It was a close-run thing, in the end; had he been a quarter of an hour later, he would not have been able to catch a glimpse of the hermitage before darkness fell. Had he not seen it in the fast-fading twilight he could not have found it, for no light burned in its window, and it had obviously been abandoned for decades, but the roof had not yet caved in. It leaked in a dozen places, but there was enough dry space within to set down his pack. He lit a candle—not without difficulty, for all that he had kept his tinder dry.
There was no point in trying to gather wood to build a fire that would burn all night, so Jehan made a rapid meal of what little bread he had left before wrapping himself more tightly in his cloak and lying down in a corner to sleep. Even as he reached out to snuff out his candle, though, he was interrupted. A voice cried in the distance, in German-accented French, asking what light it was that was showing in the darkness. For a moment he was tempted to extinguish the candle anyway, in the hope that the other traveler would not be able to find him once the guide was gone—but that would have been a terrible thing to do, even if the other turned out to be a bandit or a heresy-hunter. Instead, he shouted out that he was a traveler who had lost his way, and had taken refuge in an abandoned hermitage.
A few minutes later, a man staggered through the doorway, mingling curses against the weather with profuse thanks for guidance to the meager shelter. He took off a vast colporteur’s pack, letting it fall to the floor with a grateful sigh. He was approximately the same age and build as Jehan Thun; even by candlelight Jehan could see the anxiety in the way the newcomer measured him, and knew that it must be reflected in his own eyes. He imagined that the other must be just as glad as he was to see that they were so evenly matched, not merely in size and apparent health but in the manner of their dress.
“I did not see you on the path ahead of me,” the newcomer said, “so I presume that you must be coming away from Geneva while I am going towards it. I don’t know which of us is the wiser, for they say that Geneva is like a city under siege nowadays. My name is Nicholas Alther. I was born in Bern, although my course takes me far and wide in the Confederation, France and Savoy.”
Jehan knew that the complications of Geneva’s political situation extended far beyond matters of religious controversy; although the city was allied with Bern it was not a member of the Swiss confederation, and its position as a three-way juncture between Switzerland, Savoy and France created tensions over and above the residue of Calvin’s reforms.
“My name is Jehan Thun,” he admitted, a trifle warily. “I’m stateless now, although I’ve recently been in France.” Jehan watched Nicholas Alther carefully as he spoke his name; there was a manifest reaction, but it was not the same one that the name had usually evoked in Geneva, and Nicholas Alther did not make the same attempt to conceal it. “Thun?” the colporteur echoed. “There was once a clockmaker in these parts named Thun.”
“That was a long time ago,” Jehan said, very carefully.
“Yes,” Alther agreed. “He was a fine mechanician, though, and his work has lasted. I have one of his watches in my pack—my own, not for trading.” So saying, the colporteur rummaged in one of the side-pockets of his capacious luggage and brought out a forty-year-old timepiece. Jehan Thun observed that its single hand was making slow progress between the numbers ten and eleven. “You doubtless have a better one,” Alther prompted, as he put the device away again and brought out a cheese instead.
“No,” Jehan confessed. “I have no watch at all.”
“No watch!” Alther seemed genuinely astonished. He offered Jehan Thun the first slice of cheese he cut off, but Jehan shook his head and the other continued, punctuating his speech with the motions of his meal. “Perhaps you are not related to the old clock-maker—but your French has a hint of Geneva in it, and I doubt there was another family hereabouts with that name. Aubert Thun must have been one of the first men ever to use a spring to drive a clock, or at least a fusee regulator in place of a stackfreed—and the escapements he made for weight-driven clocks will preserve his reputation for at least a century more, for they’re still in use in half the churches between here and Bern. He was a greater man than many whose names will be better preserved by history, although I don’t recall hearing of anything he did after he quit Geneva.”
