Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (49 page)

Not for the first time, Grymonde thought:
We’re killing the wrong people
.

He saw the Blind Piper through the rain.

He paused before crossing the street.

It was easy enough to pretend he knew nothing; it was close to the truth. As for seeing what stood before him, he didn’t need his gut to tell him that the Piper was a den of treachery. The Blind Piper was to treachery as the Vatican was to the Laws of God. What his gut knew was the gnawing, and what stood before him was his conscience; which Carla had awakened over the corpse of a demon Turk.

Return to the Hôtel D’Aubray? Go back to the beginning?

He sensed that he should. When the bear wanted to hunt the hounds, he started from the site of their last kill. This hound might find the bear sniffing there. But why should Grymonde go? The justification was too thin. He owed nothing to anyone. But owing had naught to do with it.

He wanted to serve Carla.

He had never served anyone. It felt good.

Grymonde craved information. If Paul wasn’t always the first to know whatever was worth knowing, he was always the second. Paul had sent a runner with word of the Louvre massacre before it had happened. Claiming his gold gave Grymonde a reason to be here.

The Lunatic be damned.

Grymonde crossed the street and pulled open the tavern door.

That morning, after his mother had banished him to give her and Carla some peace, Grymonde had led his young lions back out to the richer
quartiers
of the Ville.

The King’s general order to exterminate the Huguenots he had learned of only while on their journey to the Hôtel D’Aubray. If the Swiss Guard had recently slaughtered the Protestant nobles, the environ of the Louvre would still be too hot, so he headed east again towards the
quartiers
of Saint-Martin and Sainte-Avoye, where merchants and nobles alike had lately been feathering new nests.

Anarchy appealed to Grymonde, in principle.

‘
The unlawful liberty or licence of the multitude
’ was how the on high defined it, excluding, with characteristic cunning, their own vile liberty and licence, having taken care to enshrine the latter in statute. He did not blame them for their rapacity, nor even their mindless wars for which all and sundry were forced to pay in anguish and coin; but he did resent being called a criminal – a title he otherwise bore with pride – by the most corrupt and pitiless criminals alive. But such was life. It was a fool who hobbled his stride with notions of good and evil; only the deluded ever tried to live by them. Mother Nature took account of neither. In her timeless ledger good and evil counted less than the rains and the winds that bore them. For him, as for wind and rain, the day was the thing.

By the time they reached the walls of the
Fille-Dieu
, his regulars had been swollen by so many new volunteers that they numbered forty or more. Most were adolescent, some even younger; most boys, but with a sprinkling of bold girls. He stopped them in a mass and climbed on a cart.

‘Listen close, my young lions. The King has decreed that all the Huguenots of Paris must die. But unless their pockets be heavy and deep, Huguenots be damned.’

He saw perplexity in the faces of even his lieutenants. He grinned.

‘The King and his lordly counsellors have delivered the sword of confusion into our hands.’ He flexed his massive fingers in a mime of wielding such a weapon. ‘And we will use it to cut their bollocks off.’

A ripple of uncertain laughter, which Grymonde encouraged with his own.

‘Our purpose is to take whatever we want from whoever’s got it – from them as don’t know what it’s like to go to bed hungry, from them as never thought there’d be a price for their greed. None of these swine are friends to us. In famine and siege we do their starving. In their wars we do their dying. When their debts fall due we pay them with our toil. Should we live the lives of saints we’d die as villains in their eyes, and so, let us prove ourselves more villainous than their direst fears. Bare your teeth and let them feel your bite.’ He sniffed the air. ‘Can you smell their money?’

The tatterdemalions answered with a fierce and reedy cheer.

They loved him. Grymonde loved them.

‘Let your hearts be stone. And on that stone sharpen your knives.’

‘Kill the cunts! Kill ’em all!’ cried Papin, as another hurrah was raised.

‘Fall upon their lives with the spleen of tigers.’ Grymonde clenched a raised fist. ‘Let their lamentations be your music. Let us fill our horn of plenty with their blood.’

‘All praise to the Infant!’ shouted Bigot.

