The French Executioner (46 page)

Makepeace glanced down and shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t keep it for a moment. Too big, see.’ The long blade caught a little
of the dim torchlight. ‘But … I wonder?’ He reached his hand inside his doublet to the small of his back. ‘You might, just
might, get away with this. If we was clever.’

In the palm of his hand, reaching from the callused base of his fingers to the middle of his wrist, rested a slim shaft of
dark metal.

‘Ever seen one of these? It’s called a pistole. From Pistoia, you know, near Florence? “City of assassins” they call it. Well
named too. Everyone carries one of these.’ He flicked it up into the air, caught it. ‘You can throw it. It’s deadly sharp
and so well forged, you can even bend it nearly in ’alf, then bend it back. It’s a little favourite of mine, ’elped me out
a dozen times.’ His eyes glistened with a memory of slayings. ‘Still, can’t be sentimental about a weapon, eh? Tell you what,
I’ll trade you it for your sword.’

‘My sword?’

‘Aye. I saved it in the madness up above. I’ve taken my last ’ead, me. This gold will buy me a new career – innkeeper. And
I can’t think of a better memento to ’ave above my bar than the sword what took the ’ead of a queen.’

Jean only needed a brief consideration. The Englishman was right: it was wrong to be sentimental about a weapon. And he was
offering Jean a chance.

‘Agreed, then. Now, where could we …’

The chest wound he’d received in Siena had part-opened in the struggle with Bockelson’s guards. It drew Makepeace’s attention
and oozed when he squeezed it, causing Jean to groan.

‘It might just …’

Whistling again, the Englishman used the little knife to slice off a few longer strips from his own cape. These he daubed
in the blood, then, bending the pistole so it lay flush to Jean’s skull, he deftly tied the other strips around his head,
tucking the fabric under Jean’s black and now reddened tufts.

‘Not bad,’ Makepeace said, standing back. ‘You look bloody enough to act ’urt. Keep clutching your ’ead, put more blood on
when you can. Long as they don’t rub you there, you might get away with it.’

‘It’s a chance, anyway. And I thank you for it.’

Gratitude made Makepeace uncomfortable and he mumbled his way to the door.

‘A last favour?’ Jean stopped the Englishman before he could call to the gaoler outside. ‘When you make it to the camp outside,
can you find a friend of mine? Haakon is his name, a huge Norse axeman. He’ll probably have a wolf beside him. Tell him …
tell him what has happened. And tell him that while I am alive I will not give up hope.’

‘Then long may you remain alive. And I ’ope to see you again, Jean Rombaud. If only to get my pistole back.’

His feet tramped up the stone stairs. Jean settled once more into his position to wait, a time made more bearable by the fact
that Makepeace had loosened his bonds and by the touch
of a thin strip of steel, wrapped in cloth, against his skull. A strange thing, for it was uncomfortable yet it gave him the
only comfort he had.

The Fugger would call that a paradox,
Jean thought.
A word, an idea – yet another thing I would not have discovered if I’d taken the quick way out in the gibbet.

The thought of the shuffling German with all his tricks and tics and strange sayings made Jean smile for the fraction of time
before he remembered why he was lying there.

‘Why? Why?’ the Fugger cried, and then realised that he had cried it out loud, that he had once more failed to contain his
misery. He knew this by the looks of the three scarecrow men his father had gathered from their various posts on the wall
to work for their former master. He knew it by his father’s curse and his return from the far side of the room where he had
been crouched over the trapdoor, listening.

‘Quiet, fool! Do you want to bring a patrol down on us?’

Cornelius stood for a moment above his son, eyes afire, furious. The Fugger could see the big hands twitching, as if they
longed to strike and had to be desperately restrained. Blows would have fallen were it not for the servants.

Frustrated, the older man went back to his post and the Fugger to his thoughts of despair. To the punctuation of the cannon
booming on the far side of the city, his mind whirled with images from the past months, of escapades and assaults, weapons
clashing, monks chanting, naked bodies plunging in heat. Vision after vision, none staying, all bleeding into each other:
an executioner with a wolf’s head, a slingshot hurling skulls, a crucified raven. Faces raced at him, only to grimace and
gibber and race away. Two lingered longer than the rest: Jean, with his eyes that had seen too much, with no anger in them,
with something much worse, the terrible hurt of trust betrayed. And beyond even this image, another kept returning: the hideous
mask from the dungeon in Siena that was no mask at all, mouthing words.

