Death in Gascony (6 page)
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
T
EN
days later D’Artagnan had to admit to the undisputable superiority of the method of travel which involved money and the ability to command inns and taverns for one’s comfort over traveling alone, on a horse of odd color and with no better patrimony than a letter.
They’d sent Monsieur de Treville’s horses back at the first stop and proceeded on the well-rested attackers’ horses. After that, given the sudden wealth from the attackers’ purses, they’d been able to command fresh horses at every stop, and did not have to worry about injuring their mounts or themselves by riding too long on tired, stumbling animals.
In a way, that might not be the best of ideas, D’Artagnan thought, as they dismounted in the yard of a hostelry just inside the walls of Nérac.
They’d come fast indeed, climbing into the Haut Pyrenees with very little account for their rest, much less for D’Artagnan’s wound, taken the rolling hills between the Lot and the Garonne at a dead gallop and finally crossed the Garonne near Barbaste.
Now they were in Nérac, the town of Henri IV, where his castle loomed over the city like some ancient temple—or at least like the memory of times past. That those times were pleasant seemed to make no difference, since they were well and truly lost. As was the memory of the Gascon King who had thought Paris to be “well worth a Mass.” As was—D’Artagnan sighed heavily—the younger D’Artagnan who had cantered through Nérac last spring, alive to all the beauties of the place that was often called the Gascon Athens.
Back then, his head had been full of nothing but what the town must have looked like when Queen Marguerite made her court here. His nose had been full of nothing but the smell of flowers from the great garden by the river.
Now he returned tired and heavy with fatigue. His wound remained red, as though outraged at the treatment D’Artagnan gave it, riding these long days into the hills of Gascony. Its inflamed, suppurating depths discharged blood and pus onto the ligatures that protected his shirt.
Sometimes, when they finally stopped for the night, he would find that his shirt had become glued to the dressings and he would change in silence to avoid his friends’ attention to his state.
His friends suspected it or suspected that not everything was as it should be with him. Not that D’Artagnan expected otherwise. One thing it was to lace ones doublet tight and to ride all day and not complain of fatigue or pain. Another and completely different to manage the easy banter he normally exchanged with his friends. And yet another, even more difficult, to not flinch as he dismounted, and not exclaim when someone ran into him in the dark corridors of one of the inns.
These last two were entirely beyond D’Artagnan’s willpower and he knew they had long since given him away. But as long as he refused to discuss it, as long as he refused to let them see the wound itself, they could not tell him he must stop. After all, his pretending to be well was the equivalent of his telling them he was well. To challenge it, they would perforce need to challenge his word. And that was reason enough for a duel.
Not that—D’Artagnan thought, as the stable boys took the horses away and he stared at the stone facade of the spacious inn—he could now win a duel against them. But perhaps because of that, and because of their friendship for him, none of them would challenge his word or ask about his health.
The stones seemed to blur together in his vision and the grapevine trunks that stood, stark, beside the inn yard, seemed to writhe like brown snakes. He blinked and wondered if he had a fever.
It wouldn’t be surprising considering the pace of their travel. He should delay. He should rest. He should reveal his unhealed wound to his friends and wait a while longer.
But he couldn’t. He was less than three days from his home, at the pace they’d been going, and he must hasten home.
When he’d left from Paris, in high enough spirits, though afflicted by grief and filled with filial regret, he had thought to hurry home to console his mother and take up the unwanted burden of his father’s duty. In his mind, if distantly, had been the Greek and Roman poems and treatises he’d studied—the duties of the loyal son, the duties of a nobleman.
Those had been reason enough to hasten home, but not to brave this type of ride with an unhealed wound. But the wound, the wound itself and the manner of receiving it—those were reason to break with all reason and logic and to hasten to his mother’s side as soon as possible. Because the fact that someone had attacked him by the roadside—whether by order of the Cardinal or not—joined to his father’s sudden and violent death to make D’Artagnan fear that there was some awful plot afoot and some terrible crime in all this. It made him fear that his mother, herself, was in danger. Or else that his domain was at the center of a dispute.
