Blood Ties (15 page)

‘With actions.’ Gianni’s voice was quiet, intense. ‘Words are weak tools, too easily misinterpreted. Actions – decisive, bold, true – they are unmistakable. The sinner ignores the words that urge him to repent his sin. He can’t ignore the firebrand thrust into the pyre at his feet.’

Brother Nicholas was surprised at the torrent his own words had produced and not displeased.
Debate at last!

‘Well, Pope Innocent the Third agreed with you, young man. “Action ranks higher than contemplation,” he said.’

Thomas’s eyes had not left those of the young man opposite, for the cleansing fire Gianni talked of burnt there, the first time he’d revealed any such flame.

‘Forgiveness is an action too, is it not?’

‘Forgiveness … is a word.’

The fire had disappeared, eyelids snuffing it. Thomas noticed that the Fugger had looked up from pushing food around his plate, was now staring at Gianni intently. Behind him, behind Brother Nicholas, one of the lay brothers was reaching forward to refill his master’s wine goblet. Thomas had noticed this man in the simple wool cassock before, among the herbs, a hood pulled down well over his face. Noticed him because he seemed not to want to be noticed … no, desire was not part of it, he simply wasn’t present unless you chose to single him out with a look. It was the sort of oddity Thomas noted, a large man who moved like a small and stealthy one. He’d tried to speak to him, to question him about the jasmine. A finger had pointed an answer, the only reply he received. To forestall the next esoteric point bound to be coming from their talkative host, Thomas gestured to the man pouring the wine.

‘And yet within your domain some have chosen a wordless world, Brother Nicholas.’

The Neapolitan looked around, started a little. ‘Ah, he always does that to me. You can be quite certain you are alone in a room, maybe testing out its acoustics, eh? And he is standing there like that. Yes, yes, pour my wine.’ He held up the goblet. ‘He has earned his name well, for in my five years here and, I am told, in the fifteen before that, he has never uttered a single sound. He hears, he obeys, he … treads around. Softly. But he does not speak. Can’t, probably.’

‘And his name?’

‘Not very original, I’m afraid. They call him Brother Silence.’

The goblet rose beside the Fugger and his eyes rose with it to the hood that had opened somewhat so that the face within was partially exposed. Not much of it, the right side, and he thought, at first, not even that because it did not seem to bare any aspect of man. Where the eye should have measured the pouring, there was a puckered depression, a socket of old scar tissue with a darker red slash from the missing eyebrow to the top of the cheekbone. The nose looked as if it has been partly burned off, a nostril that was little more than a flap of skin resting atop a gash of a mouth. As the man bent, the hood opened to the other side and a solitary eye gleamed there, as blue and pale as ice on a carp pond. It was a ruin of a face and in a moment, the Fugger saw again another face, laughing in a roadside tavern in Bavaria as he chopped off the Fugger’s hand, howling in a dungeon within a kaleidoscope in a palace in Siena, finally shrieking his death agony at a crossroads in the Loire – the same crossroads that the Fugger was leading these men to now. At each encounter there had been terrible pain and it had ended only when that ruined face was punctured by the Fugger’s dagger. He had killed a man called Heinrich von Solingen at that crossroads, finally, certainly, nineteen years before. But gazing at this silent brother’s hideous scars and the blue eye, he could almost believe he hadn’t. That thought, of nightmare beyond words, brought him to his feet, crashing the chair to the floor behind him, had him running for the door before the meagre contents of his stomach could void his body.

His guard followed him, stood in the doorway, as the Fugger vomited again and again, long after all that came was bitterest bile. In a bed of lavender, pressing his face into the sweet-scented herb, pressing through the branches to the earth below, he sought to hide his own face and the ruined face, deep in the Tuscan earth, as he had once hidden just these horrors in a gibbet midden. Buried there, somehow his breathing came back to near normal, his eyes focusing on the purple stems he’d crushed beneath him, his nostrils filling with their fragrance, clearing the vision from his head. Another came, from that same time, when his mind had been taken over by savage secret potions, and a Black Mage called Giancarlo Cibo had tried to raise the spirit of a dead queen using that queen’s six-fingered hand. Anne Boleyn
had
come but only to the Fugger, she had saved him, given him the courage he needed to fight, to help Jean Rombaud, in the fulfilment of his quest.

