The French Executioner (54 page)

Inside, the structure was much larger than it appeared from the outside. It was a single room, but spacious; in one corner,
a fireplace and chimney were built into the rock face of the hilltop. There was a table, benches, some chairs, all woven of
the same coppiced wood that made up the walls. Flowers and plants were everywhere, fresh in bundles, dried in wreaths and
posies. Beck immediately saw the arrangement of glass over the fireplace, and a little shiver shook her. Something similar
had stood in the centre of the kaleidoscope that had become her father’s prison. But this gave off no acrid metallic gas,
rather the fragrance of ripe berries.

‘Juniper,’ said Hanna, looking up briefly from the examination she’d begun of Jean, and noticing Beck’s curiosity. ‘It was
a little early to start on them, I had not finished all the gathering. But my stocks were low and something told me I might
need some.’ She raised Jean’s left arm and felt along the bone. ‘Broken. As well as the right leg. Several ribs, most of the
fingers and toes. Then there are the wounds. So, essence of juniper to cleanse those, then a nettle poultice. Marshmallow
and comfrey for the breaks and … cypress for all the bruising.’

There were several tubs of flowered rainwater in the hut, adding to the sweet profusion of smells. Hanna dragged one over
beside the bloodied body and fetched down a bolt of white linen from the eaves that she quickly cut into pieces. Dipping one
into a tub, she began carefully to daub at the blood caked over Jean’s body.

‘I will help,’ said Beck, reaching for a cloth, only to mistake the distance and fall forward slightly.

‘You will sleep, child.’

‘But he is my … my friend. I must see him well.’

‘And the best way to do that is to let me explore him in my own way.’ Hanna rose to lead Beck over to a truckle bed, laying
her down upon it. ‘Drink this,’ she added, holding up a cup of cool liquid so refreshing that Beck was suddenly joyously awake
and the next second the complete opposite.

‘What is it?’ she murmured, her coldness dissolving under the blankets that were being tucked around her. She was snoring
lightly before she could hear a reply.

Hanna had worked her way halfway down Jean’s body, gently cleaning away the caked-on blood, wincing at the depth and multiplicity
of cut and burn, when she reached what she thought was a blood-sodden bandage. Unwinding this, she realised that it was a
container; in it lay a six-fingered hand. Though surprised, she felt no revulsion. She nodded at it, to it, before briefly
wiping the little traces of Jean’s blood from its rosy whiteness. Placing it to one side, she returned to the task of trying
to save a life.

When Haakon returned an hour later, having watched Franchetto, Heinrich and thirty horsemen ride past and having followed
them for a short distance to make sure they were well and truly sidetracked, he found both his comrades unconscious. Beck
looked like a boy of twelve, wedged into a mountain of skins and blankets, an actual smile transforming the usually scowling
features. Jean, though scarred and bruised in the face, such of it that could be seen, could at last be recognised again.
He lay on a bed of soft fir boughs, his body wrapped from toe to top of head in strips of white cloth. Haakon saw that each
glistened with moisture and when he touched them they were warm.

‘Augh! What is that smell?’

Hanna laughed. ‘By themselves, each plant has a lovely scent. They seem to combine … unfortunately. But each is necessary
in its differing powers.’

‘Will he live?’

Hanna got up and stood beside the tall man, not at all dwarfed by him. He could have been one of her sons. ‘He is
badly hurt. I have set his arm and leg and bound his ribs, but much else is hurt besides, inside and out. Yet he already seems
to have survived what would kill most men. He must have a good reason.’

‘He does.’ Haakon gave a huge yawn, and rose. ‘Well, I will sleep for an hour, then resume my watch.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I need to sleep.’

‘No, why so little? They will not return for some days.’

‘How can you know this?’

‘I see it in the flames’ – she gestured to her fireplace – ‘just as I saw your coming.’ There was confusion in his tired eyes,
so she shrugged and continued, ‘Friend, you need sleep as much as these two.’

‘Nevertheless—’

Hanna raised her hand. ‘As you wish. But have a taste of this. It will make your little sleep go further.’

Haakon was too exhausted to argue. He took a long pull at the same elixir Beck had sampled and, finding it good, drained the
flask. Then he curled up into a sheepskin on a bench next to Beck.

