Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (34 page)

‘How many men are upstairs with the girls?’

‘Two, sire. Jean and ah . . . Yes, Jean is upstairs, but it’s not me, it’s another Jean. Jean and – give me a minute, sire, I’ll remember, Jean and –’ He coughed red drool. ‘Students, sire. I didn’t know ’em until this morning. I only came in for a bit of breakfast, sire. That’s all. A bit of breakfast.’

‘Is that why your clothes stink of smoke?’

‘Please don’t kill me, sire. I haven’t even seen the girls. Please don’t kill me.’

‘Close your eyes.’

Jean did so. ‘Jean and Ebert. Yes, Ebert. Please, sire, don’t kill me.’

Tannhauser crammed the rag back into his mouth and stood back. He mustered a second swing and cut off Jean’s nailed hand at the wrist. The blow knocked the bodkin loose but did not dislodge it. Jean took a deep breath to scream and sucked the rag down his throat. Tannhauser pulled the arrow from Jean’s chest with the hand still impaled. The bodkin was not deformed. He slid the severed hand free of the shaft and pitched the arrow onto the table. The hand was sweaty and hot. He tossed it through the door and into the stairwell. Blasphemies erupted from those who saw it land.

Jean was strangling on the dishrag but had no means of pulling it out. Tannhauser pushed him out of the door. The ceiling of the landing was the full height of the stairwell, plenty of space for the third swing, which clove Jean’s skull through the vault as far as his eyebrows. It was not a blow Tannhauser would use with his own sword; there were better strokes with less risk of damage to the blade, but the scalp bled to spectacular effect around the lodged steel. He left the sword in place and tilted Jean backwards over the rail. Tannhauser wasn’t sure if anyone had yet dared start to climb the staircase. If they had, the bleeding body dropped on top of them.

The consternation below reached a new crescendo. He heard someone call for cannon and someone else for cavalry. If only they had armour. If only they were decently equipped. If only their heroic service were better appreciated. He heard the militia retreat as far as the street.

He returned to the kitchen where the man with the apples and cheese had died. Tannhauser recovered his dagger from his thorax and wiped and sheathed it. He pushed two apples into his doublet. The cheese was fouled with gore. He rolled the dead man flat on his back, dragged him out onto the landing and kicked his legs apart. From the kitchen table he grabbed his bow and arrows, and the second bastard sword. With a ditch-digger’s thrust he planted the sword through the dead man’s genitals, the tip biting deep into the wooden planks beneath. He renocked the bloody shaft to the bowstring and headed to the third floor.

At the top of the stair, which was narrower than the one below, he found a shorter landing and only two doors, both of them closed. In the ceiling at the rear a trapdoor hung open. An ingenious folding ladder, which was attached to the trapdoor, hung down from the loft. He looked up. All was dark and quiet. He couldn’t see a way out onto the roof, but there had to be one.

He stopped by a large wicker basket filled with laundry. He heard two male voices from the farther of the two bedrooms, the one at the front of the house. Jean’s screams had not disturbed them, nor had the shouting below; but they’d been ignoring screams and shouts all morning. He unslung his rifle and checked the pan. Since the day before, someone had primed it. The wheel was cocked. He laid the rifle in the laundry basket.

He imagined what to expect. A cramped bedroom, the same size as the kitchen. Furniture, beds, clutter. Obstructions of every kind. Two innocent parties. Two young, untested hostiles. A fair chance of panic. He hadn’t found his pistols.

He unslung the quiver and put it with the rifle. He unbuckled his sword belt and added that, too. He drew the lapis lazuli dagger and took the bow and bloody arrow.

He stood at the first door and listened. Nothing. He turned the handle, threw the door open, drew the arrow. A ransacked bedroom. A man’s shoes. The fragrance of orange water. Daniel Malan’s room. He stopped at the final room.

He had let Carla die. In his mind’s eye he saw her face.

Tannhauser kicked on the door.

‘Jean. Ebert. Put your britches on and come out. The captain wants us.’

Silence fell. Then low, frenzied murmurs. Students, not militia. A debate. They sounded guilty, anxious. No sound from Pascale or Flore. But then silence was the usual response to violence and rape. A reedy male voice piped up.

‘We can’t come out right now. Our regrets.’

‘Tell the captain we will join him later.’

‘Regrets?’ Tannhauser kicked again. ‘You’ll regret a good flogging.’

He heard a key turn in the lock.

