Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (93 page)

Pascale let go of his arm. She nodded.

Tannhauser put a hand on Grymonde’s shoulder and squeezed.

‘My Infant, I have business on shore, with a boy and a bucket.’

‘You are a stubborn man.’

‘It’s a good day for being stubborn. Do as Pascale tells you.’

‘I’ve become accustomed to taking orders from children and women,’ said Grymonde. ‘I recommend it.’

‘If in doubt break the boom, for La Rossa and the nightingale.’

Tannhauser started down the causeway.

‘So what’s in this bucket?’ called Grymonde.

Tannhauser didn’t answer. No point upsetting Carla.

The last circle was waiting to be closed.

At the place of dead monkeys.

TANNHAUSER UNSLUNG ALTAN’S
bow and drew four arrows. The string was bloody but the Turks wove them with such conditions in mind. Pure silk spun straight from the cocoon, and stiffened with isinglass and resin. He nocked and stopped by the impaled and sodden corpse. The last flatboat was deserted, an open grave for any who dared try to cross it. Tannhauser looked at the Pilgrims on the jetty, thirty feet away. They sneered and scowled, and one displayed his arse, but their invitations to battle couldn’t disguise their hope that he’d decline. Some were sincere in their truculence, but it was a rare man who had the nerve to be the one to start a war.

Taken as a whole, they just wanted him to leave.

A hundred feet east of the jetty, Garnier aped a general stunned by events passably well, but he lacked the experience that made a general a general, good or bad: that of sending an uncertain number of his men to their certain deaths, and watching them die for nothing.

Dominic might have done better. But if Tannhauser’s intuitions were right, Dominic’s severed head was in Orlandu’s bucket.

He couldn’t think of any other use for the bucket, unless Orlandu had decided to deliver milk to the troops. If there was a head in there, he could think of no other head it might be. Orlandu had gone from the bridge to the Hôtel Le Tellier. He had waited behind the door by the piled slain. When Dominic had returned in search of Petit Christian, he had found the chandelier embellished with his father’s face.

It took iron in the gut to saw through a man’s spine. Especially one-handed, with a knife. Every eye ashore was fixed on Tannhauser but they were watching the wrong man. Tannhauser looked up the beach.

Orlandu was passing through a scatter of Pilgrims. They paid him little mind. He was one of them, the disciple of Marcel Le Tellier, no less. He had tied red and white ribbons around his wounded arm. His face was in shadow but Tannhauser sensed the light in his eyes. He must have seen Tannhauser, and Grymonde, and the chidren and his mother in the skiff. He was too intelligent not to read the field, the situation too peculiar not to strike him for what it was. All combatants were inclined to go their ways without further bloodshed. Even Tannhauser, or he’d have been hard at them already.

Orlandu was the man who had the nerve.

He aimed to make amends for starting one war by starting yet another. A practice hallowed by a thousand kings.

He’d get Garnier to look at the head, then he’d stab him. A grand gesture on a grand stage; followed, in all likelihood, by heroic death, perhaps even immortality.

Tannhauser understood. Not only Orlundu’s need to right the wrong he had done, but that excruciating tension whose allure transgressed and transcended all other experience. He understood why that feeling was worth dying for. It gave him no joy to steal another man’s thunder; but the price Carla would pay was too high.

If Tannhauser summoned him to the boom, Orlandu could probably make the forty yards across the beach without anyone trying to stop him. If he refused, Tannhauser, at this range, could put a broadhead though Garnier’s thighs for a certainty. That done, Orlandu’s bucket might as well contain milk. With his grand stage in turmoil and his moment gone, he would heed the call of survival, though the odds would be thinner.

Orlandu reached the foot of the broad wooden stair. Garnier glanced down at him, and away, as if the youth were irrelevant to his troubles. Orlandu was just eight steps from the wharf and another reckless lunge for redemption. Tannhauser feared to endanger him with too particular a greeting; and he wanted a space around him to create a killing zone for any rash enough to enter it. He let him climb three steps and called out.

‘We’re ready to go.’

Orlandu stopped and looked at him.

Garnier, his bombast undiminished by shame, mistook Tannhauser’s intention.

‘Then for God’s sake go!’ he said. ‘I have no power to pursue you!’

