Malevil, Page 54

  “All right,” she said, “it’s just this. Vilmain attacks. As you say, he draws a blank.” (God knows why, but there she laughed.) “He goes back to La Roque, he starts guerrilla tactics against us, and you don’t fancy that.”

  “Don’t fancy it!” I said. “It would be a catastrophe. He can do us a great deal of damage.”

  “Well, then,” she said, “when he goes away, we must stop him getting back to La Roque. We must go after him.”

  “He’ll have a hell of a start though.”

  She looked at me with an air of triumph. “Yes, but we have our horses!”

  I was staggered. It wasn’t just an excuse; she had really had an idea! And one that I hadn’t had, even though I had spent my whole life with horses. War and horsemanship had just never been connected in my mind. No, that’s not quite true. I had linked them once, just once, when I was trying to persuade the assembly to barter our cow for Fulbert’s two mares. But that had been an argument thought up to win a debate, nothing more. It was our one enormous advantage over Vilmain: our cavalry. And I hadn’t been going to use it!

  I straightened up on my chair. “Catie, you’re a genius!”

  She blushed, and from the sudden joy that flooded through her, making her look like a happy child with half-open lips and shining eyes, I could see how painful it must have been for her to endure my underestimation of her before.

  I pondered a moment. I didn’t tell her that her idea needed elaborating somewhat, because we couldn’t just rush out and follow Vilmain along the road hell for leather. The horses’ hoofs would make a terrific noise on the metaled surface. Vilmain and company would certainly hear us. They would wait for us at a bend, and what targets we’d make for them!

  “Bravo!” I said. “Bravo for Catie. I’ll think that one over. And meanwhile, not a word about it to anyone.”

  “Of course not,” she said with a proud look. And carried away by the unaccustomed weight of her virtues, she even added discretion to them. “Well now,” she said, “I must go. I can see you’re busy. I’ll leave you alone.”

  I stood up, somewhat incautiously, since once around the corner of the desk she hurled herself on my neck and coiled herself around me. Peyssou was right; she wriggled.

  There was a knock on the door, and I called out, “Come in,” without thinking. It was Meyssonnier. Oddly enough, he was the one who blushed and began blinking. Though I was certainly very sad to be the cause of his embarrassment and shock.

  The door slammed behind Catie, and Meyssonnier permitted himself not the slightest reaction, neither the “Well, well” that Peyssou would have growled out in similar circumstances nor the wicked smile Colin would certainly have flashed.

  “Sit down,” I said. “I won’t be a moment.”

  He sat down on the chair, still warm from Catie’s behind. But he sat four square on it, upright, in silence, not moving a muscle. It was very restful sometimes, a man’s company. And I certainly finished my poster much quicker and much more efficiently than I’d begun it.

  “There you are,” I said, handing it over to him. “What do you think?”

  He read it out loud:

  “DOMAIN OF MALEVIL AND LA ROQUE,

  The criminals whose names appear below have been condemned to death:

  VILMAIN, outlaw and ringleader.

  JEAN FEYRAC, murderer of Courcejac.

  For the rest, if they lay down their arms as soon as they are required to do so, we shall restrict their punishment to banishment from our territories with a week’s provision of food.

  Emmanuel Comte,

  Abbé of Malevil”

  Having read it out loud, Meyssonnier then read it again to himself. I watched his long face, the long furrows running down his cheeks. The word “conscience” was written in all his features. He had been a good militant for his party, but he would have made an equally good priest or doctor. And with his passion for public service and his attention to detail, an extremely good administrator. What a pity he had never got to be mayor of Malejac! I was sure that even now he sometimes still regretted that.

  “What do you think?”

  “Psychological warfare,” he said soberly.

  That was the statement of fact. The evaluation would come in good time. He fell to pondering again. Ah, well, I knew he was slow. And I was also sure that the result of his ruminations would be worth the wait.

