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  For Whom My Tears Have Made Me Blind

  WHEN MATTIAS ALMOST started towards the skiff, but didn’t, Carla knew he was going to turn back into a darkness blacker than the night. A complexity of painful feelings knotted inside her. She knew he didn’t need to go back. And she knew that he did.

  She took Amparo from Estelle, and cuddled her. The baby they had made gave her comfort while she watched Mattias bathe in blood.

  His descent into violent madness shocked the children, even Pascale, who adored him. They thought they had known him; and they thought they had known him to be a bloody man, yet now they were appalled. They were terrified. For a moment, so was Carla. She cared nothing for the dying as they tumbled by threes and fours into bleeding piles. She trusted they were bound for Hell. But Mattias wasn’t killing them for justice or creed; or even to defend the boom. He killed them because they were there and because he could and because this was his calling.

  He had hurt her by turning back. She couldn’t help but fear for him, and of fear she had had her fill. His spree was spent inside a minute or two, and the whole arena was cleared inside of five, but they were long ones. He prowled among the heaps of slain, his skin wet and black in the moonlight. He decapitated the wounded, as if their continued existence affronted his. She had no idea what thing he emptied from the cage, nor why it was so important he commit it to the river, and when Estelle voiced those very questions no one there could give her an answer.

  Carla watched Mattias wash himself, and though she tried to contain a surge of love so deep it felt more painful than giving birth, the sight overwhelmed her, and sobs racked her shoulders, and tears fell down her cheeks and onto her babe. The man she loved was a man wedded to bloodshed. No feeling she might know would change the fact. He had pledged that fidelity long before he had known what it was that he vowed, when men not unlike these now extirpated on the shore had scourged the life he might have had from the realm of possibility. Perhaps it was for that that Carla wept, for such possibilities would have kept him forever from her arms, and from Orlandu and Amparo, too, and those joys she would not have foregone for any price; not even peace for Mattias’s turbulent spirit. And so, she had no right to censure his fury, for without it he would never have been hers, nor she his, and if she couldn’t love all that he was, she deserved none of him.

  The children wept, too, all except Grégoire, who moaned in a drugged sleep on his horse blanket. They had endured intolerable hazards and intolerable loss with extreme courage. They did not cry for their own troubles. They cried because they loved Mattias and because they feared the loss of his soul.

  Orlandu did not cry, but he was a child no longer. He had kissed her and returned her blue scarf, and she had thanked him, and he had sat down on the middle thwart, next to Pascale, and had said no more.

  Amparo did not cry either. She was wide awake and seemed not in the least perplexed or upset by the surrounding woe. Her face was turned to Carla’s.

  Carla smiled. The song and dance of Life Her-own-self went on.

  ‘Will Tannzer come back?’ asked Estelle.

  ‘Of course he will,’ said Pascale.

  ‘Yes,’ said Carla. ‘Of course he will. And he will need us to take care of him, so let’s dry our tears and show him he can count on us.’

  ‘I didn’t think Tannzer needed to be taken care of,’ said Estelle.

  ‘Yes, he does,’ said Carla. ‘He needs us more than we need him.’

  ‘He’d never admit to that,’ said Pascale.

  ‘I think you’d be surprised.’

  Carla watched Mattias wade dripping from the river and climb back to the jetty. He looked at her, and though she couldn’t see his face, in his posture she saw a certain, insincere, remorse. For her sake.

  For his sake, Carla stood up and raised Amparo towards him.

  Above the river of the dead.

  Beneath the stars and the full of the moon.

  The burden of insincerity flew from his shoulders.

  He stepped down onto the boom.

  Carla lowered the baby. A late cramp clenched her and she sat down and waited for it to pass. The pang dried what was left of her weeping. She could feel absolute exhaustion lurking, waiting to consume her. She saw the Swiss Guard, and Mattias facing them, and her fear was refreshed. Ten Swiss were more dangerous than three score Pilgrims, and she didn’t put it past Mattias to go back again.

  The guards started hoisting the dead into the water.

  She heard Mattias wish their spokesman Adieu.

  She heard a grinding of iron on wood.

  The current was tearing the boom in two.

  Grymonde tossed the halberd behind him and lunged across the bow as the cleat he had half-unseated popped from its mooring. It seemed he hoped to grab the drifting stern and hold the entire boom together by sheer force of will. His hands grasped only the air. Carla was about to call to him when the release of tension and the unopposed current caused the skiff to shift away from the hull of the lighter.