Jehan Thun looked at the colporteur sharply when he said that, wondering whether Alther might have the name of Calvin in mind, but all he said, reluctantly, was: “Aubert Thun was my grandfather.” “Did he abandon his trade when he went away?” the colporteur asked.
“No,” Jehan admitted, “but there are locksmiths and clockmakers by the hundred in Paris, which means that there are escapements by the thousand and far more watch-springs than anyone could count. He had the reputation there of a skilled man, but there was no reason why rumor of his skill should carry far. It has surprised me that his name is still remembered here; he told me that he was only an apprentice to the man who first used springs in Genevan watches and first put verge escapements into the region’s church clocks.”
“Is that true?” Alther replied, his features expressing surprise. He had wine as well as cheese, and offered the flask to Jehan Thun, but Jehan shook his head again. Alther took a deep draught before continuing: “I heard the same, but always thought Master Zacharius a legend. Even before Calvin, Genevans were reluctant to think that anything new could be produced by the imagination of a man; everything had to be a gift from God or an instrument of the Devil. The tale they tell of Thun’s supposed master is a dark and fanciful one, but nothing a reasonable man could believe.”
Jehan knew that the conversation had strayed on to unsafe ground, but he felt compelled to say: “I agree, and I’m sorry to have found people in Geneva who still look sideways at the mention of my grandfather’s name. Master Zacharius did go mad, I fear, but the stories they tell of him are wildly exaggerated.”
“And yet,” Alther observed, “you’re coming away from Geneva. Are you, by any chance, heading in the direction of Evionnaz...and the Chateau of Andernatt?”
Jehan suppressed a shiver when Alther said that. Colporteurs were notorious as collectors and tellers of tales, for it oiled the wheels of their trade; Alther’s stock was obviously broad and deep. He said nothing.
“I’ve seen the chateau on the horizon,” the colporteur went on, eventually, “And that’s more than most can say. No one goes there, and it seems to have fallen into ruins. Whatever you’re looking for, I doubt that you’ll find it.”
“My destination might lie further in the same direction,” Jehan pointed out.
“There is nothing further in that direction,” Alther retorted. “Evionnaz is the road’s end. I’ve traveled it often enough to know.” “The world is a sphere,” Jehan said, knowing as he said it that it was not an uncontroversial opinion, and hence not entirely safe. “There is always further to go, in every direction, no matter how hard the road might be—and the Dents-du-Midi are not impassable at this time of year.”
“That’s what I thought before the rain set in,” Alther grumbled, following his cheese with some kind of sweetmeat—which, this time, he did not bother to offer to his companion, “but the people of Evionnaz think the world has an edge, no more than a league from the bounds of their fields. They never go to Andernatt.”
“I have not said that I am going that way,” Jehan said, rudely. “But if I were, it would be no one’s business but my own.” He felt that he had said too much, even though he had said very little, and he indicated by the way in which he gathered his cloak about himself that he did not want to waste any more time before going to sleep, now that the colporteur had finished his meal.
“That’s true,” Alther agreed, shrugging his shoulders to indicate that it was of scant importance to him whether the conversation was cut short. “I’ll venture to say, though, that you’d be unlikely to meet the Devil if you did go that way, whether or not there’s anything more than a ruin at Andernatt. There are half a hundred peaks on thi
s side of the lake alone where Satan’s reported to have squatted at one time or another—and that’s not counting dwellings like this one, whose former inhabitant was reckoned his minion by the Calvinists down in Geneva.”
“I’ll be glad of that, too,” Jehan assured him, and said no more.
Jehan Thun and Nicholas Alther parted the next morning on good terms, as two honest men thrown briefly together by chance ought to do. They wished one anther well as they set off in nearopposite directions. Whether Alther gave another thought to him thereafter, Jehan did not know or care, but he certainly gave a good deal of thought to what Alther had said as he made his way towards Evionnaz. It was a difficult journey, but when he finally reached the village, huddled in a narrow vale between two crags, he was able to buy food and fill his flask. He passed through with minimal delay into territory where the paths that once had been were now hardly discernible. No one in the village asked him where he was bound, but a dozen pairs of eyes watched him as he went, and he felt those eyes boring into his back until he had put the first of many ridges between himself and the village.
