Darkscapes

by Anne-Sylvie Salzman

  He stationed his car under the beeches; the rest of the way had to be made on foot, something that in the cool of the morning was not unpleasant. In his rucksack Josselin carried a thermos of chocolate and a bag of croissants.

  He found the boys behind the sheepfold in the process of filling up a hole they had dug, they said, to bury a hare found dead in the grass. Secretan had eyelids still swollen with sleep; Fleming was yawning and cleaning his nails with the help of a carefully pointed match.

  Josselin sniffed the air, pointed with his foot at branches turned to charcoal.

  ‘Hey, boys, I told you not to make a fire.’

  Muscat had already laid out at the foot of the wall, in full sunlight, Josselin’s provisions. They squatted down and had breakfast.

  ‘We were very careful, Josselin.’

  While the others folded up their sleeping bags, Josselin took Muscat aside.

  ‘You don’t look as if you’ve had much sleep. Everything went all right, apart from the fire?’

  Muscat had large brown eyes, in which the pupils, this bright morning, contracted to tiny holes. Josselin read nothing in them but tranquillity.

  ‘Everything went super-right.’

  ‘You didn’t do anything silly?’

  Muscat looked up at the pass and gave a slightly foolish laugh.

  Josselin piled the kids’ knapsacks into the boot of the car. They had competed for the front seat with vigorous kicks; Sausserau finally succeeded to it. The other three squeezed into the back seat. Fleming and Secretan fell asleep when the car regained the road, and Muscat, his stomach still slightly empty saw through the window the blazing stars of the past night.

  II

  Crucifixions

  SHIOGE

  YOU get to Shioge—when you need to get there, something seldom necessary—by a road that is well kept and almost straight: a little road that starts after the last house of Coll, makes a big circuit round the Peninsula, and rejoins the main road by passing through the Little Valley. Today, however, you turn back before the Little Valley, which is also called, or was once also called the Happy Valley; now the few houses that were there are falling into ruin. The roofs and walls are hollowed out by rain in the dark months; the summer heat bakes these wounds hard. All this dates, no doubt, from the year the sheep died, and the crofter of Shioge after them. The house in which he lived no longer exists, although from high up, if you know what you are looking for and where to find it, you can make out the site, and on certain sunny evenings the shadows of where its four walls used to stand are long and dark.

  I do not know on what day it was that the sick lamb was noticed in the pasture that runs beside the road after the bend it makes to reach the Little Valley. Later a cairn was raised as a memorial of those bad times. At Shioge a sick lamb is everyone’s affair. The lamb itself, standing in the short grass, was nodding its head unhappily, a strand of grass hanging absurdly from its lip. Its eyes were half shut, and it had on its back a wound as large as a hand, purulent and food for flies—and for other creatures, according to the crofter of Shioge, a man still young who had ceased, nevertheless, to look for a wife; not something, as he said, ‘about which I much care’. This shepherd watched his lamb suffer for two days, and killed it on the third, in front of the other animals. It was too weak to be driven to the shed. On the third day it had sustained other wounds, one in its breast, another in the interior of its ear, and small ones about its eyes and mouth. The lamb was lying in a ditch, and trembled when the shepherd touched its forehead. The shepherd of Shioge killed it with a blow of a cudgel on its neck, and then threw the body into a pool of water on Nis—that is what they called the Peninsula that pushed its two prongs out into the sea beyond the village. There was nothing there but bog and dead heather. The man from Shioge, the shepherd, was afraid for his sheep and those of his neighbours, the disease being one to which he could not put a name.

  ‘I should say it was a bird; an eagle perhaps, or rather a skua or a gull that’s come to feed on them as they usually feed on carcasses,’ the shepherd told himself; but he did not really believe it. These birds, he knew, never attack a living animal.

