Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Willocks

  Map

  Dedication

  Title Page

  PART ONE: This Fearful Slumber

  CHAPTER ONE: The Printer’s Daughters

  CHAPTER TWO: A Very Great Philosopher Indeed

  CHAPTER THREE: Swine

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Lady from the South

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Rat Girl

  CHAPTER SIX: The Gentle of Spirit

  PART TWO: Acts of Black Night, Abominable Deeds

  CHAPTER SEVEN: In the Vein

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Dogs on Fire

  CHAPTER NINE: Clementine

  CHAPTER TEN: Out of the Strong

  PART THREE: False Shadows For True Substances

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Cockaigne

  CHAPTER TWELVE: On the Vertex

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Alice

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Burning Man

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Madman Has No Master

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: In the Land of God

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: More Shameful Than Murder

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Magdalene

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Birthing Room

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Pope Paul

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Symbol

  PART FOUR: As Far From Help As Limbo Is From Bliss

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Minstrel

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Crimson Apron

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: The Yards

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Mice

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Sisters

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: The Blackness

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: The Angel

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: The Juggler

  PART FIVE: Direful Slaughtering Death

  CHAPTER THIRTY: If This Be Paradise

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: The Judgement

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: A Very Particular God

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Just Another Child

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: The Crucible

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Short Weight for the Blind

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: The Hanged Man

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Horses and Boys

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Something of the Lore

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: The Quays At Saint-Landry

  CHAPTER FORTY: Ghosts of the Unrepentant Damned

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: The Devil’s Causeway

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: The Place of Dead Monkeys

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: For Whom My Tears Have Made Me Blind

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: Nameless Ways

  EPILOGUE: Environed With A Wilderness

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Paris, August 23rd, 1572.

  What do you do when your wife disappears . . .

  In the middle of the bloodiest massacre in European history . . .

  And you know she is about to give birth to your only child?

  Three wars of religion have turned Paris into a foetid cauldron of hatred, intrigue and corruption. The Royal Wedding, intended to heal the wounds, has served only to further poison the fanatics of either creed. But Carla could not have known that when she accepted an invitation to the ceremony.

  When Mattias Tannhauser rides into town, on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve, his only intention is to find her and take her home. But as the massacre of tens of thousands of Huguenots begins, and the city plunges into anarchy, Carla is abducted by Grymonde, the grotesque gang leader of the Yards, and Tannhauser finds himself imprisoned in the Louvre, at the centre of a vicious conspiracy.

  Wanted by the law, the assassins’ guild, and a militant army who call themselves the Pilgrims of Saint-Jacques, Tannhauser must rise to pitiless extremes even he has never known before. With no one to help him but a stable boy, he wades a river of blood without knowing what lies on the other side.

  As he harrows Hell in search of his beloved

  His destiny is changed forever by

  The Twelve Children Of Paris . . .

  About the Author

  Tim Willocks was born in Stalybridge, Cheshire, in 1957 and studied medicine at University College Hospital Medical School. He is the author of four previous novels: Bad City Blues, Green River Rising, Bloodstained Kings and The Religion.

  Also by Tim Willocks

  Bad City Blues

  Green River Rising

  Bloodstained Kings

  The Religion

  To my friend

  DAVID COX

  who walked every step of the way

  The Twelve Children of Paris

  Tim Willocks

  PART ONE

  THIS FEARFUL SLUMBER

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Printer’s Daughters

  NOW HE RODE through a country gutted by war and bleeding in its aftermath, where the wageless soldiers of delinquent kings yet plied their trade, where kindness was folly and cruelty strength, where none dared claim his brother as his keeper.

  He passed gallows trees where red-legged crows roosted black as their carrion, where knots of children in rags and tags returned his gaze in silence. He passed the roofless hulks of burned churches where shards of stained glass glimmered like abandoned treasure on the chancel floor. He passed settlements tenanted by gnawed bones, where the yellow eyes of wolves gleamed from the darkness. A blazing hayrick lit some yonder hill. In the moonlight the ashes of vineyards were white as tombstones.

  He had covered more miles in fewer days than even he had thought possible. Yet here at last he was and there it stood. The walls quavered in the distance, warped by the August heat, and above them glowered a swag of ochre haze, as if the walls were not walls at all but, rather, the lip of some vast shaft sunk into the nether realms of the earth.

  Such was his first impression of the Most Catholic City in Christendom.

  The sight brought him little comfort. The forebodings that had driven him were undiminished. He had slept by the road and taken to the saddle in the cool before the dawn, yet every morning his destiny had risen before him. He felt it lying in wait, behind those Plutonian walls. In the city of Paris.

  Mattias Tannhauser pressed on to the Saint-Jacques Gate.

  The walls were thirty feet tall and studded with watchtowers as high again. The gatehouse like the walls was stained by time and the shitting of birds. As he crossed the drawbridge his eyes watered from the fumes of the putrid garbage filling the ditch. Through the blur, as if in a dream, two families tottered out between the enormous timber doors.

