I hurtled down the two flights of the spiral staircase like a madman, flung myself at the bathroom door and tried to open it, forgetting that it was bolted, then hammering with both fists like a lunatic on the massive wood panels, I yelled, “Come quickly. Something’s happened to Peyssou!”
Without waiting for the others, I set off again at a run. In order to reach the field we were plowing I had to run down the road along the side of the cliff to the flat beneath, then turn left around a hairpin bend, cross back under the castle, and keep on down the bed of the dried-up stream till I reached the nearer branch of the Rhunes. I was running as hard as I possibly could, the blood thudding in my temples, completely at a loss for an explanation. Amarante was so gentle and quiet that I simply couldn’t believe she’d attacked her driver in order to escape. And anyway, escape to where? Since there wasn’t a single blade of grass to be had anywhere and at Malevil she was being fed all the hay and barley she needed.
After a while I could hear the others’ boots on the rocky track behind me as they struggled to catch up to me. A hundred yards before I reached the field I was overhauled and passed by Thomas, who was running with long, very rapid strides and was soon a good way ahead of me. I watched him as he stopped, knelt down beside Peyssou, turned him over very carefully, and put a hand under his head. “He’s alive!” he shouted to me as I approached.
I squatted down in my turn, exhausted, completely out of breath. Peyssou opened his eyes, but they were still vague. He couldn’t focus them. His nose and left cheek were covered with earth and there was a great deal of blood flowing from the back of his head, staining Thomas’s shirt where it was resting. Colin, Meyssonnier, and a completely naked Momo still streaming with water arrived as I was examining the wound, which was certainly wide but appeared at first glance to be only superficial. Finally La Menou appeared. She had stopped off to pick up a bottle of brandy from the gate tower, and she was also carrying my bathrobe, in which she proceeded to swaddle the naked Momo before even glancing at Peyssou.
I poured a little brandy onto the wound and Peyssou groaned. Then I poured a generous mouthful between his lips and cleaned the earth from his face with a brandy-soaked handkerchief.
“It couldn’t have been Amarante who did that,” Colin said. “He was lying all wrong for that.”
“Peyssou,” I said, rubbing his temples with a little of the brandy, “can you hear me? What happened?” Then, to the others, “In any case, Amarante never shies.”
“It’s something I’ve always noticed in her,” La Menou said, “even when she’s playing. That one, she can’t bring herself to get her bottom in the air.”
Peyssou’s eyes began to focus, and he said in a low but distinct voice, “Emmanuel.”
I gave him a second mouthful of brandy and began rubbing his temples again. “What happened?” I asked, patting his cheeks and trying to hold his gaze, which kept tending to swim away into vagueness again.
“He’s had a pretty nasty shock,” Colin said as he stood up. “But he’s coming around. He already looks better.”
“Peyssou! Do you hear me? Peyssou!”
I looked up. “Menou, pass me the belt of my robe.”
As soon as she handed it to me I laid it across one knee, folded my handkerchief in four, soaked it in the brandy, then pressed it carefully over the wound, which was still bleeding copiously. I asked La Menou to hold the dressing in place and tied the belt around his head and forehead to hold it in place. La Menou did as I said without a word, her gaze fixed the whole time on Momo, who had certainly “caught his death” running around outside in the cold like that.
“I don’t know,” Peyssou said suddenly.
“You don’t know how it happened?”
“No.” He closed his eyes again, and I promptly slapped his cheeks.
“Come and look at this, Emmanuel!” Colin called. He was standing over by the plow, back toward us but looking over his shoulder, an expression of distress on his face, staring into my eyes.
I got up and went over to him.
“Look at that,” he said quietly.
The first time we’d tried Amarante in the plow we had realized that the buckle and strap fastening the shaft to her harness was inadequate. We had replaced it with a length of nylon cord, made secure to the pole by a series of loops and knots. The cord had been cut.
“A man did that,” Colin said. He was pale and dry-lipped. “With a knife.”