  The following week he went to look over his sheep in the Valley and on the high ground. In good mild years like this he had a flock of more than three hundred, which he marked with a red circle and a green. Once he passed (without having intended it) the hole where he had thrown the body of the lamb. The water there was black. A soft warm rain came down and made Shioge think of lambing time, that peculiar time when the lambs, hardly able to walk, follow their dams fearlessly onto roads and into ditches. He loved such days.

  At the end of the week he saw, high up in the valley, another sick animal. It was not one of his. The evil had bitten into the blue mark of Bua. When Shioge came back from above, where all the flock seemed healthy, he found a dead ewe. The same bird, he said to himself, had dug into its back with repeated stabs of its beak, though the thing was impossible. He did not remove the body; the wounds, he persuaded himself, were not the result of sickness. Nor did he say anything to the other shepherd, the crofter at Bua, since the bird’s bite fell outside the realm of the possible, as did the nameless disease.

  Nevertheless, two more of that year’s lambs died at Shioge. By September the lambs were already large animals, but they succumbed in the same fashion as the first lamb and the one belonging to Bua. The deep wounds were to the back and the head, they knelt by the roadside and died, one finished off by himself, the other from its wounds. The shepherd climbed up to Bua but found no fresh animals taken there; the one he had seen before had been partly eaten by birds. That, said Shioge, is well within the natural order of things.

  He stared at the carcass with some disquiet, and decided to spend the night in the sheep-walks. ‘If there really is a bird that is attacking living animals, I shall surely see it eventually.’

  The nights were still quite warm that year, and were preceded by red evening skies. The man from Shioge lit his pipe to drive off the midges that gather at dusk, and sat on the verge a couple of paces from the road. From there he could survey all the pastures at the bottom of the Little Valley and had a view of several lights: a pair up at Bua where two windows only looked over the valley, and on the other side in the distance (but the evening was clear) the green navigation light on the coast. From further still, there came a pale pulsation just above the horizon: it was the lighthouse of the other Ness, out at sea in the Atlantic. The shepherd passed the hours till nightfall watching these lights. Ordinarily he would go into Coll, supping sometimes with his sister, sometimes with a widowed cousin; he would return home by ten o’clock, switch on the radio, and fall asleep listening to it.

  The apprehension which these destructive birds had been causing in him for several days kept him on the alert all that night. When would they appear? What would be their flight? Nothing came from the mountains; nothing came from the sea or from the further Ness; nothing rose up from the Valley. The animals were undisturbed. To keep himself warm, Shioge several times in the middle of the night walked up to the old sheepfolds from which it was possible to see some of the lights of Coll and the reflection of the Ness lighthouse on the water. On his first visit Shioge looked up and nearly forgot the purpose of his vigil: the stars were so numerous and so close.

  Later he heard the barking of dogs: first those of Bua, the pair of them, then another he did not recognise, lastly his own, less fierce. The night was so clear beneath the stars that it was almost impossible to feel fear or anger. To Shioge it even seemed that the sea was being illuminated by a submarine moon. Seated on his verge he turned his straining eyes now on the water, now on the pastures and the peaceful sheep with their opal fleeces.

  In spite of everything, after that calm night he found another injured lamb with the same wounds: its feet bitten, a frightful gash the length of its back. A chill came over the shepherd’s heart, and he had not the spirit even to put an end to the animal’s suffering. With the
back of his hand he stroked its muzzle and forehead. Then he did a round of his flock; no other animal was affected.

  At the end of the morning he climbed up to Bua. Wisps of fog were oozing out of the sides of the valley, ankle high. ‘Perhaps that is what’s killing my flock,’ murmured Shioge, pointing down at the mist; but his mind was still on birds.

  At Bua, the shepherd’s wife offered him beer and shortbread. Himself, she said, was up in the hills. Shioge told her of his anxiety. Bua’s wife nodded in sympathy. Bua and their elder daughter had found the dead lamb.

  ‘I truly believe it’s a bird,’ said Shioge. ‘Perhaps it’s some kind of nightjar. They make hardly any noise. Or it might be an eagle of some kind we don’t know.’

