Timeslip Troopers

by Théo Varlet

  Renard saw that departure as an exceedingly ominous sign. He resolved to speak out.

  It was an evening at the end of December. Jasmin’s successor, the new Chief Cupbearer, sorry to have been taken away from the alcohol factory and its profits, fulfilled his duties reluctantly. He had let the provisions of wine run out, and they would have had none, but for Myriam. That daily visitor to the palace, informed of the difficulty—as of everything else that happened; she was a member of the family—remembered that her father Melchisedech possessed, in a suburb of Valencia, a highly-reputed winery—famed for the 1338 vintage, in particular. Specimens were sampled, and the deal was concluded. The barrels had just arrived at the palace for bottling. The new wine—the Melchisedech plonk, as the major had baptized it—was to be drunk for the first time that evening.

  Toward the end of the diner, when the decoction of roasted acorns that was such a poor replacement for coffee was served and the most hardened smokers had stuffed their pipes with the infamous leaves of the lettuce known as “Valencia tobacco,” and lit up disgustedly, Renard took the floor.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, addressing de Lanselles, Thévenard, Geronimo, Etcheverry, Dupuy and Lénac, “I don’t think, if you agree with me that we’ll be drinking Melchisedech plonk for long...at least in this palace. I think the time has come to submit to the inevitable. There’s no need to tell you that things can’t go on any longer. We’re short of ammunition, our factories have stopped, the reverend fathers are inundating us with forged currency, the Moorish police are no longer reliable, our troopers are discontented, and alcohol is insufficient to maintain our dominant prestige. Progress is an admirable thing, but it can only be realized in a propitious atmosphere, in its own time. And the civilization of the 20th century, which we have the honor of representing, certainly seems to be incompatible with that of the fourteenth, into which we have intruded. In other words, it’s time to go back to the Lorraine front.”

  “My God,” said the major, “we haven’t been bored here, but I agree with you, Renard: these harem ladies and Myriam’s little friends become monotonous in the end, and I wouldn’t be displeased to get back to my chick in Landremont.”

  “You’re not going to abandon me!” cried Geronimo, raising his arms to the heavens.

  According to Monocard, the situation, without being brilliant, was not desperate. Should they allow themselves to be put off by a few temporary snags? Ought they not, on the contrary, to stick to the task, to devote all their energy to it?

  “Whatever you decide,” he concluded, “my resolution was made a long time ago. I’ve interrogated my conscience, and it has dictated my highest duty. My battalion of Saint-Cyriens has more than confidence in me. I dare to say that it’s hero-worship. A part of the population is ready to march with us. Go on, go—and take your poilus with you. The manufacture of alcohol will cease—so much the better. And the debauchery, and the mercantile traffic. All of that has held back our progress...

  “Yes, go! Me, I’ll stay with the Holy Father, that noble apostle of Freethought! We’ll do our duty until the end—all of our duty! And if, some day, having returned to the century which has enough enlightened men without you, you change your minds and think about the marvelous task that you might have accomplished here with a little perseverance—well, come back! Come back with specialists, munitions, books above all, good books! I’ll welcome you as brothers, without rancor.”

  The monk spoke in the same vein, and asked for the complete works of Nietzsche. It was impossible to make any impression on the two of them; they were committed.

  Renard put the motion to the vote. The departure was decided, by five votes to two—within the week, in principle. The exact date would be fixed according to circumstances.

  De Lanselles, offended by a slightly lively riposte from Renard, got up, threw down his napkin, and refused to sleep under the same roof as “the deserters of Progress.” He went to join his students at the University.

  The monk remained in the palace, but also went up to his bedroom, in spite of the major’s amicable nudges.

  When they had gone, Renard admitted that, in anticipation of the departure, He had already ordered preparations to be made for the relocation.

  “In addition,” he said, as enemy galleons are gathering off the coast, and seem to be threatening a disembarkation, I’ve doubled the guard in Port-sur-Seille. We now have five hundred Moors and fifteen poilus there. Here, in that matter, a sign of the times: Nénesse, whom I ordered over there this evening, replied insolently, and I had to threaten him with a week in the slammer...”

