Page 24
Story: The Worm in Every Heart
Le Famille Prend-de-grace, moving to block out the sun; a barren new planet, passing restless through a dark new sky. And their arms, taken at the same time—an axe argent et gules, over a carrion field, gules seulement.
A blood-stained weapon, suspended—with no visible means of support—above a field red with severed heads.
We could not have been more suited to each other, you and I. Could we—
—Citizen?
* * *
1793: Blood and filth, and the distant rumble of passing carts—the hot mist turns to sizzling rain, as new waves of stench eddy and shift around them. Dumouriez rounds the corner into the Row of the Armed Man, and La Hire and Jean-Guy exchange a telling glance: the plan of attack, as previously determined. La Hire will take the back way, past where the prostitute lurks, while Jean-Guy waits under a convenient awning—to keep his powder dry—until he hears their signal, using the time between to prime his pistol.
They give Dumouriez a few minutes’ lead, then rise as one.
* * *
Crimson-stained sweat, memories swarming like maggots in his brain. Yet more on the clan Prendegrace, a red-tinged stream of sinister trivia—
Their motto: Nous souvienz le tous. “We remember everything.”
Their hereditary post at court: Attendant on the king’s bedchamber, a function discontinued sometime during the reign of Henri de Navarre, for historically obscure reasons.
The rumour: That during the massacre of Saint Barthelme’s Night, one—usually unnamed—Prendegrace was observed pledging then-King Charles IX’s honor with a handful of Protestant flesh.
Prendegrace. “Those who have received God’s grace.”
Receive.
Or—is it—take God’s grace . . .
. . . for themselves?
Jean-Guy feels himself start to reel, and rams his fist against the apartment wall for support. Then feels it lurch and pulse in answer under his knuckles, as though his own hammering heart were buried beneath that yellowed plaster.
* * *
Pistol thrust beneath his coat’s lapel, Jean-Guy steps towards Dumouriez’s door—only to find his way blocked by a sudden influx of armed and shouting fellow Citizens. Yet another protest whipped up from general dissatisfaction and street-corner demagoguery, bound for nowhere in particular, less concerned with destruction than with noise and display; routine “patriotic” magic transforming empty space into chaos-bent rabble, with no legerdemain or invocation required.
Across the way, he spots La Hire crushed up against the candle-maker’s door, but makes sure to let his gaze slip by without a hint of recognition as the stinking human tide . . . none of them probably feeling particularly favorable, at this very moment, toward any representative of the Committee who—as they keep on chanting—have stole our blood to make their bread . . .
(a convenient bit of symbolic symmetry, that)
. . . sweeps him rapidly back past the whore, the garbage, the cafe, the Row itself, and out into the cobbled street beyond.
Jean-Guy feels his ankle turn as it meets the gutter; he stumbles, then rights himself. Calling out, above the crowd’s din—
“Citizens, I . . . ” No answer. Louder: “Listen, Citizens—I have no quarrel with you; I have business in there . . . ” And, louder still: “Citizens! Let . . . me . . . pass!”
But: No answer, again, from any of the nearest mob-members—neither that huge, obviously drunken man with the pike, trailing tricolor streamers, or those two women trying to fill their aprons with loose stones while ignoring the screaming babies strapped to their backs. Not even from that dazed young man who seems to have once—however mistakenly—thought himself to be their leader, now dragged hither and yon at the violent behest of his “followers” with his pale eyes rolling in their sockets, his gangly limbs barely still attached to his shaking body . . .
The price of easy oratory, Jean-Guy thinks, sourly. Cheap words, hasty actions; a whole desperate roster of very real ideals—and hungers—played on for the mere sake of a moment’s notoriety, applause, power—
—our Revolution’s ruin,
in a nutshell.
And then . . .
. . . a shadow falls over him, soft and dark as the merest night-borne whisper—but one which will lie paradoxically heavy across his unsuspecting shoulders, nevertheless, for long years afterward. His destiny approaching through the mud, on muffled wheels.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24 (Reading here)
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114