The Wolves of Paris

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THE WOLVES OF PARIS

by Michael Wallace

copyright 2013 by Michael Wallace

Cover design by Damonza

Chapter One

The two men collecting tolls were craning for a glimpse of Lady d’Lisle’s bottom when the last cart of the day came clattering onto the bridge. The bells of Notre Dame on the Cité had just rung vespers, and the watch was getting ready to drop the portcullis and close the bridge for the night.

The older of the two, a heavy-set man with a gray beard named Etienne, peered through the gloom at the cart, loaded with bolts of wool, pulled by a pair of blowing oxen. The animals struggled to get their footing on the icy stones, and a merchant drove them on, yelling and cursing in a guttural, Flemish tongue. Why the devil was he in such a hurry?

“There she is,” Jacques, the younger man, said, voice high and excited. “There’s her bum!”

“Tell me,” Etienne said, forgetting the latecomer at once. The two men leaned over the parapet of the bridge wall. “Describe it.”

Etienne’s eyes weren’t what they used to be, and he couldn’t see anything in the fading January light but a blur in the dark hole of the garderobe hanging over the river. Lucrezia d’Lisle, widow of the duke, was one of the most beautiful women in Paris. A tall, proud Italian, she was rarely seen in the city, but at one glorious moment every day she would expose her beautiful white bottom in a hole to relieve herself into the river from the third story of the duke’s stately house. And for some reason, only the two toll collectors on the Petit Pont paid it any attention. Etienne didn’t know why every fisherman in the city didn’t linger on the Seine just before dusk to catch that beautiful view.

Alas, no matter how he squinted, he couldn’t actually see Lady d’Lisle’s bottom himself, so he relied on Jacques to describe it for him. Fortunately, the younger man was a former jongleur. He had lost his voice from a bad case of the grippe, but not his poetry with words. Hearing Jacques describe the woman’s bottom was almost better than seeing it. Besides, that way he didn’t have to go home to his wife feeling guilty that he’d been staring at another woman’s bottom.

“Like the white flesh of a pear,” Jacques said. “Carved into two perfect halves, sweet and delicious. Ah, now she’s shifting. What a view, the light is perfect.”

The light was perfect every day at this time, Etienne thought. Even when it was overcast, or snowing, Jacques had no problems seeing her bottom clearly. What luck that they, of all the men in the city, were the ones to be here at this exact moment each and every day.

“What else?” he asked, eagerly.

“Put your hands apart like this,” Jacques said, grabbing Etienne by the wrists and moving the older man’s rough, cracked hands some distance apart. “If you put your palms so, you would just enclose the two cheeks of her bottom.”

“That wide?”

Etienne’s question came out with a whistle between two cracked teeth. He flushed picturing it and for a moment didn’t feel the damp breeze or smell the stench as men on the opposite bank unloaded carts of offal into the river.

“And her hips?” Etienne asked. “Can you see those?”

“Oh, yes, can I ever.”

They finished crossing the bridge, and at last the Flemish merchant stopped beating his poor animals. The man looked around him, at the left bank of the river, and the homes and shops crowding the riverbank, the fisherman dragging their wooden coracles out of the river for the night.

“One to pass,” he said, panting and blowing like his animals. “Plus two oxen. And goods.”

His French was good, and as the man drew closer and came into focus, Etienne thought he’d met this one before. So what was he so worked up about?

“You’ll want to see this,” Etienne said. He pointed up at the overhanging upper floor of Lady d’Lisle’s manor. “Do you see the garderobe? Jacques, tell him. Hurry, before she finishes.”

The trader paid the scene no attention, but reached inside his robes and removed a purse. “I have,” he began, still panting, “twelve bolts of wool and two of linen. What is the toll?”

“Hold on,” Etienne said, annoyed. “This is the only time of day we can see this.”

“The toll, man? Hurry, what is it? I must get in.”

“Let me see, um. Twelve and two . . . uh, two animals and a cart. One man. You’re alone, you say?” He figured on his fingers, frowning. Twenty, no that couldn’t be right. “Fourteen deniers,” he said at last.

The man pulled out a pair of silver pennies. “Two sous. Now step aside and let me in.”

Etienne leaned forward and squinted to get a closer look at the man, suddenly suspicious. The trader was a young, smooth-faced man, with a hint of a mustache on his upper lip. He wore an unsheathed dagger at his belt, and a crossbow slung over his shoulder. Had that really been a Flemish accent? It wasn’t English, was it? Or maybe this was a Burgundian spy. His behavior was suspicious enough. Overpaying the toll? Whoever heard of that?

“Why are you traveling alone?”

“I wasn’t, not at first. They killed Jan at Provins. Pieter last night.” His words came out in a tumble. “And now they’re after me. I must reach the Cité. I’ll be safer on the island.”

“But you’re in the city already,” Jacques said, indicating the opposite bank with a sweep of the hand, where the college and the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés lay.

With the fighting over for the moment and three years since the last plague, the areas outside the walls that had once fallen into disrepair were slowly being rebuilt. The college was expanding again. Everyone said the war with the English would be over soon.

Etienne gave a final, disappointed glance up the river. Lady d’Lisle would be long gone by now, and the light was failing anyway. At their rear, the cries of the bread sellers were dying, the clank of blacksmith hammers on anvils coming to a halt. Dogs barked from narrow alleys. In streets off the Rue de Glatigny, young
fillettes
of the night hung red lanterns from pegs on the second floor of timbered houses. As soon as they closed the bridge, Etienne would trudge home to his wife and daughters off the Rue de la Pelleterie, while Jacques would go straightaway to the nearest tavern.