  It was eight o’clock. Myriam arrived with her companions. They were welcomed, all the more so because, beneath their capes, they were dressed as bayaderes. The major, who was pouring a round of the new wine, offered them a glass. Myriam refused, on behalf of them all; it would have slowed down their dance.

  “Give some to the poor poilus instead,” she suggested.

  They could hear the men singing and the strains of the accordion downstairs. By way of condescension to Myriam’s desire, twenty bottles were sent down to them.

  The tambourines and castanets struck up a prelude. The dancers, dressed in gauze sashes, launched themselves forth, whirling...

  “And to think,” Dupuy sighed in Etcheverry’s ear, “that perhaps we’ll be in Lorraine tomorrow, at Port-sur-Seille!”

  “To Myriam’s health!” the major proposed, filling the glasses. “A true nectar, this little Melchisedech!”

  V. The Return of the Holy Office

  Renard awoke. But open his eyes or make a movement…no, not yet! The slumber that had just cradled him in its unfathomable depths left him with a strange physical numbness, sweet to savor before the return of lucidity. He was initially conscious of piercing headache, an abominable dryness in the throat and a vague but all too familiar sick feeling.

  “What a hangover!”

  And, in an instant, it all came back to him: the deliberation of the General Staff, the decision to return to the front made in principle, in spite of the defection of Monocard and the monk; the evening of libations with Myriam and her little friends...

  What an abominable hangover, indeed! He had drunk too much. Drunk too much? But no…somewhat less than the others...

  The torpor that was making his thoughts sticky was dissipating. What were those noises, those cries, those clamors? Was the party still going on? And this ultra-hard bed? The floor of the Lion Hall?

  Overcoming the crushing listlessness, he made his first gesture, to stretch himself. Resistance, pain in his wrists, metallic cold…what the…?

  He opened his eyes, and uttered a hoarse cry.

  In chains! On the bare stone floor of a cell, with Dupuy, Lénac, Etcheverry and the major, lying inert—perhaps dead!

  And the shouting—there was a crowd outside, glimpsed through the barred skylight, around a pile of wood…a pyre surmounted by a huge green cross…the pyre of the Inquisition!

  With all his might, he called out to his companions.

  One after another, they opened vague eyes.

  “What?” said Thévenard, stupidly. “Good God! This is it! We’ve been caught!”

  “What about the mates?” moaned Dupuy.

  “In another cell, evidently,” said Renard. “Who can save us, then?”

  “Myriam, damn it!” roared Thévenard. “The little cow! It wasn’t for nothing that she bragged to us about her father’s wine, that vile Melchisedech plonk!”

  The major was not mistaken. It was, indeed, Myriam’s treason that had facilitated the success of the plan worked out by Tortorado, in collaboration with his friend Segura. The Blue-Helmets no longer having an airborne spy, since the loss of the aircraft, the Castilian army had been able to arrive from Toledo, by means of a forced march, in three days. The day before, it had camped in the woods four kilometers from Valencia. At eleven o’clock in the evening, Myriam had come to tell the Inquisitor that the drugged wine had taken effect
, and that the entire General Staff, as well as all the poilus except those on guard, had been plunged into sleep.

  Poison would have been more radical, but the politics of the Holy Office demanded that the greatest possible number of “demons” be taken alive.

  The dozen poilus who had sent the night at the convent of Santa Cruz had already been massacred, along with the Moorish sentinels at the gates of the ramparts. The Castilian troops entered the city, cheered by the population. In five minutes, in spite of a salvo from the machine-guns, whose servants had escaped the drugged wine, the palace was invaded and all the Frenchmen captured in their sleep. The Moorish police, crushed by the weight of numbers, had only put up token resistance. All the cavalrymen were killed on the spot, along with the new Emir and his concubines. In the city, an enormous sweep delivered into the hands of the Holy Office the distillery workers, the profiteers of the occupation, the Jews and all those who had allied themselves with the strangers. Monocard, assisted by his sacred battalion, had taken refuge in the attics of the University, where they had held out until daylight.

