Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (89 page)

Grymonde bent and took his weight on his hands and groaned and hoisted and twisted and landed square. The skiff swayed. Estelle clapped. The Mice joined in. Tannhauser ran the oars through the locks and across Grymonde’s lap.

Grymonde doubled over in a spasm. He couldn’t contain an awful groan.

‘My Infant, if you’re going to die, die backwards.’

‘One dark day, my friend, you will hear grim laughter behind you, and you will turn. And you will see nothing. But be assured, it will be me.’

Tannhauser collected the five swords and chose the best of a poor lot, and stowed it by the tiller of the barge. Hervé had built a three-step redoubt which, at its top, was two sacks deep and nearly a yard taller than the gunwale. It would protect the pilot from all but a cannonball. He gestured with the rolled tarpaulin he carried under one arm.

‘With your permission, sire, I thought I’d drape this over the fire. Light up the whole town, sire, when this goes up.’

Tannhauser decided to keep the tarred canvas in reserve until he reached the boom, where just such an effect would give the most advantage.

‘No, leave it there. Fetch that table. Stack that on top instead.’

Tannhauser walked across the sacks to examine the fire.

Hugon and Pascale had latticed the pit with inflammables, end to end.

‘Magnificent. Hugon, get in the skiff. Pascale –’

‘The violl! I left the violl!’ Hugon ran towards Irène’s.

‘Pascale, do you see that torch flame yonder?’

Tannhauser pointed up the quay to where he had dropped it.

‘Yes, but I have another in Irène’s fireplace, and your rifle’s there.’

He nodded. He laid the swords in a gridiron across the sacks, above the kindling. He laid the oars lengthwise across the swords. He pulled three fresh sacks of char and piled them side by side on top of the grid. The lantern had cooled. He pulled the stopper and sprinkled whale oil over the sacks. On top of the sacks he coiled the heavy, tarred rope. Hervé gave him a hand to slot the legs of the table over the whole ensemble.

Tannhauser stepped back and nodded.

‘If that lot doesn’t get it burning, it isn’t charcoal.’

‘My word, sire, I believe that’s Captain Garnier. Over on the square.’

Tannhauser vaulted to the quay and dashed to his bow and quiver as he looked across the river to the Place de Grève. The black beams of the gallows rose above a horseman who sat his saddle and watched him. A big man. Breastplate. Helm. Sixty yards. He had made plenty of better shots but the chances of killing an armoured man with a broadhead were slim. He was loath to waste an arrow. Get him on the turn? He recalled Garnier leaving Le Tellier’s. Fluted back plates. A full cuirass.

He slung the quiver and walked to the edge of the quay behind Carla. Garnier reined his horse into a half-turn. Tannhauser waved Altan’s bow above his head and Garnier paused. Tannhauser pulled an arrow and waggled it from his crotch. Laughter drifted from the militia on the Place de Grève. Garnier shook his fist and rode away through his men.

The Pilgrims would be waiting at the boom. Tannhauser wondered where Dominic was. He restored the arrow and slung Altan’s bow across his chest. He unhitched his sheathed sword from his belt. Pascale ran over from the house. In one hand she carried his rifle and in the other a torch. Over one shoulder she had a bow and quiver.

‘I took it from one of the
sergents
. Can I bring it home?’

Bodkins. He took the weapons and hung them over his shoulder.

‘Where’s Hugon?’ he asked.

‘Hugon’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘The violl has gone, too.’

‘Hugon won’t be back.’ Grymonde swung his head back and forth, trying to find Carla. ‘I saw it right off, in the birthing room. Can’t blame a thief for thieving. I’m surprised he waited this long. But then, Hugon was always a queer lad.’

‘If he had asked for the violl,’ said Carla, ‘I would have given it to him.’

‘He knows you love it. He heard you play.’

Tannhauser took the torch from Pascale and gave her his sword.

‘Won’t you need this?’ she said.

‘I need to be nimble.’ He took her hand. ‘Get in the skiff. You’re second oar, if needed. Do as Carla tells you.’

She nodded. Her black eyes gleamed.

He squeezed. ‘You’re the only able body in the boat.’

‘I’ll look after them.’

‘I know you will. I saw the bodies in the market.’

She beamed. He helped her aboard. He heard Estelle, somewhat wounded.

