The French Executioner (53 page)

‘Haakon! Grab Jean!’ Beck screamed.

‘One moment.’ The Norseman was striding towards the upturned table, axe held on high. ‘Something to settle first.’

His journey across the room was interrupted by a new and not unfamiliar voice.

‘Ah brother! What a night we have had!’

When Franchetto Cibo spoke these words from the doorway, he was looking back into the corridor and grinning at his bodyguard,
Bruno-Luciano, who had surprised his master that night with a hitherto unrevealed depth of carnality. It was only after they
were uttered that he turned back to enter, just as Heinrich bellowed, ‘Help us!’

Franchetto only got the briefest glimpse of the strange scene before a naked woman stopped whirling something
above her head and slammed the door on him. There was a key in the lock, rusted from disuse, and it took both her hands to
turn it. It clicked just as someone crashed into the door and indistinct bellowing erupted from the other side.

‘Haakon!’ she yelled, and the Norseman now turned to her. ‘No time! Grab Jean, for the love of God! This door will not hold
for long!’

The Norseman could just see over the edge of the table. ‘Another time then,’ he said clearly, seeing the German’s eyes narrow,
the hate mirrored back.

Thrusting the shaft of his axe behind his back into the folds of his cloak positioned to act as a sling, he stooped and put
his arms under the Frenchman’s body. It did not hang right when he lifted it, and he could not believe how light it was. The
lifting obviously sent pain shooting through him, for Jean’s eyes suddenly opened and, in a distinct voice, he said, ‘Have
a care, you great ox!’

Haakon smiled down at him. ‘Welcome back, little man.’

There were two crashings of wood then, one at the main door where a large body was hurled against it, one where another of
Beck’s stones hurtled into the table, a finger’s width below where Heinrich had unwisely raised his head.

‘The door is giving,’ Beck called. ‘Where now?’

There was one other door in the room, off to the left side of the fireplace. Haakon knew the back of the house lay in that
direction and he could only hope all the hours of scouting there had not been in vain.

‘This way!’ he shouted with a confidence he did not feel, and threw the door open.

A murky passage was indeed revealed, leading he knew not where. He hesitated, but the splintering of the other frame left
them no choice, and Beck ran to join them. Pausing for a second once more to raise the slingshot, she found her head was close
to Jean’s. She heard him whisper, ‘The hand. We cannot leave it here.’

It had fallen to the floor when Heinrich had jerked back the
table, and lay now an arm’s length from it, resting on its fingertips, as if waiting.

Heinrich’s cry of ‘To me!’ brought yet another crash, and the door shuddered inwards. It would not last much longer.

Beck hesitated.

‘Please,’ Jean whispered. ‘All is lost without it.’

She said sharply, ‘Take him! Go!’ and as Haakon set off down the passage the main door burst open and two men fell through
it to sprawl on the floor. A third brandishing a sword leapt over them and it was he who died, Beck’s stone taking him between
the eyes. He was dead before he began to fall backwards, and an outflung hand struck Franchetto in the face as he tried to
enter. He clutched his nose with a cry, temporarily blocking the doorway.

Beck dived for the hand, aware as she did so that a shape was rising from behind the table. Something sliced down through
the air towards her. She twisted, folding in on herself, landing at the same time as Heinrich’s sword bit into the floor an
inch from her head. Her right hand snatched up that of Anne Boleyn as she fell over it, and she used the motion of the roll
to keep going and end up on her feet.

Franchetto stood in the doorway, clutching his face, screaming. Two men started to push past him. Heinrich was between Beck
and her only means of escape but he was bent over his sword, his back slightly to her, trying to pull it from the floor where
the force of his wrong-handed death blow had lodged it.

Stepping forward on her left foot, she lifted her right back and kicked him hard between the legs. He crumpled, and she leapt
over his falling body, running down the passage into the darkness, the two men just behind her. She ran into something in
the dark, was picked up, placed to the side. There was the sound of two blows. In the entrance to the passage another man
had appeared. There was no width in the passage to use her slingshot so she merely pitched the last of her stones at the shape.
There was a yelp of agony.