Jehan no longer had precise directions as to the path he must take; he had not dared to mention the chateau in Geneva. All he had to guide him now was vague advice handed on by his grandmother, which told him no more than to steer to the left. Inevitably, Jehan soon became desperately unsure of his way. While the sun descended into the west he wandered, searching the narrow horizons for a glimpse of the ruins that Nicholas Alther claimed to have seen. At least the sun was visible, so he was able to conserve a good notion of the direction in which Evionnaz lay, but by the time he decided that he would have to turn back he knew that it would be difficult to reach the village before nightfall.
Then, finally, he caught sight of a strange hump outlined on a slanting ridge. He was not certain at first, given the distance and the fact that he was looking at it from below, that it really was the remnant of an edifice, and it seemed in a far worse state than he had hoped, even after hearing Alther’s judgment.
Because it lay in a direction diametrically opposite to the route that would take him towards Evionnaz, Jehan Thun knew that he would be in difficulty if there were nothing on the site but broken stones, but he had to make the choice and he was not at all confident that he could find his way back to his present location if he did not press on now. He decided that he must trust to luck and do his utmost to carry his quest forward to its destination.
Again he reached his objective just as night was falling, and again he saw no light as he toiled uphill towards the crumbled stonework, until he lit his own candle—but this time, there seemed at first glance to be no roof at all to offer him shelter, merely a tangle of tumbled walls, cracked arches and heaps of debris.
He did not realize for some little while that he had only found an outer part of the ancient edifice. He might easily have lain down to sleep without making any such discovery, but, as chance would have it, he was fortunate enough to see a flock of bats emerging from a crevice behind a pile of rubble. When he climbed up to see if he could insinuate himself into the gap, he did not expect to find anything more than a corner of a room, but he was able to make a descent into a much broader and deeper space that had two doorways. These gave access to further corridors, each of which contained a stairway leading into what had seemed from beneath to be the solid rock of the ridge. He quickly came to the conclusion that the chateau must have been much larger than it now seemed, built into a groove in the ridge rather than perched atop level ground. The lower parts of its walls had been so completely overgrown that the casual eye could not distinguish them from the native rock that jutted up to either side.
One stairway turned out to be useless, the wooden-beamed storage-cellar to which it led having caved in, but the other led to further rooms and further portals, some with ceilings and doors still intact. The route was awkward, not least because of the stink—the bats had been depositing their excreta for generations—but he managed to open three of the closed doors to expose further spaces beyond, two no bigger than closets but one of a more appreciable size. This one had a slit-like window, through which the stars were clearly visible, although no such aperture had not been discernible from the side of the hill he had climbed on his first approach.
That first room was uninhabitable, but when he went on again he found one that the bats had not yet turned it into a dormitory, because the shutter on its window was still intact. The bare wooden floorboards seemed more hospitable than stone, and they seemed remarkably free of dirt, so Jehan set his pack down. He was so exhausted that he stretched himself out and blew out his candle without making a meal.
His thoughts immediately returned to what Nicholas Alther had said about Master Zacharius, and he began to regret not asking exactly what story it was that Alther had heard. According to his grandmother—who believed far more of the tale than her husband— her father had put his soul into the spring of a clock commissioned by the Devil, thus conceding the Adversary power to transmogrify and finally obliterate his work. Aubert Thun’s son, Jehan’s father, had been as skeptical as the old man, and Jehan had the same attitude; he would never have come here had it not become impossible for him to stay in Paris—but once the capital of France had become as unsafe for Protestants as Geneva had once been for Catholics, the only choice remaining to him was the direction in which to flee. Since he had had to go somewhere, and had no other destination in mind, it had seemed to Jehan that he might as well do what his grandmother—who had died of natural causes thank God, long before the massacre—had always wanted his father to do. Now that he was here, though, he could not help reflecting lugubriously on the fact that he had come in order to have a destination at which to point his automation limbs, not because he believed that there would be any treasure to find or any curse to lift.