A ridiculous thought, when one considered his entire domain was little more than a bastide and some fields. But yet…But yet what else could he think?
“I think we’ve overshot our mark, and we’re in Spain,” Porthos said loudly, breaking into D’Artagnan’s revery.
Startled, the young man brought his swimming vision to focus on his friends who stood before a corpulent man in a clean apron. Aramis and Athos were a little aside and seemed to be conferring, leaving Porthos to his own devices—something always a little chancy. And Porthos, staring at the man, had just expressed his opinion loudly.
“Porthos! We are not in Spain,” D’Artagnan said, hastening forward. “Nérac is not Spanish. Why, it is the birthplace of Henri IV.”
Porthos turned back. His red eyebrows were furrowed over his eyes which were, in turn, squinting with the effort at understanding. “But we must be,” he said, “because this man does not speak French at all. And what he says sounds very much like Spanish.”
D’Artagnan turned his attention to the man who spoke to him, volubly. Through D’Artagnan’s swimming senses only two words struck home, but those were enough. It was
lenga
and
Gascona
.
D’Artagnan felt tears prickle behind his eyes at the words—it was enough to tell him he had come home. To the man he said, in the native Gascon dialect, “I’m sorry. My friends are strangers. We need your most spacious room and dinner sent up to it. Also water for washing.”
And before the man could answer, he turned to Porthos. “He speaks the Gascon language, Porthos,” he said, softly, reminding himself that Porthos barely spoke his own native French and therefore could not be held responsible for knowing or speaking any other language, or even showing respect to it. “Not Spanish. No more French.”
Porthos frowned. “Ah,” he said. Then frowned again. “But we’ve been in Gascony for some time, so how come…”
D’Artagnan shrugged. “It is just that as we go farther into Gascony we will find more people whose main language it is and who speak hardly any other. Though in my village, down in the foothills, they speak some Spanish as readily as some French. But mostly they speak Gascon. The language of my people.”
Porthos frowned on him slightly, as though trying to understand what any sane man might want with more than one language, but before he could find his way through the thicket of words in his own mind, the host spoke again, in a fast dialect—so fast that D’Artagnan, away from home for many months, had to strain to follow it.
“I don’t think you wish to say here, sir,” he said, speaking quickly. “I don’t think our inn is very healthy, and I would be loath to see something befall you.”
D’Artagnan frowned. In his limited experience he had never had a tavern keeper or inn host warn him away from his own place and the idea struck strangely.
“Athos,” he called to the older musketeer, who had approached. “This man says we shouldn’t stay here because it isn’t healthy.”
“Not…” Athos said, then looked straight at D’Artagnan. “D’Artagnan, I scarce understand what he’s saying, save for my knowledge of Latin which patches over some of my ignorance of the language, but…Are you sure he didn’t say that you are not healthy enough to stay in his hostelry? Because, D’Artagnan, you look like you’re suffering from some dread plague.”
D’Artagnan nodded and swallowed. This made sense. No hostelry owner wanted someone to die of some plague in his hostelry. At worst it would cause authorities to close it. At best, it would make all other travelers avoid it, lest the vapors of the illness should linger and make them sicken in turn.
And as sick as he felt, as much as words seemed to reach him through a veil of low-level buzzing like a hundred angry bees, he might very well have misunderstood what the man said. “Look,” he told the man. “I am not ill. I just have a wound that is troubling me. I must get a room here as soon as possible, and ointment for my wound, or I might die of fatigue.”
The host hesitated. He looked at D’Artagnan, then from him to the three musketeers who had clustered behind him, partly in the confusion of those who do not speak the tongue, and partly waiting for a decision.
“Your friends,” he said. “I reckon they are all fighters, fast and fierce with their swords, are they not?” And then, with a deep sigh, as though exhaling the troubles of his soul. “I guess there would be no harm in letting you have the lodging.”
