Dying by the Sword

A Fortuitous Meeting; Where Three Friends Are Better Than One; The Impossibility of Two Musketeers Dueling One Guard

D’ARTAGNAN hurried to the palace with a confused and worried mind. Oh, he did not doubt Constance, whose nature was as her name, nor did he fear that she might entangle him in some plot. But he did fear that a plot was already in place and might entangle himself and Constance without mercy.

On the way to the palace, he responded to Porthos’s questions as to what D’Artagnan had been doing near the armorer’s, with half syllables, which not only led Porthos to believe that D’Artagnan had been seeking additional work, but to heartily approve of it, because, as he put it, the pay in the guards seemed to be as bad as in the musketeers, and that was as irregular as the very irregular finances of their sovereign.

D’Artagnan didn’t bother arguing how unfit it would be for him to take a position as an assistant baker, or even an armorer. Porthos was, after all, the only one of them who had ever done work for pay. He’d been employed as a dance and fencing master upon first coming to Paris. And he was a proud man-or at least, he liked to wear clothes resplendent enough to put the royalty to shame, and he told a great many innocent falsehoods about his familiarity with princesses and duchesses. Yet, he could consider with equanimity a course of action-becoming employed as a servant, under an assumed name-which would have made Aramis speechless, caused Athos to challenge someone to a duel for accusing him of it and which, had D’Artagnan given the idea his full attention, would have made D’Artagnan blush.

There was absolutely no reason to argue with Porthos, and D’Artagnan was concerned with far weightier worries. The note from Constance worried him, after what might have been the deliberate entrapment of Mousqueton. If they were right and if the Cardinal were so desperate to get leverage against Anne of Austria and to make Anne of Austria confess to some plot that he would stoop to entrapping Mousqueton, would he not prefer to entrap one of them?

He’d looked at her letter, and it did look like her handwriting, but would not the Cardinal, in all but name and honor the King of France, be able to command someone to imitate the hand of a woman who lived at court and who had, doubtless, written notes to various people living there?

He felt a shiver down his spine, even as he gave his password to Monsieur de la Porte and got admitted into the palace-or at least into the dark gardens adjoining the palace. Because his eyes were sharpened by his awareness of danger, his mind prying the edges of every dark corner, every lengthening shadow, he was alert and ready, and dropped his hand to his hip at the sight of a man walking towards them.

The words, “Who goes-” were on his lips-the training of years as a guard in the long watches of the night. But he got no further than that because his eyes had recognized the tall, slim figure, the glimmering blond hair, the fashionable attire of his friend Aramis.

“Aramis,” he said, at the same time that Aramis’s voice echoed back, “D’Artagnan.”

The two stood in the winter garden, surrounded by bare trees, looking at each other. D’Artagnan was surprised to see something very much like hostility in his friend’s eyes.

It was only when Aramis said, “He made you come after me, did he not?” that he understood the mute resentment in the green eyes.

“Athos?” he said, and, to Aramis’s nodding, “No. I convinced Athos that you-and I too-must be allowed to investigate this by… having freedom of movement. I am here because I got a letter.” He felt himself blush. “From Madame Bonacieux,” he added, with reluctance that came not only from laying open his affairs to his friend, but also from his consciousness that Aramis’s lovers were of a much higher level in society.

But Aramis didn’t seem to catch the implication, nor to be inclined to deride D’Artagnan’s choice of society. Instead he leaned in close to his friend and said, worriedly, “Madame Bonacieux? She has sent you a note? What did she say?”

“Nothing, except for asking me to meet her.”

Aramis gave him a curious look. “Is this normal, then?” he asked. “For her to send you a note ordering you to come to her at the royal palace?”

D’Artagnan shook his head. “No,” he said, and blushed a little. “Normally she comes to see me. She has the keys to my lodging, and she will come in any time of day or night that she can get away. I assumed…” He cleared his throat. “I assumed she did so today, coming into my lodging and leaving me her note, since I was not there and neither was Planchet. Unless, of course, she sent the note earlier, while Planchet was still there. Why are you looking at me with such an expression of reproach, Aramis?”

Aramis’s expression of reproach did not abate, but he frowned harder at D’Artagnan. “My friend, sometimes I am reminded of how young you are and that you are, in fact, far younger than I, myself, am or remember being. How can you, at such a time as this, come to a summons written on a note, without any warranty that it is from someone who means you well? Did you at least take the precaution of not coming in the way she told you to? Or the way she expected you to come?”

D’Artagnan frowned. “I came the way she asked me to, and gave word to Monsieur de la Porte.”

Porthos said, “Surely you can’t think that Monsieur de la Porte is betraying us? He has always been on the side of the Queen. His-”

“Porthos,” Aramis said. “We are now in such territory that I’m not absolutely sure the Queen means us well. And I know the Cardinal means us ill.”

