At some level in his mind, he knew this was madness, he knew this was suicide. But he could say, with complete honesty, he’d have done the same had he seen any other single man being attacked by five armed men.
“Ah, Aramis,” Porthos said, while he flashed and danced and parried the swords of all opponents, seeming to be in ten places at once, and to have eyes behind his back besides.
It was only when seeing him do something like this that one remembered that Porthos was a fencing and dancing master.
“Catch,” Porthos yelled, and as he did, he brought his sword up from below, catching an opponent’s sword at the tip, and sending it flying, in Aramis’s general direction.
This was so much like a dozen duels they’d taken part in, that Aramis didn’t even think. At any rate, the worst thing you can do is think while a sword is headed for you, turning end over end.
Instead, Aramis leapt forward and grabbed the sword handle, plucking the weapon out of midair as easily as if it had been handed to him. In the landing, he kicked his foot up, managing to hit the man who’d lost the sword just so, as he dove for it. The man went flying in turn, falling to the dirt, immobile.
Aramis called, “
A moi
canaille. See how you fight when the odds are more even.”
Half of Porthos’s opponents turned towards him.
Aramis had come home.
Evening the Odds; Two Gascons and a Musketeer
E
ACH step Athos took, he thought might be the last. His leg hurt and threatened to buckle under him. But Athos had long experience in refusing to give in to his body.
He had fought drunk, he had fought wounded, he had fought after he had spent nights without sleeping and his dreams, like waking phantoms, plagued his daytime vision. It would not change now. He would not give in to his pain, or his weakness now. What he lacked in strength, he made up for in sheer determination.
He ran and every time he thought he would fall, he forced himself to run faster. Behind him, he could hear Fasset panting, trying to catch up.
His pain spurred Athos on, faster and faster, till he heard the sound of swords clashing on swords, nearby. And then he stopped for a moment, catching a breath, as the thought caught up with his panicked mind.
D’Artagnan. They’d already got to D’Artagnan. D’Artagnan was suffering through an onslaught like the one that Athos had endured.
Oh, D’Artagnan was the devil himself with a sword.
Ventre saint gris
, the King himself had called him. But even so, D’Artagnan was young. And for all his theory, he was short on practice.
And those men would be the Cardinal’s best, most merciless killers.
If Athos had been running fast before, now he flew, his feet barely touching the ground, his borrowed sword somehow moving out of the scabbard and into his hand.
“Athos,” D’Artagnan’s voice yelled, as Athos rounded the corner.
Without ever slowing down, Athos took in the scene before him. There were five men fighting D’Artagnan. Only D’Artagnan was not on the same level with them, but was suspended from a trellis, heavily plaited with ivy, that ran up the side of D’Artagnan’s building. In a position only possible to someone as young and agile as D’Artagnan, the young man was hanging from the trellis with one hand, and keeping the guards at bay with feet and sword.
At D’Artagnan’s call, some of the men turned, all of them looked. D’Artagnan took the opportunity to jump down from the trellis and engage the guards fully. Athos registered, without giving it much thought, that the young man was wearing only his shirt—white and knee long.
“But it is impossible,” one of the guards said, facing Athos fully. “You are dead.”
“No,” Athos said, jumping into the battle. “But you soon will be.”
And then the battle plunged into what it always was for Athos—a red mist, and a craving for fight and death and blood. When he’d first come to Paris, when he’d first started his self-imposed exile, he was afraid he was possessed by some evil spirit. His dueling which, up till then, had been mannered and masterful but more art than anger, had become a screaming pit of rage after his wife’s death.
He still wasn’t sure he was not possessed. And he didn’t care.
He fought in the red, hot mist of his own rage, from which only his friends—D’Artagnan to his right and Fasset to his left—were protected.
When the fury abated, and his heart, that had been threatening to break the bounds of his ribcage, slowed down enough for Athos to stop fighting, he found himself standing with his back against D’Artagnan’s wall. D’Artagnan was still to his right, and still in his nightshirt. Fasset was still to his left, bent double, clutching his sword, while breathing so hard that Athos thought the man must be wounded.
But it didn’t matter if he was, because they’d carried the day. In front of them, in various positions of death, lay six guards of the Cardinal.
“Are you wounded, Fasset?” Athos asked.
Fasset shook his head, while still drawing deep, chest-straining breaths. “No, curse you, but I’m also not a demon, like you.”
Athos nodded. He might be a demon, for all he knew. “We must go to Porthos’s place now,” he said, as much to D’Artagnan as to Fasset. “I don’t see any reason to go by Aramis’s lodging because he wouldn’t be so stupid as to go there and they must know it. But they’ll be at Porthos’s. Porthos will need our help.” He thought of his capable, giant friend, who bragged of being able to take three duelers at once, and usually could.
But could he stand alone against determined killers who didn’t care for the rules of war?
“Will you come with me?” he asked both of them.
“Yes,” D’Artagnan said.
“In your nightshirt?”
D’Artagnan grinned, and kicked up his foot. “It’s warm and I have my boots on.”
Athos nodded. “And you, Fasset?”
Fasset shook his head. “I don’t think I could. The two of you aren’t human.”
“Better, perhaps,” Athos said. “These six are dead, but we don’t need the guards, as a whole to know you’ve betrayed them. Thank you, my friend. I owe you my life.”
Without delaying, Athos took off running, following D’Artagnan who ran like a demon, taking every possible shortcut between his house and Porthos’s.
What To Do with a Fugitive; Where the Cardinal’s Guilt Is Agreed Upon, but Guilt of What Is Strenuously Argued
D’
ARTAGNAN arrived at Porthos’s house before Athos, just in time to join the melee.
