The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  For Cooking, Nothing Is Better Than

  VEGETALINE!

  Pepper slept sandwiched between a floor that advertised:

  SAVOYARD SAVON FOR SOFTER SKIN

  and a ceiling that exhorted him to

  BE A MAN: JOIN THE FOREIGN LEGION.

  It made for the strangest dreams. Depending on whether he faced left or right, he woke looking at a green demon, brandishing a bottle of something noxious and red, or an overexcited elephant wearing a bedspread and shouting, “I Smoke Nothing But Nile Cigarette Papers!” (Odd—but not so cruel, Pepper supposed, as giving the elephant the tobacco to go inside them.) His bedroom was open at either end: to drafts at night and insects during the day. It did not rain once—despite the broken billboard nearby advertising Revel Umbrellas.

  Jacques’s den, at the heart of the structure, was more complicated to reach, surrounded by complex zigzagging corridors of plywood. At night he disappeared into it and became nothing more than a noise of snoring or the rasp of knife blades. Jacques was forever sharpening his knives.

  Every third day, Jacques had a lady visitor. Unlike Pepper, she was allowed to penetrate to the center of the house of cards. Jeanne arrived on an ancient motorbike, its panniers stuffed with bread and Dutch cheese and cheap wine, wearing a coat reinforced with strips of tire rubber, which made her resemble an armadillo. “What’s he doing here?” she demanded as she ducked inside the shack and was confronted with Pepper.

  “Lag on the run,” said Jacques. “He does the horses. Leave him be.”

  After a bite to eat and a quarrel, Jacques would drag out a motorbike of his own from among the billboards, and the two of them would both mount up and roar away over the bumpy ground, tires skidding and skittering on slicks of marsh mud and ribs of white salt, a bucket of brown slop hanging from Jeanne’s elbow. Pepper wondered if they were going to confession or to hear their banns of marriage read out in church. He was still a romantic by nature.

  But then one day the bikes came wobbling back at walking pace, leading behind them, on a long rope, a horse. New bloodstock, damply brown. Pepper had to pull coils of barbed wire aside so that it could be added to the horses in the north paddock.

  About a week later, Jeanne and Jacques quarreled more than usual, and some of the walls of the house of cards swayed, and the advertisement for the Foreign Legion belly flopped onto Pepper’s bed. Jeanne threw a few things—knives by the sound of it; Jacques hit her and knocked her down, then crawled out into the daylight. Seeing Pepper rebuilding his annex, Jacques turned his annoyance on him.

  “Don’t see why you can’t help me instead, useless lag!” he said, hitting Pepper with a coil of rope. And he dragged out the motorbike and told Pepper to ride behind him. Loath to cling to the man’s hunched back, Pepper clung to the passenger seat instead, shut his eyes, and clenched his teeth to keep them from being shaken out of his head.

  When he opened his eyes again, they were in a narrow gorge with a stream at one end. A clutter of poles had been roped together into a sort of paddock. And inside the paddock…two wild white horses. Alarmed by the noise of the bike, they were pressing themselves against the far fence.

  “Bottle trap,” said Jacques succinctly. “Push their way in to get to the water. Can’t get out again. Get the ropes on them, then, moron.” Pepper hesitated. He had no idea how to rope a wild horse. “What you waiting for? Thought you liked the fleabags.”

  Pepper pushed the chest-high pole barring the narrow entrance to the pen. It swung easily away from him, then back into place; it could not be pushed open from the inside. The horses showed him the whites of their eyes. Their hooves pranced. Their heads turned a little to one side for a clearer view of him. Pepper talked to them, but without much conviction: These were wild horses, not domestic ones; maybe they spoke Basque or Romany or some Camargue dialect he did not know. “Hello, horses. Nice horses.”

  They threw their hooves in his face.

  Pepper did not move; he only looked up. The sky over his head was an empty, blaring blue with not a bird in sight. “It’s not my time,” he told the horses, and they took him at his word, for almost at once they stood quiet. Jacques must have found a few teeth he had forgotten about, because he uttered a whistle of envious astonishment: The lag really did have a way with horses.

