The French Executioner (40 page)

The old man squinted up, wincing, as Jean continued to probe. ‘How long since you have been here, sonny? They have overthrown
the Church in there and set up what they call “the New Jerusalem”. Though the money lenders weren’t driven out, they were
strung up by their balls and burnt to death. Christ, man, what are you about down there?’

Without replying, Jean went to his saddle bags and returned with his barber’s kit. He said, ‘You can wait for the butcher,
or you can let me work.’

Januc, who had had an arrow head removed by Jean on the
Perseus,
said, ‘He is good, old man.’

With a nod, Johannes turned his face away. Jean had worked the edges of the metal piece free and now grasped the end of it
with his pliers. At a glance from him, Haakon and Januc held the old man down. When they had him, Jean jerked the fragment
free and swiftly stemmed the flow of blood with a cleaner cloth. Johannes fainted, but a swig from Haakon’s flask – grappa
from Montepulciano – revived him. Jean handed him the bloody piece of metal he’d removed.

‘Pah!’ spat the old man. ‘Looks like a piece of a comb. Not even a little profit in being hurt.’

Jean used more grappa to cleanse the wound, stitched it, then wrapped an unstained cloth round and round the big chest. At
the end of the procedure Johannes was pale but still awake.

‘I think you will be all right. But do not remove the bandage for at least a week.’

The Switzer painfully leant over towards his pack. ‘I do not have much money to pay you with, surgeon. Can you wait? We are
on a bonus when we take the town and as much loot as we can carry away. You can have your share then.’

‘Keep it, old man. I’ll swap my skill for some information – if you feel up to talking.’

‘If you help me back to my tent, there’s food and wine for you there. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

Johannes’s ‘tent’ turned out to be a hut of reasonable size. Smoke from the cooking hearth filled it, and a begrimed servant
hurried about to provide a meal for his master and his new friends.

Once settled on his large truckle bed, a mug of hot beer in his hand, Johannes listened to Haakon’s shortened version of why
they were there.

‘Sure I can help you get in. You’ve both served in sieges, I take it? There are always ways in and out. But why you’d want
to enter that hell hole …’ Johannes spat. ‘They’re all madmen in there. And mad bitches too. They don’t fight for money like
all the other good Germans I know. They fight for God. It’s so unreasonable.’

The Fugger’s eyes gleamed. ‘Unreasonable? The city reforms according to the word of Luther and the law of God, and you call
it unreasonable?’

‘Luther?’ Johannes laughed, then began to cough, clutching his side in pain. When he had recovered, he continued. ‘Most men
who attack the city fight under the Protestant banner.’

‘But I have seen the flag of the Papist Bishop of Munster!’

‘And flying right next to it is the Eagle banner of Philip of Hesse.’

The Fugger stuttered in shock. ‘The … the Landgrave of Hesse? But he is the temporal leader of the Protestant cause. Luther’s
protector!’

‘Aye, queer bedfellows, you might say. Catholics and Lutherans combined. But the madmen in the city threaten both orders.
So they ally to cut out the disease before the contagion spreads. Speaking of which, what did you stitch me with, you butcher,
cat gut? It feels like a dozen of them are scratching down there.’

Jean poured the old man some more of the beer and said, ‘Explain it to us, Johannes. We need to know what goes on in there.
What disease do you speak of?’

‘They call themselves “Anabaptists”. Say that only adults who know the word of God can receive the blessing of the water.
Then they are baptised again.’

The Fugger said, ‘It’s an extreme position but a debatable one. Why would they be so persecuted for holding it?’

‘Because of what goes with it. They believe they alone are God’s Chosen. So they have set up his Holy Kingdom, the New Jerusalem,
to await the final reckoning. All will be destroyed and only they, the true believers, will survive. Lunatics from all over
Germany, from Holland, France, even England, have flocked here to the call.’

‘And this second baptism is so bad that Lutherans will ally with Catholics to crush it?’ The Fugger was hopping about the
room now in agitation.

