Death in Gascony (5 page)

Athos retraced his steps. Barely stopping, he wiped his sword on the cloak of a fallen man, and hastened to help Aramis.

The boy wore his guard’s doublet beneath the cloak, and it was stained with blood, blossoming with such exuberance across the dark fabric that one could not tell exactly where the wound lay.

They freed him of his doublet and plain shirt. The boy’s teeth were knocking together, and Athos thought it wasn’t good, it couldn’t be good, till he remembered they were as good as undressing him to the cold winter air.

Aramis was saying something under his breath, which sounded like a lot of Latin words strung together. Praying. He was praying, and Athos hoped it was that the sword hadn’t found a vital organ and that the boy would live. Athos would have prayed too, had he still thought his prayers worthy of being answered.

It was all Athos’s fault—his ridiculous pride again. His pride had once caused him to kill his wife rather than admit he might have been fooled into marrying a marked woman. And now…and now his pride had told him to dismiss Planchet, and to send him ahead with D’Artagnan, instead of going with him right then, and then sending for his friends to follow.

With the clarity of hindsight, he realized that was what he should have done. He should have gone ahead, to protect the foolhardy Gascon, while sending Grimaud for his other friends. He shouldn’t have allowed a young man who was little more than a child to brave the road to Gascony alone.

“Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” he whispered.

Porthos looked at him like he had grown a second head. “Leave off the Latin, Athos. Get the famous Gascon ointment from Planchet. The sword missed the heart. The boy will live.”

Blinking, through sweat that threatened to blind him, Athos saw that it was indeed so. Though the wound still bled profusely, it had pierced in a way that had to have avoided both lung and heart.

“
Hola
, Planchet,” he called, his voice shaking too much for his own taste. “Did your master pack any of that ointment that will heal in three days any wound that falls short of fatal?”

The boy bobbed his head, but he was still holding the massive dog. “In his pack, monsieur. His saddlebag. The chestnut.”

Athos crossed over to the chestnut horse. The boy’s saddlebag had been overturned onto the grass of the clearing—doublets and shirts and all were spread around. Doubtless the men had done this before Aramis caught up with them.

Amid the clothes flapping in the wintry breeze was D’Artagnan’s purse, curiously untouched. Next to it was the pot of ointment. Shattered. It had fallen against one of the stones insufficiently cushioned by dirt.

“I
T
was a close thing,” Aramis said. As he spoke, he heard his own voice, tight and small, as it hadn’t sounded in many years. And it came to him there had been several close things. As he went on with his sentence as he’d first meant it, “I might very well have ridden past without noticing it,” he realized several other things might have happened.

His friends might not have heard him, in which case all he would have achieved would have been to get himself killed alongside D’Artagnan. Alternately, Athos might have gone, finally, over the edge of that precipice of darkness that forever peeked from behind his dark blue eyes.

Porthos and Aramis had never discussed it, but Aramis was sure—as he was sure there was life after death—that Porthos too, in the back of his mind, had long ago decided someday Athos would lose all control and his civility would slip. In a moment of drinking, in a night of profound despair, Athos’s veneer of civility would slip. Then would he give vent to the darkest part of his nature and he would kill and kill and kill, unable to stop—locked inside a body possessed only by a longing for blood and death.

On that day Aramis was sure, as he was sure of his hope of heaven and of the bonds of friendship, it would fall to himself and Porthos to stop Athos. And it was only by sheer luck—by a miracle—that the day hadn’t arrived today.

He looked sideways at Athos’s, again controlled, again civilized face, and he said again, “It was a very close thing. I heard the sound of the dog.” He gestured with his head towards the ruined tower where Planchet, with Grimaud’s aid, was relocking the door. “Planchet was having trouble holding him, but did not dare let him go for fear that in the confusion he would turn on D’Artagnan. The dog let a bark escape, and I looked at the sound of the bark, and I heard the swords. So I called out and I followed.” He took the ligature that Planchet was offering him, and wrapped it around D’Artagnan’s chest. The younger man flinched and started, as if to say something, but Aramis glared at him. “Don’t speak. Let us bind this.” And took from Athos the end of the ligature to tighten it around the wound. That and lacing D’Artagnan’s doublet tight should keep the wound from bleeding too much, at least overnight. In the morning, on horseback…

Aramis frowned. He doubted he could convince the Gascon to stay his journey. As well to convince the sun not to rise in the morning. And on that again, no. Arguing with celestial bodies would be far more fruitful than trying to keep a Gascon from endangering his life.

He pulled the binding tighter than he had meant to and heard D’Artagnan draw in sharp breath.

