Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (16 page)

They followed her down the main stair to the hallway, bewildered and made even more afraid by the mention of Altan’s name. She explained nothing. She did not know what to explain. Noises came from the rear hall, clatters, blows and grunts, but not of combat. She found Altan Savas rigging a variety of wedges and timber props, improvised from planks that he appeared to have ripped from the floor, in such a way as to buttress the lock and hinges of the back door against the hole the planks left behind. Altan Savas did not seem much impressed, though Carla was. He glanced at Didier as if the man was a woman or worse. He beckoned her back towards the entrance hall that enclosed the front door and the foot of the staircase. He pointed to her candle and motioned about with his hands.

‘Candles, here. Here. Many, many. Light.’

‘Didier,’ said Carla. ‘Tell Denise to forget our food. Both of you place as many lamps and candles as you can find here in the hallway and light them. Quickly, now.’

Altan stabbed a finger at the front door.

‘The bad men come. Here. Yes.’

‘Yes, I know, we can’t stop them getting in,’ said Carla. She did not plan to but she found herself asking him, ‘Tell me, can we go? Can we get away, just you and I?’ She made a walking gesture with her fingers, and pointed to his chest and to hers.

Altan nodded. ‘Yes. You want?’

Carla didn’t answer. She heard the pluck of strings above, the sleepy voices.

She shook her head.

Altan pointed to the back door. ‘They want to come there. To be not seen.’ He threw back the bolt on the front door so that only the lock held it. ‘But we make they come here.’ He again gestured about then nodded up the stairs and made the motion of drawing and firing an arrow downwards. ‘When many dead, they go.’

Carla understood. Encourage the invaders to come through the front door on Rue du Temple, where there was at least a chance of others witnessing the assault and summoning help. Then use the front hallway as a killing ground, defending the stairs from the first-floor landing outside the parlour and the master bedroom. If enough of them were killed, if the price was bloody enough – and she was certain Altan Savas would drive a hard bargain – the others would give up.

She felt hope rise in her chest.

‘Yes, yes. Good. Mattias would be happy.’

Didier brought in a pair of candelabra and Denise began lighting the wall lamps. From above came the sound of reluctant bows sawing at strings.

‘Should I join them?’ She pointed upstairs.

Altan nodded. ‘One candle. Not more.’

Carla took her seat with her viola da gamba propped almost against her belly. The position required her to bend and stretch awkwardly to finger and bow, but she had adapted. She knew that when she played the instrument vibrated against her womb. The music filled her child’s entire universe. She had been playing to him all his life and she knew he loved it. Music had nurtured him as surely as had her blood.

She had played for her dead child, Bors, too, throughout his life inside her. Even now it consoled her to know that his existence had been filled with the purest beauty. And if it was so, as Mattias, following Petrus Grubenius, insisted, that in the womb there is, and can be, no such thing as Time, but only Before Time, then Bors had heard her play through that same eternity which ruled before the dawn of creation. As Mattias said, Bors had not only always listened to her music, he had listened to her music for forever.

She took her bow and looked at the children. Their eyes were wide in the semi-dark, not even sure whether or not they should be afraid.

‘We did not play for the Queen so we will play for your mother.’

‘Maman has heard us before,’ said Antoinette.

‘True. But not as she will hear us now, for we will play like never before.’

Carla counted off and they began the
chanson spirituelle
that she had composed for the occasion of the royal wedding. It was a rondeau for four voices, one human, sung by Martin, and three instrumental. Antoinette had a recorder part, often improvised but rarely, thanks to Carla’s glances, catastrophic.

Previously Carla had been much concerned in their practice with achieving a respectable performance. This morning she played for herself and her baby. She closed her eyes. If her baby was not going to emerge into Time at all, if all he would ever know was forever, then she would try her best to fill it with magic and not with her terror. She let the music, the wood, the gut strings, her skin and muscle and bone, carry her deep into his world, into the world Before Time.

