63. Léon Carries Out An ution
63
LéON CARRIES OUT AN EXECUTION
H enry and Léon stood in a moment of stark and brutal silence, the two of them on the stage in front of everyone, not a single other person with the vaguest idea of what they meant to one another.
“Untie me,” said Henry.
“And I’ll pull that rope myself.”
Léon smiled.
“You are brave Henri. Brave and often stupid.”
Henry might have remarked that wasn’t a particularly kind thing to say to someone in his situation, but Léon had already stepped away from him.
He picked up his axe, and with nerve-fraying horror, the weak light of the winter sun reflected sharp in Henry’s eyes.
“No. Don’t do that for me.”
Léon held it with a steady hand, and Henry hated to think of how he could.
Had he gone back to that lonely place where Henry had found him?
Gone back to that isolation, the wall around himself that Henry alone had been able to destroy?
For him to live the rest of his precious life that way…
It broke Henry’s heart.
Léon came to him, so close Henry could feel the heat of his body—the body he would never touch or kiss or love again.
Henry said, “I can’t stand for you to do this. I will pull that rope myself. I’m not scared of death, I fear only for you. For I have loved you so deeply, Léon. So deeply and so truly. I cannot bear to be the one to hurt you.”
Léon listened to his words with his body taut, his fingers white on the axe handle, his eyes watering.
He turned his head away just as the first tear broke, and yelled to the crowd in a strong and false voice, “Henri De Villiers! You are here today, convicted of treason. Of spreading seditious materials. Of writing and distributing numerous articles in which you made such outrageous claims as, ‘The people of this nation are good and true and strong, and require only to be freed from the chains of the monarchy to create a just and free land.’” Henry stared up at him, paling.
“Pamphlets, where you declared, ‘Every man, woman, and child has a right to food, education, healthcare, and respect’. Stories where you said that human nature is intrinsically good, only pushed to foul extremes by the brutality of its rulers—where you claimed citizens would never require or institute capital punishment in a country that gave its people enough sustenance so they didn’t have to kill to survive.”
“Léon, shut up,” Henry snapped.
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“You’ve cut off the head of the snake today,” Léon yelled out to the crowd.
“The power is in your hands. These people,” he indicated the carriage carrying Henry’s cellmates, “are due to die. And for what? The revolution is now! You have won. It’s over.”
“Léon, please.”
But Léon swallowed down the lump in his throat, and continued, “It’s important to know when to stop. It’s important to know who and what you’re fighting for. Do you want freedom? Equality? Peace? Or do you just want blood?”
Léon came around behind Henry, then wrenched his head back against his navel.
An approving cry broke from the crowd at the perceived barbarity of it, even if Léon’s hands were loving on Henry.
His thighs pressed into Henry’s shoulder blades, and Léon lowered the axe between his own legs.
“Don’t move,” he said softly, as the axe glided like butter through Henry’s restraints.
Henry was confounded.
Perhaps Léon was going to let him pull the rope.
He must have been considering it, because he then yelled out, “Do you want the head of this man who believed in this revolution? Or do you wish to build something better, more beautiful, something based on the principles we were supposed to stand for?”
But the people glared at Henry’s long and beautiful neck, exposed to their hungry teeth, and they screamed for it.
As one mob, whipped into feverish nationalism by years of war and death and horror, no one was prepared to try to stop the violence.
They had convinced themselves it was acceptable.
Necessary. One more death.
Seven more deaths. A thousand more deaths, and where it would stop, neither Henry nor Léon knew, but Léon had made up his mind, by the looks on their faces, by his difficult and horrifying history, by the beating pulse of the man he loved beneath his fingers, that he was choosing love.
“If you decide to stay,” he warned, “you won’t get justice—all you’ll get is blood. Leave now, unless that’s what you want.”
Every side of the scaffold was filled deep with living, seething humans who screamed their acquiescence—who had long-since overstayed their welcome in Léon’s life.
“The people have spoken,” Léon said.
He kicked the heading block in front of Henry.
“Head down, my love. Keep your wrists together as if you were tied.”
“You’re being very casual about this,” Henry replied, trying to wrestle down the disgust of placing his head where so many others had lost theirs, the cold of the blackened and greasy mahogany like ice on his neck.
“It will all be over soon,” Léon assured him.
“I won’t make it hard for you. Just know that I love you, Léon.” A few tears dropped to the wooden scaffold floor in front of him.