‘Listen here, sirrah,’ a voice began, with a stab at lordly authority. ‘We’re not members of your militia and we’re entitled to do as we please. Is that clear?’

At that, as if to dramatise the point, the fellow popped the door open.

Tannhauser was about to stab him when he recognised one of the two actors he had thrashed in the Red Ox the day before. The actor recognised him, too.

He almost screamed: ‘No. No. We saved them. We saved them both.’

Tannhauser pulled the upstroke that was meant to gut him, and smashed the pommel of the dagger through the bridge of his nose. The bones gave way and rivulets of blood snorted forth. Tannhauser kicked the actor’s legs from under him and shoved. The actor hit the floor as Tannhauser entered, the thumb of his dagger hand on the bowstring. He drew and aimed at the second actor, who rose from a chair by the window. He noted that both men had been gouged in the face by fingernails.

‘Sit down or I will kill you. Put both hands under your arse.’

The youth obeyed, his eyes flitting back and forth from the gleaming leather apron to the wet red bodkin aimed at his chest.

‘Are you Jean?’

‘Yes and it’s true,’ said Jean, ‘we saved them both –’

‘Don’t speak. Stare at your balls.’

Jean obeyed.

Tannhauser looked at Pascale and Flore.

They were alive. They were fully dressed. They appeared unharmed. To his shame he felt tears cloud his vision. He lowered the bow and sheathed his dagger. The room contained a double bed, two chairs, a table by the window; sundry jumble and clutter. Pascale and Flore sat on the farther side of the bed. Ebert lay face-down, snivelling blood. Tannhauser stomped on his left ribs.

‘Ebert, crawl under the bed.’

Ebert moaned and snaked across the floor until his head and shoulders were crammed under the bed. He started crying. Ebert had a knife at his waist. Tannhauser took it. It was trash. He threw it out of the door. He stomped on Ebert’s right ribs and felt the cartilages crackle under his heel where they joined the spine. He turned to Jean and took a long butcher’s knife from Jean’s belt. It was new and appeared unused. He held the edge under Jean’s chin while he peered through the window into the street.

‘Got yourself a butcher’s knife, did you, Jean? Fancy yourself a butcher?’

The windowpanes were thick and blurred at their centres, but he could see enough. A mob of around a dozen militiamen were holding a conference upwind of the bonfire. There was a good deal of arm-waving and red-faced recrimination.

Tannhauser turned and looked at Pascale. She wore a red silk scarf around her throat. She looked back at him. For an instant it felt as if the whole world were frozen by her immense and unreckonable woundedness. But he knew that it was an illusion and that the world was moving still, and moving against them.

‘Where are my pistols?’

Each girl held a thin pillow across her lap. Neither of them moved. Tannhauser thought about the long and scalp-crawling terror they must have endured.

‘Forgive me if I’m curt.’ He hadn’t shifted the knife at Jean’s throat. ‘You must be sore distressed, but only the practicalities are material. The pistols?’

From her lap Pascale produced the first of the wheel-lock pistols, holding it in both hands like a short musket. The dog was down on the pan cover.

Flore revealed the second.

‘Are they primed and cocked?’ he asked.

Pascale took a deep breath, as if it were the first she’d taken in a while.

‘If they were not, there’d be no sense in having them.’

‘Perhaps I asked a stupid question.’

‘It was a good question,’ said Flore. ‘Papa showed us how to prime them this morning. They’re loaded, primed and cocked.’

‘May I take charge of the pistols?’

‘Not this one,’ said Pascale.

‘I understand,’ began Tannhauser.

‘No you don’t,’ said Pascale.

‘I intend to travel over the rooftops,’ he said. ‘We can’t so travel with cocked guns. If you’d seen as many men shot by accident as I have, you’d take no offence.’

‘I take no offence,’ said Pascale. ‘And I will not shoot by accident.’

She stood up and pointed the muzzle of the gun at Jean’s chest.

Tannhauser stepped well clear of the bore.

‘Pascale, don’t fire. Let me explain.’

Pascale paused but held her aim. Jean began to shake.

‘We came here to save you, Pascale,’ said Jean. ‘We did save you.’

Before Jean could talk her into shooting him, Tannhauser smashed out his front teeth with the butt end of the butcher’s knife. Jean fell to the floor. He looked up at Tannhauser. His eyes were glassy.

‘I told you not to speak.’

Tannhauser looked at Pascale. Pascale looked at him.

