The French Executioner (2 page)

‘I don’t see why we are here, my Lord. Why didn’t we just kill the Frenchman back at the inn?’

‘I think you tried, didn’t you?’

‘I mean after, when he was unconscious.’

The smaller figure shifted in his saddle. Moonlight fell on a sharp forehead, a long straight nose, fleshy lips. There was
a touch of something sad in the silkiness now.

‘Really, after what he did, we should have tried him as a heretic then given him to God’s redeeming fire. Alas, the time is
not right for his story to be told abroad. So we give him here, into God’s hands.’

‘But my Lord Archbishop—’

The blow surprised Heinrich because the Italian was neither young nor, he thought, especially strong. Pain contradicted that
impression.

‘I’ve warned you about using my title in a public place.’

‘I am sorry, my Lord, but there is only the prisoner and my men—’

The hand emerged again from within the cloak and moonlight glinted on heavy rings, which explained the blood now running down
Heinrich’s chin.

‘Enough! You are a fool and I another to let you question me. There may be a gibbet keeper nearby who would recognise the
rank. And your men did not know it till now. I must think. Get them to find the keeper.’

A curt command and the three soldiers began to search where they could, yet there was little there: a bare crossroads a league
beyond a village with neither tree nor bush nearby. Little for the full moon to shine upon but the dangling, vaguely human
iron form, the cross-beamed support and the midden of gibbet filth on which, in six parts now, sprawled the cage’s last tenant.

The men reported their failure.

‘Very well.’ The Italian coughed, a gout of blood caught in the swiftly raised cloth. There was little he could do now; and
even if the keeper did lurk and had somehow heard Heinrich’s indiscretion … Well, how could a creature of such an occupation
threaten a Prince of the Holy Church?

Giancarlo Cibo, Archbishop of Siena, decided he could take the risk. He didn’t take many – it was how he survived the hurly-burly
of life back in Italy after all. He wouldn’t take another with Heinrich’s men. Heinrich would have to deal with them himself,
later, a fitting punishment for his indiscretion. Perhaps incorporating some unusual methods. The Archbishop would like to
see that. It would truly upset the surly German. The Archbishop would like to see that too.

‘Put double the usual coins in the offertory. Let’s pay the keeper well,’ he said, all silk and smoothness again.

Ducats were dropped into a small box at the base of the gibbet, and Heinrich went back to join his men. There he listened
to his blood drip onto the pommel of his saddle, kept his silence, and watched from a distance as the Archbishop pushed his
horse right up to the gibbet.

The Italian leant forward until it looked as if he was almost kissing the cage’s iron-slatted face. Until he could feel the
breath of the man inside on his own lips. The man’s breathing was erratic; Heinrich’s men had beaten him badly when they finally
felled him. Not surprising, as the Frenchman had killed two of their number and incapacitated two more, his strange, square-headed
sword dancing graceful and deadly among the suddenly leaden-footed Germans. Heinrich had said it was an executioner’s sword,
much favoured in France as a more humane way of despatching traitors, if their rank and purses deserved it. The sword would
make a fine trophy on his palace wall, for he knew just whose neck had last been severed with it. A neck and something far
more unusual – a six-fingered hand.

‘Why did you do it, Jean?’ Cibo whispered into the cage. ‘A belief that it could heal, like the bones of St Agnes? Is that
what you thought she was, Jean, a saint and martyr for the new religion? Or was it gold? The most powerful relic in the world
would have fetched more than you could have earned in a lifetime of headtaking.’

The unconscious man had no answer for him, beyond his
shallow breaths. The Archbishop studied the face before him. Features somewhat finer than was common among the French, a smaller
nose, thick black hair now slick with the blood and sweat of the fight. It was ordinary. He was always surprised when ordinary
men did extraordinary things.

‘I do wonder about you, Jean. Sadly, I will never know. But it’s mine now, a greater weapon than any executioner’s sword for
myself and for Mother Church. We’ll have to see how best we two can use it.’

And with that, Cibo turned his horse and broke straight into a gallop. He was proud of his horsemanship and his steeds were
trained to respond to his instant whim. The Germans were surprised and, with Heinrich bellowing orders, followed as swiftly
as they were able.

