The French Executioner (8 page)

‘Dawn? It’s a hideous idea. It must be mere hours away. And my kittens here have not allowed me to rest.’

One of those kittens reached up and ran a painted fingernail down his exposed thigh. Heinrich looked quickly away.

‘But my Lord wanted to move in haste. The … artefact is needed in Rome.’

‘It is. But not yesterday, nor tomorrow. If we take the ship that awaits us in Toulon we can be there in ten days. It will
suffice. And besides, the Bishop, my new friend over there’ – he gestured to a bare rump just visible under a pair of sugared
thighs – ‘has requested my official presence at an execution tomorrow evening … I mean tonight. Six heretic weavers are to
burn, and a heretic count is to have his head removed as a climax. Who would have thought a Catholic prince would turn away
from his Mother Church like that?’

‘Fat Henry of England did.’

‘Exactly, my knowledgeable friend. There must be no more Henrys. So my attendance is important. Rome sends a message. Unless,
of course …’ He beckoned Heinrich closer and the tall man reluctantly bent towards him. Whispering now, the Archbishop continued,
‘I had a rather intriguing message during the feast last night, from a rival of my dear host over there. The Bishop of Angers
wants the See of Orleans for himself. He thinks I can influence that. Go there in the morning and find out what he’s offering
me.’

‘My Lord.’

‘You may leave. Go on, man, it’s time for a little more
entertainment. Unless, perhaps, you would care to watch and learn?’

‘I will go to church, my Lord, and pray for my sins.’

‘What a good idea.’ The Archbishop was gently kicking his kittens awake. ‘Do say one for me.’

If the Archbishop of Siena was relaxed, the Bishop of Tours, a few hours later, was the opposite. All had gone to plan so
far, the orgy had been a great success. Now, he was dragged from the arena of pleasure to hear the news that the centrepiece
of his festival was in jeopardy.

‘What do you mean? He can’t be dead! He’s my executioner,’ he roared, somewhat illogically. He had a headache like a hammer
pounding on an anvil. ‘How did he die?’

His steward, Marcel, shrugged. ‘Apparently he tripped over his sword, Milord. He was trying to piss out of the window.’

‘How dare he?’ screamed the Bishop. ‘Have him flogged immediately!’

‘Yes, Milord,’ Marcel said nervously. ‘Um, he is dead.’

‘I don’t care. He’s left us in a very bad position with his carelessness. The execution is tonight.’

‘I could send to the Bishop of Angers?’

‘Idiot!’ The Bishop struck his steward hard across the face. ‘Is this the sort of advice I pay you for? The Bishop of Angers
wants Orleans for himself. He will come with his executioner and he will steal my glory. No, you must find someone here in
Tours.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes. There must be an executioner out there among that rabble of discharged soldiers. Mercenary scum, most of them, not even
French. Find one.’

‘Eminence,’ Marcel spoke carefully, while backing out of range, ‘I doubt we’ll find a skilled swordsman at such short notice.’

‘I don’t care,’ screamed the Bishop, turning the same colour
as his purple hat, ‘if he takes off the head with a sword, an axe or my tailor’s pinking shears! Find me someone to do it!’

And with that, clutching his own head, the Bishop sank back onto his bed. He wasn’t used to panicking. He had people to panic
for him.

By the time Jean and the Fugger reached Tours mid-morning, the town was abuzz as an ever-changing crowd gathered at the main
church’s doors to read the poster hung there.

‘ “Due to the unexpected and sudden demise—” ’ the Fugger read swiftly, ‘uh, “only men of true worth and experience need apply.”
That’s you, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ said Jean, ‘but I had not thought to ply my trade again so soon, if at all.’ He looked across at the young German.
‘I thought, perhaps, a new career in barbering.’

‘Either way,’ mumbled the Fugger, rubbing his shorn head, ‘you’re a butcher.’

Jean laughed and turned back to the poster.

‘Wait! What’s this?’ He gestured to the words scrawled near the bottom of the paper.

He could not read as quickly as his companion and by the time he’d finished the Fugger was hopping from foot to foot in excitement,
humming the while. He stopped when Jean looked at him.

‘I know. I’m drawing attention, but think of it. He’s here, he’s here! That’s what it says, “In the presence of his Holiness
the Archbishop of Siena”.’

