by Tony Moyle
“When is nigh exactly?”
“Usually very soon.”
“Then why don’t people say ‘the end of the world is very soon’?”
“Somehow it doesn’t strike the same level of fear. I mean if I said to you, ‘Watch out, someone’s going to stab you with a sword,’ and you said ‘When?’ and I replied, ‘Sometime in the next fortnight,’ you’re probably not going to be overly worried. But as soon as I say, it’s nigh you’ve already started sweating and strange, gurgling noises are dropping out of your stomach.”
“I guess it does sound more fancy.”
“Exactly!” said Michel.
“Ok, rule three, I should use fancy words like nigh but categorically not in reference to the end of days. Got it.”
Phil had no qualms over this third rule. He had no intention of indicating that the end of the world was coming, although it was helpful to understand that his prophecies should err on the negative side.
“Right,” said Michel, getting to his feet and stretching out his stiff limbs which, unknown to him at the time, were the early signs of gout that would one day impact him greatly. “Let’s see if you understand. I want you to rewrite that prophecy of yours, but this time take into account the three golden rules. Then we can move on to the next lesson.”
Phil returned to the coffer to make the desired changes. It wasn’t that difficult to make an already useless prediction even more nonsensical, all without the aid of some cosmic force field. After a couple of minutes of edits he passed the amendment to his new teacher.
Low in the sky the sun will set on the Northern fleet
Rabid teeth will bite at their hairy, ancient masters
Missing will be the boats of the townsfolk,
beware thy neighbour who hides objects amongst the flowers
“Oh yes. That’s much better,” said Michel after reading the second attempt.
“Really?” said Phil, not entirely sure what it all meant, even though it came out of his own head.
“We need to do some work on your choice of words to make it even more obscure and to confuse all but the most talented of readers. But not bad for a second attempt.”
“What next?”
“That’s enough for today I think. I have my own work to do as well, you know. We’ll start again tomorrow evening with a detailed assessment of star patterns.”
Over the next week, after the sun had set, every evening was taken up by Michel’s teaching. Into the small hours he would lecture, and Phil would listen, occasionally broken by a practical session for Phil to demonstrate what he’d learnt. Although Michel had never taught anyone before, his experience as a student leant itself to a concise and simple approach to the study plan.
They never focused on the same discipline for more than a day, always varying the subject to keep it fresh. On the first day Michel demonstrated how to write a star chart based on a person’s place and time of birth. On the next they researched specific historical events that had happened at times of significant planetary alignments. Phil noted them down and paid close attention to the scale and impact of any recorded disasters. On the third day they reviewed some of the great philosophers from history and debated their approaches and style. The fourth day focused on the present. They discussed the current sociological trends and how the war of religions was a godsend for those like Michel.
Each new day brought new twists, new opportunities and fresh ideas that Phil felt he could use. He was gaining more confidence in his ability to write in a way that was both poetic and confusing. At the end of the fifth day of lessons his brain had been stretched to its limits and a lack of nutrition was causing him physical fatigue.
“I can’t take any more in. Can we stop now?”
“If we must,” replied Michel calmly.
“I need to rest my mind.”
Michel passed him a battered tankard of water, although water was rarely the only substance contained within it. A cloudy, yellow liquid, which wouldn’t have been out of place as the by-product of the drinking process, it had a musty smell similar to dry dirt and a density that meant it could be knocked over and reinstated some minutes later without the tiniest bit of liquid flowing out. It was hard to know whether you drank it or attacked it with a knife and fork.
“What will you do when you get out, Michel?” he asked, reluctantly taking a mouthful of sludge from the cup.
“Keep writing,” he said without flinching.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll throw you back in here?”
“Not really. I’ll be more careful next time. But I must continue. My children rely on the money I make from selling ‘Les Prophéties’.”
“You have children?!” The question was delivered in a tone of voice that might have been deemed rude or insulting, but considering Michel’s advanced years it took Phil by surprise that anyone closing in on their sixties would still have dependants.
“Yes.”
“But they’re grown up now right. They don’t need your money surely.”
“My wife is currently pregnant and I have five other children to look after.”
“Jesus!”
Until the late-twentieth century it was usual for people to have a lot of children. It was common to find families who had as many as a dozen. This was highly impractical because only the very richest families had homes and incomes that could cater for such large numbers. If you only lived in a shack, or worse, a hole, increasing the numbers of those that lived there made very little sense. Every new mouth needed feeding and the amount of food available was unlikely to increase.
In truth couples didn’t actually want more children. But they did want more sex. After all, what else in their lives was both free and made you feel good, other than public hangings, which shared the similarity of involving a lot of grunting and the occasional wayward fluid. But if you wanted the joy of sex you had to accept that children might be the result. That’s just how it worked. Family planning was non-existent and no one had developed an effective early withdrawal method. Plus you needed lots of babies if you wanted to end up with any toddlers at all.
