Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  “Confession will earn you the Lord’s mercy, Michel,” she said.

  “I didn’t do it, Sister.” She set her teeth and the oak screamed down again. Seven, eight, nine times. The room was filled with the terrible sound of the paddle. Whoosh! Whack! Whoosh! Whack! Again and again the sharp edge of the oak found its mark, biting into his flesh. No one said anything, or dared move. The room was hot, and Moussa fought to keep from crying out. The burning was terrible. He wanted to reach back, to touch his flesh and hold it together.

  After twelve she stopped again.

  “Confession will earn you the Lord’s mercy, Michel,” she repeated. Moussa’s knuckles were white where he held on to the chair. Tears welled at the corners of his eyes and he clenched his teeth. Be strong, be strong, be strong. He made no sound.

  “Very well. Your pride is your undoing, Michel. Pride is the devil inside you.” The oak lightning struck again. Paul looked away, ready to cry. He knew Moussa was strong, but he didn’t know how he could take such punishment. Three strokes was the usual, five the most anyone had endured, and those were never delivered with this kind of force – not even by the curé himself.

  Whoosh! Whack!

  A stain of red blossomed on Moussa’s shirttail. A trickle of blood ran down the back of his left leg. He tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. The fire burned white hot. He closed his eyes tight against the world. Be strong, be strong.

  Whoosh! Whack!

  The trickle ran into the crook of his knee and made a tiny pool. When the count reached fifteen Moussa knew he could not take another blow. He was about to cry out and confess when suddenly it stopped. His entire body trembled, waiting for the next blow. He expected her to say something, to offer him some more mercy, but she was silent. Sister Godrick dropped the paddle to her side. Her blood was up, her excitement high, the Lord’s vengeance running hot in her veins. But she saw the blood and caught herself. She didn’t want to maim the boy, and the paddle had not drawn a confession. God’s punishment was not yet complete, but for the moment hers was. Moussa’s strength was as extraordinary as his pride. She said a silent prayer, that the Lord might give her the wisdom to deal with this boy.

  “We shall see whether you have learned your lesson, Michel,” she said when she got her breath back. She straightened herself up and brushed her habit. She looked at the boys standing in line, watching. They were deathly silent and afraid. The exercise had been fruitful. It was time to restore the normal order of things.

  “Return to your places. Open your exercise books to page seven,” she said, and the boys moved as if they’d been threatened by the snake.

  * * *

  The Prussians obliged Moussa the next week, if only temporarily. Moussa and Paul heard a huge explosion just after dawn, and with Gascon raced to the river’s edge. They climbed a tree and saw smoke rising from the bridge to St.-Cloud, which the defenders of Paris had blown up. Across the river, up past the trees and out of their sight, huge clouds of dust rose from the advancing columns of troops under the command of the crown prince of Saxony, who had approached from the east to encircle the southern part of the city. At the same moment in the north, the crown prince of Prussia marched his own troops. Between them, the princes commanded more than a quarter of a million men, who drew their investing lines in a circle around Paris. Great booming noises shook the air as different forts around the city tested the range of their guns and fired at the Prussian positions. There was no returning fire. The Prussians were careful to stay out of range. Distant explosions signaled the end of other bridges. Train and boat traffic stopped completely, and the gates of Paris were drawn shut. The Prussians cut the telegraph wires leading out of the city. At last the two armies joined together in the west, and the circle was complete.

  The siege of Paris was under way.

  Henri’s days were hectic. General Raspail helped him locate a soldier, a hard wiry man named Blanqui who had served with distinction with the Chasseurs in Algeria. Blanqui was tough, lean, and observant, and had spent several years in the town of Sedan, an area he knew well. He laughed at Henri’s idea of finding Jules’s witness, Major Dupree, but for a fee of fifty thousand francs down and an additional fifty upon his success, agreed to take two men and set out on a search. He would trace the steps of Dupree and his regiment all the way from the farmhouse to the battlefields of Sedan, checking the hospitals and interviewing soldiers.

  “Even if I find Dupree, it may not benefit the colonel,” Blanqui said. “Your brother is in the hands of lunatics. I know men who could easily bring him out of the École tonight, and it would cost you a lot less money.”

  Henri had thought of that, but only as a last resort. He knew his brother. Jules would never permit it. His honor was at stake. To flee under the shadow of false accusations, to dishonor his family, to live in exile, would not be something he could bring himself to do.

  “Perhaps another time,” he said.

  “Another time may be too late, Count,” Blanqui shrugged. “But I shall do as you wish.”

  Blanqui was also to look for news of Delescluze, but he was certain the search would be futile. All of his work would have to be done without arousing the suspicions of the Prussians who controlled the countryside in which he would be operating. The veteran soldier had gray hair and a short bristly beard, and walked with a limp from an Arab scimitar. “The Prussians will think I’m just another impotent old Frenchman,” he said. “I’ll get by them.”

  Even if Blanqui were successful, he would have to smuggle Dupree all the way back through occupied France and then sneak him into the city through Prussian lines. Blanqui shrugged when they spoke of it. “If I find him, Count, I will think of something. That will be the least of my problems.” Blanqui and his men left five days before the Prussians sealed off Paris.