  A detachment of five hundred men, sent to attack Port-sur-Seille, was repelled with heavy losses, but as they retreated southwards, the Moorish cavalry had abandoned their French allies in order to reoccupy their former camp. Only the fifteen poilus remained to watch from the advance posts, listening from afar to the tocsin and the crazy tumult that was rising up in Valencia, horribly anxious about the fate of their comrades, who were not responding to radio calls.

  All night long the populace had pillaged the homes of the profiteers, set fire to the factories, plundered the alcohol plant and smashed the stills. The army was obliged to put out the fires, which had spread.

  Tortorado’s first concern, as soon as he was master of the city, was to retake possession of the palace and the treasures that the demons had accumulated with so much foresight in the Inquisition’s own coffers, which would make it richer than ever. Dominicans, notaries, clerks and hirelings—the entire personnel of the Holy Office—was triumphantly reinstalled, and after a rapid provisory exorcism and purification, all of the rooms and courtyards sullied for six months by the presence of the Blue-Helmets and their infamous orgies recovered their pious purposes, from the Grand Inquisitor’s cell to the torture-chamber and the dungeons.

  In spite of their number and capacity, the latter were overflowing, and it was necessary literally to pile up some of the multitude of captives. The newly rich and the students and the factory-workers occupied the four upper floors of the prison tower next to the torture chamber. Down below, in the crypt, the thirty-four poilus—still plunged into the comatose sleep induced by the drugged wine, which they had drunk in much greater abundance than the members of the General Staff—had been thrown pell-mell. The latter, carefully separated according to Myriam’s indications, were on the ground floor of the Palace, in a cell situated directly beneath the Tribunal Hall.

  Through the barred window they were able to witness the first burnings of the monstrous auto-da-fé that would take all day, as the sentences were pronounced. For Geronimo the Antipope, the sacrilegious and apostate monk, no simulation of a trial was necessary. He had been outside the law for a long time. He was executed at eight o’clock in the morning, to the roaring cheers of a delirious crowd swarming in the square, on the terraces and in windows, all the way to the highest galleries and domes of the cathedral.

  Placed on a vast pyre of pine-wood, sprinkled with alcohol and constructed, with delicate attention, within view of the prisoners on the ground floor, were, firstly, the cadavers of the machine-gunners killed at their weapons and the poilus slaughtered in the nunnery—fourteen in all. One by one they were secured upright, dressed in their uniforms, against stakes bearing the label: DEMON. Then, in the middle of this macabre display, at a higher level, was Geronimo, in a sulfur-dusted chemise and tiara. His label read: ANTIPOPE AND ACCOMPLICE OF DEMONS.

  He was still somnolent, and paraded his stupefied gaze over the multitude stamping their feet on the ground and on the balconies of the palace, where the entire personnel of the Holy Office was enjoying its vengeance. The lugubrious psalmody of the ritual maledictions rose up, followed by the anathema launched by Tortorado.

  At the voice of his enemy, the unfortunate antipope woke up. Comprehension of the unexpected disaster in which his magnificent hopes were sinking shot through him. And in the formidable clamor that rose from the crowd at the moment when the executioner set fire—ironically, with the aid of a kerosene lighter—to the faggots of the pyre, he recognized the eternal hue and cry with which the vulgar and stupid herd condemn geniuses and the masters of thought. He gazed bitterly, and with infinite sadness, at the society that he had attempted to save, and his head fell back on to his breast.

  The roaring flames of the immense alcohol-soaked pyre shot up; they enveloped him. Suddenly, dominating their roar, in the restless silence of the crowd, breathless with joy, a supreme cry of revolt sprang from the hectic flames, directed by the victim at the better future, at his naïve and radiant utopia:

  “Down with the Clergy! Long live Anarchism!”

  In their cell, the prisoners had watched the auto-da-fé, chilled with horror. Not one thought of smiling at the grotesquerie of Geronimo’s appeal. They perceived its sublimity, and remained mute and trembling while the crowd roared and the flames rose into the sky.

