Blood Ties (11 page)

‘She’ll need more water. There is a fountain in that side street.’

Anne was darting through the crowd before Jean could stop her. He had taken a step forward when a huge hand gripped his arm.

‘Jean! There he is!’

Jean looked back. He did not have the Norseman’s height, but even he could see Erik’s distinctive head ploughing through the mêlée.

‘Are they with him?’

‘I only see Erik. And my son looks concerned.’

Erik’s story was spurted out in a moment. ‘We have searched everywhere. I think the whole of the Scorpion Contrada is in the streets looking for her. The Fugger leads them. I must join him.’

The boy turned back. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot. I found it, Father.’ Reaching into his scimitars’ sling, he produced a third weapon from it. It lay in its fraying scabbard, a square-tipped edge poking through at one end, the green leather of the grip peeling off, rust around the apple-sized pommel.

‘You nearly left it, Jean.’ Haakon beamed, offering the sword across. ‘How can you be an executioner without a sword?’

Jean looked down, looked quickly away, back to the gate.

‘Oh.’ His voice was flat. ‘Throw it in the cart.’

‘I go.’ Erik was wheeling away.

‘And I will go with you.’ Haakon started forward.

‘Haakon!’ Jean’s voice was sharp, commanding, and it halted the Norwegian. ‘The gates will open any moment. I cannot push the cart by myself, I wouldn’t make it halfway to Montalcino. And we cannot stay. De Monluc is right; our lives are in danger.’

He had managed somehow to keep the fear from his voice. Haakon paused, his son on one side, his old comrade on the other.

‘Father, you should go. The Fugger and I will look. We’ll find Maria and join you in Montalcino.’

Haakon’s reply, when it came after a long pause, was gruff. ‘See that you do, boy. And take no chances!’ He cuffed his son around his head.

‘Me?’ There was a swift smile, a touch of a scimitar in salute, and he was gone.

To Jean’s great relief, Anne was back in a moment, ladling some fresh water into her mother’s mouth. On hearing that Erik had gone to look for Maria she cried out, ‘But I know where she went. To the gate, to try to barter gold for food with the Florentines. This gate, the Porta Romana I think.’ Seeing the looks on their faces she said, ‘I should have told you before.’

Haakon started back toward the city for Erik.

‘No, Haakon. We will look for her outside and we will send word. You will not find them now. And look. Look!’

Jean’s panicked words brought Haakon around and, far ahead down the Via Roma, now the Sienese Republic’s Via Dolorosa, he too saw the Porta Romana start to swing open. Everyone around began to lift weapons, stretchers, babies, packs, carts, anything that held their goods or their wounded, and pressed forward. Haakon, with one long last look back, bent to the handles of the cart. Beck moaned as it rose.

‘Hold tight, Anne. Do not let go of the cart,’ Jean ordered. He tried to breathe calmly. With a little luck, they would be out and clear soon. On their way to Montalcino and, beyond that city, maybe on their way home. His lips twisting in barely remembered prayers, he set his mind to the road ahead.

They had arrived at the gates near dawn after two day’s hard riding from Rome. There, just behind the Florentine siege lines, on a scrap of barren earth, the horses were hobbled and nose-bagged before twenty exhausted men fell upon the hard ground as if it were a feathered mattress. The grey-cloaked figure who had pushed his horse the hardest, impatient with any rest, now went off to reconnoitre, to gather news of the surrender. Gianni Rombaud felt he would never sleep again. Not, at least, until this mission that was his salvation was complete.

Not so the man in the black cloak. When his head finally reached the stiff comfort of his pack, Thomas felt that he might never wake again. His body ached, his mind numb of everything except a desperate desire for oblivion. When the words reached through the cloud of his head that the French and Sienese would not march out till two bells of the afternoon, eight hours away, it was as if he’d been granted a lease on paradise.

Yet his rest was not untainted. The mustering of the Florentine forces, the cries and orders in Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian disturbed him not at all; but sometime toward midday, when the first heaviness of sleep had passed, it began to fill with images, jumbled recollections of things present and things past – a whiff of the coffin, a snatch of a rhyme, a child’s hand pressed into his. This last led him on, until he was both holder and held, his father and himself, walking into the desecrated buildings of Wenlock Priory. Half the walls were down yet men still carted blocks away to the village beyond. The great rose window was a mere frame, bare of its stunning glass. On one of the few remaining leaded casements, a crow was perched, its beak upraised, cawing notes that Thomas could not hear, yet summoning fellows, until the window was filled with black feathers, and silent screams.