If they died, together, then together they would continue into the world Beyond Time. She thought of Mattias whose spirit, she believed, was near as large as eternity – for as he might say,
What right soul is not?
– and could encompass all things and all loss. She grieved for the pain that would gore him. Yet Mattias would endure until he joined them, as she knew he would, for any Paradise inclined to reject him she would scorn. The baby joined them, here and now. They all three played together. Somehow she knew that the baby sensed his father and felt his presence through her.

When Martin’s voice stuck in his throat, Carla did not waver.

When Antoinette dropped her recorder, she did not care.

When Lucien and Charité stopped playing, Carla played on.

When the battering of metal on wood began, and Symonne started screaming and the children joined in, Carla closed her ears to their din.

She played on.

When glass began to shatter all over the house, Carla did not open her eyes nor did she miss a note. She played on and her baby listened and he loved her and she loved him. Let Death, too, join them in their song if he would. They would die amid love and music.

She did not stop playing until Altan Savas wrenched the gambo violl from her hands. She didn’t open her eyes until he pulled her to her feet and out of the parlour.

The big window which lit the hallway from over the main front door gaped glassless but for saw-toothed fragments in the rabbets. Stones and lead balls lay among the gleaming debris and the overturned candles on the tiles of the hallway floor. At the foot of the stairs the front door shuddered in its frame with blows from the street. They alternated between the upper hinge and the lower. Two hammers. The door was heavy but no door is stronger than its hinges and the hinges rattled and twisted on creaking screws. Throughout the house more windows burst with such exuberance that one might think them freed from bondage, their original purpose fulfilled. Above the clamour of despair from the parlour, Carla heard strange animal yowls and human curses.

Altan’s hand was immensely strong. His grip hurt her arm.

He shouted in her ear. ‘We go, now.’

He released her and Carla followed him down the stairs without questioning the change of plan. Altan wore his Turkish horn bow on one shoulder. He drew the short, heavy-bladed
Messer
sword that he favoured. He drew a dagger. Carla felt a hand grab hold of hers. It was Antoinette’s. Carla held onto it and pulled her along.

Halfway down the staircase their limbs were quaked by a hideous squeal that seemed torn from the outraged spirit of all living things. A spiral of flame erupted outside the jagged frame above them, and, as if the hole were a portal to some darker and more vicious Hell than any of those the prophets had foretold, a dog on fire soared through the broken window towards them.

Antoinette screamed. For the first time, Carla screamed too.

She dragged the girl behind her, stumbling back up the steps as Altan hacked the piteous animal, alight from neck to tail, in mid-air. The sword cut the dog half through its mid-section and hurled it to the tiles in a smoking frenzy, its jaws panting and agape, its eyes whited with terror, its muscles squirming beneath the flames. Its paws scrabbled and skated in the tinkling shards and with a howl it took off down the corridor.

Carla retreated further as a second burning dog came through the window.

She could smell the pine pitch in which it was smeared. The stench of burning fur and flesh turned her stomach. She felt Antoinette’s fingers clinging to her skirts, heard the girl’s racking sobs. As the second dog writhed to its feet, the first returned down the hall in its blind sprint of agony and panic, the fire fluttering, the yowls pitiful to hear. The two blazing animals collided and exchanged snarls, and seemed about to fall to fighting, then exploded together up the stairs. Altan Savas kicked them aside, tongues of fuel flaring from his boots, and spread his arms wide about Carla and Antoinette.

As the dogs on fire spread their fever to the crowded parlour, Altan guided Carla down to shelter in one front corner of the hall. Carla heaved for breath in the sulphurous air.

Yet more dogs appeared.

These dogs were not ablaze but were almost as panicked and surely more enraged. They were tossed through the ground-floor windows at the front and rear – six dogs? Eight? – street curs of indeterminate breed, small in size but large in energy. They hurtled about and up and down in a deranged tintamarre, barking in terror and confusion. From the parlour above Carla heard the voices competing in terror – in pleas, in prayer – dog goading human and human goading dog into a lunacy of fear absolute.

Nor was Altan Savas immune. His head twitched from side to side, eyes glazed as if waiting for ranks of demons to emerge from the walls.

Carla hit him hard across the cheek. Her hand stopped dead, as when one slaps the hindquarters of a horse, but Altan blinked and his senses returned.