As he lay there breathing in the scent of purity, he saw her again as she had appeared to him, in the whitest of robes, thick black hair cascading down onto her bare shoulders. The spirit of a Queen giving him the power to act as he never had before – with courage. He had betrayed her once, for his family, betraying his best, his only friend, Jean Rombaud, with a Judas kiss.

‘
No!
’

He buried the silent scream in the herbal bed. He could not betray them again. Not even for the daughter he loved beyond life. There had to be another way.

Groping forward with his bandaged hand, the Fugger encountered the first step of that way. His back to the guard who had followed him out, he raised himself up from the lavender bed onto his knees.

‘Help me, friend, for mercy’s sake,’ he cried.

The guard came forward, muttering. When he was about a pace away, the Fugger gripped the shovel handle as best he could, supported it with the stump of the other hand and swung up and over. The metal plate caught the man on top of the head, but the Fugger didn’t wait to see how good the blow had been. Not very, he suspected. Enough, perhaps, to see him into the cherry tree and over the wall.

Erik had circled the Jesuit compound a dozen times, always ending up beneath a blossom-heavy tree, whose overhanging branches allowed him a perch to sometimes study the house within. As he leaned against the wall, he was feeling quite pleased with himself.

‘You see, Father,’ he muttered, ‘I have followed, waited, watched. I have not stormed the house. I have not killed anybody. Yet.’

He hoped the waiting would not go on much longer. For one thing, he was starving and if there was no movement from his quarry soon he would have to leave his post and steal some food. For another, the longer he lingered there, idle, the more his thoughts turned on Maria, and the only fear he’d ever known. He had followed the Fugger because he was the only connection to his missing love he could find in the falling city. He was the father of the woman he loved and, if Gianni Rombaud was involved, the Fugger was in terrible danger. Erik had grown up with Gianni, knew better than any of the parents the darkness that had taken over the boy’s soul. He also knew his intelligence. That’s why he was so pleased he was waiting outside the compound, under clouds of cherry blossom. He had out-thought Gianni Rombaud! He would wait for him to make the first move that night – then take him in the dark.

A sharp
clang
brought him from this reverie, and the groan that followed it had Erik leaping from his squat and up into the branches, pushing through the petals. There was enough light left to see the two shadows running to the tree, his tree, both stumbling through the herb beds. There, the first figure tried to leap up, but failed to get a grasp, a bandaged hand flailing as he fell back to where the second man was even now reaching for him, with curses and outstretched arms, a step away.

A step he never took. It had taken Erik one second to leap up into the tree. It took him just another to drop down from it. The reaching hands of the guard found a huge and solid chest. The eyes came up in shock and Erik headbutted the man between them, at the bridge of the nose. He fell like a tile from a tower, instantly silenced. The other man had jumped again, even managed to get one arm around a tree branch before he slid back down, moaning.

‘Fugger! Fugger!’

He raised his bandaged hand to ward off this new threat, then lowered it when he recognized the voice. ‘Erik? By all that’s holy, how …’

‘Time to go now. Time to talk later.’

He hoisted the Fugger up onto the lower branch, climbed up beside him, straddled from tree to wall, then lowered the Fugger down the other side, dropping him into the soft earth there, where he began to scramble away. Erik caught him, held him.

‘Fugger. Where is Maria?’

‘Rome.’

‘Rome?’

‘Come, I will explain. We must get away. They will be after us and I cannot run fast.’

‘You do not have to. I have a horse. There.’

The two men ran to where the animal was tied and the Fugger was lifted up again. Erik mounted behind, gently nudging the reluctant beast with his heels. They had gone a mere hundred paces, walking on the sandy verge till they were out of hearing of the Jesuit house, when the Fugger let out a groan.

‘Are you in pain?’

‘Yes! What have I done? My daughter! Oh, my Maria!’

‘What of her? Tell me.’ Erik jerked the reins, halting the horse. ‘We do not move until you tell me.’

In jerky sentences, the Fugger recounted what had happened, all Gianni had said and done. It didn’t take long and when he was done, Erik said, ‘And this locket? The one that will free her. He has it?’