  That done, Henri turned his attention to the matter of the balloons. It was an audacious plan of the committee’s, to set a balloon aloft every second or third day, carrying mail and dispatches and the spirit of Paris between the capital and countryside. The French had invented balloons a hundred years earlier, and knew more about them and flew them better than anyone in the world. Now they would fly them in the face of the Prussians, out of their reach. “When they look up at us we will spit in their eye,” said the committee about the Prussians. At least that was the plan.

  Henri and the other experienced balloonists recruited by the committee had little to work with. Only a few balloons remained in Paris, most of them left over from the Great Exhibition of 1867. Their envelopes were in shreds and their baskets in tatters. They would have to be repaired, and new ones manufactured. Henri was to work in the Gare d’Orléans, the giant station whose trains lay dormant under the siege. He walked through the eerily silent great hall with its soaring arches and iron beams. He was satisfied. It would be big enough to accommodate such an undertaking. He would need more than seventy volunteers for the task, among them some to fly the balloons.

  There were few qualified aeronauts in the city. Volunteers would have to be found and trained, but of those there would be no shortage. Departing the besieged city in a magnificent balloon would be heroic, a feat that would beckon mightily after the short inglorious war. It was a dangerous undertaking, yet there would be ten men clamoring for every spot. Henri figured to lose as many men from inexperience as from Prussian guns or capture.

  There was little time for sleep as he set about the tasks at hand. Supplies of coal gas had to be secured, along with the piping required to deliver it to inflate the balloons. There was no silk available in the city. Cotton cloth had to be used instead. The cloth was cut into strips and sewn together by seamstresses working at long tables. Each seam was inspected and tested. Henri tried different mixtures of varnish to be applied to the cloth. The first attempts left the cloth too stiff, so that it cracked. “No, no,” he said as he saw what his assistants had produced, “they’ll never fly that way,” and they tried again. Other mixtures left the cloth too
soft and permeable, allowing the gas to leak through too quickly. Finally he stumbled on a combination of linseed oil and lead oxide that seemed to do the job. A laborious process began of treating each section, letting it dry and then rotating the cloth so the next section could be done. When the envelopes were ready they were pulled over to one side of the cavernous hall where they were partially inflated to be tested again. Rope webbing was pulled around them to secure the balloons to the baskets. The baskets were constructed of wood and wicker, and were then suspended from the girders. Henri rigged up a full training set complete with rigging and ballast, and began training his Balloon Corps. Most of the volunteers were sailors. Those not busy learning the techniques of flight were put to work braiding halyards and filling sacks for ballast.

  The spirits of the men and women in the hall were high, their chatter excited, all of them glad to be doing something instead of simply waiting in gloom. It was one of the few places in Paris where people were not preoccupied with thoughts of enemy superiority and battlefield defeat.

  Henri watched proudly as the first of his balloons was inflated. “They aren’t pretty,” he said to a member of the defense committee who had come to watch with him. “But they’ll fly.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Let’s break him out.”

  “What?”

  “I said let’s break him out!” Moussa and Paul were sitting in their tree house. Moussa was trying to hit a pigeon with his slingshot. The bird stood well out of range and danger. Moussa aimed a few rocks at other things, watching the bird out of the corner of his eye and hoping to lull it into a moment of incaution. Paul was carving a piece of ash. There were shavings scattered all over the floor of the tree house, and a passable sailboat was taking shape in his hands.

  It was a lazy Saturday afternoon, warm and humid and oppressively boring. They were bitterly disappointed with the Prussians, who had turned out to be a dull lot. Since the morning Paris had been surrounded, the boys had ventured to the water’s edge a hundred times, expecting a pitched battle to unfold before them on the banks of the Seine. Each time they had come away disappointed. There was nothing to see, nothing at all. There had been a terrible battle to the south of the city, at Châtillon, but they knew it was a battle only because Henri told them so, and because the floor of the château shook from the heavy artillery. But hearing wasn’t the same as seeing, and seeing was all but impossible: the count had sternly forbidden them to leave the château grounds except to go to school or, with permission, into Paris. That meant they couldn’t inspect the situation themselves. The whole world was blowing up, and they were stuck in a stupid tree house.

  A siege just wasn’t very exciting.

  “Break who out?”

  Moussa grimaced as he let a rock fly. “Who do you know who needs breaking out? Your father, idiot!”

  Paul didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Moussa was crazy. Paul wanted desperately to see his father, it was true, to talk to him and make sure he was all right. But they wouldn’t let him visit.

  “You can’t get in,” Henri told him. “It’s a military stockade. No civilians are allowed inside.”

  “They let you in!”

  “I’m a count. It’s almost the same thing as being in the military.”

  “I’m a count’s nephew!”

  “It won’t work, Paul. I’m sorry.” In fact, Henri was lying. He could easily have gotten Paul inside the stockade, for the guards there were indolent and corrupt. He had thought it a good idea to take the boy to see his father, but he had first raised the idea with Jules, who was vehemently opposed.