Did the man think D’Artagnan was threatening him with his and the other musketeers’ prowess with the swords? Certainly even here, as far as they were from Paris, the uniform of the King’s Musketeers would be known. And considering what the musketeers were capable of and the—mostly true—stories told about their roguery and violence, the man might have a reason to feel threatened.
D’Artagnan started to open his mouth to tell the man that he didn’t mean him any harm and that none of his friends would raise sword towards an innocent man. But then he thought better of it.
He needed to lie down. He needed to sleep. Feeling as he felt, his brain might very well be in the grip of a fever. And if not, then he’d managed to bleed enough on horseback today for his mind to be unable to focus. In either case, leaving here, looking for a hostelry in the thick of the town and perhaps being turned away at a few others could very well mean his death.
Or, if not his death, it might well mean he would be truly ill tomorrow and unable to proceed in his journey home. And he must hurry home. Even now, who knew what perils his mother was facing and what threatened his house and family?
So instead of denying any possibility of violence, he shrugged, a movement which hurt his shoulder, and said, “We can defend ourselves well enough.”
In a land of gasconades and exaggerated threats, this might very well have seemed paltry, but it was clear that the man already had, in his mind, an idea of how dangerous musketeers could be, because he only sighed again and nodded. “Very well then.”
He called out and a dark-haired urchin emerged from the shadows and, upon instruction, led them up the stairs to a room, which took up most of the space over what—from the sounds and the smells emerging from it—must be busy kitchens.
D’Artagnan, taking in the broad, clean-looking room, with oak flooring, fresh rushes on the floor and the sort of beds that were little more than pallets—only four mattresses set upon the barest of frames—sent up mental thanks for the separate beds. In some of the hostelries in which they’d stayed they’d had to share the beds two and two and, in one of them, all four. Getting elbowed by Porthos’s giant arms in the night probably had a lot to do with how mauled he felt.
But here—he thought, turning back to the beds to discover surprisingly clean sheets and blankets, smelling of sun and wind—here he would sleep well. And tomorrow he would be well enough to go on with the travel. He must be. His mother needed him. Of this he was sure.
He heard, as if a long way off, disconnected sounds—his friends splashing water—doubtless in the lone washstand in the room—then banging dishes about, and Porthos’s surprised exclamation, “The paste is made from the livers of what? And what do they do with the rest of the goose?”
He didn’t remember either the water being delivered or the food being brought in. Somehow, he’d lain down on one of the beds, and he felt as if the whole world were receding before this present comfort of being off his feet and not being bounced about by a horse.
“D’Artagnan,” Athos said, as if from very far away. “Are you sure you will have no food?”
“Oh, let the boy be,” Porthos said. “He’s been looking like curdled milk all day. Perhaps he ate something that didn’t agree with him.”
“I don’t think so,” Aramis’s voice said, calculatingly. “I don’t think so. I think it’s his wound paining him.”
“But didn’t he use the Gascon balm?” Porthos asked.
“The jar was broken. He should have rested instead of pressing on.”
“He feels a duty to his house and family,” Athos said.
Aramis made a sound that wasn’t quite a sigh and wasn’t quite a tone of exasperation. “You and your duty, Athos. What you don’t understand is that such a sense of duty is really the sin of pride. You hold yourself to such a duty as if you were immortal and not cut of mortal cloth. When our Lord came to the world—”
D’Artagnan could see in his mind’s eye as Aramis lectured Athos on the path of holiness, and he wished he was awake enough to laugh. But he wasn’t, and therefore he let himself sink, deeper and deeper into the well of sleep, till he could hear no more.
The Very Odd Habits of Gascon Cutthroats;
The Finer Points of Treason
D
’ARTAGNAN
woke up with the sound of a knife sliding on its sheath and a voice whispering in the Gascon language, “Which of them?”
Another voice answered, in a whisper, also in Gascon, “The dark-haired one.”
“But there’s two dark-haired ones.”
Through D’Artagnan’s still-foggy mind, the thought went that his friends had learned to speak Gascon very fast. But neither of the voices sounded like his friends’ voices, and then there was that knife, the sound of it. Truth, they used knives to eat with, but there were no sounds of eating.
