Mary Gentle (8 page)
Authors: A Sundial in a Grave-1610
A man does not wisely trust the ostlers of poor inns, so I went out after the meagre meal to check if the Andalusian jennet and the roan had eaten any better. The horse-bread was of reasonable quality. I dismissed the ostler, tacking up both horses myself, and then stopped, resting my arms against the saddle. The smell of oats, straw, horse-manure, and human sweat brought back the Paris stable with such immediacy that I was again physically embarrassed, and in mental torment.
Leaving aside what he may guess of Henri, of the Queen—
how can I risk traveling with the boy?
He may tell any man, at any time, what happened to me when he defeated me with the sword. He may desire to prove he can do it again. I will be wiser to solve this with my rapier, today. Good as he is, I am still better.
I heard, in my mind, what I had tried vehemently not to hear him say in Paris:
You know I can make you kneel to me, don’t you?
I snatched my hand away from absently fondling the crotch of my breeches. A man may have a piss-proud erection of a morning, I thought.
It means nothing
.
I sighed. A man does not get to my age without knowing when he hides something from himself.
It is merely an obsession,
I told myself firmly. The turn of a woman’s head has done as much before now. The shape of a smooth thigh as some noble lady raises her petticoats to tie her garter. And then the pursuit, the chase, the capture—and the obsession done, gone, and over with. This is no more than that. In a month I will wonder what it was that moved me.
Before the week’s end, I will have killed him to stop him falling into the Queen Regent’s path.
We saddled up and rode towards the north gate of that town, and I caught a glimpse of a profile beyond the crowd of men going to early Mass. He had worn a grey cloak in Poissy; now he wore a green one. He was walking towards the north part of the town.
Wordless, I turned the Andalusian’s head and rode west.
The boy had a chance before the close of day to see how adventures in the May sunshine end. The vast sky clouded up, darkened, and rain began to plummet. By the time we came to Ivry—where my master once fought a battle, and much further west than I had ever planned to come—water streamed off my Spanish traveling cloak. M. Dariole reached up, adjusting his hat-brim so that it shot the rain onto his shoulders and not down his collar.
His high riding boots and his breeches were water-darkened, his doublet hidden in the swathes of his short cloak, and the egret-feather on his hat hung down thin and pitiful, reduced to a white rat’s tail. Water dripped off the chape of his rapier. For all that—and to my irritation—the grin that I caught between his cloak-collar and hat-brim was alive with excitement.
It happened that I knew a quiet inn by the river, which I had had occasion to use before when riding out towards Brittany; one with a tactful landlord. With the noise of the rain almost drowning out my words, I bargained with him for sleeping quarters in the hay-loft over the stables, the inn rooms being full of lawyers, a silversmith and his family, two priests, and several horse-traders; all on their way to Alençon, Mayenne, and Rennes. It did not put me in good humour to be housed so, but I did not have the money to bribe the man, not if I were to have enough to leave
I stamped back to the stable both to establish a pallet-space to sleep, and to wipe down the Andalusian jennet and the roan, if the ostler had, as I suspected, done a poor job.
Their breath was smoky in the rain-cold air as I walked down the long shed in which the inn housed its beasts.
The young man, Dariole, crouched with his back to me, with the contents of my saddlebags strewn on the ground.
“Son of a bitch!”
Vicious joy flooded through me. His weapons were on the floor, in their scabbards, some distance from his feet. Let no man say revenge is not a complete satisfaction. Before he could grab rapier or dagger, I took him by his doublet collar and slammed him face-forward up against the piled bales of straw at the end of the stables, so hard that he bounced. I kept a tight grip on the back of his neck. “What are you thieving from me!”
He laughed. My weight pressed him face-forward against the straw, and he laughed. Blind rage touched me; for a second all my muscles tensed to yank my dagger out of its scabbard and shove it up under his ribs. End it as I should.
“I’m soaking!” He laughed again, twisting his head back to look at me. “I wanted a spare pair of breeches, messire.”
“You wanted
what?
”
“Got ’em, too.”
Evidently this was some great joke to him. I kept my fist clenched in the sodden linen collar of his doublet, dragging his small ruff back against his throat, determined to wipe the smile off his face.
He pushed back against me.