  The bottle trap might look like access to water, but cruelly it stopped short of the stream. Trapped in the pen, the horses could not drink, even by stretching their necks between the poles. These two might have already stood there for forty-eight hours, taunted by the tinkling music of water, unable to slake their thirst. Pepper crawled under the end pole and cupped up water in his hands, reaching it over the fence.

  “What you doing, idiot? Just get ropes on them, will you?” Jacques revved the bike.

  The horses’ heads collided as they competed for the water, and they knocked Pepper’s hands and spilled it; he felt the wiry sharpness of their whiskers and saw the yellow shine of their teeth. He fetched more, and would have gone to and fro fifty times just to feel the soft blowing of their nostrils on his wrist, see the swiveling of their dappled ears, see up close the great blue-brown globes of their eyes with their sumptuous lashes. There was the same restless, surging energy under that white-and-cream hide as in sea waves moving under their skin of foam. It was as if two waves had broken against the shore, outrun it, and congealed into horseflesh. Their tails splashed over his head, and that touch of horsehair felt as sweet as a shower of warm rain. It was a feeling as powerful as happiness, and fear and wonder, and it rooted him to the spot. He was alive. He was feral boy. What does a feral boy want with a name?

  While Pepper had the horses’ attention, it was simple for Jacques to slide a loop of rope over each one’s head, then turn and run. They kicked up a bit then, of course—landed a kick or two on Pepper’s back as he cowered down—but Jacques was well pleased with himself, tying off the ropes to the timber fencing. He let the mares exhaust themselves, then jabbed a knife into the soft pads of their hooves, “to make them walk more ladylike,” as he explained to Pepper.

  At such low speed, the bike weaved and wobbled along, but the limping horses could at least keep up. Uninjured, they could have taken off at a gallop, dragging the motorbike behind them. Now, they simply slumped along, flanks brushing.

  “A week from now they won’t feel a thing,” said Jacques. “Promise.” And Pepper had no choice but to believe him.

  Back at the stud farm, Jacques told Pepper to “dirty them down,” and produced a can of tarlike slime and a currycomb. “It kills the lice,” he said. “These beasts are martyrs to the lice.”

  So Pepper curried the two mares and turned them from white to the color of muddy boots. As he did so, he saw them change from white, wild horses into thoroughbred bloodstock just like all the rest: shaggy, squat, and thick-legged, drab and defeated. Flies mustered around the wounds in their feet. The rest of the horses were unsettled, pawing the ground, sawing their heads up and down, up and down. The mess on Pepper’s hands smelled vile, but the taste it put in his mouth was like carbolic soap. To Pepper, everything had come to taste like soap lately. He brought the mares more water, and sure enough, as they drank, the stain washed off their noses and left them with the distinctive white muzzles all the others had.

  No one paints horses brown for honest reasons. But Pepper had no way of knowing what law was being broken. People trap badgers and rats, slugs and rabbits—why not horses?

  Jacques had accumulated seventeen horses.

  “Enough,” said Jeanne. “Let’s go.”

  “Shift the wire, cockroach,” said Jacques. And Pepper had to drag the big barbed metal coils aside while the horses in each paddock were formed into teams. Four at a time were united by a single slat of wood from a billboard, which ran under their jaws and kept them from going their separate ways (or working up to a gallop, even though their hooves had healed). They put Pepper in mind of the protesters in Marseille, united by their placards. What w
ould horses protest about if they could? he wondered.

  “Where are we going? To a horse fair?”

  “Right,” said Jacques. “Happy homes all around. Ladies with sidesaddles. Kiddies in jodhpurs. Big houses with stables. Easy street. Sea air and fun.” Splat, splat went the words, and lay in the sun gathering flies.

  “Thoroughbred bloodstock, that’s what we got here, right?” said Jeanne, menacing Pepper with her rubber biking gloves. “Thoroughbred bloodstock bought at great expense and brought on to perfect condition. Right?”

  They roped the horses into a convoy, as if, like huskies, they might have to drag some sled. But they had only to drag their sorry carcasses over thirty miles of scrub, following behind the smelly motorbikes. Pepper rode the tall dun cob with fluffy feet. If they tried, they could get away easy, thought Pepper, but he knew that they would not. Perhaps they had gotten wind of the new life in store, better than the old one.

