Shopping for Clovis

Our canoe lurched as I took a swipe with my axe at the pole supporting the weathervane on the roof of the Louvre Palace. Sparks punctured the moonlit December night as my glinting axe connected. A metal on metal screech briefly drowned out the wind. A rooftop cat hissed as the canoe flew past.

“Night Watch is up! We’re going back to the Arthalaska,” Tremblay shouted from the stern as a musket ball whistled by.

“Just one more hit and it’s ours. Hard about-turn starboard and a final pass,” I replied looking back at him. Fear was etched on his face.

“We’ll be killed.”

“Poltroon. And we promised Clovis.”

He hesitated. We were moving at a good clip and our momentum took us beyond the Palace where, looking down to the streets, I could see a patrol of musketeers aiming at us. And even worse, the rooftop defenses should be limbering up soon. But no need to remind Tremblay of that.

“Alright. One pass,” said Tremblay. He jammed his paddle under our craft, sending the canoe hard to port.

I’d been expecting starboard. Before I could react, the loot we had collected during our foray into the castle slid the width of the boat. The silver-hilted Poignard was headed toward our gold-rimmed vase pinned against the side. To prevent the collision, I lunged for the dagger just when a gust of wind hit us. Off balance, I was forced to grasp the gunwale or end up dumped on St-Honoré street. The axe fell from my grasp onto the Paris cobblestones. I reached the dagger only after it had smashed the vase, and I cut my finger on a porcelain shard. I swore loudly at my losses, only to be drowned out by a stream of invective in French from below.

“At least your axe was useful for a change,” Tremblay shouted to me.

At least his morale seemed to be rising again. That was worth an axe. I wondered why he hadn’t taken a shot of the Autumn Blend 70 proof Spirit I’d given him before the raid; it was the best protection against lack of moral fibre in aerial shoppers. He’d been carrying the flask in his pocket when we snuck into the castle from a balcony an hour ago. But the bottle was gone when we came back, loot in hand, to our canoe berthed on the balcony. To my despair, he’d still been sober and low on fighting spirit.

“To the vane,” I commanded, turning my back to him.

He was battling wild air currents to line up the craft for one last run. I could see the vane clearly now in the distance. A finely crafted rooster on top of the four cardinal signs, it was. That and the dagger were the final items we hadn’t yet acquired on Clovis’s shopping list.

There were always those who believed that a vane stolen from the enemy could predict the weather. 

But distant Clovis, who’d read the Arthalaska’s vane, certainly hadn’t predicted the clear weather over Lower Normandy and Paris; he’d forecast clouds to block the moonlight and zero wind. And the vane used for that call had been stolen from the Tower of London, so who were we to challenge his predictions? Clovis the Cloudcaller, reputable sailors and farmers said of him. If we were to complain, Clovis would reply the storm winds were imaginary, just a light breeze exaggerated by cowardly shoppers. And the moonlight, well, he’d look out a porthole up to the clouds over the Channel where he awaited us, forty leagues northwest of Paris, and say he couldn’t see the moon.

Tremblay had the canoe lined up now, the prow pointing at the vane. The wind favoured us for once and shifted to our back. As we gathered speed, I realized to my dismay that I had not the proper tools for the job. My first axe I had abandoned in the Castle. I had broken it while prying open the steel-rimmed chest that had held the now-broken vase while Tremblay had rummaged in a kitchen looking for a midnight snack. My second axe hopefully had done as much service falling to street level just now, although the invective told me that blow hadn’t been decisive. That left me just my musket, but I couldn’t see myself shoot the pole and then scoop up the vane while moving at our current speed.

My gaze fell on the dagger and I picked it up. It had a good heft and the steel looked sharp. But I was afraid I’d damage the blade with a good hack to the pole. I had to check with my shopping partner.

“You think the knife can handle the vane pole?” I shouted.

Tremblay’d been concentrating on the paddling and steering. At my call he focused back to me. I held up the knife, lining up the parallax so that the blade was right beside the farther vane in his field of vision. He had little fighting spirit, but he’d been a metalsmith assistant and knew his weapons. He barely hesitated.

“Yes!” He bent back to the paddle.

Rooftop air defences still hadn’t opened up on us. I scanned the roof tiles and chimney tops for the ambush I knew had to be there, but all I could discern was a scraggy cat. And the groundfire was already hot. We were fifty feet away from the vane when a musket ball pierced the hull. The craft bobbed. A second ball came through, inches from where I sat. Tremblay was paddling rapidly now, his single side J-stroke stretched out with an up and down motion as he tried to keep the canoe at the right altitude and fight a drift to port. I couldn’t paddle now; my job was to take the vane.