“We have to keep it from bleeding on horseback,” Aramis said both to D’Artagnan and to Athos. They both nodded and Athos joined in, holding one end of the strip of cloth, allowing Aramis to pull it tighter than he’d otherwise have managed. D’Artagnan went very pale and flinched twice, but—to his credit—neither cried out nor protested at the rough treatment.

Soon enough they had the wound bound—an art at which, as musketeers, they had more practice than practically anyone else alive.

D’Artagnan, still pale, allowed them to pull on his shirt and tighten his doublet more than was, doubtless, comfortable. Again, he made no sound of protest.

“Wait. We shall talk,” Athos said. “But you lost far too much blood.” As he spoke, he stepped towards his horse, which their servants had tethered to a nearby tree. “Here,” he said, returning with a bottle. “I have brought some excellent burgundy, which you’ll do me the honor of drinking before you speak.”

Athos handed the bottle to D’Artagnan, and ignored Aramis’s distracted frown at him. That Athos had a bottle about his person did not surprise Aramis, but it worried him. Athos drank too much. It was a sure thing that his drinking would only encourage his attacks of cold fury.

But the wine put color back into D’Artagnan’s cheeks. Enough for the boy to say, in a confused tone, “How come you here?”

“By providence,” Aramis said. “And you’d best thank providence on your knees. Else you’d be dead, you young fool.”

He helped D’Artagnan rise, and the boy stood, swaying slightly. Only six months ago, when D’Artagnan had first arrived in town, Aramis had viewed him with the deepest suspicion, both because he wasn’t sure the boy wasn’t working for the Cardinal and because Aramis could easily recognize in D’Artagnan’s mind a cunning to rival his own.

But blood shed together and murder avenged had brought him around to feel…brotherhood with the Gascon, a feeling very close to that which linked him to Athos and Porthos. “You fool—what did you want to go stealing off in the night alone for?” he asked, sternly.

D’Artagnan shook his head. “It is my business,” he said. “My family business and not yours.”

“If blood shed together does not amount to brotherhood, I don’t know what does,” Aramis said. “What did you expect?” He cast a look at Athos to find the older musketeer staring his solidarity at him. “That we’d stay calmly in Paris and allow you to face untold dangers alone? What did you think of us? What of the oath sworn, one for all and all for one?”

D’Artagnan shook his head, feebly. “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s not that. Only, you see…The letter said my father had been working for the Cardinal…and then…and then there was everything else.”

“Everything else?” Athos asked, his voice dangerously soft and even.

“Well, I am the only son of my father’s house. Oh, I know, it is a small house, the patrimony ridiculous. You see, my father was a second son and had to rely on the army to make his fortune, only somehow he never did. Make his fortune. Instead, he spent some time in Paris and was a comrade at arms of Monsieur de Treville in his youth—which is why my father’s letter to the captain was my most prized possession, but you see…”

Aramis shook his head. He did not see. D’Artagnan seemed to find Aramis’s confusion funny, and he shook his head slightly. “No. I didn’t expect you to understand. But my father’s house is a small one, but small though it is, it is the manor house of a village, and the village and villagers depend on us for direction and on our protection should things turn violent as they often do in Gascony. So, with my father dead, I must take his place, and I must stay there: I cannot return to Paris.”

He looked from one to the other of them and seemed quite wild. “I will have to stay behind there, and how could I explain it to you?” He took a quick swig from the bottle, and said, in a rush, “How could I explain to you, Aramis, that I must leave Paris and fashion behind? How could I explain to Porthos that I must leave the court and ambition behind? And how could I explain to Athos…” Here he floundered, but recovered. “…that I must give up all ambition of the honor of defending king and country, that which you”—he looked at Athos—“so often told me is the essential duty of every gentleman worthy of the name. You left estate and name behind—You—”

Athos laughed, though the sound was closer to a bark, coming as it did from a throat wholly unaccustomed to mirth. “D’Artagnan! Because I left house and name behind it doesn’t follow that I don’t understand the dictates of honor, and that which a gentleman might owe to his subordinates, beyond what he owes to the Crown. You could say I left to preserve my name and my honor, just as you…just as you might be required to stay to preserve yours.” He shook his head. “We’ll understand if you must stay behind in Gascony. We’ll understand if you find that you must instead return with us. Only trust us. We are all your friends and all gentlemen. You shouldn’t try to steal away from us and avoid us, like a thief in the night. Trust that we understand your best interests and will look out for them.”

“But…” D’Artagnan said. “If my father was working for the Cardinal!”

