Paradise for the Damned. - 22. Dark Bonds

Claude awoke to darkness. His body was resurrected to the myriad pains and aches, and most distressing of which, was the whirring shredding pain in the back of his head. The ground felt cold against his cheek, and the smells were disturbingly earthy.

He tried to move, but his knees and feet were bound, as were his hands tightly behind his back. All his wriggling and contorting to free himself succeeded only in making his wrists raw with pain.

He yelled, “Thou rascals!” but the echoes evaporated in the tight and oppressive dark. Had Antoine felt this desolate when the guards came upon him? When the church bells pealed the calls to prayer, Antoine must have prayed to the lesser god to curse him and his fair hair, damn him to die alone in a place such as this—Where was he?—The Devil saw fit to answer his anguished cries. Demons had always been a surer Hermes than angels ever were.

One truth was certain: Amaline was still missing.

A gorge of irreparable feelings caved in him and he was shivering and breathless and gnawed with pain. And it seemed as if Heaven itself had taken mercy on him when the sweet free days of his youth engulfed his senses, those raucous days of beggary when he had nary a concern for the grave. Why would he have been worried? Wives were pleased to exchange food scraps for sweet words. And tucked away among the niches on Le Rue de l’Empire, he had a hidden bed that tempted not the truculence of rogues. And the idea of bending over in the dark for money was execrable as was sucking a maiden’s teats. When melancholy might mean to mar him, he would pace the steps of the Palais de Justice and pray for the fair face of Simone de Gaillharde.

For certes Simone—Claude laughed to the point of feeling a bitter pain in his chest—even then as a youth with sparse hairs in his groin, he understood the levers of power that forbade a passing acquaintance between them or the seditious desire he felt upon beholding his tall proud form arrayed in the lawyer’s staid black. Something of rules and shame he understood but not enough to prevent his hurling himself onto the lawyer’s train and demanding to be employed as another of Simone’s liveried boy attendants, who carried his books and beadle. Simone, like any other son of a family newly-enthroned to nobility by legal prestidigitation, ignored him and let the guards take care of his sooty face and black teeth. But Claude knew well how to run, but not before cursing him a “rouged ragamuffin.”

Those were the days of boyish mischief and of Antoine. Although Claude was wont to be impartial in the face of distress, he had volunteered to help Antoine against the area bullies in vague hopes of coin. However, Antoine had neither coin nor bread but a free scolding on his slothful ways. But the idea of work was anathema to Claude. He recoiled Antoine toiling everyday from miserly master to miscreant master for the dear cause of dowries for his sisters. And that ugly she-cur of his mother had pushed Antoine into unspeakable services all in the name of family and bread for the wee-little ones. “Work was slavery,” Claude would bellow at Antoine. He would rather beg than be a slave to coin.

The cold and the dark pressed upon him and he shivered violently. He opened and closed his eyes repeatedly for a scare light to guide his mind to surcease. There was light, a great gleeful light around Antoine beaming red and pink before Cecile de Levaillant strutting amidst the lace and plumed impressions of her ambulatory train. Claude would snigger and jeer, “the sissy hath taken the roborant of love.”

No hope or love therein to be found likewise between Antoine and Cecile. She was high, he was low, and in the twain, none shall meet. Rumors also blared obnoxious and giddy about betrothal between the house of Levaillant and the house of Gaillharde. But hope was hope in their cistern of squalor. Antoine longed for Cecile’s rouged cheeks; Claude longed for the Simone’s silvered countenance.

Hope was the spectre of the impossible, was warmth when your toes curled in the snow, was the bread to pair your thin gruel. Hope was the meaning in a life bereft of glad tidings. It would be sinful to question the boundaries of hope and wish for more, even more sacrilegious to dare to attain for something more than hope. But Claude was different, the intrepid gamin trampling across the flagstones to interrupt Simone talking to Catherine in the open street. He swelled his chest, smoothed down his lice-ridden hair and boomed a soliloquy to Cecile about the superior character of Antoine, the man of superior virtue and humors, and a superior member as he could attest from the many unmentionable liaisons.

Claude was about to suggest that Cecile judge Antoine for herself over a hearty supper perhaps, when Simone bellowed for the guards to tie him and drown him in the Garonne. Claude excused himself from the fair lady and demanded especially of Simon, “Guards do your fighting. Christ’s wounds, they do your bedding too.” Simone, ears tipped crimson, blundered towards him, perhaps to better comprehend the gall of a tattered vagrant, and Claude took the liberty of the first blow across his bearded jaw.

Claude fleered into the dark. Even as he peered down the murky, misty valleys of memory, that day and its sky thick with grimy clouds was saturated with color. He remembered the weight of that blow steeling his hand, his fist balling with heat, the many eyes damning him, praising him, cajoling him to give another. That punch, his first attack against the world, his first ascent to the dais of Demiurges, then again it was his first unrecoverable mistake. The iron shine of morions surrounded him, and Simone’s cracked eyes were glowering. Claude knew well to flee, not gloat. Over the cackles, sneers, the bellows of the guards chasing, his hair was lifted in the fierce breeze. He was free, free as the wind soughing amidst the strong oak’s leaves.

A week later Claude, prideful, lustful, made a turn into one of the many secluded passages and happened the same guards, swords and daggers around, doming over a kneeling Antoine. From several feet away he could see Antoine’s eyes glassy and lifeless, spiraling away into the steel reflections of his ruin.

Claude was running away again. Then he was free, free and tremulously jubilant, outside the ramparts of Toulouse, and on the road to Bordeaux. Duty, loyalty, courage would find him another day, another week, but not before Antoine was beaten and tortured for three weeks and dumped in the Garonne. The torture had been necessary, for the house of Gaillarde were convinced that a certain son of the rivaling house of Bonfils had procured his dark services.