He opened his eyes. There were two men—
He had no time to see beyond that. Two men. Two men he didn’t know, and they were standing by the table. At the table, D’Artagnan’s friends sat and for a moment—for a cold, heart-stopping moment—the youth thought they were dead. But their heads were down on the table, and in front of them the remains of what seemed like a cyclopic repast. And Porthos was snoring.
The two men stood by the table hesitating.
“We could cut all their throats,” one of them said.
“No,” the other one said. “You know his orders very well. Only the dark-haired one and no more.”
“But there are—” and in saying it, the intruder, who spoke Gascon, and who was short and dark, turned to look towards the bed and met with D’Artagnan’s gaze. “
Ventre saint gris
, he looks—”
He never said what it was that D’Artagnan looked, because D’Artagnan had fortuitously realized that he’d been so tired on arriving at the inn that he’d dropped right to sleep without so much as removing his scabbard and sword. His hand, as though moved by a keener mind than his foggy brain, had already grabbed hold of the blade.
Jumping across the room, ignoring the shots of pain from his shoulder, he screamed as he moved, “Athos, Porthos, Aramis. Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
Porthos opened one eye. His snore stopped. But the other man had pulled out a sword and was coming at D’Artagnan, while the one with the knife backed away towards the side of the table. This left D’Artagnan free to concentrate on the man with the sword.
The man was neither swift, nor by any means as good as the duelists D’Artagnan was used to facing in the capital. He held his sword like a cutthroat and came at D’Artagnan full of intent and malice. But he lost both when D’Artagnan retaliated and soon was backing away very quickly, while the young Gascon pressed home his advantage.
Only the intruder maneuvered towards the door and, opening it, dropped his sword and ran down the stairs. D’Artagnan ran after him. He had no more than left the room, though, than he heard the ruffian left inside say, “Come back inside and drop your sword, or I cut your friend’s throat.”
D’Artagnan looked over and realized that Athos was still sleeping, and that the man had his knife at Athos’s throat. There was nothing for it but to back inside the room and drop his sword.
As the sword fell to the floor, the intruder pulled the knife away from Athos’s throat and said, “Ah, I knew you would—”
He never said what his prescience had warned him of though, because at that moment Porthos rose, swiftly, lifting his chair above his head.
The giant redhead brought the chair down on the intruder’s head, just as D’Artagnan—who had been as swift to retrieve his sword—ran the man through.
Doubly mortally wounded, the ruffian made scarcely a sound as he sank to the ground. D’Artagnan withdrew his sword and wiped it on the man’s clothes, and looked up at Porthos. “Why didn’t Athos and Aramis wake?” he asked.
Porthos shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Only that I still feel sleepy, as though I had cobwebs upon my senses.”
D’Artagnan—ignoring his shoulder, which was hurting him more than he was willing to admit even to himself—went to the table and swiftly checked both Aramis’s and Athos’s pulses. He’d no more reassured himself that both were alive, than a splash of water fell over all three of them.
Looking up, D’Artagnan saw Porthos holding the empty washbasin. He was about to protest, but Athos was stirring and so was Aramis and both, by the sound of it, in a temper. Aramis said, “Porthos? God’s wounds, this is my good doublet.”
Athos exclaimed something more to the point and yet more profane. Looking up at the larger musketeer, Athos looked like he was keeping his temper barely in check as he said, “Have you taken leave of your senses, Porthos?”
“No, but you see, we couldn’t wake you any other way.”
“Wake us? Why…” And at this moment Athos stopped, as though only then realizing that they were in a room that would be pitch dark, save for the glow of the moon coming through the two windows. Judging from the food on the table, D’Artagnan guessed that they’d gone to sleep shortly after eating, which would be at sunset.
Athos ran his hand over his face. “How long did I sleep?”
Porthos shook his head. “I don’t know, as I just woke, with the man saying he had a knife to your throat.”
“Man?” Aramis said, and turning around looked at D’Artagnan. “D’Artagnan, why does he speak in riddles?”