‘No, lads, no. Bigot’s been spending too much time in church. Do not praise this man but, rather, praise us all. For Cockaigne is us and we are Cockaigne and together we’ll abide in plenty. Now. Band yourselves in groups of seven, a magical number. From each band let one declare himself its captain – or if a girl hath the necessary temper let herself so declare – and let that captain appoint a fast runner. Let these bands be as swarms of stinging bees that swoop and gather honey, and should one band fall into a hard encounter, let the runner be sent to summon new strength. The bourgeois militia are out there and they’re no friends of ours either, so beware. If you must fight, sting and run, sting and run. We come to prosper not to die. And steal only the finest stuffs, else we’ll scarce have room enough to freight it in our carts. Are you feeling nimble?’

A wild roar of ‘Aye!’ and obscene boasts.

‘Are you feeling cruel?’

The cries grew even wilder.

‘Share and share alike!’ roared Grymonde. ‘No tomorrow!’

Grymonde doubted that the King’s decree was genuine. The country was ruled by imbeciles, true; but any dumb beast could see that killing forty thousand citizens would gut the city. When they reached the Rue Saint-Martin, his doubts were removed.

He stopped and his followers halted behind him, and they stared up like witnesses to some shared hallucination as, on the parapet of a four-storey building, militiamen shoved a family from the roof.

The children went first, one by one. Saint-Martin was one of the few paved streets, and three small bodies already lay on the flagstones, stunned and shattered, or dead. Four more followed, whimpering, bewildered, terrified as much by the shouts of the Sunday soldiery as by the prospect of the drop. The speed at which they fell perplexed Grymonde’s senses: at the same time much slower and much faster than he expected. They fell in silence, perhaps that was it; as if holding their breaths; as if it were some daring game with a jolly outcome. Their clothes fluttered briefly; their legs broke; their heads bounced and split apart to discharge their brains. It occurred to Grymonde that their end, ghastly as it was, was swifter than that which his own victims had met at the Hôtel D’Aubray.

The women were next, three of them. They filed from the low doorway of a garret with their hands clasped before them, praying as they sobbed, and they went to their deaths with a dignity that put their murderers to shame, though of shame the latter showed not a trace. The women believed in something Grymonde did not, and he thought of Carla, and the shame became his, and the rats inside him bared their teeth and started to gnaw.

He looked back at his tatterdemalions. The diversity of their feelings could only be guessed at, but many eyes turned to him, as if for guidance, and he could not give it. He turned away.

Two Huguenot men holding bibles plunged from the roof; then the militia ducked into the garret and the roof was empty. Piteous groans drifted from the tangled pile.

Grymonde chewed his tongue. He looked up and down the street. Other groups of militia – four, five – were breaking down doors with spear butts and axes, and dragging folk outside, whereupon they slaughtered them.

A great confusion overwhelmed him. His heart banged on his ribs like the knock of some infernal bailiff on the gatehouse of his soul. He heard the sound of his mother’s voice but not her words. He had spent his life in loving her and not listening; and though she had loved him through all, she had not listened either: to his rage at not being the man he might have been; though what that man was, he himself had forgotten long ago.

A weight lay in his gut like a sow of lead; he had carried it all day. He had borne that same burden only once before and, there was no mistaking it, for nothing else on earth was so heavy. He was in love with Carla. On the part of whichever demon played such pranks, it was a good one; not least because this time, unlike the last, he had no doubt as to the woman’s true worth.

‘Chief?’ said Bigot.

Grymonde flapped a hand to silence him; but Bigot was right. There was the business in hand. The militia emerged from the house opposite, empty-handed but for their half-pikes, and they stabbed the broken and scattered bodies in the street. The groans of those yet alive ceased. The militiamen moved on to other atrocities.

Grymonde had never felt more like a king. He had roused his people to action with a confection of fine fancies that served his own vanity and which would damn their souls. He could have ordered them to turn back and go home. He could have spun some other fancy to justify it. Like the people of any king, eating shit was the one thing they could be counted on to do. But that decision would inaugurate the beginning of the end of his reign. A true king would have laid down his crown, though which king had ever done so, except at the point of a knife? His kingdom was miserable and fleeting, though which was not, even should it encompass the world?