Such was the speed of their departure, such their pleasure in forsaking that dismal place, that no one even glanced back at
the gibbet cage and its new occupant. If they had, they would have seen that the first effects of their beating had worn off.

Jean Rombaud, master executioner and recent slayer of Anne Boleyn, had woken up.

The first thing to be done, he knew, before opening his eyes, was to tally the injuries. He had learnt on a battlefield to
take stock blind, because moving without knowing who’s around you could mean ending up worse off.

Begin with the chest, breathe a little deeper. Christ preserve me, there’s pain, maybe a rib broken, others bruised. The taste
of iron. Probe with the tongue. No, shit! Two more gone. Worse than the ribs, that. Ribs heal, but teeth left on battlefields
across Europe made it harder each day to chew meat. One leg curled up under – the pain of constriction, or a break? Among
the many blows, a memory of being kicked on the shin. Kicked hard.

Trace the body, look for wounds. Head? Battered yet intact. Guts? There was always that smell when they were pierced. Groin?
Seemingly unswollen. And he’d have remembered the entrance of metal anywhere. He’d felt it before, after all. It was a distinct
sensation.

All in all, and considering the odds, he wasn’t doing too badly. So now, fall to listening. Anyone breathing out there? Anyone
watching him for a trace of life, blade poised, waiting to snuff it out? No? Then open the eyes.

No. Close them again, dismiss what they’ve seen. There has to be another explanation. Move the hands, shift the legs, measure
the space. No. It can’t be.

‘Jesus!’ Jean Rombaud blasphemed solidly for a minute.
He was imprisoned. Worse, far worse, he was in a gibbet cage. Hung up like a common thief, left to rot and die. It wasn’t
possible, he was still unconscious, dreaming …

The cage was swinging wildly now in his panic, grating, screeching. That would do him no good. The last thing he needed was
to draw attention to his position. He was outside the village but he didn’t know how near it was. He did know how the villagers
would treat him if they found him. At best jeer, pelt him with muck, make bets on his endurance; at worst … well, it had been
a hard winter, and the salted mutton would be running out.

‘No,’ he said again, firmly, and managed to still the lurching cage. He had been put there silently by men who did not want
witnesses. There was time to think, in these few hours before dawn. This could not be his destiny, to die from torment or
starvation, or more likely from a cannibal’s knife, in a cage in the middle of France.

He used his limited movements again to explore his confines, glad he was slightly smaller than most men, for he had little
enough room, none to raise his arms above his head to where the lock held the front and back of the cage together. Yet even
if he could twist himself to get a hand through the slats and up, the lock looked rusted but solid.

He bit down on his despair. This couldn’t happen. He wasn’t a man who gave much thought to death, it would come when it must.
But swifter, surely? Not like this, not when …

Then the memory of what had led him to this place came scrabbling back and, cursing again, he reached out to squeeze the slats,
find their weakness, force himself through them. These men had stolen from him, and thus from Anne Boleyn, the most precious
part of herself, bound by sacred vow to the care of Jean Rombaud. His oath to his Queen would surely give him the strength
to snap mere metal!

Long after the certainty that it was futile, he squeezed and pushed and beat upon the unyielding iron, till the blood ran
from his fingers. As his struggles became weaker, the executioner did something he’d not done since the day he’d laid his
wife and child in the plague pit, picked up his sword and took again to the mercenary’s road. He wept. His tears fell from
the cage, splashing droplets onto the gibbet midden below.

Salt-blinded as he was, he didn’t notice the first stirrings amid that filth, of something beginning to work its way up from
within, from the very depths of muck, rotting clothes and bones picked clean, didn’t see what looked like a worm break through
the crust, to be followed by another worm, then a third, then five. Fingers they were, joined to a hand, an arm, a shoulder.
Then a head burst out of the earth and a voice, mud ridden and muck-choked cried out, ‘DAEMON!’

Jean set the cage swinging again, his face turned from this vision spewed from hell. He’d long since forsaken the Church he
was baptised in, disgusted by what he’d seen done in the name of God on battlefields and in the palaces of the Princes of
Religion. Tales to frighten children he’d called their stories, their rules and penalties. Well, he was no child and he was
terrified now.