D’Artagnan pointed to the man on the floor. “That man. He and his accomplice came in…somehow. I don’t know whether through the window or through the door. I woke up with them in the room discussing whether they should kill me or you, Athos. I engaged in a duel with one of them, who escaped, and then this one…”
“A duel?” Athos asked.
“A duel. And you and Aramis slept through it, though Porthos gave some indication of waking up.”
“Aye,” Porthos said. He was pouring water from the washing jar over his head, as he leaned over the empty washing basin. He shook his hair, like a dog coming out of a river, splashing them all liberally. “I woke up, or at least you could call it that, only I was still…I felt as though I weren’t quite awake. Still do, in a way.”
“The wine,” Athos said. And reached for an almost empty bottle on the table, smelling it. “I don’t smell anything, but it must be the wine.”
“How do you come to that conclusion?” Aramis asked.
“Well,” Athos said. “D’Artagnan is the only one of us who did not have the drink, and the only one of us who woke up immediately, when someone entered our room. Porthos was the second most alert one, and he would be, being the largest. The dosage of whatever the potion might be would be smallest for him. While Aramis is the lightest one, and therefore would sleep soundest, except that I…” He rubbed his forehead. “I might have drunk a little more wine than the rest of you and therefore have been equally lost to the world.”
Knowing his friends’ drinking habits, D’Artagnan was quite sure that by “a little more wine” Athos meant easily three or four times the amount. He didn’t say anything. The reverse of Athos’s nobility was his inability to take criticism from those he considered his inferiors. And to Athos everyone was inferior.
“Well,” Porthos said. “I shall go and ask the host why he poisoned our wine then.” He said it pleasantly and carelessly, as though this were quite a normal errand.
“Stop, Porthos,” Aramis said. “You could go, except you won’t understand a word he says.”
Athos stood up. “I shall go,” he said.
“But you my friend, you do not speak Gascon either,” D’Artagnan said. “And besides it is foolish of us to go charging out into the inn like this, in the middle of the night. They might very well be lying in ambush for us and, in the dark, we’d be likely to be overcome.”
“D’Artagnan is right,” Aramis said. He lit one of the candles on the mantelpiece from the dying embers in the fireplace. “It would be foolhardy to charge into the night, into unknown territory.”
“Then you propose we cower here, in the dark, not knowing who might be ambushing us or why?” Porthos said. “And not a drop to drink that isn’t drugged?”
D’Artagnan cast about for an answer, since neither alternative seemed palatable. But his chest hurt, and he could feel the blood seeping beneath his shirt and doublet, and his head going utterly dizzy with the loss.
“Well,” Athos said, phlegmatically. “I suppose I should search the corpse. It might tell us something about his purpose and why he attacked us.”
“He attacked us to kill either you or me,” D’Artagnan said. “He said his orders were to kill the dark-haired one. He seemed confused there were two of us.”
Athos raised an eyebrow at him but said nothing. Instead, he knelt by the corpse, rapidly looking in all the likely places. At last he stood up, with the man’s purse in his hand. “Five pistoles,” he said. “And nothing else.”
“Well, that’s half what the other attackers had,” Porthos said.
“Perhaps Gascon cutthroats are cheaper,” Aramis said.
“Are you sure there are no other papers or letters or anything that will tell us who this man is?” D’Artagnan asked, feeling as though his head were swimming. “But this is maddening. How are we to know more about this man, then?”
“I’m quite certain. If you and Porthos wished me to find out more about him, you should not have made him so thoroughly dead.”
D’Artagnan opened his mouth to say that they’d seen no other alternative, but the words never formed. Instead, he stared intently at a dagger in the man’s hand. Kneeling, he pulled at the man’s still lax fingers to free the dagger. It was a fine implement, the handle of which was ornamented with two lions facing each other upon a field of azure. Seeing it, he felt as though a grey mist descended before his eyes. His knees gave out under him.
“D’Artagnan,” Aramis yelled, followed shortly by Porthos and Athos’s shouts.