He was half-dressed; I had barely noticed. The hem of his shirt hung down below his doublet-tabs and dangling untied points. He was clutching the front of a pair of breeches up, but they had fallen down at the back, and what pressed against me were his naked hot buttocks.
In the way that one notices minor things, I noticed that the breeches he had been pointing to his doublet were indeed mine—a sober, charcoal-wool pair of trunk-hose, ridiculously over-large on his skinny frame. The waist-band hung down and cut under the curve of his arse, just at the tops of his thighs. White breath steamed from between his lips as he laughed—laughed at
me
.
Pressed against him from shoulder to thigh as I was now, there was no hiding it.
Involuntarily, I groaned.
“What’s the matter, messire?” His voice was thick with laughter. “I didn’t know you cared….”
My other fist clenched, within an instant of crushing the bones of his face. For a moment I wanted that so badly I could
see
it: his nose flattened sideways, cheekbone bloody, spitting out broken teeth.
“No,” I said, barely intelligibly.
There is a better way
.
I grew up with Henri III’s court, and his catamite young men. When rough bullying among the younger boys at times got out of hand, the older youths would assert their dominance physically.
“What would be a better way to teach you a lesson?” I said, and pushed him face-down over a lower straw-bale, bending him forward. With my free hand I wrenched open the front of my breeches and drawers. My prick stood up hard between the two of us, throbbing between flesh and flesh; a desire for absolute and fitting revenge drove me.
“Can you feel that?” I snarled in his ear, letting all my weight crush him down, as it had done at Zaton’s. “Can you feel my prick between your fat little bum-cheeks,
boy?
”
In a cracking adolescent voice, he snapped, “I’m not a boy!”
“Tell me that when you need to shave more than twice a week!” I grabbed one of his wrists in each hand, and pinned him down. He tried to push back and wrench himself free.
“You are old enough to fight duels and kill men. And you are old enough to pay for letting a man live when you should have killed him!”
I freed one hand, spat into it, and dropped it down to wet the length of my prick.
He shoved, slippery and muscular as an eel, and wrenched his hand free. I leaned my head back to avoid being clawed in the eye—glanced down, and saw his fingers vanish into the fork of my breeches.
In the next second, his dead-cold fingers cupped my sac, and he held my balls in the palm of his hand.
I froze. I thought I might weep. Despair, desperation, and fury went through me. I felt him wrench his other wrist free of my grip. I had a second to think,
Oh dear God, what is he doing to me!,
and to anticipate the searing pain of his crushing and twisting my testicles.
My prick stood up full and stiff, bobbing ridiculously against his smooth buttocks.
He cocked his legs slightly apart, reached behind himself with his other hand, and pushed the head of my prick up against the bud of his anus.
I groaned, lost in a tide of physical feeling that drowned all thought. It must hurt him, to have my ungreased wet prick thrusting at his arse—but there was the pop of his muscle-ring opening, and I froze, the head of my prick inside him, on the brink of spending.
He took hold of my wrists. One of his hands grasped each. I have the hard, broad wrists of a duelist: I could have pulled free. I only stood, I suppose with my mouth hanging loose and my eyes goggling. His fingers dug into my wrist-bone and muscle, as if to signify that it was he who held me. I heard him chuckle, and he twisted his head to look over his shoulder and grin at me.
He worked his hips twice, pumping at the head of my prick, and I incontinently spent my seed into him, with no volition of my own.
The thunders of the little death flooded my body. It was so sudden, so devastating, that I did nothing, said nothing. I only stood, lost.
He turned around, his head no higher than my collar-bone, laughing up at me. His hands were on me again. I felt him take my wet prick in his hands, tuck it back uncomfortably into my drawers, and—without fumbling, his hands not shaking—fasten up the front of my breeches. That done, he gave me a not-quite-contemptuous pat on the front of my trunk-hose.
It was the more humiliating because, if I could have spent twice in a few minutes, that gesture of his would have provoked it.
“
What have you done to me?
” I said blankly.
I could have forgiven myself a passion for a pretty boy; that obsession is far from unknown even in the court of Henri of
“You’re not even
pretty!
” I groaned.
He snorted with laughter and reached behind himself, threading and tying the points that attached my spare breeches to his doublet. He bent to pick up a belt and buckle that on, in some attempt to make the over-large garment not flap around his thin waist.
