Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (31 page)

As Carla stowed the violl, she realised that Alice had said ‘I’.

She closed the case and turned and saw Alice take a slim deck of cards from a shelf. She sorted through them, selected one, and laid it face-up on the table. She spent some moments in its silent contemplation. She closed her eyes and splayed the rest of the cards face-down and mixed them, moving her whole body back and forth as she circled and crossed her palms. She stopped and opened her eyes and gathered the deck back together and cut some from the top with her left hand, and set them aside. From the stack that remained she drew a card and laid it on the table, below and to the left of the one she had selected. Though its image must have been familiar, she absorbed it with the raptness of a trance. She turned another to the right of the second card, and studied this, too, and then a fourth to the right of the third to form a line. She set the deck aside, and put her palms on the table, and leaned over the cards for what seemed a long time.

Whatever Alice may have been reading in the cards, Carla could not read her.

Carla waited. Another pang came. She leaned on her knees and rode the wave. The power was intense, yet it no longer frightened her. The power was hers now. The birth was no longer something that was happening to her; she was no longer in Nature’s fist; the birth was something she and Nature were doing together. The spasm passed.

Alice sat down in her chair and beckoned Carla to stand beside her.

The first card Carla saw was Death. She looked away.

‘Now then,’ said Alice. ‘What shall we two witches make of these?’

AT THE BOTTOM
of the spiral staircase Tannhauser locked the door and hung the key around Juste’s neck. The twin girls were sitting on the pew he had specified and were drinking from wooden bowls. There was no sign of roasted fowl. The girls waved at him and smiled their tormented red smiles, no doubt as so ordered by their pimp. The soup had smeared the paint on their mouths. Marooned in the black circles daubed on their lead-white faces, their eyes were full of fear. The fear had been there the first time he had seen them at the Saint-Jacques Gate. Fear always. Pain often. Humiliation without cease.

Tannhauser turned away.

Tybaut was not to be seen.

Tannhauser left the cathedral by the central portal and stopped.

Fresh blood shimmered on the Parvis in a large, irregular pool, its surface as tense as a globule of crimson quicksilver. It crept outwards, with sudden excursions along the joints between the flagstones. Four men had contributed to the globule’s creation, their throats cut with unusual thoroughness and depth, as if by someone who boned meat for a living. Their corpses were slung in a heap from which their all-but severed heads lolled out at extreme angles, their black garments gleaming wet in the morning sun.

Tannhauser watched as the bearded captain he had seen from the tower cut the throat of a fifth Huguenot, whose hands, like those of the already murdered, were tied behind his back. He did so with the kind of skill that makes a difficult job look simple: a single stroke, rotating from the hips, using a knife sharpened so many times its blade was worn to a crescent. A primeval moan erupted from the collective belly of the assembled, Catholic and Protestant united, at least for a moment, in their awe of indecent death.

The captain was a man of enormous size, and when the brief but spectacular fountains of gore had spent themselves in the lake, he dragged the corpse away with one hand and hefted it by its belt onto the pile.

Tannhauser felt Juste bury his face against his back. He looked for Clementine but the big grey mare was not to be seen.

The audience for the murders was composed of militiamen and their prisoners, along with those beggars and civilians of a ghoulish nature who had elected to stay behind in surprising numbers. The bearded captain looked at Tannhauser. Tannhauser returned his gaze. The captain sucked his moustache with his lower lip. He wore red and white ribbons entwined around his arm, as did a fair proportion of his men. He looked down at Tannhauser’s feet. Tannhauser knew the freshened tide of blood was about to lap his boots. As it did so, he didn’t step out of the way. A murmur rippled through the militia.

The captain raised his arms for silence, as if resenting the loss of attention.

‘We’ve promised ourselves that for once in their greedy, thieving lives the lawyers wouldn’t get away with it. Nor will the heretics and traitors who deny the True Presence, and who’d sell our city to the English and the Dutch for a handful of double farthings. And so here we are with the first batch of vermin, though God willing it won’t be the last.’

A hearty cheer went up from his men. From the sixty or so victims awaiting their turn rose a cacophony of lamentations. The captain grinned.

