Blood Ties (12 page)

When they began to truss the sobbing girl, the locket fell from her clothes. It was handed to Gianni, who opened it and nodded, showing the miniatures inside to Thomas.

‘The girl’s parents. This is the man we seek.’

As he spoke, the great bell in the Torre del Mangia sounded its first sad note. Gianni looked up. ‘Ah! Shall we see if we can find him?’

Thomas let all the others leave, Gianni at the head of his men, the girl pushed before him. The two soldiers had fled the other way, deeper into the gully, leaving the body of their comrade in the dust. Thomas bent over it now. The blood had pooled, forming a great circle, a halo of red around the head. Grasping even this small symbol of grace, Thomas swiftly genuflected, touching his fingers to his lips. The prayers had, of necessity, to be short, for all the bells of Siena were tolling in mad carillons and, under them, he could hear the beat of the French drums.

He found Gianni again as the first regiments, under their swirling banners, were already sweeping by their vantage point a few hundred paces before the Porta Romana. Blaise de Monluc rode at their head, glancing neither right nor left, his one eye fixed ahead as if on future battles. The soldiers that followed did not look as if they had withstood fifteen months of privation and siege, for the spring sunshine dazzled as it bounced from burnished armour and helm, from pikes proudly raised, swords swept up in salute. The French, and the mercenary companies among them, were birds of prey still, united in the glitter of their plumage, with their puffed and blistered sleeves, the linings pulled through the cuttes in a rainbow of colour, extravagant doublets of crimson or eggshell blue surmounting the clashing ochre or gold breeches, the black and silver hose. Thomas shuddered as he remembered the profits of his first sacked city in Flanders spent on just such finery. Putting it aside to don the sackcloth and rough wool of the noviciate had been like a second birth to him.

The Spanish lining the road jeered the French, who returned the favour, the mercenaries of both sides exchanging greetings and abuse with present enemies, past comrades, future allies. They took half of one hour to pass, the soldier in Thomas calculating their number to be about five thousand, each regiment accompanied by its goods and wounded in large wagons. When the last of these had passed there was a pause, as drumbeats receded down the road, the dust hanging thick in the air. Then there came through the gate a shrill cry of command followed by the roar of one word, the name of their city. Then the warriors of Siena marched forth.

The contrast to those who had gone before was marked. There were drums still, a few, and banners sporting both the city’s symbols, of wolf and founding fathers, and the mark of several of the Contradas – the Lion, the Unicorn, the Scorpion, the Broadsword. Beneath them, though, Thomas saw men and women in plain garb and practical armour, starved faces trying to stave off tears, failing, their bodies savaged by hunger and wound yet forced to march proudly from homes they might never see again. Their leaders marched among their people, distinguished only by their plumed hats, alike in the tears that flowed, in their bandages and their limps. Though it was clear the majority were not professional soldiers, yet they contrived to march in step, their footfalls stirring up more dust from the roadway. The drum, the heavy breaths of exertion, were all the noise that accompanied their sad exit. Their enemies watched in silence, save for the occasional exile who stepped forward to spit at some old rival’s feet, to receive not even a glance in response.

In their midst, in marked contrast to the huge wagons of the French, small dog carts were heaved, piled with groaning bodies, meagre goods. Thomas sensed the tension in the young man at his side, for Gianni had craned forward at the first sad beat of the Sienese drum, wrapping the hood of his cloak about his face despite the warmth of the sun, one hand holding an edge so that only his dark eyes were clear, studying the throng. Gazing at him, Thomas decided he would be better served watching this boy to whom he had been shackled like a slave on an oar bank. To better know this enigma, who lived in a monk’s habit yet killed like a street assassin.

Gianni saw Haakon first, of course, even though the Norseman was bent before a small cart, his huge hands gripping its two handles. His eyes immediately swept around the cart, missing what he sought, looking around, looking back, settling finally in a sort of wonder, for his father had changed in the three years since he had last seen him, changed mightily. It was not that he had shrunk, as Gianni knew parents did when sons grew older. It was more as if something had been cut from him, thus reducing him in size to this small, limping man struggling to push a dog cart. Something misted in his eyes and he reached a hand up, stunned to encounter moisture there. He wiped it away, sought his ready anger, forced the water down. He had vowed long before that he had shed his last tears for his family. Sinners were not worth the salt!

