Into The Fire (10 page)

It seems not.

Fools.

Ten men are left around the Maid, of whom Tomas is one. He presses closer. Hammer in the right hand, axe in the left; swap them over. Swap them back. One day soon, he’ll fight with two hammers. Or two axes, maybe?

The Maid’s an axe-holder too; you don’t need a shield when you’re in full plate. Shields are for children and peasants: she bears an axe always in her left hand, her Crusader sword in her right. It was owned once by Charlemagne, dug up from some distant church at her command. One day, Tomas will find out how she did that. It flashes now in the light of new torches lit by the English. Where are the English archers? They must have—

The ram is through. God damn, but that was fast. Half a dozen thundering blows and they’re in! Run! Run! Through the broken gate and duck under the lintel and into the dark courtyard with the flashing torches and already the place smells of latrines and blood. It’s too dark to tell whom he’s fighting, only that someone is trying to kill him and he has good reason to stay alive.

From his left, he hears, ‘On me! Men of France! Gather on the Maid!’ Her voice is deep for her sex, but still flexed with the timbre of womanhood, not the coarse burr of a man. She’s gone ahead. Tomas pushes up towards her.

Iron flashes front and back. The entire defending force is here at the gate. Are they insane? There are two groups coming in from the sides and they haven’t left anyone on watch. This is what fear does, and losing, and thinking you have a demon sent against you.

‘Die, God damn you! Die!’ In English. From the side.

His hammer is up, swinging hard to the right. Someone dies, his side or theirs, he honestly doesn’t care. The Maid’s ahead and he has to get to her. He sweeps his axe in a vicious back-handed cut at a looming face, fends off a thrust with his mailed elbow, traps the sword under his armpit, bears down.

Teeth shatter. A head snaps back. If not dead, then down, and she’s three paces in front, her blade a whipcrack in the leering orange torchlight, her voice pure as a choirboy’s, pealing over the fray.

‘France! France!’

I’ll give you France, you little bitch. A leap, a twist, past two men locked fist to face and back again. A spin of his hammer – God, he loves this hammer – and a helmet dented deep enough to thrust your fist halfway in, and an Englishman screaming, trying to pull it off. Stamp on him as he goes down and –
yes!
– he’s beside her. This is it. Her back is to his back, plate to mail; he can feel the press of it. He could howl for sheer satisfaction. Nobody will know whose blow killed her. Already he is cradling her ruined body, carrying it back through the broken gate, weeping bitter tears as the French gather round him and retreat. There aren’t enough of them here to cause the cataclysm of Jargeau.

Or maybe he rips off his helm and declares himself English: ‘Tod Rustbeard has just killed the demon!’ Talbot and Scales, the English commanders, will honour him; Knights of the Garter, both. He’ll be knighted, at the very least. Bedford will give him a manor; he has enough to spare. They’ll forgive him the men he’s killed; these things happen in war. One day, when the infant King Henry is grown, he’ll call him in to listen to the story and …

He feels her shift towards him, turns, lifts his hammer high. His shoulders are hot, burning with the need to strike. One blow. Between the eyes. She is not a demon. God does not watch over her. Do it!

‘Look out!’ The press of her plate springs clean away. She’s spinning. Her axe is a blur of molten metal, scything down to his left. A sword shatters; not hers. ‘Tomas, look right!’

No!

Three of them, bearing York’s colours out of Ludlow. Big men of the Marches with polearms fit to skewer him. He ducks down under the first as it jabs at his face, drops his axe, grabs the haft, pulls hard, sharp, angles the wood down and stamps on it and throws his hammer – gone! His hammer! – into the oncoming face.

‘With me!’ She’s making space for him, sweeping sword and axe in two killing arcs. Men slew back out of her way. She is a knight and in truth only other knights can hope to match against her and there are none here: Talbot and Scales are across the river.

The pikemen are doing their best, but she uses her body, cased in plate, to block the next strike, rides the blow, lets it spin her in towards the third of the three. ‘Ricard! Here!’

They are mailed, not plated, and Ricard the crossbowman pitches his quarrel from less than twenty paces. He might as well stand right up against them. The bolt punches straight through. The third of the men drops like a stunned heifer even as his pike scores along Tomas’s chest.