‘Pascale, we are in a dire pickle. We have a long way to go before we’ll be clear of it.’

‘You think we can get clear?’ said Flore.

‘I didn’t come here to die. As you’ve discovered, those pistols come in handy, especially if those clowns in the street don’t know we have them.’

Pascale’s eyes were dark tunnels drilled for the conveyance of pain.’

‘Are you telling me not to kill him?’

‘I’m asking you not to shoot him. We’d be deaf for the rest of the day. If you want to kill him, cold steel is more reliable. But killing is a bridge you cross in only one direction. There’s no way back from the other side, not just in this life, but through all eternity. My advice is to keep your soul clean of murder. More likely than not, you’d regret it.’

‘I do not consider it murder. I do not believe I will regret it.’

‘Listen to him, Pascale,’ said Flore. ‘I believe Papa would say the same.’

‘Father is dead.’

Pascale did not break her gaze away from Tannhauser’s.

‘He is dead, isn’t he? That is what we’ve been breathing all morning. The smell of Father burning?’

‘Yes. He’s dead. They burned him on a pile of the books he had made.’

He heard Flore choke down a cry. Pascale didn’t blink.

‘But I said “more likely than not”. I did not say for certain. I do not know you. Perhaps it is your destiny, to be a killer, whether you regret it or not. Or I should say: perhaps to be a killer is the destiny you will choose, for a destiny must always be chosen, despite that it lies in wait for you to find it.’

‘Do you regret choosing yours?’

‘I crossed that bridge so long ago I can’t remember what lies on the other side.’

‘I waited for you,’ said Pascale.

Tannhauser was taken aback.

‘For me?’

‘For you. You told us you would come.’

Tannhauser didn’t reply.

Pascale’s lips trembled. She clenched them.

‘I waited for you all night. I told Father you would come. I told Flore you would come. And you didn’t come.’

‘Pascale, don’t say this,’ said Flore. ‘He did come, he’s here now.’

‘Then I waited for you all morning. And then they took Father. And they burned him on a pile of the books he had made.’

Pascale’s eyes filmed with tears. Yet she did not let them fall.

Tannhauser felt his own vision blur again.

‘He was the best man in this world,’ said Pascale. ‘He could sing and he could dance. He could speak and write in the ancient tongues. Inside his mind the universe turned ten thousand times a day, so he told me. And I believed him.’

‘I believe him, too,’ said Tannhauser.

‘He was a better man than you.’

‘I do not doubt it. He raised you and Flore.’

Without breaking her gaze, Pascale raised a hand and wiped one eye at a time.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is a dark and bloody day.’

‘It’s a darker and bloodier day than you can know. But I am a dark and bloody man. Let me deal with the practicalities.’

‘I want to deal with the practicalities, too.’

‘There are six men downstairs whose souls already squirm in Hell, and who did their share of squirming as they died. As for these two, if they stand not high in your esteem – the contrary possibility being the only reason I spared them this long – I’d rather they didn’t live to spread my name.’

‘We don’t know your name,’ cried Ebert from beneath the bed.

‘His name is Tannhauser,’ said Pascale. ‘Why don’t you show him your cock like you showed us? Go on. Get it out again.’

Tannhauser looked at Ebert.

Ebert broke wind. ‘We didn’t mean any disrespect.’

‘We came to help you, Pascale,’ said Jean. He rose to his knees, gibbering through the fresh gaps in his teeth. ‘And we did help, didn’t we? We kept the others away from this door, didn’t we? We protected you. We don’t hate Huguenots. By my word, I admire them. We aren’t like the others, we’re not militia.’

‘You brought them here,’ said Pascale. ‘You knew where we lived.’

‘They knew your father,’ said Ebert. ‘They would have come anyway.’

‘They wouldn’t have come so early,’ said Pascale. ‘They wouldn’t have come until later, until tonight, or even tomorrow. They wouldn’t have come two hours ago. They wouldn’t have come before Tannhauser arrived.’

‘We didn’t know Tannhauser was going to arrive,’ blurted Ebert. ‘Though of course we thank God that he did.’

‘We came to take you home with us,’ said Jean. ‘And if you let us, we will.’

‘You mean that dirty garret? Or to meet
Mater
and
Pater
in the grand chateau?’

‘Pascale,’ moaned Jean. ‘Can’t you see I adore you? I’m in love with you.’

Pascale hawked and spat on him.