Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  “Did you see him? Did you see?” Moussa gasped when they stopped to catch their breath. They were laughing as quietly as they could, their chests heaving from their flight, their slight bodies trembling all over in ecstasy mingled with fear. They’d both forgotten the accusation of cowardice, the tension in the cave. Everything had melted away except the vision of the little rose quartz flying through the air and striking its mark. There was no mistaking their success. They had blooded the enemy.

  “You got him! Right in the eye!” Paul whooped. He was filled with pride, happier than he’d ever been. He realized he’d done something brave, or rather that he’d made Moussa do it; but it amounted to the same thing, he thought. That’s what officers did, they got busy thinking things up and then appointed someone else to actually do the work, afterward keeping most of the credit. He didn’t mind sharing the credit, because he knew that some was legitimately his too. For as long as he could remember he’d been afraid, often of the most trivial things, desperately wanting to do the brave things that seemed to come so easily to Moussa, but then always backing out at the last moment, or cringing the whole way through. But this had been different, and he knew it. It was like the day of the boar, a day in which there had been no time for fear. He felt strong and savage and utterly invincible.

  When they’d listened for a while and knew for sure that no one was chasing them, they relaxed and sauntered down the corridor again, Moussa and Paul taking turns explaining the battle to Fritz. Paul announced he was fairly certain he’d seen the soldier’s eye popping out and rolling around on the floor like a marble. Moussa said the man would probably die soon from his wounds, if he hadn’t already. Fritz listened attentively and smiled appreciatively and didn’t argue their claims.

  They talked about whether they should tell anyone. They knew in the instinctive way that boys do that none of the adults were likely to share in their enthusiasm for what they’d done. Gascon would understand, and might even secretly approve, but they figured that after he was done congratulating them he’d probably get out the cane. In the end they decided it was wiser to add the afternoon to their long list of secrets.

  When they arrived back at their hunting grounds beneath St. Paul’s, they were delighted to discover that the rat business had been brisk. They heard their catch before they saw it, mad claws scratching against tin pots. By the dim light they saw the traps all full and swarming. Scores of trapped eyes regarded them with malevolence and fear. Carefully they lifted them by their tails to avoid the long slender teeth that nipped and flashed, and dropped them into the burlap bags. When they had two sacks full, and the sacks were as heavy as they could carry, they lugged them back up the basement stairs.

  On the way Moussa stopped and pulled some cloth out of a box in one of the storerooms. He made a wrapper for Fritz, and they emerged into the daylight. It was late and the afternoon had grown bitter cold. They had no jackets and shivered as they walked. The rats in the sacks made a terrible commotion, squealing and flopping around inside. All the movement and the teeth and claws that occasionally poked through the sides made progress slow and difficult. People they passed on the streets regarded the two urchins with looks of puzzlement and disdain. As they arrived at the Place de l’Hôtel, dusk was forcing the rat vendor to begin packing up. At first he didn’t recognize the boys, all bloody and torn.

  “We brought your rats,” Paul told him proudly, and suddenly the vendor remembered. “Ah, the noble hunters.” He looked at their wounds and assumed they’d gotten them catching the rats. He shook his head in pity for the hapless children of the bourgeoisie, who could manage to make a hundred francs of trouble out of a fifty-sou problem. And from what he could see, they hadn’t even gotten it right.

  “But look here,” he said, “why have you kept them together like that, in those sacks? Don’t you see what they’ve done?” He pointed at the burlap, which was covered with dark stains. The boys hadn’t noticed. They loosened the drawstrings and looked inside to find a terrible mess of fur and blood. Jumbled together and panicked to escape, the rats had attacked one another. Nearly all of them were wounded, or dead.

  “I can’t sell them that way,” he told them, aware of what they must have gone through to fill the sacks, but certain that no one would buy a damaged animal. “Next time don’t put so many in the same bag. No more than six, do you hear?”

