The French Executioner (28 page)

For what? She’d sat there for a year before and not a single chance had occurred in that time to get in, or to pursue the
Archbishop outside. He was always too heavily guarded, or surrounded by people. Once she had nearly lost all patience and
attempted an assault single-handedly, despite the odds, but had held off knowing that one chance was all she would have.

That chance had now come and gone, on the road to Toulon. It should have been just her, Cibo and the hulking bodyguard – good
odds! The man should have died there, his seal of office hers with which to forge documents for her father’s release. Instead,
other men with other motives had got in her way. One man especially. She had hesitated then, and again in Toulon, distracted
by feelings that had never affected her before. And now, with that man gone and probably dead, she was back where she seemed
to have spent her life, waiting for another chance that might be years in the coming.

Despite this realisation, she was still reluctant to leave her post until hunger forced her to, her own and the growling Fenrir’s
at her feet. In the winding alleys beside the palace, foodsellers had already staked their pitches, for the Palio was due
to take place the next day. Prices had already started to climb, and Beck reluctantly paid three scudi for a meagre loaf of
bread and some cooked meat which she didn’t consider too closely. Long gone were the days when she ate according to the dictates
of her tribe. Life on the streets of Siena didn’t allow such luxuries. And Fenrir didn’t mind the gristly meat at all.

It was while they were returning down the side alley to the front of the building that Fenrir suddenly growled and jerked
the length of rope from her hand. He ran to the palace wall and began to paw at something on the ground. She saw a rat’s corpse
and was about to pull the dog away when she noticed the rat move. Since it was obviously dead, she looked closer. Something
was moving it from below, and it wasn’t the steady stream of smoke she now noticed rising around the body.

She bent down. Expecting another rat, the glinting eyes that suddenly fastened on her, set within a crown of black feathers,
gave her a shock, but that was nothing next to the shock of recognition.

‘Daemon!’ she cried.

The raven ceased gnawing only for the time it took to say, ‘Hand.’

Beck put down her food and looked back. The grate was set within two buttresses. For the moment, no one was in sight in the
alley. She bent down and tried to pull the grate up but it was wedged solidly, held down by years of filth and sediment.

‘Don’t move,’ she said to the raven, which acknowledged her departure merely by taking a bigger bite.

Beck ran back to the stall keepers. Several were still in the process of setting up and some stalls were more elaborate
than others, with sides and awnings. She spotted what she wanted beside one of them and, while the two men were distracted
by the voluptuous female form of an orange seller passing by, she seized the crowbar and ran back.

Inserting it into the grate she pressed all her weight down upon it. For a long moment nothing seemed to happen, then there
was a slight giving followed by a rush of movement as the grate tipped up at an angle and the rat’s body disappeared down
the hole. Daemon hopped out immediately and, putting his head to one side, looked up at her with a reproachful expression.

‘Here, you can share mine,’ she said, handing over some bread.

While the bird set to munching again, Beck regarded it with wonder. She coughed and waved a gust of smoke away from her face,
then breathed in again more urgently. There was some familiar savour to it. Somewhere, she had smelt it before.

And then it came to her. The smoke carried a memory of the last time she had seen her father before he smuggled her out of
the palace, sitting before his crucible, its white heat reducing iron to molten metal, an acrid cloud enveloping him with
its scent.

This scent. The scent in her nostrils now.

She blew her nose to the side of the hole before her. Looking down, she saw the thread trailing away into the darkness. What
is that? She reached down and Daemon leapt up onto her outstretched hand. Running her fingers down the wool, Beck tugged it
lightly, feeling the resistance.

‘Clever Fugger,’ she said.

She fought down the instinct to throw herself into the hole, to immediately trace the red line to its source, which she knew
now must also be the source of the smoke. She had a vision of her father sitting in a cloud of it and the desire to slither
into the subterranean depths and into his arms was overpowering.

But she was a street fighter of old and knew that plans
launched in haste usually ended in bad blood. So she swiftly untied the thread from the bird’s talons and attached it to the
grate before replacing it. Then she went in search of what she would need. It wouldn’t be much. Her knife and a good length
of rope should do it. And her slingshot, of course.

Preceded by Fenrir and circled by a cawing Daemon, she set out for the riverbed to look for smooth stones and to await the
full darkness of midnight.

Far beneath the surface, in a room that saw no natural light, the preparations were nearly complete. The score of reed torches
lining the walls of the outer chamber had been reduced to a quartet – north and south, east and west. Of the Cathedral candles,
only nine now burned outside the glass vault, while another seven stood within on an altar erected opposite the door, set
around a huge gold cross, inverted, its top driven into the centre of the wood. The cauldron within, still glowing red from
its hidden fire, had been emptied of its molten contents, half-filled instead with a mixture of spices, grappa and wine.

The scent of the sweet-smelling liquor made the Fugger’s eyes heavy; he had caught himself slipping twice into a desired sleep,
until the reality of his situation brought him back. He watched as Giovanni brought in the items, alive and inanimate, that
now lined the glass walls. Another time, everything might have filled him with the wonder of the curious student he had been.
Now, things familiar or strange created nothing less than a sense of total dread.

Soon, all activity was over, and silence, broken only by the occasional chirrup of a bound and blinkered beast, settled over
the dungeon and its kaleidoscopic centre. Abraham lay on a cot outside the glass walls, insensible, a scraggy arm thrown over
his face. He had not spoken a word in the long hours since the Archbishop’s departure, and the Fugger’s
further attempts to press him about Beck had met with nothing more than a curt denial.

How long they waited, the Fugger had no clue, for time was absent from these dark reaches. To stay awake, he paced out the
limits of his large cell, seeking some little hope in the near darkness. But the walls that funnelled up in smoke were clammy
and sheer, the water that surged beneath the wooden stopper – he had dared to prise it open and look – was a maelstrom, terror
for a strong swimmer, death to one such as he.

