Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (20 page)

‘Clementine?’

Tannhauser had hoped at least for a suitably intrepid name.

‘You don’t like Clementine?’

‘I like it,’ said Juste.

They looked at Tannhauser as if awaiting the verdict of Solomon.

‘It’s the very name I would have chosen myself.’

He stood before the great creature and looked at her and let her size him up. Wisely, having no good reason at all to trust the likes of him, she grunted and reserved judgement. He murmured some endearments in Turkish and was rewarded with a whicker that made his chest vibrate. He took this for permission and swung into the saddle.

‘Grégoire, as a judge of horses you have no peer.’

The moment his arse hit the leather he knew the lad had picked a legendary steed. His thighs, his backbone, his heart, were connected to a massive force of life whose spirit was undaunted. The strength of his own spirit redoubled. Yet bells still tolled all over town and he had kept too many appointments he hadn’t made.

‘Grab a stirrup strap, lads, and hold on tight. Take me to the gallows.’

AT FIRST, THE
streets were quiet. Any Sunday would have muted the turmoil of dawn; rumours of slaughter and rebellion must have prompted thousands more to stay indoors. Through a gap between the houses lining the Seine, Tannhauser saw a solitary boatman punt across the river. Seagulls patrolled the strand.

They began to pass armed citizens wearing white armbands, with white crosses pinned to their caps. Some carried flags so colourful they would have embarrassed an Austrian duke. No archers or crossbowmen; not the regular city guard. They roamed the wharves with the malign self-importance of those whose bigotries were backed by the state. The cross on Tannhauser’s chest was saluted with waves of their banners and spears.

By the time Clementine reached the Pont Notre-Dame the militia were stretching a chain across the road between iron hooks moored to the houses lining either side of the bridge. Tannhauser pressed on, though so many armed men now filled the thoroughfare he had to slow the carthorse to a walk lest she plough them down.

Grégoire had slung his shoes around his neck by the laces. He held onto them with both hands to avoid being kicked in the mouth. He let go and patted Clementine’s enormous shoulder.

‘A good choice, master?’

‘She must have been sired by Pegasus.’

The boy’s gums gaped in a warped grin. Tannhauser masked his disgust.

The Place de Grève opened before them. It was congested with bands of militia flying their colours. A pair of drummers practised a tattoo but no one marched. A preacher harangued the troops with apocalyptic fantasies. Cooks fired up their braziers. Enterprising drabs tried their luck. A miscellany of dogs scouted the doings with a nose for scraps.

Tannhauser saw the gallows, the pale mare foaled by an acorn that had taken so many on their short last ride. The timbers were stained and saturated with the final evacuations of the doomed. Even at this distance, the stench of the distillate was piercing.

Beyond the gallows stood the half-built town hall, the Hôtel de Ville, where those who believed themselves the city’s best devised new catastrophes for its people. The façade was inscribed with the motto: ‘
One king, one law, one faith
’. Archers, crossbowmen and halberdiers were drawn up outside and passed a wineskin from hand to hand. Artillery crews manoeuvred eight bronze cannon. The church bells tolled.

Grégoire guided them north to the Rue du Temple. Like all but two or three of the largest streets its surface was unpaved. Here, too, an iron chain had been stretched across the street. A sentinel leaned on the shaft of a glaive whose tip stood an arm’s length taller than he. He held up one hand to stop them.

Tannhauser stared at him.

‘You’d best use that hand to lower the chain or I’ll cut it off,’ he said.

A diversity of expressions battled on the sentinel’s face, none suggesting the judgement he was in need of. Juste stepped forward to save the fellow pain.

‘If it please you, good sir, let me lower the chain for my master or he will slay you, and that would make seven the men he has slaughtered in less than half a day.’

Juste’s plea was so heartfelt that the sentinel tripped on the shaft of his spear in his haste to unhook the chain. Clementine clopped forward with a snort.

‘Tell me, sirrah,’ said Tannhauser, ‘what exactly are your orders?’

