The French Executioner (49 page)

Haakon, a weeping Cornelius preceding him, moved through the devastation. It was not far to the square, and their arrival
coincided with the triumphal entrance of Philip of Hesse and the Bishop of Munster.

Just behind them rode the Cibo brothers.

Franchetto was in full armour but still hunched forward, Giancarlo upright in the red robes of his office. They were moving
towards the platform where only recently the King of Munster had received the acclamation of his people. He was there now,
but all vestiges of majesty had been stripped away, leaving a naked man in a cage, his body blue with bruises, blood coagulating
in patches around his many wounds, eyes downcast and glazed. Those townsfolk who had survived the assault, the many who had
always hated and feared him, jeered him now, and there was a continuous barrage of muck that coated him.

As the mounted leaders reached the stage, Haakon scanned the scene for any sign of Jean and his nemesis, von Solingen. The
German was a hard man to miss, and Haakon’s eyes found him soon enough, surrounded by his guards. Looking closer, he made
out a sack-like thing at their feet, and only after staring through the shifting figures of the crowd was he able to see it
was made not of cloth but of flesh, trussed like a chicken. That thought took him for a moment back to a hot day in Tours,
to an abattoir and a competition with this unmoving, bound figure. At least it meant one thing: Jean Rombaud
was
alive. There was no point in binding a corpse.

He was too far away to hear the exchanges on the platform. The cage containing Jan Bockelson was hoisted up onto the façade
of St Lambert’s church to much derision and acclaim. First Philip, then the Bishop, made speeches, the
latter calling over the Cibo brothers at one point and obviously praising them for the conduct of their men, for Giancarlo
then made a speech himself and at its end signalled Heinrich to follow them back out of the square. A pole was placed through
the bonds on Jean’s ankles and hands and he was carried, hanging like the trophy of the day’s hunt, through the square towards
the main gates.

Haakon, abandoning his weeping guide, made his way down through the people to intercept the convoy, with no plans as to what
he would do there, just needing to see Jean closer to. Fenrir went before him, the dog’s growls opening a gap swifter than
any pushing would have done. Soon they were standing at a rank of soldiers, the Landgrave’s personal guard, who lined the
route in and out.

He reached it just as the brothers were passing. Ten paces behind them was the battered figure of his comrade, dangling from
the pole. His breathing was shallow and he was obviously not in this world, which was as well for him. Haakon watched, all
other sounds fading, his huge hands clasping and unclasping on the haft of his axe. He wanted to lift it up and fling it with
all his great strength, take the heads off the brothers, follow up with his short sword, his snarling warrior dog, somehow
reach Jean and free him, steal horses, ride triumphantly away. It was a majestic vision, and the gap between desire and reality
brought tears.

It was when the last of the procession had passed that Haakon finally felt the hand tugging at his shoulder. He shrugged it
off, but it returned and tugged harder, and this time a voice went with the insistent pull.

‘Fuck! Tell me what has happened here, Norseman.’

He turned, and Beck was standing before him, hands at hips, one clenching and unclenching on the pommel of a sword. The look
was a mixture of distress and fury, the latter directed straight up into Haakon’s eyes.

This had been her fear, that she would come as fast as she
could and it would still be too late. Watching her beloved’s body carted like dead game through the street, Beck’s mind went
back to each delay on the road, searching for that moment when she could have moved quicker, ridden harder, been here just
a day, an hour, one bell’s ring sooner to prevent this atrocity.

Too late! Because it had taken too long to join their relations in Venice. Her father’s weakness had made travelling slow
work, and when they arrived they discovered the Jewish ghetto had been sealed off on some Christian suspicion. No one went
in for a week. Once inside, she had finally found Abraham’s cousins and their husbands, who were more than willing to welcome
the relation they’d never met, for he was reputed to be the best jeweller of the scattered family and the trade was thriving
with the exquisite gold from the New World. They were less willing to let Beck go.