‘I’m an able body, too. Aren’t I, Carla?’

He untied and coiled the dock line and threw it behind Grymonde.

‘Are we done, then, good sire?’ Hervé hovered on the quay.

‘Hervé, you are done. Know that you owe your life to Grégoire.’

‘Then I’m very grateful to him, sire.’

‘Stay away from the militias. Go home to your wife.’

‘Wife, sire?’

Grégoire cried out.

Carla’s voice, sharp. ‘Agnès, Marie, sit back down at once.’

Tannhauser turned to a sudden turmoil in the skiff. The Mice stood holding hands and were leaning back so far against the riverward gunwale they would have fallen in had they been much taller. They both stared at Hervé with closed expressions.

Tannhauser was sickened.

The Mice looked at him and he saw that they were afraid. Of him. The colour of their fear appalled him. They didn’t fear pain or death; they feared betrayal. He supposed they hadn’t known much else. He loved the Mice. They endured. If they didn’t survive, none of them would. He looked at Hervé. The man was oblivious to his own depravity.

‘Tannzer?’ Estelle had reclaimed Amparo and was cradling her inside her frock. ‘Do you know what I think?’

Hervé smiled at the Mice and waved. He opened his mouth to speak.

Tannhauser chopped him in the throat with the edge of his hand and kicked his legs from under him. The back of Hervé’s skull cracked on the quay. Tannhauser looked at the Mice. Their faces were closed again, but the fear at least was gone. They sat down.

‘You’ll be safe with Carla,’ he said. ‘You will always be safe with Carla.’

Tannhauser looked at Grégoire.

‘Grégoire, will you release me from my promise?’

The lad’s agony was extreme; but he understood what had just passed.

He glanced at Hervé. He nodded.

Tannhauser pushed the skiff out into the river.

‘Obey Carla. All you have to do is sail through the breach in the boom.’

He dragged Hervé by the scruff of his jerkin to the front of the barge, and laid down the torch and the
spontone
. He squatted and picked him up in both arms and stood and dropped him arse down into the space between the bow and the sacks, his feet in the air to either side of the stem. He unhitched the dock line and used it to bind Hervé’s ankles to the prow. Hervé coughed and blinked. His head and shoulders were a yard forward of the fire pit above him.

Tannhauser pushed the bow out from the quay. He loaded his weapons and untied the stern and boarded. He checked the rudder, whose crest was decorated with a large-breasted and much-fondled mermaid carved in wood. The sternpost was sheathed in iron. He bent for the pole and his back stabbed him as he straightened. He propped the pole on the redoubt. He looked over the sacks of char at Carla, who held the rudder hard to port to stay the skiff. Grymonde called out from the oars.

‘La Rossa! Do we still have my satchel?’

‘Yes, it’s here.’

‘Open it, look inside.’

Tannhauser climbed on the sacks and walked forward with the torch. Down in the bilges beyond the fire pit, Hervé craned his head backwards.

‘Begging your pardon, sire, but if I stay here I’ll be roasted like a chestnut.’

‘Try to stay alive until your comrades catch the spectacle.’

Tannhauser shoved the torch into the kindling and blew on it. Smoke spiralled upward. He stepped back and away. Flames erupted from either end of the pit. The oil on the sacks beneath the table caught and bright yellow rags fluttered skyward. Hervé lunged with his arms, his fingers straining towards the knots cutting into his ankles. The movement wedged him more deeply in his fiery tomb. He screamed for mercy above the pop and crackle of the faggots. Tannhauser walked back to the stern.

A thousand yards to the boom. Tannhauser reckoned the current at no more than three knots; with pole and rudder, under ten minutes. He rolled his neck. He butted the pole to the quay and pushed. The barge slid out into the current and passed the skiff.

Grymonde’s eyeholes bored into him across the water. They were tunnels of absolute darkness. His smile was horrible. He waved a roll of brown paper.

‘You may hear that laughter underwater, my friend. We have the caul.’

CARLA STEERED TOWARDS
the fire that floated down the black and silver river ahead, towards the wild and bloodstained ferryman whose figure quavered and warped against the flames he had kindled from wood and human bone. He passed beneath the Pont Notre-Dame and the flames filled the stone archway entire, and Carla could see nothing beyond them, as if fire were all that lay before him and all that he could promise those who followed in his wake. In Malta, he had followed her into the fire, on the promise of a piece of music. He had done the same here, in Paris.