  “No! I will not have my son see me this way,” Jules said. “He will never see his father in a cage.” Henri had managed to get a new uniform and toiletries to his brother. Jules looked and felt like a different man, but he was still a colonel confined to the stockade, surrounded by an unsavory bunch of guards and prisoners. There was too much a boy Paul’s age could not understand. Jules was firm: he could face anyone in his situation, from the court-martial to the mob. But he could not face his own son. Not yet. “You must lie to him, Henri.”

  “He believes in you, Jules. Seeing you locked up won’t alter that. He knows what has happened. He has already seen you in the cart. Certainly the stockade is no worse than that. He’s a strong boy. I think it would be good for him.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. I will not permit it. I will see him again when I am free. Not a moment before. I will not discuss it further.”

  And so Henri had honored his brother’s wish and told the lie, and Paul was locked out of his father’s confinement, left to imagine things. He thought about him all the time. He wrote a note and gave it to Henri to deliver.

  Dear Father,

  I hope you are well. I will see you soon, when they let you go. I hope you killed a lot of Prussians. They’re camped out across the river, but we haven’t seen any. I caught a frog with Moussa, but it died. It was a big one. It is waiting for you in a box at home.

  Your son, Paul

  He missed his father terribly. He was angry at everyone, and understood nothing. He hated the Prussians for winning so much. He hated the Frenchmen responsible for his father’s captivity, hated the people in the street he’d seen torturing his father. He just wanted things to be like they used to be. He just wanted him back. Now his lunatic cousin was talking about setting him free.

  “Don’t be crazy,” he said to Moussa. “We could never break him out.”

  “Oui! I heard my father talking with a man who said it would be easy. You have seen the École! It’s just a big yard, with a wall around it and some fences for the prisoners! They’re all outside. We can crawl along the wall and drop a rope to him. He can climb out, and we’ll all leave!” It was simple for Moussa, who in matters of intrigue possessed a limitless supply of self-assurance. If an adult could do it, he reasoned, so could they, only a little better. They were ten, and invincible.

  Paul considered it. At first the idea was insane, just one of Moussa’s big plans, but the more he thought about it, the more it intrigued him. He didn’t think they’d actually be able to get him out – that part sounded impossible. But maybe at least he’d be able to see his father, to know that he was all right. Maybe he could even talk to him.

  “What do you think they’d do to us if we got caught?”

  “Well, they wouldn’t shoot us, I don’t think.”

  “They’ll probably lock us up for a hundred years with Sister Godrick.”

  Moussa frowned. “Then I’d rather get shot, I guess,” he said. “But look, we won’t get caught. I know how to do it.” He flung more rocks at the pigeon, which seemed to know just how far away from the boy was far enough, and spelled out his plans in detail. After he finished talking, Paul mulled it over. He suggested a few refinements, which were to Moussa’s liking.

  “D’accord,” Paul said at last. He felt the butterflies that he always got when he was about to do something wrong and knew it. “Let’s break him out.”

  They spent the afternoon getting ready. “We have to make a map,” Moussa said, and even though they knew every inch of the route he drew one, which Paul laboriously colored with pencils. They went to the river to pick up their raft, and hid it in the woods. That night they hurried through dinner, and surprised Serena by going to bed early. “Big day tomorrow,” Moussa told her vaguely. Henri was away in the city at the train station, finishing his preparations for a balloon launching the next day, and would not be home that night.

  At ten o’clock the lights of the château had all been turned out. The house was quiet. They opened their bedroom window and crawled out onto the roof. They slid down the roof tiles to an inside ledge where they could catch hold of a branch and then climb down the tree to the ground. They’d left the house that way a hundred times.

  At the base of the tree they stopped to make their final preparations. They dug up four knives they’d buried, two for each. “Hide the extra one in your boot in case we get c
aptured,” Moussa ordered. “They never look in your boots.” Paul picked up a coil of rope they’d hidden behind a bush and draped it over his shoulder.

  They were dressed in dark clothing that Moussa thought would make them harder to see. They knelt and rubbed their hands in a batch of mud they’d made and smeared it on their faces. Suddenly Moussa realized how much light Paul’s hair reflected. “Spread some up there,” he whispered, afraid his cousin’s nearly white hair would give them away.

  “I won’t!” Paul protested. “It’s too cold! Put some on your own hair!”

  Moussa sighed and thought for a moment. “Wait here.” Quickly he shinnied back up the tree and disappeared into the house. A little later he reappeared with two stocking hats that belonged to Gascon. “Put this on,” he said.

  There was still a light on in the carriage house, but no one about. The night was cool and cloudy. To the northeast they could see the new electric lights at Montmartre reflecting off the clouds. Somewhere dogs barked. A light breeze rustled the leaves in the trees and carried with it the smell of distant cook fires. Paul leaned against the tree and looked at Moussa. Standing still was giving him a chance to think. He was beginning to have second thoughts. Before he could say anything, Moussa signaled the all-clear. “Tout est bien!” he whispered. “Let’s go!” Paul watched him running silently into the trees toward the Bois, and shook his head. He took a deep breath and plunged after his cousin into the darkness.