‘I can read.’

Jean turned away down the alley to the left of the church, quickly entering the rancid, sweating, crowded heart of Tours on
a festival day. The Fugger followed, the raven perched on his shoulder. The lane was so narrow and the opposite houses overhung
so much that they nearly touched two storeys above, making flight impossible.

‘We’ve caught up with him. It is here, what we seek. We can take it back,’ the Fugger whispered excitedly.

‘Indeed.’ Jean was straddling with his steps the line of sewage running down the middle of the lane. ‘And how would you suggest
doing that?’

The Fugger grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into an alcove.

‘I have a plan. My fine, educated mind has worked on the problem and come up with an answer instantly, yes it has. It’s a
golden opportunity. You take the job of the executioner. You will be up there, shrouded and armed, right beside the Archbishop.’

‘Fugger, you want me to steal the hand in front of a thousand people?’

‘Why not?’ The Fugger’s darting eyes finally settled upon Jean. ‘It’s not as if you haven’t done it before.’

The second gold coin from the offertory box bought them a share of a palliasse, unoccupied now it was day, a hunk each of
bread and meat, some sour beer, and gave them a little change. Consuming his food swiftly, Jean straight away lay down and
tried to sleep. The Fugger, delighted to find his mind working once more along relatively straight lines, was determined to
share the results. He sat up and uttered a continuous stream of words.

‘What we’ll need is some sort of diversion. Well, that will be my job, mine and Daemon’s. We will direct the eyes away for
a moment from the block – oh, I’m sorry, I know you don’t use a block – well, from the stage anyway, while you pin that little
worm of Satan against the wall and force him to give up the hand. Or, better still, maybe a fire, just a small one, around
some bales nearby – nothing like a fire to get a town moving, of course, terrible things. I was in that great one that burnt
down half of Basle. Yes, a fire to draw them away, your sword to His Eminence’s throat and—’

‘By the scrotal beard of Suleyman, will you shut up!’ roared Jean. ‘I need to rest. I cannot think for lack of sleep.’ He
flipped onto his side. ‘What time did they call on volunteers for this job?’

‘Three bells, at the abattoir. The execution is at nine in the main square.’

‘Wake me at two bells, then. And, by the weeping Madonna, be silent,’ Jean said, and closed his eyes.

The Fugger watched him for a while, twitching, scratching, his mind as agitated as his body. He couldn’t sleep, felt he’d
been asleep for a thousand years; now there was so much he wanted to say, so many plans he had to share. He wanted above all
to be useful, to belong to this noble quest, as more than a hindrance to be dragged around. He owed this barbering, barbarous
headsman that much.

Just then, one of the headsman’s eyes opened.

‘If you want to be useful, go and find out what happened to the dead executioner’s sword.’

Not twenty paces from where Jean began to snore, another headsman was lying down, but this one had given up all hope of sleep,
his mind too full of the images Angelique had brought back from the Bishop’s palace where she’d been one of the inhabitants
of Sodom. He’d waited outside the palace all that rainy night to escort her home at dawn, and now he lay awake while she slept
next to him, his arm growing stiff under her head, trying to conjure other images. Failing.

A shout from the street below, an argument breaking out, curses, the sound of blows exchanged. Carefully withdrawing his arm,
Haakon moved to the window, stooping to peer out into the murk. The source of the dispute was hidden, but enough light penetrated
through the almost joined roofs of the houses to allow a distorted reflection to appear in the thick, grimy glass – the outline
of a curling beard, of thick golden hair pulled back and held in a clasp at the neck. The angle of the head, the strength
of nose, brow and forehead, all these reminded him, inevitably, of his father. For a tiny moment, if he closed his eyes he
could almost hear him again, recounting the sagas of the heroes and the old gods Haakon had struggled so hard to memorise,
sitting with his back
to the legs of a huge oaken chair, his father’s rich voice resonating through the wood and on into the heart of a boy, words
stored up against the day foretold when he also would speak them to his people, to his own son. The day that had never come.

A groan from behind him, a little laugh. Haakon turned slightly and the reflection turned with him, his father disappearing
to be replaced by a satyr, licking sugar from fleshy lips. A satyr, yet still himself, the man who now lived by the profits
of the licked.

