Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (85 page)

They passed the smell of a stable and the Mice led Hugon to an alley.

‘Hugon, wait.’ Pascale ran up with the torch. ‘I’ll go first.’

She slipped down the alley. Carla saw that she and Grymonde wouldn’t fit.

‘Grymonde, I must walk. We’ve reached an alley too narrow for us to pass. And I smell the river, we’re at the quays. You’ve done it.’

Grymonde lowered her down. Her legs took her weight without shaking. She’d been so exhausted that the rest in Grymonde’s arms had restored more strength than she could have hoped for. Grymonde clenched his teeth and raised his arms and plucked Estelle from his shoulders and her face shone with delight as she flew through the air. He stopped halfway as if, had he not, he would have dropped her. Then he lowered her gently to her feet and doubled over, his hands on his knees, and panted, though not for want of breath. His shoulders stiffened until they shook. He tossed his head. He growled.

‘Go on.’

‘We can’t go on,’ said Carla.

‘You can’t see,’ explained Estelle. ‘So we can’t leave you.’

‘Take my hand,’ said Carla. ‘We’ll go down the alley sideways.’

Grymonde walked his palms up his thighs. He pushed himself upright.

Carla settled Amparo against her heart and slipped her right hand into Grymonde’s left. His huge fingers closed. He squeezed her harder than he realised, but not as hard as he could. His battle wasn’t with blindness or pain. His battle was to be the man he felt he had to be. Carla felt a deeper sadness for him than any she had felt before. He had fought that battle all his life and had won it a thousand times over. The squeeze gave her a vision not of that man, but of the man he might have been. Grymonde turned his face towards hers. The moist holes seemed to read her more clearly than any other gaze could have. He had glimpsed that other man, too, said the holes, but the vision had come too late.

‘The Hanged Man smiles because he doesn’t know he’s hanged. Much less that he was the hangman. The Lunatic smiles because he does know.’

‘Estelle, give the pistol to Grymonde and hold his little finger.’

Carla led them down the alley after the Mice and the lanterns. Grymonde’s back and chest scraped either wall, as almost did his chin and the back of his head. Hugon’s strength was so taxed by the weight he had carried, he bounced from one wall to the other; but he wrestled the violl case ahead of him with low grunts of determination, which, as Carla got closer, she discovered were inventive obscenities. She wondered where Mattias was. She had hoped he would be here by now, given their delay. If they were both to die, she wanted to die with him. She scolded herself.

‘Grymonde, cheer me up. Let me hear some more morbid rhetoric.’

‘We shall hear some from my bowels if I don’t get out of this alley.’

Pascale’s torch swished into the mouth of the slit, beyond Hugon and the Mice.

‘Everyone turn back. They’re coming across the river in boats.’

TANNHAUSER GESTURED TO
the left of the front rank and sent all four spearheads swinging that way. Had they read his body, not the gesture, they’d have seen he was headed to the right.

Halberd, partisan,
spontone
. The beauty and the danger of pole arms lay in the weight. The heavier a weapon, the harder it was to use well. Once committed, such force was the devil to ward; but by the same law it was as hard to alter its course; with the wrong grip or stance, it was impossible, at least within the instants that death left available to avoid him. Footwork, posture, ebb and flow; the natural geometry; the circle and the line. There was music to be played with a
spontone
. Most who drilled with pike or spear were like donkeys trying to sing.

In a stride he was inside their draught and their points were useless. With stoop and sweep, thrust and pull, he scythed the two outer Pilgrims across the shins, and felt three good bites. As a swing and twist brought the iron-shod shaft against his hip, he switched length and forward grip, underhand, and shouldered the nearest Pilgrim aside while he was hopping on his one good leg. The Pilgrim fell on his crippled comrade and Tannhauser jabbed the man behind him through the goitre in his throat – windpipe, gullet – not too deep, twist and out. The goitre burst like a bad fruit and the torch in his hand swung wide among his friends as he sucked the poison through his lungs.