Aramis realized that laughter had bubbled from his throat only as he heard it echo in the brittle air of early morning. “D’Artagnan, remember that my mother too has worked for the Cardinal.”
2

It was a jest he would not make to anyone else, but it brought a surprised smile to D’Artagnan’s features. “You would not despise me?” he asked.

“We are neither of us responsible for our parents’ sins,” Aramis said, shrugging. “Now you see how foolish you were in attempting to leave without us.”

“I would have acquitted myself well enough,” D’Artagnan said.

Aramis opened his mouth to retort but was saved from offending D’Artagnan—who, being a Gascon, might very well believe that he could indeed have defended himself against six enemies and escaped death—by the sound of Porthos’s voice from behind them.

“By the Mass. These are the richest highwaymen I’ve ever met yet.”

“P
ORTHOS,”
Aramis said.

Porthos looked up at the call, glancing away from the four money pouches and several jeweled rings he was holding. “Yes?” he asked.

Aramis pressed his lips together and shook his head slightly. “One does not rob the dead.”

Porthos frowned at his friend. Oh, he was well aware that Aramis had gone to seminary and studied theology and all that. He spoke very easily of such things as sin and absolution and exactly what food was permitted at Lent and in what circumstances drunken revelry could be pardoned and when not.

Which was all very well, but the thing was this—that these men had tried to attack D’Artagnan, and they’d been killed for it. And it seemed to Porthos that, having died while trying to murder someone, the men were outside the rule of the church. They were probably in hell and being spit roasted by grinning demons. At least if the priest who’d taught Porthos his religion had been right—and Porthos saw no reason to doubt a man who knew Greek and Latin and the refinements of grammar.

He tried to explain himself. “Listen, Aramis—these are not dead. Or rather they are, but not dead as if we’d found them by the wayside, you know, when we might be required to be Philistines or Samaritans or Sardinians or whatever the devil the creature is that doesn’t pass by on the other side. If we’d passed by on the other side, they’d have killed D’Artagnan. Since we didn’t, they didn’t, but died for it. And having died for it, they were…murderers. What happens to the wealth of convicted murderers?”

“It goes to the Crown,” Aramis said. “But—”

“Well, the Crown isn’t here, but we are, and we are the King’s Musketeers, and, as such…” He shrugged. “Almost the King himself. Or at least the closest thing we are likely to find in this corner of the world. And besides, if we leave the corpses here, with all their wealth upon them, what is likely to happen? That the villagers hereabouts will take the money and the jewels. And what do the villagers have to do with these men I ask? It is not as if it was them that the men tried to kill.”

“Well, it was probably them who were subjected to these malefactor’s depredations for years, Porthos.”

“Well, then…it wasn’t,” Porthos said, triumphantly. He shoved his hand, filled with coin pouches and jewels, towards them. “Because if it were, the highwaymen wouldn’t have all these jewels and coin. Villagers aren’t that wealthy.”

This stopped Aramis right enough. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.

“What jewels and coin?” Athos asked from the other side.

“Well…” Porthos said. “While you were tending to D’Artagnan I counted the money in these pouches and they have ten pistoles apiece. And more, there are seven jeweled rings between the four of them, and none of it is glass. And trust me, I would know glass.” He frowned slightly, expecting his friends to contest that, but none did.

Instead, Athos looked at D’Artagnan in silence, and D’Artagnan frowned a little. Aramis seemed to be trying to formulate the theological argument against counting the money of the dead, and not being able to find the right words.

D’Artagnan let a soft word escape. It might have been a curse. Aloud, he said, “We’re going to have to search them, then.”

“Why?” Porthos said. “I’m sure I got the money and the jewels.”

“We shouldn’t—” Aramis started.

“We’re not looking for money or jewels,” Athos said, interrupting Aramis. “Porthos, did you search them else?”

“No, I—”

“Well, I will do it,” Athos said. And to D’Artagnan, who made as if to start forward towards the corpses, “Not you, D’Artagnan. You are not fit.” He stepped forward, leaving the boy standing, holding on to the bottle.

Porthos realized what Athos was doing as the older musketeer started searching the men’s cloaks and clothes. He was looking for hidden pouches, and at this too Porthos had as much practice as Athos and more practice than practically anyone else. Or at least than those who had never joined the musketeers. He stuffed the jewels and money into his own travel pouch, then knelt on the other side of Athos, silently helping him.

While he was feeling his way inside the blood-soaked sleeve of a rapidly cooling body, his fingers struck a folded sheet of paper, that rustled at his touch. “Hallo,” he said. “What have we here?”