His father let slip his hand, and Thomas floated away from the boy on the ground, up above the sacked priory buildings, over his native village of Much Wenlock. There was his home, the comfortable brick manor house built next to the covered market, location and manner befitting the squire of the prosperous Shropshire town. But it was not his home any more, he remembered now, others lived there, others who had conformed, who had profited from those who had not. He was no longer looking down but up – now he could hear the birds, now he was a boy again, see them diving, circling, squabbling over the body swinging in their midst. It was spinning around, faster, faster, he couldn’t see who it was until some unseen hand, perhaps his own, halted the whirling, scattered the birds back to their window perch. Now he could see the face, see that despite the protruding purple tongue, the rolled up whites of the eyes, it was utterly and completely his father’s.

Thomas had thought his scream was silent, held within a dream. But as he sat up quickly, the looks of those around him, Carafa’s men checking their arms and equipment, told him otherwise. Loosening the fold of cloak that had somehow wrapped itself too tightly around his throat, Thomas placed his forehead on his knees, began to recite his catechism, the principles of his faith, the familiar Latin words slowly having their effect. His breathing calmed, his heart steadied. He knew why he’d had the dream – the sacrilege of the sacking of Wenlock Priory, the sacrifice his father had made to oppose it, these were the goads Thomas needed to keep him on the path of righteousness. Even if he must do questionable things. And he’d never questioned anything before as he did this quest of Anne Boleyn’s hand.

The man he saw striding toward him seemed to have no such qualms, no night-time terrors. Thomas watched Gianni glance neither to right or left, watched big soldiers step out of his determined path. In their brief conversations, before setting out, in hurried rests on the road, Gianni had revealed little – and Thomas had an array of methods for finding out what he needed to know. The boy was folded over some internal flame. It shone out from his dark eyes, a yearning. The man who would be Pope, the Cardinal Carafa, had said in Rome that his protégé had ‘intimate’ knowledge of where the hand could be found. The way he’d said ‘intimate’ had made Thomas shudder.

Gianni covered the last twenty paces to them at a run. ‘You! Alessandro! Bring ten of your men. Armed. And follow me.’ To Thomas he added, ‘God has smiled upon our venture, Brother.’

‘He always does. How, particularly, now?’

But Gianni did not reply. He just turned and led the assembled company swiftly away.

Thomas struggled to keep up. His knee was always at its worst after sleep.

Gianni had spent the morning moving up and down the lines, talking with soldiers and officers, gleaning information. He’d heard the snatch of a ballad sung over a breakfast fireplace, familiar names leaping from the verse. The rebel Sienese who sang, who fought against their own republic, told him the ballad was of an infamous general within the city whose balls, it seemed, were held firmly in his harridan wife’s hands.

‘We’ll relieve her of that duty when we exiles get inside. This reckoning has been a long time a-coming. Just last week this Rombaud led the men who killed fifty of us at the Porta San Viene. Now he will pay!’ The officer’s eyes gleamed with vengeance as he spoke.

It was strange to hear his father and mother talked of thus. He’d left them at Montepulciano, a prosperous farmer-winemaker and his wife. Now it seemed they had returned to their former life, piling sin on sin, the subject of bawdy ballads. Well he, of all the family, would atone. He had achieved much in that line up to now, God be praised. The work he was about now would dwarf those accomplishments.

His seeking took him, near midday, down to the Porta Romana, gates he would later position himself beside to scan for his prey, to make sure they did not escape the city, but could be stalked within it. There was a crowd gathered there, for many starving citizens were testing the truce, had slipped out the sally ports to barter such treasure they had left for crusts of bread, scraps of meat. There were enough exploiters there to bargain with, not least the mercenaries who, by this honourable surrender, had been denied the looting of a captured city.