“What do you mean you don’t think the Queen means us well? We have always been her devoted servants, and in fact, we have allowed her to remain on the throne and we-”

Aramis’s finger darted out, and stopped D’Artagnan’s lips. “Shh,” he said. “Shhh. Do not be foolish. Doesn’t even the Bible exhort you not to put your faith in princes?”

“But-”

“No,” Aramis said. “The devil. I’m starting to suspect, with Athos, that this whole thing is deeper than we thought. Where is Athos, speaking of him? What is he doing?”

D’Artagnan shook his head. “I presume he is back at his lodgings, with the servants. He did not tell me he intended to do anything else. At least…”

“At least?”

“At least since I disabused him of the notion that he could pass for a peasant looking for work,” D’Artagnan said.

Aramis’s chuckle echoed like a clap of thunder, all the more surprising because until it sounded, his features had been so grave and tense and full of foreboding. Now he grinned at D’Artagnan. “Surely even our friend could not-”

And at that same moment, Porthos lunged past D’Artagnan’s shoulder, sword out, so quickly that D’Artagnan was forced to dart out of the way or be trampled. And in darting out of the way, he noticed a motion. Something dark moving past his line of sight towards Aramis. At the same time, Aramis had his sword out, and his cloak wrapped around his arm, and was defending himself from two adversaries at once.

D’Artagnan in turn found himself fighting two men, attired all in black and wearing what looked uncommonly like monkish cowls. They had sword and dagger out, each of them, and there were at least six. They fought fiercely, with quiet intensity, their only noise being grunts of surprise when their attacks were parried, or sudden exclamations of pain, when first Porthos and then Aramis put his sword through one of the adversaries.

Faced with two of them, D’Artagnan, for the first time in his life, found himself sweating to hold his own in a duel. He’d fought two guards of the Cardinal before, and wounded them both. He’d fought more than two of them, sometimes, truth be told. But this-this was something quite different. These men fought with unerring ability, as though each of them had been as well trained as D’Artagnan himself had been by his battle-veteran father. It was all he could do to meet each of their thrusts and push them away.

In his mind, his late father’s voice echoed, in quiet reproach, never be happy that you are parrying each of an enemy’s thrusts, my son. The truth is that if you’re only parrying you have already lost, for you’re never attacking. You have to be lucky every time they attack, and they only have to be lucky enough to let the sword go through once.

But though his father had trained him on how to respond to sudden attack, and given him intensive practice on dueling two experienced swordsmen-often recruiting his friend, Monsieur de Bhil for the occasion-he had never trained him in fighting two people who were intent only on murdering him.

“Holla there, what goes here?” a voice called, out of the shadows.

On that sound, one of the adversaries lunged, and his sword blade thrust towards D’Artagnan. D’Artagnan had only the time to interpose his arm to push the blade away from his chest. And then his opponent was gone; vanished, as though he’d come out of the night, and left via the night itself.

And D’Artagnan realized, only then, that he’d been wounded and his arm was bleeding profusely. He watched the blood drip from the cut which had pierced both the velvet of his doublet and his flesh and, from the pain of it, had grazed the bone of his forearm.

“I see, musketeers with their swords out,” the voice that had spoken out of the shadows said again. “Dueling, were you?”

Into the relative light of their position-in the middle of the garden where neither shadow of tree nor of wall fell on them-strode Jussac, one of the Cardinal’s favorite guards. “Porthos, Aramis, D’Artagnan. Tell me, who was dueling whom? Not that it matters, as you have undoubtedly been dueling, and therefore you are all arrested and you’d best hope that the new edicts weren’t signed tonight, else you shall all be beheaded by first dawn.”

Porthos answered only with a long stream of swearing-inventive swearing, D’Artagnan noted, even in his shocked state, his hand holding his wounded arm up and staring in disbelief at the stream of blood pouring forth. He was fairly sure whatever the Cardinal might or might not have done to or for his niece Madame de Combalet, it could not be what Porthos had just said he did. Mostly because it was anatomically impossible and probably fatal.

He felt light-headed and as though he would presently lose consciousness; only Aramis touched him on the arm and said, “D’Artagnan.” And D’Artagnan, looking up from his arm, realized that Aramis had put away his sword, and was holding up one of his immaculate, embroidered, silk-edged handkerchiefs, and trying to remove D’Artagnan’s doublet.

“Can you remove your arm from the sleeve without my cutting it away?” Aramis said. “Your doublet might be salvageable with the insertion of some panels. I’m sure Mousqu-Well, one of our servants should be able to help with that. Only I must tourniquet your arm as soon as it may be, else you will bleed out very quickly.”

As though in a dream, D’Artagnan opened his doublet and removed his arm from its sleeve and watched Aramis tie the handkerchief around his arm. A gulp escaped him when Aramis tightened the handkerchief, and then Aramis made D’Artagnan lift his arm. “It will help stop the flood,” he said.