‘He wears it round his neck.’

‘Then I must take it from him.’

Erik slipped off the horse as he spoke. The Fugger reached down an arm.

‘No, Erik. There are too many of them. And they will be doubly on guard now. We need help if we are to stop them in what they are planning. It is a great evil.’

‘I do not care about that. Maria’s in danger.’

‘Erik …’

‘There is a barn just as you leave the town to the south. Hide there. I will return with this locket by dawn. If I am not there by then …’

‘Wait!’

It was no good; the youth had disappeared into the gloom. The Fugger almost followed, until he remembered how crippled he was. He would only hinder. Cursing his helpless state, he prodded the animal toward the south.

When the guard was found, they didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious but it had taken less than a minute to muster and dispatch the rest. It took less than thirty for the first of them to return, reporting failure in a mumble, avoiding the young man’s furious eyes. An hour later all the men had drifted back and ‘nothing’ was still all they could report.

‘It would be difficult enough, in a harbour town, at night, with fleets preparing to sail. But now we know he has help …’ Thomas looked across at the guard, just conscious, still trying to stem the blood flowing from his broken nose.

‘And what do you suggest we do, Jesuit?’ Gianni made no attempt to keep the acid from his voice. ‘Give up? Soothe the situation with
words
?’

Thomas felt his own anger rise, took a deep breath to quell it. ‘I suggest we look to where he will go. Anticipate his actions before we take any of our own. He is not a well man. We still have his daughter. I think he will enlist help and then go for her.’

Gianni was pacing around the small table where Thomas sat. The refectory hall was empty save for their party, Carafa’s men, at the large table, muttering in low voices, drinking the wine that Brother Silence dispensed. They were all booted, spurred and cloaked for travel.

‘So what are you suggesting? That we go to Montalcino where his “friends” are and wait for
that
siege to end? Then break people who have never been broken? Or make for Rome, stake out the prison, hope the Fugger decides to drop into our web?’ Gianni leaned on the table, bringing his face close to the Englishman’s. ‘I will not return to tell Cardinal Carafa of failure in the first task he has entrusted to me. I have waited too long for him to notice me.’

Thomas stretched his leg out, rubbed at his knee. ‘I do not know we have many other options. He must learn of this, as must the Ambassador in London. This … relic. It would have been a useful point in the tennis match, but it is not the whole game.’

‘But it is. It is!’ Gianni thumped the table hard. ‘You speak of games? You do not know the curse that was laid on my father by that witch of England.’

‘And “the sins of the father are visited upon the son”. So it is revenge you seek? Or atonement?’

‘I seek the glory of God, Jesuit.’ Gianni held Thomas’s stare. ‘And believe me, I would rather go to France and dig up every crossroads outside every village, beneath every gibbet in the Loire, than kneel before Christ’s representative on earth and tell him that the guilt of the Rombauds still lives in this world.’

‘Carafa is not Pope yet.’

‘He will be. And the gift I was to lay before St Peter’s throne was the six-fingered hand of that great heretic, Anne Boleyn. I will descend to the lowest reaches of Hades to find it.’

In the silence that opened between them, a voice entered. It was a voice that none of them had heard before. Indeed, it had not been used for nearly twenty years. There had been nothing in all that time the speaker considered worth saying. He was not sure this was either. But he said it anyway.

‘The village is called Pont St Just, a day’s ride from Tours. To the south, there is a crossroads. A gibbet stands there. Four paces from its base, where the four roads meet, a casket is buried. Within it rests the hand of Anne Boleyn.’

While the voice spoke, for a little after, no one moved, as if the sound held them in some binding spell. Gianni and Thomas’s eyes remained fixed on each other, the guards’ goblets of wine frozen where they had been when the voice reached them. It was croaky from disuse, yet it had carried into every part of the hall, each word clear as if it hung in the air like smoke from the fire, drifting, like that same smoke, to the open window where it reached a man perched outside and above it on the stone lintel. But Erik, like everyone else, did not move. ‘How do you know this, Brother Silence?’ asked Thomas, gently.

He considered.
Did he need to add any more to what had been said?