As he arrived, Porthos and Aramis were close to carrying the day, with three of their opponents lying dead. As D’Artagnan started fighting the fourth, he dropped his sword, turned and ran away.
He was shortly followed by number five, while the sixth fell to the ground, Porthos’s sword having neatly speared him through the chest.
Athos arrived just in time to see the three friends standing there, looking at their dead foes. With immediate and complete composure, Athos stopped and slid his sword into its scabbard. He looked down at the foes, and crossed his arms on his chest, while he frowned at them, as though holding them responsible for cutting his fun short.
D’Artagnan became aware of being very informally attired. Even in the warm evening air, his legs felt naked and cold, as the breeze ruffled his nightshirt’s hem.
And he became aware that Aramis was looking at him, and frowning vaguely in his direction.
“I was in bed,” D’Artagnan said. “And I heard men talking, beneath my window. They were going to force the door open.”
“So he jumped down from his window, scrambled down the trellis and gave battle,” Athos said.
“And then Athos and . . . was that Fasset?” D’Artagnan asked, and Athos nodded. “Joined, and Athos killed three of them, I killed two, and Fasset killed one.”
“But why?” Porthos asked. He cleaned his sword on the clothes of a fallen opponent, and slid it back into its scabbard. “Why were they trying to kill us? Because that was not a simple challenge for a duel. They wanted to kill us.”
“They thought—” Athos started.
“No,” D’Artagnan said. It occurred to him that in the dark, with darker doorways all around, there was a very good chance of being overheard if they stood here, in the middle of the street. And, D’Artagnan thought, looking at the corpses at their feet, if this was not secret matter, it should be. “Porthos, may we go inside?”
The redhead’s face fell. He looked guilty, immediately, of lack of hospitality. “Of course, of course,” he said. “Do come in. I’m a boar. I should have invited you in sooner.” And, as he spoke, he started unlocking his door.
“Hardly,” Aramis said, his voice dry and humorous. “If you had invited us inside sooner, we’d only have got blood all over your stairway.”
Porthos’s stairway was very grand, as was indeed, his entire lodging. The rooms had been subdivided from a much larger, much grander home, and the vestiges of it remained in marble panels on the walls, and in columns separating the entrance from the area where they gathered.
As in all their homes, in Porthos’s home too they had a room, a particular place where they gathered for their war councils.
2
Here it was a broad table, which Mousqueton kept polished to a high gloss. Around it, disposed, were four arm chairs.
D’Artagnan took his place beside Athos, facing Porthos, while Aramis sat next to Porthos. But Porthos sat for only a minute, before getting up, mumbling, “Mousqueton is not here tonight. I’ll get some wine.”
And D’Artagnan who remembered Mousqueton’s pretty friend, smiled and thought that Mousqueton was luckier than all of them. And then thought of his own Planchet, the redheaded stripling, whom he’d cautioned against leaving the house under any conditions.
Fortunately, through their short time together, Planchet had learned that his master meant what he said when he made such conditions. D’Artagnan thought he would be safe, but wondered what Planchet thought had happened. And how much of a confusion would envelop the neighborhood when the bodies were found.
“Why are you back in Paris,” Porthos asked Aramis, as he set a jug of wine and four cups on the table. “I thought you were safe in the countryside.”
D’Artagnan couldn’t read Aramis’s expression at all. It wasn’t dread and it wasn’t boredom, but it was as though both of those and something else besides—something very akin to the terror a pious soul might display at the thought of hell—crossed Aramis’s perfectly symmetrical features. He made a little gesture, as though tossing the idea out of his mind, and he said, “I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay in the country and know my friends were battling who knew what perils for my sake.”
He said it prettily and bravely, and D’Artagnan would almost believe it. Except there was still that look of haunted terror in Aramis’s face.
Porthos only nodded, though, and disappeared, to come back again with a pair of breeches in his hand. “Try these ones, D’Artagnan,” he said.
D’Artagnan took them and pulled them on. They were much too large and since they were ankle length on Porthos, had to be rolled up, but he supposed that looking like he’d gone out wearing his father’s clothes was better than looking half dressed. He tied them on, as tightly as he could.
They sat around the table, and sipped the wine for a long while. D’Artagnan could feel that Athos was working towards saying something. He’d only known the three musketeers for a month, and yet he knew Athos well enough to guess that everything the musketeer said emerged as if out of a deeper silence upon which it was no more than a frail bridge.
After a while, he found himself looking expectantly at Athos, waiting for Athos to speak.
“Aramis,” Athos said, at last. “Do you know any reason why the Cardinal should hate you?”
Aramis frowned. “Not that I . . .” He paused, shrugged. Then sighed. “A week ago I would have told you no, no more cause than he has to hate any of you.”
“And now?” Athos asked.
Porthos turned half around in his chair, as though waiting to hear the revelation.
“Well,” Aramis said. He cupped his long, delicate hands around his wine cup. “I have only one reason, though I don’t understand why it would make him hate me.”
D’Artagnan found himself raising an eyebrow at Aramis, and Aramis’s gaze met his. Only a month ago, those green eyes would have been full of suspicion. Now, when he looked at D’Artagnan, Aramis softened his look, as though in response to the young man’s effort to understand. “You see,” he said. “I found out that the Cardinal Richelieu, when he was young, killed my father in a duel over a girl whom they both loved.”
“Your mother?” Porthos asked.
Aramis closed his eyes, as though fearing the onset of a headache. “Porthos, I’m not a posthumous son.”
But Porthos only grinned. “I fail to see what that has to do with anything, Aramis. You were having an affair with a married woman. Surely you know . . .”