‘Hervé the plasterer at your service, sire! Our orders are to prevent the Huguenot rebels from escaping. Or from attacking. It is not certain which they intend, though it is certain that they intend evil.’

As far as Tannhauser’s eye could see, the Rue du Temple was deserted.

‘Has a rebel force been spotted?’

‘I wouldn’t know, sire, but I do know – everyone knows – that these devils have been sneaking in for years from all over the country. Normans. Southerners. Foreigners, too, of course, starving for blood and pillage. This here
quartier
– Sainte-Avoye – crawls with heretics. They’ve faggots and powder stashed in their own homes ready to burn the city down – that’s fanatics for you – just like in ’65, when they torched the windmills. Can’t trust your own neighbours. I had to sell a good coat to buy this spear, but you can’t put a price on safety –’

Tannhauser urged Clementine into a trot.

‘If we don’t protect our city who will? The magistrates? The Knights of Malta? And gramercy for your generous contribution to the cause!’

The street remained empty, the hoof beats loud in the early morning shadow. The shuttered fronts of the houses, some three storeys, some as many as six, showed no signs of occupation, not even kitchen smoke from their chimneys. They could not all be inhabited by terrified Huguenots, but it wasn’t much safer for peaceable Catholics. Only the reckless, the militant and the criminal would venture out this morning. The city was caged by swords. In some form or other every living soul he had met had been afraid. Now that he was so close to Carla, he realised how afraid he was himself.

The boys at his stirrups ran at full pelt now, each of their steps, should it falter, threatening to pitch them under Clementine’s irons.

‘Let go the straps, lads. You’ll find me up ahead.’

He left them behind and almost at once Clementine cleared her nostrils with distaste. Tannhauser smelt it, too. Burned flesh and hair. Blood. Death.

Up ahead he saw the old city walls of Philippe Auguste to either side of the road. Petit Christian had mentioned the wall. Three honeybees above the door. On the west side he saw a splendid house, designed with an abundance of glass. In its faith in light he saw the hopes of a new era, of a new way of thinking, of living, of being. The windows were shattered, the door agape. A body was suspended from an upper sill and clots the colour of aubergines were splashed in fantastic patterns on the paving stones below. He didn’t need to see the honeybees.

He reined in Clementine and walked her slowly past the charnel house in which he had hoped to find his wife, and in which he knew he would find her corpse.

He saw drag marks in the puddled blood in the street. The half-burned carcass of a maimed dog lay in the gutter. A dead man, naked, lay inside the doorless threshold.

The body at the second-storey window was a woman, nude and suspended by one ankle from a golden cord tied to the mullion. Her free leg was bent and twisted behind the other. Her throat had been cut by someone with insufficient practice, or will, for the gashes were many and most of them shallow, and some had carved her jaw as she struggled. One breast had been cut off and an attempt made on the other but abandoned. Trickling gore had caked her head entire and was congealed in her dangling hair like melted wax. Dark drips still fell, but so drained was her corpse that her skin was the hue of lard. She looked to be of middle years, perhaps forty. She had been dead less than an hour. As far as he could tell in such a condition, Symonne D’Aubray – if this was she – had not been the most handsome of women, in either face or build. The observation was unkind but he could not help making it.

Carla was fair.

The contrast would not have been lost on those who had done this.

Most windows on all three floors had been broken, which at six panes per casement was a lot of glass; yet little had fallen into the street. Only slings, or an unlikely band of arquebusiers, could have reached so high and done such damage. No sound came from within. He scanned the houses either side of the street, but the Black Death might have swept them clean for all the signs of life they showed.

He rode through a side alley to the courtyard and garden at the back of the house. Here, too, all the windows had been smashed inwards. The only reason to break so much glass – and to do so had required many hands – would be to create chaos, to distract the defenders while one or more intruders forced an entrance. And there: one window in the first storey was not smashed; but gaped wide open. The main back door was also open but showed little damage, the lock none at all. It had been opened from inside.

The lower half of the door was streaked with crusted blood. A gelatinous pool, now trampled, had hardened on the outer steps below. The bloodstains puzzled him.

