Blood Ties (35 page)

‘Father. I think I see something.’

He joined her near the branch end, which dipped alarmingly under their weight. He peered through the gloom.

‘The wall of the palace. Can you see a balcony, or a way down?’

‘No.’ She turned to him and he could see well enough to note her gleaming eyes. ‘But I can see a way up.’

They crawled back to the trunk, shimmied up to the next level, followed that branch out again. They came to the wall and perceived guttering, a roof sloping away beyond it.

‘We can’t climb onto the roof, Anne. It will be treacherous with rain. Too dangerous. Let us go back. There must be another way to the ground.’

He’d half-turned when he realized she wasn’t following.

‘Anne, come!’

‘Father,’ she said, her head angled over, ‘do you hear it?’

He listened. All he could hear was the continuous buzzing of voices, some hounds giving tongue, a louder shout breaking through some steady cheering.

‘I don’t hear anything other than—’

‘Shh!’

Then he did hear it, unmistakable, within the uproar. The deep-throated growl of a frightened animal.

‘A bear!’ she cried. ‘A bear, Father. I knew it!’

As she spoke, Anne sprang from the branch, hands scrabbling for a purchase on the eaves. One hand slipped, but the other managed to grab hold, and she swung her legs up and scrambled onto the slick tiles.

‘Anne!’ he called again to halt her, but she was gone, slipping along toward the front of the building. In a moment she had disappeared.

Cursing, Jean knew he had no choice but to follow her.

The King had decided on a surprise interlude prior to the storming of the confectionery castle. There hadn’t been many such entertainments lately due to the sustained demand for them and the ever diminishing supply. But while the nobility of France picked over the carcasses and sucked bone marrow from the scraps, his Majesty’s chief bearward, Grillot, attended to the preparations. Before the palace, directly below the sugared walls they all craved, a pre-dug hole was uncovered, a sturdy wooden stake thrust into it and wedged tight. Thick chains ending in manacles were secured to it with iron pins. Sawdust was scattered in a wide circle with the pole as its centre.

His steward advised him when all was ready. Henri rose and there was an immediate silence – for even in their gorging everyone kept an eye on the King.

‘Nobles and Ladies of France,’ he declared. ‘In honour of the feast of St Genesius and the visit to our court of our new Father’s holy representative, Cardinal Borromeo, we have arranged a special entertainment. We hope it will give you appetite for the ransack of the sweet castle to follow. For see what stands between you and it!’

He descended from the high table, and everyone rose and crowded forward. There were bursts of excited whisperings, acclaim. They spread around the circumference of the sawdust circle. Everyone knew what it meant, everyone recognized the chain-wrapped stake at its centre. Everyone, including Tagay.

He had risen like the rest when the King did, but when he had followed the sweep of the royal arm and seen what lay below him, he had sunk down again as soon as the King left his dais. Soon he was alone, his back to the gathering crowd. He could not leave but he did not have to watch. He could drink more, attempt to achieve what he had failed to so far. All night he had remained stubbornly sober. He reached for a flagon.

He could not block his ears. As soon as the King’s feet touched the ground, the signal was given and the dogs, which had been held in a dark kennel and whipped into silence, were released into the night air, pulling to the length of their chains with a chorus of deep-throated yelps. A collective gasp arose when they appeared, for these were not the hounds they were all used to.

‘A gift from his Holiness the Pope,’ the cardinal was saying to those near him, ‘from his native land. Neapolitan mastiffs – the finest fighting dogs in the world!’

Tagay heard and, despite himself, turned. The beasts were like nothing he had ever seen. Soot grey from muzzle to back paw, they came up to the waists of the handlers struggling to rein them back. Their heads seemed to be all jaw, tendrils of salivation streaming from huge and fearsome teeth. Their shoulders and haunches were bunched muscle. Black eyes rolled in reddened sockets. Tagay saw more than one noble or lady cross themselves, for the dogs looked as if they had sprung fresh from Hades.

A different sound, deeper even than the baying, a roar of pain and confusion set the hounds yelping louder and all the nobility crying out. Tagay tried to turn away, failed, his hand reaching behind him, knocking over his full cup of wine. His eyes, like all there, were locked on the corner of the house.