  They were dressed in black and he took them for Huguenots. Or Calvinists, Lutherans, Protestants, or even Reformers. To the question of what to call them he had never found an answer that served all needs. Their new conception of how to live with God had hardly learned how to walk, yet their factions were already hard at each other’s throats. To Tannhauser, who had killed for God in the name of more than one creed, this came as no surprise at all.

  The Huguenots, women and children too, staggered beneath a diversity of bags and bundles. Tannhauser wondered how much more they had left behind. The two men, who had the look of brothers, exchanged a glance of relief. A slender boy craned his neck and stared at Tannhauser. Tannhauser mustered a smile. The boy hid his face in his mother’s skirts and revealed a strawberry birthmark on his neck below the angle of his jaw. The mother saw him note it, and covered the mark with her hand.

  Tannhauser pulled his mount aside to ease the pilgrims’ progress. The elder of the brothers, astonished by this courtesy, looked up. When he saw the Maltese Cross on Tannhauser’s black linen shirt, he dropped his face and hurried by. As his brood followed, the l
ittle boy looked back into Tannhauser’s eyes. His features lit up with a grin, and it was the gladdest sight Tannhauser had seen in many a day. The boy tripped and his mother caught his arm and dragged him across the bridge towards hazards unknown.

  Tannhauser watched them go. They put him in mind of a flock of ducks. They were poorly equipped for the road, whose dangers were considerable, but at least, or so it seemed, they had escaped from Paris.

  ‘Good luck.’

  Tannhauser received no reply.

  He pushed on beneath the first of two portcullises and into the gatehouse, where a customs officer was too busy counting coins to afford him more than a sour glance. Here more emigrants were being fleeced and they, too, were clad in black. He entered the city and stopped in the shade of the wall. The humidity was suffocating. He mopped his brow. The journey north from the Garonne had consumed eight days and a dozen mounts, and had almost wasted him, too. He felt as if he didn’t have a mile left in him. But this was his first time in the capital and he roused himself to take some measure of its spirit.

  The Grand Rue Saint-Jacques ran ahead, downhill towards the Seine. For most of its length it was no more than five yards wide. Every square foot teemed with human beings and their animals. The clamour of voices, the bellowing, the bleating, the barking, and the snarling of flies, would have made a field of war seem tranquil; and those among the damned whose eternal task it was to scour Satan’s piss pot with their tongues knew not a fouler smell. All this he might have expected, but beneath the workaday turmoil he sensed a more malignant tension, as if too much fear and too much fury had been swallowed by too many for too long. Parisians were a truculent lot, prone to disobedience and public disorder of every kind, but even they could not sustain a mood so febrile as a matter of course. In a different circumstance, this might not have caused him much unease, but he had not travelled the length of France to pull on trouble’s braids.

  He had come to find Carla, his wife, and take her home.

  Carla’s foolhardiness in visiting Paris had caused him an agony of worry and exasperation, emotions compounded by the fact that she was, by now, exceeding late in pregnancy. It would be their second child, and God willing the first to survive. Yet her behaviour had not much surprised him. Carla’s mind, once resolved on any matter, evinced an iron fixity of purpose, and practical hurdles of any kind aroused her scorn. This was one of the qualities he loved in her, and a wall he had cracked his skull against more than once. If one added to this the fact, as he had it on good advice, that pregnancy was a temporary state of insanity, then her journey to Paris, along roads unimproved since the fall of Rome, might even seem unremarkable.

  And few women can resist an invitation to a wedding, especially one between two royal houses and celebrated far and wide as the union of the age.

  A pair of child prostitutes tottered towards him through the muck, their faces caked with white lead, their cheeks and lips daubed with vermilion. The little girls were perfect twins, which no doubt added to their asking price. The radiance that had once lit their eyes had been snuffed and would never shine again. As if trained in the same school of depravity, they mimed lewd smiles for his delectation.

  His stomach turned and he searched the press for their pimp. A brutish adolescent caught his gaze and realised he was staring down the bore of a thrashing or worse. The pimp let out a shrill whistle. The wretched girls turned on the spot and scurried back to his side, and they vanished into the crowd to be raped elsewhere.

  Tannhauser urged his horse into the throng.

  His knowledge of the city and its geography was primitive, gleaned from the letters of Orlandu, his stepson, who was here to study mathematics and astronomy at the Collège d’Harcourt. This southern half of the city, on the Left Bank, was called the University. The island in the Seine was the City. The Right Bank beyond the river was known as the Ville. Beyond that he knew only that it was the biggest city on earth, a vast overpopulated warren of uncharted streets and nameless alleys, of palaces, taverns, churches and brothels, of markets, abattoirs and workshops, of multitudinous hovels too desperate to contemplate.