Later, when the children had fallen asleep, Etienne and his wife would fumble beneath the blankets, and then his wife would be frustrated—there was something wrong these days, no denying it. Etienne still wanted to, still loved his wife. But these days it took heroic feats of imagination to get his knight standing tall in the saddle. And tonight he wouldn’t be able to picture Lady d’Lisle’s bottom, since Jacques had only begun when this beardless boy interrupted the telling.

That was a problem for later. Right now, he puzzled over what had this young man so frightened. Did this warrant a report to the watch sergeant at the gate?

“Were you beset by bandits?” he asked.

The man rubbed his hand through his hair. He glanced behind him, eyes wide, frantic. “No, not bandits.”

“Were they French? English?”

“I don’t know, for God’s sake, let me pass!”

He held out the silver pennies and Etienne let them fall into his hand with a clink. As Etienne accepted the toll, Jacques walked around to the back of the cart. He pulled back a rough wool blanket, stiff with ice, to inspect the man’s cargo.

“Looks good to me,” Jacques said. “What do you think?”

Etienne’s irritation at the interruption had faded. Now he wanted it done with. And he had two silver pennies, against a toll of fourteen deniers. Never mind why, the two men could divide the difference and the tollmaster would be none the wiser.

“Fine, fine. Wave him in.”

He hadn’t finished speaking before the trader was urging his oxen into motion. After such a hard ride, animals would often balk, refuse to go on until dragged, cajoled, and whipped. But these two animals, tired, thin from day after day on the road, resumed at once.

“Rough business,” Jacques said to Etienne, “losing both your traveling companions on one trip. There is a song in there somewhere.” He put a hand to his throat and sighed.

“What the devil has him so frightened?” Etienne asked, still staring at the trader as he disappeared beneath the gatehouse.

“It’s none of our worry. Make change for those pennies, will you. I want my share.”

Etienne opened the toll purse that hung at his belt and sifted out a few of the black coins taken throughout the day—various Lombard, English, and French coins made of base metal—to make change for the silver pennies. He divided the overpayment with Jacques.

Etienne squinted across the bridge. Almost dark now. “That’s it then. Go rouse the tollmaster. I’ll clear the bridge.”

His sabots clacked as he left his companion and crossed the Petit Pont toward the left bank of the river. Every third or fourth step a squish replaced the slap of wood on stone. The bridge was quieter in winter, and the chill hardened the dung, but his sabots were still filthy by the time he reached the opposite side. Out of habit, his hand dropped to the pommel of the short sword belted to his waist. He rarely drew it—the last time had been over a year ago, the day after Michaelmas, when a band of lepers tried to march across the bridge, complaining that the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés had been stingy with their alms.

Etienne saw nothing, and it was not so dark nor his eyesight so feeble that someone could have hidden on the narrow stone span without his seeing. There wasn’t a proper guard tower on the other side, but a squat building that straddled the bridge, one wall crumbling. A portcullis had once dropped here, too, but security in the city, while improving, wasn’t what it had been in the days when Etienne’s grandfather was a young man—before the war, before the Black Death.

His task was only to clear the bridge, and he was turning on his heel to clomp back across when a dog’s insistent barking caught his ear. There should have been nothing special about that—they came out by the dozens every evening to pick through the offal heaps, dead chickens, and other refuse along the riverbank. Nasty, vermin-infested beasts, their chief competition the rats that nested beneath the bridge and in grainhouses south of the Lord Mayor’s mill. The dogs barked and screwed and fought all night long, causing a racket that could be heard on the other side of the river.

But this barking was deeper, more insistent. Sounded like a mastiff, not a street dog. The kind of animal that protected a noble’s manor house, lurking around the property to set upon trespassers and tear their throats out. It barked and barked and nobody yelled at it to shut up. It sounded like it was just beyond the crumbling gatehouse and down the narrow lane to the right. That street was lined with rickety hovels, the passage no wider than a man’s shoulders. Not the place one expected to find a rich man’s dog. It had probably found itself surrounded by a pack of street dogs, nipping at its heels.

And, he realized, an animal like that was valuable. There might be a reward for the man who found its home.

Etienne was curious enough to pass beneath the deep shadows of the gatehouse and take a look into the street beyond. Rats scrabbled out of the way as he entered their territory, and the dank air hung heavy with the stench of animal and human filth. He was relieved to reach the clear again. There was the dog, a broad-shouldered figure at the mouth of the narrow alley, back turned. It stopped barking and let out a low growl. The hair bristled on its neck. It stared into the darkness at something Etienne couldn’t see.

Etienne whistled to get the animal’s attention before he got too close. Last thing he wanted was to startle the thing. It really was a big animal, with a broad head and heavy jaws. Big enough to hunt boars or protect a flock in the countryside.

“What’s got you so upset?” he said. “You lost your master?”

The dog didn’t turn, but kept growling. The muscles on its shoulder quivered. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea.

Etienne was about to give up and return to the bridge when three shapes appeared in the alley beyond the dog. It was growing darker by the moment and Etienne had to squint, but as he picked them out, he drew back in surprise. Three more dogs, not as broad at the shoulders as the first, but big enough. They faced the mastiff, growling. The bigger dog was outnumbered—why didn’t it turn and run?

Instead, the mastiff stood its ground as the other three leaped in for the attack. One of the dogs came at its throat. Two others attacked its underbelly. The four animals rolled in a heap of biting, snarling fury.

Any thoughts Etienne had of seizing the mastiff and finding its owner in hopes of a reward fled from his mind. Unable to take his eyes from the struggle, he backed up until he was beneath the ruined gatehouse. His heart pounded with fear.

The fight ended in seconds. The mastiff lay dead, belly opened, throat gushing blood into the dirt. The others stopped savaging the corpse and looked in Etienne’s direction. The biggest let out a low growl. Its eyes glowed with a savage, demonic light. Etienne’s stomach dropped out. He turned and fled.