Tannhauser avoided a panicked sword swipe from elsewhere in the pack and darted round the flank of the outer file. Scythe grip, high port, slice and shove; chest, arm, shoulder, hip; his run behind it, too. The rear-rank man was lifted from his feet, the blade so entrenched beneath the hinges of his jaw that Tannhauser felt it splinter the base of his skull. A gust of blood through the nose and teeth. Stop, backstep, turn and pull.

Tannhauser ran the next rear-ranker through the loin from where he stood and carved him to the backbone and swept out and up to bat away the sword of the last in the rank. He followed through on the push, the pull, the hip, the circle, chopping through the side of his face to the depth of yonder nostril. He rolled the shaft with both hands as if cranking water from a well and felt the crackle as the blade prised the upper jaw from the rest of his face like an obstinate clamshell. The
spontone
slid free as he stepped back and he rammed him up under the breastbone and hoisted, and pitched him into the legs of the congested.

Tannhauser took the first breath he had needed.

A body of men needed training to work as a unit; and then they needed command; and their function was to tackle other such bodies, or in this case the wholly defenceless. While the lamed caterwauled and floundered, and the throatless sprayed blood and terror, the rest yelled instructions at each other while trying not to injure the same with their brandished arms. They were young enough to boast a deal of belligerence; but they were not to know that in the space of that single breath the fight had been decided and they were done.

He reversed grips, a left-handed stance, to exploit the angle and the wall. He gored his way through the rest with contempt, like a man shovelling shit. Yet as always he marked his targets and what the blade told him, noting any deviation of the result from his intention; for in future such deviation might cost him a wound. Rising strokes under the ribcage. Upwards, piercing the Pilgrim nearest the wall above the left hip, clipping the front of the spine as it burst the aorta. And out. Upwards through the side of the gut of the next as he turned; a half-squat and turn on the pull, the muscle and skin parting like cloth, the entrails mobile, tenacious, clinging to the tip as it pulled them out through the slit. And upwards, beneath the floating ribs from behind, kidney, tripes, the point bursting from the belly, pull back, hip twist, shove, slice, and out as a scarlet mouth spewed from the loin.

Tannhauser took a second breath. The air was befouled with the evacuations of the slain and the disembowelled. Red and white ribbons added a gaudy note to the shambles. If the whole affair had taken half a minute, he would be embarrassed. There were two still standing. A third bent against the wall, braying as he inhaled his ruptured goitre.

The farther of the two yet unmolested ran, towards the lads. Tannhauser snapped his head towards the nearer, who held a torch and a sword, and screamed in his face.

‘Drop the sword.’

The youth, for such he was, recoiled and obeyed. Tannhauser took a half-step back, arming the
spontone
like a javelin as he reckoned the fugitive’s distance and pace. He made the cast, arcing the shaft into the spot beyond its prey. The
spontone
wasn’t built for casting but the range wasn’t far, and by the time it got there, so had the fugitive. It cut through his left shoulder blade as if it were parchment, and didn’t stop until the wings dug deep. The Pilgrim plunged into the blood that oozed about the wagon from horse and boys.

Tannhauser drew the lapis lazuli dagger and slapped aside the torch the youth held and stabbed him through the base of the neck. He picked up the sword. Its quality was common. It was streaked with crusted blood, though likely shed in murder, not combat. He stepped over to the first of the lamed and cut his head off, or would have done so clean with a decent blade. He slashed the strings of flesh that remained. It was useful to have such a token to fling down the street if the moment came. The second cripple curled in the filth and covered his head with his arms. Tannhauser planted the sword through his armpit and let it stand.

Both the fallen torches were fresher than that on the wagon. He picked one up. He left the man by the wall to inhale his goitre and the gutted to pray for the end.

He recovered his own sword from the wagon and sheathed it. He swapped the torch in the bracket and stuck the dimmer one between the spokes. He knelt over Grégoire and collected the dagger Juste had used and sheathed it. Juste had wrapped the trace strap around Grégoire’s thigh and was trying to tighten the knot with one hand and his teeth. Tannhauser took over. The blood came in pulses. The artery. He staunched the flow.

‘Good work, Juste. Plug your own holes with that axle grease.’

Tannhauser examined Grégoire’s leg. The ball had struck below the right knee, from the side, and shattered the larger bone like a stick of chalk. There was an exit hole in the fossa behind the knee, from whence the bleeding had been worst.