“Consider those my last words, won’t you?”
“No,” said Léon.
“I won’t.”
He raised his axe high, stepped a foot forward to brace his body, then swung the weapon wide, taking off six heads in one sweep, the loudest and most eager members of his audience.
Not the ones who came to see their oppressor die—the ones who had stayed for the sake of violence, had pushed their way to the front, and had screamed for Henry’s head.
Now they had their blood.
More than they could ever have imagined.
It was the screams that snapped Henry’s own perfectly intact neck up.
A fountain of haemorrhaging scarlet leapt from the necks as the decapitated bodies slunk to the ground, and Léon was down in it.
With a tsunami of blood, Léon slashed the axe across every surrounding torso, releasing a veritable waterfall of innards.
He held steady as they piled up around his feet, wielding the axe expertly, taking an arm here, a leg there, from anyone who didn’t run fast enough.
Guards came towards him, trying to get a clear shot over the panicking crowd.
“Léon!” Henry screamed.
A noise sounded to his left, his head turned sharply, the heads basket shook, then Catherine emerged from it, two pistols held aloft, one of which she shot, lodging a bullet directly in the skull of the man who had the best chance of hitting Léon.
“Take these, Henry. And fast!”
He scrambled over to her.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Did I ever tell you how much I like your boyfriend?”
“He’s going to get himself killed,” said Henry, exploding the face of another man who’d levelled his gun at his beloved.
“No. Not while he has you.” She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of the enormous basket.
“Cathy, get down!” Henry yelled.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Just you worry about Léon. Your sword’s in here too.”
With that news, Henry shoved the guns back to Catherine.
“You’d better take these, then.”
“I’ll be fi?—”
“Léon!” Sword in hand, Henry leapt from the scaffold and cut a line towards him.
He gave each man in his way as much sympathy as they had given him.
Stabbed, sliced, cut down, he fought his way across the square.
He saw the prisoners still in the back of the prison carriage, waiting to be killed.
Slipping his blade into the warm entrails of a man who tried to punch him, Henry whistled low and long, and the horses shot forward.
The prisoners were flung against one another, down on the floor in a heap as the wheels of the cart ground against stone, smushing anyone who got in the way.
The horses were just as merciless as the cart, knocking dozens out of the way, leaving a swath of screams and limbs as they dashed for freedom.
Léon, when Henry finally got to him, was awash with blood.
His fight was frenetic.
He exuded a dark determination that went beyond survival.
It was heads and heads and heads he went for.
An arm that came for him would be cut off, but the second that body hit the ground, the head rolled.
It was a revenge. It was every screaming and gawping mouth that had yelled at Léon up on that stage.
It was every demand for the cruel show of public execution.
It was Léon’s own personal setting to rights for the life they had made him live, and for his father, whose blood they had demanded.
Now they had blood. A surfeit of blood.
Seeing the lively spark in his eye, Henry took to maiming this man and that, then throwing them in Léon’s path, still alive, just for a few seconds.
“Thank you!” Léon called above the din of screams.
“You’re mad,” said Henry, unable to repress a smile.
“I think so. It was only a matter—” a slice clean across a neck “—of time.”
The last, who hadn’t been smart or fast enough to get away, got Henry's sword deep in his shoulder, and his knees smacked to the bloody ground. Henry kicked him over and put a boot on his back. With one final chop, the head was off, and Léon was in Henry’s arms. His hands ran over his naked biceps, glowing with energy, dripping red. “I can’t believe you did that.”
Bright eyes met his. “I would never let anything happen to you, Henri. Never.” Léon grabbed him by the back of the neck and kissed him. It was a kiss with all the youth and energy that should always have graced every movement of his young body. Freedom and energy and love.
Henry held him tight, barely able to believe that he got to hold him once more, but without half the faith Léon had in their escape. It was, to Henry, a last-minute gift, and a bitter one. “You shouldn’t have come back for me, Ange.”
Léon’s bloody hand gripped his cheek, and with his forehead pressed against him, Léon said, “You saved me, Henri. Of course I was going to save you.” He gave him another sweet, soft peck on the lips. “Call Destroyer.”
“Did you…” Henry looked around the empty, blood-soaked square. He shot out a loud whistle, and it was mere seconds until they heard the hooves echoing off the walls, louder, louder, two horses galloping into the square. Destroyer moved fast, bareback, next to Azazel, as though they were trained for the occasion. Destroyer came directly to them, Azazel making for the scaffold where Catherine still waited, having watched the destruction calmly from on high.
