In the Name of the King Page 10
I ran blindly over the gravel on to the grass and I think I was crying ‘Stop!’ Even the air was frightening as if filled with unseen swords, and I turned round and round, my dress tangling in my legs, and my head confused with pain and fear. Something grasped my ankle, I snatched it away in terror, and saw a man lying writhing on the ground. I stared in panic, but it was not André. The two of us were quite alone.
The man’s hand pawed weakly at my shoe. I knelt beside him, and at once he clutched at my gown, crushing its folds in a white-knuckled fist.
I said ‘Where are they? The Chevalier, have they taken him?’
His lips moved, but only to cough out blood. I began again ‘Where are they?’ but a faint shout from the darkness brought my head up sharply, and ahead of me I saw my answer.
Two great green walls of box hedge loomed before me, and between them yawned the black gap of an entrance. It was from there the voice had come, and now I caught another calling in answer, the sound muffled by layers of many hedges. They had run into the maze.
André was alive, for whom else would they be pursuing? Hope cleared my head, and now I remembered his instructions. I tried to rise, but the man still clutched my dress and as I tried to detach his grip I heard footsteps thumping over the grass, someone running round the outside of the hedge and coming this way.
I hesitated, unsure whether to flee or cry for help, but a man was already skidding round the corner and when he saw me he stopped dead. Candlelight was spilling out from the open door behind me, and in it I saw the face of Jacques.
Jacques Gilbert
Anne was dishevelled and desperate with blood on her dress, I could only think to draw my sword. I said ‘Where is he?’
She said ‘They chased him into the dédalus. I think he may be wounded.’
My legs almost turned and went by themselves, but I forced myself to say ‘Are you …?’
She shook her head. ‘Please, go after him.’
It felt unchivalrous, but the boy was hurt, I couldn’t wait. I said ‘Stay there,’ and belted after him into the maze.
The entrance was a straight pathway through a tunnel of thick green, but it was blocked at the end, and I nearly smashed into a hedge. The tunnel split in two to form an outer path like a giant circle, I could go round either way but didn’t know which. It was dark, there weren’t footprints or bent branches to follow, just two paths exactly the same, but André might be caught any minute, I’d got to just pick one and come back if it was wrong. I half-turned left then thought ‘No,’ and turned right instead. Even as I went I was certain I’d got it wrong.
I’d only gone a few steps when I saw an opening to the left that would get me off the outer ring and into the maze. I plunged through it, followed round a lot of bends, turned a corner and almost jumped at a figure right in front of me. My sword was up in an instant, but it was only a statue, a horrible grinning thing with goat legs and horns and a pipe in its hand. Behind it was nothing but hedge. Dead end.
I ran back to the outer ring, shot up the next turning, saw a path off and took it, found I was doubling back on myself, took a side turning and hit another dead end. The sweat was wet on my forehead, I spun round to go back, then stopped short as I heard footsteps on the other side of the hedge.
I opened my mouth to call André, then shut it again fast. There were too many steps for one man. The hedge was a solid mass of greenery, but the bottom looked more spindly where the trunks went into the ground, so I dropped to my knees and peered through.
I caught a blur of grey hose as the first man went past, then someone else in brown. The next legs had smart yellow hose but worn black shoes, someone just pretending to be a gentleman. He was carrying a naked sword, the point flicking to and fro as he passed. Three. I’d known the boy fight that many before, we could take them between us.
Someone shouted ahead of me, a word like ‘Venus!’ which didn’t make sense, but it was another of them, there were four. Someone else yelled from the other side, something like ‘Clear Mars!’ Five. I gripped my sword harder and walked cautiously back the way I’d come. The men I’d seen weren’t shouting at all, and I wondered how many others were just prowling round silently. The maze might be full of them.
A bang and whoosh overhead made me jump before I saw the white flash and realized the fireworks had started again. The light washed over the hedges as it passed, making the grass turn pale grey and flicker with white tips, but it was broken by a splodge of black, by several, a trail of little dark dots on the ground. I crouched and put my hand to the biggest. The light had gone, but there was damp under my fingers, the stickiness of blood.
