Assassin's Creed: Unity by Oliver Bowden

Author:Oliver Bowden [Bowden, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

JANUARY 1789

i

On a hillside overlooking a tiny village outside Rouen, three landworkers wearing leather jerkins laughed and joked, and then, on the count of three, heaved a gallows onto a low wooden platform.

One of the men placed a three-legged stool beneath the gallows, then bent to help his two companions as they went to work hammering in the struts that would keep the gallows in place, the rhythmic knock-knock carried on the wind to where I sat on my horse, a beautiful and calm gelding that I’d called Scratch, in honor of our beloved and long-since-departed wolfhound.

At the bottom of the hill was a village. It was a tiny village, more like a cluster of disconsolate shacks and a tavern that had been scattered around along the perimeter of a brown and muddy square, but it was a village all the same.

A freezing rain had eased to a steady and just-as-freezing drizzle and a fierce, bone-chilling wind had blown up. The villagers waiting in the square wrapped shawls tightly around themselves, clasping shirts at their necks as they awaited the day’s entertainment—a hanging. What could be better? Nothing like a good hanging to raise the spirits when the frost had killed the crops and the local landowner was raising his rents and the king in Versailles had new taxes he hoped to enforce.

From a building I guessed was the jailhouse there came a noise, and the frozen spectators turned to see a priest wearing black hat and robes emerge, his voice rich with solemnity as he read from the Bible. Behind him came a jailer, who held a length of rope, the other end of which tied the hands of a man who wore a hood over his head, who staggered and slipped in the mud of the square, blindly shouting protestations in the direction of no one in particular.

“I think there’s been some mistake,” he was shouting—except he shouted it in English, before remembering to do it in French. Villagers stood watching him as he was led toward the hill, some crossing themselves, some jeering. There was not a gendarme to be seen. No judge or officer of the law. This was what passed for justice out here in the country, it seemed. And they said Paris was uncivilized.

The man, of course, was Ruddock, and looking down the hill upon him, as he was pulled by rope so that he could swing at the end of another one, it was difficult to believe he had ever been an Assassin. No wonder the Creed had washed their hands of him.

I pushed back the hood of my robes, shook my hair free and looked down upon Bernard, who stood gazing up at me with wide, adoring eyes.

“Here they come, mademoiselle,” he said, “just as I promised they would.”

I dangled a purse into his palm then tweaked it away when he went to grasp it.

“And that’s definitely him, is it?” I asked.

“That’s him all right, mademoiselle. Man who goes by the name of monsieur Gerald Mowles.

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