The French Executioner (32 page)

It was the day of the Palio.

But in the stable of Lucrezia’s house, the heart of the
Scorpion
contrada,
people were not thinking of fortunes, they were thinking of survival. The stallion on whom the hopes of so many rested stood
unattended in his stall, for one of Lucrezia’s brothers was its trainer and her nephew its jockey, and they too were crouched
down on the stable floor hearing of a night of horror beneath a palace.

When she finished telling her tale, the tears flowed again down the cheeks of Maria-Theresa. She wiped them away with her
one free hand, the other holding on tightly to the only hand of her saviour, as it had almost from the moment they emerged
from the pool. The Fugger was unspeakably content with this and made no effort to free himself. In his life, he had never
held the hand of a woman other than his mother. And she had never caused such strange and complex stirrings within him. The
life he observed in this girl, who was also a woman – the innocence, the purity yet power of her feelings – was of such a
force it made him feel like a page of new paper with nothing written upon it, no years of degradation, no tales of endless
nights scrabbling for survival in a gibbet midden. It made him feel alive. He was conscious of the glances that came his way
from her family, but they were not hostile, just curious. The only thing distracting him from the way Maria-Theresa’s hand
moved in his was the mirror sight opposite where his comrade Beck clutched at the old man’s hand.

He looked, and remembered the woman’s body swiftly hidden again under the man’s clothing. He’d kept silent, knowing that if
someone felt they had to go to that trouble to conceal who they were there must be good reason. He knew about concealed identities.
He would wait to know … hers.

As Beck looked away briefly from the father she had not seen in ten years, she met the Fugger’s eyes and she too remembered.
It troubled her, yet she’d only donned the disguise to achieve what she had now achieved, to hold her father again in her
arms. In a whispered conversation she’d begged Abraham also to keep her secret for a while, yet she
wasn’t sure why. Except that now was perhaps not the time to be herself again. For as she listened to Lucrezia, she knew danger
was far from past.

‘I have been out on the streets. There’s a prince’s ransom offered for the capture, alive, of this gentleman’ – she indicated
Abraham with her hand – ‘and not much less for the rest of you. The gates are all shut and heavily guarded. The spies of Church
and state are spreading throughout the city. I myself was asked if I knew a woman who was looking for a kidnapped virgin.
It is only a matter of time before someone takes the gold and talks.’

Maria-Theresa spoke. ‘We cannot give them up, Mother. I would have died. I will die before I let them go.’

‘No one is speaking of giving them up, child. But how do we save them?’

Beck said, ‘
All
the gates are locked?’

‘All save the Porta Pispini. And men with good descriptions search anyone trying to leave.’ Lucrezia moved to the stallion
in its stall, stroked its neck. ‘What if we split you up? Wait till the revelry tonight. Even the guards will be drunk then.’

‘We will not be split up,’ said the Fugger, and looked at Beck who nodded, held his eye for a moment, blushed and looked away.
‘We must go to Montepulciano. We are to meet our comrade there, and in the meantime his friend there will shelter us at his
inn.’

‘Montepulciano is still beyond the city walls. The hills there are said to be the source of many of the springs that fill
Siena with water. The source—’ Lucrezia broke off. ‘The cisterns, Giuseppe. What do you think?’

Her brother rubbed his grey stubble. ‘It is possible. I have not been down them for many years.’

‘I have.’ Maria-Theresa leant forward excitedly. ‘Giovanni took me there last year to play.’ Giuseppe gave his son the jockey
a clout around the ears.

‘Cisterns?’ said the Fugger.

‘The rich in this city, about two hundred years ago during a plague, wanted their own water supply that could not be contaminated
by us peasants.’ Lucrezia spat on the floor. ‘They built these chambers, tunnels, underground channels to bring it to them.
Then more water was discovered and they fell into disrepair. The passage you came down to the pool was probably one of them.
Some lead out, it is said, in the direction of Montepulciano.’

The Fugger leant forward. ‘It is said?’

‘No one to my knowledge has ever followed them all the way out. But water still flows from them. And what comes in …’

‘… Must lead out.’ Beck stood. ‘We will take them. I will not stay here to be caught like a weasel in a trap.’