In the gloom, she could just make out Haakon stooping to pick up the prone Jean.

‘Come on!’ he cried, setting off. ‘I think this way is out.’

Another door opened on to the small courtyard, full of barrels and sacks, that Haakon had observed on his night missions.
Five hunting dogs snarled and snapped, straining at their short chains. A dozen paces across, a gate gave on to a lane. Their
horses were there.

‘Here, take him!’ Haakon passed the body to Beck and it was her turn to be surprised at the weight.

She looked into the ravaged face, whispered, ‘Oh, my love! What have they done to you?’

‘Come!’ the Norseman yelled, stacking the last of the heavy barrels against the door just as the first shoulder hit it from
the other side. He took Jean back and they ran for the lane, where a familiar growl greeted them.

‘Fenrir! Foe!’ Haakon shouted, and the dog followed the pointed finger and ran into the yard they’d just fled. A sound of
crashing followed by a confusion of snarling and yelling erupted there.

Beck was in the saddle, Jean passed up to be cradled before her. Haakon was on the other horse in a trice, and pausing only
to cry ‘Fenrir!’ he kicked first the side of Beck’s mount, then his own. They sped down the darkling lane as the first bloodied
man ran shouting from the yard.

The night gatekeeper at Wittenberg’s main portal later tried to excuse his failure to keep it shut by telling of the strangeness
of the vision, as well as the suddenness and force of the vision’s appearance. But the Hochmeister did not believe his tale
of a naked Valkyrie bearing a dead warrior in her arms, accompanied by a huge headsman and a giant wolf. It sounded like the
product of a wine-clouded mind, and since the gatekeeper already had a reputation for drunkenness, he was brutally flogged
before being dismissed from his post.

The Hochmeister was so hasty in his anger he did not even hear of the other group, some thirty armed men who had again forced
the gate and, preceded by baying hounds, disappeared urgently into the night.

They rode hard through the rain-driven night, but dawn revealed their lead to be much diminished, for the hunters were riding
only one man to a horse. Judging from the howling of their dogs, they were now less than a league behind.

So Beck had plunged into the woods, up a path that had rapidly become little more than a deer track. Haakon had followed,
cursing all the way, his wood madness from the road to Munster returning almost instantly. Only his love for Jean kept him
going, his need to get his broken friend away from the fiends who had broken him. But after an hour’s galloping deeper and
deeper into the dense foliage it was not his madness that told him that they could not go on much further, it was his sense.
Their horses were breathing spasmodically, their flanks bedaubed with the continuous foam of exhaustion. Behind them, the
hounds’ barks drew ever nearer.

Beck was following Fenrir. It was all she was capable of doing. They had stopped just long enough for her to put on her boy’s
clothes and to swathe Jean in a blanket, neither covering seeming to have the least resistance to the never-ending rain. The
only sign that Jean was alive were the groans he would let out when her horse lurched over, round or through some obstacle.
Then his eyes would start open and a shudder would rack him, until the next merciful faint carried
him away again. His pallor was deathly, the only colour provided by the blood oozing steadily from between ragged lips. She
felt sure that at any moment she would look down and he would be gone, and the bitterness of that, after all they had gone
through to free him, made her colder than even the water and wind. So she tended not to look down but focused as far as she
could on the tail of the wolf dog ahead of her.

Fenrir was driven by the instincts of the hunt, as both chaser and chased. The forest floor was criss-crossed by little pathways,
mainly for the use of small animals. Somehow, he always picked one that could accommodate a horse as well, his muzzle lifted
to the wind, discerning the different scents.

His last turns had led them upwards, climbing a large hill within a grove of silver birch. The horses’ heads began to droop,
more foam appearing on chest and shuddering flank. Fenrir gave them a very brief respite at the next slight crossroads. He
stopped at the junction and began to whine. He seemed to want to go straight ahead, but something kept forcing him back onto
the other path, the one that looked wider and went downhill.

Haakon pushed his exhausted horse up beside Beck’s and called down, ‘Which way, Fenrir? Come, we must choose!’

‘I do not think it matters now, Norseman. Listen!’

