Toulouse. The bells called upon bells, toll upon toll, like a rotund of a thousand foundlings crying for succor. Pont St Julien yawned its gates to the tight stench of yesterday’s corpse and yesterday’s excrement. Still, to the trio’s eyes Toulouse was not the cauldron of rot downriver but the shiny city on the hill. This shiny city rocked with royal gossip. The Duke of Anjou was dead, the maid delivering fish said to the coifed crone. France has no proper Catholic heir to the throne, the maid said. Quel horreur! The Heretic of Navarre has claim to the throne by Salic law. The Heretic, another Henri, another name, another rustle of wind brushing past Claude’s peeling ears. He slugged past the maid, clutching his cloak, eyes dimming over the haze of sunset.

The three men stopped off at Picard’s inn. Claude had coin, Guy’s coin, but coin enough for a room. A great bustle unfolded of swinging braids, stretchers of bread bowls, ewers, boys still with high voices. It was not Aurin with its grey people and dull minds. The troubadour crooned, not about the Virgin, but of knights with swords the sizes of which men wished their manhoods to be, and of maidens holier that the Virgin. Claude winked at him, and the strums of the lute hiccupped in an apoplectic moment.

Merrily, Claude doffed his hat and sidled over to the corridor where stood Picard looking slimmer in an apron the shade of earth. Picard leered at Alphonse who was leering at a maid setting a flagon before a guest leering at the low cut of her kirtle. He switched back to Claude with a downcast gaze of disappointment. “Your beard … would repel even the sickly hags.”

Coins bounced in Claude’s hands as he chewed on choice insults for the innkeeper: the ill-shaped head that the Devil himself would envy or the face that would turn away the Whore of Babylon. He just sighed. “Your wife would be pleased with it.”

“And you may have her beastly rumps.” Picard pointed to Alphonse doing an impression of a rabbit to a serving girl. “She may not have him though.” Alphonse proceeded to poke happily the cheeks of the girl.

Claude sighed a round of gloom. Scabby hands and a sun-dried face darkened the masculine allure of Alphonse’s hard buttocks. “Propose him a trade, I shall enjoy his gelding you.”

“At my age, I am a poor man, but the poorer bits pleases you, eh?” Picard walked over to the counter, waving fingers here and there to the maids. “Where have you been? Clovis tires my ear about your absence.”

“Learning my letters.”

“What need you have for letters?”

“Guy said—” Claude fell dumb-stricken to the memory of Guy’s murderous eyes. The paradise of fucking and fighting, the men who would line up to kiss his member…. Claude wanted to kick himself for being so impressionable, so taken in with Guy’s mystique. And Serge and his long stares had since lost its sting—somewhere in the trek from Aurin to Toulouse. He was a new man, no regrets over Serge and no shackles from Guy. With this new spirit of self-discovery and adventure, Claude leaned on the counter and donned the look of a coquettish little thing.

“Turn your witchery to the runnions,” Picard growled.

Claude batted more eyelashes.

Picard looked away from him and vomited more curses. “You and your friends may have a room for one night.” He emphasized, “And no shameful romps.”

“St Sernin bless you!”

Picard scowled a missive of disgust.

Alphonse and Leo tugged on Claude’s elbow and grunted their impatience for carousing. Claude shooed them off and went upstairs to his room to rest. Darkness stretched in the hours of his thoughts of plans and counterplans. He was finished with Guy. Done, done, done. Still Guy’s eyes… the weight of earth-hammer crushing his chest. His body broke into a convulsion of whooping pants. Claude swept himself off the bed and back downstairs.

One friend begat more friends, more inquisitors really, doming over Claude and demanding private explanations on his peasant look. The beard that packed more fleas than a whore’s fig. The hair that Delilah herself could not comb, much less cut. At least his eyes (Praise the Black Virgin) were still as blue as sky. Then Esteban walked in from the cooler outside and arrayed himself in a lonesome majestic corner among the pilgrims stamping their walking sticks. Within a glance of the man in a blue doublet and a pointed beard, stars burst in Claude’s hose, and coolly he tossed his attentions back to the woman who was not quite believing that he could write his name.

