The French Executioner (29 page)

Faster now, the circle speeding around. The stench coming from the cauldron, flesh and plants of power combined, was piercing,
acrid fumes making the Fugger’s eyes run, his nostrils stream. The whirling made him nauseous and he rested his head, tried
to block out the words, managed not to listen to all the verses. But when that familiar silky voice spoke out, he couldn’t
help but be drawn out again into the spell.

Blood from baby

Torn from Mother’s hug,

Churchyard earth

From grave new dug

The circle was spinning so fast now that people were beginning to cry out, in fear, in exhilaration. On Cibo’s last words,
when his clod of soaked earth hit the pot, there was a unanimous cry, the last chorus seeming to come from one voice:

Stir it into

Satan’s broth,

Sacrifice

To conjure THOTH!

A giant flame shot from the cauldron. The circle crashed to a halt, bodies falling outwards. One maddened monk barrelled into
the silent, black armoured figure and bounced off. The Fugger buried his head again as another monk fell on him.

Only one man was still moving, his left hand spilling coloured sand in a large circle on the floor. He quickly filled the
circle with the lines of a five-pointed star. Within that
pentangle he wrote, with the falling, gore-red sand, the words ‘suproc tse coh’.

Something was shaken out of a velvet bag to fall into the centre of the star of sand, onto the reversed words.

‘Suproc tse coh!’ cried the Archbishop of Siena. ‘Hoc est corpus!’

And, gazing down upon the six-fingered hand of Anne Boleyn, the coven set about the raising of the dead.

High above them, yet already far below the surface, something moved slowly through a tunnel of infinite dark. At points, the
chimney was so narrow that the blindworm creature was forced to dig its face into the earth, to hold its breath and push its
head through tiny gaps, propelled by scrabbling feet and the clawing fingers of just one hand, trying never to release the
woollen thread stretching out into the blackness.

Twice Beck had let it go when forced to pull with the strength of both hands to wriggle through a near-impossible opening.
Once, when briefly climbing upwards again, she had snagged and split the thread, just at a fork in the tunnel. She’d struggled
up the left channel for a dozen pulls of her body before deciding to go back and take the right channel where, after much
panicky groping in the complete darkness, she recovered the thread. Thereafter, it remained locked in her grasp, making the
way slower, but surer.

There was little air, and what there was of it was tainted with sulphurous smoke. Beck coughed, choked, spat mud but crept
ever downward. Time passed but made no sense. There was only this blackness, the twistings of rock and clay, an occasional
cave where she could sense space above her, where she could straighten for a moment and stretch her bunched limbs. Then, inevitably,
the thread would lead her down again to a narrow hole and, with a last shrug and shift, she would thrust her head into it,
squeeze her shoulders through, renew the painful scrabbling descent.

As a ward against the terror that constantly threatened to engulf her, she began to talk. At first it was nothing – childhood
rhymes, snatches of psalms, the song of Solomon. Gradually, these words adapted themselves to her surroundings as if her life
had only ever been this space, merging with the earth and mud, the foul air and the things she carried with her, her destiny
dangling at the end of a red thread. ‘Lord, though I crawl through the valley of dark death, yet I have my weapons clutched
to my side. Though I breathe the poison of the air, yet am I strong. Knife and stone, slingshot and string. Follow the trail
wherever it leads. To my father. To my father. To my father.’

The tunnel widened a little and, raising her face, Beck inhaled something different, redolent of both sweetness and corruption.
It made her suddenly, fiercely hungry, yet at the same time nauseated, as if her hunger could only be sated by something foul
and unnatural. She breathed again deeply, both drawn and disgusted, eyes closed to this breeze. Then something hit her in
the face. A body. It ran into her, was repelled, then ran into her shoulders, scrambled up and over them. She cried out then
and thrust her face into the mud before her, burying her scream, as wave upon wave of furred bodies, large and small, ran
into the top of her head and on over her, tiny feet scampering down her back, running down her legs, hundreds, thousands of
them.