At first things had been friendly. They’d persuaded her to stay the one extra night to attend a feast of welcome. But she
had been too long out in the world, in the freedom her male attire had given her, to enjoy being segregated with the other
women, wearing a borrowed gown. Unwisely, she had opened her mouth to complain of the restrictions, to tell of how she would
need to be away the next day to pursue her ‘mission’. To the women of a people whose mission was simply survival in a Christian
and malevolent world, this was incomprehensible. To the men, it was a threat to the order that allowed them to survive in
that world.

Too late. For the next day the door had been bolted and only opened to bring her to where the men met. Abraham was there,
better by the day, once again becoming the strong father she had loved, but also the strong father who now demanded obedience.
He had told the others of their adventures, of the escape from Siena and of the mystery of his child’s ‘mission’. He had observed
his daughter and at least some of her relations with the Gentile.

‘The days in the wilderness are over now, Rebecca,’ he had
said. ‘We are back where we belong. And, at last, I will have the joy of seeing you married to a good man, in the faith of
our people.’

It had been said gently, but there was no mistaking the command within the wish. It was to be. Seeing the resolution of those
around her, Beck had managed to bite back on the words that would tell of the good man she had already met, the man she had
to join. Common sense now told her to seek silence and plot escape.

Too late. For it took a week, a week of dutiful womanhood, of ceremony, family life, forgotten skills with a needle retaught
to hands that craved not thread but a slingshot’s cords. Within days, the women had told her that a husband had already been
found, that her father was making the arrangements. She’d smile and bow her head while pressing the needle into her finger,
using the pain to hold back a scream.

They hadn’t trusted her. All remembered how ‘she’ had once been ‘he’, for it was when Abraham had first smuggled her out of
Siena that she’d adopted the guise of Beck and had maintained it for a year in Venice. They remembered how ‘he’ had joined
‘his’ cousin Daniel’s street gang, the Sicarii, Jews who fought back against the Christian oppressor with slingshot and knife.
Her relations would not be fooled again.

But at the Shabat feast, she had put on a display of such contentedness that even the most suspicious were convinced. She
was the best dancer there and led everyone time and again onto the floor. And when the men had drunk enough sweet wine, when
the last aching limb was lowered onto mattresses, she had slipped from under the arm of a snoring cousin, reclaimed the boy’s
clothes waiting for use as cleaning rags, quietly picked the lock of the back door. The Sicarii had used the canals as their
roadways; a stolen skiff and a dozing Venetian guard had seen her clear of the ghetto walls. A jeweller’s house had yielded
up a gold chain that was turned into coin for the road, more clothes, the first horse, and the
materials to make a slingshot. Armed, anxious, barely sleeping, buying a new horse when one tired, she had at last made fast
progress to Munster, the on-the-road rumours of that town’s siege driving her even faster.

But it was too late. For now she stood there, all her hopes black ash in her mouth, watching her love hung like a deer’s carcass,
the prize of some hunt. While the man who was his friend stood uselessly by.

She shrugged off Haakon’s arm and said, ‘Why are you leading me away? Didn’t you just see him leave?’

‘I am trying to think like Jean. I need time for that.’

‘Time?’ The fury in the raven eyes made him wince. It was aimed at him like a stone from a slingshot. ‘The time it takes to
watch him die on a pole? Are you his friend? Or are the wages not high enough, the risks too great … mercenary?’

Though this last word was spat at him with equal amounts of venom and phlegm, Haakon’s temper held. ‘Easy, boy. I love him
as well as you.’

‘Do you? And the others?’

‘The Fugger went with him into the city and has not reappeared. Januc … Januc has taken to the mercenary road again. Come,
the city gates will have been closed to keep in traitors. I know of another way out.’

On the way back to the warehouse, he told Beck all that had transpired as he knew it. On hearing that Jean had surrendered
himself to the danger of the siege for her sake, delaying his sacred quest, she drew blood from her lip with gnawing teeth.

‘Do not feel guilty in this,’ Haakon said. ‘He loves you, lad. I have seen the love he bestows on a true comrade. He could
not let you down.’

‘And you?’ Beck tried to convert the cause of the tears that rushed to her eyes into anger at the only person there to be
angry at. ‘Will you let him down?’

‘I will not. But Januc was right in this – the odds are too great now. But they want Jean alive, that is clear. Why, I
don’t know. So we must follow and wait for a chance, some sign, some weakness on their part. I think such a chance will come.’