I was suddenly calm. André had come this way, he was wounded and hunted and needing me, all I’d got to do was keep my head and get him out. I followed the way the blood had been leading before the light went, and I wasn’t scared and lost any more, I felt like a soldier. Another dead end, two more statues, then one went and bloody moved, and it wasn’t a statue at all, it was a man with drawn sword and his mouth open to yell.
I didn’t think, my hand came up in the old way, lunging clean, no armour to worry about, straight in the chest. No noise came out his mouth, nothing but a spray of blood and an odd coughing noise, then he was down on his knees, on his face, he was down. Behind him the statue loomed taller, a man with a jagged chunk like lightning in his hand, and a memory stirred, lessons with Charlot, a lot of guff about Roman gods, then I understood what all that shouting had been about. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, there were statues all over the maze, the bastards were checking every corner and moving towards the centre like a tightening net. The man at my feet retched and died, and I didn’t so much as look. He was the first Frenchman I’d ever killed, but I stepped over him and never looked back.
Anne du Pré
I was torn whether to stay as Jacques had ordered or run for help from his friends. I could never go and come back in time, yet it seemed impossible to do nothing while every second my mind said ‘If you had gone when you first thought of it you would be halfway there by now.’
The wounded man choked, and his eyes fixed in an agony of pleading on my face. Here at least was something that would not wait. I hope I didn’t do wrong, but I took his hand and said what I could remember of the Dominus reget me et nihil mihi deerit. He knew it, his hand tightened on mine and the pupils of his eyes grew bigger and blacker. His face was terribly disfigured with smallpox and the cheekbones sharp with hunger. I am sure he would not really have wanted to kill André, but perhaps they offered him money and he had a family.
I went on with the psalm. I was so afraid for André I dare not allow myself to think, but I heard myself saying the words and it helped us both be calm. There was only the sound of my voice and the roughness of his hand as we waited together for death in the dark.
Jacques Gilbert
I was running through darkness, on and on, and when a hedge came in front of me I just swerved till there wasn’t one and went on running to find the boy.
There was a yell ahead of me, then the ring of swords. André was fighting somewhere within feet of me, I hurled myself round the bend and found another bloody hedge. The path curved away from it and was going the wrong way.
Answering shouts came from all round the maze, they knew where he was and were coming to finish him off. I threw myself at the hedge, but the branches were thick and tangled, I couldn’t even work an arm through. I tried to climb, but the branches bent under me, the hedge was swallowing my foot like sponge. I clutched at the hedge and shook it, I shouted ‘It’s me, André, I’m here!’
A voice behind said ‘So you are.’
I spun round. A big man in a brown coat was standing in the mouth of the path I’d just come from, and another coming up behind.
I ran at him, but he was already lunging. I twisted so sharply my ankle bent over, but I stayed upright and my left hand grabbed his wrist as he plunged past. I brought my sword up and in him, right in the side, got the bastard, got h
im, pull out and spin for the next. I heard others coming, but was suddenly almost drunk with fearlessness and went at the next like André himself. This one was an ogre with squashed nose and jagged teeth, but he wasn’t trained, I parried him high, my forte to his faible, felt his blade give, slid out and up for the lunge in the armpit. He dodged back, my thrust wasn’t deep enough, but I turned for the edge as I came out and sliced his upper arm.
Something flashed in the shadows behind him, then a pain so excruciating I think I shrieked. A blade was biting into my knee, I had to pull my leg back off it, sickness shuddering through me as I stumbled away. Another man was lunging past his wounded comrade, I blocked him but reeled back from the power of the parry and bumped into someone behind me. My leg wouldn’t turn properly, I whirled my blade wildly and hit only hedge.
‘Steady,’ said André.