  “Think. One day you might belong to someone like me,” he told his mount.

  Do you live on soap? said the brown horse obscurely.

  The seaside town of Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer came into sight, first its spires, as if it were proudest of being holy, and then its factories, as if it were proud of being rich. Its curved smile it saved for its seaside visitors; approached from behind, it was a muddle of poor houses crouching down low so as not to embarrass the hilltop hotels and villas. Noon set the étangs, the seawater lakes, glinting like great moist eyes keeping watch over mounds of mined sea salt. Saint-Bonnardde-la-Mer had grown rich on salt.

  There was a cloud overhead in the shape of an albatross. The tide was turning, and a fine drizzle began to pepper the dusty horses—to dapple their hides. Jacques’s face settled into a stupid grin, as if he were about to tell a dirty joke. “You’ll want to clear off, lag,” he told Pepper.

  Pepper was startled. “Why would I?”

  The horse breeder snorted—something he must have picked up from long acquaintance with horses.

  Jeanne agreed. “You on the run and all. We know about you, see. Jacques read about you in the paper. ’Scaped off a chain gang, in’t you?”

  “Off a—” Pepper laughed so loudly that the horses shied and jostled. He pointed at Jacques. “I thought that was him! I thought he was the escaped prisoner!”

  Jeanne laughed too, then…though Jacques simply reached up and pushed Pepper off the horse.

  “I’m not a convict! Honest!” Pepper protested, picking himself up.

  But the two drove off anyway, the jerk of the ropes almost snapping the head off one mare and making two others stumble. The dust swamped Pepper, then settled on him like sleep, along with silence as the bikes receded into the distance. He set off to walk in their wake—could no more have stopped still than if there had been a rope around his neck too. Because if he was not responsible for looking after those poor horses, then Jacques and Jeanne were right: He was nothing but a boy on the run. “Honest.” Honest, had he said? The very word tasted like soap.

  A million years before, as a little boy, he had been taught by Aunty Mireille not to tell lies. Whenever he had said (as five-year-olds do), “Look, I’m a pirate!” or “I hunted a tiger in the bushes this morning,” or “There’s a monster under my bed,” or “I’m going to be a captain one day, like Daddy!” then Aunty had grated carbolic soap into his bedtime milk and made him drink it down, whispering, “Lies! Such a little liar! We’ll have to wash the sin out of that lying mouth of yours!”

  Lies (he learned) taste like soap. In the way certain smells bring pictures floating to mind, so Pepper had been left with the taste of soap in his mouth every time he spoke—or heard—a lie.

  It was not difficult to follow the trail of seventeen horses, and he did not have far to follow it: Town planners don’t build abattoirs—slaughterhouses—in the middle of towns but on the outskirts, where the stench can be enjoyed by the fewest people. Soon, the smell on the hot wind was so bad that Pepper gagged.

  All manner of animals ended their days at the Abattoir St. Adrian: goats, sheep, cattle, and horses, though the locals tended to kill their own pigs and chickens. The law of course forbade the killing of the famous wild white horses, pride of the Camargue…but then the law never understood about business enterprise or canny entrepreneurs like Jeanne and Jacques. The manager of the abattoir had a nice little “backdoor” arrangement with the two of them: Jacques took a low price for the horses he delivered and, in return, the manager asked no awkward questions about where they came from. Meat’s meat, and people who buy and eat it have better things to worry about than whether the meat had a name once or is protected by the law.

  In point of fact, wild horses make for tough eating—sinewy in comparison with domestic horses fattened in grassy paddocks. Then again, most nags sold to the abattoir were ancient, sickly specimens that could barely drag their bones over the threshold. And wild meat has a nice dense texture that a good butcher can dress up well on the slab.

  Pepper stood outside the bolted gate of the Abattoir St. Adrian and held his nose shut with finger and thumb, palm covering his mouth to keep his no-breakfast inside him. Aunty Mireille had shown him many pictures of Hell, so he could easily imagine the scene inside the gates: the meat hooks, the cleavers, the saws, the fires…. Just on the other side of the gate he could hear the trampling hooves of his horses—his charges—his friends—as they turned around and around in the confined space of the yard. Their whinnies, snorts, and shrieks all seemed to mention Pepper by name:

  “Where’s Chevalier Pepper?”

