Michael Jecks - The King of Thieves

Paris, near the River Seine

Vital shrugged his cloak around his shoulders. Here in the alleyway, no sun could reach them, and it felt as though they were living in a perpetual chill.

‘I hope he’s not just testing our cupidity.’

‘More likely he is looking to see how to get himself out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d thought we’d bring him along without chains, and he’d try to run for it,’ Pons said.

Vital gave him a sidelong look. His companion was dressed all in shabby brown, like a worker along the shores. It was only the sword which made him stand out, and that was mostly hidden under his cloak.

‘Bring him up here!’ Pons suddenly barked behind him.

There was a small force of five-and-twenty men, all armed with good polearms and long knives, all picked carefully for the task ahead. In their midst was Le Boeuf, and now he was manhandled up to meet Pons and Vital. ‘These chains, can’t you-’

‘No,’ Pons said. ‘If this is the genuine place, and your work brings this matter to an end, then I personally will release you. If there’s nothing there, you will go back to the cell, and I will tell all that you tried to sell me the King, but failed.’

‘But they’d flay me, if they thought I’d done that!’

‘Then you had best hope that he is in there and that we capture him, eh?’

Le Boeuf stared at him with his one good eye, and then peered over his shoulder. ‘It’s that one, the third door, the one that looks like it’s only got one hinge. That’s where he lives.’

‘Good,’ Pons said, and issued his instructions quickly. The men separated, with one smaller force of eight running off to the rear of the building, at the river’s edge. Meanwhile, Pons and Vital waited, watching and muttering, Pons counting to four thousand, which was the amount of time the second force would need to get into position.

‘Time’s up,’ he announced quietly. ‘Good luck, boys — good luck, Vital. Mind your nice cloak, eh?’

‘You mind your moustaches, old friend,’ Vital murmured, and then the two gripped their scabbards in their left fists and ran lightly over the road.

There was no sign of life inside. Pons leaned down to peer in through a gap in the timbers of the door, but could see nothing. No lights, no people, just a mess of broken planks and refuse of all kinds. A rat scurried, suddenly alarmed.

Pons looked over, and Vital shrugged. ‘Doesn’t look very lived in, eh?’ and then he beckoned.

The men rushed over the road and ran at the door. There was a loud crack and splintering as the door gave way, and then they were all inside, pelting up the narrow corridor, up some rickety stairs, men fanning out in all directions, shouting and screaming at the tops of their voices, slamming weapons against closed doors, thundering about up in chambers overhead.

Vital looked down at his feet. ‘I think he was wrong about this place, don’t you?’

Pons was about to respond, when there came a shout from outside, at the rear of the building.

‘There’s a body here!’

The King swore and slammed a fist into his cupped hand. ‘Who betrayed us? Who dared to tell the officers about us, about our home?’

Amélie was still curled on the bed of furs, and now she stretched, lithe as a cat, curling her fingers over, and staring along the length of her arms and hands with satisfaction. ‘Perhaps it was the poor assassin you tried to double-cross? Or one of your men who deserves more money than you paid?’

‘Shut up whore! If I need the advice of a bitch like you, I’ll ask for it,’ the King spat. He returned to the window out over the Seine, watching as the men floundered through the thick river ooze to the figure which still lay out nearer the water.

‘It is the dry summer this year. Apart from the rains in the last couple of weeks, it’s been dry,’ his clerk said nervously.

The King made no comment, but stared silently at the work outside. ‘They should have carried him further out,’ he hissed. ‘The river was dropping already when they put the men out there.’

‘We didn’t know,’ said Peter the peasant. He wasn’t going to whine. He’d done all he could, sliding down the rope to kill that man on the flats to stop the officers being called.

‘You didn’t know ?’

‘It wasn’t our fault if the bastard didn’t get washed away like all the other refuse from the city. Anyway, a man found out there could have come from anywhere. Didn’t have to have been thrown from here.’

‘There is much which is interesting about this. First is the stupidity of a man like you leaving a corpse out there for anyone to find. Then there’s the way you left it there for three days so the officers could come and find it. But worst of all, there’s the incredible dimness of a man like you who can’t see that these fellows were told where to go. They walked right in through the house we used to deposit the bodies in, didn’t they?’

Peter shrugged. ‘It was the nearest house to the body. Where else would they have gone?’

The King nodded and then, in a fluid movement, he turned, drew his knife and slashed it across Peter’s face. It left a fine red line that began at Peter’s right cheekbone, missed the hollow near his nose, then marked over the nose, to the left cheek, running right across it almost to the man’s ear. The line remained until Peter’s mouth opened in a shocked bawl, and then a fine spray burst from it.

Peter’s hands came up to his face, and his eyes stared down in horror at them as they were bedewed with his blood. He drew a breath to cry out, but by then the King had reversed his blade. His hand snaked out and gripped Peter’s neck, suddenly pulling his sergeant towards him. The sobbing man had no time to scream before the knife stabbed upwards three times, two to the lungs, the last to the heart. He was dead even as his body slumped on the blade.

‘Take that tub of lard away. I don’t want to see his face again,’ the King said with cold dispassion. He wiped his knife on his sleeve, unheeding, as two of his men pulled the twitching form out of the room. ‘We move from here tonight. We’ll go to the rooms near Saint Jacques.’

Amélie pouted. ‘But I don’t like it there. It stinks of dead animals all the time.’

‘You will get used to it or you’ll die,’ the King said matter-of-factly. He felt his broken teeth with his tongue.

This was the result of being slack. He had been enjoying his life too much. There were times to take leisure, but not when a man dared to defy you. The fool Jacquot had killed his men and brought this on to him, and he wouldn’t take it. Whether or not Jacquot had sent the men over there to try to catch the King and his men, he didn’t know. Probably not, because Jacquot would have directed them to this, his main residence, not the other house. In the past the King had called that chamber his ‘courthouse’, because it was where he had his men go when they were accused of some misdemeanour. If they were said to be keeping too much of their whores’ money, if they were not declaring the full contents of a purse they’d stolen, if they ‘forgot’ to mention a gambling game that had paid well, they were taken to the courthouse so that their case could be heard. And then justice was administered according to the King’s whim. Sometimes the accused was confirmed as guilty, sometimes the accuser was declared to be at fault, and more often than not, the two were forced to fight to the death to determine the outcome.

The advantage of the courthouse was that it was far enough away from any freeman’s habitation. Those who lived down here at the side of the river were the poorest and meanest. They would not go to the Sergent to report a murder or screams. And that meant that his courts could be held in safety, and that the bodies afterwards could be usefully slipped into the Seine, to be taken downriver, far away from the place of their death.