by Tim Powers
But the thing didn’t approach him. It turned away and shambled back out across the deck into the darkness from which it had emerged, and after a few minutes he heard a long, rattling whisper of sifting gravel, and he knew that the thing had relaxed its sketchily anthropoid form back into the tiny stones that had comprised it.
It took Crawford a long time to get back to sleep.
CHAPTER 6
Ye that see in darkness,
Say, what have ye found?
—Clark Ashton Smith,
Nyctalops
Something bumped against the hull, and Crawford awakened instantly, thinking that the gravel creature was up and moving around again—but the whole ship was creaking and rocking, and he could hear voices and the clumping of boots from overhead, and he guessed that they were arriving at their destination. After a few minutes his guess was confirmed by the splash of the anchor hitting the water. It was still night, unless somebody had fastened covers over the portholes.
He stood up quietly and groped his way to the porthole he’d come in through, being careful not to blunder out across the deck, and even when he was still yards short of the porthole the incoming land-scented breeze let him know that there was no cover in place, and that dawn had not yet come.
He poked his head out, and by starlight he could see a long stretch of land across a wide expanse of calm water, and he knew the ship was in some harbor. The air was hardly chilly at all now, leading him to believe that the ship must have sailed south—so this was France, or just possibly if they had made very good speed and exhaustion had made him sleep much longer than he thought, Spain.
He took off his boots and tied them together with his belt so that he could carry them while swimming, then set them down and peered out to fore and aft, trying to decide when he’d best be able to jump into the water unobserved … but when gravel shifted somewhere on the deck behind him he just sprang through the porthole in a somersault, touching the rim with nothing but his fingertips.
He hit water feetfirst, and plunged far down into the shockingly cold depths.
And he woke up completely; the seawater cleared his head of the feverish confusion that had plagued him throughout the last week, and as he began frog-kicking back up toward the water’s invisible surface he was already making plans.
He would return to England somehow and vindicate himself—after all, he was a respected doctor, and no jury could judge him even physically capable of doing what had been done to Julia—and he would shake this weird obsession with Switzerland. Keats’s tales were self-evidently the fantasies of an imaginative would-be poet. Crawford didn’t understand how he could even have listened to such nonsense.
Then he broke the surface and gulped air, and the doubts fell in on him again. He began paddling toward the stern of the ship, for the sound of voices seemed to be louder up by the bow, and he had already dismissed his momentary hope of returning to England and vindicating himself. You’ve already crossed the channel, he told himself; the Alps—the majestic, towering, dream-known Alps—are ahead of you. You can’t possibly turn back now.
Hell, he thought, even if you could go back safely …
When he rounded the high, square stern he saw that the ship’s anchorage was a good distance out from shore. The sky had only begun to glow a deep predawn purple over some hills far away across the black water on his right, but he was able to see a shoreline ahead of him, and patches of trees that seemed to shine faintly on the rising land beyond.
He looked back up at the ship, and was blinded by the relatively glaring light that shone from the cabin windows; he glanced away for several seconds as he quietly treaded water, and then squinted back, avoiding looking directly at the lights. There was one man visible on deck, his face and hands strangely luminous against the dark sky, but he was looking at the mainland, not down at Crawford, who turned away and began paddling silently toward shore.
After ten minutes of swimming he stopped berating himself for having jumped without grabbing his boots, for he knew now that he’d never have been able to drag them along with him all this way … but he was sorry that he’d used his belt to tie them together.
It made him nervous to be swimming in deep water without anything to lean on if he should get tired—he was reminded of dreams in which he could fly, but was always hundreds of feet in the air when his arms began to cramp from the furious flapping necessary to keep him aloft. Could he still get back to the ship? He turned and looked back, but the ship was now as distant behind him as the shore was ahead. Fighting down panic, he resumed his course. He had never felt as alone and unprotected … and when his knees and feet eventually bumped against sand, and he realized that he had reached shallow water, he wanted to nuzzle the gritty stuff like a strayed sheep finally found by the sleepless shepherd.
