On the other side of the Thay there appeared the black animal, large and thin, that had crossed my path. It approached along the water-edge among the kingcups and took a long drink; then, something in the manner of a wolf, though wolf it certainly was not, it went down into the river and, having reached its preferred element, not without some effort, it allowed itself to float away, out of my sight and in silence.
I climbed back up the path. The infant had turned over, and I saw that its back was bleeding from many small wounds and scratches. The blood was already black and the flesh round the wounds was swollen and red. I unfolded a handkerchief which I had in my pocket. To this day I cannot describe the sensation I experienced when my hand, even through the fabric of the handkerchief, perceived the trembling of this miniscule body. Then the infant wailed and kept wailing, its eyes invisible behind their thick lids; and taking it up in my hands I saw the faint marks it had left in the dust.
A moment later it occurred to me to fold in the four corners of the handkerchief and knot them so as to carry the infant like a bundle. The blood stained my handkerchief. It seemed to me, when I reached the side of the Thay—a good mile downstream from the meadow where I had seen the prowling animal, though I kept a nervous lookout for it none the less—that the infant had grown heavier and perhaps larger. It emitted a thin, piping sound that never ceased.
They say that huge sheatfish live in the Thay. In the past I have seen snakes come out of it, and black insects with broad flat feet. That day there were also ragworms, fat and reddish.
Towards the south the river is more clear and forms big pools where our children used to go and swim. The infant writhed and wailed in its little bundle; I was afraid to look at it in case I should see its eyes. It was in one of these pools that, having removed my shoes, I drowned it, hoping thereby soon to lose the memory of how it looked.
That hope was vain. I let four or five big rocks fall into the pool on top of the tiny drowned infant, which perhaps might have lived if I had carried it back to my house in the village and fed it, without telling anyone; so that one night I might bear it back into the forest: ‘Go, child of the woods, find your family.’ And they would have come out of the forest—that family to which it belonged.
Then I went home by another path. In those woods the big bumble-bees fly so close to the ground that when it is sunny the dust and dry leaves stir under them. For a long time I watched them, or looked at the sun shining between the trees and on the leaves and through the delicate wings of insects—then took out my handkerchief—‘The river—back to the river—it’s the infant’s winding-sheet.’
My throat was dry. I wanted to speak aloud; perhaps I should have been heard. ‘Don’t condemn me. That poor thing, could it have lived?’ I pinched my arm, sat down once more not far from the river. The wild beast, I thought, was surfacing there from time to time; often I seemed to see its dark head in the water. At another moment I wanted to go into the river myself. But when I had put in my foot I thought of the infant and gave up the idea of bathing. I even fell to my knees again on the path. But what use was that?
It was soon dusk. I had not left the forest; I was lost. The paths always led me back to the Thay; but more than once I fancied I was passing the corner of the wood where I had found the infant. As for the tall dark animal, the beast with lean flanks, it often rubbed its wet body up against me and once or twice tried to force its grunting muzzle between my thighs. And others, too, of its kind, with thin spotted limbs, but brisker in their running: I did not know them, I could not escape them, for they were swift, they came silently in the night, nudging me without biting. Several times I imagined I could hear the moaning of the child—and I hung my head—and I fell. But most of the time I walked or ran down the muddy path—through the night—through the rain that came at its blackest hour—even through my sleep, the worst of my persecutors. Morning found me on a slope at the foot of the graveyard wall. My clothes were sodden, crushed leaves were sticking to them and to my hair. There was blood on my face; fear in the night, I think, had given me a nose-bleed.
In the evening after a day passed in sleep I saw that there were long cuts also on my arms and legs, of which some, the deepest, had bled abundantly. A little later I left that country, the Murton that I so loved, its valley, its hills, the Greater and the Lesser, and went to die, murderer that I am, far from the river.
