The Last Musketeer Page 4

Greg just nodded. Best to keep his mouth shut, or when he did have to speak, to agree with everything this kid said. “You’re right,” he said. “I misspoke. I’m exhausted. It’s been a long day.”

  Aramis stared at him for a long while and then broke into a genuine smile. “You’re a very strange person.”

  “Not where I come from,” Greg replied defensively, even though that wasn’t quite true. Every kid in twenty-first-century Queens thought he was a weirdo, too.

  “Wherever that is,” Aramis said with a good-natured smirk. “Very far away, I suspect. You have no clerics, but you do have an extra planet. I’ve never seen clothes like yours before. Especially your shoes. What on earth is this substance?” He prodded the sole of Greg’s sneaker.

  “Rubber.”

  “Fascinating. And what are these slits in your clothing?”

  Greg had to laugh. “You’ve never seen pockets before?”

  “No. What are they for?”

  “To keep things in. Like keys and money.”

  “You mean, instead of a purse?”

  “Yes.” Greg bit his lip. They didn’t even have pockets in 1615?

  Thankfully, Aramis didn’t seem suspicious as much as intrigued. He caught Greg’s wrist and gazed at his watch as if it were a priceless jewel. “And this. This is the most fascinating of all. A miniature clock that fits on your wrist! You must have the most incredible craftsmen in your town.”

  Greg suppressed another laugh. He’d bought it at Target for $19.99.

  “I have heard they have great craftsmen in the Artagnan region, but that the people there have very different customs from us. Is that where you’re from?”

  “It is,” Greg answered, even though he hadn’t the faintest idea of where Artagnan was. It was better than the truth.

  “Ha!” Aramis beamed, pleased with his deduction. “I’ve never met anyone from so far away before! Why, that’s practically in Spain!”

  “Yes,” Greg agreed, although this was news to him.

  “Well, D’Artagnan, tell me about where you’re from—”

  “What’d you just call me?”

  “D’Artagnan. Meaning ‘From Artagnan,’ of course. I can’t call you ‘Greg.’ That’s simply too strange. It’ll draw attention.”

  Greg’s mind whirled. That name! He knew it. It suddenly clicked why the name Aramis sounded familiar, too. They were characters in The Three Musketeers. He’d read it in French class the year before. Aramis, Porthos, and Athos were the names of the heroes. But the main character was a newcomer named D’Artagnan. Greg also remembered that the author, Alexandre Dumas, had claimed in the preface that the characters were all based on real people in spite of how he’d made up the story. . . .

  Now that Greg had been labeled D’Artagnan, his heart leaped. What if the boy before him was the Aramis? If so, he would eventually be renowned as one of the greatest warriors in French history. He was certainly smart. And while he claimed that he wasn’t skilled with his rapier, maybe he was only being modest. Greg’s parents were apparently stuck in some godforsaken prison—nearly four hundred years away from their own time—and Greg was too lost in this society to even think about freeing them alone. But a future musketeer would be exactly the type of person who could help him. And if he’d found Aramis, maybe the other two might be around as well. . . .

  “You don’t have any friends named Porthos and Athos, do you?” Greg asked.

  Aramis looked at him curiously for about the thousandth time that night. “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I’d heard of two great warriors by those names. And I could use all the help I can get to free my parents.”

  Aramis grew dour. “You have my help, D’Artagnan. But to free your parents from La Mort Triste, you’re going to need much more than warriors. You’re going to need the grace of God. And some stockings.” He reached under the straw and tossed Greg a pair of what looked like pantyhose.

  Greg frowned. There was no use protesting. But he couldn’t help thinking, Stockings? What on earth am I going to need those for?

  Chapter Six

  FLEAS. THAT WAS WHAT THE STOCKINGS WERE FOR. Fleas.