Sadly most infants didn’t survive. Mortality claimed about two in every three newborn babies, a lottery that no one would accept in modern times. Back then it was just part of life. They still felt a deep sense of sorrow when someone lost a child, just no shock. And it didn’t stop them trying for more.
“Six kids, at your age!”
“What are you implying?” replied Michel indignantly.
“I’m implying that you’re either exceptionally fertile or you might want to have a serious conversation with your wife.”
“Mind your tongue or I’ll be forced to remove it.”
“I meant no offence, it’s just, well…How?”
“Don’t forget I used to be a herbalist. I know plenty of recipes for aphrodisiacs.”
“Even so, pregnant! You must be in your fifties?”
“Fifty-eight, what of it?”
“It’s not…normal.”
“Maybe not for you, laddie, but I’m Nostradamus.”
“You can’t justify something like that by repeating your own name in a theatrical manner. You should be selling your secrets to the medical profession rather than writing books.”
“Maybe I will one day. More than my books, my children are my real gift to the world. One day they will make their own history and continue the family line. What about you? Don’t you want to settle down?”
“No. I just want to get out.”
“What about Annabelle? She’d make a fine wife.”
“Yes, I think Jacques thinks so. She’s very interesting, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get a girl like that. They just wouldn’t allow it.”
“Not if you continue like this. Taking false names and stealing from the rich and powerful. That’s no way to build a stable future. But if you had a legitimate profession it might be possible.”
“I think it’s too late for that.”
“It’s never too late, Phil. I have had more jobs than I can care to remember. Each one built on the success of the last and harnessed everything I’d learnt. It just takes time. Here, I have something for you.”
Michel took a small, wooden box from inside his cabinet and presented it to Phil who took it in his hands in surprise. No one had ever given him anything before, he’d always just taken from people who had too much. On the front of the box a small, metal clasp kept the lid tightly shut. He flipped it forward and lifted the lid. Inside the beech wood container was a silk-lined interior and lying on top of that were pen nibs, small bottles of ink and some scraps of paper.
“Michel, I don’t know what to say?”
“Thank you would be the normal convention!”
“But why?”
“It’s to mark your progress. Now you can write your own prophecies whenever you need to. If that’s the direction you want to go in, although I’m not sure it’ll be enough to convince your way out of trouble. You might need more help for that.”
“Thank you.”
“Use it to make a fresh start. Leave false names and pranks behind you. Make something of yourself.”
*****
An old man stood upon the dockside watching the sea lap against its fragile, wooden frame. Conditions in Calais were fair and a gentle breeze was pressing the salty spray against a face that was fifty per cent straggly beard and fifty per cent old leather. Most of the town’s simple handmade boats were already out in the Channel checking on the nets laid the night before, or laying new ones to farm the plentiful stocks of gurnard and herring that lived in the shallows. A few vessels had already returned and were safely tied up on the dockside, or purposely beached on low sandbanks by the returning current. The old man was hoping to bring in his own haul of scallops, but something confusing had stopped him.
At his feet a length of rope was tied tightly to a mooring hook while the other end floated limply in the water. This was in contrast to how he’d left the same rope no less than twelve hours ago. Yesterday the recently wet end had most definitely had a canoe attached to it. He stroked his beard to massage his brain into deep thought, and did his best to ignore the large, shaggy dog sniffing around his feet in search of anything that might be described as edible and eating many things that weren’t.
“Nice morning for it,” said a passer-by who was walking down the mooring points from the direction of his own boat.
The old man couldn’t imagine that there was anything nice about it. What was nice about being confused?
“Where’s your boat?” said the younger man who was dressed in simple garments and carried the unique smell that could only come from an extended stint at sea.
“Canoe.”
“Ok, then what’s happened to your canoe?”
“Storm.”
Even though he’d been out in it all morning, and the conditions had barely changed, the younger man casually glanced up at the perfectly blue skyline. Yesterday, as he recalled, it had been even better.
“It must have been very localised,” he argued sympathetically, making an imaginary circle with his hands over the region where they stood. “I mean, look at the other boats. Not a scratch on them. I’ve been fishing whiting for hours this morning and there’s not been so much as a gust.”
“Sunk,” said the old man offering an alternative and still searching for any feasible explanation. He’d been a fisherman his whole life and when boats went missing it was almost always because they sank or were wrecked by storms. Unless there was a war on, which there wasn’t.
“Sunk? But you’d be able to see it. I mean I can see the seabed under the water from here. It’s only about three feet deep. How big was this canoe of yours?”
“Twenty-four feet.”
“Then you’d definitely see it. I mean if it was a toy canoe or an extremely long but very thin one, that would be different, you might not see that. Was it very, very thin?”
“No.”
“What colour was it?”
“Blue.”
“Blue, you say. Interesting. Have you looked inland?”