I took the two ends of cord from him so that I could inspect them more closely. The cut was clean, without a trace of raggedness or pulling. I bowed my head without a word. I was incapable of speech.
“The fellow who unharnessed Amarante,” Colin said, “undid the breeching buckles and the left-hand buckle of the girth, but when he found the knots on the right side, he lost his nerve and pulled out his knife.”
“And before all that,” I said in a shaky voice, “he hit Peyssou on the head, from the back.”
I realized that La Menou, Meyssonnier, and Momo had gathered around us. They all had their eyes on my face. Thomas was looking up at me too from his position on the ground, one knee on the earth, the other supporting Peyssou’s back.
“Lord, Lord, what a thing!” La Menou said, casting a frightened glance all around her and seizing Momo by one arm in order to pull him to her side.
There was a silence. Along with a stirring of fear I experienced a feeling of mocking irony. God knew with what ardor, with what love in our hearts, with what almost despairing eagerness we had prayed in our hearts that there would turn out to be other members of the human race than ourselves who had survived. Well, now we could be certain of it. There were.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I chose the .22 rifle (given me by my uncle on my fifteenth birthday) and Thomas took the over-and-under shotgun. It was agreed that the others would stay inside Malevil with the other shotgun. Not much in the way of armaments, but then Malevil had its ramparts, its battlements, its moats.
As we reached the hairpin bend that led from the Malevil entrance road to the little track down to the Rhunes, I cast a long look back at the castle perched on its cliff. I noticed that Thomas was looking up at it too. No point in trying to tell each other what we were feeling. With every step, we both felt more naked, more vulnerable. Malevil was our refuge, our stronghold, our eyrie. Till now it had protected us from everything, including the utmost refinements of human technology. What a nightmare, leaving its shelter, and what a nightmare too that long walk, one behind the other. The gray sky, the gray earth, the stumps of the blackened trees, the silence and immobility of death. And at our goal the only human beings still alive in that lifeless landscape were waiting in ambush to strike us down.
I was quite certain about that. The theft of the mare, given that it was utterly impossible to cover up the tracks of her hoofs in the burned and dusty earth, could only mean that the thieves had expected us to pursue them, and that somewhere, at some point in that denuded landscape, a surprise attack awaited us. Yet we had no choice. We could not just allow someone to get away with knocking one of us over the head and stealing a horse from us. And unless we wished to remain passive, then we had to begin by playing the aggressor’s game.
Between the moment when I had first seen Peyssou lying motionless in the field beside the Rhunes and the moment when we left Malevil, no more than a half hour had elapsed. It was evident that the thief had lost a great deal of his lead in his struggles with Amarante. I could see the places where she dug in her heels then stabbed the earth with her hoofs as she wheeled this way and that. Although so docile, she was also attached to her stable, to Malevil, and to Bel Amour, whose stall was next to hers and whom she could always see through the barred opening between them. Moreover she was a young animal and still easily frightened by the slightest thing—a puddle, a hosepipe, a stone catching her hoof, a newspaper flapping in the wind. The human footsteps running alongside the hoofprints showed clearly that the man had not dared mount her barebac
k. Proof that Amarante’s Anglo-Arab spirit had alarmed him and that he was not a very good rider. The miracle was that Amarante, despite her occasional shows of resistance, had nevertheless consented to let him lead her away.
The Rhunes valley was a plain scarcely a hundred yards wide running between two lines of once wooded hills, with the twin rivers running from north to south and the small local road running parallel to them along the flank of the hills to the east. The thief had not followed the road, which was quite straight and on which he would have been clearly visible from a great distance, but made his way instead just under the line of hills to the west, a much more winding path but one that offered much better cover. It seemed to me that we were in fact in very little danger until he had regained his hideout. Neither he nor any possible companions were going to engage in any action before Amarante was safely out of the way in stable or paddock.