Not just looting, Gianni realized. Three soldiers, who one moment had been flirting with a ragged young girl, luring her to the side of the mêlée with promises of food, now grabbed her, a hand over her mouth, picked her up and ran her down into a little gully. He was about to walk away, to continue his explorations, when a vision of the girl’s face came back to him, just before the hand went over it, cutting off the scream. It had seemed familiar in that instant, almost as if he had seen that look of terror on that very face before. Then he realized that he had, and where, and he was running back to his men the next instant.

When they reached the gully’s mouth, sounds led them down the narrowing passage, sounds of terror, of laughter. As he pushed through the bushes, Gianni saw that Maria Fugger was lying, spreadeagled, pinned by two of them at arms and legs, the squat, bald sergeant crouched before her, pulling at the straps around his waist.

The sergeant, hearing them, turned and snarled, his face contorted into the grimace of an animal interrupted with its prey.

‘We found her first. You can fuck off and wait. There’ll be some left over when we’re done.’

Gianni paused. He had no particular regard for Maria, a stupid girl he’d enjoyed tormenting sometimes, who had early formed an alliance against him with the equally bovine Erik. She had probably brought this on herself with her sluttish, sinful ways. This was not like Wilhelm, these soldiers were not in training to be priests. As long as they didn’t kill her …

As he considered, a black-cloaked figure pushed past him.

‘What is happening here?’

Thomas had been a soldier himself, had turned away from such desecrations before. What he didn’t know was why Gianni was here watching it.

The young man told him. ‘God’s smile, Brother. She is the one we seek, whose father will lead us to our goal.’

‘And you would see her raped first?’

When he saw the young man shrug, anger surged through him, bile burning his throat. With it came the memory of his dream, the questionable decisions that must be taken for the greater glory of God. This Gianni was a part of all that, a weapon in his own right, part of what had to be tolerated. But there were other things that needn’t be.

‘Let her go.’

The sergeant’s hands held his belt, which he was about to discard. Instead, he reached down toward his sheath.

‘You’ll wait your turn like a good boy.’

Thomas was a soldier of Christ now, but he had been a soldier of England once. There were rules he had lived by then, rules he had not forgotten. So he acted on one of them – strike before you are struck.

He bent down, turning half away from the man before him, his body and cloak hiding his left hand until it was too late for it to be stopped. He used the heel of his palm, striking upwards and across, snapping the man’s nose, reeling him back against the gully wall. Both soldiers dropped the girl’s arms, reaching toward a pike and sword resting upright against a bush behind them. The sword was sheathed and buckled so Thomas went for the man with the pike, seizing it as the soldier was trying to bring its point down, driving the shaft back and up into the man’s neck, collapsing him. He swung it around toward the man who had unsheathed half the blade of his sword, who stopped when he saw the cutting edge in Thomas’s hand, dropped his sword, stepped back with arms upraised.

Gianni only had time to say, ‘You surprise me, Jesuit,’ when a cry cut across his words, and the sergeant, blood pouring down his face, knife in hand, ran at Thomas’s exposed back. The blade was a hand’s length away when it halted, seeming to hover there a moment, pointing like an accusation into the Englishman’s black cloak. Sounds emerged, but no words – blocked, no doubt, by the dagger that had appeared in his throat. The man dropped to his knees, his own knife still held before him, plunging it into the ground as he slowly sank forward, his forehead coming to rest on the ground almost between the terrified girl’s legs.

For a moment there was silence, save for the gasps of Maria Fugger, the deep inhalations of the Jesuit, the gurglings of the man whose neck held a blade. Gianni stepped forward, gently pushed the sergeant’s body with his toe until it keeled over onto its side. Then he bent and retrieved his dagger from the throat, wiping it on the man’s jerkin before straightening up again.

‘Did you have to take his life?’ Thomas threw the pike down as he spoke.

‘Now,’ asked Gianni, smiling, ‘is that gratitude?’

It was then that Maria’s tears, long held back, began to flow down her cheeks. She was staring at Gianni, disbelief mingling with the horror, words choked in water.

‘Hallo, Maria.’ Gianni’s voice was pleasant. ‘How’s your father?’

Sobs cut off any reply. Turning to the men behind him he barked, ‘Bind and gag her.’

There was a rush to obey. The men who followed him were Carafa’s and the Cardinal’s orders had been to do as this man bid them. Any question they might have had about doing that had ended when a thrown dagger had entered a throat.