Tannhauser mastered a surge of nausea, as if his stomach knew before he did what was required of it. Strange, the different songs that butchery sang. He could do it, if he stopped the song from sounding in his heart. Don’t look at his face. He stood up.

He took the shaft of the
spontone
and pulled. It was lodged fast in the Pilgrim. He used it to drag him out of the way, levered it free with the help of his heel. He propped the
spontone
on the wagon and dragged out the mattress and slung it away. He lifted the unconscious boy in his arms and laid him out on the wagon bed, the ruined leg closest to the edge. He looked at his face.

Grégoire breathed noisily. Tannhauser put a hand on his forehead.

Clammy, cool. He stroked the hair away. He saw the lad’s ugly, gaping mouth.

He choked on a knot of emotion. His nerve failed him.

Loosen the strap. Let the lad slip away in peace.

‘Juste, help me, brother. Should we let him die?’

‘What? Grégoire? How can we let him die?’

‘Well said. Come here. Hold this leg high and steady. Keep your back to me.’

He lifted Grégoire’s left leg perpendicular and placed Juste to hold it thus. A musket ball splintered the wagon bench. Tannhauser stooped to the halberds and brushed a thumb across the axe edge of each and chose the sharper. As he took the shaft his nausea returned and he let it come and vomited into the blood pool. He spat and wiped his lips on the hairs of his forearm.

He straightened and stepped back and chose a grip and judged the angle.

He summoned all his strength, body and spirit.

Tannhauser chopped Grégoire’s leg off.

Grégoire sat up and screamed over Juste’s shoulder.

Tannhauser met the boy’s eyes. The pain he saw there he expected. The utter bewilderment – the unspoken ‘
You
?
’ – laid waste to his heart.

He looked away.

He had aimed to split the boards beneath the leg and had done so. He levered the axe head free and propped the shaft. Grégoire clung onto Juste, oblivious to his friend’s dire wounds, and Juste let the good leg fall, and clasped him to his chest with his one good arm, and cried with him. Another musket ball whirred by. Tannhauser dug out the half-stone of opium. He stooped for the wineskin and pulled the stopper with his teeth. He slipped the opium through Grégoire’s deformed lips and pinched his nose and poured wine down his throat. Tannhauser dropped the skin and clamped a hand over his mouth.

‘Swallow, lad, swallow. We’re with you. We need you.’

Grégoire swallowed and he let him go and the boy coughed but the stone stayed down. Tannhauser corked the skin. He put a hand on Juste’s head. He felt the sobs.

‘We need you, too, Juste. Hold him fast.’

Tannhauser took the amputated leg by the foot and threw it out of sight. He took the torch from between the spokes. He saw his shirt behind the bench and grabbed it. He spun the shirt twice around his open left hand and turned his back to Grégoire and lifted the stump. The second bone had been severed clean, level with the fragments of the first. The stub of the calf muscle had contracted under the skin; so had the vessels he had to cauterise. Tannhauser held the knee joint tight and applied the torch to the stump.

He said an
Ave
, steadily, to time himself.

He couldn’t hear it over the screams.

‘
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
’

Grégoire kicked him frenziedly. He prayed for Grégoire to pass out.

‘
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
’

He rolled the burning sponge of the torch over the raw surfaces.

‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners . . .’

He pressed deep on the contracted tissues to seal the vessels.

‘. . . now, and at the hour of our death.’

His own hand started to burn through the shirt.

‘Amen.’

Grégoire fell limp in Juste’s embrace.

Tannhauser withdrew the torch and the smell of burned flesh hit him. Smoke rose from the stump. Pitch flared and died in the wound. The scorched shirt smoked, too. Tannhauser dropped the torch and slackened the strap. The slight ooze congealed as it appeared. A thin, blackened bone poked forth from the seared skin and muscle. It was ugly, but the job was done. He wrapped the shirt over the stump and tied it around the thigh by the sleeves. He heard a pistol shot from the north.

Another.

Pascale.

Amparo. Estelle.

Carla.

Whatever had happened would be over before he got there.