We were level height with the target but our line was three feet off, across an abyss of Parisian air and whistling musket balls. The claws, spiked comb, and beak of the weathervane loomed large now. Wrapping my feet around the thwart I reached out my full length over the abyss on the starboard side and took a vicious swipe at the damaged pole while reaching out with my left hand. The clang was short and sweet, an indication of my triumphant cut. With my left hand I grabbed the prize. I was about to hoist myself up by sheer abdominal force when a ferocious stabbing pain bit into my skull in one, two, countless places.

My head an explosion of agony, I flopped back upside-down, my chin thirty inches beneath the hull. I was hanging by my feet still wrapped around the thwart. I was now vertical, the feet over my head the only part of me still in the canoe. I could see below the Seine River in all its glory. Across the tee keel I saw Tremblay under the boat, he too feet up in the canoe and head down beneath the hull, in the same position as me but on the port side.

“Counterweight,” he shouted.

Clever kid.

“I’m hit. Head shot!” I hollered back.

“There’s a cat in your hair!” he shouted.

I had no time to absorb this. We were both upside-down in hostile territory, I could feel blood pouring out my scalp, and the inverted tower of St Germain des Prés church was headed our way.

“On the count of three!” I said.

He put his paddle end on my chest and on three pushed. My sternum nearly caved into my vertebrae but it was enough to flop us both back on board, which I needed since my hands were full and my head was feeling so heavy.

“Hard about-turn!” he shouted.

I understood we were going due south and safety was toward the northwest, but he had not the foggiest tactical sense in matters of combat shopping. He was about to bring us back directly over the Louvre kill zone for another turkey shoot. I put the dagger and perfect vane into the bottom of the boat and turned to shout some common sense into him when my world went dark.

A light impact and furious meowing at my feet brought me back to my senses an instant later. In the stern was a black cat with hair upright and a nervous twitching tail. The beast stared at me with venomous eyes, but I only spared it a glance. We were headed toward a church tower.

“West to Boulogne, then back north!” I shouted. “And for the love of life, don’t take us over Versailles.”

He seemed to understand directions for once, so I grabbed my Blessed Laurentian birch bark patches and resin and set to fixing the hull. We’d taken six hits and I had only six patches so I had to get this right. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the fifth hole, the cat attacked my sixth birch patch and tore it.

“Stupid cat,” Tremblay said as he took a swipe at the cat with his paddle. The cat had been focusing on the bark and only raised its head when it heard Tremblay’s insult. Too late. The paddle connected in a glancing blow on the animal’s shoulder.

The furious cat charged up the length of the paddle before Tremblay could bring it back and scratched him on the face. The damage done and Tremblay now livid, the cat scampered away at the bottom of the boat toward me, but Tremblay grabbed it by the tail. He tried to throw the cat overboard but it jammed its claws on the edge of the sixth bullet hole in the hull, further gouging it. Pulling the snarling cat harder would have torn the hole wide open and brought down Clovis’s precious canoe. Tremblay let go of the tail with a curse. The cat, looking huge with its bristling fur, hid under my seat beside the vane and hissed.

With a bullet-sized hole only partly patched up, the spiritual harmony in our Blessed birch bark hull had been disturbed, and that black cat’s claw gouges must have further upset the spirits. We were slowly losing altitude. At this rate we’d soon be scraping treetops. The only way to keep the ship at altitude was for both of us to paddle hard and up.

It was a tiring and backbreaking business. We were now over the Montmorency Forest three leagues north by northwest of Paris, with many leagues still to go. Adrenaline was seeping away slowly.

 “We need to lighten up or we’ll go down. Throw it overboard,” he said looking at the cat.

The beast, still fixing Tremblay with an evil stare, was lying on my feet now, the only spot on the boat with no wind and a warm patch to lie on. At least it was keeping my toes warm.

“Never. It’s our prize. Cats kill rats and bring good luck on a ship.”

“Not black cats. It’s right in front of me.”

“It’s night. All cats look black. It’s probably white in daylight,” I said.

Under his breath he cursed the cat’s ancestors in rhythm with his rowing all the way back to the pharaohs, which helped me match his stroke. Another two leagues went by before he ran out of insults or breath, I could tell not which.

“It could have been worse,” I said after another league of sullen silence, “Rooftop defence never fired on us.”

He laughed. “You know when I was in the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“I dumped the bottle of Autumn Blend in the guards’ broth.”

There was enough there to knock out a couple of caribou.

“Clever.”

The sun was rising as we reached the Channel over Dieppe. We’d paddled all night and were exhausted. Compounding our hardships, a league away from land, the Blessed bark spirit must have been exhausted and the canoe glided down into the water.

The seas were calm. We took turns paddling and bailing.

At the first whiff of saltwater seeping through the hole in the hull, the cat had panicked and clambered back up to the top of my head, thoughtfully sinking its claws into the same holes it had punched hours before. I forced it to jump back down. It perched itself possessively on the rooster of the weathervane, between me and Tremblay, an inch above the water bubbling in.

