Dying by the sword (8 page)

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Authors: Sarah d'Almeida

BOOK: Dying by the sword
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After all, if your teacher and master, who claims to be the son of God himself, has just returned from the dead, wouldn’t you want to make sure it was him and not some fakery, by putting your fingers or hand into his wounds? Else, how would you know it wasn’t just something painted on, and the look on the man’s face a mere casual resemblance? And if you were going to go out preaching this as truth to the whole world, how could you
not
need to know for sure?
He shook his head in dismissal of Aramis’s odd notions, notwithstanding that Aramis was a good man and a better friend. Porthos must remember this, and perhaps he should try to argue with him less. Aramis could not avoid the blindness his excellent education had created in him.
Meanwhile Porthos, who was far from blind, discerned in the corner an instrument somewhat like a shepherd’s crook, which was used to bring swords down and put them up onto the ceiling racks. He loped over to get it, and returned to select a hammer to hang up.
Here he was faced with an immediate problem because while swords had means of hanging from the hooks on the suspended racks, hammers did not. There was no handle, no loop of leather, no way he could hook that hammer on the shepherd’s crook, and get it hanging from the rack. Which left . . . balancing the hammer on the shepherd’s crook and hanging it up there.
Porthos looked at the hammer, the handle of which was big enough to fit his own hand, but for which most men would need two hands, and the head of the hammer, which was almost as big as Porthos’s own head. “Right,” he said, and wandered off in search of some sort of material to make a loop. He found it in the form of a pile of leather strips in the corner, that, by the look of them, were used as some sort of polishing implement.
He tied a couple of the longer strips to the hammer handle, then using the crook, gently inserted the loop into one of the hooks on the rack, then looked up at the hammer hanging amid the swords. So far so good. If there had been a hammer hanging on the rack, that would be what it had looked like. Now, if that hammer fell, and hit someone on the head . . .
Porthos frowned upwards. The hammer was too high for the result of such a blow to be unconsciousness. Even a casual blow, glancingly struck, would kill a man when coming from that height and endowed with the speed and force of its fall. He could not try it on himself. Of course, he could not try it on anyone else either. Not that he expected to have any volunteers.
So, what was the good of putting a hammer up there, except to prove to whomever came in after him that hammers could indeed be hung up there? None that he could think of.
He frowned at the swords up there. But then, how could Mousqueton have got those swords, again, without getting hold of the shepherd’s crook? Oh, Mousqueton was ingenuous and able, both as a servant and a thief. Porthos had seen him steal bottles from locked cellars and meat from the spit without the owners being any the wiser. But . . . a sword? Wouldn’t the armorer think it odd, if Mousqueton went to get the crook, to pull out the sword?
Besides, this was an armorer to which Porthos sent Mousqueton often enough. There was no possible way the man did not know of Mousqueton’s sad failings when it came to the eighth commandment. Just like anyone who had a passing acquaintance with Aramis knew of his almost inimical relationship with the seventh. No one in his right mind would allow Mousqueton near his property or Aramis near his wife.
But Porthos knew all this was no good. His friends might believe him. His friends might understand that Mousqueton could not possibly have stolen the sword. But his friends either already understood, or were willing to pretend they believed that Mousqueton was innocent. To strangers, he couldn’t possibly explain how stupid the whole story was.
Well, first because Porthos couldn’t hope to explain much of anything else. His words would get tangled, even if he tried to explain things people already knew or with which they were in utter agreement. But, beyond that, in this case, people would simply tell him that Mousqueton would have asked for the sword, as if to evaluate it, and then killed the armorer with it.
Which was utter nonsense, of course. If Mousqueton asked the armorer for the sword, the armorer was likely to laugh in his face. If it was Langelier’s masterpiece, neither Mousqueton, nor Porthos, nor indeed Monsieur de Treville could have afforded it.
So it left Porthos to figure out—and prove—whether the hammer could be brought down from the rack or not.