  The boathook twisted free of the gunwale. The pole slipped from the hands of Agnès and Marie, who
had been as racked by tears as any. Their dismay at their failure was immense and their hands snatched out together. Pascale reached for the boathook, too, and so did Orlandu. But all were too late and it fell into the water and slipped away.

  The skiff was adrift and the children panicked.

  Carla realised they were afraid of losing Mattias.

  ‘Pascale, get the dock line.’

  Carla pointed to the coiled rope beyond the forward bench.

  Pascale leapt across her bench and scrambled for the line.

  ‘Throw it to Grymonde. Grymonde!’

  Grymonde was sitting on the bow, his legs above the water. He had wrapped the chain still attached to the lighter around his left wrist. He pushed himself in. For a moment she didn’t understand what he was doing, then the jaws of the broken boom gaped and the skiff was carried into the gap.

  ‘Pascale, Orlandu, ready the oars.’

  Grymonde was ready before them. With a roar that conveyed his rage at the pain inside him, he hauled himself up by the chain and reached out, and grabbed hold of the skiff by the stern, his eyeholes brimming with water, and held onto it in defiance of the current.

  Carla could do nothing to help him. She could have told him to let go, that his agony wasn’t necessary, but that would be to steal the only precious thing he had left.

  Orlandu slotted an oar in the larboard lock with one hand, and Pascale took her place beside him, and picked up the other. They weren’t going to leave Mattias behind. But they would be leaving Grymonde.

  Grymonde would have stayed behind anyway. Of course. But she hadn’t had the thought until now. The knowledge filled her with a confusion of feelings, sadness foremost. No. Foremost was love. His enormous hand was inches from hers, the fingers as thick as pike shafts gripping the gunwale as if they would splinter it. She put her hand on his and turned to look at him. The weight of the loaded skiff had stretched him like a man crucified. He spat water as the current wafted them slowly shoreward. The holes in his scorched and deformed face were indifferent to his agony. They simply saw everything.

  ‘Grymonde.’ Carla didn’t know how to go on.

  ‘It wasn’t tears made this man blind, so he’ll have none shed for him.’

  ‘Grymonde!’ Estelle stood up.

  Carla put an arm around her to hold her steady.

  ‘La Rossa, my darling. Be true to your sister and her mother.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I will be watching you.’

  ‘Like an angel?’

  Grymonde heaved for breath as membranes burst inside him.

  ‘A black angel?’ Estelle looked up. ‘Like Tannzer’s?’

  Mattias leaned over the bow above Grymonde, and extended a halberd and secured the skiff with its hook and pulled it in. Grymonde held on, but sank in the water.

  ‘My Infant, you are in my way.’

  ‘Then step around me, for to such am I accustomed.’

  Mattias changed the hook’s purchase, to the other side of Carla, and she shifted over. Mattias swung a leg over the side, then the other, and stepped onto the thwart, and threw the halberd in the river while keeping hold of the lighter with his free hand.

  A sound heard by no others before them exploded through the night.

  Carla turned towards it, as did they all.

  Freed from the widening arms of the broken boom, the fire barge rotated slowly as the current made off with it. It seemed to float on a carpet of bodies. A fountain of steam erupted skyward abaft of the prow. The sound was that of a thousand coals surrendering their fire to the river.

  ‘My Infant, we’re all aboard, and we’ve paid our coin.’

  ‘Then be gone. And wait for the sound of my laughter.’

  Mattias released his grip and the skiff drifted away to the outer limit of Grymonde’s arms. Estelle cried out and clutched Amparo and pushed deeper into Carla’s breast.

  Grymonde held on, teeth bared, his eyeholes staring at the stars.

  Mattias made his way to the forward rowing bench and unloaded his gear. He beckoned Pascale and Orlandu to pass the oars, and he took his seat and fitted the oars to the locks. He leaned forward and laid the blades flat on the water, and paused. He smiled at Carla from behind the sad, young faces. He awaited her command.

  Carla took the tiller and nodded.

  Mattias dipped the oars and pulled.

  As Grymonde felt the stroke he opened his hand and reversed it, and his fingers caressed Carla’s. The skiff pulled away and the hand fell into the water. Carla glanced down at Amparo. The babe was still awake, still enraptured by the world.

  Carla turned as Grymonde’s chin fell to his chest.

  His great, mutilated head sank below the water.

  All that remained above the surface was his arm, his huge hand splayed and blue, his wrist bound to the broken boom by the chain.