He feels the sting of it, and the rush of relief, and the last man is his to take, stooping for his fallen hammer, left and right, hammer and axe in a blizzard of battle heat. They tried to kill him. Him! Fuck them all. It doesn’t matter which side they’re on, he will kill anyone who tries to kill him. He is not ready to die. Not here. Not now.

And the Maid is away, calling La Hire at one side and d’Alençon at the other as both come in over the walls and these three meet in the middle, the king’s three knights, and she is one of them, shining.

Alive.

He watches her go, and curses her shade and her shining face. You did not come out of nowhere. Somebody made you. Whoever you really are, wherever you came from, I will kill you, and then I will destroy the legend you have made for yourself. I, Tomas Rustbeard, swear this.

The next day, rising early, Tomas hears a rumour that Bedford has sent reinforcements from Paris, commanded by no less than Fastolf himself, Knight of the Garter and one of England’s best.

Nobody cares. No man among the French army stirs himself. They don’t believe it, and even if it’s true the English did not arrive in time to save Jargeau or Meung. Nor, as the days pass, do they arrive in time for Beaugency, the next town along the Loire, which surrenders without terms.

The Maid’s victorious army grows in numbers. It’s not true, evidently, that the French have no knights at all; simply that they choose not to fight for a weakling king.

Being on the winning side, though, that’s a different matter. Men appear who have not dusted off their plate in over a decade, and they ride with a new sense of purpose.

They head north, aiming for Rheims, where generations of Gallic kings have been anointed with holy oil and thereby acknowledged monarch of all France in the eyes of God. The English have not yet brought the young king Henry VI for any kind of anointing. To get there first will go a long way to silencing those who say that Charles VII of France is not his father’s son and has no legitimate claim to the throne.

Tomas Rustbeard rides north in the wake of the Maid. He is not in her inner circle, but he is close enough for there to be other chances to kill did he try to take them.

He does not. Jargeau and Meung together have combined to teach him that Glasdale was right and he, Tomas, was wrong: it is not enough to kill this woman, he must destroy her, and to do that, he must expose every part of her fabrications.

Accordingly, he lays plans, or rather a single plan with many threads to its weft, first of which is that he needs to get to Paris to see Bedford, because if he is going to change his mission he has to speak to the regent, a lord who does not take readily to his servants having their own ideas.

LUC IS IN
the foyer.

Picaut feels him before she sees him. She feels him in the stares of the men and women coming down the steps, in the tilted heads, in the questions that are given no voice. It’s astonishing how many people work in this building, and every single one of them has come down to take a look.

Luc shines. He is their hero, so French you could press wine from his bone marrow and olive oil from his tear ducts; so well bred, he is the closest they have to royalty.

He is only one seventy-eight, not Sarkozy-small, but not so tall as to be intimidating. He has perfect teeth and southern skin and he wears just few enough clothes to let everyone know that it’s all muscle under there, no fat. His hair is lushly black and flops across his face in a way that is at once shy and full of courage. His cheekbones are Bogart, his eyes pure Clooney. He is the young Alain Delon, c. 1964, straight out of
The Unvanquished
, and even men grow silent in his presence.

He is standing now in the seedy foyer of the police station that is Picaut’s place of work and half the women will be having orgasms at the mere sight of him and the other half will stare at Picaut as she walks in, wondering how, and why – for fuck’s sake,
why?
– she ever left him.

Nobody has yet asked if he beat her, but the question hangs over their heads, just waiting for someone to pick up the courage to speak it aloud.

Patrice remains unmoved. He pushes through the crowd and takes the steps in one leap to land before Picaut as she stands at the bottom.

‘Sauron,’ he says, as they press kiss to cheek, which is distracting enough to draw Picaut’s attention away from Luc.

His T-shirt says, V
ICTOR IS DEAD.
G
ET OVER IT
. with a particularly angelic image of the wide-eyed revenant child beneath.

More importantly, her memory of him is badly askew. Sometime since she last saw him – yesterday? Maybe the day before? – he has found the time to dye his platinum-blond hair in a shade of sparkling, metallic, kingfisher blue. The trailing tip of his pony tail reaches down to his waist, which she thinks is also new. It is possible that he may be wearing hair extensions.