It went on for what seemed like an age and then they were gone. She dared to raise her head, to suck in deep that repellent
air, to thank her loving God for meeting them there and not ten paces further back when she was wedged in the narrowest gap.
Then she took the thread again into her hand and pushed herself forward through the sickly-sweet smoke, towards a horror even
the rats had fled.

Within the kaleidoscope of light, a kaleidoscope of sound. Shrieks, garbled pleading, maniacal laughter suddenly cut off,
replaced by a desperate sobbing. The grunts of the lustful, the
insatiable, cries of orgasmic delight, of rapine torment, prayers uttered as curses, curses as prayers. No relief for those
who suffered, no satiation for those who craved. The endlessness of desire, the prolonging of sweet and terrible pain.

Nowhere to look; everywhere the horrors, the pleasures, the two so enmeshed it was impossible to see where one ended and the
other began. One moment the Fugger was weeping with a depth of desolation he’d never known, even in the darkest nights of
the midden, the next he was laughing as if his jaws would split from his face, as if some howling dog would burst from them,
dragged out by the imps sat atop his cheekbones dangling fish hooks in his lips, pulling them back to speed the passage of
this demon he was giving birth to. And above him no respite, just the revolving chambers of glass spinning now in frenzy,
vomiting forth roses that grew and withered in an instant, amulets and eye sockets exploding in rainbow shades, dissolving
and re-forming into the legions of the damned.

And everywhere the bodies. Joined on the floor, perched on the ends of the altar; men grappled with men while the naked woman
took one after another, yelling her encouragement, her mockery, urging them on to greater acts of sweaty degradation either
side of the white-clad virgin whose only movement was the endless flow of her tears. These soaked a handkerchief laid there
for the purpose. Someone would wring this out regularly into a jewelled chalice beside her on the altar. It was already half
full.

And the Fugger knew, somewhere in the small part of him that still could think, that all this was a result of the awful cauldron’s
contents, which had been stirred and heated and chanted over until it was ready to be painted onto the naked bodies, at armpit,
nostril and groin. His struggles had meant that maybe his skin absorbed less of the thick liquid than some of the others who
had willingly, joyfully daubed themselves. But he also knew that whatever was inside him was
not diminishing in force but building, that the small part of him that still could reason was dissipating to nothing.

‘What will I do when even that little is gone?’ he cried out, his voice drowned in the shrieking. Then he realised he did
know, and so he clutched that thought to him, his only hope of salvation.

Just when he thought the rock walls of the dungeon would burst apart, a command was called from the altar and all in the room
froze, in mid-ecstasy or anguish, to look up. A stag-headed man stood there, antlers splayed and swaying, pointing over the
crowd. And that small, thinking part of the Fugger remembered now that this stag, this Archbishop of Siena, was one of the
small group who had not partaken of the foul broth, along with Abraham, the still-weeping virgin and the armoured Heinrich
von Solingen.

‘Prince of Darkness! Come to us now!’ The voice emerging from the mouth of the stag was silky, low-pitched. ‘Prince of this
world, Father of lies, of the Other Truths, Diabolus, Ahiram, you who have a name and no name in all the tongues of the earth,
descend to be with us, your servants.’

The heavy breathing of the disciples, the drip of water and of tears, the turning of the chambers, all noise was sucked away
then, leaving a silence that yearned to be filled. As if somewhere someone had laid a hand against a door that would open
upon them.

No, not a hand, the Fugger realised. A cloven hoof.

He heard a faint scratching, all heard it, and all looked up to the glass roof. Shadows, separate shapes, were moving together,
forming into one dark cloud stretching over them. When all was obscure, when the shadow was upon them and they could feel
its terrible weight, it paused there as if waiting for more.

The silky voice issued again from the stag’s head. ‘What do you wish, dread Lord? Name it and it is thine. Life act or death
stroke, it is thine. Any abomination, corruption, degradation, it is thine. Show us how to do thy work, to
honour thee. Help us summon the spirit of this dead queen, this she-hag, this Hecate who once did thy command with her six
fingers and can again, with thy favour. Help us join witch’s hand to beggar’s stump. Name thy price and it shall be paid.
It is thine! Thine! Thine!’

