Down: Pinhole (30 page)

Rainald said he didn’t know but his worried expression gave no comfort.

In the large grassy bailey the king sat on a throne that had been carried outside. Frederick said something to one of his brawny lads sending him running inside. When he returned several minutes later, he was herding a half-dozen shackled men, naked to the waist and blinking in the daylight. When Emily asked what was happening, Rainald said he still didn’t know although Himmler sported a satisfied look that suggested he might.

Some other men appeared but they weren’t prisoners, they were workers straining to carry a heavy wooden frame from inside the palace. The rectangular contraption was shaped like a box without sides, closed only on one short end with a ratchet-like iron mechanism and an attached crank handle. When it was placed on the grass, Frederick called for Emily to choose three of the shackled men.

“Choose them for what?” she said.

“For my demonstration.”

“I won’t do any such thing,” she said.

“Very well then. Himmler, you choose.”

Himmler strode over to the dirty, wretched men and briskly tapped three shoulders. These men were led to the frame and made to stand inside, belly to back, their arms hanging over the upper cross beams. Their wrist and ankle irons were rechained, immobilizing them in the apparatus.

“I don’t like this, Rainald,” Emily said. “What is happening?”

“Honestly, I do not know. I have never seen this machine. Vice Chancellor, what is the meaning of this?”

Himmler smiled. “A little something I have been working on for the king’s amusement.”

Frederick gave an order to proceed and one of his young men fetched a steel-tipped spear that had notches running down the shaft. As he was inserting it point-first into the ratchet, Emily suddenly understood its purpose. She loudly protested but the king told her to be silent. She begged Rainald to put a halt to it.

“Sire,” Rainald said, “I question the wisdom of this enterprise.”

“How dare you!” Frederick bellowed. “If I order it, it is, as a matter of fact, wise. Get on with it, Hans.”

Hans, one of the quasi-twins, seated the spear and gave the handle a half-crank. It advanced a few inches. He looked to the king who raised a hand.

Emily screamed, “No!” but Hans began putting his shoulder to work, cranking the handle and advancing the spear. The prisoner closest to the point looked down and watched in horror as it indented his abdomen just above the navel. He tried to move away from it, pressing himself against the man to his rear, but there was only so much room within the frame. He let out a hideous scream when the spear pierced his body. Blood began to ooze around the buried shaft.

Emily turned away.

Frederick ordered her to watch but she refused so he had his other lad grab her and hold her tight. She struggled weakly against his grasp; the horror of the moment drained her strength. But he couldn’t keep her from closing her eyes. Hans kept turning the handle and the spear passed cleanly through the first man and entered the second. Now two men were screaming and the third man, though still unaffected began howling in anticipation, and the three baying men proved too much for Emily who fainted, suspended like a rag doll in the young man’s powerful arms.

Emily awoke to see JoJo hovering over her. She was back in her room on her bed and her head was pounding. She didn’t have a second of disorientation. She instantly remembered what she had seen and knew she had passed out. Her eyes stung with salty tears but they were tears of anger. JoJo asked what had happened and after drinking some cool water, Emily propped herself up and told her, her voice dripping with venom.

“This fucker sounds worse than Guise,” JoJo said when she was done. “We’re in big trouble.”

“Our only hope is Rainald. I don’t think he’s a bad sort, at least as bad as the others.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, love. No one helps anyone down here.”

“I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, thanks for getting me the good grub and all that, but face it, you’re different from everyone else here. You’re not an evil, dead bastard like the rest of us.”

“You may be dead, JoJo, but I don’t think you’re evil.”

“Tell that to the fools I murdered.”

Andreas unlocked the door and entered without knocking. He seemed happy that Emily was conscious and offered her wine. She declined, asked instead for a couple of Paracetamol for her headache, and laughed at his confusion.

“Not to worry, Andreas, but here’s what you can do for me. Tell Rainald I need to speak to him, would you?”

“You want him to come?”

“Yes, I want him to come to my room.”

He nodded and locked the door behind him.