His sister walked on the other side of the cart in that calm gait he had so loved to mock, to imitate; yet he had never quite got right the way she seemed to hover over the ground. One of her hands was placed within the cart, he thought at first almost to tether her, to prevent her floating away. Then he realized that Anne’s hand held another, one that emerged from what he’d assumed was a stack of rags and blankets. Then Gianni saw the high forehead, the greying-black hair of his mother. Her eyes, the twins of his own, were hidden beneath her closed lids. He could see that she was alive and he could see that it was only just.

He did not know he had taken a step forward, that a word had escaped his lips, until the Jesuit had spoken beside him:

‘What? Do you see him? Shall I gather the men?’

Gianni raised a hand, stepped back, made sure that, as his family passed, no one else passed behind them. At last, when he was sure his voice was his own again, he spoke.

‘He is not with them. He would be, if he were leaving. He is still in the city looking for this.’ He toed the girl lying in a bundle at his feet, who moaned through her gag. ‘She’s told me their address. Shall we enter?’

Thomas let Gianni order the men, tried to settle his impressions of the last few minutes. He had been right to watch for he knew now that the calm young man he’d just met was capable of emotion – and emotion was always a useful tool. He had also seen what the young man had looked at, or rather whom, knew that his reactions could only have been provoked by people he loved or hated. Perhaps both, for sometimes the line between the two was hair thin. But then Thomas had become distracted by the girl walking beside the cart. No, not walking, floating somehow, as if allowing the cart to pull her along. She was air, translucent, a mote hovering in the sunbeams that streamed in the road dust, passing through the veil of her black, black hair.

It was only the young man starting forward that brought Thomas back from this vision, had him scrabbling for words. In action there was a course out of this confusion.

Though there was a scramble at the gates, the main conquering army would enter from the north-east, through the Porta Camollia, so it took them only a little time to force their way in. The gag was dropped long enough for the directions to the Fugger residence to be ascertained. It was as good a place to begin as any.

Gianni called to Alessandro, one of the troop leaders. ‘Take her to Rome, to the Lateran prison. She is to be released only when this locket is brought for her. Understand?’

Maria was thrown across one of their horses, and half his force accompanied her back out the gate. Gianni led Thomas and the remaining ten men away from the main Via Roma, where soldiers streamed toward the Campo, and up a narrow side street, the Via Valdimontone. He’d quite recovered from his strange reactions at the roadside, determined now to atone for even so slight a display of weakness. Ahead was a man who would help him in that atonement. A one-handed man who would help him atone for everything.

For the Fugger, searching frantically through the falling city, the bells were terrible goads pricking him on. Without his Maria there was no life, she was the last memory of her beloved mother, also called Maria, his wife’s shy smile, quick laugh, gentle touch still alive in those of his daughter. He had talked to his wife every day of the five years since the flux had taken her. He talked to her now, even after the last of the drum beats had faded, running down the side street that led to the ruin he had called their home for the last fifteen months.

‘You’ve taken her there, haven’t you, my love? Guided her back, away from all the evil of this day. She’s there waiting for me now, there’s still time, we have nothing to carry, just ourselves, down to the Porta Romana, out, they won’t have gone far. Jean, Haakon, Beck, Anne …’

Anne would be angry with him. The bandage she’d so carefully wound around his hand, over the stump of his two fingers, had unravelled, was trailing now as he ran. He could see the shattered flesh beneath a final layer of cloth.

‘They’ve chopped more bits off me, Maria. They’ll be nothing left soon. What life will there be for a one-handed, three-fingered man on a farm?’

The farm! Jean had written in his note that they would try to return there, to start again in the place all of them had known their only true happiness. There, he had invented all sorts of devices to aid in the pressing of olive and grape. Surely, he could invent something that could be worked with a thumb and two fingers. His daughter would help him. She always liked to help him in his work.