  He had travelled using the relay network of post-horses re-established after the wars. The final stable in the chain lay on a side street west of the Rue Saint-Jacques. He found it easily enough – the Écurie D’Engel – but not without repelling further entreaties from the off-scourings of humanity. Paris was home to more beggars, whores and thieves than existed in the whole of the rest of France. Hired assassins were so numerous that, like the goldsmiths and the glovers, they boasted their own guild. Criminal gangs flourished in league with various of the commissaires and sergents. And at the other end of the hierarchy, the Crown and the great aristocrats, when not plotting against each other or fomenting mindless wars, devoted those energies surplus to their debaucheries to robbing their subjects with ever more ingenious taxes, these latter being, in Tannhauser’s view, the most heinous of their many crimes.

  After the street and its open sewer the smell of the stable afforded his nostrils and eyeballs some relief. He heard the sound of someone being flogged, and it wasn’t a horse for the victim was too quiet. The grunts of pleasure accompanying the lashes came from the flogger’s throat. Tannhauser dismounted in the yard and followed the sounds to a stall, where a muscular fellow, stripped to the waist, worked up a sweat by whipping a boy with the sharp end of a bridle. Tannhauser glimpsed bloody rags, an ungainly body curled and writhing in silence on a mass of straw.

  It didn’t sit right with him.

  He caught the bridle by its bit as the hostler cocked his arm, and looped the strap around the hostler’s neck and heaved. As the hostler choked on his own fist, Tannhauser stomped on his Achilles tendon and rammed a knee into his spine. He rode him down with his full weight and the hostler’s face bounced from the flagstones. A piss runnel carved into the floor ran past the stalls, replenished by the frightened mare. Tannhauser crammed the hostler’s nose and mouth into the stream and let him inhale. He wondered if this were Engel himself. The hostler squirmed and wheezed in the piss until his strength fled. Tannhauser let go of the bridle and stood up.

  The flogged boy was on his feet. He was a big lad but otherwise nature had been no kinder than life. A harelip exposed his gums as far as the left nostril. His age was hard to guess, perhaps ten or so. To his credit, there were no tears on his cheeks. His lower jaw was misshapen and Tannhauser wondered if he might not be an idiot.

  ‘The mare needs a rub.’

  The boy bobbed his head and disappeared.

  Tannhauser booted the hostler in the chest until he crawled out of his way, then unloaded his gear and stripped the saddle. As the boy arrived with a currying glove, Engel stumbled past, dragging one leg and clutching his ribs, and reeled towards the street. The boy watched him go. Tannhauser wondered if he’d done him any favours. Future beatings would likely be more vicious than before. He contemplated the weight of his belongings and the prospect of hauling them through crowded streets and crippling heat.

  ‘How well do you know the city, boy?’

  The boy garbled something unintelligible. He uttered a strange, halting laugh. He hunched his shoulders and made odd gestures with his spade-like hands. All Tannhauser gleaned was a sense of enthusiasm.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  He had a stab at interpreting the strangled, nasal reply.

  ‘Grégoire?’

  Again the laughter. Furious nodding. Tannhauser laughed, too.

  ‘Well, Grégoire, I’m going to make you my lackey. And I hope my guide.’

  Grégoire fell to his knees with his hands clasped and chanted what might have been a blessing. The boy would make a singular Virgil, not least because Tannhauser could hardly understand him. He raised him to his feet and looked in his eyes. They were bright with intelligence.

  ‘See to the horse, Grégoire, and we’ll find you some decent clothes.’

  Grégoire, reattired in Engel’s white cambric shirt, b
ore up well under the burden of two enormous saddle wallets, a canvas sleeping roll, a goatskin of water and a pair of holstered horse pistols, from which Tannhauser had blown the priming so that the boy wouldn’t blow off a foot. Tannhauser carried his wheel-lock rifle cradled in his arm. His hand-and-a-half sword was slung by his side. As they approached the Grand Rue Saint-Jacques, Engel reappeared.

  His nose and lips looked like a mass of rotten pears, and one eye was swollen shut. He was in the company of two sergents à verge armed with short bows. Tannhauser wondered how much Engel had paid to recruit them. The sergents weighed up the large, well-armed figure striding towards them and concluded that their fee had been inadequate.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ said Tannhauser. ‘You’ve arrested him.’

  The sergents stopped.

  ‘I found that man buggering my horse.’

  Engel’s jaw dropped. Blood drooled from the new gaps in his teeth.

  ‘In fairness, it was a mare, but I trust that the penalty is no less severe.’

  Engel took a breath to protest and Tannhauser stepped up and fed the butt of the rifle into his brow. Engel toppled as if his feet were nailed to the ground, his fall only broken when the back of his skull cratered a mound of filth. Tannhauser smiled at the sergents, who had retreated and grabbed at their sword hilts.

  ‘My lackey here can testify to his crime. Can’t you, Grégoire?’

  Grégoire garbled something incomprehensible.

  ‘Now, do you officers need anything else?’

  ‘Carrying that gun contravenes the law.’

  ‘Your laws don’t apply to the Knights of Saint John.’

  The sergents looked at each other.