The only way out was the way in. He paused before the door for the fiftieth time, scanning its strong oak beams, iron bands
and studs.
The only hope is beyond,
he thought, and as he thought it he heard a noise and such little hope as there was ended with it, for the noise developed
into a chant that he recognised. It was the Latin Mass. Yet the words were a corruption of that tongue, and within its deep
repetitions he heard the high, shrill note of desperate weeping.

A scraping of a key in the lock and the door moved slowly inwards, the chanting surged and he knew what was wrong with it.
He was still scholar enough to understand what they were doing, these eight cowled figures who moved steadily, two by two,
into the chamber, swinging censers filled with burning sandalwood. As they swung they chanted, and they were indeed reciting
the High Mass. But they were reciting it backwards.

He reeled away from the cortège and fled to the side to press himself into the rock as if it could be made to melt and he
to disappear through it. Yet he could only slip down the walls and curl up, press hand and stump to his ears, try not to hear.

The Devil was abroad in the world, everyone knew. All had to be vigilant against him. Had not even his own beloved Luther
been confronted by him, hurled a Bible at him back in Augsburg? And these men were now inviting the Devil to join them in
this chamber. The Fugger had heard how such
invitations were issued and now the preparations began to make an awful sense, more so as the rest of the procession entered
the room.

A woman followed the cowled, chanting figures, as naked and open as they were covered and hid. Only the flimsiest of silk
loincloths adorned her, her full breasts rising and falling as she matched the monks’ steady pace, now hidden, now revealed
by the unbridled tresses of her hair. The swaying of her ample figure betrayed, it seemed to the Fugger, her voluptuous nature,
disclosed again in the secret smile beneath a leather eye mask. She reminded him instantly of the statue at the Fonte Gaia.
He was drawn by the memory, repelled by it, could not look away. She entered the glass chamber on bare feet, gliding through
the two lines the monks had made, and took her place before the altar.

The female form that followed her could not have provided more of a contrast. She was covered neck to foot in linen of purest
and unsullied white, gold sandals on her feet, her hair held in a wreath of blue and yellow cornflowers. Even with the concealing
robe, the Fugger could see she was barely a woman – a thin girl’s body, a pale and freckled face, smirched by tears flowing
ceaselessly, the desperation of her weeping increasing as she saw into what place she entered.

A man in black armour held her in his arms, marching at the funereal pace the chanting dictated. Faceless, a visor of the
same dark sheen, the slits in it the bars of a cage within a cage. The stride remorseless, the blows of the girl’s hands the
weak flutterings of a moth against lamp glass. He too marched into the kaleidoscope and straight up to the altar where he
laid the girl before the inverted cross. Out of his arms, she seemed suddenly calmer, until the Fugger recognised a new aspect
to her demeanour, one so familiar to him – an animal in a trap, paralysed by fear.

The armoured man moved from the glass dome to pick up Abraham from his cot, depositing him on the floor inside.
Then he emerged again and raised one gauntleted hand to beckon the Fugger. He knew who summoned him. He had seen, staring
through the slits in the visor, the eyes of Heinrich von Solingen. If there had been anywhere to flee, he might have made
the attempt. But there was no escape, only this inevitability. Rising, he passed the black armoured sentinel and found that
his pace was matching the rhythm of the chants, which seemed to rise in a crescendo as he entered, then ceased altogether
when the glass door lowered, entombing them all.

Thirteen,
he thought, counting the occupants.
Dear God, thirteen. Holy Father, protect thy servant.

Silence, untainted even by the girl’s whimpering, stretched for several heartbeats, broken finally by a cowled figure at the
front who lowered the censer he’d been wielding to the ground, picked up a hazel wand as tall as himself and rapped its iron-shod
tip three times upon the floor.

‘Corpus Hermeticum,’ a silky voice said from within the folds of cloth. ‘Let us seek the wisdom of Hermes. Let us speak the
true words of Thoth.’

As he spoke, Giancarlo Cibo threw off his monkish robes. He was naked but for a shift of silk wrapped round his thin waist.
Turning to face his followers, he cried out, ‘Let malefaction reign!’

‘Malefaction!’ came the roared echo as seven more robes were discarded and the monks, clad even as their master, began to
gather items from around the walls. When each was ready they formed a circle around the cauldron, the naked shape of the mistress
at their centre, Cibo to her right. Only the girl, immobile in terror on the altar, von Solingen in his blank black armour,
the unseeing Abraham and the unwilling Fugger now remained beyond their ring.

The circle slowly started to move widdershins, against the clock. When the naked woman reached the central place before the
altar again, she raised a bundle over the cauldron, a sack bound in twine that twisted and wriggled in the rising
heat. Despite the desperate jerking, she held the bag there, leading the circle around. Then she began to chant.

Toad and the stool

Which he cowers under,

Brain of bat

With head split asunder

And she dropped the wriggling bag into the cauldron.

The bag sparked and flashed, what was within twisted and shrieked as it landed in the bubbling liquid. Then everyone joined
her in the next words.

Stir it into

Satan’s broth,

Sacrifice

To conjure Thoth

The next participant reached the apex of the circle, a jowly, tonsured monk who cried, as he threw his bundle,

Hemlock and henbane,

Belladonna, nightshade,

Opium for dreams

God has not made

And the cry, in unison:

Stir it into

Satan’s broth,

Sacrifice

To conjure Thoth

The next man stepped up, chanted, threw.

Mandrake shaped

Like the nub of man,

Shroud from a plague pit,

Courtesan’s fan

A chorus, another verse, the speaking coming faster:

Tooth of tiger,

Silver adder’s tongue,

Entrails of she-wolf

That never had young