Esteban came forward and squeezed himself beside Claude on his bench. “Clovis wondered where you were.”

“And you were blissfully blind when the sun fell away.” Claude poured stiffly himself wine.

Esteban inclined his head towards him. “Blind, but now I see.” He took over Claude’s cup then forwarded him some coins. “For the wine.”

“I could use a month’s worth of wine.”

Claude gave a moment’s thought to Guy and his proscriptions—the rogue—and then shunted with Esteban out the door.

The moon was full and bright over the spire of St Nicholas and trailed a thin white line over the Garonne. The empty streets were theirs, the river was theirs, all of Toulouse would be theirs, and yet they had no bed. They wandered alleys and boulevards in prayer to Lady Fortuna for a chance castle. Outside the walls of the Cistercian monastery, Claude grabbed Esteban’s hand, swung him into a niche and thrust his tongue into his mouth. Amant, Amatis, Amat. Amour, Amor. And three months of need hardened against Esteban.

“Aurin was that unkind?” Esteban said.

Claude saw eyes with the brilliant red of a setting sun burning above Esteban’s head. Gall flooded away the copper taste of wine in his mouth. He blinked and spun away then pressed his face against the wall, waiting. Esteban molded his body over Claude’s. Surrendering to the heavy warmth on his back, he prayed, Pater Noster, Qui es in Caelis. Yes, Caelis, heaven could not descend fast enough.

***

The next day in Picard’s inn, Clovis insisted on sitting by Claude, partook of his wine, insisted he had forgiven him for kicking him in the groin, overlooked the money Claude supposedly owed him for the unsanctioned rendez-vous with Esteban, ran grubby fingers through his white patch of hair, insisted on knowing Claude’s whereabouts for the past three months, then took a heaping breath of finality. “I have a lord for you.”

Claude laughed helplessly at the gall of the miserly badger then laughed more affectedly when Alphonse and Leo swaggered towards him in the raiment of post-coital bravado and twice-patched doublets.

A military rhythm drumming from his fingers, Clovis furrowed over Alphonse and thought of all places he had failed to look for Claude. He then asked, “How’s wood carving?”

“Wood-carving?” Leo dropped into a seat. “Claude, you’re a student, methought?”

“A student?” Clovis’ patch of white hair bounced higher into the air.

“Oc, and a foppish tutor at that, I say,” Leo said.

Clovis nodded knowingly. The men continued on being repulsed by Claude’s effete diversions of Latin. Claude sipped wine, casting iron gazes of dispassion over men being boringly boys, until Alphonse asked for the third time where he had been last night. He stamped his hands on the table. The men shuddered to silence. Claude smiled, proud of his commanding heft. “Clovis, shall we to this lord?”

Five

Claude waited in one of the many secret rooms of the Archbishop’s residence located by the Cathedrale St Etienne. He had been scrubbed, shaved, oiled, powdered to resemble a poor Hyacinth by a retinue of green-liveried servants. Opulence marked the room with a dizzying geometry of interlocking triangles on the tiled walls. The rug was patterned with the motif of the three hares. An arrangement of damask-cushioned chairs and a lacquered table stood by the window framing the black sky. The bed was bigger than his bed with richer tassels, velvet drapes, and brightly colored reliefs on headboards.

Claude plopped himself on the bed; his scrubbed skin rejected its feathered softness. He felt Guy hovering at his side with green eyes slanted in mischief, laughing at him, taunting him to bare himself. Startled, he sprang out of bed and helped himself to the wine on the table. Bitter notes, gritted with sourness, glided down his mouth, and he relished thinking Guy was nothing but an impish mountebank. Where was this paradise promised by him? By the graces of his arse, he was now in the finest estates of Toulouse. The bastard letters had nothing to do with this good fortune.

The room took a more vivid glimmer now and popped richer colors through the sheen of the dull yellow cast by the candlelight. Claude imagined with gusto the length and girth of the lord’s erection or what sort of face the lord would be cast in the molten bronze of pleasure.