  “He promised us good homes…”

  “…women in riding habits…”

  “…children in smocks…”

  “…meadows in flower…”

  “…apples in hand…”

  “…love in plenty…”

  “Pepper Papier will write about us in the newspapers and make everything come out right!”

  “Chevalier Pepper will free us—rely on it.”

  “…as sure as the sun will come up tonight.”

  The gates were bolted on the inside, and very high. Pepper had been climbing things since he was four, but his hands were in a bad way, and there were no footholds at all. He stopped passersby and told them: “Horses! White horses! They’re selling horses to the meat man! They’re trapping horses for meat!”

  No one would listen. Sleeping under a soap billboard for four weeks had done nothing to keep his clothes clean. Barbed wire and hooves had both left their marks on Pepper. The dust of the Camargue had near enough blotted out his respectability. The good people of Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer walked past him, through him, around him, and hurried on down the hill.

  Think, Pepper. Be clever, Pepper. What do you know about gates, Pepper? How to open a gate? He thought back to the books in his father’s library—remembered explosive devices lashed to castle gates—battering rams!—catapults lobbing fireballs! All he lacked was explosives or a battle engine.

  He remembered how the hatch cover of L’Ombrage had been raised with winch and rope. All he lacked was a winch and a rope.

  He thought of the power of the press, and how Pepper Papier could have written something to outrage all France and bring the police running. All he lacked was forty-eight hours and a pencil.

  He thought of lobbing prayers at the sky, offering a deal, a bargain, a trade-off: Take me instead of the horses! All he lacked was a system of pipes that would carry his words as far as Heaven. Besides, if the angels were in need of new horse souls to draw their fiery chariots, they would ignore him.

  He thought of shouting protests through the slats of the gate: Skeleton men! Skeleton men! But such things hadn’t persuaded Captain Pepper to open his cabin door; why should they work here? So what would induce them to open up?

  “Sell me the goat! Sell me the goat!” he shouted at the woman standing in her cottage doorway. She hastily shut the door.

  Pepper jumped her gate, ran this way and that, giddy with vexation, the br
eath barking in his throat. He was turning into an animal, and he knew it. Animals can’t think logically.

  “Excuse me, madame,” he said, smiling crookedly at a second woman standing in her cottage garden. “I would really love to buy your sheep…. Sorry about the clothes: I was caught in a landslide.”

  “Tea, dear?” said the woman.

  “Thank you, but just the sheep would be nice, madame. I’d pay a good price.”

  “A pastis? You look very hot, dear.”

  “You are much too kind. What do sheep cost exactly? It’s a very nice sheep.”

  “She’s a good milker. Lovely cheese.”

  Pepper took out the contents of one pocket and held them, crumpled and bunched up, on his two hands. “Cheese too! Mmmm,” he said appreciatively. The woman picked all the paper money out of his palms and left the prayers written on lilac paper.

  Pepper knocked at the side gate of the Abattoir St. Adrian. The sheep at his knee looked up at him with yellow demonic eyes. “I have a sheep wants killing!” he called when he heard movement on the other side of the gate. The gate opened, but only a crack.

  “Come back tonight. We got a yardful.”

  “I just want it jointed. For a party. Tonight.” And the side gate opened a little more.

  “Too much work on. Come back tomorrow, I said.”

  The sound of Pepper’s voice had stirred the horses, like a spoon in a bowl. Their individual stamping and cribbing gave way to a shared distress. They began to circle the yard now, like water in a drain. The sheep pressed against Pepper’s legs, warm and greasy, and peed on his feet, terrified by the smell of death. The slaughterhouse man scowled and looked over his shoulder at the welter of sweating, agitated horses: He was needed to quell the unrest in the yard. Pepper seized his chance. He kicked the sheep backward into the street, darted inside, and ran straight in the direction of the front gates, though his way was barred by seventeen frightened horses.