  ‘It’s something else, to judge from what we’ve seen,’ said Bua’s wife.

  ‘A wolf,’ said the other, ‘if there are any still.’

  ‘A wolf wouldn’t let them live.’

  ‘Well then, a fox.’

  The woman of Bua shrugged her shoulders in a movement not without grace.

  ‘If you like, Shioge, Bua will go down to lend you a hand,’ she said. But in fact Bua did not come, and for the second night running the shepherd of Shioge gave up his sleep and experienced the uncertainties of the dark. The lights on the sea trembled, the dogs barked, probably between two and three o’clock, but the shepherd could not be sure, since he never had his watch on him. There also appeared in the sky, brighter than on the preceding night, a broad band of bluish or blue-green light. The shepherd, a man ignorant of history, thought he recalled things long forgotten, and in the hollow where he was sitting he smiled.

  The following day, having seen nothing apart from the lights, and heard nothing except the dogs, the night birds, the sounds of his sheep and perhaps—but it came to him only later in the day, when he thought he heard a similar noise—perhaps the rustle of a small animal on the other side of the road—a lizard, if there were lizards at Shioge, or a blindworm—the following day he felt reassured. But before this noise came back to him he found once more, in a small field of his near the sea, two of that year’s lambs tormented in that horrible lassitude which he could not now fail to recognise—there was no sickness like it.

  In the afternoon he again did the round of his pastures. The dog, running between his legs or several yards ahead, was probably trying to find the scent of the enemy. Up on the hill ground he again found a dead ewe. The dog at certain spots on the way growled and tried to enlarge the entry to holes in the ground, either with its feet or its jaws.

  The shepherd did not climb up to Bua, fearing, perhaps to make another discovery. The people of Bua were helpful but taciturn. He slept until nightfall to keep his mind fresh; perhaps he dreamed, I cannot say of what. A man like Shioge, of what could he dream? Of the night, of what came in the night, of what he could neither see nor arrest?

  It was not a fine evening. It rained from ten o’clock until the small hours with a steady sound that was a harsh trial to Shioge’s patience. Under cover of this constant din all the predators in the world might come to ravage his flock.

  ‘The devil and his demons,’ thought Shioge in the rain and the wind. He took a turn round his house, and went up the hill as far as Bua, where all was sunk in sleep. He stroked the blunt foreheads, woke up an animal that was sleeping on the road. The cloudy sky provided no distraction. Towards two o’clock he once more heard the dogs, and since their barking held more disquietude than on the previous night he realised that the dogs were scenting the passage of the enemy. From the road he tried to reconstruct its course. Bua had barked first, then Shioge, and then Shall, where the sound was deeper. After Shall there was a distant echo which Shioge could only just hear.

  Shall was almost on the shore. The shepherd let out his dog and went down in the rain to Shall. His mind kept turning to things long past and absurd; he had the impression, for instance, as he passed the chapel of Shall, that he had gone into it one night as a small child and seen the moon through the stained glass; though this chapel was not one where he worshiped.

  After Shall a track descends towards the sea. The Shall dog barked and Shioge’s dog responded, but when they reached the sea it pricked up its ears and was silent.

  Some sheep were sleeping in the shelter of the sand dunes. Shioge dared not inspect their necks or backs. Perhaps, he said to himself, they are all dead, so heavy, suddenly, was the air with universal death. At the base of the dunes—perhaps the people of Shall did not know of this bank of sand and this tree—at the base of the dunes a tree was growing just above a bank of grey sand. The branches of the tree were bare; the tree was dead. On each dead branch there hung what the shepherd at first took to be a small white bag; when he reached the foot of the tree he saw that these appendages were the skulls of sheep and lambs, the branches thrust through the holes for their eyes. All along the beach the dog ran to and fro, sniffing the bones under the sand, and the shepherd looked for a moment at the sea, which appeared to his eyes a crimson that was almost black. I think that among the mingled sounds of the waves and the falling rain he did not hear the return of what he had been following, the soft dark enemy.

