The Wolves of Paris (2 page)

Get to the bridge. Call for help.

The night watch would be on the walls by now. They could raise a cry, come rushing out with staves and swords. Drive off the miserable brutes. Bludgeon them to death if they persisted. Vicious beasts—they had no place in the streets.

Etienne was terrified as he passed through the dark beneath the gatehouse, but he reached the other side safely. He let out his breath with relief. Behind, he heard the three dogs snarling and fighting among themselves.

Praise the saints. It was nothing.

Something strange about those three. An unusual appearance, tall and lean. And what was that smell? It wasn’t exactly canine, was it? More like a—

Etienne froze and his stomach lurched into his throat.

A dark figure crouched on the parapet in front of him, where the bridge reached the peak of the first stone arch. It looked like a man at first glance, perched on the edge in a crouch, staring up the Seine toward the manor houses that lined the river from Lady d’Lisle’s home to the palatial dwelling of the king’s provost. A long cloak flapped in the wind behind him.

I cleared the bridge! There was nobody there.

Etienne drew his sword.

“In the name of King Charles and the Lord Mayor, stand down from there. Present yourself or I’ll run you through.”

The figure shifted and Etienne gave a start. Damn his weak eyes. Not a man at all. Another dog, the biggest yet, a huge brute of an animal. What he’d taken for a cloak was the dog’s fur and tail. Growls sounded from behind. The other dogs coming for him at last. The large dog in front of him dropped down from the parapet.

“Back off, you filthy cur. I’ll cut your throat.”

It leaped. Etienne lifted the sword, but the animal, clever as the devil himself, went for his forearm. Huge jaws sank through his flesh with a bone-crushing pressure like two millstones grinding together. He cried out in pain. His sword clattered to the ground. The dog pulled him down, then went for his throat.

As the wet, dank smell filled his nose and the wide, toothy jaw opened at his neck, he had a final look. Long snout. Pointed ears. Sharp, cunning eyes. This was no dog.

It was a wolf.

Chapter Two

“Lord Nemours is a devout man,” Marco said. “If he expects you to wear a penance, you’ll wear a penance.”

Lorenzo bristled at his brother’s tone. Standing outside the tent, under Marco’s disapproving gaze and Dimetrius’s more amused expression, he pulled on his tunic, laced up his blue and red leggings, and fastened a gilt belt at his waist. He let Demetrius—their Greek agent—strap on his sword, but ignored the saffron-colored cross that Marco was holding out to him.

“Just pin it on,” Marco said.

“If the king’s provost is so devout,” Lorenzo said, “let him wear it himself.”

“Don’t be difficult. These French can be prickly. We don’t want trouble.”

“We already have trouble. I haven’t been living on the road for the past twenty-nine days so I can impress Lord Nemours with my piety. If I wanted that, I’d still be wearing the black and white. And I thought we were not going to see Nemours until tomorrow.”

“He might send for us tonight.”

“And if he does, I’ll put it on.”

It was a chill day across northern France. Unlike their native Tuscany, much of this country was wild and wooded, plagued with wild beasts and bandits. They never traveled without their swords, and more than once had drawn them to show steel to the curious and incautious.

But the small party of traders had emerged in the past few days into a more civilized land, roads in better repair and speckled with villages. With the English finally retreating to the west and Burgundy somewhat less meddlesome thanks to a couple of spanking defeats at the hands of the French crown, there was hope in Florence that France was entering a period of stability more conducive to the regular business of buying and selling, borrowing and lending.

“Listen to me, little brother,” Marco said. His tone was more grave now. “You can either stop this blasphemy or I’ll see to it that you wear the black and white again.”

“Don’t fool yourself. The priory wouldn’t take me back now. Yellow cross or no.”

Nevertheless, he stood still while Marco came and pinned the cross above his right breast. “Give thanks to the Virgin the Inquisition was merciful,” the older brother said. “And that the Boccaccio name still has some influence. You’re lucky they didn’t put you to the question.”