  In the short time it took to prepare for bed, Greg discovered many annoying and disgusting things about the seventeenth century. The lack of indoor plumbing, for one. Aramis had proudly told him Notre Dame had one of the finest “privies” in the world. Upon seeing it, Greg realized this meant the rest of the world’s plumbing was in very sorry shape. The toilet—which was all the way at the far end of the cathedral from Aramis’s room—was nothing more than a wooden seat suspended over a foul-smelling chute that dumped its mess directly into the Seine. Plus, the seat gave splinters. Then there was no toothpaste, or soap, or washcloths. . . . And not only was the bed merely a small thatch of hay, but Aramis expected to share it with him; there was nowhere else to sleep. Greg could hear rats scurrying through the walls, and bats fluttering in and out of the belfry.

  But the fleas were the worst.

  Despite Aramis’s warning, Greg tried to sleep without the stockings at first. Within a minute, he’d suffered a dozen bites on his legs. So he shimmied into the hot and itchy cloth, but the fleas simply migrated to other parts of his body: his arms, his torso, his neck, his ears. No bite was terribly painful, but they added up. And they didn’t stop coming.

  Aramis, on the other hand, was completely inured to them. He was already snoring, despite the thousands of little mites siphoning his blood.

  After a while, Greg gave up. Sleep was impossible.

  Though his body was tired, his mind kept racing. How was he going to rescue his parents? And even if he did pull off that feat by some miracle, how would they ever get back to their own time? Unless . . . The crystal. Would that work? Dinicoeur had used it to bring them here, so maybe it could bring them back. Yes, they’d left the stone in the future—in the Louvre—but if it existed then, it probably existed now, in the past too, right? Only, finding it wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, it could very well be impossible. Greg didn’t even know where on the entire planet to begin looking for it. Which meant he and his parents might be stuck in a world of poorly made toilet seats and ravenous bloodsucking fleas forever.

  Greg glanced at his watch. It was only ten. He rarely went to sleep before midnight, although Aramis had claimed this was the latest he’d ever stayed awake. This was what life was like before the advent of electricity. Without televisions, computers, video game consoles—or even lightbulbs—life took place while the sun was up. Once it went down, there wasn’t much to do except sleep. . . .

  But there was something Greg could do. He could read Jacob Rich’s diary.

  Greg slunk across the creaky wooden floor and sat by the garret’s single window. The half-moon had risen. Over the pitch-black nighttime city, it was surprisingly bright. A shaft of light spilled into the room, more than enough to read by. Greg emptied his pockets. In addition to the diary, he had a souvenir matchbook from his lunch at the restaurant at the Eiffel Tower, his plastic hotel card key, and a half-empty pack of gum. Oh, and forty euros’ worth of money that wouldn’t be minted for another four hundred years.

  Last: his cell phone. Great, he thought dismally. A lot of good that would do him now. Back home, he couldn’t go five minutes without looking at it. Here, he’d forgotten it even existed. The battery was three-quarters drained. He turned it off. For a second, he was half tempted to hurl it out the window along with the rest of his meager and useless belongings, but he caught himself at the last second. He couldn’t afford to get frustrated or freak out. Time travel might only be temporary. If he came back, he’d need the money, his phone, and his room key.

  “Just read the diary,” he told himself. That would distract him.

  Unfortunately, after three minutes of poring over his great-great-grandfather’s polished scrawl, Greg yawned. It wasn’t just dull, it was the most deathly boring thing he’d ever read—the minutiae of running the family estate: how much hay had been b
aled for the horses, the construction of a new trough for the pigs, guest lists for dinner parties full of names that didn’t mean anything . . . Jacob did mention, more than once, that he was doing research into the family history and discovering “fascinating truths.” But he didn’t bother to share them. Eventually, even Jacob himself seemed to have grown bored. He simply stopped writing, leaving over half the pages in the book blank.

  Greg scowled. His great-great-grandfather went through all that trouble to hide this? Why? Because he was embarrassed about how lame it was? Greg flipped back to the first lines again.

  4/7

  In any life, there comes a time for introspection. This is my time. Or more importantly, to detail what I know. Here now, perhaps more than ever, it is important that pen meets paper. This is the task I will undertake for thine eyes.

  Now that he reread them, the lines struck him as odd. The writing was stilted, and if it was supposed to be an introduction, it raised more questions than it answered. Whose eyes did Jacob think he was writing for? And if the time had really come for introspection—or to detail what he knew—then why had he spent the whole diary writing about such uninteresting things? Maybe the boring stuff was somehow designed to camouflage something of more interest. . . .

