Blood Ties (39 page)

He reached out, touched the scabbard, and suddenly, looking once more at his women’s faces melding in the silver light, Jean realized what the morrow would hold.

Smiling now, Jean surrendered to sleep.

It was a glorious day, a cloudless sky, a gentle swell, and a strong warm wind blowing off the land. The caravels roped to the dock looked like falcons on jesses, straining for flight.

They stood above the
Sea Feather
watching the seventeen men of the crew make the ship fast for the ocean. Jacquet was among them, checking every detail of provision and implement. Their own meagre goods had been taken and stowed in one of the holds below. Now they could only wait, turned inward to the land, for the ocean beyond it would beckon soon enough.

Shouting made them turn back. It came from the end of the long stone pier that bent around to nearly touch the cliffs opposite. Between the two points was the narrow gap, the entrance to the harbour of St Malo.

Anne shielded her eyes against the sun with a raised hand. She saw men gathered around an iron frame.

‘What are they doing, Father?’

‘Lowering the boom. It’s the chain across the gap that keeps unwanted visitors out.’

The plunge of heavy iron links was a signal to the men on the boats. Those who were ready began to cast off, those who were not sped up their loading. Glancing up the dockside, Jean could see that the captain they’d rejected, Ferraud, was among the tardy.

‘Come, Father. They are telling us to board.’

Jean looked to his daughter. Tagay was below her on the rope ladder, an arm reached up to support her.

‘I am not going,’ Jean said.

‘What?’ She was back beside him in an instant, Tagay joining her, despite the protests from below. ‘Father! You agreed. The hand must be made safe.’

‘It must. But you are its guardian now and you must decide its destiny. I can do no more.’

She made to speak. But he laid a finger to her lips and, with his other hand, drew her close.

‘Hush, now, child. You know, and I know, that this is right. You know me, better than anyone else. You know I no longer have the … the strength for what must be done. I have used it all up. What remains may get me home, wherever that is. To your mother, at least. I have some amends to make.’

He pulled her tighter to his chest, looked past her to Tagay. ‘Take her, lad. She is the dearest gift I could ever give. Help her to do what must be done, let her help you. For she is a wonder, surpassing all the wonders of the world.’

Jean gently unloosed Anne’s arm from around his neck. ‘Go now. Follow your visions. Let them guide Anne Boleyn to her final rest.’

Tagay reached, pulled a speechless Anne toward him. ‘I will protect her, Jean Rombaud. I will give my life for hers.’

‘You had better.’ Jean reached to touch the sword strapped to his back. ‘Or my friend and I will come looking for you.’

They descended to the boat where impatient sailors helped them aboard, then turned to ropes and knots. Soon, the
Sea Feather
was floating away from the dock, its three sails unfurling. Anne stood in the bow, tears cascading, her one good arm raised. Suddenly, it appeared to Jean that there were two Annes there, his daughter and a queen, both waving their farewells. And it was as if all his aches, his agonies dropped away, taking the pain that had sat heavy round his heart for as long as he could remember, leaving him lighter, tasting the salt in the wind, feeling the warmth of a summer sun as if for the first time. He found himself hopping from one foot to the other, and the tears that ran down his nose and chin made him smile, then laugh. He was waving like a madman, his eyes on the boat taking both his joy and his sorrow away.

It took a while, because of the noise of his heart, for the other sound to penetrate. He saw Anne, still only two boat lengths offshore, stop staring at him and look suddenly past him, above him. Her arm dropped, fingers reaching to her mouth. Then her shout joined the other shouts, the ones that were coming from the hill on the edge of the town.

Jean turned. He had no eyesight for distance, saw only shapes on the hilltop. But the voice carried well on the offshore breeze.

‘They are there, on that boat!’ shouted Gianni Rombaud. ‘Raise the harbour boom!’

Jean saw some dozen horses, spurred by their riders, plunge down the steep hill. They were a short ride from the jetty, a short run from its shore-end to the boom’s winch. He looked back to the
Sea Feather
. It would not clear the harbour entrance in time.

Sprinting for the stone steps, he reached them just ahead of the horsemen. He heard them dismounting, then their riding boots clattering off the pebble-embedded pier as they followed him along it. Stopping ten paces short of the boom winch, Jean turned around.