‘Now wait!’ The Fugger rose too. ‘I made a promise to myself. You all heard me. Not three hours ago. No more water. Ever.
And you want me to go to a world of it?’

‘But I will be there.’ Maria-Theresa’s eyes shone up at him. ‘I will lead you through them. There are many walkways. You won’t
have to swim much.’

‘It’s that “much” that concerns me.’

But the squeezing of the girl’s hand did a little to calm him. A fragile calm that was immediately broken by her next words.

‘The problem is the way into them. Giovanni and I only know of the one. It’s a hidden entrance. But it is in a corner of a
public place.’

‘And where is that?’

It was Lucrezia who answered. ‘The Piazza del Campo.’

The Fugger choked. ‘But isn’t that where they hold this thing, this Palio?’

Lucrezia smiled. ‘It’s where “this thing” starts and finishes. The bullfight was last night, the fist fight this morning.
At noon the horses will be loosed through the city streets from there.’

‘Good.’ Beck was on her feet now, tying the slingshot
around her. ‘The Campo is where we need to go anyway. I left Fenrir and our sacks with a stall holder there.’

‘Are you all mad?’ cried the Fugger. ‘It’s right beside Cibo’s palace! He – all of them – will be there!’

Lucrezia’s smile never faded. ‘In a lifetime of doing it,’ she said, ‘I’ve discovered there is no better place to hide than
in plain sight.’

Giuseppe was backing the stallion out of the stall, bridling him. Lucrezia left and returned with masks and costumes. Handing
them over, she said, ‘Welcome to the best team in Siena – the Scorpions!’

Humming a hymn of battle, the party flung open the doors of the stable and marched out to the street where the rest of the
contrada’s
members, numbering some hundred and fifty, were already gathered under the crimson banner with its black and menacing emblem,
its wicked sting curving above them.

The Fugger barely had time to mutter, ‘I thought I was the mad one,’ before a young woman’s hand was once more thrust into
his and he was dragged into the middle of the parade. A clash of drums and cymbals, a chorus from a dozen trumpets, a shout
of ‘Scorpio!’ and the procession lurched off.

Reports came in to Heinrich and Franchetto from spies cast like a fisherman’s net over the city. There were many sightings,
but always something wrong in the detail. The Jew was monstrous, as Jews often were, with gold teeth and a hump. The young
man was a Biblical warrior with a curved sword, the madman missed a leg as well as a hand, while the virgin had turned whore
and plied her trade in a house near the Palazzo Marescotti. The fugitives were said to lurk under the banner of the Wolf,
the Snail or the Scorpion, bound to their
contrada
by an oath of death.

On any other day, time would yield them up. It was not that big a city, and the reward was enormous. But time, Heinrich knew,
was what the pursuers didn’t have. Many of
those attending the Palio came from beyond the city walls. They would be drunk and happy for the first few hours after the
race, then drunk and quarrelsome, finally drunk and morose and wanting to go home. To try to funnel them through the one gate
while Heinrich observed each face would be to provoke a riot that not even Franchetto and his men, in the full flow of their
brutality, could control.

With a hunter’s sense, Heinrich put himself in the position of the hunted. They would know of the beaters, the armed gangs
who swept through every neighbourhood offering inducements to betrayal, both violent and financial. Only the sick or the guilty
remained behind on this one day, and quarry would be too easily flushed out. Within the thousands on the street, then, lay
the security of the herd. The wolf pack could snap at the edges, but most would remain safe within the centre of the drove.
It was like the retreat from a battlefield. Keep together, present a solid block, you had a better shot at survival. Flee
on your own, and you would be chased down and butchered.

They are here, or will be soon,
he thought as another passer-by paused to acclaim the horrific wonder of his ‘mask’, then realised his error and moved swiftly
on. Heinrich had looked in a mirror just once and knew what it was people saw. His face was one vivid wound, a scarlet gash
from brow to chin, raw and weeping. He could still see, now that the fused lashes had been prised apart, but the missing eyebrows
gave him the look of a skull.

All the more reason to find them,
he thought.
They will also pay for this.