With another anguished roar the bear appeared, dragging the two men who held his neck in rigid pincers. A third pulled on a thick chain wound about the animal’s waist, his feet gouging trails in the lawn, while another sought to control its movements with the torches he thrust forward. The animal was big and male, its rush carrying him into the middle of the sawdust circle. The crowd gave back, ladies clutching at the arms of their escorts, the men trying to simultaneously thrust their peacock chests forward while moving their bodies out of reach. The mastiffs jerked the length of their chains, their howls doubling in volume. Somehow, and after a great struggle, the bearwards attached the bear to the stake by its waist chain. The pincers were removed and the men fell back, one tumbling to the ground as the enraged bear ran and slashed at him, his paw catching a flailing leg, tipping him over. Tagay saw that, as usual, the bear had had its claws ripped out. He was surprised to see that the bear’s teeth remained. His Majesty must have noted the fearsome jaws of the mastiffs and decided on a more even contest.

Contest
? There would be no contest. There would only be one loser – the bear. The spectator’s joy came from seeing how long the bear could last, how many of the hounds it would defeat, in singles, pairs, threes, before the whole pack was released. Tagay could see bets already being laid, everyone caught up in the fever of it, clutching at each other in an ecstasy of excitement. When the first mastiff was let slip, a cry of release as in lovemaking rose from the crowd.

He could not look away. His mother had been of the Bear clan, one of eight clans within his tribe of the Tahontaenrat, and therefore so was he. So it was as if it were him there, tied to a stake, surrounded by snarling enemies, him who jerked up his bloody paws, who tried to grab the leaping dog and fling him to one side. He felt the teeth that crunched into the arm, felt the jaw lock, the agony of snapping bones. It was he who bent and flung the animal high up into the air, jaws rending as they released their grip. The hound flew backwards, almost reaching the crowd, bear’s blood spraying from its muzzle. It fell badly, something gone in the back, but it still tried to crawl back toward the bear, front paws scrabbling, teeth snapping, till a keeper pulled it aside and, in plain sight, slit the dog’s throat.

‘One!’ cried the crowd, as the bear crouched, fired by the pain, watching for the next of the hounds that strained and leapt. Two were released then, one coming straight for the throat, one going low, the high one buffeted to the side while the other sought to sink its jaws into the exposed belly. Its half-grip the bear tore loose, raised the animal and sank its teeth beneath the snapping jaws. When the other dog rejoined the fight, leaping on the bear’s back, biting an ear, Tagay put his own hands out, as if he too were thrusting the dying dog aside, reaching up behind to grip, to throw down, to stamp on the writhing body.

‘Two! Three!’ they shouted and Tagay knew that it would soon be over, for he saw the King’s flushed face turned in anger to the noble who had just taken his money. The King did not like to lose.

‘Silence! Silence!’ Henri shouted, a cry instantly taken up by his steward, his guards. Gradually, the crowd quieted, until all that could be heard was the growling of the dogs and the deep-throated
hmm hmm hmm
of the bear.

‘Release them all!’ Henry said softly into that silence and the crowd swayed forward to get closer to the orgy of death unfolding. The houndsmen struggled to keep hold of each dog, gripping each studded collar as they were unchained, for they had to be released as a pack. The bear stood on its hindlegs, head swaying side to side, its flanks heaving with effort, streaked in its own and its victims’ blood.

It was him, Tagay, swaying there, waiting for his death, brought to bay by his enemies. He was of the Bear clan. And if he had to die, he would die fighting with that clan.

Tagay had a new sword at his side, purchased by shame. Drawing it, he stepped down from the King’s high table.

Anne leant over the two-storey drop below her, her fingers splayed on the slick tiles. Jean perched a few feet away, his feet pressed against a buttress which concealed him. He didn’t look down.

She did. She had to –
for it was all there as she had seen in her dream
. The nobles spread out around the stake to which the noblest creature there was chained. She had watched each hound released, turned away from the sight if not the sound of the suffering, turned back when the crowd chanted. The voices demanding silence drew her eyes again, but still she was not sure what she was looking for.