  Mattias rowed and the skiff pulled away. They passed the dying barge as it wheeled towards the shore and threw rolls of smoke across the floating dead. The towers of the Louvre were black against the midnight sky and getting smaller. She saw the torches on the wall that surrounded the city. They had left Paris.

  Carla turned away.

  Estelle did not. She stared across the water at the drifting boom.

  ‘He moved. Look, Carla! The dragon’s not dead.’

  Carla looked back at the chained arm. It might have been some trick of moonlight, smoke and water, but she believed Grymonde’s hand had clenched into a fist.

  ‘Estelle?’ said Mattias.

  Estelle wiped her face and turned to look at him.

  ‘It wouldn’t sit right with the Infant to be an angel.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘An angel’s wings aren’t strong enough to carry such as he.’

  Estelle brightened. ‘But a dragon has wings.’

  ‘Aye. And a dragon shares something else in common with the angels.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A dragon never dies.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Nameless Ways

  HUGON WAITED IN the alley by the stable until all he could hear were distant screams. When the screams hadn’t moved in five minutes, and were getting weaker, he made his way through the darkest shadows he could find to the Pont Notre-Dame.

  He looked down as the bald dog trotted up alongside him.

  ‘I told you not to go with ’em last night, but you wouldn’t listen, would you? Had to follow the pack. Look where it got you.’

  The dog seemed pleased enough with his adventures. So was Hugon. He’d done all right. He’d taken some chances. The bodies in the river had almost pulled him down with them. But you had to take chances if you wanted what you wanted, especially when everyone else wanted what they wanted and reckoned you weren’t worth much more than a bald dog.

  None of them really knew who he was. That was the way Hugon liked it. Keep them guessing. Not even Alice knew him, though he thought she thought she did. He was sad Alice was gone, but she hadn’t been long for this world; he’d known that for a while. Grymonde, too. Tannzer had surprised him – he hadn’t been kidding about the forty years’ wages; what was that about? – but that just went to show how stupid it was to think you could see into a person, without waiting to see what they did. Mind you, he wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of the man; that didn’t take any guessing at all.

  As for Carla, well, Christ, she would have him guessing for the rest of his days. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was carrying her violl, he would have thought he had dreamed her. He was sorry she’d gone off with the others. She had secrets he wanted to know. He couldn’t say that of anyone else he had ever met. But he had the violl. He knew it didn’t make much sense, but the violl felt a lot more precious than the forty years’ wages hanging round his neck.

  He would have to think of a name for the dog when he had the time, if the dog stuck around. He was a tough little thing, and he had the Devil’s luck, so Hugon hoped he would. Tannz
er’s boys had called him Lucifer, but what kind of name was that for a bald dog?

  When he got there the bridge was deserted, except for the little girl.

  The girl was of no great interest to him. He didn’t even know her name. But she looked lost, not because she didn’t know where she was, but because she was alone.

  It didn’t do to care too much. He’d always known that, and today had proved it, and so would tomorrow. Yet it was funny. Carla would never know, and she probably thought him a right bastard for stealing her violl, but he felt he owed it to her.

  He walked over to the girl and she turned, and he saw she knew him.

  ‘What’s your name, then? I’m Hugon.’

  ‘I’m Antoinette. Where’s Carla?’

  ‘She’s gone, down the river, to wherever she’s going. Though I wouldn’t bet much on her getting there.’

  ‘Why did Carla leave me in the cathedral?’

  He almost said: Maybe they didn’t want you, which seemed the likeliest reason.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she just forgot.’

  ‘You saw me in the cathedral.’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t up to me, was it?’

  She could see that this was true enough, and it was. But she was still puzzled. Maybe she was even a bit hurt. He shrugged and felt the weight of the collar.

  ‘Tannzer said the cathedral was the safest place in the city. Said you were better off in there than they were out here, and if you’d seen the state they left in, you’d not disagree. You could have lost a leg, easy.’

  This explanation seemed to give her some comfort.

  ‘Who’s Tannzer?’ she said.

  Hugon didn’t know where to begin. He thought Tannzer should probably be chained to a muck cart and given a shovel, for he was lunatic enough, but he didn’t say so.

  ‘Just a man.’

  ‘Will you take me home?’

  ‘I don’t know where you live.’

  ‘Aren’t you going back to the Yards?’

  ‘Where else? At least, for the time being. I got what I wanted. And more.’

  ‘Take me home to the Yards – that’s what I meant. Can I come with you?’