His son was where he expected him to be, at the front. Gianni slowed when he saw Jean turn, his men forming a wedge behind him. Ten paces away, he halted.

‘Cede the ground, old man,’ Gianni snarled, ‘for you cannot stop us now.’

‘You’re right, my son, I cannot. But I can, perhaps, delay you for a while.’

As Jean spoke, he reached up behind his back and pulled the square-headed sword from its scabbard. It emerged into the sunlight as it always had done, a predator blinking into a dawn.

He glanced around. Near the shore end of the jetty, a man in a black cloak was limping toward them. Up on the hill, he could make out the shapes of another group of horsemen beginning their descent. Reinforcements to his enemy, he presumed. On the water, the
Sea Feather
was fast approaching. Not fast enough.

He looked from the ship to his son. He needed a little time.

‘A man dying at a crossroads told me you may be better with a blade than me. Was he right, Gianni? Did I teach you so well?’

It was bait and Jean saw his son take it, as Jean would have taken it at his age.

‘He’s mine. Mine alone,’ said Gianni, drawing a heavy rapier from its sheath.

He attacked fast, as Jean knew he would, with the invincibility of youth. It had been three years since they’d last crossed swords in practice and Jean could see that his son was stronger now, faster. He had not spent those years simply in prayer and penitence.

The triangular-pointed blade came at him from a running lunge, chest high, straight, a young man’s attack. The square-pointed blade moved square to meet it; met air – the run was a feint, for young men know what old men think of them. Gianni’s tip moved outwards and, as his back leg caught up with his front his hands joined and, double-handed, he swept the weapon over and down in a half circle to Jean’s exposed shoulder. Jean had to lunge backwards, taking his body out of line, his parry a slope to guide the other’s weapon away.

But Gianni had not put anything into the blow. His father had exposed his back, given ground on the first pass. Suddenly, joyously, he knew he could take him. He let his blade slide off the square tip then, jerking it to a sudden halt, he flicked it sideways. It did not have the force to cripple, but honed metal bites nonetheless and this did, into Jean’s outstretched leg.

Father and son looked at the cut in shared wonder. It was Jean who recovered first, withdrew his leg, stepped back two paces, came on guard. He stood with his feet parallel now, the hilt grasped two-handed and held straight out before him.

‘You have learned, Gianni. I am proud of you.’

‘Pride before the fall.’

‘Perhaps.’

A man limping along a jetty. Horses flowing down a hill. A boat still too far away. Gianni looked and saw it too.

‘Enough, old man. Your sword or your life.’

You can only take so much from a cub
, Jean thought.
Even your own
.

So he bent, dipped his finger in his wound and reached up to taste his own blood.

‘Now that brings back memories,’ he said, and on the last word he attacked.

Swords rose to clash, metal on metal crying like the gulls that circled overhead, while the years of anger and misunderstanding coalesced in sunlight and sparks on their blades. Two men became animal and the young stag challenged the old.

To Gianni’s guards, to Anne and Tagay on the boat, it was a blur of steel as swords sped through the air, met with shrieks, screamed in parting, renewed assault and parry, feint and counterfeint. Not one watching could see who led, who followed in the dance.

The men knew. It went both ways, giving and receiving, a blow no sooner thought of than delivered.

He is good
, thought Jean,
and he is now trying to kill me
.

He is still good
, thought Gianni,
and once more he stands between me and my God
.

I am old
, thought Jean,
and I have not done this for a while. Time sides with youth. He could fight all day while I … I cannot even fight until that boat passes by

So I must do something
, Jean thought.

And did.

It was a trick. An old one – simple, dirty. He had meant to show it to Gianni years ago, but the boy had run away before he could.

Just as well
.