  When they had finished separating out the rats that were still healthy, the vendor counted out their pay. Moussa and Paul looked at the little pile of centimes and their hearts sank. The rat business was tougher than they’d thought. Yet they’d found Fritz and whipped the Prussians.

  It hadn’t been such a bad day after all.

  “Uh oh,” Moussa said as they approached the château. “It’s your father.” He could see him there in the drive, near the kitchen door. If it wasn’t late enough at night to use their rooftop approach, it was the way they slipped into the house when their appearance might land them in trouble, as at the moment. Madame LeHavre, the cook, would cast them a disapproving glance, but she never told on them, and let them creep up the back stairs to clean up. But this time it wouldn’t work. Jules was sitting outdoors in a chair, trying to light a pipe.

  They approached the colonel as inconspicuously as they knew how, hoping he would ignore them. There was a time when he would have, but no longer. Paul looked on the ground next to where the colonel sat, hoping he wouldn’t see it, not this time. His heart sank when he saw the bottle, and he knew it was trouble. His father was drunk.

  “Where’ve you been?” The colonel’s voice was cross.

  The boys hung their heads and shuffled near. Jules was slumped in his chair, draped in it almost. It was cold but he sat without a coat, seeming not to notice. His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. The alcohol thickened his tongue and mangled his speech.

  “Just out, Father. No place special.”

  “Just out? Looking like that? You look like pigs, filthy pigs! How dare you come home that way? You’re bloody and crude! Don’t you have any pride? Speak up, Paul, and look at me when I talk to you. I asked you a question.”

  Paul avoided his eyes, and stared at the ground. He hated it when his father got this way. Lately he had to hate it all the time, because Jules had been drunk for a month, and it was getting worse. His temper was foul, and sometimes he drank so much he passed out in his plate of food, right at the table in front of Uncle Henri and Aunt Serena.

  Once he had disappeared for three whole days. Henri and Gascon took a carriage and went looking for him in the city. It was late when they brought him home. Paul woke up and watched from the top of the stairs as they tried to get the colonel to his room. The smell of vomit filled the house.

  Jules snapped at everyone in the château, and even had Madame LeHavre in tears, which was nearly impossible to do, because the cook was tough as a mule and accepted trouble from no one. But Colonel deVries could deliver a devastating tongue-whipping, and his cruelty flashed bright and often. It was a side of him no one had ever seen, and it frightened Paul to death.

  Lately he had taken to slapping Paul if the boy didn’t move quickly enough. It took only the slightest offense to provoke him, like forgetting to comb his hair. Jules would lash out with the back of his hand and slur something, and then he would turn red and get quiet and walk away. But he never said he was sorry. The first time it happened the shock of it was so great Paul burst out crying, even though he wasn’t hurt. “I’m sorry, Father, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” he said, although he hadn’t done anything at all. Once when Jules slapped him, Henri saw it. The count’s face darkened and he moved to intervene, but then he checked himself. Later Paul heard them arguing. Their voices were loud and some glass broke, but all the details were muffled behind closed doors.

  After the first few times Paul learned that avoiding him altogether was best. Paul didn’t know what to make of it all. The transformation had been so fast, so complete. His father had taken to drink just as
quickly as he’d set off for war, with the same vigor and drive for vengeance. He watched his father grow cold and hard, and from the way Jules snapped at him he was certain he’d done something to cause it.

  “It will pass,” the adults told him, trying to cheer him up, but they really didn’t know what to say to the boy. “He’s a tough man, the colonel,” Gascon told him. “He’ll get over it.” Serena seethed, and once tried to talk to Jules about Paul. Her timing was terrible; he was drunk. “Go back to where you belong,” Jules thundered at her. “Go meddle in some camel shit. Something you understand.” She slapped him so hard that it hurt her hand, but he laughed and staggered away. No one else saw it. Serena wept alone. She dared not tell the count. The next day Jules didn’t remember. “He doesn’t mean it,” she told Paul. “He isn’t mad at you. He’s ill.”