Carla realised she was the fire. She was his fire.

Her love for him caught in her throat. She swallowed.

‘Grymonde, blades in, let her run.’

Grymonde had claimed the role of sole rower and she hadn’t argued with him. His strokes were few but with each the water plumed from either side of the bow. He pulled his oars across his lap and bent over them and growled words she couldn’t hear.

The boat freighted so much pain it was a wonder it didn’t founder. The two boys lay in the bilges side by side, as if through proximity they might assuage each other’s hurts. Pascale had lost her sister and her father, and bore other unseen wounds that she didn’t yet know she had sustained. Carla knew little of the lives of Agnès and Marie, but little was enough. Estelle sat at her feet with Amparo in her shirt. Both seemed happy in the spell each cast upon the other, yet Estelle, too, had witnessed and taken part in abominable cruelties. And Amparo, her baby? She had done more than any to bring them together, to bind them together. What had she felt and seen?

Carla’s love for her baby caught in her throat.

Her love for all of the children.

The skiff handled well as she took it under the arch. Despite the run-off, the current was steady. Mattias and his flames sailed under the Pont au Change.

‘Grymonde, three strokes, then blades in.’

As they ran the next bridge Carla saw a woman’s body caught up in the pilings. She was naked, gashed, her mouth agape in an expression of unreckonable disillusion.

The paddle wheels of the watermills churned three boat lengths beyond, closer than she had expected. Mattias steered the barge between the two most southerly wheels. She followed and rode the spume and the river opened out before them. The shimmer of moonlight that divided it ran clear to the boom. Most of the barrier’s length was hidden by the islands. From the Right Bank torches and lanterns crept out along the low black line of chained boats.

‘Grymonde, pull.’

Carla steered to draw parallel with the barge. Mattias held the tiller between his knees and poled without hurry. He glanced over his shoulder and waved. The prow seemed a waterborne volcano, the flames roaring upwards from the banked rim of glowing char. She glimpsed a writhing figure on its farmost slope, blackened and hairless, his flailing arms smoking from the scorched tatters of his sleeves. The cruelty repelled her; Mattias’s cruelty; but she had raised no objection when she might have and the cruelty was hers, too.

Carla turned away.

The beach of the City, below the Conciergerie, was strewn with the corpses of the massacred. Their murderers stood among them, legs caked to the knees in bloody mortar, and they bawled curses and brandished their knives like the ghosts of the unrepentant damned. By the clock tower above it was a half past midnight. In the shadow of the prison she saw a turmoil of Huguenots, a score or more, encircled about their collective waist by a rope held by a militiaman. As the skiff passed by, the desperate throng buckled and reeled and arms and cries reached out towards her.

Carla turned away.

‘Carla, look.’

Pascale pointed at the shore. A young woman ducked the rope and broke free and ran down the beach. She beckoned them with one arm and pointed to the water’s edge further downstream. In her other arm she held a tiny child. There was a shout and two of the ghosts sprang after her. Carla pushed the tiller to starboard and the skiff swung landward.

‘Grymonde, give me your best.’

Grymonde heaved and howled and the skiff leapt forward. Three more ghosts joined the pursuit, as if the murder of an unknown woman and her child were the greatest prize on earth. Waterlogged bodies congested the shallows. Carla had made an error. She carried that prize in the skiff and had put it at hazard. She had seconds to correct her course. Her hand clenched the tiller to steer away and her womb clenched harder in reply.

If you don’t try, you will be damned, too.

Carla held steady.

‘Grymonde, larboard blade in.’

The bow ploughed through the floating dead and slowed.

The woman splashed into the shallows. The ghost on her tail lunged with a sword and stabbed her in the back. She staggered and twisted and struck the blade away and the ghost stumbled and went down on one knee. Love and desperation gave her the strength to wade on, her mouth gaping for air. She saw Carla. She held out her baby at arm’s length. Carla aimed the bow to skim past the dying woman.

‘Pascale, take the child.’

Carla felt the scrape of sand on the hull. Pascale straddled her bench and leaned out and called to the woman. The woman faltered, thigh-deep, and pulled the baby back into her breast for balance. The ghost gained on her and raised his sword. An arrow hissed into his chest and he spun and fell.