Jean did not have to pretend to be tired. But he let each parry get weaker, counter-attacks rarer, let his son’s ringing blows force his own sword ever closer to his body. Parrying two-handed, his breath coming in huge whooping gasps, stepping back and back, his foot finally reached the edge of the winch. Seeing this, with a grunt of triumph, Gianni stepped in close to drive his blow hard into his father’s injured thigh, and Jean’s parry barely halted the cutting edge a finger’s width from his flesh. Then, with sudden force, he thrust his blade along Gianni’s and straight down. His cross guards brought the rapier low and Gianni had to step close to retain it. Leaving only his left hand on his sword, Jean pulled his right back into a fist and hit Gianni hard, twice, straight on the nose. Eyes watering, he reeled back, tried again to disentangle his blade and bring it up. But Jean stepped closer still, keeping the blades tight and, reaching up with the hand that had struck, he grabbed his son’s left shoulder, pulled down hard, then snaked his arm around the young man’s neck. In a moment their two heads were conjoined and an executioner’s sword pressed at Gianni’s throat.

For moments it was all each could do to breathe.

Finally, Jean spoke. ‘It’s over, boy. Over.’

Gianni tried to move and felt the razor edge nick his skin. He could, however, speak.

‘Kill him,’ he said to his stunned men, ‘kill him now.’

Jean sighed, then turned again to the water. The
Sea Feather
was drawing level. Anne was reaching out to him, Tagay barely keeping her aboard. They looked close enough to touch and they were just about to pass the neck of the harbour.

Gianni had cut himself, straining against the weapon, so Jean removed it and shoved him away to sprawl on the jetty’s stones. Jean knelt, watching as the tiny rivulet of blood crept down the runnels of his sword.

So much blood
, Jean thought,
so much down the years
. The guilty, the innocent, the simply unlucky, their life force pooling in these same channels, long wiped away, some vestige of them yet clinging, a trace of every departed soul. Not least that of his queen, Anne Boleyn, her smile a memory now. Her blood running here, from neck, from wrist, like his son’s ran now. His sword had tasted more than just its share of blood. It had tasted enough.

As his son’s men came for him, weapons thrust cautiously ahead, he stood and, as he had done once on a battlefield and once in a slaughter yard and once at a crossroads in the Loire, Jean Rombaud bent, unleashed still powerful shoulders and flung the sword high up into the air. It spun in a gentle arc, rising over the bow of the boat, over the upturned face of his beloved daughter, into the sunlight. Seagulls shrieked and dived for its whirling brightness, but it plunged, square point first into the waves and was gone before any could do themselves harm upon it.

He raised his arms up to the blue sky as the first man lunged at him and, meeting no resistance, lunged on. Others followed, the sky turned red, and Jean Rombaud fell to a dozen swords.

‘No!’ screamed Gianni, just before the ball from a Spanish musket went past him, exploding the head of a lieutenant busy with murder. Two pistol shots followed and two more of the assailants jerked back in pain. The others paused, looked back along the jetty at the two men sprinting toward them, the sun bouncing off the weapons they carried – twin scimitars and a long-handled battle axe.

‘A Haakonsson!’ the Norsemen cried as they crashed into Gianni’s men who scattered, desperately defended themselves, desperately died. Just two survived and only because they hurled themselves into the harbour.

She arrived as the last man fell, the smoke still curling from the muzzle of her musket.

‘Tell me – do they live?’ Beck panted.

‘Your son does.’ Haakon pointed with his axe to where Gianni still lay, clutching the thin line of blood at his throat, staring at them, mad-eyed, disbelieving. Then the Norseman began pulling at the pile of the fallen. When his body was pulled out, Beck sank down with a sob, cradled his head in her lap.

‘Oh, Jean, my Jean. What have they done to you now?’

Within the sheet of blood that was his face, eyes blinked slowly open.

‘Heaven so soon,’ he whispered. ‘That didn’t take long.’ Then his brow wrinkled. ‘But what are you doing here before me?’

‘You live! My love, oh my life! We must get you aid! Quickly …’ She turned to the others. ‘Haakon! Fugger! Why will you not move?’

It was the Fugger who went to her, laying a hand gently on her shoulder. Jean’s eyes flicked to him.

‘How fare you, Jean?’

‘I am dying, Fugger. You?’

The German couldn’t help smiling. ‘I am well. My Maria is safe. And your Anne – she was on that boat?’

A tiny nod. ‘Both Annes. They seek their rest in a New World. Haakon?’

He could not see him, but the size of the shape that blocked the sun seemed familiar.

‘Yes, little man?’

‘Look to Beck, Norseman.’

‘I will, old comrade.’