II
Crucifixions
BRUNEL’S INVENTION
THERE were five of them going up to La Redotière, and already three of them were dragging their feet—they were hot, thirsty and now at midday they had had enough of this stony uphill road without shade. The man they met at the beginning of the forest path was coming down the mountain, a canvas hat pulled over his eyes. Brunel and Muscat dived under the beeches, but Secretan and Fleming squatted down on the roadside and brought out their water-bottle, while Sausserau accosted the man, contrary to the rules.
‘Excuse me, do you know if it’s still a long way to the sheepfold?’
The man stared at the boys from under the peak of his white hat.
‘Properly speaking, a good half hour: more if you go by the forest. Are you all alone?’
‘Yes,’ replied Sausserau, soon to regret it.
‘But you’re just kids. Aren’t you afraid?’
Fleming stood up, feeling a shiver under his shirt.
‘Someone’s coming. They’ll find us.’
‘They’ll find us,’ echoed Sausserau.
In fact that was the object of the walk. They had started before sunrise from the campground at Les Alezards, one party making for La Redotière and another, led by Sauffert, the oldest of them and the one with real responsibility for them, for Maubranches. The adults had searched their knapsacks and confiscated their mobiles. Secretan, indeed, and Muscat, did not possess them. They had to find La Redotière by map and compass alone. From the camp-site to St Alban’s the way was easy and cool; after the chapel they climbed in direct sun, and the glare from the gravel of the path hurt their eyes. The sky, however, was far from blue. Clouds were swelling up in the distance behind ranges of hills of greater or less distinctness. Towards midday they heard thunder; then the clouds dispersed and the heat redoubled, even though it was not yet summer.
After the encounter with the man, the laggards cut through the wood to overtake Muscat, but without success. Muscat was the fastest of them, and Brunel always followed at his heels, afraid of being alone.
‘Muscat is a real swine. He could have waited for us.’
‘We could be dying, he wouldn’t notice. Now he’ll spend the evening making fun of us.’
‘Yes.’
***
The forest was of beeches planted far apart, where formerly medlars had been introduced. One was growing right up against a scrawny beech, and their trunks were intertwined, something that made the boys laugh. Secretan groaned. He had emptied his water-bottle to the last drop. In one of their rare silences (they chattered constantly) they heard a car pass on the road below. That couldn’t be Josselin, one of the three adults in the camp: it was too early. ‘You will spend the night all alone up there, but I’ll come round about four o’clock to see you’ve got there all right.’
‘Josselin! What a clown! He makes us walk for mile after mile, and as for him, he swans up in a car.’
‘He’ll have to walk a bit, all the same. You can’t get anything to the sheepfold by car.’
‘What? But he won't end up dying of thirst like me.’
‘Is it true that he’s going to bring loads of water to us?’
***
Despite their secret hopes, they were not lost. At about three o’clock they reached the edge of the wood. From there a grassy slope mounted straight towards the great fold of La Redotière. Muscat and Brunel were waiting for them, stretched under a dead tree and letting their legs soak up the sun. Muscat was laughing. Brunel had taken off his shirt and placed over his stomach a sheep’s jaw he had found in th
e grass. He was thinking of his father.
They dawdled up to the sheepfold, looking for flints, bits of bone, Roman coins. They ran baying after Secretan, who was considered fat. They made his nose bleed, and he pelted them with stones. Muscat, who was struck on the knee, bled in his turn, at which the others were envious. By four o’clock they were all bloodied in one way or another and shouting among the desolate mounds of La Redotière, their foreheads and cheeks covered with dried blood. Muscat told them to wash before Josselin arrived. ‘He won’t stay, anyhow. When he’s gone we can get back to mucking about.’
Josselin arrived—they had heard his little car climbing up in the forest—and found them established in the shade behind the sheepfold. He inspected their knapsacks and judged the boys fit to pass the night alone on the mountain. ‘Muscat, it’s all right because you’re there.’ Muscat said nothing. He had blood under his finger-nails, and was sucking them as he listened to Josselin. ‘You’re in charge, O.K.? You’re not going to play the giddy goat up there?’
A pleasure to which, none the less, they surrendered themselves as soon as his back was turned. They had climbed on La Redotière the previous year, in high summer, but they had been caught by a storm and not reached the crest.