He wondered what could make the hammer fall? Shaking the rack, definitely. Taking a deep breath, he took the flat end of the shepherd’s crook, and set about shaking the rack back and forth.
The swords swayed and trembled, and hit each other with an infernal racket, sounding much like a madman loose in a bell tower and having hold of the ropes to the bells. And yet, neither sword nor hammers fell. Porthos hit the side of the rack with the hook, with enough force to set the rack swaying on the chains that suspended it from a ceiling beam.
Through the deafening racket, he barely heard the voice from outside, “Holla! What goes on in there? Who is there?”
Monsieur D’Artagnan Searches for a Position; Bread, Soup, and the Friendship of a Gascon; A Clatter in the Night
D’ARTAGNAN felt oddly excited about going in search of a position as an apprentice or as a day laborer of some sort. Perhaps, he thought, it was that he had never done that. He had come to Paris to look for employment in the musketeers, but he’d come with a letter from his father.
And the letter being stolen, he had yet to obtain that position he had once dreamed of. So, now he would like to try his luck and see if he could obtain another position, without such help or such problems.
Wearing Planchet’s suit, which had, in truth, been made out of the suit that D’Artagnan himself had worn to town and which had been altered to fit Planchet. Of course, now that it had been altered—by Planchet’s able needle—wearing it was akin to wearing a much too long tourniquet. But D’Artagnan could endure it for a few hours. Much harder was the lack of a sword by his side. He kept reaching to the side and finding it bare, and feeling lost, as if he’d left some essential part of himself behind.
It was true, since for almost a year now, he had lived by the sword. The sword earned him the respect of his fellows as well as his income as a guard of Monsieur des Essarts. Now, going into the working class neighborhood, where the houses were either much smaller—and only one story—than even the ones in the area where he lived, or tall, flimsy looking towers where each floor seemed to be inhabited by an impossible number of screaming babies, he realized that people walked much closer to him, and occasionally jolted him.
It was sunset, and women rushed home to prepare the main meal of the day, while their husbands rushed home to eat it, and sons, whether apprentices in nearby workshops or merely street-playing urchins, were called home by the tolling of their empty stomachs. None of these people saw any reason to steer clear of this short young man, with the dark hair and the curiously ill-fitting suit.
As for D’Artagnan he found himself quite at a loss for what to do next. He was not normally of a retiring disposition and since coming to Paris had struck many more friendships than with just his closest friends. And he’d found himself in situations he’d never before faced and made himself known.
But he’d never been in a situation he didn’t quite understand as something other than himself. He’d never had to present both a humble and yet unremarkable appearance. He’d never had to be . . . common. He understood, as people walked past him without a glance, that even in his childhood days, when he had mingled freely with farmers and merchants and behaved like one of them, they had not behaved to him as to one of their children. He’d always been Monsieur D’Artagnan’s son, and, as that, accorded more respect than he would have otherwise had.
He felt a smile play on his lips, as he thought to himself that he was a fool, lecturing Athos about fitting in, when he, himself, seemed to fit in all too well, and to—thereby—be able to achieve nothing.
And just as he thought this, he passed a small house with a shop. Like most houses in this area, the shop was part of the house, the door open to allow people in and out, even as the business of living went on on the other side of it. Judging by the smell of freshly baked bread, and by the people coming out carrying various forms of bread, the place was a bakery. But what attracted D’Artagnan, more than the aroma, which caused his still-adolescent appetite to wake up and his stomach to growl, was the voice emerging from it—clearly the voice of a father giving orders to a daughter and a son. “Now, Belle, what are you doing? And, Xavier, did I tell you to put that tray there?”
The words were innocuous, save that they were said in the curious mix of French and the Gascon tongue that only transplanted Gascons used. D’Artagnan took a step in the door, almost unable to help himself. The family looked like his people too—or at least like most of the people around his province, even if his father hadn’t been one of them—small and dark, with straight, black hair. It was, for a moment, like looking back at a bakery in Gascony, as he watched the father take a tray out of the oven and swiftly hand the loaves of bread to his daughter who handed them out.