  Elisabeth was almost never home, getting in late at night if at all. Paul didn’t know for sure, but he thought his parents weren’t sleeping in the same room anymore. Elisabeth watched Jules deteriorate and felt she had to say something to Paul, struggling to find an explanation. “It’s those articles,” she told him.

  The Paris press had treated Jules viciously, and had not let him alone for a moment since the trial, when they trumpeted their charges of influence and bribery and corruption in the infamous case of the colonel who ran. They excoriated him on the front pages. They got hold of the Delescluze letter, which they printed in its entirety with no rebuttals. The prosecutor fed them details that were richly embellished before they ran.

  Jules’s likeness appeared in nearly every edition until his face was as well-known as that of Gambetta or Trochu. He was recognized readily in the street and run off like a mad dog. Interest in his story was heightened by another, about a simple sergeant named Ignatius Hoff, who sneaked out of the city at night to the enemy lines, where he cut the throats of German sentries and returned with their helmets as trophies. His kills were counted carefully, nearly thirty in the month of November alone. His exploits were legend, the contrast irresistible.

  Within ten days of his release Jules began attacking the bottle. He’d returned to the château after trying for the fifth or sixth time to volunteer his services to the forces defending Paris. The brigades were ill-trained and poorly organized and needed officers like Jules. “They didn’t want me,” was all he said when he came home. “Didn’t want me, and wouldn’t have me,” and he would clean off whatever mess had been thrown onto his uniform, eggs or worse, by the proud men of the defense forces. And he retreated into his rum.

  Paul did his best to shut it all out, to pretend that it wasn’t happening, and his mind clung to the hope it would be over soon. He’d seen his mother come out of her own shell when Jules had been in prison, and expected the same thing would happen with his father. In the mornings when he woke up he started fresh, anxious to see his father, to see whether his storm had passed, and if he could polish Jules’s sword again or do him some favor. But the first look of the morning from Jules would kill the hope quickly, as Paul could see from the angry eyes that nothing would be different that day than the day before, and the day before that.

  But now it was the early evening, the dreaded time when the colonel’s furies were strongest, and Jules was building a rage against him for being late, for coming home bedraggled and torn.

  “I’m sorry Father,” Paul said. “We were playing in some—”

  “Shut up! I don’t want to hear about your amusements! The city surrounded by Prussians, people beginning to starve, and you’re playing! Playing! Where is your sense of respect? Where is your honor?” For long hot moments Paul withstood his withering scorn. Moussa stood helplessly by, wishing he could either leave or do something to help. Now he knew how Paul felt, having to sit there while Sister Godrick worked on Moussa. Nuns and colonels learned how to address people from the same books, he thought.

  Paul forgot himself then, and tried to ease his father’s harsh impression of their activities. He broke his promise to Moussa about the secrets of the afternoon. “Wait, Father,” he said, “you don’t understand. We were in the tunnels below the city. We saw some Prussians, in a cave. We hit one of them in the eye and hurt him. Hurt him bad. He’ll have to go home, Father! He’ll have to go back to Germany! We were helping, really we were!”

  The colonel absorbed some of it and rose from his chair on shaky legs. His face was reddening as he listened to the tale, his eyes narrowing, his teeth clenching. His hands were shaking and he dropped his pipe to the ground.

  “You too?” he said. “You would humiliate me? My own son wishes to show me how a man fights Prussians? And with a wild tale like that? A ten-year-old who does what the colonel did not? How – dare – you—” He was out of words, his mouth working in silent rage. “You little bastard!” he finally said. He lashed out with his hand and caught Paul on his cheek and knocked him to the ground. Paul raised his hands as if to ward off another blow. His cheek was bright red where Jules had struck him. “No Father, please, that’s not it. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s not a lie! Ask Moussa. We did it, we really did! I thought you’d be proud!”