The baying was close. The pursuers had arrived at the last crossroads and chosen the uphill route.

‘How long, do you think?’ She was almost too exhausted to speak. Jean slumped against her as if dead already.

‘Not long.’ Haakon gazed at her for a moment. ‘We may have to make other plans. Fighting plans.’

‘There are thirty of them at least! How do we fight?’

‘The same way as if there were three or three hundred. Fight as if you do not care whether you live or die.’

‘But I do care.’ She was looking into Jean’s face when she said it.

Fenrir, who had made several more attempts to run up the path ahead, suddenly sneezed ferociously three times, gave a
little yelp and leapt onto it, almost as if he had broken through some invisible door. Instantly, he was bounding along it,
his barks beckoning them on.

‘Well, maybe he thinks the same as me,’ muttered Haakon. ‘The top of a hill is a better place to die than the base.’

Two more minutes of riding and they reached a clearing, backed by a rocky outcrop. The hut was so carefully blended into the
foliage they could not see it at first. Only a plume of smoke gave away its position, and that could almost have been mist
clearing from the boughs of the oak and linden that had been bent together to provide the roof of the structure. Walls woven
out of coppiced branches spread between the trunks of both trees, and on closer viewing were seen to perch on top of a platform
suspended off the forest floor. It was as if the structure hung from the trees, like a massive fruit.

‘What is this?’ said Beck, shaken from her torpor.

‘A good place to die.’

Haakon had dismounted and was moving forward, stringing his bow. The barks had got that much closer. Their enemy would be
at the last junction all too soon.

‘Is that what you have come here to do?’ The woman’s gentle voice seemed to come not from within the structure but from the
very trees themselves.

Beck and Haakon looked at each other, then Beck stepped forward to the base of the oak and said, ‘We’d prefer to live. But
others may not give us the choice. Can you shelter us?’

‘It seems I cannot even shelter myself, since you have found me. It’s hard for wolf or dog to find the way up here, but yours
did. Its need must be great.’

‘All our needs are. Those that pursue us would slaughter us without mercy. They have already nearly killed one of us, by slow
and foul means.’

Beck walked back to where she had laid Jean on the ground. She gently lifted his head and poured the last of the water from
her flask between the ruins of his lips, watched as most of it ran down the side of his mouth.

A shadow fell across her. She had heard no sound of her approach, but a tall woman in a simple brown woollen shift, iron-grey
hair woven in a single tress reaching to the backs of her knees, stood above her now. Her face was heavily lined, but full,
strong teeth gleamed from a mouth that was wide and looked well used to smiling. She had none of the bent-back brokenness
of most older women after a lifetime of care, and her soft brown eyes were kind.

The dogs’ yelping was so close now. Maybe they had reached the grove of silver birch.

‘Will your dog follow me, if I bid him?’ The woman spoke to Haakon.

‘He will obey no one but me. What would you have him do?’ Haakon was standing at the head of the little path they had just
come up, an arrow notched. ‘No, old woman, do not get too near him, he’s …’

But she had already gone over to Fenrir. The dog stiffened at her approach, his head still pointed down the path. He showed
his teeth, gave a little growl in his throat, but then it changed into something like a whimper as she bent to him and began
whispering in his large velvet ears. When she arose, a little flask hung from the hound’s studded collar. A single drop of
some viscous liquid oozed from the neck onto the forest floor.

‘Take him down to where the two paths cross, where he was first reluctant to come up. This liquid was there in large measure
and dogs hate that. This little’ – she pointed to the leaking flask – ‘they love. Send him along the other path and they will
follow him. He will come back to you?’

‘He will always find me, but—’

‘Then take him now. Or they will find us.’

Haakon looked at the two women and down at the slumped body of his friend. This clearing was the only place in the forest
where he did not feel the madness descend. It was not a place to die after all. It was a place to live.

Without another word he led the dog, who was trying
but failing to dislodge the flask at its neck, back down the path.

‘Now, my dear. My name is Hanna.’ She spoke softly, touching Beck’s arm. ‘Shall we get this poor man into my house?’