I will find you. Wherever you go, I will be there. In the end, you will beg me for your death.

His father signalling silence, calling the servants over to take the rope’s end, barely interrupted the thoughts in his son’s
head.

He is coming for me, that I know, and the only man who could save me from him I have betrayed.

His thoughts were as jumbled as anything he’d experienced lying in the stinking warmth of the gibbet midden. But they were
worse here, because here the nightmare was incarnate in his father, tensing himself to pull on the rope that ran through the
large iron ring on the floor. The trap led to the old passage that emerged in a dry riverbed beyond the walls. His grandfather
had used it, years before, as a way of bringing in goods he did not want the city or his competitors to know of. But little
Albrecht Fugger had never seen it as a way in, for he had never been entrusted with its portal beyond the walls. In his imagination,
the passage only went one way – out, to freedom, to a world beyond beatings, a world where his failures weren’t manifest,
his fate still his own to decide.

Now he knew he had always been wrong, that the leaders of reform, Luther and the others, his father too, were right. All
was
predestined. There was no escaping one’s fate and the passage only led in.

Thus it was no real surprise, when the trapdoor was pulled up, that the first head to appear had no face. It was a ruin, a
pitted, near featureless landscape that flinched backwards at the torch thrust downwards by Cornelius, eager to greet his
rescuers.

‘Put it out, fool,’ growled Heinrich von Solingen.

It was no surprise, but the horror of the image in his head melding with the horror emerging from the trapdoor had the Fugger
up on his feet in an instant.

‘No!’ he cried from a throat suddenly thickened by the ghost of a mailed fist clamped upon it. ‘You shall not have me!’

The Fugger fled into the midnight city, running swiftly towards the sound of the guns.

As the torch was lowered and Heinrich’s eyes refocused, all he saw, for an instant, was the back of a man bursting away from
him through a door. Yet even in that instant he caught a whiff of things familiar. He could not dwell on it, because the fury
it raised was diverted by the fool with the unguarded torch, who was again waving it upwards in a parody of welcome, babbling
the while.

Von Solingen grabbed the torch, dropped it on the floor and stamped it out. The room darkened suddenly, but the gated lantern
he carried revealed all he needed to see. So he took the old idiot by the throat and squeezed until all noise, even breathing,
stilled.

‘Silence,’ he said. Allowing the man to slip from his grasp and fall to the floor, he leant down into the underground passage
and whispered, ‘Bring them all out. First men to secure the doorway. Quietly. Now’ – he turned back to a spluttering Cornelius
Fugger – ‘which way to the gates?’

They had waited for a seeming age in the complete darkness of the tunnel the Fugger girl had led them to, breathing in each
other’s rank breath, sensing each other’s fear. Men yawned, but not from tiredness. All knew the risks of such a night-time
assault, knew that many of their number would never see a day’s light again.

At last, the shuffling forward began, and Januc, who had worked his way forward into the vanguard, right behind von Solingen’s
own troops, concentrated on the only plan he had – to stick as close to the ugly German as he could and, if they found Jean
alive, be ready to bury his blade right between Heinrich von Solingen’s huge shoulders.

Januc saw them ahead as he emerged into the gloom of the warehouse. The companies were already assembling and crowding out
the space.

‘All right, first company with me. Let’s secure the street.
And you’ – Januc saw him turn to a quivering townsman – ‘I never want you to leave my side.’

‘But my … goods. These bags here,’ Cornelius was jabbering. ‘I have the Landgrave’s word.’

‘I will leave men here. But only after you lead me to the gates will you earn the wages of your betrayal.’

‘But my servants can show you—’

‘No!’ Once more a mailed hand choked off the sound of pleading. ‘Forward!’