He was standing with his back to the Palazzo Pubblico, the opposite end to the tower, looking across the Campo as the crowds
swept in, each
contrada
preceded by its banner and its huge war cart constructed to resemble the individual symbols. A giant Swan nuzzled at a Scorpion,
a Caterpillar duelled with a Unicorn, each entrance to the square greeted by mighty cheers and equally raucous boos, swelling
as each cart was
taken from the overcrowded square. Already at least twenty banners waved above their yelling partisans, which left at least
ten more
contrade
to go, though where such numbers would fit he could not see. Huge numbers crammed the central space, held in a ring of fences
and armoured troops; others packed every terrace, balcony and colonnade opposite them. Between, an outer ring was kept clear
for the main reason everyone was there: the race.

With a burst of crowing, the Rooster
contrada
entered the Campo, at its head the tall, strutting figure of the Duke Franchetto, resplendent in his brown, crimson and emerald
feathers. Heinrich decided to note where he settled. Then he would join him so they could co-ordinate the search of the square
from within.

A sudden explosion of greater noise within the hubbub, screams of panic and abuse. Just to Heinrich’s left, a baker’s cart
burst out of a side alley, sending vast wheels of bread rolling in all directions, pastries flying through the air, tarts
sliding underfoot. Once collapsed, though, the cart did not stay still, for something was moving under its fallen awning and
the whole structure was advancing steadily across the ground in a crush of flour, sweetmeat fillings and splintered wood,
scattering people on every side. The baker ran along beside it, a switch in his hand, raining blows down on the moving bulge,
a curse for every strike.

‘Bastard! Assassin!’

The stick rose and fell but did nothing to halt the cart’s progress. The awning got caught on another cart, skewing it, slipping
gradually off, and from under it a huge, snarling animal appeared, more wolf than dog, its grey-white pelt bespeckled with
flour. It paused to catch the switch in its vast jaws, wrench it from the baker’s hands and snap it to kindling. Triumphant,
it let out a long howl. Then it resumed its relentless march forward, pushing through the outer rim of spectators and across
the race track, seeking to enter into the heart of the central crowd itself, dragging the cart with it.

Heinrich had heard that howl before.
Where had it been?
A sudden throbbing at his temple made him reach up and touch the swollen skin there. Then the memory came. The ambush in
the hills outside Toulon had been preceded by the same howl.

‘The dog! Grab the dog!’ he yelled at the half dozen men-at-arms beside him. Two got themselves bitten in their enthusiasm
to obey the order while a third, more sensibly, gathered up the awning and threw it again onto the animal. It took the unbitten
four to hold it down, but eventually there were no more stirrings from beneath.

‘A young man, no more than a boy really.’ The vendor was shivering under Heinrich’s questions. ‘He left that cur with me,
said he’d be back later, gave me two scudi for my trouble. Two scudi! Look at what it’s cost me. Three nights’ baking, a month
of living at the least. Holy Mary!’

‘You! Get a stick and collar on it. Now!’ Heinrich ordered.

It was a struggle, and one man was badly mauled, but finally the hound had a rope round its neck and a long stick wedged in,
attached through a loop and twisted tight, allowing the men to keep the dog thrust before them. They forced it to the ground,
waiting for orders.

Heinrich looked across the crowd and saw that the main entrance to the Campo was closed off, that all the
contrade
were in position inside, the horses already being led to the starting point up to the right of the Palazzo Pubblico.

‘Now.’ He bent down until his eyes were level with the strange, rectangular, maddened ones of the dog. ‘Let’s just see who
it was you were trying to find.’

Gathering his six armoured men behind him, he signalled the two who held the stick tight to loosen their grip. The dog immediately
rose and plunged, snarling, into the central crowd, causing the impenetrable barrier of humankind to give way, opening a channel
that the soldiers quickly widened to a breach. Heinrich, taller by a head than most of the Italians round him, immediately
saw the direction in which
they were moving and it puzzled him. They were making for the huge black, red and gold Rooster, the richest flag in the square.
Towards Franchetto Cibo. But when his banner started waving back and forth, Heinrich saw another revealed behind it. On it
a black creature of scales, claws and hideous fangs dripping poison.