  Could it be a code?

  Greg started reading with fresh eyes. But no matter how intently he studied the pages, he couldn’t deduce any hidden message within them. Either there wasn’t a code, or he didn’t have the slightest idea how to find it. Another yawn escaped his lips. Well. There was only one upside to finding such a mind-numbing piece of garbage. Greg tucked it back in his pocket, sprawled on the straw beside Aramis, and—despite the fleas—fell fast asleep.

  Chapter Seven

  GREG AWOKE EARLY TO THE SOUND OF CHIRPING BIRDS, itching for a shower. Literally itching. He was so smothered with flea bites he looked like he’d been printed in Braille. Plus, he stank. And he had bits of straw jammed in places he didn’t want to think about.

  But of course: Showers didn’t exist yet. Baths did, but the only tub was in the head priest’s quarters, according to Aramis.

  “Can we use it?” Greg asked hopefully.

  “What for?” Aramis replied. “Do you want to get sick?”

  “I want to get clean. I haven’t bathed in almost two days.”

  “I haven’t in over a month!” Aramis responded proudly. “Dirt blocks your pores and prevents poisonous vapors from entering your body.”

  “That’s not true,” Greg protested.

  “Tell that to the king,” Aramis countered. “He didn’t have a single bath until he was seven and he’s healthy as can be.”

  Greg tried to explain that back where he came from, bathing had been proven to prevent disease, not cause it. And furthermore, if Aramis tried it, he wouldn’t smell so bad. But Aramis just laughed. “Yet another foolish belief from the backward area of Artagnan!”

  Whatever. Greg could live with the stink. After all, Aramis was going out of his way to help him—a total stranger. He even lent Greg some clothes to help him blend in: a wool tunic that was cinched with a leather belt, soft leather shoes, and the stockings he’d slept in. The tunic was rough and chafing, but the shoes were the worst. The soles were so thin Greg could feel every stone in the floor through them. Aramis then forced him to part his curly hair down the middle. Greg had hoped to avoid this—but he changed his mind when Aramis told him his old style made him look “quite last century, from the era of Louis X.” He had to blend in at all costs if he had any hope of saving his parents.

  At the thought of his parents, his throat tightened. He tried to swallow but found a lump instead. His parents were in danger. Yes, he had been angry with them. Yes, he had thought they were foolish, allowing everything they cared about to slip away. But . . . they were his parents.

  “Let’s you and I try to find out what happened to your family, shall we?” Aramis said gently, as if reading his mind.

  Aramis planned to ask at the Hôtel de Ville if anyone had been tossed into La Mort Triste overnight. “It is a house of law for the common people of Paris,” he explained, and Greg imagined it was a sort of city hall. Thankfully it wasn’t far. Then again, nothing was far. Paris in 1615 was a village compared to the city it would become. The modern city Greg had left had a population of nearly twelve million people. He could only guess how many lived in this stink-pit now. Probably fewer than half a million. The entire city was a lopsided circle less than two miles across. You could walk from one end to the other in under half an hour.

  Aramis donned his cleric’s robe and pulled the cowl over his head.

  “You probably shouldn’t speak unless spoken to, D’Artagnan,” he warned as they set out into the bustling streets.

  Greg nodded mutely. He had no problem with that.

  Once out in the sunshine, Greg could see the Louvre in the distance, protecting the city’s western gates. The Bastille protected the gates to the east; in 1615 it had yet to become a prison. The Hôtel de Ville stood directly between them, smack in the center of the city. Notre Dame, which Aramis clearly considered to be the real center of the city—the spiritual one—was only a few blocks south of it, just across the river.

  Aramis watched Greg gape at the passersby as they snaked their way toward the bridge, and laughed. “You’ve never seen a city this big, have you?”

  “No,” Greg lied, thinking that if Aramis ever saw modern Paris, he’d die of shock.