“I told you, that cat’s black,” he said.

“Shut up,” I said paddling.

“At least we could use it to plug the leak.”

“Just bail.”

“Certainly, Jean-Pierre,” he said.

I didn’t like the tone in that last acquiescence. I turned around just in time to see him reach overboard, fill our little bailing bucket to the rim with seawater, and dump it onto the cat.

Claws out and snarling, the drenched cat launched itself at Tremblay, who beat back at it with the bucket. The canoe pitched and rolled. Crawling along at the bottom of the craft with blood-tinged water now sloshing around my ankles and wrists, I made my way to the naval battle in the stern. I received a bucket whack on the forehead and a nasty scratch on the cheek before I managed to separate the belligerents.

The soggy cat now took refuge on the prow. The occasional wave spray notwithstanding, it must have calculated this was still the driest spot on a leaky boat for a cat despised by half the crew.

“Ever see a ship with a stupid black cat as a prow figurehead? Supposed to be a mermaid. We’re doomed now,” he said.

“If you bail water out and not in, we might make it.”

He half-heartedly used his bucket in the proper way.

In a sour mood all, men and cat at last arrived at the Arthalaska prowling in the quiet Channel waters.

Clovis met us as we came on board.

“My canoe is holed,” he said in lieu of greeting.

“Just wear and tear,” I replied.

“And the meteorological predictor is damaged,” Clovis said glancing at the vane. “I’ll give you five gold pieces for it.”

I didn’t manage to get in a word. Tremblay grabbed the vane and dangled it over the gunwales.

“Sixty or it’s going overboard.”

Tremblay was a mess, his long hair dishevelled, blood from several gashes, and that haggard ten-league stare I’d only seen in him once back in Petawawa.

“The Utrecht vane sold at last month’s Hochelaga auction also went for five gold pieces,” said Clovis.

“The rusty one with the pathetic pig from that Dutch clock tower? Ours is of royal lineage and in mint condition.”

On seeing the vane hanging over the edge, the cat’s hair had gone straight up and the animal advanced menacingly toward Tremblay. I thought the cat was playing into our hands by making Tremblay’s vane-overboard bluff more credible, but Tremblay didn’t see it that way. With his hand clutching the vane still over the edge, he kicked the cat. The cat dodged and the kick met only air, upsetting Tremblay’s balance. The metal rooster banged against the outside of the hull and Tremblay nearly dropped the prize into the sea before recovering.

Our customer, though, had seen enough. “Ten,” Clovis said.

We shook hands at twelve, with four clawed back immediately for canoe repairs.

“Your weather prediction was a crock. No clouds. Every musketeer from Paris to the Channel could see us,” Tremblay said, once the coins were in our hands.

“Come now, my child. I had forecast the lack of clouds. I just didn’t tell you. I was concerned you would lack the fortitude to go shopping if you knew. It was all for the best,” Clovis said, hands together.

Tremblay took the Royal Knife. For a moment I thought he would run it through either Clovis or the cat. I could only protect one, so I chose to step between my partner and our customer until the former cooled down.

“All is well, just give me the knife,” I said.

His face contorted, Tremblay handed me the knife, the sharp end toward me. I took it by the tip, turned to face Clovis, and with a bow showed him the knife.

“Ah yes. This will complete the shopping list. But wait, it is damaged too,” he said looking at the notch where knife had met weathervane pole.

“I believe that nick was made when King Louis the Thirteenth wielded it to fend off an assassin recently,” I said. Tremblay nodded.

“My children, waste not my time with simple lies,” Clovis said. “I’ll give you three gold for it.”

“The knife is worth at least thirty.  I read up on your recipes. You can still make your potions cutting ingredients with a Royal Dagger even if it is notched,” I said.

Clovis’s roving eye fell on the cat that was staying close to him and the weathervane now.

“Where did you get the cat?”

“It is a Royal Cat. We captured it after a valiant battle,” said Tremblay. “We’ll sell it to the Princess back home, who wants a worthy companion.”

“It’s a guard cat. It defends the weathervane. I’ll take the cat,” said Clovis, “and I’ll pay five gold for the dagger.”

“The cat is not on your list,” I said.

“I agree. Cats are not included. Purchased separately,” Tremblay said. He went to stroke the cat but it scratched his hand.

“It is an integral part of the weathervane system, not an optional accessory,” Clovis said, smiling.

Tremblay looked at the blood oozing out of his hand and said nothing, but clenched his fist. At this rate, I feared he’d soon pay Clovis to take the cat.

“Ten gold. Dagger and cat,” I said, defeated.

“Deal,” Clovis said, shaking my hand. “’Tis the season to be generous. Merry Christmas.”