  “Poor old Jerome! He was a bit crazy, but he toughed it out to the end,” remarked Thévenard, with a tear in his eye.

  “Did you recognize de Lanselles among the cadavers?” Renard asked.

  No one had seen him. Nothing but the cadavers of simple troopers.

  “So much the better. He might have escaped with his battalion of students. Who knows whether he might try to rescue us?”

  “Let’s hope so—but he hasn’t much chance of success. We’ll be roasted like the old man, that’s obvious.”

  With that first execution under way, Tortorado and his assessors went back to the Tribunal Hall to prepare for the next burnings. The merchants and other accomplices of the Demons, taken from prison one by one, were subjected to a summary interrogation before being thrown on the pyre that was consuming Geronimo and the fourteen corpses, which was fed in the meantime by pine logs and alcohol. The thirty-four poilus piled up in the subterranean dungeon were still asleep; they were being saved for a bonne bouche. As for the leaders of the General Staff, there would be time to confront them with certain profiteers—Melchisedech, for example.

  They were only waiting, before summoning him to appear, for the arrival at the palace of certain items found during the night in the home of the Licensed Victualler in the course of the domiciliary visit. One of the items, probably of capital importance for the trial of the Demons, was also of considerable material weight, and a crew of twenty robust hirelings took nearly two hours to effect its transportation into the vestibule of the palace. According to the express denunciation of Myriam, an unnatural daughter, the object in question was nothing less than the secret treasure of the Blue-Helmets.

  Some six weeks earlier, the Allies’ Licensed Victualler, on gong to Port-sur-Seille with two carts of foodstuffs and straw intended for the garrison, had noticed the singular object in an unmanned shed. A cylinder as tall as a ten-year-old child and as broad as his head, the lower two-thirds made of copper, it was terminated by a tapered top of polished steel that seemed to form a lid. The considerable weight of the implement—which was evidently hollow—was judged by Melchisedech to be evidence that it was an important treasure, perhaps the strong-box of the monopolists of gold and silver.

  The fact of its being thus abandoned to public view was, according to the cunning miser, a trick on the part of the Blue-Helmets. They imagined that no one would take it, he thought. And as the poilus of the guard, used to the old Jew’s foraging, let him come and go freely, he was able to take possession of the mysterious object with the aid of his acolytes, hoist it on to a cart and take it away, hidden u
nder straw, to his house in Valencia.

  Once there, he made no attempt to open it. His possessive mania was satisfied. He limited himself to going to visit the treasure every evening in the hiding-place to which he had relegated it. Myriam discovered it there in her turn, and recognized it as a Blue-Helmet object. Insidiously, she interrogated her father—who, sure of his hiding-place, swore by the horns of Moses that he had never possessed anything of the sort. Piqued to the quick, she had not hesitated to denounce the stolen goods in one of her reports to Tortorado. As soon as the Blue-Helmets were defeated and Melchisedech was under lock and key, Tortorado had given the order to fetch the object.

  The treasure hidden by the Licensed Victualler had finally arrived, on the stroke of ten o’clock, in the antechamber of the palace. Tortorado came to cast a glance over it, and attempted to open it. He had to give up, but his conviction was confirmed that there was a secret involved of some importance to the trial of the demons. He resolved to interrogate Melchisedech.

  The Spanish army, with the entire population of the city, continued to applaud the successive burnings of the merchants thrown on to the fire one by one as they were sentenced. At first the alcohol had produced a superb and vigorous flame, but, one jar having exploded in the hand of a maladroit aide, they ceased to spread it; the fire became redder and the last few victims did not burn as well. The people of Valencia became impatient. The auto-da-fé of Geronimo and the French cadavers had given them an appetite; at the sight of each new victim cries of disappointment went up. It was the Demons they wanted to see perish, without further delay. In certain groups, people were beginning to talk once again about their omnipotence.

  “You’ll see,” said one old fisherman in a red bonnet, squeezed between the peasant at the entrance to the street running alongside the palace. “You’ll see that, at the last moment, they’ll escape. The Vampire will come back in the air, and launch thunder to save them.”