A quick look up discovered D’Artagnan lurking in the doorway, as customers streamed in and out and jostled him as they went. The father of the family looked intently at D’Artagnan, then away as though he’d forgotten him, to shout an instruction to his son to go tell his mother to have dinner done “momentarily,” since they were running out of both baked loaves and customers, as those rushed home with their prizes.
The boy, probably only a couple of years younger than D’Artagnan, vanished through a door at the back, and the father and sister continued dispensing loaves, till eventually all the loaves were sold and the late-arriving customers went away empty-handed. Then the father strode towards the door, clearly to close it.
D’Artagnan, waking from his revery—in which mingled memories of his mother, his father and the servants who had helped raise him, all scented with his longing for home, and the melodic syllables of that
Langue Gascona
, which had been his first speech—nodded to the man, politely, and took a step back.
But the baker, his hand on the door as if to close it, darted the other hand out, and grasped D’Artagnan’s arm. “Hold, lad,” he said. “Hold.”
D’Artagnan looked back, and realized only as the man patted his shoulder and said, “Don’t be afraid,” that his look of shock at being thus unceremoniously held, had been mistaken for fear.
“Don’t be afraid,” the man repeated, and shook his head. Then, looking one way and the other down the street, said in a low tone of voice, “Are you hungry?”
D’Artagnan was hungry. Famished, in fact. Strangely, Monsieur des Essarts paid his guards far more regularly than King Louis XIII, with his permanently entangled finances, did. But that meant nothing, when it all came down to it. The pay of a guard was never enough, not once his servant’s upkeep and his own, and the inevitable drinking bouts with his friends, were taken into account.
The last time D’Artagnan had eaten fresh bread had been when Mousqueton had brought a couple of loaves and sworn they’d been lost by someone on the street and he’d simply picked them up. And he could smell, now that most of the loaves were gone, the meal being prepared for the family—hints of garlic olive oil, and the unmistakable odor of meat.
But he knew he was not hungry the way the baker meant, and the part of D’Artagnan who was the son of a seigneur, an armed man, entrusted with both protecting and looking after peasants, bridled at the thought that he had been confused with one of the urban poor, one of those unfortunates who needed food, or would perish of hunger.
Caught in this stream of conflicting emotions, he found himself as unwilling to speak as Athos, as clumsy with words as Porthos, and could only shake his head.
The baker frowned. “Proud, aren’t you?” he asked. “Proud like the devil, and never had to ask anyone for anything back home, did you? No doubt your father does well enough as a farmer or a tinker, or whatever, and you never knew one day of stomach-churning hunger. Aye. I remember my days, when I first came to the capital. My father . . .” He shrugged. “Too many of us at home, and I’d guess you know that too, no, boy?”
D’Artagnan, an only son, nodded mendaciously, and the man continued volubly, in a low, paternal tone. “Look, there is no shame in it. I was never hungry, not once, not for a moment, when I was in my father’s house. He was a baker, see, and the bread we ate might be stale, if times weren’t so good. But there were always vegetables from the back garden, and a chicken now and then. And then I came to Paris. The things you hear of Paris! Everyone is wealthy and eats beef every day. I thought, of course, I would live like a nobleman.”
The man shook his head as though at youthful folly. “Ah, idiot child that I was. But you see, in Paris, I didn’t know anyone, and before I got myself an apprenticeship at a bakery and saved enough to open my own . . .” He shrugged. “I was hungry many times. Lodgings had to be paid, as had food. An no vegetable patch in the back.” He patted D’Artagnan’s shoulder with a hand that left white streaks of flour. “But there, there were other Gascons. Like you, I would be called by the language and stand there and listen to it, because it reminded me of home. And Gascons look after each other. Have to, since our cursed land has always produced more boys than food, and more rocks than both.”

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