She is not sure of the implications of this. Is it more or less a sign of metrosexuality than eye shadow? She hasn’t actually seen him wearing that, but she thinks he has turned up in mascara more than once. She realizes that he has spoken and she has no idea what he has said.

‘What?’

‘Sauron. From LOTR. In Warcraft, he’d be the Orc Warlock standing in a corner of the flag room spamming chaos bolts while—’ He sees her face, the incomprehension spreading across it, flashes a grin that is all mischief. ‘Never mind. Power turns him on the way gold turns on some men, or drugs, or money. That’s so not you. Why did you marry him?’

‘I was young,’ says Picaut, which just about covers it. ‘And the sex was out of this world.’ She can say this safely to Patrice, in ways she couldn’t to Ducat or Garonne, even in the good times. The rise of his brow is wry, not lewd. Unwilling, she asks, ‘Did he say what he wanted?’

‘No. But if he’s trying for mayor, he’s going to need arm candy.’

‘Fuck that. He can find someone else.’

‘No, he can’t. His type doesn’t like to be seen to be cheating on their wives. It hurts their core vote.’

‘Give me a couple of weeks and I won’t be his wife.’

Patrice shrugs. ‘Elections wait for no man. Or woman. He hasn’t got a couple of weeks.’

‘Jesus,
fuck.
’

‘No.’

Patrice was right. Luc is in her office, which has glass walls and stands in the south-western corner of an open-plan set-up with desks for thirty officers. It’s about as private as a fish tank, but at least the doors are closed and they can speak without every word’s being tweeted to the world.

‘I’m not being any man’s arm candy.’

‘I did
not
ask you to be my—’

‘Yes, you did. Don’t spin words at me. You want to be seen with a wife as a political accoutrement. You can call it what you want, but I think Patrice pretty much nailed it. You want me to know my place and you can fuck right off. I have no wish any longer to be your wife, trophy, anything. Find someone else. Walk out there and take your pick; you must know you can.’

‘I can’t.’ He has vast, dark, liquid eyes. Picaut could drown in them. This morning she nearly did. The skin behind her knees sweats at the memory and something bucks deep in her gut with a brutal, unforgiving urgency. She presses it down out of his sight and hers. She can outstare him if she has to.

He looks away. ‘It has to be you,’ he says. ‘You’re my wife.’ And then, ‘I love you.’

‘
What?
’

She could count on the fingers of one hand – actually, just one finger – the number of times he has said this. It was six o’clock on the evening of 14 September 2009, the day he asked her to marry him. Not before, not since.

‘I love you. I can’t bear this separation. It’s eating me alive. It’s what I wanted to say this morning, but didn’t have the courage. I know you don’t want to be with me, and I’ll accept that – but for now, please, I beg you, will you stand on a platform with me and smile as if you at least don’t loathe me?’

‘The papers, the news …’ The gossip magazines trumpeted their break-up as the hot story of the winter. What they will do with this doesn’t bear thinking about. Monique Susong will be glad she didn’t leave Orléans. Her magazine will pay for her to stay.

Luc says, ‘Let the Family deal with the media. The PR department has it in hand.’ He gives the small smile he used when the Family was their in-joke; the two of them against the rest. ‘Just don’t deny any of their spin.’ He leans over to kiss her cheek.

‘Luc, I haven’t—’

‘I know. Let me say this.’ His breath a feather-light on her cheek. ‘The morning after I am elected as mayor, my lawyer will sign whatever your lawyer asks him to. Anything.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’ll never let you.’ Uncle Landis is Luc’s lawyer, a legal mind so expensive that not even Luc could afford him if he wasn’t Family.

‘He thought you’d say that. Here—’ He produces a folded note from his pocket. The paper is faux parchment. Or perhaps it’s real. One of the many reasons Inès Picaut could never truly have been Family is that she can’t tell the difference. The seal is red wax, and breaks easily. Inside, the writing is in fountain pen, in a hand she knows.

Luc is telling you the truth. For your co-operation in his endeavour, we off er you fr eedom fr om your marital vows, on the terms of your choosing. This is our promise. Whatever you know of the Family, you know we never break our oath. Keep this paper. It will stand in court.