‘Wake me at mid-morning,’ he managed before his eyes shut.

‘Of course,’ said Hanna, then added in a whisper. ‘I can always try.’

But she wouldn’t. The three would sleep through the day, the sunset and probably another dawn again.
Sleep’s Balm,
Hanna thought,
as powerful as anything in my chest of herbs.

She picked up her tabby cat, Philomen, who had slept through all the excitement with the privilege of his great age, and put
him on her lap. Laying another piece of applewood on the fire, she sat back and watched the red slowly creep over it in a
series of incendiary flowers. There were answers to seek within the flames. As the heat took the applewood and held it up
in crimson and yellow arms, she thought about the savaged man, the strange hand he carried. And what she had
said to the tall one had been true: she’d know when the hunt was about to return. She’d see it in smoke and fire.

‘Scots pine,’ sniffed the tracker, a stocky Bavarian from Heinrich’s own manor, handing him the flask. ‘We use a lot on bitches
in heat to keep away the boar hounds, until we’re ready. Then we wash away all but a trace. They love that.’

As a result of their need to rest and Fenrir’s steady pace, it had taken the pursuers the rest of the night and until sunset
of the next day to catch up with the wolf-dog. Two of their hounds had snuck up on him as he slept in a thicket and had lost
their lives as a result. But they had dislodged the flask, before Fenrir finally fled the increasing odds.

Heinrich cursed. ‘So we have been chasing a decoy?’

‘Someone has helped them trick us, yes,’ his fellow German grunted at him, moving just out of range of his leader’s reach.
His right hand might have been bandaged but he was just as vicious with the left.

Heinrich had taken a step towards the latest man to fail him, but stopped at these words.

‘Helped them? Of course. They could not have taken him much further. The prisoner was barely alive.’ He paced for a moment.
‘They’ve gone to ground. Back there. You’ – he pointed at one of his men – ‘ride back to Wittenberg directly. You should meet
the Archbishop on the road. We will rendezvous at the crossroads just before we entered the forest. The rest of you scum,
mount! We ride.’

The men, with a few scant hours of sleep behind them, had been hoping for a few hours more. But they knew better than to demur
or grumble. His tracker, with a little more guile, knew how to ask the obvious question.

‘Master, there’s much forest back there, off the trail we have come down. How will we know where to begin?’

Heinrich sneered. ‘Call yourself a hunter? We watch for a sign. A very obvious one.’ He looked at the bottle then hurled it
against the trunk of a tree, shattering it. The dogs whimpered,
snapped and snarled in their efforts to get away from the overpowering, cloying scent of pine. ‘When your hounds start behaving
like that again, we’ll know we have arrived.’

Heinrich jumped up into the saddle and dug in his heels. The horse galloped off and his men, grumbling louder now at the disappearing
back, followed close behind.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Jean was the first of the three to wake. It was not a true struggle to do so, no clambering from great
depths, no lung-bursting trawl from the bottom of a sluggish sea. His sleep, as far as he could recall, had been dreamless,
certainly untroubled by foes real or imaginary, and no sound drew him forth from the calm of it. It was not as if he could
not have slept longer; a part of him, reluctant to stir, tried to draw closed the lashed curtains on the world. But need drove
him awake.

He looked for her as soon as his eyes ungummed and he saw her straight away, as someone had had the foresight to put her exactly
where he would first glance. Sitting on a pillow beside his bed of boughs, fingers splayed out in that anticipatory way. It
was the way she sat that convinced him on waking it was not all part of some relieving dream such as God sometimes sent the
tormented. If it were, all of Anne would be there, talking to him as she had in the cell, comforting him. As it was, just
the hand lay there.

There was another woman there, a whole woman, sat at a table and humming while she crushed some dried herbs in a mortar, adding
them to a pot that bubbled gently on the fireplace. A handsome woman, even at her great age, tall and graceful. She reached
a hand behind her, brushing aside the long tress of iron hair that hung there, placing the fingers in the small of her back
to rub while she stretched.

He watched her until she became aware of it, at which instant she put down her stirring spoon and came across to him, laying
one hand on his head and one on his heart.