With careful fingers, he extracted the paper, which proved to be of finer manufacture than the normal letterhead, and opened it gingerly.

It was written in brown ink in an angular handwriting that Porthos knew all too well. “‘It is by my order and for the good of the kingdom that the bearer of this has done what he has done,’” Porthos read. And stared, gape mouthed at the signature beneath, a single letter, boldly formed—R. Indeed…regally formed. By the man who was the power behind the throne in France.

He passed the letter onto Athos, feeling as though his mind had gone foggy with confusion. He heard Athos gasp.

“Richelieu,” Athos said, passing the letter to Aramis and D’Artagnan in turn.

“It can’t be,” Aramis said as he read the letter.

“I told you,” D’Artagnan said. “I told you his hand is in all this. I do not want to expose you to danger. You should never have come. How did you know that I had tried to leave?”

Porthos saw the look of fear in Planchet’s face and did not trust Athos with the answer. The older musketeer, with his nobility, sometimes had a veritable infatuation with telling the unnecessary truth.

“Well,” Porthos said briskly, “I thought you might do something foolish and I checked at Monsieur de Treville’s, where I was told you’d borrowed horses.”

Since he had actually checked, after Athos had spoken to him, and while
they
borrowed horses, Porthos felt in the clear with his conscience.

He saw the relief in Planchet’s features and just managed not to smile reassuringly at the boy.

Instead he frowned at D’Artagnan. “Only listen. It is not because of you that we are in danger. The Cardinal hated some of us before you were ever born, or at least before you were out of your swaddling clothes. No. Listen. It is because of us that the Cardinal hates you. Did not your father tell you to respect the Cardinal and the King alike? So you see, if you didn’t do it, it was because of us, and as such, it is our fault.” He looked at D’Artagnan and met with that peculiar confusion that he often saw in his friends’ gazes, even when he thought he was being his most lucidly clear.

“The Cardinal learned to hate you because you were our friend,” he said, trying to make the whole perfectly inescapable. “And you first went up against his guards because you were fighting by our side. So you see—it is because of us that he sent assassins after you—if he sent assassins after you. It is possible they muddled the whole affair.”

Aramis made a sound of dismay. “How do you mean muddled the whole affair?” he asked. “Do you think his eminence just sent men to wait on this road to murder the first voyager that passed and D’Artagnan usurped the appointed death of another of the Cardinal’s enemies? Porthos!”

“Well, it’s unlikely,” Porthos said, with a grunt. “But then it is possible he sent them to kill one of the inseparables and they chanced on D’Artagnan before another of us.” He realized the unlikelihood of this argument and sighed. “Or something. The thing is, though, the thing is, that these”—he swept a hand around—“were definitely linked to the Cardinal and as such, I don’t see why we are not to take their money and jewels. After all, we would take them of people we defeated in honorable combat.”

“But this was not honorable combat,” Aramis said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Porthos said. “On their side. Making us all the more entitled to their bounty.”

“But—” Aramis started.

“He’s in the right of it Aramis,” Athos said. “Though perhaps not for the reasons he gives.” He flashed Porthos a smile that left Porthos feeling yet more bewildered. “You see, I knew something was wrong—and that there was a possibility these were not highwaymen but paid assassins—from the moment Porthos said there were exactly ten coins in each purse. That sounds uncommonly like a fee paid to them to dispatch an enemy. And from the letter”—he waved the paper at Aramis—“and from the fact they attacked D’Artagnan, we must assume the money was paid to each of them by Richelieu, and that it was meant to compensate their trouble in killing D’Artagnan.” D’Artagnan made a snorting sound at that and Athos gave him an amused look. “Which means, we should take it—we are more entitled to it than anyone else—to compensate us both for D’Artagnan’s wound and suffering and the risk we ran in thwarting the plan. And besides…” Athos permitted himself one of his rare smiles, though it was at least halfway a grimace. “And besides, you must warrant that Richelieu being involved, it is our duty to thwart his plan. And what best way is there to thwart his plan than with his own coin?”

Porthos grinned at Athos. Sometimes for all his philosophy and Latin, Athos could be a very sensible man. “Indeed,” he said. “And now, I wonder how far we are from a hostelry where we can let the horses rest and get a room where D’Artagnan can sleep for a few hours before we must start on our way in earnest.”

“I know a hostelry,” Aramis said, surrendering to their argument without ever admitting it. “Down this road another quarter league. We’ll walk the horses till then.” He looked around, bewildered, realizing that their number of horses had been added to by the four horses of the dead henchmen. “Only D’Artagnan must ride. We’ll go to the hostelry and make our plans there.”