‘Odin’s blood,’ he whispered, and the act of whispering reminded him how he was no longer someone who spoke his truth out
loud. Men were going to die in this town tonight for doing just that. Braver men than Haakon had become.

He went into the second of the shabby rooms he shared with Angelique. There, in a nest made from a jumble of boxes, deep in
some dream of hunt or battle, his hound, Fenrir, growled and shuddered the length of his grey-white body. His only true companion,
they had been inseparable since the day Haakon had found the puppy, mewling and still blind, in a pillaged farm in Flanders
five years before. He was bred of both wolves and their fleet-footed hunters but, like his master, he was getting fat in the
idleness of town life.

Haakon bent to scratch behind the large ears and Fenrir thumped his tail on the wooden floor, his strange, square wolf eyes
alight with pleasure at the touch. Reaching past him, Haakon rooted through the debris of his former life, the clothes, satchels
and trinkets he’d accumulated in his years as a mercenary. Buried deep among it all, somewhere, was his inheritance. If he
could not remember his father’s tales, at least he had this much of him.

He heard the familiar chink of bone, dug deep within the cavernous bag and came up with the frayed pouch of brown wool. A
linen cloth, its green faded with age, lay in the neck. He pulled it out, spreading it between his dog and himself. Then he
tipped the rest of the bag’s contents out upon it.

There were twenty-four runestones, each disk the size and shape of the circle of thumb tip to forefinger. When his father
had killed a narwhal instead of the sought-after whale he’d seen it as a sign from Odin himself and carved Odin’s runes upon
disks made from the tusk. Haakon had watched as his father spent days shaping and polishing them, then more days in contemplation
and fasting, before finally seizing his finest chisel and cutting the shapes themselves into the bone. The dye was already
prepared, his own blood and extracts of muds and iron mixed, and the freshly cut-out symbols were soaked in a red that blazed
from them still.

Turning each of them slowly over, so that all showed their cracked and yellowing backs, Haakon sought the stillness he’d need
if the runes were to whisper to him rather than just show him their faces. He’d had the skill once, like his father before
him, and his before that. Yet he feared it was another skill gone, like his ability to weave tales, from disuse, from separation
from the land from which both he and they came.

Uttering a short invocation to Odin, he brought to his mind his question, banishing all other thought. There could only be
one question: was it possible for him to escape this world he had settled in and return to a life where tales were both made
and told? He began to move the runes, and the clack of bone on bone, bone on floor, filled his ears, their redness seeping,
as mist, into his eyes.

His hand was drawn without hesitation to one of the disks, the same as all the rest. Different. Picking it out, laying it
down, he moved again till another lay beside it, then another, and as he did so he went beyond the room, beyond the present,
to past and future, all time one in his belief. Time that is and time that is becoming.

He turned the first rune over and it was FE. He knew it stood for cattle, effort expended for gradual reward, opposition overcome
if you prepare till you are ready. He’d seen it once before, four years to the day since his father’s murder,
the day he’d first picked up his father’s legacy, these rune-stones. Haakon had just turned fourteen, grown strong as he hid
from his father’s murderer among his woodcutter cousins. Holding a vision of vengeance at his axe’s edge.

The second rune was UR, the Wild Ox, the beast to be slain by a boy who in the slaying becomes a man. It meant a sacrifice,
of childhood, of much that was good and safe, and thus a leave-taking too. Something must be slain, and the fourteen-year-old
boy, on seeing UR, had reached for his father’s only other legacy, his axe.

The third rune was HAGALL, a hailstorm, striking the land from nowhere, sudden destruction, the same rune that had sent him
without a word of farewell, with only rune-stones at his waist and an axe in his hand, back over the fells of Hareid by night,
to stand in his father’s house, before his father’s bed, where the murderer slept who had stolen both. A boy had raised an
axe, struck, the sacrifice made. A man had left the house and headed for the harbour, the first step on a path that had led,
by various ways, to the mercenary road.

The red mist fading, Haakon stared down at the three symbols, unsurprised that they were the same as those that had sent him
vengefully into the night fourteen years before. Since then many crossroads, many choices between left and right, forward
and back, like the choice made by Angelique, his lover, to ply her trade in her home town of Tours at war’s end. Choices ending
up here, on a road leading nowhere.