Lorenzo stared at his brother with growing anger. Marco had no idea what
questions
, as he put it, had been asked, and how they had been answered. The strongest recidivist Jewish converso, the most hardheaded heretic—every man wilted eventually. But what would Marco know about that? Under mother’s direction, he’d resolved Lorenzo’s difficulties with the Dominicans the same way he always did, with a purse of silver and a boast about their famous ancestor, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio. Not that Marco had ever read the
Decameron
.

The muleteers got their animals up and harnessed. Men saddled horses for the Boccaccio brothers and their agent. Only eight miles from the city now, they’d tried to press on the previous evening, but a broken wagon axle stopped them short. Instead, they had pitched tents at the edge of some woods midway between two villages and set a watch. Axle repaired, morning fast broken with dark bread and hard cheese, they were eager to reach the city and figure out what had happened to the Boccaccio agent there, why they’d received no word from Paris in months.

On the road, the brothers traveled in silence at the front of the caravan. Lorenzo was in a foul mood, irritated by the yellow cross on his breast, and bored of his brother’s company after so many days on the road. Marco criticized the villagers and peasants as superstitious, as pagans, while insisting they stop at every shrine, then take confession and mass whenever they came across a church or abbey. Once, passing through Provence, they’d wasted eight hours crawling on their knees through the streets of some village so they could receive expiation of their sins in the presence of a piece of the True Cross.

“Three trips to the shrine is as good as one trip to Rome,” the local bishop assured them.

Lorenzo was exhausted mentally as well as physically. These last few miles at the end of the trip were the worst, the anticipation crushing. Paris wasn’t Florence, it was a filthy, violent northern city, worn down by decades of war and plague and famine. But it would be better than this interminable time on the road. And then there was Lucrezia, and the thought of seeing her again.

She was widowed. The news had reached all the way to Florence. Lorenzo was sure he wasn’t the only young Italian dreaming of bringing her back to her native land. But how many others would be in Paris tonight? Not many. Lorenzo glanced at Marco. Well, there was at least one other.

Lorenzo kept his thoughts on Lucrezia until Marco pulled his horse next to Lorenzo’s some time later.

“If Giuseppe is in trouble with the king, we must be sure to disassociate him from the company.”

Lorenzo raised an eyebrow. “After two decades of service to the family? Doesn’t one usually demand forty pieces of silver before turning a man over to the centurions?”

“We can only assume the worst.”

“And that is?”

“Giuseppe received word of Father’s apoplexy,” Marco said, “assumed we were too young and callow and preoccupied to look after the family interests, and has decided to set himself up on his own.”

“You credit him with too much imagination,” Lorenzo said.

“Then what?”

“Maybe it’s because of the king or his provost.”

“What, you think they arrested him?”

“Why not? Charles needs money to fight his wars. Giuseppe balked at committing more funds and Lord Nemours clapped him in irons to force the matter. He is intercepting our correspondence.”

Marco grunted his disagreement.

Lorenzo thought his theory not only plausible, but probable as well. The king was already indebted to the Boccaccios for 11,000 florins, and another 115,000 to other Florentines. A staggering sum. His debts rivaled the pope’s. But Charles had his kingdom back. Mostly.

If simple pecuniary interests were behind Giuseppe’s mysterious silence, the brothers carried the means to resolve the situation. In addition to four carts of spices and silk, they carried a strongbox filled with silver pennies for small expenses, plus notarized cheques, contracts and pledges. If needed, they could raise additional sums equal to the amount already lent. But if that’s what the king was about, Lorenzo was determined to extract favorable terms.

They passed through a pair of villages on the approach to the city. The road changed from rutted, frozen mud to a gravely base to bits of the old Roman road, flat and well-drained and lined with paving stones. Around midday, they passed the churches and abbeys of Saint-Médard, then the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the flat, flood-prone fields on the left bank of the city. They passed through the gates of the city wall itself, and Lorenzo was pleased to see that Paris had developed on this side of the Seine since his previous visit four years earlier, with older, crumbling buildings shored up, and windlasses lifting stones to repair damaged or partially built churches and monasteries. Burghers built new homes where once sheep had grazed.