  “But in my opinion,” he said, “it will only work if Vilmain and Feyrac are killed. In that case, obviously, since they won’t have anyone in command any more, the others may prefer saving their skins to going on with the fight.”

  Earlier, I’d said to Catie, “If things go badly for them.” Meyssonnier, typically, was much more precise about it: “If Vilmain and Feyrac are killed.” He was quite right too. The distinction was important. I must remember it when I gave my firing orders just before the battle.

  I stood up. “That’s it then. So can you find me a piece of plywood, stick that onto it for me, and drill two holes in the top corners?”

  “No difficulty there,” Meyssonnier said as he rose in his turn. He walked around my desk, still holding the proclamation, and stopped as he was about to pass me. “I wanted to ask you. Do you still want us to use only the arrow slits in the merlons?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “There are only five. With the two up on the tower itself that makes seven. And there are ten of us now.”

  I looked at him. “So what do you conclude?”

  “That we must have three men outside instead of two. I thought it worth mentioning now because the dugout is too small for three.”

  First Catie, now Meyssonnier! All Malevil was pondering, searching, inventing. All intent on a single goal. I had the sensation at that moment of being part of a whole that I was commanding and yet to which I was at the same time subordinated, a whole of which I myself was only one part, one cog, and which was thinking and acting of its own volition, like a single being. It was a heady sensation that I had never experienced during my existence “before,” in which everything I did was reduced to the paltry dimensions of my own ego.

  “You look pleased about something,” Meyssonnier said.

  “I am. I was just thinking that it’s really working quite well, Malevil.” The words, even as I spoke them, seemed to me ludicrously inadequate in relation to what I was feeling.

  “All the same,” Meyssonnier said, “don’t you have a few butterflies in your belly now and again?”

  I laughed. “You bet I do!”

  He laughed as well, then said, “You know what it reminds me of? The night before the state exams!”

  I laughed again and walked out with him as far as the spiral staircase, my hand resting on his shoulder. When he had gone, I went back to collect my Springfield and close the door.

  In the outer enclosure Colin, Jacquet, and Hervé were waiting for me, the last two still holding their shovels. Colin, empty-handed, was a little apart from them. Standing too near such giants must have been slightly oppressive for someone so small.

  “Hang on to your shovels,” I said. “I’ve more work for you. But we must wait for Meyssonnier.”

  Catie emerged from the Maternity Ward at the sound of my voice, currycomb in one hand, brush in the other. I knew what she was doing: taking advantage of the fact that Amarante’s bedding was fresh to clean her off. Because Amarante had a passion for rolling, whether her stall was full of droppings or not. La Falvine was sitting on a big block of wood conveniently placed near the entrance to the cave, and she stood up guiltily when she saw me.

  “Don’t get up, Falvine,” I said. “Go on, sit down again. You’ve earned a rest.”

  “No, no,” she said in an ostentatiously self-righteous tone that immediately irritated me. “You don’t think I’ve got time to sit around!” So she remained standing, but without doing a jot more work than when she had been sitting. But at least she was keeping quiet. My sharp words earlier were still having an effect.

>   La Falvine’s behavior had irritated Catie too. Particularly, I imagined, since she would undoubtedly have been obliged to do most of the mucking out very much on her own. Sensing that she was about to start a pecking match with her grandmother, I intervened. “Have you finished with Amarante?”

  “Yes, and none too soon for my liking! Whoo! the dung dust I’ve swallowed! A real waste of time it was taking a shower! And do you think it’s easy grooming horses with a gun slung around you?” (She called our attention to the gun sling by pushing out her chest and laughing as she did so.) “And that idiot mare, with nothing in her head but killing our hens! Yes, and that reminds me, she’s just polished off another! Oh, I gave her a thump on her nose, your precious Amarante, and she’ll remember it a long while.”

  I asked to see the victim. Luckily it was one of the older hens. I handed it to La Falvine. “Here, Falvine,” I said. “You’d better pluck and clean it now. Then take it in to La Menou.”

  La Falvine took it from me, delighted at the task I’d given her. A nice comfortable sitting job, just her line.