Something soft brushed my sleeve as he stepped past, his cloak bundled in his left hand. The nearest man sprang, but André thrust the cloak in his face and whipped his sword clean in the body. But something was wrong, one side of André’s shirt looked deep black, and as he twisted to get his blade to the man behind I saw the glistening wetness of blood.
My mind froze into clarity, even my knee went cold. I lurched forward and took the last one in a kind of frenzy, slash, slash and out, and there we were with three men down, but others coming towards us. I heard yelling and the pounding of feet.
‘Come on,’ said André, and I turned and ran after him, my knee making odd screwing sounds in my head as I went. We pelted round the next bend and shot up the first path we saw, but it opened on to nothing but another of those statues and a bench with a bloody bird bath.
‘Here,’ said André, pulling me towards the bench. ‘I’ll help you.’
He stood on the seat, spread his cloak over the top of the hedge and scrambled clumsily on to it, reaching down his hand to haul me up. It was easy from the bench, I was with him before anyone even showed round the corner. He slid down the other side, I followed and was immediately aware of open ground. I heard tinkling water and thought we were out at last.
We weren’t. We were standing in a big space, but there was box hedge all round in a perfect circle and just a fountain with a great copper dolphin in the middle. There was something odd behind it, a big wooden construction with bits sticking off it, but I didn’t take that in, I was looking all round and seeing just a wall of hedge broken only by more dark slots of entrances. We were in the centre of the maze.
‘Good timing, Jacques,’ said the boy, straightening awkwardly. ‘Where’s Charlot?’
I felt flat. ‘There’s just me. We didn’t know …’
He turned his face towards me, white as the fireworks. ‘But didn’t Anne …?’
My hand shot up to hush him. Footsteps on the other side of the hedge, thudding round the bend and stopping short, then a voice said ‘No,’ and I heard them moving away. They’d never thought of us climbing, and for a moment at least we’d lost them. André leaned against the hedge and began to massage his side.
Another firework flew overhead, but the light didn’t quite go as it faded. Something else was blazing nearby, yellower, more fire-like, I was glimpsing it in bits through the hedges. It was coming towards us at hand height, and I realized it was an ordinary torch.
I said ‘They’ve got lights, we’d better go.’
He swivelled at the hips and went on massaging. ‘Just give me a minute.’
André never said stuff like that, never. I stared in shock, then saw the lopsided way he was standing and understood. I said ‘I’ll get you out, André, it’s all right.’
He made a kind of hissing noise through his teeth. ‘Sounds good to me.’
It would have to me, if I hadn’t been the one who’d said it. I sat him down on the rim of the fountain and turned to face the approaching light but he saw me wince at the movement, forced a grin and said ‘Pair of crocks.’
I said ‘It’s only one man,’ and hefted my sword in my hand. It was certainly only one torch, but it was coming confidently towards us like the man knew exactly where we were and how to get there.
‘Wait a bit,’ said André. ‘Look at this.’
He was studying the wooden frame behind the fountain. It was a rack of metal poles pointing at the sky, all of different lengths to round the whole thing like a blunt arrow. Each pole had a cylinder with a pointed cap like the cones on the château roof at Lucheux, and thick string sticking out the end like a match. I’d seen things like this not twenty minutes ago, my brain clicked on to the right cog and I said ‘Fireworks.’
Light flooded through the entrance as the torch rounded the corner, and with it came a sound I knew, ridiculous and impossible, someone whistling. I even knew the tune. It was ‘En passant par la Lorraine’.
Anne du Pré
The man closed his eyes at ‘I will fear no evil’ and died before I could finish.
My fear for André was now almost choking me, and I could no longer be obedient and wait. I wished to run straight into the labyrinth after him, but knew it would not help him to have me to worry about too. I ran instead back into the hut and stared at the map of the maze.