‘How are you, son?’ Hanna said after a while.

‘Well,’ he replied. ‘But I smell a little strange.’

She smiled. ‘You smell a lot better than you did when you came to me. I think the poisons are in my bandages now, not in your
body. Here.’ She went and fetched a beaker of the broth she’d been stirring at the fire and watched as he sipped at it, holding
it awkwardly between the few fingers still unbroken and unsplinted.

‘Will this make me sleep again?’ he asked, sniffing the aromatic steam.

‘Do you want it to?’ she replied.

‘Alas …’ He did not need to say more.

‘It will not. But it will give you the strength to be awake.’

‘In that case’ – he drained the beaker – ‘more, please.’

She brought a beaker of her own and they sat for a few minutes in companionable silence, sipping. Finally, she said, ‘I do
not want to know much, son. But this hand … are you about God’s work with it?’

He took a moment to reply. ‘There are those who claim only they know the word of God. They would tell you we are not. But
the holiest person ever I met gave me this hand from her own body, freely, asking for a promise as she gave it.’

Hanna did not even glance at the hand, just said, ‘This person. I think she and I would have understood each other.’

‘I am certain of it.’

The silence returned, as comfortable as before. Jean’s eyes grew clearer as the herbs within the draught began to take effect,
so that when a tousled, boyish head thrust itself up from beneath a pile of sheepskins and blankets, he was fully able to
take in the wonder of Beck’s yawning face.

She smiled at him. ‘I have had the most wonderful dreams, Jean Rombaud.’

‘Then I am sorry to awaken you to this nightmare,’ he said, bowing a little.

She was beside him in an instant. ‘This?’ She took his head in her hands. ‘This is the best dream of all.’

And she kissed him tenderly.

A huge thump announced that Haakon too had woken up and fallen from his perch.

‘Thor’s Hammer!’ he grunted, from the floor. ‘But I am hungry! How long have I slept? One, two hours?’

‘More like days, Norseman,’ laughed Jean, ‘but the rest of us got little. Your snores would make the angels flee paradise.’

Hanna, on the others’ awakening, had disappeared, to return with loaves of solid, moist black bread, wheels of cheese, smoked
sausages and dozens of eggs she’d simmered in another of her flavoursome broths. Haakon was distracted from his mock anger
at Jean’s remark and his joy at the sight of the Frenchman’s return to consciousness by the plenteous food. He sat down and
began to chew his way through platters of it, while the others ate as heartily if less conspicuously. Jean was immeasurably
content to let Beck feed him.

‘How is it you live so well out here?’ Eating and talking caused a soft egg to shed its yolk down the front of Haakon’s golden
beard. ‘I have never seen food like this in a forest before.’

Hannah pushed some more eggs towards him. ‘I … help the local people and they reward me, that is all.’

‘But all this food?’ Jean turned his face away from Beck’s moving spoon. ‘This is a large reward. They will know you have
visitors and, perhaps, others will ask them.’

‘They will not be able to tell much. No one ever comes up here, I always go to them. They have ways of finding me when I am
needed, such as certain calls made by woodland birds that have never flown in the valley below. I hear, I go. Besides’ – she
fetched some more broth – ‘they do not betray me to strangers. They talk to me of any danger.’

Jean saw the concern that contorted the calm brow.

‘And what have these birds told you lately?’

Hanna got up and moved to the entrance of the hut, stared out.

‘They sing of the hunter’s return.’ She turned back. ‘I do
not want to send you away. I never saw a man more in need of rest and such skills as I have. But I do not want to see you
caught by my over-kindness. And I do not think my distractions will hold them again for long.’

‘How much time do we have?’

‘They will be here by the middle of the afternoon. Perhaps a little sooner.’

‘Then this is a farewell feast?’ said Beck sadly.

‘It is.’

There was a silence as Beck and Jean contemplated again the hard road recently travelled, the hardship of the road ahead.

All except Haakon. For now, he desired to contemplate nothing more than the sausage before him. A sausage he was more than
delighted to share when a thin but joyous Fenrir bounded into the clearing.

There were four of them, all dressed in the hip-length coat and leggings of those who work the land. They stood silently at
each end of the litter’s poles. Four more waited beside it.