Johannes laughed. ‘I don’t think most men would give a whore’s cuss for their bathing habits. It’s what goes with it.’ He
leant in. ‘They have done away with money, I told you. But marriage too. A man can have as many wives as he likes. It’s because
there are so many unfrocked nuns. Raving with lust, they are – cast off their habits and, uh, picked up new, nasty ones. The
women are the most vicious fighters. They
eat any prisoner taken. Having first ravished him!’ The one eye gleamed. ‘The Black Widow’s death, they are calling it.’

‘But—’

Jean silenced the Fugger’s next outburst, pulling him down.

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Johannes continued, ‘whatever they believe gives them the power of fanatics. They don’t fight reasonably
at all! They don’t seem to care if they die. How can you take a city like that? You kill five lunatics, another five take
their place, just as happy to die! Sixteen lousy months we have been here. Sixteen! But the pay’s almost regular and there
are no more civilised wars to go to, more’s the pity.’

‘So Jean,’ Januc said. ‘You still want to enter this place of djinns? Beck’s tough. He can fend for himself.’

Jean stood up and walked to the hut’s entrance. It was starting to get dark, and a gibbous moon was rising above the trees,
a moon equal in his memory to the one in whose beams he had lain with Beck at the Comet.

‘The Fugger and I will go in. I made the boy a promise. Besides, we need some help now and the Fugger can get us some gold,
can you not?’

‘Of course. My family will do anything to help my friends.’

But the Fugger didn’t know how he felt about the decision. There was his mother, his sister. There was also his father, and
a city he loved in the grip of some madness. Different from the madness he had seen at Marsheim. Maybe as bad.

Jean continued, ‘We will say we are mercenaries, come to offer our services.’

Johannes guffawed. ‘They will hang you in an instant. No soldiers of fortune fight for them. Only soldiers of Christ.’

‘Then we will have to say we are some of those. I’ll let the Fugger do the talking.’

It was swiftly arranged. Johannes headed a company whose task for the next three nights was to probe the defences
for weaknesses under cover of darkness. They had spotted a broken area of wall where the Bishop’s ineffective artillery had
actually scored a success. The Switzer sent for his second in command, a runt-faced Hessian called Franck. Franck agreed to
take the wall section and hold it for the time necessary to slip the men inside.

The assault was set for midnight. They ate and drank and talked little. The Fugger’s agitation had changed to a strange stillness,
only his eyes alive and darting. Haakon and Januc were silent too, still disapproving.

When it was close to his time, Jean spoke. ‘Watch the tower, to the left of where we go in, every midnight. We will signal
from there any time from the third night on. If you see a white cloth waved, we will be coming out and we will be coming out
fast. Be ready.’

‘We will,’ Haakon grumbled. ‘I still think this is madness, Frenchman.’

‘And you are right to think so. But I have no choice.’

‘I don’t see why I can’t come too.’ Haakon’s voice was surly.

Jean smiled. ‘Because, from the sound of it, the people in this town have been slowly starving for ten months. We might be
able to mix unnoticed. You …’

‘Are you saying I’m fat?’ Haakon stood and glowered down at Jean.

‘Not at all. You are a warrior in his prime. People cannot help but notice your magnificence. They would flock to you as to
a god. And it sounds as though there are enough of them in there already.’

Even the Fugger turned away to hide a smile.

‘Besides,’ Jean continued, ‘wherever you go your monstrous wolf will follow you. And this is a city under siege. Do you want
to be dining on Fenrir stew tonight?’

As the dog growled at the mention of his name, Franck stuck his head inside the hut doorway. ‘It’s time,’ he said shortly,
then ducked out again.

‘Very well,’ the Norseman growled, ‘but you will leave the hand?’

Jean strapped on his sword, picked up a saddle bag of provisions, and finally the velvet bag. He looked at it for a long moment,
then began to wind it within a bandage he had cut and wrapped the bandage around his stomach, until the hand rested snug against
the small of his back.

‘I will not. Only I can fulfil my vow. No, Haakon, no arguments. I will return, in three nights, with the hand, and Beck,
and Fugger gold to see us on our way to France and the Loire to finish what we started. In a month we can be back in Montepulciano,
if we choose. There we can all grow fat.’