Meanwhile, the guards of the Cardinal had come into the light, and it was de Brisarac and Jussac and about six underlings. Jussac, apparently under the control of an idea that dominated all others, said, “Which of you wounded the boy? What were you dueling over? I thought you were inseparables.”

“I knew you had deformed moral structures, to serve the Cardinal so willingly,” Aramis said drily. “I did not know that you also had subnormal wits. Why would we be dueling each other, Jussac? We are friends. We are, indeed, inseparables.”

“The first time I met the boy, you were all dueling him,” Jussac said.

“Oh, that was because I had only come to town, and made their acquaintance,” D’Artagnan said. “Now I know them better than that, and I would never duel with all of them at once.”

“So you would duel them one at a time,” Jussac said.

Aramis gave D’Artagnan a warning look and said, “I wish you wouldn’t speak, my friend, not while your head is clouded by blood loss. You see that Monsieur Jussac is determined to judge us before he has any facts.” Then turning to Jussac, he said, “We were crossing the garden, together, as you see. We were looking for our friend Athos, who said he might come and help supplement the guard today. And out of nowhere, we were ambushed by men in black wearing monkish hoods. What you saw was our effort at defending ourselves, nothing more. It was no duel, with appointed time and seconds, but surely, even under the Cardinal’s rule, a man is still allowed to defend himself when in fear for his life?”

“I didn’t see any men,” Jussac said, mulishly, jutting out his chin. “What I saw was the three of you, with your swords out. And since I know you’ve fought each other before…”

A stream of invective escaped Porthos, prompting Aramis to say, “Porthos, I don’t think the Cardinal can have done that.”

“And why not?” Porthos asked, in a challenging tone.

“Because I think you’ll find,” Aramis said, “that only women have that organ.”

“Oh,” Porthos said, and frowned. “But I meant it in the sense where things aren’t really true, but the spirit of them is, anyway.”

“The metaphorical sense? Even in that sense, that is not something I’d ascribe to the Cardinal,” Aramis said, absentmindedly and then, examining D’Artagnan’s arm. “I think the bleeding is slowing.”

“Well,” Jussac said. “Porthos can have the pleasure of explaining to his eminence his views on anatomy and metaphor, both, since I know his eminence will be overjoyed to see you. As will, might I add, most of our comrades. If the edicts have been signed tonight, which will cause you to die in the morning, we might even throw a party.”

“Ah, yes,” Aramis said. “I’ve long known that you were afraid of us.”

“Afraid? Us?” de Brisarac asked.

“Indeed. Else, why would you hope the law would rid you of us? Why else, but that you, yourselves, could not defeat us?”

De Brisarac reached for his sword, but Jussac held his arm. “No,” he said. “You do not want to answer to his eminence for that. We’ll simply arrest these miscreants, and they can tell his eminence their pretty tale.”

“It is not a pretty tale, you fool,” Porthos said. “Here. Come here.” Without ceremony, the giant musketeer grabbed Jussac by the arm and dragged him over to where he’d been fighting his enemies. “Do you see that? The ground is fairly hard, but even so you can see my footsteps and, see, two others.”

“So, you were fighting these other two and they-”

“Don’t be more foolish than you can help being,” Porthos said, and D’Artagnan had to suppress a wish to giggle, since that was a comment more often heard from Aramis to Porthos. “Look there. I wounded this man. See the blood? And before you tell me it’s D’Artagnan’s, note how the drops vanish into the shadows there. And here.” He forcibly led the guard another way. “Here, see, was where Aramis wounded his adversary. Look how he ran into the night, pouring blood out of him. Why, if the boy had bled that much, instead of simply looking white as a ghost, he would be a ghost.”

The guard made a noncommittal sound in his throat. And Porthos said, in a tone of utter, sneering disdain, “Your Cardinal is in many ways a man without honor. But he is not stupid. If you should go to him with that story, and I told him mine and showed him the evidence, I would not be the one arrested. Nor you, I dare say, since it is not a crime to be a fool. But if I know the tender mercies of the gentleman you serve, he would be furious you ignored attackers, loose in the grounds of the royal palace. And even more furious that you showed yourself for a fool. Now, I don’t know how true this may be, but I’ve heard stories of what happens to those who displease the Cardinal.”

Jussac was quiet a long time.

“Come, Jussac, you know he is right,” de Brisarac said, in a resigned tone.

“Very well,” Jussac said, in a tone that sounded more like challenge than like surrender. “We will follow your so-called attackers, but heaven help you if we find they were your accomplices.”

“How could they be our-” Porthos started.

But Aramis made a gesture to silence him. And as the guards vanished into the night, in the direction the figures had disappeared, he turned to D’Artagnan. “There, you have stopped bleeding. Now, if you can walk, we will go to Athos’s lodgings and see if we can unravel this very confusing hour.”