They were silent in the tunnel, Fenrir once more leading them back, though occasionally the dog stopped to growl into the
darkness from which they’d come.

‘Do you think someone follows us?’ Haakon had paused again to look back.

‘I neither know nor care.’ Beck could barely stop herself running through the gloom. When they got to the horses on the other
side, she made a show of adjusting the harness while she wiped away the moisture from her face, the blood from her lips and
the tears that had flowed only where there was no light to see them by. In a low voice she called, ‘So, Norseman, shall we
see if we can hasten our luck?’

Without waiting for a reply she was up and off. Haakon sighed and struggled onto his far less willing mount, recognising the
instant, unwelcome strain in his thighs.

‘Give me a deck under my feet any day,’ he muttered. ‘Yah!’

Dancing eyes finally settled on the departing horses, then moved back to the hand that was holding the thorn branch aside.

‘Remarkable,’ he said, looking at the sixth finger, nestled in beside the little one, just as easy to move. Yet a needle plucked
by his teeth from the bush, reversed with his tongue and thrust into the new flesh drew no blood, caused no pain. That was
not true of the finger next to it, nor the one beyond that. They bled, they hurt. He liked the sight of the one, the sensation
of the other, so he kept pricking them for a while, until he wondered if phantom digits were not the beginning of a brave
new phenomenon. If they were, anything could return. Anything. Hadn’t he seen that in a dungeon somewhere?

It was not to be. Raising his other arm, he saw only the
same old stump at its end. Quickly he lifted it and began to suckle on the puckered skin.

So, all hope is gone then,
he thought.
There is no resurrection of the flesh.

He stumbled out into sunshine, pitilessly bright now the storm clouds were gone. It was not right, this daylight land. He
raised his one hand to shade himself, and the gesture drew a response from a nearby tree.

‘Hand! Hand!’ came the harsh voice.

Looking up, he saw a large black bird. Its eyes flickered over him for a moment, then returned to the task of grooming that
had been interrupted by his master’s reappearance.

‘Ah, Daemon, are you come?’

The Fugger began a little dance in greeting, and the raven swooped from his perch and circled just above the head of the shuffling
man, cawing the while. Then the bird dropped onto his shoulder, head angled to the side, eyes fixed upon him.

For a moment, he was happy just to dance, until the sun intruded again, no real heat in it to oppose the chill early autumn
wind. Yet somewhere, he knew, there had to be a place of both darkness and warmth, a burrow against the cold whose boundaries
could be defined with one hand.

But not here, not in this place of sunshine and death where the mad were kings and fathers reached up into ceilings for instruments
of pain.

‘Shall we go, O Daemon dear?’

The raven, with a croak, flew away from the morning sun, settling into a tree fifty paces ahead, head turned back, body bent
forward.

‘Clever bird! You always know the way.’

Bending his face to the path, eyes slitted against the glare, the Fugger took the first step along it towards the darkness
he craved.

‘The problem with these so-called Lutherans,’ declared Giancarlo Cibo, ‘is that they are so obsessed by sins they do not know
how to commit any.’

Five days in Wittenberg and he was already intolerably bored.

‘And this is the best our gold can buy?’ Franchetto threw another damp log onto the meagre fireplace where it gave out more
smoke and little heat. This was the most spacious room in a house that would have fitted comfortably into the Siena palazzo’s
stables. ‘Do they not know who we are?’

‘They know as much as they need to know, brother. Two scholars seeking knowledge. Catholic princes are not popular in these
states, you might remember. This is the heart of the Reformation. This is where Luther began the schism, where he runs it
from.’

‘Luther!’ Franchetto spat, and stretched his back. He was almost upright again. ‘If we came to Germany to return it to the
Church, what better way than to stick a knife into that fat chest?’

‘As always, dear brother, I admire your unquenchable thirst for blood and despise your stupidity.’ The elder Cibo leant forward
so his whisper would be heard. ‘Germany is lost to the Pope and the Emperor. Luther has survived every attempt to assassinate
or dissuade him. He is beyond our
reach. And anyway, we are not here on crusade. We are here for this.’