“Why is she here?” asked Henry, only a little annoyed because she was clearly unharmed. “Couldn’t you have just hidden the sword?”
“Well,” Léon began, but there was movement from the far side of the square. Horses and soldiers, quickly recalled from Louis’ procession to the graveyard on hearing the news of an attack, moved in. “On the horse. Quickly.”
Henry grabbed the hands Léon threaded together to give him a boost. “You first.”
“But I have an axe!”
“I’m perfectly capable with a sword. Please, get on the horse.” He slapped his thigh as an indication Léon should put his boot there, and Destroyer snuffled impatiently. “Fine.” With a small sigh, Léon swung his leg over Destroyer’s back, then reached a hand down for Henry.
Henry glanced over at Catherine, who remained there in her bloodied golden dress, just as though she didn’t see the least danger in the approach of the soldiers. He shot a desperate, loving look up at Léon. “I will always love you.” He whistled, and Destroyer responded uncontrollably.
He bolted towards an alley, but it wasn’t as though Léon hadn’t seen the possibility of Henry risking himself yet again. Before the animal could pick up speed, he leapt over his back and crunched down on the ground with incredible agility. “I cannot believe you would do that!”
Huffing out a frustrated breath, Henry grabbed his hand, pulling him for the shelter of the scaffold. “Can’t you? Really?”
“You’re too stupid to be true some days,” Léon sniped.
“Thanks, Ange. Every time you say it, I just find you more attractive.” He dashed behind a post. “We need those guns.”
“We don’t, actually,” said Léon. And he yelled up, “We’re clear! Mostly.”
“Get beneath me!” Catherine called down.
“What the hell are you doing?” Henry snapped. He ran for the stairs, but Léon caught him around the waist and dragged him backwards until they were directly beneath the guillotine.
“Go!” Léon yelled up.
“I have to get her down!” Henry struggled against him, but Léon held tight.
“Just watch.”
A tremor started beneath their feet, as if at the epicentre of an earthquake. It grew and grew and rumbled out in every direction across the square. Léon and Henry tumbled to the ground, but Henry was up fast, scrambling for the way out. Until what he saw between the planks froze him in place.
The soldiers, a great number now, swayed on their animals as the ground heaved. Some were thrown down, the horses stumbling to keep upright. Following their lead, Henry whistled, and others bolted. Almost all the riders dropped one way or another, due to the unceasing shaking or the animals.
The men raised themselves up, attempting to rally together, some fifty of them now, just a small portion of those who had gone to the square earlier that day. Confusion assailed them, and the only thing that made any sense in their befuddlement was the lone woman standing tall upon the scaffold, her fingers sparking blue at her side.
At the command of one of the officers, they raised their guns.
“No!” Henry cried, attempting to dash to her, as though he could stop bullets on her behalf. But Léon’s arms held him, then, as they always would.
The first shot went off, and the bullet returned directly to its owner, sunk straight between his eyes and deep into his brain. His was the fastest death. A volley of bullets flew, but with a raise of Catherine’s fingers, all fell swiftly to the ground with a clatter.
“What is she doing?” Henry uttered. “How did she learn this?”
“Souveraine,” Léon whispered. “They’ve been working together for months.”
“Souveraine can’t understand this. She can’t control it!”
“You don’t think so?” Léon’s head was close by Henry’s, and Henry felt the movement as his gaze shifted to a glistening off to their left.
How many Léon and Henry (but mostly Léon) had killed that morning could never be counted. They would have had to go by heads, given the many unidentifiable hacked pieces and entrails they left in their wake (particularly after Henry got his sword involved). Needless to say, the number was large, and therefore, the squelching, and the rolling, and the unprecedented horror was also enormous when those body parts began to congeal, to form themselves together in a gigantic blob that began to roll towards the soldiers.
They dropped their weapons. They fled in every direction as the writhing, pulsating horror of limbs and blood and screaming faces sloshed towards them. Whatever could be identified as hands reached out and grabbed anyone close enough, pulling them into the gore, silencing them forever in a suffocation of grotesquery.
“That’s horrific,” Henry whispered.
“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Léon grinned.
“You know,” Henry mused, “I did think she was holding on to some sort of trauma about that pit incident.”
“She seems to have found a way to work through it,” Léon reflected.