The moon shone full on Garnier’s face. He was sweating in his steel plate. His flag had been pissed on, his private army decimated, his day of glory defiled. Beneath the rage and malice, he exuded self-pity and fear.

Tannhauser said, ‘The Devil requires thy soul of thee tonight.’

Garnier put his fist to his heart, as if to lend himself a flavour of gallantry.

‘I was never Le Tellier’s man. I admired you. None of this was necessary.’

Orlandu hadn’t moved, though his options must have been clear.

Tannhauser gestured to the vast and howling necropolis.

‘Speak not to me of what was necessary.’

‘Don’t you hear me, chevalier? I yield. You’ve won.’

Orlandu turned away, as if the struggle with his conscience was done. He set the bucket down. He was going to submit to reason. If Tannhauser could spin out this farce for another minute, Orlandu would be on the boom before anyone noticed, much less cared. Garnier, disturbed by his silence, proved a fine fellow buffoon.

‘You take all the honours, man. What more do you want?’

Tannhauser caught a glimpse of blue at Garnier’s throat. He’d recognised Carla’s scarf when Garnier left the Hôtel Le Tellier, and had guessed how she had used it.

‘Is that my wife’s scarf you’re wearing?’

Someone guffawed. A gust of nervous laughter blew across the square.

Tannhauser grinned. Let them warm to him, if that was possible.

Garnier lifted the scarf from round his neck as if it were a noose.

Orlandu pulled a cloth from the mouth of the bucket.

Tannhauser’s scalp clenched.

The fanatic’s son was going to show Garnier the head. He wasn’t vacating his stage, he was taking it back. Tannhauser understood that, too, but it was no longer a matter of conscience. The wrong had been righted well enough when he murdered Dominic.

‘You. The man with one arm and a bucket. Fetch me Carla’s scarf.’

Orlandu dropped the cloth but neither turned nor straightened up.

‘Carla is tired and I am impatient. Do not test my goodwill.’

Orlandu hesitated.

He reached in the bucket.

He had to declare his manhood.

It was time to see at what cost.

As Orlandu hoisted Dominic’s head by its hair, Tannhauser drew and shot.

The weight of the pull was enormous. The Turkish string sang like a harp.

Orlandu flung the head up the steps, but no one much noticed.

The broadhead ploughed through Garnier’s crotch a thumb’s width below his cuirass. It must have hit a heavy bone, for it spun him around like some gigantic marionette. He hit the timbers with a sound so dire his troops moaned with him. Dominic’s head rolled to a stop inches in front of his face, but his agony was more compelling than the sight of it.

Tannhauser nocked. While the Pilgrims gaped at their captain’s fall, and before the spectacle provoked them to revolt, Tannhauser gave them something else to watch.

‘Fetch me the scarf, man. Now. Or I’ll drop you on the spot and find some other to fill your shoes.’

Orlandu looked at him. He didn’t expect to get shot, but the deeper interpretations did not elude him. He nodded. He turned and climbed the steps.

‘Leave your trophy where it lies. Your mates can admire it later.’

The threat, along with the suggestion that the head was that of some poor Huguenot, should seal the masquerade. Tannhauser watched the watchers.

Orlandu stooped and pulled the scarf from under Garnier’s body. If Garnier now knew that Orlandu was no Pilgrim, he conveyed the fact only with guttural grunts of pain. Orlandu walked along the edge of the square to the jetty. Several Pilgrims muttered encouragement. Orlandu stepped down into the flatboat. He looked at Tannhauser.

Tannhauser beckoned him, his eyes still on the mob.

Orlandu walked the length of the boat and Tannhauser stepped back. Orlandu climbed across the chain and into the stern. He proffered the scarf. He was scared; he was sick; he was weak; and he hid it all well. But not from Tannhauser.

‘Give it to your mother.’

‘She won’t want to take it from me.’

‘Carla would take it from you if it carried the plague. I told her you were buying time we didn’t need. Since you bought that in plenty, you’ve no good reason to gainsay me.’

‘The truth is a bad reason?’

‘The truth serves only your vanity. She already has one baby to feed.’

Orlandu flinched.

‘You proved what you needed to prove to me,’ said Tannhauser. ‘If you didn’t prove it to yourself the venture was a failure and you’re still a boy. That’s for you to decide. All your mother needs to know is that you’re alive. So I ask you, man to man, to spare her your guilt, your truth, your metaphysical doubts, and whatever other hogwash you’ve been dining on.’