  Jules wasn’t listening. His eyes were on the cloth wrapping Paul dropped when he fell. The cloth had fallen away, exposing some of the skull inside. Jules bent over unsteadily and picked it up. “And I suppose this is the one you killed?” he said, lifting it out of its wrapping. “My God, Paul, what have you boys been doing? When did you begin stealing from graves?” And with that he flung the skull away. Moussa and Paul watched, helpless and sad, as Fritz hit the stones on the side of the house. He was old and dry and shattered into a thousand pieces. Only the jaw was left intact, and it came to rest in the dirt.

  Fritz was still smiling.

  * * *

  After three months of Sister Godrick and the fourth form, Moussa was learning to live with his hell in class. His existence was about the same, he guessed, as being a soldier on the fortifications, dodging bullets and eating grapeshot. He thought he had an understanding of the nun, with whom he had settled into an uneasy coexistence. Their relationship was still full of fireworks and friction and tests of will, but he thought he gave as good as he got, and sometimes, in little ways, he even thought he won. He knew he would flunk the class in the end, because she still refused to mark the papers on which he wrote “Moussa,” which was all of them; but he decided that he would talk his father into letting him quit school altogether. They were rich, he knew, very rich, and there didn’t seem much point in his continuing at St. Paul’s. He could buy a school, and hire the teachers he wanted. There were some details to work out with the words and the logic he’d use on the count, but he was sure they would come. Time was growing short. In another month class reports would be issued, and his day of reckoning with the count would arrive.

  Except for Pierre, the other boys in class had left him alone after his beating for the snake. They hated and shunned him, but gave him grudging respect for the way he had handled his punishment, and the way he stood up to Sister Godrick. They knew they couldn’t have done as well; and more important, perhaps, they knew he could still whip them.

  Aside from the certainty of his flunking, therefore, he saw the year working out pretty much like any other year in school. He knew he’d make it through, and as the weeks passed he even grew somewhat complacent. But then Sister Godrick saw the amulet.

  She was leading the class in daily prayer, beseeching the Almighty first to watch out for the young souls of St. Paul’s, and second to slay the Prussians besieging the city gates. It was a good prayer, Moussa thought, although he felt that if her connections were as good as she made out, the enemy ought to have keeled over by now. As she prayed his head was bowed but his eyes were open as always. It was one of his little victories, and one of hers. If he did not close his eyes but did bow his head, she felt as if adequate respect had been shown the Lord, and he felt as if adequate liberty had been granted. They hadn’t discussed it, but instead had settled into the compr
omise.

  Moussa had gotten dressed hurriedly that morning, and the amulet was hanging outside his shirt. During the prayer he was absently playing with it.

  Whack!

  He jumped, his reverie shattered. Her paddle still carried the shock of thunder when she used it.

  “And what is that you toy with during prayer, Michel?” Sister Godrick asked him. She nudged the amulet with the end of her paddle.

  Moussa pulled away. She had no right to touch it. “It’s nothing, Sister,” he said, and he quickly started to slip it back under his shirt, but she caught the cord near the back of his neck, and pulled on it so he couldn’t.

  “It is not ‘nothing,’ Michel. I am not a fool, and by the grace of God have not gone blind. I can see it clearly enough. I asked you what it is, and you shall tell me.”

  “It is my amulet, Sister.”

  “Ah, une amulette! A trinket for unbelievers. And what evil is deterred with this amulet, Michel?”

  “I – I don’t know, Sister. It’s lucky, that’s all.”

  “Lucky!” Her voice was full of scorn. “Give it to me.”

  Moussa’s face flushed and his heart raced. Why hadn’t he put it where it belonged? Why did she care, anyway? “It’s mine, Sister. It belongs to me. I need it. I don’t take it off, ever. It saved my life.”

  “Did it, indeed! So this remarkable amulet has God-like powers!”

  “It saved my life, Sister.”

  “Give it to me.”