It took an hour for Rainald to arrive and when he did, Emily saw he looked troubled. At first he was hesitant to speak in front of JoJo but Emily assured him she didn’t speak a word of German.

“This spectacle to which the king subjected you was despicable,” he said, pouring himself a cup of wine and slumping onto a chair. “Himmler feeds his depravity in a most unfortunate manner. The situation grows increasingly dangerous for me.”

“You’re the second most powerful man in Germania, aren’t you? I mean you’re the chancellor. Why don’t you just have Himmler locked up? For that matter, why don’t you topple the king? These kinds of things must go on, right?”

Rainald shook his head sadly. “This demonstration today of this impaling machine was not only intended to send a message to you. It was also a message for me that Himmler is the one he turns to for counsel. If I eliminated Himmler, the king would eliminate me, of this I am sure. He would probably have me put inside Himmler’s very machine. And I could never get close enough to do the king harm. His guards, Hans and Johann, have not left his side for a hundred years, not for one minute during day or night. While one sleeps, the other watches. I fear my fate is sealed. I will wind up in a state of perpetual pain and misery.”

Emily did something. The act arose from pure instinct, not from any connivance. As JoJo watched in fascination, she slid off the bed, went over to Rainald and disregarded his rancid smell to plant a gentle kiss on his cheek. The effect was immediate. He looked up at her, touched the spot she had kissed, and began to sob.

“For the first time in as long as I can remember, I do not know what to do,” he said. “I feel utterly powerless.”

“You’re wrong, Rainald,” she said. “You know exactly what you must do. You have to awaken the good within you. You may have done evil deeds during your life but I can tell that you must have done many more good ones. You have to do the good thing and the right thing now and help us escape.”

Andreas unlocked the chamber door and returned with the beaker of wine that Emily and JoJo had requested. It was night and the candles flickered in the air from the unshuttered window.

“Should I pour for you?” he asked.

Emily nodded and he filled two goblets but JoJo confused him by producing a third one.

“Who is having two wines?” he giggled.

“It’s for you,” Emily said. “We want you to join us in a drink.”

He looked around the room in a pantomime of looking for some mysterious third person then said, “Me? Andreas?”

“Yes, of course. JoJo and I figured that as we’re going to be here for quite some time that we ought to get to know you better.”

“I will drink with you,” Andreas said, dropping to the floor cross-legged. He reached for a goblet and drank all the wine in a series of gulps.

“I think he’d like some more,” JoJo said in French.

“Then more he shall have,” Emily said.

He started on his next drink and asked what they wanted to talk about.

Emily asked if he enjoyed his work at the castle.

He liked it well enough, he said, especially the women he tended. They were nicer to him than the men who made fun of him and kicked him to the ground when he passed.

How many women did he look after?

He spent a while mouthing names to himself and counting them out on his fingers. There were thirty.

What kind of work did he do when alive?

He’d been a manservant, which he found funny because he was now a woman’s servant.

He started to get up and Emily quickly asked JoJo for some more things to ask him.

“I don’t know. Ask him if he misses his balls?”

“I’m not going to ask him that.”

Halfway up, he sat back down again and yawned. “Andreas must go now. I must check on my other women. I will ask them why they never give me some of their wine.”

“There’s no rush,” Emily said in a soothing voice. “You seem very tired. Maybe you should stretch out and take a little nap.”

“I am very sleepy,” he said, reclining on the floorboards. “Maybe I will take a little nap.”

In seconds his snores filled the room. JoJo poked him with her foot and Emily tried to rouse him with a shoulder shake but he was out.

“Rainald’s powder worked,” Emily said, fishing underneath Andreas for the big iron key on his belt. “Come on.”

They took a single candle, locked the eunuch inside, and crept down the stairs. When they were outside they blew out the candle and hugged the shadows.

Drunken voices were coming toward them and they dove behind some barrels. The voices became louder and argumentative and they could tell a fight was brewing. Swords must have been drawn because there was a clanging of steel against steel. A gaggle of figures moved past them in a chaotic scrum and then a scream of pain rang out. More men came running and when the lot of them had gone past, Emily pulled up JoJo and the two of them dashed toward the main bailey where, to Emily’s horror, the three impaled men were still groaning inside the infernal frame.