On the other hand, the roads were still filthy with human and animal waste, the butchers piled their offal in vacant fields or dumped it in the river, and entire streets near the more prosperous houses had been foolishly given over to tanners. Tanning was one of the more noxious trades, with masters and apprentices outside in the chill air, scraping hides, rubbing them with chicken feces, or soaking them in pits filled with oak and water. The smell was . . .
pungent
, to put it kindly. Thank goodness for the cold. In the heat of summer, the stench would be unbearable.

Lorenzo’s eyes stretched across the river to the Cité, to the towers of Notre Dame, then northwest along the river bank to the manors and grand hôtels stretching along that side of the island. Lucrezia d’Lisle lived in one of those homes. Did she ever think about him? Did she ever think about Marco?

Lorenzo studied his brother, riding tall in the saddle, as handsome and rich and arrogant looking as Piero de’Medici, and hoped not.

✛

They had difficulties crossing onto the island of the Cité. To Lorenzo’s surprise, the Petit Pont—the little bridge—was crawling with watchmen. The men inspected wagons, opening grain baskets and thumping great casks of wine and olive oil—anything big enough to conceal a man, it seemed. The Florentine wagon train made it onto the bridge, then stalled as they fell under inspection.

Demetrius rode his horse up from the wagons a moment later. “Two men want to inspect the strongbox.”

“Open it,” Marco said. “But don’t let them touch anything.”

When Demetrius had gone, Marco turned to Lorenzo. “We’re inside the walls. A little late to be searching for English spies, don’t you think?”

Lorenzo frowned. Yes, strange.

Finally at the toll gate itself, they waited while a band of filthy, crippled men and women argued they were mendicants and not subject to the toll.

“What’s your business?” a guard asked.

“The Hôtel Dieu,” one of the beggars said. He waved a scrap of parchment. “This here is from the bishop.”

The toll collector glanced at the parchment, but neither he nor the beggar likely could read what was written there. “Show your faces. All of you. Arms and hands, too.”

The beggars pulled back cowls and lifted sleeves to prove they were not escapees from the leprosarium outside the city walls. The toll collector waved them in.

Lorenzo dropped from his horse to present his credentials. A copy of his orders, the list of his goods to trade, with the wax seal of the Boccaccio and Father’s signature—forged by Mother, since Father couldn’t grip a quill since the apoplexy struck his body. The toll collector gave a perfunctory glance, then handed it back for the Florentine to read aloud. Lorenzo read it first in Latin, then translated to French. He looked up to see the toll collector staring at the yellow cross on his breast.

He remounted. Waiting for the mule train to pull into motion, his eyes wandered along the riverbank toward the grand manor houses, thinking about Lucrezia again. A chilling sight caught his eye. Live bodies hung in the gibbets that dangled over the stone wall to the left of the gatehouse. He hadn’t paid them much attention from a distance, except to notice the shear number of them—at least forty metal cages at the end of twelve-foot poles. Criminals—both civil and ecclesiastic—might end their days in one of the metal contraptions, condemned to die from thirst or exposure. More typically, they’d winch up a convicted murderer
after
his execution, let the crows pick his flesh. The skeletons might sit in that position for years.

Indeed, most of the gibbets held nothing but bones and a few greasy strands of hair. But the nearest three gibbets held bodies. The first, strangely enough, held a dead dog—a mastiff or some other large breed. The other two held young men, dressed in rags. They gripped the bars and stared back at him.

Lorenzo couldn’t look away. He imagined his own hands on the cold metal, thought of the miserable twenty-four hours he’d spent at the priory of San Domenico, doing penance in just such a contraption. Summer then, not winter, the heat like hammer and tongs on his tonsured scalp. His tongue like worn-through boot leather. His hand went to the cross at his breast.

Marco and the rest of the wagon train were ahead of him, passing through the gates onto the island with the clomp of hooves and the shouts of muleteers. Lorenzo turned his horse to follow, but hesitated as he passed beneath the gatehouse.

“Tollmaster,” he called up at the man staring down from a window above him. “Who are those men in the gibbets?”

A shadow passed over the man’s face. “
Loup-garou
.”

Lorenzo wasn’t sure he properly understood the French. “I’m sorry—did you say wolf man?”