D’Artagnan felt as his friends caught him before he fell and eased him onto one of the beds. As hands unlaced his doublet, he started to protest, but the words didn’t seem to be more than inarticulate sounds—protests that didn’t form into words.
And then Athos said, “Porthos, go and find the host, and have him send for a physician, or our brave D’Artagnan dies. Quickly.”
D’Artagnan tried to exaggerate, but there was nothing for it. Words wouldn’t form, and his mind was in an agony of confusion. Time seemed to pass very fast or else very slowly. Suspended somewhere where thought made no sense, but pain was quite real enough, D’Artagnan felt hands at him, tugging and pulling, and felt as dress was packed into his wound, and it was doused with something that smelled like green grass and stung like alcohol.
Then hands tied dressings tightly around his torso and hands slipped a shirt over his head.
At long last, as though the rest were a dream and he were only now waking up, he opened his eyes to see a mug of wine in front of his face, held in Porthos’s huge hand.
“Drink,” Porthos said. And there was no arguing, not while Porthos forced the cup on his lips. He drank one draught, two. He fully expected to fall back asleep, this time drugged, but instead, his head cleared.
Presently he became aware that his friends were all watching him and holding the landlord in front of them.
He had changed his apron for a long, flowing, white nightshirt. And in the swimming light of the candle, he looked as white as the nightshirt.
“Speak, villain,” Athos said. “Tell us why you drugged our wine.”
And the man broke into French—not good French, but French at any rate. “I’m sorry,” he said, volubly. “Only I have a wife and ten children, and I can never be sure with ruffians like this, that they would leave my family alone. For myself, I would have resisted all attempts to make me do such a vile thing as drug travelers’ wine, but for them—how could I resist when these men might have killed my family in retaliation?”
“Stop,” D’Artagnan said, his head still swimming. He leaned back against pillows someone had disposed behind his head. “How comes it that you now understand French?”
The man sniffled, as though he were fighting with all his willpower to avoid crying. “I pretended not to speak French because I hoped one of you would say, ‘Oh, look, it’s an ignorant fool of a Gascon who doesn’t even speak our language. Surely we won’t stay here, but we will go down the street to the Golden Calf or the Notre Albret.’ But no, you would stay. Even though I warned you.” He stared at D’Artagnan accusingly. “I warned you.”
“Yes, yes,” D’Artagnan said. “You warned me. Though so cryptically that I could hardly be expected to understand—but still the question is, what did you warn me about?”
“And what did you know?” Athos said.
The man shook his head. He was sweating. Thick beads of sweat rolled down his forehead. “They came by. A few hours before you arrived. And they said I was to drug your wine, and let you sleep. And I was to ask no questions.” He shook his head again. “I thought…I thought that it was something having to do with politics, or messengers. Gascony has seen so much war, and it is normal for one side to try to overcome the other by treason and to use us, locals, as cat’s-paws. ‘So, you see,’ I told the man, ‘I will not take this powder you give me. If it’s a sleeping draught you want in the wine, then I will use some herbs that I know, and they’ll sleep.’”
He looked from one to the other of them, halfway between pride in his own reported actions and obvious fear that they would not approve of them. “You see, I told them that, and they laughed at me, and that’s what I did, because I couldn’t be sure this powder of theirs, you know, that it wouldn’t kill you. And I didn’t want to be responsible for a murder.”
“But you were willing to let them come in here, while we were in a drugged sleep,” Athos said, “and cut our throats without our being able to defend ourselves. How is that less murder? And why should I not slay you for it right now?”
The man shook his head. His hair came loose in the movement, shaking itself free from a tie that held it at the back of the head. It was black hair heavily streaked with white, lank and lifeless and shoulder long. “No, no. You see, I heard them talking when they thought I wasn’t listening. And what they said—what they said was that this would stop the papers ever coming to light. So I thought they just meant to come to the room and steal some paper or some letter. It wasn’t till I saw one of them run out, and found the other dead, and these kind gentlemen”—he bowed slightly, first to Athos, then to Aramis—“told me that he’d tried to kill monsieur that I realized they were assassins, you see.”