I nevertheless remained on the alert, my rifle no longer slung over my shoulder but held in my hand, eyes constantly on either the ground or the way ahead. Neither Thomas nor I spoke. Despite the cold air, the tension was making me perspire, the palms of my hands especially, and although Thomas was outwardly just as calm as myself, I noticed that when he removed his gun from his shoulder, where he had been resting it in order to give his arm a rest, there was a damp patch where it had been.
We had been walking for an hour and a half when Amarante’s tracks left the Rhunes and turned off at a right angle to the west, between a hill and a cliff. The topography and orientation of the place were the same as those at Malevil: cliff to the north, and running along the foot of the cliff a water course, in Malevil’s case now dried up of course, but here a small stream, very full and fast flowing, with the water at the same level as the surrounding land. Obviously nothing had been done to dredge or widen its bed, and its continual flooding had turned the little plain between hill and cliff, an expanse of barely forty yards, into something little better than a bog. I remembered that for this reason my Uncle Samuel had declared it strictly out of bounds for the Sept Fayards horses. And certainly none of us, even in our daredevil Club days, had ever dared set foot in that swamp, onto which no tractor’s wheels had ever ventured.
Which didn’t mean I was ignorant of who its inhabitants were. They were people generally said to be brutish, dour, immoral, and worse still, poachers. Furthermore, they lived in a cave, a deep recess in the cliff that had been turned into a dwelling by the simple expedient of building a wall with windows in it across the mouth. It was on account of the nature of this dwelling that Monsieur le Coutellier, the schoolmaster, always referred to them as the “troglodytes,” a name that delighted us in our Club days. But for Malejac generally they were simply the “foreigners,” or worse still—for the fact that the father came from the north caused confusion in local minds—as the “Gips.” They were all the more disconcerting in that you never saw hide nor hair of them in Malejac, since they did all their buying in Saint-Sauveur. And all the more terrible, needless to say, because no one knew anything about them to speak of, not even how many members there were in the tribe. Though it was rumored that the father—who in both gait and facial structure, my uncle had once assured me, bore a close resemblance to Cro-Magnon man—had “done time” in prison on two occasions, once for assault and battery, once for having raped his daughter. The latter, the only member of the family I knew, at least by name, was named Catie and was in service with the mayor of La Roque. She was a very good-looking girl, so rumor had it, with extremely bold eyes and a way of carrying on that set many tongues wagging. If rape there had been, then it had certainly not put her off men as a result.
The name of the troglodytes’ farm was another thing that used to intrigue us in Club days: L’Étang, the tarn. It intrigued us because, needless to say, there was no tarn any more, just a patch of swampy land between a cliff and hill, itself pretty steep. Neither electricity nor a track to it. A sort of damp gorge into which no one ever ventured, not even the postman, who left their mail, which meant about a letter a month in fact, at Cussac, a beautiful old farmhouse up on the hill. We at least knew through Boudenot the postman what their name was: Wahrwoorde. No name for Christians, it was generally agreed. Boudenot used to say that the father was a “savage,” but not poor, far from it. He had stock and some good acreage up on the hillside.
I caught up to Thomas, brought him to a halt with a hand on his arm, and putting my mouth close to his ear, whispered, “It’s in there. My turn to lead.”
He glanced around him, looked at his watch, then answered equally quietly, “My quarter hour’s not up.”
“Forget that. I know the terrain. Follow me ten yards behind.”
I walked on past him till I was a little way ahead, then waved him to a stop again with my hand at hip level and stopped myself. I took the binoculars out of their case, raised them to my eyes, and inspected the terrain. The narrow meadow sloped up gently between hillside and cliff, divided transversely by earth banks and dry-stone walls. The hillside presented exactly the same naked and blackened appearance as all the others we had seen. But the meadow itself, being well protected by the cliff to the north and also by its sunken situation generally, had suffered, well, let’s say one degree less during the holocaust. It presented the appearance of a place whose vegetation had been burned, certainly, but without being totally charred, and without the earth—perhaps because it was so sodden with water the day it happened—assuming that gray, dusty look that was apparent everywhere else. Here and there, in fact, you could even make out yellowish tufts that must have been rank grass, and two or three stripped and blackened trees still upright and recognizable.