  ***

  The following day the shepherd of Shioge, who had not slept, spoke to Bua about what he had seen on the beach and about the colour of the sea at the foot of that tree—a red, said Shioge, white-cheeked, so dark that he could no longer see his hand. At Bua, as usual, they nodded; but it was a part of the world they did not know.

  ‘It’s at Shall,’ said Shioge. ‘You must take the track to the left of the farm. The tree is not far from there, and its trunk is no bigger than this.’ He showed his two fists held together. The man from Bua had found a sick ewe that morning. With her thumb his wife turned over the coffee cup, now empty, on the side of the table.

  ‘There is no person like that, not here,’ she said, at last.

  ‘It is not a person,’ replied the man from Shioge.

  ‘Perhaps a bird,’ muttered Bua himself, ‘or it might also be a fox.’

  ‘A soundless fox, maybe,’ said Shioge, ‘and black. Yes, a fox which the dog smelt, and which made it afraid.’

  But his inner self said neither ‘yes,’ nor ‘may be,’ nor ‘a fox’. He took his leave of the man of Bua and his wife without asking them to come down that night. His mind was now only upon his tenebrous adversary, that fox of the mist, the animal he must have missed at that grey beach, and upon the hunt for it, a hunt more or less heroic, with his dog leading, that would continue into the morning.

  Shioge went to meet his fate the following night. Of the actual hunt there is no word; the unfortunate man never returned from it. I think that, as had become his custom, he had a sleep in the late afternoon, that he drank a glass of beer with his supper, and that he then went down to his lower pastures with his dog. During the day he had found two more ewes dead by the roadside. The beast had bitten them at the throat and again on the neck. Shioge kissed them on the forehead, his lips cold and bitter; and he dreamt, perhaps, of a brief and successful struggle, perhaps of the night in the chapel at Shall when the moon had shone through the sword of St George.

  I believe that shortly after his supper he heard the rustling in the grass and the stealthy passage of the beast. I believe that his dog growled and hurled itself in pursuit. The shepherd followed behind it, and the beast led them both, dog and shepherd to the slopes above Shall, which break into precipices.

  A daughter of the house at Shall, a child, found them dead in the morning, one of them half buried in the sand—the dog, already lacerated by gulls—and the other, the man, in a hollow among the rocks. Of the beast that was their enemy there was no trace; having vanquished it did not return. Shioge was buried, as were his dog and his maimed sheep. After which, sadness and night persisting at Shall, Shioge and Bua, men and animals eventually departed from what was still, despite everything, called the Little, the Happy Valley.

  III

  THE STORY OF MARGARET />
  WHAT THE EYE REMEMBERS

  for Anne Guesdon

  I

  FANNY’S eyes were green, the muddy green of the bottom of a pond, and Margaret’s were blue-grey, flecked with yellow round the pupils. Margaret and Fanny were childhood friends; they had shared the same nurse and various mischances. Fanny was the only daughter of a widower who kept an inn; Margaret was brought up by a well-to-do aunt and did not learn till she was thirteen of the tragic end of her parents: her mother had died of a broken heart when her father, an unmasked swindler on the run, went down with the Belle d’Angers on the way to New Orleans.

  ‘Fanny,’ asked Margaret one Sunday after Mass, ‘how do you think a person can die of a broken heart?’ Since their fate had been revealed, every night Margaret saw her mother in the throes of grief, and her father floating drowned in the Atlantic. The girls were playing pensively in the yard of the inn with Turk, a grey poodle.

  Fanny made no reply. Margaret’s lot seemed to her enviable. Why did not she have parents out of the pages of a novel, rather than M Boissonneau, bald and melancholy, and dead Mme Boissonneau, whose grave they visited every month? Buried with her were two little Boissonneaus who had made their appearance and departed long before Margaret was born.

  ‘If only my father hadn’t been shipwrecked,’ Margaret asked, ‘do you think he would have sent for us to America, once he was in luck again?’