***
‘There’s a cave,’ Secretan claimed.
‘Where did you hear that, idiot?’
‘It was Chauvin who was talking about it this morning.’
‘Cave my arse!’ said Muscat. ‘Josselin wouldn’t have left us alone here if there’d been a cave. He’d have been too afraid we’d go and look at it.’
***
La Redotière was the shape of a pie sliced in half. From the shepherd’s hut you ascended along the side of the hill without a path to the edge of the cliff. The highest point was called ‘the Peak’: the surveyors had marked it with a yellow board which also gave the altitude. From the Peak, on a clear day, you saw the whole range of the Alps. The boys, who were looking for the cave, hardly heeded it.
There was no cave, but a fissure more than a kilometre in length parallel to the cliff. At the bottom of the fissure the snow had not completely melted. A massive tree with bunched foliage grew at the southern end of the fissure. They carefully explored the side of the fault, and sounded the snow with a long stick without touching bottom. In places, however, the crack was more than two metres deep. Secretan suggested that they spend the night there, but the others shook their heads.
‘It’s going to be cold tonight.’
‘We were dying of heat just now.’
‘That was in the valley. We’re up more than two thousand metres here.’
‘One thousand, six hundred and twenty seven.’
The board on the Peak did in fact say 1627 metres. They walked along the edge of the crevice, their legs trembling under the influence of vertigo. Muscat walked close to the drop and leant over from time to time, still thinking of the cave. All along the crest strange flowers were growing. A short thick stem carried a single flower, blood red, the shape of a small bell. Fleming on an idle whim tore up some of these flowers and threw them on the grass. Muscat gave him a kick in the behind.
‘You’re a real thug, Flem. What’s that supposed to do?’
Nothing, certainly, it was quite pointless. They gave up the idea of exploring the path which, once beyond the cliff, went down the other side of the pass into the beeches. The sun had set; when, precisely, they had not noticed. ‘We’ll doss down early, and go up again tomorrow morning,’ said Muscat without much believing it.
They set off back in good spirits to the sheepfold, discussing what they were going to eat and drink. Josselin had thoughtfully brought up bottles of water, but forbidden them to light a fire. As they went, Muscat considered the best way of disobeying. What danger was there in making a fire in the sheepfold, under the open sky, between stones?
The first stars came out. Brunel, who was interested in them, went off to lie in the open and look at them. The four others argued about the right to keep up the fire and then to grill the sausages that had been already cooked and the slices of bread. An aeroplane passed overhead winking blue and red lights. Brunel felt weariness attack him muscle by muscle. He raised his hands towards the sky which had become sombre: heavy stars, heavy Brunel, heavy earth.
***
Fleming had burnt himself with a piece of bread. Secretan bound up his hand. Brunel, who had come back into the enclosure, suddenly fell asleep standing up. ‘And on a ship, you know, you have to turn the handle for an hour to have electricity,’ Sausserau was saying. Muscat yawned. ‘What a life you had!’ joked the clumsy Fleming with a laugh. Secretan had some cards. They grouped themselves round the dying fire and played by the light of an electric torch which Muscat had wedged between two stones. When the cold came down they went indoors.
Brunel saw dragons twirling beneath the bare roof of the shepherd’s hut. Secretan was already asleep. Fleming and Sausserau were arguing about a minor point of play. ‘Why wouldn’t you let me play that? I’d have squeezed you. You’d have been helpless.’ Muscat was reading in his sleeping bag, his back against the wall, his knees raised. A bird hooted at regular intervals—a scops owl, Brunel thought.
