The French Executioner (27 page)

And much good may they do me,
he thought.
I have swapped a gibbet midden for a death cell, the furies in my
head for ones of all too real, stinking flesh. What was I thinking, trying to be some hero in an ancient story? What can I
do here except echo the screams of those who have gone before?

A different kind of scream, the hinges of the door swinging open.

Heinrich von Solingen stood there, the flames of a reed torch silhouetting him in the doorway. The two Germans looked at each
other. The Fugger had managed so far to control his reactions to this nightmare from his past; if he shook a little more now
it suited the role he had adopted. Heinrich merely regarded him as another tool for his master.

‘Seems you’re next,’ he said, and beckoned the Fugger to follow.

‘Oh yes, Master, all too happy, all too happy.’ He belched and laughed. ‘Such a kind master. Such good wine.’

Along with the wine to warm them against the dungeon’s chill, they’d each been issued with an old and stinking blanket. His
was red, barely holding together, its wool unravelling. Clutching this around him, and keeping his head down, he shambled
and staggered after his gaoler.

The broad back preceded him into a dank corridor, guttering torches throwing their shadows over the rough walls and the misshapen
cell doors that studded them. The floor sloped down and the cold and the wet increased, a chill forcing itself into his bones,
the threadbare blanket a useless ward against it. Then, strangely, it began to get warmer and the iron-banded door they approached
seemed to glow.

Heinrich rapped upon it three times. Three bolts were pulled and a key inserted and twisted. When it swung open, the heat
struck the Fugger like the slap of a huge hand. The light was intense; there were dozens of reed torches, three score of huge
cathedral candles, a fire blazing in a brazier, near which stood a table of metal implements he didn’t want to consider. The
light was intensified by the glass vault at the centre of the room. It bounced and was magnified by
hundreds of crystalline, many-coloured chambers that made up the dome.

To its right, movement drew his eyes. Two men were crouched over some sort of hole, a wooden lid propped up beside it. From
it came the sound of fast-moving water. They were pushing something into the darkness there, and he caught a swift glimpse
of what looked like a leg suddenly disappearing. As the men replaced the wooden cover, he noticed that beside the hole lay
two tattered blankets.

A door appeared amid the shimmering glass, the shape and size of a coffin lid, opening straight up, sticking out at a right
angle from the structure. There was even more intense light from within, a searing brightness that the Fugger, still standing
behind von Solingen by the door, instinctively shielded his eyes from. But not before he’d recognised the man in flowing robes
who emerged, yelling angrily at someone behind him, within.

Giancarlo Cibo, Archbishop of Siena, was furious. They had made two attempts to attach the hand of Anne Boleyn to his handless
‘volunteers’ and each had failed. No matter how drunk and insensible he rendered them – and he’d poured considerable amounts
of grappa down each of their willing throats – the men would become instantly sober at the touch of the six-fingered hand.
The hand itself did nothing. No one apart from Cibo himself had ever seen it move. It lay inert; yet as soon as stump was
pressed to stump, the men shrieked as if burned by a white heat and flailed about the room. Two burly guards could barely
hold the scarecrow victims still. To start with they’d tried to sew the hand and stump together using fishing line, but the
thread seemed to dissolve in contact with the skin. Cibo eliminated the variable by getting rid of the ‘volunteer’, but he
had no luck with the second either, who had just joined his fellow in the long water ride out. The next one, he’d decided,
would not be sewn. He’d had another idea. And this was what had finally caused the always malleable Abraham to balk.

‘We are metallurgists!’ Cibo shouted over his shoulder at the Jew who sat at his table, his head resting on his arms. ‘What
is the point of all this equipment? What could make more sense?’

He saw Heinrich standing at the door. He barely glanced at the Fugger.

‘Is he drunk?’

The Fugger gave a little giggle and belched extravagantly.

‘As you see, my Lord.’

‘Well, I want him more so. You two’ – he called to the two guards who were replacing the cover on the water hole – ‘feed this
pawless dog more liquor. And you’ – he turned back to von Solingen – ‘make up another pipe for the Jew. Not too much. I need
him awake.’

Then he returned to the chamber and began pulling pieces of equipment to the crucible at its centre.