They went to the emplacement from where the assault would be launched. Fifty men stood in the pale moonlight, checking weapons
and harness. Franck moved up and down, speaking in a low voice to the company leaders. After a moment he signalled to Jean
that he was ready.

‘I’ll see you in three nights.’ Haakon nodded, then he and Januc went to stand on an earthwork step where they would have
a better view.

‘Allah guard and protect you both,’ said Januc as he went, then added with a wink, ‘and watch out for black widows!’

The word was whispered down the line and the company stood to, Jean and the Fugger taking up their positions in the rear of
them. The German spent his last minutes talking incessantly to Daemon, whom he then released. The bird flew up to perch on
the edge of a gabion. A superstitious soldier threw a stone at him so the bird flew up and away with a disdainful caw.

‘Now,’ called Franck softly, then led the way over the barricades.

They were twenty paces away from the wall when a cry broke the stillness of the night.

‘To arms, to arms! The enemy is upon us!’

Three arquebusiers fired before the assailants reached the
ditch. Wooden ladders were swiftly thrown up against the wall, and though newly awakened men were pouring onto the ramparts,
they were a scattering compared to the concentrated thrust of the mercenaries. Armed with short pikes, double-handed swords
and entrenching tools, the Swiss and German warriors swiftly cleared all resistance from the crest of the weakened wall. Franck
had run down the rubble the other side and, with a strength that belied his stature, was laying about him strongly with his
huge double-handed sword. In a moment the company had poured through the gap and their arquebusiers had set up a firing position.
A ragged volley swept aside the first who rushed at them, and for a moment the only guns firing were their own.

‘Now is the time!’ Franck was at the top of the wall again, calling down to its base where Jean and the Fugger crouched. They
scrambled over the rocks and debris and knelt beside him. ‘I have seen all I need. Your best chance is over there. Good luck!’

The mercenary captain had pointed along the wall, where a fall of masonry led down to street level. Houses lay half-gutted
there, most of the roofs torn down to prevent the structures within the walls catching fire in an assault, a fire which might
spread to the town. They looked unoccupied, and Jean immediately led the way down the shifting rubble, under cover of another
volley.

They ran, dodging from shadow to darker shadow, until they made the nearest house. Its walls were so battered that anyone
peering in from outside would see any movement within. So, when the distraction of Franck’s withdrawal was at its noisiest,
they ran to the next house. Here, a ruin of furniture greeted them, and they swiftly made a nest out of the items to conceal
themselves from within. Jean peered carefully over the top of a table to observe the final retreat, and the reinforced defenders’
re-taking of the wall. When the last crackle of gunpowder had faded into the night, and the moment of silence that followed
had been broken by the
jeering of the Munsterites, Jean flopped down, put his back to the table and chewed upon a piece of dried meat.

‘We’ll move at daybreak. When there are some people about,’ he said.

The Fugger did not act as if he had heard. He lay with his head buried in his arms, eyes closed, tortured by images as bad
as any conjured in his midden. This was his city, yet what had his city become in the seven years of his absence? He couldn’t
believe the stories! A realm of fanatics and flesh eaters? Could his family have become like that? His gentle mother, his
giggling sister? Even his unbending, morally upright father? Only tomorrow will tell, he told himself.

He was wrong. He didn’t have to wait nearly so long.

The voice came from above them, from among the rafters of the long-destroyed second floor. It was a hymn, to an old familiar
tune, though more of a croak than a clear utterance; yet the words, if slurred, were instantly understandable.

Some in heavy chains have lain

And rotting there have stayed,

Some upon the trees were slain,

Choked and hacked and flayed,

Drownings by stealth and drownings plain

For matron and for maid.

Fearlessly the truth they spoke

And they were not ashamed:

Christ is the way and Christ the life

Was the word proclaimed.

From the darkness above them, there was a snickering laugh. A score of rat-like eyes glittered in the moonlight.

‘Welcome, Brothers. Welcome to the New Jerusalem.’

The sound of the blow caused the two other women in the house to pause, breath held, hands suspended from activity, waiting
for the silence of the inhalation to end and the wailing to begin. Each hoped the sound of the crying would put an end to
it. The master of the house didn’t have as much strength these days, after all.