I slid the binoculars back into their case and moved warily forward. But another surprise awaited me. The ground was firm and resistant under my feet. The day it happened, drawn up by the intense heat, the water in the ground must have sizzled up into the air like steam rushing from the spout of a boiling kettle. And as there had been no rain since, the marsh was now dry.
While my mind remained perfectly cool, recording all these details with absolute clarity, my body on the other hand was playing nasty tricks on me—sweat pouring from my palms, heart beating far too fast, temples thumping—and as I put away the binoculars I was even aware of a slight trembling of the hands, which didn’t augur too well for my aim if it came to shooting. I concentrated on taking slow deep breaths, timing them to coincide with my steps, while I kept my eyes alternately on Amarante’s tracks on the ground just ahead and on the meadow sloping up in front of me. Not a breath of wind, not a sound, even in the distance. Ahead, ten yards away now, a low dry-stone wall.
It all happened very quickly. I noticed a pile of droppings that looked quite fresh. I halted and bent down to examine them. To be more precise, I was intending to touch the back of my hand to the heap to feel whether it was still warm. At the same moment something hissed over my head. A second later, Thomas appeared beside me, also squatting, and holding an arrow in one hand. Its black and extremely sharp tip was covered in earth.
At the same instant there was another hiss, just as loud as the first. I dropped flat and began leopard-crawling to the drystone wall. I thought I had left Thomas behind, so quickly had I acted, but to my great surprise, when I laid my gun down beside me and turned onto my left side, I found him lying on the ground next to me, already busy building a peephole on top of the wall with dislodged stones. Strangely, it seemed to me, he had thought to bring the arrow with him. It lay beside him on the ground, its yellow and green flight feathers the only spots of color in the landscape. I stared at it. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The troglodytes were fighting us with bow and arrows!
I threw a quick glance over the wall. Fifty yards ahead, cutting right across the narrow valley, there ran another dry-stone wall. In the middle of it there was a big walnut tree, burned but still standing. A well-chosen position, but they had made an error nevertheless. They should have let us cross our little wall and then attacked when we had
no possible cover. They had fired too soon, presumably encouraged by my immobility as I noticed the heap of droppings.
I heard a fresh hiss, and I don’t know why but I drew in my legs. It was a fortunate reflex, because the arrow, which seemed to come straight down out of the sky, embedded itself deeply in the earth about two feet away from my feet. It must have been shot into the air at a very nicely calculated angle to achieve that accuracy in its trajectory. And the bowman’s guide mark, I realized immediately, was Thomas’s improvised peephole. I signaled to him to follow me and crawled away a few yards along the wall to the left.
Another arrow hissed through the air, perfectly aligned on the peephole we had just left, but a yard away from the previous one. As soon as it embedded itself in the earth I began counting the seconds; one, two, three, four, five. On five, another hiss. So it took the archer five seconds to pull out an arrow, fit it, draw, aim, and let fly. And there weren’t two bows either, there was only one. The arrows always came in strict sequence, never two together.
I pulled the telescopic sight off my gun. The very fact of its magnification made sighting a slow business. Then I whispered, “Thomas, crawl back beyond the peephole to the other side. As soon as I’ve fired twice put your head up above the wall, fire both your barrels at random, then move again immediately.”
He crawled off. I watched him. As soon as he was in position I thumbed off my safety catch, drew myself up into a crouched kneeling position, and raised the gun with both hands until it was almost parallel with the top of the wall. I straightened up abruptly, shouldering the gun as I did so, swung around from the waist, thought I glimpsed one tip of the bow behind the walnut tree, fired two shots, and dropped again. At once, while I was still crawling away from my firing position, I heard the boom! boom! of Thomas’s two barrels, much louder than the tiny curt cracks of my own bullets.