Then she saw him stand up. He’d been there all the time, she realized, separate from the mob, aloof from it, yet intricately linked to the action. She saw that now as he stood, as if he lifted a golden chain, like the one that had bound the bear of her dream, this chain linking the animal and the man over the heads of the mob. She saw his hair, blacker than hers, as long, falling to his shoulders. She saw him draw the sword, even heard it clear its scabbard in the silence that still prevailed. She saw him lift his head and, in that moment, recognized a face she had never seen.

The man stepped forward, moving toward the bear pit. Somehow she knew exactly what he was going to do.

‘No!’ She screamed it out, standing straight up now, swaying on the edge of the abyss.

‘Anne! Get back! Lean away!’ Jean hissed. He wanted to move toward her, to pull her back. But he had glanced down just the once, and found his legs would no longer obey him.

Everyone below heard her cry. All faces lifted to her. There was an instant murmuring, Henri’s voice rising above it.

‘Who is that? Who is that woman?’

Tagay’s mind had been so concentrated on the journey he was about to take to certain death that he was the last to look. When he did, he saw the woman with the long black hair swaying high above him. He only saw her there for a moment because the moment he saw her, she lost her footing and plunged over the edge of the world.

‘Ataentsic!’ he shouted, as the body fell.

Jean screamed ‘Anne!’, his cry lost among the many. It was his voice she heard though, thinking of him as she plunged, that this was what he had always spoken of – the suspension of time around moments of death, the world a reddish cloud in which she span so slowly. She felt sad for the sadness her death would cause him. And she thought of her failure, having come so far; feeling, even now, Anne Boleyn’s hand pressing into her back.

The queen for whom she was named was the final thought in her mind as her flailing arm struck the first cream and sugar turret. She was falling spine first, so it was the six-fingered hand that first encountered the puff pastry battlements, which collapsed as swiftly as any besieger’s most wondrous dream. Layer upon layer gave way so that by the time the body had carved through the castle’s sugared floors and ceilings much of its force had diminished. Anne’s side struck the table on which the edifice was perched and it collapsed beneath her.

The collective gasp was greater than anything bear or mastiff had brought forth. No one moved, not even the animals until Tagay sheathed his sword and ran straight through the sawdust arena, passing close by the bear which rose onto his hind legs as the man came near him.

Tumult returned, astonished voices, yelping, as Tagay plunged into the wreckage. Scrabbling through the sticky walls and collapsed towers, clouds of powdered sugar obscuring his sight, at last his hands encountered a body. Carefully, he traced her form upwards.

‘Live, Earth Mother, live!’ Coughing, he put one arm under her head, began gently clearing the cream with his other hand. Her face emerged suddenly, as if she had burst from a snow drift. She gasped, her eyes flickered open, unfocused, moving about. Then they settled, held on his, and it was as if he had always known them.

She struggled up through the white storm, seeking the breath that would bring her back to the world. Then, amidst all the pained sensations of her body, she felt something pressing into her back.

She felt her left arm could be broken, but her right seemed to work. Despite the pain the movement caused her, she managed to reach down and around, and pull the unravelling bandage from behind her back.

‘They must not find this. No one must find it,’ she said, just before the whiteness took her again.

Her limp fingers released something onto his lap. Through layers of cloth, he saw the white bone of a knuckle, the joint of a skeletal thumb. As the first of the courtiers’ footfalls crunched onto the shattered sugar castle, Tagay tucked the hand and its shroud into his doublet. Then he bent and lifted the unconscious body from the wreckage.

People swirled around him then reeled back, cursing, as expensive garments were swathed in powder and cream. He strode out of it, stopping as he beheld the rank of nobles drawn up before him.

‘What is she, Tagay? A Huguenot assassin dropped from the sky?’

It was the King who spoke. Henri stood at the centre of his court. Behind him, the nobility of France jostled for precedence and a view.

Tagay may have been treated as a mascot, little better than a jester, but he had been at the court long enough to know its language – and what delighted it.

‘A woman, Great Father, sick with love for me. Her parents would keep us apart.’

‘Well, they say love lends us wings. But is she is so desperate for your love that she tries to prove it?’