The scratching, faint at first, like a mouse running across a glass roof, grew louder with these words, seeming to come now
from here, now from there, the upraised faces following the scurryings, some in terror, some in expectant joy. Soon it became
a drumming, a steady beating upon the ceiling – thump! thump! thump! – and the glass began to bow, to bulge and push against
its leaded restraints, forced inwards by claw, by finger, by palm of hairy hand.

A terrible scream, and all looked now as the girl in virginal white, previously so still, began to writhe and groan. Her body
was in the grip of unseen hands, twisted and pulled, her legs spread wide, the movements of her hips lascivious, inviting,
while her face, blanched in pure terror, showed her desperation, her terrible struggle to control what was no longer under
her command.

‘A sign! You have spoken! Thy will be done!’ Cibo raised both arms in invocation, then pointed at the girl and turned to the
Black Knight. ‘Hold her! Hold her here for me!’

Heinrich von Solingen began to march forward, his gait steady and slow. On the altar, the stag-headed Archbishop began to
loosen the silk at his waist.

It was then that the Fugger, unable to watch, looked down and saw a sight of more wonder than any yet paraded before him.
There were two hands in his lap, and they were both his. He raised up the miracle. His new hand was the same to the touch,
yet different, for he saw again the scars where the dog had bitten him as a child, the burn when he had been too eager to
reach inside his mother’s cooking pot. He bunched the fingers, stretched them out, delighting in forgotten sensations. He
was complete, and a strength and a courage he’d not felt in seven years filled him.

It was at that moment he heard the voice.

‘Look at me.’

A woman was standing within the pentangle, long dark hair, a horse’s mane of it, flowing down over bare shoulders, a simple
circlet of gold on her brow, another of sapphires encircling a long and graceful neck. Her eyes were pools of depthless black.
He gazed into them, saw the flaw within one, the question and the answer in the pair. And when she raised a hand from within
her gown of immaculate white, he saw it had six fingers.

‘I cannot hold them long,’ Anne Boleyn said. ‘Their summons is strong, for they have a sacred part of me.’

The Fugger looked up and saw that everyone else was frozen: the black knight halted in mid-stride, the stag with arms spread
wide, the virgin on the altar, her terror plain now that her writhings had ceased, every monk caught in their leers, all held
as if in a painting by a troubled master. Only the candles still flickered.

She spoke again. ‘Fight them. For help is closer than you think.’

The pentangle was between the cauldron and altar. Without stepping beyond the five-pointed boundary, she leant over and dipped
her hand into the broth. Steam rose as she withdrew it and followed her as she stretched out to the altar. A drop fell from
the little finger into the chalice there, where they had so carefully saved the young girl’s tears.

‘Remember this. Remember the power of tears.’

The faint scratching returned. He saw a slight movement from those around him, as if they were breathing in. Anne Boleyn shivered,
and the edges of her gown, the jewels at head and neck, began to blur. In a voice suddenly strained, she said, ‘Tell Jean,
I do not doubt that he will come for me.’ She then seemed to melt, dissolving and descending to the chamber floor, leaving
only a faint trace of light and a six-fingered hand within a star of sand.

He looked down. His new hand had gone, but something
of the courage he’d felt remained. As the nightmare of the chamber returned in screaming ecstasy and pain, as a suit of black
armour marched towards a girl in pure white, the Fugger knew what he must do. For he remembered the power of tears.

Moving to the altar, he picked up the chalice there and dashed the contents through the slits of the black helmet.

Heinrich von Solingen felt the liquid hit him. He had been burnt once before, with boiling oil at the siege of Novara. He
still had the scars. This pain was a hundred times worse. It seared him, ate his flesh, filled his still unhealed head wound
with molten fire. Bellowing in agony, he crashed backwards onto the sand star where a hand seemed to reach through his armour
and wrap six icy fingers around his heart.

The scratching on the panes stopped in an instant. Echoing von Solingen’s shrieks, the monks threw themselves as far from
the writhing figure as they could, cowering against the glass.

The Fugger felt a blade at his throat, a soft voice slithering into his ear.