The sky was gray in the east now, and the trees on the distant hills had lost their luminosity. When he stood up and began wading to shore he saw low buildings—houses and a church tower—a few hundred yards ahead, and he paused, wondering what to do now. The surf swirled around his bare ankles, feeling warmer than the air now.
His French was no better than utilitarian—assuming this was France, which he hoped, for he knew no Spanish—and this didn’t look like a gathering spot for cosmopolitans. France and England had been at war too recently for the general populace to be eager to help a lost Britisher. The only marketable skill he had was doctoring, and he couldn’t imagine a crowd of peasants being eager to let him set their broken bones … much less let him attend to their pregnant wives.
Would the shopkeepers accept British money? Wet British money? If not, how was he even to get beer and bread and dry clothes?
The bell in the church tower began ringing, rolling its harsh notes away across the echoless gray salt flats, and he wished he were Catholic so that he could ask for sanctuary; or a Mason or a Rosicrucian or something, able to turn to his secret brethren for help.
As he walked up the sand slope it occurred to him that he was a member of a secret brotherhood … though he didn’t know if they were at all concerned with helping one another.
Let’s see, he thought, do I know any passwords? Neffy? God knows what that might mean in French. Should I wave a bloody handkerchief? Stick a pebble in my cheek like a squirrel and wink at people?
Then he remembered what Keats had said about the unmistakable “look” a neffer had—he’d said that Crawford must newly have become one, or he’d be used to getting attention from strangers who could recognize that look.
So he just walked around the little town, shivering in the onshore breeze and smiling at the fishermen who trudged past him down the broad lanes toward the beached dories, and then at the people who began ambling up to open the shops. Many of them looked twice at the haggard, soaked figure, but none of their gazes seemed to hold the kind of interest he was looking for.
Eventually he found a warm chimney and leaned against it, and it was there that the very old man in the dun-colored cassock found him. Crawford noticed him when he was still a dozen yards up the street—and the old man was hunching along so slowly, seeming to put the whole weight of his frail body on his gnarled walking stick with each step, that Crawford had plenty of time to study him.
Strong-looking yellow teeth were exposed when the leathery cheeks pulled back in a grin, and from deep in wrinkle-bordered sockets glittered an alert and humorous gaze; but Crawford wanted to look away, for it was somehow clear to him that longevity had been more costly to this man than it was to most. The figure stopped in front of him.
Then the old man spoke, and Crawford swore softly to himself, for the language had the rhythmic precision of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, and none of the skating, back-of-the-nose elision of Picardy or Normandy.
For several seconds he tried to recall any Spanish phrases … and couldn’t. But perhaps the man also spoke French.
“Uh,” Crawford began, desperately mustering his words, “Parlez-vous français? Je
parle français—un peu.”
The old man laughed and spoke again, and this time Crawford understood a few words; apparently the old man was insisting that he was speaking French.
“Oh, really? Well, bonjour, Monsieur. Listen, non j’ai une passeport, mais—”
The old man interrupted with a question that sounded like Essay kuh votary fahmay ay la?
Crawford blinked, then shook his head and shrugged. “Repetez, s’il vous plaît—et parlez lentement.” It was the French sentence he always used most—a plea to repeat and speak more slowly.
The old man complied, and Crawford realized that he was indeed speaking French, but was pronouncing all the usually unaccented final e’s. The question had been, Is your wife here?
“Non, non …” Good God, he thought, has he got me confused with someone else? Or did he see my wedding ring? No, that’s right, it went with the finger. ”Non, je suis seul, alone, you understand. Now envers mon passeport…”
The old man put a finger to his lips, then winked and began limping away, waving his stick in front of him between each step as if to hold Crawford’s attention.
But something else had already caught his attention—the old man, too, was missing his wedding-ring finger.