Then the double doors flung open to a corpulent man in a black robe. Claude swallowed wine in a greasy moment. Blotched skin buried his jaws. There seemed to be no defined neck, fat and loose skin draped over all. Yet the face held to the angular features of a man with great authority.

“A haggish, bony Hyacinth?” The man turned importunately back to the door as if from a black-toothed soiled wench.

Claude called out, “You know why Dionysus was so in love with wine.” He took a draught of wine, the taste was lacking unlike Picard’s wine. “He lamented his dearly beloved youth Ampelos. The gods were so moved by the sadness that Ampelos' corpse turned into the grape vine. He traded his coronet of snakes for the coronet of grape leaves. Dionysus drank the first fruits of that lovely vine.” He strutted up to the man. “And he was…”

The man flowered red at the crest of his ears, redder on the nose. He glanced down and stared back at Claude biting his lip.

“Kneel.”

Claude hesitated. If Guy asked him to kneel, he would not do it, now the old lord was commanding it. He exhaled away his contradictions and obeyed. The curtain of the black robe opened to a wormy looking penis. Then a fountain of salty gold plumed over Claude’s face.

Claude accepted the rain with a smile. He would be paid a good sum.

***

“What would it take to be in the permanent employ of Joyeuse?” Claude asked the attendant counting him coins with grave eyes.

“Be the Senher’s catamite, or shall I give you to the others?”

“A servant?”

“What would the house of Joyeuse want with a catamite in their employ?”

Claude stiffened, and curses on the bastard servant remained in his mouth. “So I would be his catamite?” he asked hopefully.

“You do not please his eye.”

“His pebble cock was glad and hard inside my arse.”

The attendant raised a soiled face, tossed the purse on the table, then showed him the way out.

It was morning again, and Toulouse was remembering its roar. The rose heights of buildings towered into the white plane of sky. From across the street a shopkeeper and her ducklings of children arranged tables of fruits outside her stall.

“It is true as they say then, noblemen are so rich in their vigor that they keep alive all night?” Clovis intruded on Claude’s calm. His eyes measured Claude, up, down, right, left. “The patron gave me a livre. How much did he give you?”

“I counted not.”

“I’ll count it for you.” Clovis leered in too close to Claude. Claude moved back and counted his money.

“Hmm, four livres, a good purse.” He tucked the money away just as Clovis tried to take it.

Clovis could not decide between a smile or scowl. “See you thin and dry. Aurin must have been terrible. Swine-fuckers, bad wine, twiggy women with leaking breasts. And the tutor … Alphonse told me what a gallant he is.”

Claude glared at the porter passing by him, thinking quite dreadfully that Guy may have seduced Alphonse before him. Not this tutor who proclaimed his cock was virgin to shit arses. Then again the rogue may have been lying. Claude’s lips twitched as he boiled over in irritation.

“Not like this spry nobleman, this Guy, yes? Too poor and sickly for you?” Clovis’ laughter was at first gentle and irregular in its rhythm then he broke into a roar. “Oh, teacher, thy pen dries of its ink too quickly, and I must to Toulouse.”

Claude scampered away as if his haste to could wipe off the mind imprint of Guy’s grin. Christ’s wounds. Not only did the aristocratic tallow face passed water on him, Claude sucked on the grimy toes, endured whacks to the head after the lord lost his erection too quickly. And Clovis was still at his side, this time brawling about curs and she-curs, tutors and pupils. Then Claude’s foot slid an inch out of his natural stride. Dog shit. “The whore She is!” Clovis’s laughter had a painful breadth to it now. Claude scuffed and kicked his boots against the ground. The Virgin’s nose. The Virgin’s toe.

“Claude,” Clovis said, long suffering and paternal, “Even learned you still are a giglet.” He nudged his arm. “Deo Gratias, the tutor was no good. I—we shall be ever filled in our purses.”

Shaking his fists happily, Clovis crossed the street. Sad-eyed asses trotted towards to serried columns of the Palais de Justice. Another wagon headed the other direction towards St George’s square. Claude counted nine men with flat-topped capotains. A crowd of black-cassocked canons rushed to the colonnade of the Archbishop’s residence, and he lost all feeling over the scenery. The bells of Cathedrale St Etienne struck for the third hour, and Claude remembered he was hungry, and stinking, and he must find work. The coins felt too light in his hands. Money would have drowned out shame before, but not now—too flimsy, not enough against self-loathing.