“Land?”
“Yes.”
“It was a water canoe,” said the man struggling with the notion of an inland boat.
“Yes, all canoes are water ones! I mean who’s ever heard of a land canoe? You wouldn’t get very far with that, would you?”
“Maybe if it was pointing downhill,” replied the old man.
“Anyway…” said the newcomer, a little concerned at the older man’s mental state. “I think you might want to check out old man Hector’s back garden.”
“Garden?”
“Yes. Last night I was walking back from church and I noticed a bloody big boat poking out of the geraniums. Blue, as I recall. But Hector does have a reputation for being a little light-fingered. Although in this case you might say heavy-fingered if he pulled that off.”
“Bastard.”
- Chapter 15 -
Traboules and Caravans
Antoine pushed open the huge, wooden doors to reveal a world previously hidden from sight.
“Welcome to a traboule,” he said grandly.
Very few people knew about them. Even residents who’d lived in the city for decades would walk right past these doors unaware of their function and history. Not Antoine, though. Living as a child in post-war France he’d spent many an idle afternoon exploring a network he’d first been introduced to by his grandfather when he was a youngster. Sometimes they acted as a sanctuary from the prying eyes of others. Sometimes as a place to escape the pursuers of his own misconduct. Sometimes it was just a simple short cut from one side of town to the other.
“What is it?” asked Ally, surprised to see the dimly lit passageway on the other side of the door rather than someone’s living room as she’d expected.
“Today it’s our lifeline.”
The narrow passageway weaved through the block of apartments, making unusual turns for no obvious architectural reason. Here and there a set of postboxes were bolted to the wall next to side entrances that led off into a flat or residential complex. After five minutes of walking, they reached the other end where another door kept the traboule’s existence secret from anyone not in the know. Once on the other side they found themselves in a sealed courtyard surrounded by terracotta houses that stretched high into the air above them. Small, arched, glassless windows zigzagged up the walls and were connected together by elegant spiral staircases.
“That was the traboule then, was it? Seems a little pointless seeing how it’s led us up a dead end,” said Ally, getting rather frustrated by the whole affair of running away.
“Oh no. That’s only one of them. There are over four hundred,” said Antoine, walking directly over to a door with an enamel number six screwed above its frame.
“And where do they lead?”
“Out of the city, if you follow them to the end.”
“And after that, where are we going then?”
“Once we are on the outskirts we can hike until we find some transport to Mâcon,” replied Antoine.
“I’m not hiking anywhere in these shoes,” replied Ally angrily.
“Fine. We’ll get some transport.”
“Why Mâcon anyway?”
“You want to meet with Bernard Baptiste, don’t you?”
It hadn’t taken him long after the shock of the bombing to construct a plan in his mind. This in itself felt strange to Ally. A bombing on your doorstep and a burglary on the same day weren’t normal occurrences. Not for her at least. Most people’s immediately reaction would be to tidy up, help the police with their enquiries and look to others for some comfort. Running away didn’t seem altogether appropriate. Even if someone was out to get them, surely they’d be safer at home protected by the authorities, particularly if it wasn’t clear who was trying to harm him or why. Now they were effectively on the run, keeping themselves hidden in order to locate a man that in her o
pinion was a complete fraud.
Before she could answer his question he disappeared through door number six. If it wasn’t for the blisters swelling on her heels, Ally would have found the discovery of the traboules a more rewarding experience. Each one ended in familiar fashion, one secret door closed behind them and another would appear close by, like the back of the wardrobe that granted access to Narnia. She lost count of how many different traboules they’d entered. Each alley, stair or underground passageway presented another apparent false move before Antoine identified the next like a top-rate illusionist.
Each new discovery had a notable effect on his demeanour. He no longer acted like the slightly fragile elderly retiree she’d first met for a coffee. Adventure had rubbed away his advanced years and transported him to a time of childlike wonder and intrigue. The circumstances of this morning’s events had, if anything, made his life more interesting. It was clear that he was thoroughly enjoying the whole experience and keen to ensure that Ally did likewise.
“The traboules were originally used by the canuts to move their products down to the markets at speed,” he said as they crossed an empty side street to get to their next port.
“Canuts?”
“I thought you were an expert in languages?” said Antoine in surprise as they passed through a gateway by means of pressing the correct buttons on a security pad.
“And I maintain my expertise by being constantly inquisitive,” she replied gruffly.
“Canuts was a local name given to the silk workers. The traboules allowed them to carry their goods from workshop to market in less than four minutes. We’re not far from that area of the city now.”
Their route had been climbing steadily over the last five minutes in recognition of Lyon’s position at the bottom of a bowl-like hollow.
“Of course they aren’t used for that now,” he continued, never seeming to run out of breath or interesting facts about their location. “They have had other uses down the years. I’m told they were vital to the Resistance movement during the Second World War.”