And so she had. That and the fear of the men who hauled her out of her cabin on the boat in the middle of the night when they sailed from England. The fear of a man who drugged her and tried to force her into marriage. The nightmare of prison and processing, of being condemned for a crime no one had any proof she had committed, which she’d only done in self defence.
She had certainly found a way to process it all, just as smoothly as she processed each and every one of her assailants who weren’t fast enough to escape her wrath. They were crushed into red paste, and they were amalgamated into the beast of all her fear and anger, now finally brought under her control, there in Paris, with the love of a good woman.
“You see, you shouldn't infantilise her,” Léon explained.
“I shouldn't what?” Henry blustered.
“Are you two ready?” Catherine called.
Léon grasped Henry’s hand and pulled him out into the light. They chased up the scaffold steps where Henry stopped in front of Catherine. “You did all of that?”
She grinned wide. “Are you impressed?”
“I’m so impressed.” He rushed forward to hug her, and lest she kill him with the strange power ebbing around her fingertips, she let go of all the magic. Just as his arms slipped around her neck, the glob of human refuse burst apart, sloshing across the ground, up the sides of buildings, littering the area with dead.
Léon let out a long whistle. “That’s not nice.”
“Sorry,” she replied. “I didn't see any other way to do it.”
He wrinkled his brow at her, but given how well she had managed the task of keeping bullets off them, he said only, “Henri, do you think you could call our horses back before anyone else arrives?”
He didn’t need to be asked twice. Henry whistled, the horses came right to the scaffold, and this time all three climbed on and dashed out of Place de la Révolution.
The De Villiers carriage was equipped to hold four horses, and waited in a quiet lane a half hour’s ride from the scene of slaughter. Souveraine watched at the helm with émile by her side, a gun in her hand, not afraid to shoot anyone who took note of them.
They’d stayed far away from the procession of Louis’ execution and burial for fear they might have been thought part of a plot to save him at the last minute. Consequently, the area was quiet, which was just as well, because the sight of Léon, Henry, and Catherine, riding hard through the city, the first two absolutely covered in blood, would have drawn attention from even the most seasoned of Parisian revolutionaries.
Léon and Henry were directed to jump straight into the back of the carriage to be hidden away, a move they did eagerly just as soon as Léon had seen émile well and happy at the front. Catherine pulled a shawl over her dress, which displayed the blood of the ex-Kings’s severed neck. She, Souveraine, and émile made short work harnessing Destroyer and Azazel to the front of the carriage, and with a snap, they were away, Léon and Henry once again alone in the intimate space of a carriage, hidden from all the world. But how different it was to that first time.
Léon leapt on him, kissed him, pushed him down onto the seat, threading his fingers through his cropped hair. “I got you back. I did it. I got you back!”
Henry indulged fully in the next kiss, then whispered, “I still don’t believe you’re really here.” He stared at the beautiful face he never thought he’d see again.
Léon’s grip on his cheek was trembling. “I would never let them take you. Not you, Henri.”
Henry wrapped his fingers around Léon’s. “But what have you done? Ange, I’m not worth this. You’ve given your life for me. They know who you are—it’s a death sentence.”
“Don’t you see? I’m only really alive because of you. It’s only now that I have you—for the first time in so long, I have a place. And it’s not working myself to death. It’s hope. And it’s plans for the future. You gave me back a piece of myself that was gone. You’ve given me a family. You were right all along. You were the man who was going to save me. But I needed to save myself, too. And I did that today. Paris has saved us both.”
“Oh, my love. Let me look at you. I don’t ever want to stop seeing you and holding you. You have become everything to me. The man you are. You’re my angel, you're the very breath of the forest, you’re the light and the freedom and the love, and Ange…” Henry kissed him over and over. “I want to ask you to marry me. And know I can’t, but I need you to understand, I want you forever. I want you to be my husband. I want to go where you go, and I want to be by your side. I want to be buried next to you when we die, and I want you to be mine in heaven. I love you, Léon. I love you more than life itself.”
Henry dipped his head to kiss Léon’s neck. Léon arched against his lips, squeezing fingers into his naked back. “Don’t stop. Don’t.”
Henry laughed, placing a coy peck on his lips. “I think it might be very awkward when they open the carriage.”
“We’re not going to stop for hours, my love. Not for anything. Not until we’re safe.”
Henry’s beautiful eyebrows raised. “Hours?”
“Hours,” Léon assured him. “Now kiss me.”