  Still, it was fascinating. The bridge that led to the Hôtel de Ville was lined with homes—built side to side so that you couldn’t even see the water. If it weren’t for the stench of the Seine, you wouldn’t even know you were on a bridge. Aramis remarked that these were “fine places” to live, as their owners didn’t have to worry about toilets at all. They just cut holes in their floors.

  Just beyond the bridge on the riverbank, they came to a cramped, oddly shaped plaza: the Place de Grève, flanked by the Hôtel de Ville on the east side. Greg felt a strange flood of relief: This area existed in modern Paris, though the Place de Grève of 1615 was a lot smaller than the one he’d seen. It was also jam-packed with temporary stalls, where merchants hawked fruits and vegetables, and makeshift pens for live goats, sheep, chickens, and rabbits, while boats full of freshly caught fish lined the riverbank. Normally, Greg would have been nauseated to see live geese beheaded and eels gutted right before his eyes, but he hadn’t eaten since lunch four centuries earlier, and everything made his stomach growl so loudly that Aramis could hear it.

  “You must be famished,” the cleric said. He pulled a small copper coin from his purse and purchased a loaf of bread still warm from the hearth.

  Greg wanted to protest—Aramis had done so much for him already—but the smell of fresh bread overwhelmed him. “Thanks,” he said, and dug in ravenously. He’d almost devoured the entire thing by the time they headed up the stone steps of the Hotel de Ville and through the wooden doors.

  Greg glanced around warily, searching for any soldiers or guards. There didn’t seem to be any. Clearly, a medieval city hall didn’t need a lot of security.

  “Where are we going?” he whispered.

  Aramis marched purposefully up a cramped staircase to a small room on the second floor. “To see the man in charge of La Mort,” he replied, then pushed open the door.

  Inside the room, slumped asleep at a desk, was a boy who didn’t look much older than Aramis. Greg noticed he was dressed in much nicer clothes: a bright red robe with a sash of ermine over the shoulder. “He’s in charge of the prison?” Greg asked, dumbfounded. “I’ll bet he’s not even eighteen.”

  “So? I’m sixteen and I’m a cleric.”

  “Yes, but shouldn’t he be doing something else?”

  “Like what?” Aramis demanded.

  Greg caught himself before he answered. School probably didn’t even exist. There wasn’t anything for children to do except work. Besides, how long did people even live in 1615? When the life expec
tancy wasn’t much more than forty, eighteen must have made you middle-aged.

  “I don’t know how you do things in Artagnan, but here in Paris, when your family buys you an administrative job, you take what they give you,” Aramis said. He rapped on the doorjamb. The boy bolted upright, startled. He didn’t look all that smart, especially for someone in charge of a whole prison. A string of drool dangled from his jaw.

  “What business have you here?” the boy snapped.

  “I call myself Aramis, and my friend calls himself D’Artagnan,” Aramis answered politely. “We have come to make a plea on behalf of the cathedral of Notre Dame. Might I ask what you call yourself?”

  “Jacques Boule.” The boy wiped his chin with his sleeve. “Your friend doesn’t look like he works for the church.”

  “We are clerics there,” Aramis answered cagily. “But rest assured: We are here with the full authority of the cathedral. It has come to our attention that last night, a man and a woman may have been sent to La Mort Triste from the Louvre.”

  “Perhaps. Let’s see.”

  Greg shifted nervously in his uncomfortable shoes. There was only one item on Jacques’s desk: a folded piece of paper, sealed with wax. As Jacques had been sleeping atop it, it was marked with a large spot of drool. He broke the seal and stared at the paper for a long while. Eventually, it occurred to Greg that he probably couldn’t read. Finally, he gave up and held it out to Aramis. “You’re clerics. You read it.”

  Aramis took the paper. Greg read it over his shoulder.

  Let it be known to those concerned that last evening at the Louvre palace, two criminals were apprehended in an attempt to assassinate His Majesty, King Louis XIII. Both wore foreign clothing and spoke in a strange dialect. They have been incarcerated in La Mort Triste and are sentenced to death by hanging three days hence. His Majesty’s Loyal Subject, Dominic Richelieu

  Greg’s felt his stomach plummet. He seized the door frame to steady himself.

  Aramis turned to him, concerned. “These are your parents?” he whispered.