A hand fell upon Emily’s shoulder. Startled, she chopped it away with a Krav Maga move and prepared to pivot into a kick when she realized it was Rainald, wearing the hooded cloak of a monk.

“All went well?” he asked.

“He’s sleeping like a baby,” Emily said.

“Perhaps he is as close to a baby as we may see in this godforsaken land.”

He beckoned the women to follow him to the stables where the ox cart Emily had seen that morning was standing, unhitched and piled high with empty sacks.

“Spend the night hidden here,” Rainald said. “At first light the driver will leave the castle for the south. Wait until he stops then flee. I can offer you no more than this. You will be on your own to deal with the dangers you will surely face. You will try to reach Brittania?”

“I’ll try,” Emily said.

“Then I will say God speed, Emily. Perhaps even here, you are still under the Lord’s protection. I do not know.”

“Will you be safe?” she asked.

“I do not know that either. The king will be in a fury.”

She leaned in and kissed him again and then JoJo approached and did the same.

“Thank you,” Emily said.

“It is I who should thank you,” he said, moved to tears. “You have cleansed what little is left of my soul.”

King Henry leaned against the railings of his galleon,
Brittania
, and peered at the craggy coastline that had just appeared through the mist. He had chosen the vessel as his new flagship following the presumptive sinking of
Hellfire.
Despite a thorough search for wreckage and survivors, not a trace of it was found. He had to conclude that she had been holed by the Iberians, condemning its sailors to a watery eternity. The loss of the Duke of Norfolk required the appointment of a new fleet commander. Henry Cameron, the Duke of Suffolk, was tapped for the role. However, the real loss was John Camp whom the king had intended to keep on a short leash. Camp had proven himself a valuable resource. The notion that Henry would have honored his promise to allow him to depart for Francia was laughable.

The flagship was cutting through a stiff wind and the treacherous Kattegat tides which set the vessel pitching and rolling. It was at the fore of the vast English fleet that now filled the Nordic sea with canvas. Henry’s stomach remained tranquil but Cromwell rushed to his side and dry-heaved over the rail. A reluctant seafarer under the best of conditions, Cromwell found the present circumstances quite intolerable.

“See how the men laugh at you?” Henry said, gesturing toward the sniggering deck hands.

Cromwell was as pale as the sails. “I begged Your Majesty to allow me to remain behind and tend to your affairs on dry land.”

“Never mind. You are here. If all goes well you will have much to do on dry land counting the gold in Christian’s vaults.”

“If there is any gold. My spies have always told me that an invasion of Norseland was pointless. King Christian has stayed on the throne as long as he has because his kingdom has never been worth the cost of conquest.”

“Until now. Until we learned about their iron.”

“So says John Camp. Who knows if he will be proved right?”

“Do you think he is really dead?” Henry asked.

“We have never before seen a live man here. Perhaps he can die, perhaps not, but surely he went down with the
Hellfire
.”

The galleon rolled violently and when a heavy wave crashed into the hull Cromwell grabbed the rail and barfed again. Suffolk, a navy man from the seventeenth century, approached from the helm, walking a line so straight one might have imagined the ship was stationary. It helped that he was short and stocky with a low center of gravity. Though he was immaculate in his brass-buttoned uniform, his white beard was flecked with red bits of the salted pork he had eaten for breakfast. He handed the king a spyglass and oriented him to a spot on the shore.

“You see there at the inlet? That is surely the mouth of the Göta älv.”

“Do we enter it?” Henry asked.

“I would advise against it. To protect Gothenburg, King Christian will have deployed cannon on both banks of the river. We might find ourselves in a crossfire.”

“Then we will have to find a good beach to land and assemble our army,” Henry said. “After we have taken their defensive positions we may move
Brittania
upriver and pound the city to submission with the one remaining singing cannon.”