‘Do they have to be Huguenots, captain? Or will any lawyer do?’

The captain frowned and he was good at it.

‘Steady now, men, this is serious work. The King’s work. God’s work. And who are we but His strong and humble hands, we who have sworn to accomplish His will?’ He crossed himself with the bloody knife. ‘So. Who’s next? Come on, come on, the sooner we get through this lot the sooner we’ll be on to the next.’

A sixth man was shoved to his knees. The captain stared at him. His face distorted with recognition and malice. He leaned over, almost nose-to-nose.

‘You remember me, don’t you? Course you do. Bernard Garnier? Falsely charged with murder in sixty-three? And persecuted ever since for debts thus incurred? You should remember, you turd, you’ve pocketed enough of my money.’

Vulgar laughter. The bound man closed his eyes.

‘No, no, no,’ said Garnier. ‘We’re saving this bastard till the end. Set him over there where he can watch. And take his shoes off. If he closes his eyes, stab him in the feet, and if he keeps on muttering his Huguenot filth stick him again. Now, bring his wife and children up, so he may watch me bleed them.’

Tannhauser glanced to his left as Tybaut arrived, still shirtless. His breaths were fast and shallow, both his pride and his courage stretched to their limits. His cheeks were swollen and red. He held one hand behind his back.

‘Take my advice, Tybaut. Go away.’

‘I want my key back.’

‘’Tis a pity you’re a pimp. I might’ve had use for you.’

‘Give me my key or I’ll turn your boy in for a dirty heretic.’

‘Go away now, Tybaut, or I will kill you.’

Tybaut sniggered. ‘Oh yes? These are my people, not yours, you pillock.’

Tannhauser drew with his left and stabbed Tybaut through the gut below the breastbone. Beyond skin and muscle, the resistance to the blade faded, then he felt an elastic tug as he pierced the aorta. He withdrew the dagger and returned it to its sheath. The move took hardly longer than it had taken to slap him. Tybaut grunted, winded and astonished. The wound appeared unremarkable, yet inside his abdominal cavity his life was rushing away, embalming his coiled entrails in his own blood. The colour stole from his face. A knife tinkled to the ground. Impending death filled him with a need for Tannhauser’s blessing.

‘There’s thousands worse off than my girls. Why’d you pick on me?’

Tybaut’s eyes swam with bewilderment.

Tannhauser spun him by the arm and grabbed the back of his breeches.

‘Here’s another godless traitor. He’s no lawyer but he’ll do.’

Tannhauser hoisted him into the blood. Tybaut’s legs tangled one about the other in their attempt to keep him upright. He fell full length, his arms too weak to break his fall, and a groan went up from the gathered as a great shower of gore speckled their clothes.

Tybaut’s jaw drooped open. His last sigh bubbled into the red swill. Tannhauser seized an ox-tongue spear from the nearest militiaman and spun it down and wedged the blade through the rear of Tybaut’s ribcage by the spine. In a pinch the ox-tongue would have served as a shovel. Though Tybaut was long gone, Tannhauser stood over him and ploughed him with steel.

He stabbed for his mother. He stabbed for Amparo. He stabbed for the twins with vermilion mouths drinking soup in the cathedral. He stabbed for Carla. Not one of them would have thanked him. All would have found him repellent. He stabbed the dead youth from the lava of rage and pain surging up through his heart as if from the stones beneath his feet. He mutilated the pimp in a spasm of disgust at his own impotence.

And just like the Devil squatting on his back, and his guardian Angel watching from the bell tower, he could see himself all the while.

He paused to blink sweat and blood from his vision. He looked down.

The ox-tongue spear had chopped Tybaut’s ribs from either side of his backbone, exposing his core through two gaping trenches. Even in the grip of blind rage, the skill was commendable. Even by the standards established on the Parvis that morning, the sight was obscene.

Among the spectators there was absolute silence, as if they feared that to make a sound would doom them, too, and in that instinctive calculation they were not far wrong. Tannhauser looked up. His gaze met that of a Huguenot who knelt bound and shoeless, waiting to watch the death of his kin, at the outer rim of the blood.

The Huguenot was silent, too.

Yet did he mouth the words ‘
Kill me
’?