The old man led him out of the village east along the shore, skirting hills that were purple with a richness of heather Crawford hadn’t seen since leaving Scotland, finally to a tiny house made from the bow half of an overturned fishing boat. The sawn sides had been boarded across and fitted with a low door and a head-sized window, and a few yards away crude wooden steps led down among piled rocks to a tide pool that was overhung with tangles of nets and lines and scaffolds.
Crawford’s guide dragged open the little door for him, and Crawford sidled inside in something like a fencer’s crouch. Archaic-looking books and liquor bottles filled the dim triangular room, but there was a square indentation in the dirt floor, and Crawford sat down there.
The bow corner of the room was a little fireplace, and Crawford moved some pans aside so as not to have to sit on his feet … He paused before setting the pans down, for though they were of an ordinary silvery color, they were much lighter than any metal he’d ever handled.
The old man was grinning again when he followed Crawford in and perched on a stack of books, and in his outlandish French he remarked that Crawford was sitting where the old man’s wife had always sat; but before Crawford could apologize or ask if the wife was likely to appear soon and demand her seat, the old man was talking again.
He introduced himself as François des Loges, a poet, and assured Crawford that this was indeed France—a village called Carnac, on the south Brittany coast near Vannes. There was a government office in Auray, eight miles distant, and Crawford’s passport problem, whatever it was, could be rectified there.
Crawford was beginning to get used to the old man’s accent, and he could see why he had mistaken it for Spanish at first; not only did the man pronounce all the terminal e’s, he also gave words like “mille” an almost Spanish or Italian lilt, and he rolled his r’s. It was recognizably French, but seemed to be French as it had been spoken when the Romance languages were still more parallel than divergent.
Des Loges had pulled a straw plug out of a bottle as he was speaking, and now poured brandy into two blue crystal cups. Crawford sipped the liquor gratefully, and then, setting aside his doubts of the old man’s ability to give arbitrary and illegal orders to Customs officials, asked what he would be expected to do in return.
The brandy in des Loges’s cup caught a gleam of morning sunlight through the warped glass of the little window, and threw a spectrum of purple and gold across the weathered planks that were the wall. “Qui meurt, a ses loix de tout dire,” he began.
Crawford mentally translated this as A dying man is free to tell all. As des Loges went on, Crawford had to keep interrupting with requests that he talk more slowly, and even so he wasn’t sure he was understanding the old man’s speech.
Des Loges seemed to be saying that he had imprisoned his wife—though he waved toward the sea when he said it—and was now free, with help from the right sort of person, to get away forever. The in-laws might not be pleased—here, for some reason, he nodded toward the pans Crawford had moved—but they couldn’t touch him. He picked up one of the lightweight pans, made a face, and tossed it out the door onto the dirt outside. “Disrespectful, I know,” he added in his strange French, “but they’re not even good for cooking—they’re always getting pitted, and they discolor sauces and eggs terribly.”
He had had many women during his life, he told Crawford, but he wouldn’t tell anyone where these “yquelles” resided currently. None of them could get at him now, that was the important thing. He pointed at Crawford’s maimed hand and, with a grin, said he was sure Crawford understood.
Crawford was pretty sure he didn’t understand, though, especially when the old man concluded his speech by saying, “Les miches de Saint Estienne amons, et elles nous assuit,” which seemed to mean, “We love the loaves of St. Stephen, and they pursue us.”
But when des Loges stood up and asked Crawford if they were in agreement, Crawford nodded and assured him that they were. If he can get my passport stamped, he thought, then I will help him do whatever this procedure is that’ll protect him from his in-laws, or from loaves of bread, or whatever it is. And even if he can’t, even if he’s crazy, at least he’s a contact in a foreign land—and I’m ahead already by a roof and a glass of brandy.