I was hopelessly confused by it, and only two points impressed themselves on my mind. The first was that it was symmetrical, with a great opening in the centre and easy routes radiating away to the outer ring. The second was that the outer ring did not run clear all the way round, but cruelly tapered into dead ends, so that only the last segment of the circle ran true to the exit. A man might reach the outer hedge but be no nearer freedom than in the thickness of the middle. I thought of André and Jacques trapped in such a cage, and thumped the map foolishly with my fist.
I looked up in despair at the walls, and only then did I see the answer.
Jacques Gilbert
André slid off the fountain to stand beside me, sword levelled firm towards the sound of whistling.
The light spread into the clearing in a widening pool, but the man who strolled in behind it was short and wiry, dressed all in dark green, and with a face that looked wrinkled as a walnut. He had the torch in one hand, a long stick in the other, and nothing that looked like a weapon at all.
He walked cheerfully up to the frame, stuck his torch in a wire basket, then pulled on a lever so the whole rack came down to point horizontal, the strings of the rockets dangling invitingly in a row. He looked at them lovingly, then lifted his pole, a linstock with a bit of slow-match wound round the crook.
‘Monsieur,’ said André.
The man jumped back with a yelp. ‘Fuck me to Freiburg, what you doing there?’
André raised his hands. ‘Please, speak softly.’
‘What do you mean, speak softly?’ yelled the green man. ‘What you up to? That’s the Cardinal’s fleur-de-lys, going up right after the starburst.’
André flapped his hands frantically to silence him but I heard a voice yell ‘In the centre!’ and others answering, the sound of running feet. They sounded horribly close.
I grabbed André’s arm and turned for the nearest entrance, but a man was already coming out of it. I jerked right, but there were two emerging from that one. Across the clearing the dark holes of the last two openings thickened and blurred as a man appeared in each. Five of them, and the torchlight glittering off their swords as they advanced.
‘Hey,’ said the green man with a hint of unease. ‘Bugger off out of it, will you? Take your games outside and let me do my job.’
They kept coming. Two looked wobbly, and one I recognized as the ogre whose arm I’d cut, but they were still too many for the state we were in.
André faced them. ‘In front of a witness?’
‘What witness?’ said the one in front, and lunged straight at the green man.
André’s blade whipped out to deflect the blow, but the sword still scraped down the green man’s belly as it was knocked aside. He stared down in shock at the blood on his coat.
André slas
hed back at the leader, but couldn’t twist properly, the man dodged and brought up his sword with a grunt of triumph, then suddenly I was roaring with rage and snatching the burning torch out of the basket, I whirled it round like a thunderbolt, and the man reeled away in fear of the fire.
‘The rockets,’ said André, stumbling back towards me. ‘Jacques, the rockets!’
The green man was quicker than me, he screamed ‘Not with the rack down!’ and then I understood. The other men were almost up to us as I swept the torch left-handed against the trail of slow-matches, one, two, three, four, a man coming at me but André’s there, knocking the blade down hard. I keep sweeping, five, six, seven, step along the rack, eight, nine, ten, matches sizzling behind me like spitting snakes, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. None have gone off yet, but as I light the last four I see the matches are shorter and realize they’re timed to go together. The green man’s yelling ‘The lever, get the rack up!’ but I don’t want them shooting in the air, I want them where they are right now. The nearest man knows, he’s trying to get past André to stop me, but the boy’s still fighting, wounded or not, he’ll fight till the world ends, and then suddenly it really does.
It wasn’t a bang, just a kind of hiss and whizz, then the rockets blazed forward with such force the whole rack kicked and swung back at me, knocking the torch out of my hand. They didn’t all go straight either, the poles were curved and rockets going everywhere, we didn’t dare move from behind the rack. One smashed into the front man, hurling him back against the hedge then blowing up in his clothes, and I had to look away. The rest exploded round us, everything blanked out with sudden whiteness then the yellow of fire, a blue-grey choking smoke, and the familiar smell of gunpowder in my mouth, my nose, my lungs. I groped for the torch but the grass was burning round it, I snatched back my hand.
André pulled at my arm. ‘Leave it, come on!’