“I
had
you!” I protested wildly. “You took the woman’s part! How is it that—”
I broke off, humiliation choking me.
He shifted from one foot to the other, plainly amused. “I got a sore enough arse. But you’re right, Rochefort.
I
had
you
. And you know what?”
“What?” I demanded; and then, when he didn’t answer, but looked at me, suddenly serious,
“What?”
One corner of his mouth pulled up into a smile. “You never
expected
to get away with that one.”
It should be him, I thought, stunned, gazing at the young man. It ought to be Dariole on the verge of weeping: a grown man does not weep. It ought to be Dariole, wanting to fall to his knees in the straw; wanting to take out his pistol and blow his brains across the stable wall. Most of all it ought to be Dariole defeated, broken, in despair.
“After all, it’s not like I need a sword to put you down, is it? We both know
that
.” Dariole walked past me, leaving the stables, heading for the tap-room.
Sweat sprang out all down my spine and along my hairline: if someone
saw
us—!
I felt my flaccid prick momentarily react.
No.
Fear went through me. Not the fear that one feels in a duel, facing a sword-blade or pistol-ball. I watched Dariole walking away, and I felt a fear that loosened my knees—and, more disgracefully than anything else I could imagine, began also to stiffen my prick.
It did not last more than seconds—I have never been particularly able to repeat myself on the instant, although I have a remarkable stamina in some respects. But it happened. I could not, I realised frantically, deny it. It happened.
At the thought that he had beaten me, and at the thought that he might defeat me again in the future—at that, and the imagination of being again helpless before him, my prick stood up.
5
I
went outside.
The rain had stopped. I sat on the damp earth, wrapping myself in my heavy cloak, and leaned with my back against the wall of the stable. I watched my cold breath drift white on the air. For a long time I stared into the dark.
After an hour, I realised that even the sifting mist of drizzle had cleared. I looked up at the cold night sky. The stars turned overhead. The constellations of Spring: Gemini now in the ascendant.
That,
I thought bitterly,
is apt enough
. I am two men. One wishes to deal with this catastrophe that I have unwillingly provoked on the country: protect Sully, preserve myself; in due course stand witness against the Queen Regent, if I can make such an unlikely event into a possibility. And the other—oh, the other man.
He
can only think of his prick, and a brat. A youth not twenty, not
eighteen,
dear good God! Impudent, insolent, unconscionable brat.
Windows went dark in the houses around me, but not all of them. Men burning their cheap rush-lights or expensive candles to sit up late and debate what will happen to them now that
And I sit here debating my prick
.
I snorted quietly, shaking my head with disgust, and got up. The wet mist had soaked my hat and hair. Tangles of the latter hung wetly into my eyes. I wiped my face clear, trod quietly around the outside of the building, and looked in at the tap-room window.
M. Dariole sat on a settle close to the fire, face bright over the dice, playing two men at hazard.
I got one glimpse of him. The inn’s public room was remarkably full. Men in whose company he will drink, dice—and talk.
Yes, he is fool enough to spread rumours about the Queen Regent and murdered Henri. He’ll laugh, say
I know something you don’t know
—and there is Rochefort in custody, the Duc de Sully accused, the employees and clients of the Duc ruined: all because of one irresponsible young man. Does he even realise he will be in danger, too?
I can do nothing while there are witnesses. If I am taken and imprisoned, that will be as bad
.
Overhearing closer conversations, I guessed that the landlord had let out more than his stable for impromptu overnight accommodation. Here are men and women in service, or apprentices, or day-workers, all fleeing home from Rennes or Alençon to their families, because what will happen to us now? Will there be Papal troops in the streets, Hapsburg soldiers; will Henri’s own countrymen rebel against his wife? Will there be civil war again? Better to be home at such a time.
The cold wind stirred the streets of the town. I took a solitary turn towards the river, walking wrapped in my cloak and with my hand on my sword. No man disturbed or challenged me. I came back to the inn without a brawl or robbery—
And I would welcome it,
I thought; welcome just the chance to wipe out memory with action!
The young man still played at hazard, this time with a different group of men. There was no disturbance as I looked in at the door.
He has said nothing yet
.
