Free The French Executioner by C.C. Humphreys Page A

block – well, from the stage anyway, while you pin that little
     worm of Satan against the wall and force him to give up the hand. Or, better still, maybe a fire, just a small one, around
     some bales nearby – nothing like a fire to get a town moving, of course, terrible things. I was in that great one that burnt
     down half of Basle. Yes, a fire to draw them away, your sword to His Eminence’s throat and—’
    ‘By the scrotal beard of Suleyman, will you shut up!’ roared Jean. ‘I need to rest. I cannot think for lack of sleep.’ He
     flipped onto his side. ‘What time did they call on volunteers for this job?’
    ‘Three bells, at the abattoir. The execution is at nine in the main square.’
    ‘Wake me at two bells, then. And, by the weeping Madonna, be silent,’ Jean said, and closed his eyes.
    The Fugger watched him for a while, twitching, scratching, his mind as agitated as his body. He couldn’t sleep, felt he’d
     been asleep for a thousand years; now there was so much he wanted to say, so many plans he had to share. He wanted above all
     to be useful, to belong to this noble quest, as more than a hindrance to be dragged around. He owed this barbering, barbarous
     headsman that much.
    Just then, one of the headsman’s eyes opened.
    ‘If you want to be useful, go and find out what happened to the dead executioner’s sword.’
    Not twenty paces from where Jean began to snore, another headsman was lying down, but this one had given up all hope of sleep,
     his mind too full of the images Angelique had brought back from the Bishop’s palace where she’d been one of the inhabitants
     of Sodom. He’d waited outside the palace all that rainy night to escort her home at dawn, and now he lay awake while she slept
     next to him, his arm growing stiff under her head, trying to conjure other images. Failing.
    A shout from the street below, an argument breaking out, curses, the sound of blows exchanged. Carefully withdrawing his arm,
     Haakon moved to the window, stooping to peer out into the murk. The source of the dispute was hidden, but enough light penetrated
     through the almost joined roofs of the houses to allow a distorted reflection to appear in the thick, grimy glass – the outline
     of a curling beard, of thick golden hair pulled back and held in a clasp at the neck. The angle of the head, the strength
     of nose, brow and forehead, all these reminded him, inevitably, of his father. For a tiny moment, if he closed his eyes he
     could almost hear him again, recounting the sagas of the heroes and the old gods Haakon had struggled so hard to memorise,
     sitting with his backto the legs of a huge oaken chair, his father’s rich voice resonating through the wood and on into the heart of a boy, words
     stored up against the day foretold when he also would speak them to his people, to his own son. The day that had never come.
    A groan from behind him, a little laugh. Haakon turned slightly and the reflection turned with him, his father disappearing
     to be replaced by a satyr, licking sugar from fleshy lips. A satyr, yet still himself, the man who now lived by the profits
     of the licked.
    ‘Odin’s blood,’ he whispered, and the act of whispering reminded him how he was no longer someone who spoke his truth out
     loud. Men were going to die in this town tonight for doing just that. Braver men than Haakon had become.
    He went into the second of the shabby rooms he shared with Angelique. There, in a nest made from a jumble of boxes, deep in
     some dream of hunt or battle, his hound, Fenrir, growled and shuddered the length of his grey-white body. His only true companion,
     they had been inseparable since the day Haakon had found the puppy, mewling and still blind, in a pillaged farm in Flanders
     five years before. He was bred of both wolves and their fleet-footed hunters but, like his master, he was getting fat in the
     idleness of town life.
    Haakon bent to scratch behind the large ears and Fenrir