The Fugger was taken to a corner of the stone hall. Even though much of it was obscured by smoke and heat haze, he could sense
the immensity of it. And looking up, he saw the smoke funnelling away through some kind of hole.

The guards gave him a bottle filled with harsh brandy. He turned side-on to them, placed the neck of the bottle beside his
face and allowed the liquid to slip slowly down his thumb and onto his shoulder. He gasped, spluttered and giggled until it
was half empty, then feigned passing out. The guards caught the bottle and moved away, finishing it between them.

The Fugger reached behind him and pulled out the raven. Jet eyes reflected the flames of the chamber.

‘It is time, O Daemon dear,’ he whispered. ‘You must go and bring help.’

But how, oh how?
he thought. If there was a vent at the roof of this dark cave, Daemon might find it eventually. If the hole was big enough
he might slip out. But then? Would he find Beck waiting outside? And what could the lad do, beyond knowing that there was
another way in to the palace? A way he had sought for years and never found?

Despair threatened to overwhelm him, worse than anything he’d ever faced in the midden cave. There, at least, he was safe,
his own master, however low and filthy and lost. Here … well, he had no doubt that he would soon be following his predecessors’
corpses to watery doom. And that might come as a blessed relief after whatever was being prepared for him within the glass
vault.

He wanted to release Daemon but somehow he couldn’t bear to, knowing he would never see him again. He held him, wedging the
warm body against his side, within the blanket. His one hand plucked at its red thread, unravelling row after row. It made
him think of his mother, in the warmth of their kitchen in Munster, forcing her young son to sit still and hold his hands
out so she could untangle the wool and render it into skeins for her knitting. He’d pretend that he hated to do it, to be
so domestic when he should be out with his father learning the ways of men, of commerce and property. In reality, he loved
the soft texture wrapping around his hands, his two good hands, his mother crooning some old song or lullaby as she wound
the thread round and round.

A jangle of it lay before him. He looked into the lustrous eyes of his companion; then, pulling the bird up to his mouth,
after a struggle with teeth and fingers he finally succeeded in tying the end of the wool tightly round the raven’s left foot.
He then frantically unwound more and more of the blanket, using his two feet like his mother had used her son’s hands, until
over half of the blanket lay in a circle of red before him.

The command ‘Bring him’ was issued from within the glass dome, and Heinrich von Solingen emerged and made towards him.

‘Go with all my prayers,’ the Fugger whispered. Then he released the raven, just as the big German bent over him.

With a screech, Daemon took off, causing Heinrich to reel back with a curse.
Foul creatures,
he thought, and swiped air as the bird flapped down at him once, twice and again before giving a last cry and heading for
the ceiling. Heinrich had the
oddest feeling that the bird had a trail of red behind it, like an exhalation of smoke, but he knew it to be nothing more
than a figment conjured by his still-throbbing head and the swirling haze of the chamber. He ordered the guards to pick up
the bundle on the floor that the Fugger had become, hiding in feigned unconsciousness.

When they brought him within the kaleidoscopic room, Cibo looked up from his preparations and said, ‘What was that noise?’

‘A bird, my Lord. They sometimes creep in through the vent.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for? Put him on the table. No, not that way, idiot. His stump up this end. Nearest the crucible.’

Even though he’d long since lost all feeling in the wrist, the Fugger could feel through it the intensity of heat emanating
from the iron cauldron half buried in the floor. Opening his eyes to slits, he looked into a face that was a stranger’s yet
oddly familiar. Grey hair burst from beneath a skull cap straggling a sharp, haggard countenance. Dark eyes regarded him dully,
and it was these he felt he had seen before.

‘Well, Abraham, shall we begin?’ said the Archbishop, coaxingly. ‘And no more scruples, eh? A few may suffer, true, wretches
who are all but dead anyway, but only so the many will gain. The Philosopher’s Stone is within reach. We have its secret before
us, in this witch’s hand, in this handless man. Come, for life eternal.’

Abraham muttered a few words and looked away.

‘You will see, my friend, you will see.’ Cibo gestured to the guards. ‘Place the stump on the crucible.’

The Fugger’s arm was lifted and stretched towards the white heat. All pretence of sleep gone now, he struggled, vainly, to
pull it away. An inch, a finger’s breadth, already the pain intense.

