A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9), Fred Saberhagen [some good books to read TXT] 📗

only gradually, and sometimes whole days went by without a single accused aristocrat or traitor losing his or her head in the name of Liberty.

      I had been asleep for several days, oblivious to what was going on in the breathing, waking, workaday world only a few yards from my hidden fastness. But my first sight of this new digging, the broad trench ten feet deep, obviously intended for mass burials, stopped me in my tracks. Such excavation suggested either an epidemic or the near approach of war. A faint odor of corruption was perceptible despite the scientifically enlightened attempt at thorough burial.

      Listening carefully, I could hear no cannon. That, I thought, suggested pestilence as the most probable cause.

      How little did I know.

* * *

      I decided that a brief examination of whatever bodies had been buried in the trench would be the quickest means of gaining the information that I sought. And indeed one glance, more or less over the shoulders of the two women, was sufficient. They were all adults, and mostly men. Most were fully clothed, though coats and hats were absent. And they were all without their heads; and I suddenly understood just what kind of an epidemic had begun to ravage Paris.

      The new government had adopted the guillotine in April of that year, the same month in which Revolutionary France found herself at war with Austria and Prussia. The introduction of the new machine was viewed as an idealistic gesture. Away with the hideous and prolonged tortures which in the past had been the common means of capital punishment! The age of humanitarianism had arrived. No more would those condemned to death be broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered, or have their flesh torn with red-hot pincers—modes of punishment still very much in style across the map of European civilization. In France, simple beheading had formerly been reserved for aristocrats, but now everyone in the newly classless society could enjoy its benefits.

      Let me assure the modern reader that it is not my intention to single out the French as particularly brutal. The last execution for witchcraft in England had occurred as late as 1685, when Jack Ketch, whose name came to stand for all of his profession, hanged Alice Molland in Exeter.

      In 1790 in England, the penalty of burning to death, inflicted for a variety of crimes, had finally been abolished—for women. And hanging, drawing, and quartering was still on the books as the prescribed punishment for treason.

      Also there is testimony that as late as 1790, the heads of executed traitors were still to be seen exhibited on Temple Bar—staring eyelessly in through the north windows of Tellson’s Bank, which stood adjoining. (One version has it that they were two officers of Prince Charles’s army, decapitated in the old, inefficient, and haphazard way, by the headsman’s axe or sword; another, that they were veterans of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715.)

* * *

      But let us return to that fateful night in 1792, in the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine, the burial ground of Revolutionary freedom. I was aware that the place was guarded, at least sporadically. The sentries were under orders from the Committee of Public Safety, to prevent grieving relatives from attempting to retrieve the mangled bodies of their loved ones. As one might expect, a little bribery allowed such recoveries to take place fairly often—the fewer bodies, the easier the gravediggers’ task. And, as it happened, no guards were anywhere in sight when my fateful meeting took place.

      Still unaware of my presence, the two women kept working away under their bright light, right at the place where the latest crop of bodies had been dumped. A new section of trench was dug almost every day, laborious spade and shovel work. Then the section excavated on the previous day was filled in on top of the latest crop of bodies—then usually only two or three, sometimes as many as half a dozen—after they had been hurled carelessly into the pit and sprinkled with lime. Still, as I have already remarked, there was only a trickle of dead flesh as yet, foreshadowing the floods to come; sometimes a day passed without a single beheading.

      The elder of the pair of workers, whose age I judged at a youthful thirty, was sitting on a chair or stool, not knitting but holding a raw-necked head, a fine example of Sanson’s handiwork, face uppermost in her lap, which she had protected with a piece of canvas.

      In my experience it had been invariably only the worst, blackest sort of magic which brought its practitioners into cemeteries to perform rituals at midnight. What little I had seen of such behavior was not only evil but amateurish, a defect which confirmed me in my determination to avoid the business as thoroughly as I could.

      Gradually I drew closer to the busy pair. I wondered if I should call attention to my presence with a gentlemanly cough.

      I had been standing in thoughtful observation for almost a minute before the younger woman looked up and saw me there, standing in the fringes of the bright light of the Argand lamp. For some reason it did not strike me until later that this modern technology argued against the magical explanation of the women’s presence, which I had so unthinkingly assumed. Also, for would-be sorcerers, the pair seemed remarkably unconcerned about an idler who stood by and watched.

      “Good evening, citizen.” By now the older worker had observed me too. There was nothing frightened or uncertain in either woman’s manner. If this was Satanism, it had grown bold indeed.

      Both of the women were obviously hardened to their work. And the elder, as she worked on, informed me that they were there by order of the Convention.

      Is the Revolution dabbling now in magic? I asked myself; but did not bother to voice the question aloud.

      While the woman of thirty kept talking to me, mostly banalities about the weather and the price of bread, her hands