‘Thank you, madame.’

He stood to one side of the door, watching the hinges come loose. From the darkness upstairs came a renewed burst of distress. With a suddenness that made Carla jump, the door flew inwards and crashed to the floor. A man lunged in right behind it, off balance, carried by the momentum of his last hammer stroke.

‘
Allaaahu akabar.
’

Altan Savas chopped him through the nape of the neck and would have severed his head but that he pulled the stroke in order to dash on through the blood spray to swarm the second of the hammer men. In the space of a heartbeat Altan stabbed him four times, dagger and sword, in the gut, chest, throat, then stepped back as he glanced across the street. Three bodies lay on the baked dirt, pierced by arrows, one still mewling, clutching his leaking belly. Carla realised Altan must have shot them from the windows above while she was playing. Something whistled by and cracked and careened around the hallway but Carla heard no gunshot.

Altan pegged his sword in the doorjamb and belted his dagger and unslung his bow and produced and nocked an arrow with movements no less swift and precise than those of Carla’s fingers on the frets. Across the street she glimpsed a figure make an overarm throw with a sling. She retreated, face to the wall, and again came the whistle and the crack of the stone. Altan Savas swung into the gap, the horn bow flexing, the arrow coming up to the aim. He loosed from the ivory thumb ring and she couldn’t help but peer around the door.

The slinger was on his knees, his hands cupped before his chest from which blood spouted like wine from a skin. The arrow quavered in the timbers of the building ten feet behind him. He fell forward onto his face and didn’t move.

Altan had already knocked and drawn again, aiming at some target she could not see. But at the last moment he swivelled back inside and Carla flinched and ducked back into the shadows as the broad head tip of the drawn arrow swung in her direction. Altan swooped the arrow tip up above her head and levelled it again.

Or tried to.

Later she wondered if the swoop had cost his life. And so much more.

Glass crunched behind her. She was deafened by the roar of a gun.

Flame and powder smoke blasted Altan Savas in the face.

He was thrown over backwards. The arrow vanished behind her. An enormous figure charged past her and fell astraddle Altan’s body, a knife rising and falling as if to kill some fabled creature known to be immortal. But Carla knew from the way he had fallen that Altan had died the instant he was shot. The ringing in her ears faded. The enormous shoulders stopped stabbing. He stood up and looked down at his victim.

‘Hellfire. Even so, he nearly killed me.’

Despite the shock in his voice, it was the deepest Carla had ever heard.

He didn’t turn.

She realised it was his head and shoulders that gave the impression of a giant. He was over average height but not as tall as Mattias, and, apart from his feet, which were huge, his lower half was of reasonable proportion. His shoulders and head were those of a man who might otherwise have been twice the size. He looked out of the front door, his back still towards her, and she caught sight of the immense lower jawbone. A thick gold ring pierced his ear, as if in some defiant act of vanity; or to dare someone to take it. A pair of crazed dogs slithered through the weltered gore and careened between his legs, snapping at each other in their desperation to escape the deranged women and wailing children, the barking and the broken glass and the stench of burning hair.

The killer waved a two-barrelled wheel-lock pistol across the street, smoke curling from one muzzle. He bellowed into the night.

‘The Turk is dead. We’re in. Bring up the carts.’ He glanced at Altan’s corpse and murmured, ‘If there’s enough left to pull them.’ He bellowed again: ‘I want to be gone by first light.’

He shoved his bloody knife into the back of his belt and looked down again at Altan. He shook his head as if counting his luck. He belted his pistol and stooped and took the ivory ring from Altan’s thumb. He looked at it curiously, then tried to slip it over his own. It didn’t fit. He slid it over his little finger and seemed pleased with the trophy. He turned and looked at Carla.

His features were not deformed in design, yet his nose, his lips, the heavy ridges of his cheekbones and brows were so huge, so overgrown, that the effect was grotesque. His eyes were deep-set and dark. Strangest of all, he gave off something of the air of a monstrous boy. Perhaps it was the disproportion of his head; perhaps something inside him. The Infant of Cockaigne.