‘No!’ he screamed, and there was a hammering on the
dungeon door and voices calling Cibo’s name. The guards, at a gesture from their leader, released the Fugger’s arm.

‘Your Eminence?’

It was Giovanni, Cibo’s manservant and master of his household.

‘My Lord, the council is here. They await you above. The final arrangements for the Palio. We need your commands.’

Cibo looked down at the gibbering Fugger, then across at the glazed eyes of Abraham.

‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘duty over pleasure, I suppose.’

At his signal, one of the guards swept the hand into its velvet bag, then slipped that into the saddle bags. Slinging them
across his shoulders the guard came and stood behind Cibo, who said, ‘Will you carry on without me?’

The other man finally spoke. ‘There may be some tests I can conduct in your absence. Leave the one-handed subject with me.’

‘Good.’ At the door of the kaleidoscope Cibo stopped, then turned slowly. ‘You know, Abraham, I think we may have been approaching
this incorrectly. We are men of science, yes, but this, in here’ – he tapped the leather bag – ‘this belonged to nothing less
than Hecate, a Queen of Witches – its uncorrupted flesh proves it to be diabolic in its very nature. Believe me, I have seen
that to be true.’ He shuddered. And then a little smile came to his lips, a glow into his eyes. He continued, ‘Therefore,
forces beyond science should be harnessed in our quest.’ He turned to his bodyguard and his master of ceremonies. ‘We will
hold a Black Mass. Here, tonight. See to it, both of you. We’ll need the usual participants. Tell my mistress. Oh, and find
a virgin – if there are any left in Siena.’

He swept from the chamber, followed closely by Giovanni and the two guards.

Heinrich left more slowly, muttering curses. Thinking.

I
am no theologian, but a Black Mass? An abomination in God’s eyes
,
surely? Yet God has ordained this Italian to be
His true rock, the bulwark of the One Church. To God and Cibo my oath of obedience is sworn. In all things. All!

He had never attended a Black Mass; but he could not balk at it, he would have to play the part required of him by Christ’s
representative. Yet, as he left the chamber Heinrich began to cross himself repeatedly, for he had heard of dangerous things
appearing at such rituals. Evil things. Things with more than a whiff of brimstone about them.

When the door slammed behind him, the Fugger once more opened his eyes. Abraham hadn’t moved, continuing to regard him in
that unfocused way. The two men looked at each other, the only sounds the hissing of molten metal in the crucible, a distant
rumbling of flames, the steady drip of water.

The Fugger thought he knew where he had seen the old man’s eyes before. If he was right … well, he had to take that chance.

‘Master,’ he said, ‘I have come from your son.’

Abraham’s expression did not change. He showed no hint that he had even heard words spoken.

‘Your son, master. He waits outside this evil place. He is trying to free you.’

Abraham got up and shuffled towards the open doorway of the glass chamber. He was almost through it when the Fugger called
again.

‘It is true. Your son will rescue you.’

The haggard man didn’t even turn around to say it. ‘I have no son.’

For the raven that some humans called Daemon, it was an easy choice. Caverns were not places where he liked to hunt, and he’d
got the faintest whiff of something freshly dead, up beyond the fug of the cave.

So when his creature had released him, he’d followed the scent up on the spirals of smoke and swiftly came to a hole beyond
which lay the promise of prey. It was narrow, so he’d
squeezed his wings tight about him and pushed through, into a passage that curved upwards.

Eventually Daemon saw light, and within a moment had bumped into a metal grate. Beyond it, through slats, lay the early-evening
sky. On the grate lay a rat’s body.

He was not concerned now that he could get no further. He was concerned with hunger. It was awkward but, clinging upside down,
he was still able to pull a brown haunch through with a red-tagged talon, to plunge in his razor beak, to rend and tear. The
more he did, the easier it became.

It was hunger that brought Beck reluctantly along the side of the palace, away from her vantage point before the main gates.
The longer she waited, the greater her anxiety. She’d been a fool to let the Fugger take the risk he had denied her. Now she
was both helpless and alone. Back watching the building she knew held her father prisoner within it. Back doing nothing, able
to do nothing but watch and wait.