The light of the night was now leaking in, murky and faint, through the two low-set windows of the hut and the gaps in the roof. Fleming, who awoke for the first time towards one in the morning, heard the sound of steps outside, and shook Muscat, who was sleeping near him. The windows of the shepherd’s hut were pale to the eye. The moon had risen. Muscat put his fingers on his lips, and Fleming, startled, opened his mouth. Muscat gently withdrew his legs from the sleeping bag, stood up, and went to the window, his back stooped. Through the window he saw the great slope of La Redotière swept by the wind under the moon. He made a sign to Fleming to get up and join him. They went out silently by the door beside which they had left their boots. Fleming shivered, more from cold than fear; but Muscat felt his heart, his intestines, sparkling with happiness beneath the mantle of his skin. They made the round of the sheepfold and, seeing nothing on the side towards the forest, took the path to the pass.
Brunel was sitting in a room with no light, holding a young swan with grey plumage on his knees. The bird collapsed, melted, dissolved on Brunel’s lap; its little black eye, swimming above this disaster, still fixing the boy for a while.
‘They’ve gone out.’
‘What’s that?
‘They’ve gone out—Muscat and Flem.’
‘You’re joking.
‘Just use your eyes.’
‘They’re mad.’
Brunel saw them in their turn file out, little Secretan and burly Sausserau; he heard without fully understanding their whispered exchanges, engulfed as he still was in his nightmares. He must have fallen back into sleep, wandering off again into lands of shadow, and was suddenly restored to wakefulness by a terrifying spasm. He found himself sitting up against the wall, his hands pressing on his stomach. He must have died in a dream. He didn’t know of what. He held up his hand before the window, fingers spread, seething—with rage. ‘The dirty swine, they’ve cleared off, all of them.’ The square of light which the moon cast upon the cement floor of the hut was moving very slowly. Brunel got dressed. His stomach ached.
But walking beneath the moon under the vast sky of La Redotière dispelled the pain. Feeling some relief, Brunel went straight towards the pass and the cliff to which the others had surely preceded him. A small animal passed him running ahead in the grass: it was swift and long, a hare hardly darker than the herbage. The grass rustled. Brunel was at the foot of the steepest part of the slope, which led up to the fissure. He turned to look back at the valley. In the distance there were moving lights, motor vehicles, probably, on the mountain roads. A memory of the preceding year returned to him. He had been at the back of a car driven by his father. It was night. There was a medical broadcast on the radio. Brunel was looking at the clouds and the moon through the open top of the car.
&
nbsp; ***
He found no trace, as he climbed the slope, of the big red flowers which none of them had been able to name. They had closed up; perhaps they had even sunk back into the earth. He bent over the grass, put his knees on a flat stone, and lifted his eyes. Towards the summit of the mountain, away from the moon, the sky was sprinkled with stars that you saw better, Brunel realised, if you looked at them with your head on one side. His anger came back to him.
The moon set before he reached the fissure. All the stars in the sky, he thought, had passed under his skin and threatened to transfix him. When he reached the edge of the fault, he first heard the air sigh and whistle; then he saw the night-birds, pallid and unresting, flying the length of the fissure and about his ears. His comrades, Muscat, Fleming, Sausserau and Secretan, were lying in the hollows of the rock with blood on their lips. The man in the white hat was trampling savagely on the four corpses. Brunel felt in himself a hideous rending.
***
At La Sainte a lorry was blocking the road; a dog came barking in front of Josselin’s car, soon followed by a young man with a sour face. ‘Excuse me, I must get past,’ said Josselin. ‘I’m going up to the pass to look for my kids.’
‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘We’ll move aside in a minute. There’s a queue. You must wait your turn.’
Two women were standing near the lorry. One held a lamb in her arms. Along the side of the fence, within a space of 100 metres, Josselin saw three heaps of dead sheep. Further on, however, lambs and ewes were going peacefully about their ovine business. Josselin, whose parents had a vineyard down in the valley, knew little about the diseases of sheep, and did not want to be held up. At the col of Veynes he took the bumpy track which climbed to the sheepfold where the boys had spent the night. ‘I shan’t go back by La Sainte. It wouldn’t do to show them that.’ He thought he saw other sheep among the beeches, alive, these, but cringing at the approach of the evil that had killed the others, or, worse, thought Josselin, of the vet’s knife. In an epidemic, you slaughter the whole flock: that, at least, Josselin knew.
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