Heinrich’s men moved out behind their leader, Januc close behind. Three townsfolk trying to raise the alarm were swiftly silenced,
but Januc didn’t even draw his blade. He would fight to defend himself, that was all. His weapon sought only one victim this
night.

The voice, so impressively controlled, so marvellously deep and full, poured over the ecstatic crowd.

‘And it is written in Ezekiel: “So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood
upon their feet, an exceedingly great host.” ’ King Jan paused, and looked down on his followers from his dais. ‘And I say
unto you, that time has come. See what God has sent his chosen people. See the symbol of his love for us. See the hand of
Anne Boleyn!’

Jean didn’t want to look. He was more concerned with rubbing the ropes that tied him to one pillar of the Great Hall – like
Samson, he’d been told, mockingly – up and down against a rough patch he’d found on the stonework. But the power of those
six fingers was great, they drew him now as they had from the first moment he’d seen them. Strangely, as he looked, he heard,
through all the gasps and acclamation of an ecstatic crowd, a deep laugh, the laugh of a queen, just as he’d first heard it
months ago on Tower Green. He knew it was a trick of memory, but for a moment it made him smile. He redoubled his efforts
on the ropes.

‘Behold!’ Jan raised the hand to cries of ‘Hosanna!’ and
‘Hallelujah!’ ‘See how it is unblemished, though the body died so long ago. Died, but shall be resurrected this night.’

To a universal shout, trumpets blared in welcome, drums were beaten, the staves of the Elders were rhythmically thumped on
the wooden stage. The noise quickly settled into a steady beat, those who were without percussion clapping in time or chanting
the words ‘She is risen! She is come!’ over and over. The King began to dance, a series of sinuous steps. Anne’s hand held
out before him, her fingers in his, as if she were his partner in a galliard. As the pace of the drumming, stamping and chanting
built, as sweat bloomed on faces, Divara, First Queen of Munster, gave a rapturous cry and started to swirl, arms straight
out, head thrown back, eyes half-shut, lips apart in a steady exhalation of pleasure held in the single word ‘Come!’ Others
began to spin and cry out as their King stepped into the centre of what became a circle of seven dancing women, moving left.
Around them another circle of Elders moved right, and around them the guards and remaining members of the court joined hands
and took the opposite route, paralleling the women. It was not just flesh joining them in these concentric rings. They pulled
around and around, the pace building along with the one cry, the one word, the invitation.

‘Come! Come! Come!’

Jean remembered something Makepeace had told him, that before his elevation to royalty, in the days of his tailoring in Leiden,
Jan Bockelson had been an enthusiastic participant in the local Passion plays. He had been a notable John the Baptist, it
was said, and had created some of the more spectacular effects.

Jean could believe it. The way Jan held the hand was perfect, the weight and angle finely judged, the movements so counterpointed
that even Jean could believe there was a whole person spreading beyond those six fingers. King Jan’s followers certainly believed,
saw the illusion as fact, expected
the immediate and corporeal appearance of their saviour: Anne Boleyn, Queen of the Apocalypse.

‘Come!’ was still the one cry of the whirling circles.

The pace was building, the air filled with an energy that crackled around their heads. It was like the moment in a storm before
the lightning and Jean did not know what would happen when it struck. Would Anne Boleyn appear? The Fugger had told him that
she had done so before in the dungeon, at a moment just like this, a moment of great need and evil men’s desire.

I did not fear my death except in this, the harm I could do after I passed over were this vow not spoken.

That is what she had said. And he had failed in that vow.

Jean concentrated on the bonds and the patch of rough stone. One rope had already snapped, the other was fraying. And pressed
against the back of his head was a thin strip of steel which gave him hope. If he could reach it in time.

He soon found himself chanting with the rest.

‘Come! Come! Come!’

The element of surprise had not been as great as the attackers had hoped. One screaming man running through the town had woken
those who had managed to sleep through the diversionary barrage. The townsmen, many of whom slept near the main gates, had
poured out of their barracks, and though many had been cut down in the mercenaries’ first assault, accurate firing from the
walls had broken that attack and allowed many defenders to take up positions behind barricades. The gates were held and with
each moment that passed more Munsterites were arriving. The gates had to be taken, and taken fast.