He loved Carla, and in that cause, and without a qualm, he would have laid down all he had. But there was nothing that could serve that cause. Carla would consider it no decision at all, but only that which ought to be done on the instinct of decency.

Rage could lighten the weight that oppressed his entrails. He knew that. The practice of evil could dull the pain of love better than any physic. He knew, too, because Alice had taught him, that evil was not some eternal essence on its own account, but merely a craft – a practice, a tool – designed like many others by the race of men to advance their power. And like any other king, what else could he lay claim to but the power to do wrong?

Perhaps that was a king’s duty. Their habits suggested so.

The king turned to his army. Some had made their own decision and were scuttling away. He didn’t stop them. He looked at Bigot. Bigot took a step back without knowing it and stared at Grymonde’s chest.

‘Elect one band to yonder house to reap the pillage,’ said Grymonde. ‘Another to follow the militia and scavenge their droppings. Tell ’em to keep it sly. We’re going on.’

Bigot nodded. Grymonde looked at his rabble. His spell had waned. He was king not of lions but of crows. They needed to spill some blood. The weight inside him was heavy. His heart kicked his chest. He waved them on.

They got their blood. The streets were soon awash with it. It filled the iron-hard wheel ruts in the mud; it brimmed from doorsteps; the noonday sun baked it into enormous glazed platters that crackled underfoot. Killing for kings, killing for duty, killing for gold, killing for pleasure, killing for creed, it was all much the same; and much of it there was to be had, and much was done. Grymonde had never been for a soldier; he preferred to die for his own crimes than be gutted for someone else’s; yet here he was doing a soldier’s work, killing his enemy’s enemies for money he would never spend, turning boys into murderers and worse. Like dogs gone crazed in a field of sheep which slaughter without eating, they forgot they were here to profit, and the carts remained half-empty. On and on it went in the foetid heat, house to house, street to street, family to family, the beggars competing in atrociousness with the militia they despised, and grease and sweat ran from Grymonde’s pores, and he lost his mind. He had no purpose of his own in all this; yet he stayed; he exhorted; he inspired. And he was not alone. Here, two priests wandered the carnage, sprinkling the butchers with Holy Water from buckets plated with gold. There, a bevy of armed nobles sat their mounts and watched as if at a tourney, until boredom drove them on to other pleasures. A herald rode up in a uniform that must have cost more than his horse and blew a trumpet, as if God were a comedian and this a bold satire He Himself had writ upon His Judgement, and in the King’s name the herald told them all to stop, and they pelted him with rocks and turds and drove him away, for here Death was king and god both, and all of them his loyal subjects, the living and the slain alike.

Grymonde’s army dwindled.

They stuffed their shirts, mostly with bright trash, and sneaked away.

Grymonde didn’t stop them.

He lost track of the carts and didn’t care.

The weight in his gut got heavier. His vision blurred and the images crafted by evil multiplied in his brain. He clapped a hand to his eyes. He no longer needed to see the depravity; he was no longer even part of it; rather, he contained it: all of it, the blood, the vomit, the tears, the shit, the screams; it was all of it awash and reeking in the cesspit of his being. He stumbled through an open porch to escape the carnival, but in this deplorable home no escape was to be found.

Bloody bodies littered the hallway in puddles of gore. From the parlour came coarse grunts and piteous whimpers. Conscience had been hatched to keep the poor at heel, for the rich never jumped to its sting, and so he had always disdained it, blunted it, silenced it. He told himself to find some other refuge. He drew his twin-barrelled pistol from under his shirt and lowered both hammers to their wheels.

He barged into the parlour.

Papin held a young woman face-down over a table, while Bigot grasped her buttocks in his meaty, bloody hands and raped her. His face was bright red with sunburn and the strain of trying to pump out his seed, for this victim was not his first. They both looked at him, startled.

‘Leave her be,’ said Grymonde. ‘We’re going home.’

‘What, now?’ gasped Bigot. His thrusts became more frantic.

Papin stepped away from the table.