Or did he merely say as much with his eyes?

Or did Tannhauser hear the pleading of his own deranged spirit?

Neither Devil on his back nor Angel on the tower knew for sure.

He waded through the gore, the blood riding up over his boots like red mud, and drove the spear through the Huguenot’s heart. He heard a woman’s cry from among the prisoners. The kind of cry torn from the inmost workings of a woman who has lost the man she loved. He put a foot to the Huguenot’s chest and shoved him from the blade.

He turned and looked up at the cathedral and its vast and mysterious text. He heard the Green Lion roar and he wanted to roar himself, for he heard its message. Petrus Grubenius had tried to convince him to devote himself to its truth. A message so radical it could only be written in – and trusted to – an alchemical code so mysterial that few living men would ever read it and fewer still take it to their hearts. Tannhauser had merely taken it into his memory.

The only manifestation of wisdom that is worthy of the wise is compassion
.

Compassion for the worthless and the forsaken.

Compassion for the victims of the strong.

All other paths, no matter how glorious, lead only to emptiness and folly
.

He could have taken a dozen militiamen at least; given their quality, probably all thirty, though by ten or so even these donkeys might have the sense to run for their lives. Without looking, he positioned Garnier in his mind, for the captain would have to go first. And if they did not run, if they stayed to fight, then so much the better, for what more apt ground than here on the Parvis to admit his failure in the art of life, in the custodianship of his soul, thence to stake his claim on everlasting fire?

He thought:
I am going mad. And I love it.

The clatter of massive hooves declared Clementine’s arrival.

Tannhauser turned again. He saw Grégoire take in the bloodbath, in which Tannhauser stood ankle-deep, with gore running down the spear shaft and the dead heaped around him like the proof of unspeakable crimes. He saw Grégoire grin, his exposed gums shiny and snotty with the mucus from his nostril. Grégoire grinned because he was glad to see him and for no other reason at all. He did not care what Tannhauser had done. He loved Tannhauser. The grin restored Tannhauser’s sanity.

He tossed the ox-tongue spear to its owner. The owner ducked and shielded himself with his arms and the spear clattered to the ground. Grégoire shoved the big mare into the perfect position for Tannhauser to step into the stirrup and mount. Tannhauser did so and looked down at Juste. Juste was pale. Tannhauser wondered how much more he could take. With a gesture he ordered him to hold on and Juste grabbed the stirrup.

Tannhauser looked at Captain Garnier, who had witnessed it all. The speed and precision of the kills; the berserk frenzy. Garnier blinked. Tannhauser ran a slow glance across the other spectators. If any of them recognised Tybaut, and it was at least as likely as not that they did, no one spoke up for him.

‘Won’t you stay to see off more heretics, chevalier?’ asked Garnier.

Tannhauser didn’t answer. He looked at the huddled doomed. He felt nothing for them. But he had heard the Green Lion roar. He turned back to Bernard Garnier.

‘This ground was consecrate to God before men discovered fire. These stones are the sacred centre of Paris, of France, some say of the world. By the law of divine symmetry, and in the opinions of diverse philosophers, it is probable that beneath our feet is the vertex of the cone of Hell itself.’

This was rewarded with a general gust of dismay.

‘The burning lake below is far from full. On this weird locus, we all should beware what sacrifice in blood we offer to gods unknown, for one thing is certain: if this sacrifice is meant for Christ, it will curdle His bowels.’

Many in the crowd retreated from the Parvis, step by step, as if from some poisonous swamp. Garnier groomed his beard with bloody fingers.

‘As for these Huguenot women and children, I speak for His Majesty in person when I urge you to take them to the priests in the cathedral. Give them the chance to consider a Catholic baptism and if not, to claim sanctuary. If you deny them that small mercy, what mercy will you deserve come the Last Judgement? When we rise from our tombs and Michael takes a reckoning of our souls, and our eternal destiny is weighed on the balance of the love we showed, not only to God, but to all His Creation.’

He pointed out the apocalypse carved above the cathedral’s central portal.

‘Is it coincidence that Judgement Day is here writ above our heads?’

A Huguenot cried out: ‘We would rather die than submit to popery.’