The old man threw Crawford a pair of ancient shoes to put on, and from behind the door he lifted a cloth sack and indicated that Crawford could carry it—remarking, as they left the little house, that he had bought extra food and drink when he had heard that Crawford was coming.
Startled, Crawford asked him how he had heard that—but des Loges just winked, pointed at Crawford’s hand again and then pointed to the tide pool below them. Crawford stepped to the edge of the rocks and looked down, but the only thing he could see in the pool was a knee-high pyramidal stone with a square base.
Walking back away from the water, Crawford looked around for some sign of a paddock where horses or donkeys might be kept, but the little boat-house was the only structure on the heathery hillside. Was old des Loges planning to walk eight miles at his crippled-bug pace?
He was glad that the shoes were a good fit—and a moment later he wondered if des Loges had bought them when he had bought the food, having been told Crawford’s shoe size in advance too.
Then he saw that the old man had dragged out from behind the house a child’s wagon with a rope attached to its front, and that some kind of shoulder-harness was tied to the far end of the rope. As Crawford watched incredulously, des Loges climbed into the wagon, with his knees tucked up under his chin, and tossed the harness-end of the rope into the dust at Crawford’s feet.
The old man helpfully pantomimed putting the harness on. “In case I didn’t get the idea, eh?” said Crawford in English as he picked the thing up. He slowly put it on, feeling the stiffness in his joints and wishing he hadn’t spent the night curled up in a cold wooden bin. “Well, I’ll tell you this—you’d better be able to get me a passport.”
Very clearly, des Loges asked him if, for the walk, he would prefer stone-soled shoes.
Crawford declined the offer.
“Ah, le fils prodigue!” remarked des Loges in his barbarous French, shaking his head.
Crawford leaned forward against the rope and the wagon creaked forward, but then he realized that he was still carrying the bag. He stopped and walked back and, over protests, made des Loges hold it. Then, with that small victory won, he walked back until the rope was tight again and began pulling. Within the first few minutes he had figured out the most comfortable way to wear the harness, and the easiest-to-maintain pace.
As he plodded away from the sea, leaving the village behind as the ground slowly rose, the only smells were of sun-heated stone and the spice of heather, and the o
nly violations of the sky’s quiet were Crawford’s heavy breathing and the creaking of the wheels and the monotonous skirling of the bees.
After what might have been an hour he crested a hill, and found himself facing a broad, shallow inland valley … and he stopped abruptly, letting the wagon roll forward and bump him in the calves, for an army of giants stood in ranks across the distant gray-green slopes.
Then he heard the old man laughing at him and he realized that the figures in the valley weren’t men but were upright stones—the landscape reminded him vaguely of Stonehenge.
A little embarrassed at having been startled by the sight, he began walking down the north slope of the hill; but after the wagon had twice more bumped him from behind, he decided that it would be easier to let the wagon roll down the hill ahead of him backward while he trudged along after it, hauling back on the rope and acting as a brake.
In this ludicrous posture they were passed by a party of six unamused monks on donkeys, and des Loges added to Crawford’s humiliation by choosing that time to recite, in a loud and sarcastic voice, a local legend that held the stones to be a pagan army that had been chasing one St. Cornely toward the sea until the saint turned, and, by the exertion of his virtue, petrified them all in place.
A narrow arm of the sea extended far inland, narrowing to a river eventually, and the buildings of the little town of Auray clustered around the mouth of the river and mounted in steep lanes and terraces up the flanks of the hills on either side.
From the old man Crawford had learned that the history of the whole area was peppered with miracles and apparitions—only a mile away to the east was the Chappelle Ste. Anne, where the Virgin had appeared to a peasant named Yves Nicolazic and told him to build a church there, and down the road a little way stood a cross marking a fourteenth-century battlefield, the unshriven casualties of which were condemned, according to popular belief, to wander the hills until the Last Day—but the citizens weren’t prepared for the procession that came plodding and creaking and barking into town at a ceremonious pace just at sunset on that Friday.