He dismounted and left Clementine to crop grass and white cabbage. The trampled dirt of the vegetable patch was carved with the tracks of several two-wheeled carts. There were no hoof prints. A palliasse lay on the ground: Altan’s, he guessed.

He drew his dagger and approached the back door.

On the flagstones that bordered the house he noticed a raw lump. He crouched and poked the lump with his dagger. It was a man’s severed cock and scrotum. One ball was missing, though its owner must have been past caring. He noted the heavy knocker on the door, and again the congealed puddles, the vertical stains. Someone had been hung from the knocker and left to bleed.

He stepped inside and stopped and listened. He heard nothing. Several planks had been pulled from the floor just within. They were not to be seen. To his left a door led down into a cellar; to his right was a large kitchen suite that spanned the depth of the house. Glass on the floors. Pantry, cupboards and shelves ransacked and emptied. There wasn’t so much as a wooden spoon to be seen. A little flour had been spilled but not scattered. Burglars who considered flour and spoons worth stealing.

He thought about that. It was easier than thinking about Carla. He walked down the hallway where numerous feet, many of them shoeless, had trampled through a mass of blood. The blood clung to the soles of his boots. Like that spilled by the back door, it was black and the consistency of warm tar. In the front hallway lay a great deal more blood, this as thick as cold gravy, also well trodden but more recently spilled by perhaps an hour. Glass. Glass. Bare feet hard enough to brave it. His own feet trod on a lead musket ball. He picked it up and found it distorted by impact but without any trace of burned powder. Slings. He had faced them in the grain riots in Adrianople; cheap, but in expert hands or massed attack, deadly enough.

He examined at closer quarters the body he had seen from the street.

It was Altan Savas. He was set in a great pool of jellied gore like an edible figurine on a confectioner’s fancy. Rats, as if thus tempted, squatted on his thighs and chest and nibbled at his wounds. Tannhauser kicked them away. He sheathed his dagger.

He had expected to find Altan dead since the moment he had seen Symonne D’Aubray bleeding from the window. Altan had not been a man to abandon a breach, nor anything else to which he had committed himself. When Tannhauser had bought him from the Sea Knights, in Malta, there had been other janissary slaves in the dungeons of Saint Anthony. Instinct had prompted the choice, that and his broader faith in Serbian mettle. He recalled the words that had sealed their understanding, when Altan, after brief reflection, had said,
If, as the price of freedom, you expect me to forswear the Prophet, blessed be his name, you’d best leave me chained to an oar.

Red Dawn Rising
was his Turkish name. In a bloody dawn he had died.

Their friendship had been the more profound for being without much warmth. Altan had only ever smiled at him after a fight, when they were cleaning the blood from their weapons. During the recent wars, when the countryside had been scourged by rabid bands of mercenaries and deserters, there had been more than a few occasions for such smiles. Looking at his corpse, Tannhauser felt pain.

He studied Altan’s injuries.

Altan had been shot in the left eye at close range, with a pistol. His face was blackened and peeled by the powder burns. His skull was otherwise intact. A number of knife wounds were well grouped to pierce the heart. He had been stripped of his clothes and weapons. Large patches of skin had been incised and peeled from his thighs. His killers had taken his janissary tattoos for trophies. They had not taken his privates; but even among killers, to cut off a man’s pizzle took the coldest blood.

Tannhauser guessed that Altan had captured a forward scout, mutilated him and strung him from the back door to deter and unnerve further intruders. Several candle stubs burned on the hallway floor. There had been light to fight by. A killing floor and choke point. Altan had been ready for those who had come through the broken door and, judging by the quantity of blood, he had killed several. Attacking from the street, Tannhauser himself would not expect to get the better of Altan, and never to get close enough to shove a pistol in his face. His killer must have come from behind. A single shot at close range had taken him unawares, probably intended for the back of his head.

Tannhauser looked up the staircase.

The stink of burned hair. Glass and blood and silence.

Altan Savas had died to protect Carla, but in dying he had failed. Murderers, rapists and thieves came to murder, rape and steal. From what he has seen so far, these villains set few bounds upon their appetites.