The room was cold and dark and still again in the dying throes of Claude’s laughter. Squealing from somewhere juddered Claude—something uncouth breathed in the maleficent yonder. A rotten smell thickened in his nose; the scent clung to his face, his clothes, to the dark and the damp. Suddenly within a ken of despair, he saw Antoine’s face wizened and peeling with maggots. A wide terror funneled down his tight throat and he pounded his head hard against the hard wall. And when pain ceased to hide and dull, he writhed, twisted against his bonds, but the rope cutting into his flesh, his ankles rubbing raw against each other …. Pain eddied through his skull, and the squealing would not stop. Something warm and sticky dripped down his temples, and his palms stung as the patches of skin had been stripped. And the dark quivered in his eyes, in deepest corners of his soul, and then as if a gentle rain from heaven, a name settled on his lips: Guy. The man had promised to be there in his last. Where was the imp now when he needed him the most? Claude wept.

***

Amidst of heavy waves, he made out a low noise crunching closer. His heart seized with hope and fury.

“Untie me, you dogs,” he yelled.

“Claude, is that you?”

Claude roused. His face burned and his belly constricted in hunger, and his head … what terrible waves moved within it.

“It does smell like you.”

Was that Jean-Baptiste’s voice he heard? Claude held his breath but pain rang. Would blood drinkers take him as well?

“What brings you hither?” Claude asked, a tightness in his throat.

“Business about your tutor brings me.” The door shook, but it did not open. “Open the door.”

How now should he answer? Be open and show he was free to eat? Or be crafty and risk the wrath of a blood drinker?

“What of Guy?” Claude said, apprehensive.

“He’s been hunted. You shall be caught in it if you remain here.”

That decided it. Claude shouted, “Break down the door and get me out of here.”

The door was broken with ease, too much ease. And there was Jean-Baptiste, hooded, very undead under the half-silvered moon. The thought he had been locked up in granary maddened Claude, but feelings petered upon the sight of the painful twisted look on Jean-Baptiste’s face. Without word or feeling, he untied Claude, careful not to touch his bloodied face. The man did well in hiding his thirst, Claude thought as Jean-Baptiste helped him walk across the fields and meadow back to his ransacked cottage.

“I had feared hunters had come already …” Jean-Baptiste said.

His ropes of sausages, his legs of ham, his flagons of good wine, the larder had been emptied, bowls and flasks, coin, clothes, bedding stripped. At least his books and ink had been spared. Claude shriveled on himself and wanted to curse Guy to hell. The villagers must have been reasonably assured he would be not be returning, and that realization pummeled Claude, not with a feeling of gratitude but of his piddling existence.

Claude waddled about the inner chamber, fraying in half-finished thoughts whether to light a fire or to scrounge up the necessities to clean up or take the chance and run.

“Where wouldst thou go?” Jean-Baptiste shadowed the doorway.

“How is it of your concern?” Claude growled. The pain in his head reminded him not to irritate a man fascinated with his blood.

“I like you alive, practicing those lunges. It would be sad indeed if you fall because your tutor’s peculiar circumstances.” Jean-Baptiste walked away.

Claude chuckled, followed after him in a mutiny of sentiment. “What hath he done?”

“Guy, he has … he has angered the ancients one too many times.”

“He’s an imp. ” Claude said too easily, suppressing a bead of concern for his tutor.

“You should not be so cheery. The ancients have dispatched prime hounds to apprehend him. No one flees from them. No one flees from Segui Altaid.”

The name failed to make Claude to mirror Jean-Baptiste’s tense stare into the black sky out the window.

“Guy claims to be God.” Claude mused brightly now for fire, now that it seemed company would be long.

“Christmastide was the season for brawn. Your tutor ran a mayhem through Bordeaux. They say he shut the doors to a great hall whereof housed the personages of our kind, including Edjya. And he set it on fire. And he ran a ten-men duel through the streets. A bosom-heaving spectacle of decapitated heads and snatched hearts I hear.”

“By the Virgin!”

The horror of it, the blood washed spectacle of it, Claude painted the cruel red of it over the black hearth. And to think he had called upon him name for salvation—He ruminated upon his scabbed, stinging hands and could neither rise a yawn nor a sigh.

“Verily, he is a man astray.” Jean-Baptiste smoothed the hood back and stared vacuously at the door. “You cannot stay here.”

Claude laughed. “Senher, did Guy tell you about our pact? My life is ever in danger.”

“But I hear Sabrine told hunters you were his bed slave.”

There was a shudder in the dark, a sparkle of malformed curses. “The wench is yet alive?”

“She shouldn’t be?”

“God’s teeth, I’m no bed slave to the imp.” There was no movement in him that Claude could construe as sympathetic agreement. He skidded to gloom. “To Betrada I must to find sanctuary.”

“Perhaps a good idea. She is in Toulouse now.”

The serendipity of Betrada’s present location could be the greatest of fortunes or the sign of his eventual downfall. More so, these wretched hunters might not know what he looked like, but Sabrine certainly did, surely knew what he smelled like. The question seized him: what had Guy done to Sabrine that night? Claude offered shivers and wide-eyed stares to the gods of the dark. Thoughts whirred round and round of Sabrine mad with blood and fury, of Guy and his face glowing with glyphs of sorcery, and of Amaline somewhere in the vagrant plains, probably ravished and ravaged. But quivering in there amongst wild images of his undoing, was the thankful sense that whether in ruin or in triumph, he would, at last, be granted a measure of rest.