With hands folded hard across his chest, he scurried around the human pebbles still clinging to sleep on the sidewalks. He was but a hollow reed too useless to even sway in the winds of men. At Place St George the militant cheer of a peddler rushed over him a rascally desire to take an alley northward and visit Serge. The carpenter should be expecting a child now, if not, he was willing to light a thousand candles to the Black Virgin to bless the frigid sodomite with equally sodomite sons. But there was not enough glee in his mischievous musings to make him ignore the irascible reek of urine. And he trudged eastwards towards the Garonne, unable to discern the blue promise of a good day in the white sky.

The morning light sheeted the brown of the windows shutters, the black of the chimney rims, and the rose of bricks edifices, with its white, all-encompassing glare. With an idleness profane to the busy hours, Claude watched the goings of wagoners, of plump mothers with white headscarves, of the boys scrambling back and forth between howling masters. A walnut tree stood sentry over the battlefront of the morning. Sunlight splintered and shattered over its green crown, fracturing yellow, as in a frantic daze of desperate hope, down the glossy simple leaves. Claude found himself hating the warm sun and the noises of people certain of a fruitful day.

“Claude, where have you been?” A girlish voice asked from behind him.

Claude lurched and hurried to smile at Bearitz sniffing warily at the air. An auburn pigtail glanced over the blue sleeves attached with strings to her brown kirtle, and under her strong arm, she clasped a cloth-wrapped package.

“Senher Mirepoix called you all manner of names at his wedding.” Her hazel eyes waved studiously over Claude as if to confirm Serge’s insults.

Claude gritted his teeth, refrained from spewing his invective against hypocritical masters. “Never mind me. You are well? Those onion-eyed witches trouble you still?”

“Not now that Isarn has asked for my hand in marriage.” A red Bearitz looked over the creases in her brown petticoat. “Mama thinks well of him.”

“Deo Gratias,” Claude said, “a good match indeed.”

“You think truly?”

“He is well-liked and hardworking.”

“But do you think him good?”

A sudden fall of light whitened the side profile of her face, and her dirty silver irises looked like pellucid gels, which in turn imbued her with the varnished look of a languid angel. Truth was demanded by those roving eyes when evasion or trifling talk seemed the more honorable course of conversation. Claude had naught to say about the question of goodness. Isarn was esteemed of his peers and looked to inherit his father’s wood-joining business. There could be one complaint though, probably nothing of consequence to the gentle Bearitz. Perchance he should warn her of the poor-looking groin and question his ability to fulfill his duty on the marriage bed. Claude looked away from her strong eyes, barely unable to evade himself from the shame of thinking so basely before her. The shame hardened still then staked the remains of his dissolving spirit. Isarn was the definition of good. He was the pestilent, abysmal black.

“I must go,” she said heavily, “Come over later. I’ll let you have some of the good hippocras that Mama made yesterday.” She scarcely gave him time to assent or refuse before sailing away, as easily as her long, free-flowing skirts would allow, in the manner of a barge bucking in the calm waters of the Garonne.

Then something pulled on Claude’s doublet. It was a boy with wild brown hair and pebble nose, begging for money. Much too happily, Claude gave four denarii, a third of a sou. At the receipt of coin, the round face was swirling with myriad smiles then wrinkled and crinkled in a frown. A powerful stamp on Claude’s foot came the boy’s gratitude.

“Ow! Your future wife shall be an ugly sow.” Hopping on one foot, Claude cursed at the little boy already lost among the thick bough of adults. Curses dried, and he was left with the unrelenting, damning energy of the day.

Now again in this rough morning, time had cranked its gears; forward it trundled, and onward rolled the grand machinery of events of which he remained outside of its working, as he had been wallowing in the far off muddle of adolescent fancies, golden fountains, and turbid white drizzles. Verily, it had come time to put the childish things away.