  So there we were. Waiting for Meyssonnier. Life at Malevil went on. Jacquet, arms hanging by his side, amazed at finding himself idle, gazed at me with his good-natured, pleading eyes, as moist with affection as any dog’s. Hervé, elegantly poised with his weight on one foot, rubbed his seductive little pointed beard and looked at Catie, who was not returning the look but nevertheless calling attention to her charms—partly for his benefit, partly for mine—by moving various parts of her anatomy this way and that with no conceivable utilitarian end in view. Colin, leaning against the wall, was observing the scene from a distance, with one of his gondola smiles on his face. And La Falvine was now seated again, the hen on her lap. She hadn’t actually begun to pluck it yet, but she would get around to it; she was gathering her strength.

  “The fact is,” Catie said, without discontinuing her undulations, “your Amarante has every vice under the sun. She kicks, she rolls in her droppings, and she kills chickens.”

  “It may be a matter of secondary consideration to you, Catie, but Amarante is also a very good horse.”

  “Oh, I know. You adore her!” she said impudently. “Her too!” She laughed. “All the same, it would be a good idea if you put a little piece of wire netting along the bottom of her door. What’s the point of having eight men about the house if we can’t find one to do a little thing like that for us!” She laughed again, and shot Hervé a glance out of the corner of her eye.

  I left the group, strode quickly up toward the store in the keep, found a roll of wire and a pair of pincers, entered them on Thomas’s withdrawal slate, and all the time, as I went through these mechanical gestures, I was thinking back over Catie’s suggestion for using our cavalry, over Meyssonnier’s invaluable observation about the number of arrow slits, and suddenly I realized something. What we were in the process of doing in Malevil, and quickly, very quickly, since speed was the precondition of our survival now, was learning the art of war. The evidence was blindingly obvious. There was no longer any state to guard us. There was no order but our guns. And not only our guns, our wiles. We who at Easter, not so long ago, had no other concern but to win the Malejac local elections, were now in the process of inculcating in ourselves, one by one, the implacable laws of primitive warrior tribes.

  As I emerged from the store I met Meyssonnier carrying my proclamation. I took it from him. It was perfect. A work of art even. He had left a border of plywood all around the sheet of drawing paper. As I walked back down with him into the outer enclosure, I read it through again. I felt those butterflies in my stomach again suddenly. It wasn’t important. It would pass.

  As we reached the little group, Catie asked me what was on the little board, and I held it up so that they could all read it. Colin too came over.

  “What? Are you an abbé... father?” Hervé said, amazed and rather embarrassed. His sudden and belated respect raised smiles from the others.

  “I have been elected Abbé of Malevil,” I said, “but I’d rather you went on calling me Emmanuel.”

  “Well you were right to put it on your notice anyway,” Hervé said, quickly recovering his aplomb, “because there are some of Vilmain’s men that will worry badly. And you were right as well to call Vilmain ‘outlaw’ like that. Because the way he talks, you’d almost think his extortions were somehow legal, just because of his army rank.”

  I was pleased to hear both these observations. They confirmed what I’d already been thinking, that in the anarchic times we were now living in, brute strength wasn’t in fact all that mattered. Contrary to what one might have expected, a rank, a title, a function, they all still counted. In the general chaos, men were clinging to any straw from the vanished order they could find. Even the tiniest semblance of legality hypnotized them. So I had dealt Vilmain an appreciable blow by ripping off his officer’s insignia—on paper at least.

  “Catie, you will have to let us all out of the cat door. And you will stay down near the gate tower all the time we’re outside. You, Falvine, go up and tell Peyssou that all five of us are going outside. He’s in the cellar with Maurice.”

  “Now?” La Falvine said, without getting up, the hen still completely intact on her lap.

  “Now, now!” I told her. “Stir your stumps.”

  Catie laughed, and pivoting her young bust arrogantly around, she watched her grandma trundling off, quivering like a vast jelly.