Orlandu tucked the scarf in his sling.

‘I bought time you didn’t need.’

‘We’d didn’t need the time to get away. But I’m grateful for every minute.’

Orlandu didn’t understand. He couldn’t imagine what his return meant to Carla. Such ignorance was a son’s birthright; and a certain sort of stupidity the privilege of youth.

‘I’m grateful for Dominic, too,’ said Tannhauser, ‘if that head be his.’

Orlandu pulled a knife from the sling and cut the ribbons from his arm.

‘It was the vilest thing I ever did.’

‘I’m glad to hear that. Your mother need not.’

‘She won’t.’

Tannhauser slapped him on the back and stood aside.

‘Tell Grymonde to break the boom.’

Orlandu walked by. Tannhauser almost told him not to fall in the water, but to a Maltese, even one sore wounded, the insult would have been too great. He watched him pick his way through the bloodbath and cross the gap to the third lighter. Tannhauser was exhausted down to bones he didn’t know he had, and he was testy, but he reckoned that the privilege of age. He turned back to the jetty.

The conversation had taken place beyond earshot of the Pilgrims, though Tannhauser had kept one eye on their puzzlement. Now that they had their solution, and could add treachery, deception and the pleasure of being gulled to their humiliations, they were enraged. The tide of oaths and insults was more heartfelt than before, but he saw none who wanted to die so close to bedtime.

He asked himself why his life had made him so familiar with such swine, but before he had a chance to mount an answer, a scream echoed across the beach. The scream was of so harrowing a quality even Tannhauser might have been moved had it not been Bernard Garnier’s. Gut, muscle and bone. The edges Altan had honed on the arrowhead were carving the captain’s entrails with every breath and squirm. Garnier screamed again.

‘By the blood of Saint-Jacques!’

Tannhauser heard a man praying for a miracle, but a figure knelt by the captain, and he heard it different. He stood up. It was Ensign Bonnett. Since Tannhauser had left Notre-Dame, the zealous little turd had inconvenienced him more than any other. His first instinct was to shoot him, but again the provocation seemed unwise. He hesitated and learned again why he mistrusted the practice.

‘By the blood of Saint-Jacques!’ shouted Bonnett. ‘For God and the King!’

The mob roared, at first without form. The rallying cry was taken up.

Tannhauser shot Ensign Bonnett in the chest.

Bonnett dropped across his master and exacerbated his anguish.

Tannhauser turned away.

He saw Orlandu slide over the gunwale into the skiff.

Grymonde had both hands on the halberd but wasn’t cranking it.

Pascale was shouting in his face.

‘Pascale,’ called Tannhauser. ‘All aboard.’

She stopped and looked at him. Tannhauser pointed at the skiff.

He turned back to the mob.

A surge from the rear of the jetty pushed two Pilgrims to stumble into the flatboat. A third jumped in behind them of his own accord, and then a fourth. Tannhauser let an untidy file assemble, then drew and shot the Pilgrim in front. The fletchings vanished through his belly and he fell, and the man behind him sank to his knees with the bloody feathers protruding from his privates. Tannhauser nocked the last of the arrows in his fist and pinned the next two together like a pair of rutting dogs. His shoulders ached already from the weight of Altan’s bow. He stretched them as he looked back.

Grymonde was cranking the halberd under the cleat. He paused after each movement as atrocious spasms waxed and waned within his body. Only Paris could have made him; only Paris could have brought him down. Everything he had left, and, had his heart not been so great, that would have been nothing, was thrown into his final task, of liberating the children who had liberated him.

Tannhauser would be sorry to leave the Infant behind. He was relieved not to see Pascale. Everyone who needed to be in the skiff was in it, except he.

He turned again.

The fervour on the jetty had cooled, the invasion of the flatboat abandoned.

On the beach, the wharf, the square, jeers and battle cries continued, though those who voiced them showed no inclination to move. God. King. Saint-Jacques. Saint-Jacques.

By his holy blood.

Blood, blood, blood.

They wouldn’t have vexed him so much if they’d known what they were talking about. Tannhauser’s skin was caked in a blackening slurry, in places half an inch thick. He was covered in the blood of men he despised. His body was as drained as he had ever known it to be. His belly was empty. He was thirsty. His loins ached. So did his feet.