He glanced across the room, and the corner of his mouth tugged up when he saw me, as if he found the act of smiling irresistible.
I did not demand you leave Paris with me! Dear God, if I had only had a chance before now to kill you!
I slammed back into the stables. He had made himself a pallet there. I thought of him imagining he might sleep beside a man armed with dagger, with pistol, with sword.
I went outside into the yard and sat down with my back to the stable wall, feet apart, arms resting on my knees. Between them, I held a pitch-lined jack of raw brandy from my saddlebags. It burned a fiery line down my throat. The heat of the spirit must be the excuse for the heat of my face.
I did not sleep.
Ten times I got up and walked into the stable, determined to saddle up the jennet and ride out of the town. Ten times I went back out.
The town gate is shut now, they will let no one through before dawn; not even a man with the Duc de Sully’s accreditation. Not at a time like this
.
The stable was empty apart from men’s horses. There was no sign of Dariole. I went back to look through the tap-room window, moving clumsily with the advancing night’s cold in my muscles.
He lay wrapped in his half-dried cloak on the settle, talking cheerfully to other men as they spread out blankets, evidently preparing to sleep on the tap-room floor. The inn-keeper would not be poorer for this crisis. Dariole stretched out his booted feet towards the end of the settle and the dying fire.
He’s there because he knows I cannot kill him in front of a room full of people
.
Turning away from the dimly lit room, my eyes dazzled at the darkness. The clock struck midnight as I stumbled to the stables, and threw myself down to sit on a straw-bale beside the Andalusian jennet. I drew my dagger and turned it about and about in my hands, staring at it.
The hilt-work was black, both ribbon-flat guard and pommel; the grip was bound in braided wire. In a man’s gloved hand, that grip does not slip. And the wide polished blade, made of quarter-inch stock and as long as the space from a man’s wrist to his elbow, had an edge silvered with sharpening: I had sharpened it the morning before I stepped out of my lodgings on the way to kill Henri IV.
I should settle this simply, I thought. As soon as he leaves the inn. This dagger in under his ribs and up, straight into the heart:
that
will solve this problem.
Death is a casual thing. I have killed men in duels, when I did not choose to let them live. Marie de Medici has chosen to kill me, to give the order:
Rochefort knows things that he should not, make sure he does not live to tell any other man
. I will be in no great quandary, killing M. Dariole.
The cobwebbed darkness of the stables felt oppressive. I sprang up, disturbing the jennet. He scraped at the ground with his fore-hoof, then turned his small head on his great arched neck and lipped at my arm. I yanked a wisp or two of hay from the manger and fed it to him, then wound the folds of my cloak tighter about my body and went outside into the yard.
The sudden jolt of men shouting made me drop the folds of cloth and have my sword out in my hand in a second.
No—it is outside, in the street
. I heard a rasp of edge on edge, running footsteps, an authoritarian shout, a shrieking sob, and then a mutter of voices and orders that went on for ten minutes or so. The town’s watchmen clearing up a brawl.
The hilt of the rapier comforted my hand. I made a couple of expert passes in the darkness of the stable yard, hearing the edge cut the chill air; then re-sheathed the blade. Faint starlight glimmered on the horse trough. I walked over, stripping my gloves off, and cupped freezing water to splash on my face. The shock of it tingled along my nerves.
I can wash nothing away
.
The silence broke again, with the shriek of a baby being eviscerated.
Hot sweat ran down my spine, although I identified the noise within in a second. The body and the mind are often thus distinct.
A vixen,
I realised. Calling in the May night because she wants to mate.
At least she is a she!
The love of the Greeks has sophisticated Classical precedent; the Bible forbids it; either way, it has never been a great passion of mine. I have not been prone to young men since I grew past the age of twenty or so, dividing my liaisons since then between three-livre whores and the wives of complaisant friends.
And yet here I am, and here is the boy, and I desire him—here is the witchcraft of it. How can I desire him when he disgraces me! How can I desire disgrace? Can he have robbed me of manhood, of courage, of myself?
The inn-keeper appeared in the door to the yard, his face hidden by the light of the lantern he carried. His voice sounded worried. “Monsieur, if I can get you anything?”
“You, out of my sight!” I snapped, and to my dishonour had my hand down on my sword like any ruffian bully in Les Halles. He shook his head at me, muttered something under his breath, and vanished back inside. I heard the clatter of the shutters going up on the upstairs windows.