‘If she is there, wife. If she is waiting for me just around the next corner, like any sensible girl would.’

She wasn’t. Armed men stood in front of his doorway, and he ran into one of them, into hard breastplate sheathed in black cloak, the pace of his run knocking the unprepared soldier back into a comrade.

‘Heh, you stupid …’

The voice was rough, the dialect Roman. The Fugger, knowing his late enemies instantly, adopted the accent of the Sienese, along with a servile attitude.

‘Sorry, Master, sorry. A thousand apologies.’ He was backing away slowly the way he had come, glancing past the soldiers into his lodgings, hoping for a glimpse of his daughter, hoping she was not there in this new danger. So focused was he on this hope, he did not see the one guard nudge his fellow and point at the Fugger’s puckered stump. The men lunged for him, holding him beyond hope of escape, before running him through the doorway.

Inside it was dark, except for bars of light which dropped through the broken roof, showing the meagre furniture and the two men, one sitting on the table’s edge, the other standing, his hooded face in a shadow, turning Jean’s note over and over in a sunbeam. This hood raised toward the Fugger, who was thrust onto his knees, his face in a patch of sunshine, dazzled, blinking up. Strangely, his first thought was of roofing materials.

‘Ah! The Lord continues to smile upon us.’

That voice! The Fugger knew it, yet could not place it at first, the calmness of it, within that calm an energy barely contained. Then the face moved forward into the light.

‘Gianni!’

Along with his gasp, the Fugger’s mind filled with contrary images, flashes of memory. The quick boy who soaked up all the Latin and Greek the Fugger could teach him. The sad boy who came back from the mountains. The cruel boy whose tricks drove his Maria to frequent tears. The angry boy who’d stolen away into the night. The boy in the man’s face that looked down at him now.

‘But … how … why are you … what are you …?’

A simple question cut off the stuttering. ‘Do you know where your daughter is, Fugger?’

The tension held within the voice wrapped around his fear, doubling its intensity.

‘My daughter. My Maria. I …’

‘Because I do. I know where she is, I know where she is going and I know what is going to happen to her there. All the terrible things that will happen to her there.’ The words were said so calmly, as if they were of no matter at all and the Fugger felt his heart like a creature, flapping at the bars of his chest. ‘Unless …’

A hand went into the cloak, emerged with a glitter that dangled at the end of a chain. It swung back and forth there, a pendulum of light, trapping the Fugger’s eyes.

‘Unless, Gianni?’

‘Unless you do exactly what I ask of you. Exactly. And if you do, I will give you this. This will free her. Save her.’ The locket stilled, spinning slowly now in its one position. The clasp had opened and the Fugger could see inside, to the two tiny portraits there, his wife, himself, his wife, himself, revolving before him, blending, until it was his daughter spinning there, the melding of these two halves.

He raised his trembling half-hand toward the locket, which withdrew at the approach, dangled and spun just beyond the outreached fingers.

‘Not yet. First you have to do what I ask of you. Don’t you want to know what that is?’

It could be anything and the Fugger knew he would do it. Any crime he was asked to commit, any sin, to have this locket in his hands. To fulfil the promise in those words. To free. To save.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, Gianni, tell me what I must do.’

And Gianni told him and the glitter disappeared from his sight, swallowed by the black pit of his horror, the black pit just like the one where he had lived, if life it could be called, in a midden beneath a gibbet cage at a crossroads in the Loire. He had been delivered from that pit by Jean Rombaud, a man whose cause he had followed and later betrayed, who had nonetheless raised him up a second time, given him again his friendship, another chance, the joy in the day’s light he had had in all the years since. He owed the man everything. And that man’s son was now urging him to a second betrayal, a worse betrayal than before, to destroy a man’s life work even near its end. And the tears that now forced their way from the Fugger’s eyes, as his wife, and his own and his daughter’s image revolved before them, were tears of a bitter certainty. She was all the joy he had left, all that remained of the only woman he had ever loved. What were friendship, loyalty and a dead queen’s bones, compared to that?