  As soon as we were all outside on the road, I walked briskly on ahead with Meyssonnier and in a low voice gave him his instructions. He was to choose a good spot on the side of the next hill along from the Sept Fayards slope, with a good view of the palisade, and organize the digging of another dugout for our extra man outside.

  He nodded. I left him there with Hervé and Jacquet while Colin and I carried on till we found the forest track. Once off the road, I walked on ahead and told Colin to follow exactly in my footsteps. This was because when I came to the branches I had tied across the track I would be walking around them, through the undergrowth, in order not to break them.

  They were all still there. Which meant that the enemy had still not found our shortcut to La Roque. I had imagined he wouldn’t, for the reasons given earlier. But I was glad to have it confirmed.

  That left the second stage of my mission. The last time I had ridden over to La Roque along the road I had noticed a very narrow stretch between two hills, with two charred tree stumps exactly opposite each other on either side of the road. My intention now was to stretch the wire I’d brought along between the two stumps, then hang my anti-Vilmain proclamation from it in the middle of the road. Unfortunately, even using the shortcut, it was a long way on foot. I could hear Colin laboring and panting behind me, and I suddenly remembered with a stab of remorse that he couldn’t have had much sleep the night before out in the dugout. I turned around. “Are you done in?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Only another half hour. Can you make it? As soon as I’ve got my notice up we’ll take a rest.”

  “Don’t you worry about me,” Colin said, screwing his forehead into a determined scowl and sticking out his lower jaw.

  Although he was past forty, he still looked like a little boy to me when he pulled that kind of face. Though I took good care not to tell him so. He set great store by his virility, perhaps not in the same flamboyant style as our big Peyssou, but no less all the same, underneath.

  It was very hot. I was sweating profusely. I opened my collar and rolled up my shirtsleeves. I paused and half turned from time to time in order to hold a long branch so that it wouldn’t whip back into Colin’s face. I noticed how pale he was, the eyes a little hollow, lips set in a grim line. I was relieved on his account when we reached our goal.

  From the forest track down to the road the slope was quite a gentle one at first, but the last twenty yards or so were steep and rocky. Getting down wouldn’t be any problem; if need be I could just slide down on my heels. But
getting back up was going to be quite difficult. The terrain on the far side of the road was identical, which incidentally gave the road itself a rather oppressive feel at this spot. You could sense the two rocky bluffs pressing in as though trying to strangle it.

  I shot down rather more quickly than I’d intended, and landed with a nasty thump on the road. I threaded the wire through the two holes in the plywood, twisted one end tight around one of the stumps, then stretched it across the road and made it fast to the other. I didn’t stay down there a moment longer than necessary. Colin, though I couldn’t see him, was lying concealed in the edge of the undergrowth just before the steep part of the incline, gun in front of him, covering me in the direction of La Roque. Which was a fair guarantee of safety if we had to deal with a single individual. But what about a group? I would be extremely vulnerable then, since I had nothing behind me but absolutely open ground, without a ditch or a bush till the nearest bend, or the alternative, if I wanted to regain the shelter of the undergrowth, of climbing sixty feet of very steep embankment in full view of my attackers.

  I noted that with my rifle slung on my back—that is, not immediately usable—and using both hands, it was still only with the greatest difficulty, after repeated efforts, much slipping and stumbling, that I managed to get back up at all, and even then with extreme slowness.

  When I did reach the top, Colin was so well camouflaged by the undergrowth that I couldn’t see hide nor hair of him. He could see me, presumably, but didn’t dare call out for fear of being heard by others. I heard an owl wail. I halted in amazement. Because ever since the day it happened the world had been so silent, no buzzing of insects, no cries of birds. The plaintive wail came again, very close. I walked toward it and stumbled over Colin’s legs.

  “Hey, watch it! That’s me!” he said in a low voice.

  “Did you hear the owl?”

  “That was me,” Colin said with a soundless laugh. “I was calling you.”

  And he pushed his safety catch back into place with a triumphant click.