Two paces took me to the tap-room window again. I took a last glance through the leaded glass. Dark lumps of men rolled in blankets dotted the floor, outlined by the fire that an inn-servant was damping down even as I watched. I heard voices as they chattered in the dark. What will happen to us now? Wars of religion, again? We have only been at peace ten years, after all. Invasion from beyond the border? Fire, floods, comets in the heavens; all these might be expected.
It was as if they gained support from their own proximity and the prattling of rumours, soothed like hens clucking in a hen-coop.
I could not see his face, but I recognised Dariole’s sleeping form—on his back, one foot off the end of the wooden settle, one arm dangling down, every muscle carelessly relaxed. Deep in peaceful and untroubled sleep.
The shutters went up as I walked away, back to the stable yard. The inn sank into darkness, if not quiet. A swaying light shone in the street, dimly illuminating the overhanging upper storeys of the houses outside the inn yard. The watchmen going past with lanterns on poles, I realised. I doubt such keenness to attend to their duty existed before the fourteenth of May. Their footsteps died away on the damp cobble-stones. One guffawed loudly into the night.
I left off my glove, took my dagger out of the scabbard again, and felt the edge with the pad of my first finger. With a curse under my breath, I strode around the stable yard’s confines, the movement beating the cold painfully out of my feet. I lifted the weapon to hammer the pommel on the closed and barred door of the inn; lowered it again without using it.
If he does not come out tonight, there is tomorrow. But by then he may have spoken
.
I did not sleep.
The stars moved on from east to west, arcing over the earth. The more esoteric court gossip this year had been news from
I will kill him. That will be the simple end to this. He cannot expect to treat men as if they are toys, for his delight
.
The leather jack was not yet drained of brandy. I sat again, took off my hat, and leaned my head back against the brick wall of the stables. Narrow Roman bricks, barely visible in starlight, taken from some proconsul’s villa a millennium and a half ago; now they serve to keep in horses. The wall was cold against my hair and scalp. I put the jack to my mouth, tilted it, and coughed as I swallowed the raw spirit.
I have seen no man here: that means nothing. All the while I persist in trying to get word back to Sully, there is a chance my messengers will be killed, my letters intercepted, my path followed. I may as well leave sign-posts behind me! And yet how can I not?
Bleakly amused, I thought:
I am, after all, Sully’s black dog
.
The Duc must be able to identify and remove the man whom Marie de Medici has in his house. Apart from that….
Even in cipher, I did not write that I knew who was responsible for Ravaillac’s actions. No name.
If I tell him that, and the Queen’s agent is not yet caught, the agent will be required immediately to kill him
.
I took another drink of the brandy, the night air cold on my heated face.
If I could but be in Paris!
And if I were? M. the Duc will hear me out, for as long as it takes me to name Ravaillac’s instigator. And then—then he will ask me the precise circumstances of Henri’s death. And I must say,
Monseigneur, to save your life I endangered the King’s, and matters so fell out that he died
….
A more personal shame, at the back of my mind, whispered,
I cannot go back to Paris with the memory of what Dariole did to me there
.
The flagstones breathed damp chill, and my cloak and the straw that I sat on barely kept me warm. I was reminded of nights on duty in the Low Countries, in the war against the Spanish there, when I was a much younger man.
Scandal dies, a man need not
. Where is Gabriel Santon to say that to me now? Even he, if he had been in the stable tonight, would have been hard put to tell me how I could outlive the humiliation that M. Dariole had inflicted on me.
“Perhaps I need not worry about outliving it,” I remarked aloud, comforted from the world by the brandy. Marie de Medici does not want me found alive and inconvenient. All the while I am merely missing, I am a finger of accusation pointed against the Duc de Sully. Discovered, I will be a witness against
her
. Therefore Maignan’s killer and her other men will have orders to leave M. Rochefort’s body under a light covering of earth in some backwater area of Normandy or Brittany.
Which is the grave I have always supposed I might come to—
but I will do my best to avoid it for many years yet
.
Or else they will produce my dead body, and let
that
mutely accuse the Duc de Sully—one of his agents unfortunately killed while in flight from the King’s murder.