The demon worked its shoulders clear, then, resting a moment to glance up at Jean, threw back its head and shrieked: ‘He’s
got my legs! I’m trapped. The foul fiend nips my ankles. Help me! Help! Pull me up, why can’t you? Ohhh!’ It gave a piteous
wail and cried ‘Dae-mon!’ once again.

As if answering a summons a raven, a blue-black brute, flew down and circled the gibbet, cawing a series of short cries, descending
in darting runs to flap round the head of the embedded demon. The two of them made hideous harmony, alternating in pitch and
volume, and Jean suddenly, forcefully, realised that all the tales he’d denied, all the visions that had merely troubled a
few sleeps since his priest-ridden childhood, they were all true. There
was
a hell, and he was descending into it.

Then the demon ceased its wailing. The raven stopped
screeching and landed on its shoulder. The two of them tipped their heads to one side and four eyes regarded Jean. Then, like
a cork from a bottle, the whole hideous shape popped out of the hole in the ground and stood, feet splayed, upon the midden.
The skull of the gibbet’s former occupant, which had perched precariously atop the midden, now rolled down and lodged between
the creature’s ankles, seeming to make a third set of eyes to gaze upon the prisoner.

‘Well, well, well,’ said the demon, after a moment and in quite a reasonable tone, ‘and who is our guest for tonight, Daemon?’

A mud creature stood there, black with filth, its eyes reflecting the moon the only flicker of light. Garbed in some sort
of tattered dress, a shapeless sack hanging from shoulder to ankle, one arm bare and one encased. Wild, spiralling locks hung
from the encrusted head, falling in shanks down to the shoulders to meld with a rat’s nest of a beard. The bird was as clean
as its perch was filthy.

In the silence of their stares, Jean regained his defiance.

‘Be gone and torment me not. I am not for you yet.’

The two heads swivelled to look at each other, then back to him. The raven gave a cry and took to the air, while the mud beast
leant forward and spat.

‘Do you hear that, Daemon? Orpheus tells Charon when he chooses to cross the Styx!’ It threw its head back and laughed, a
ghastly rattle. It then reached up to the cage and said, in its formerly reasonable tone, ‘It’s for me to decide, you know.
Daemon and me’ – it bent down to pick up the skull – ‘and my friend Felix here makes three. What shall we do with him?’ Fingers
moved the fleshless jaw up and down as if in answer.

Bowing to the skull, the creature began a strange shuffling that Jean realised was a dance, of sorts. Humming a tune, it moved
across the midden, back and forth, words and laughter emerging.

‘He wants to be left alone. But that can’t be. Such a long
time since we had a visitor! Last one was you, dear Felix, and how boring were you? They did for you before you arrived, few
breaths, no stories to pass your passing. I like a story with my supper, and if I can’t have one at least I can have … but
this one looks healthy, this one looks good, he won’t be leaving till I tell him he should! A rhyme. A rhyme! I still have
the gift, oh yes. Papa would be proud.’

Jean listened and calculated as he did. The creature was mad, that much was sure, but there were bits of sense within the
ramblings, even a way of speaking that sounded less than brutish.

‘You dance well,’ he called down, ‘but your partner lacks something in the leg.’ The creature had stopped its swaying to listen.
‘Why don’t you let me down? I can cut a finer caper than your Felix.’

The creature dashed the skull to the ground then rose up next to the gibbet and hissed, in a whisper as devoid of mirth as
its dance had been full of it, ‘Death is all you have coming. The time is God’s to choose. I am God’s helper. I keep his clock.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick … tock.’

The creature sank silently back down to the midden and began to collect up the bones that lay there.

Jean knew now he was at the mercy of no demon, but one who sinks as low as any human can. To be a gibbet keeper was to survive
on scraps dogs would shun, with an occasional coin thrown from a justice’s hand or prised from a victim’s family to swiftly
end a loved one’s suffering. It was life, but barely, and Jean knew the best he could expect was that same swift slitting
of his own throat.

And yet, how could he accept such a death? Was this a fitting end to his career, a last cruel joke in a life that had witnessed
many? No. While he had breath, and a tongue in his head, there was hope.