He decided before he fell asleep that he would explore the ruins as thoroughly as was humanly possible on the following day, and then make further plans. The food he had bought in Evionnaz would be enough to sustain him for more than a day, although it should not be difficult to find pools of rainwater to drink. He would have to decide soon enough whether to retrace his steps in the direction of inhospitable Geneva, or to make his way back to the Rhone and follow the path that Nicholas Alther had presumably been walking, or make his way eastwards along the north shore of the lake—or go on into the Dents-du-Midi, into a bleak and empty region that the people of Evionnaz took to be the limit of the world.
* * * *
In the morning, Jehan Thun was awakened by a hand placed on his shoulder. The room was still gloomy but the shutter had been partially opened; the beam of sunlight streaming through the narrow window brightened the plastered walls, reflecting enough light to show him that the person who had woken him was very short and stout: a dwarf.
That was a terrible shock—not because it was unexpected, but for the precisely the opposite reason. His grandmother had told him that the Devil had come to her father, Master Zacharius, in the form of a dwarf named Pittonaccio.
“Who are you?” Jehan stammered, quite ready to believe that he was face to face with the Devil. The moment of awakening is a vulnerable one, in which deep impressions can be made that are sometimes difficult of amendment.
The little man paused momentarily, as if he had not expected to be addressed in French, but he answered fluently enough in the same language. “I am the Master of Andernatt,” he said, proudly. “The question should rather be: Who are you? You are the invader here— are you a bandit come to rob me of my heritage?” His Germanic accent was not as pronounced as Nicholas Alther’s, but was evident nevertheless.
“I’m no bandit,” Jehan said.
“Are you not? Are you a guest, then? Did you knock on any of the doors you passed through last night? Did you call out to ask for shelter?”
“I saw no light,” Jehan protested.
“You would have seen a light had you taken more care to look around,” the dwarf replied. “
My chamber has a broader window than this one, and I lit my lamp before sunset. I suppose you did not see my goats on the ledges either, or my garden in the vale.”
“No,” said Jehan, becoming increasingly desperate as the challenges kept coming. “I saw no goats—but if I had, I’d have taken them for wild creatures. Nor did I see a garden, but it was dusk when I approached and I was fearful that I might not reach the shelter of the ruins before night plunged me into darkness.”
“The stars were shining,” the dwarf observed, “and there’s near half a moon. Your eyes must be poor—but I suppose you came from the direction of Evionnaz, from which my window would have been hidden. You still have not told me who you are, or what business you have here.”
Jehan Thun hesitated fearfully; he felt a strong temptation to declare that his name was Nicholas Alther, and that he was a colporteur who had lost his way—but he had no pack of goods and trinkets, and no good reason to lie. In the end, he plucked up his courage and said: “My name is Jehan Thun. My grandfather was Aubert Thun, apprentice to Master Zacharius of Geneva.”
The dwarf recognized the names, but he did not look sideways in suspicion, let alone recoil in horror. Instead, he smiled beatifically, and the expression caused his unhandsome face to become quite pleasant. “Ah!” he said. “The answer to my prayer! There have been others here before you, searching for the clock, but none named Thun. Zacharius must have been your great-grandfather, Master Jehan, for Aubert Thun married the clockmaker’s daughter, Gerande.”
Jehan was terrified already, so the fact that the dwarf knew all this gave him little further distress. “And you?” he said, in a quavering voice. “Are you...?” He could not say the word. His grandmother had been twice devout, once as a Catholic and once as a Protestant, and had prayed incessantly for her father in either mode, but Jehan had never been able to put quite as much trust as that in the attentiveness of Heaven or the menace of Hell. Even so, for the moment, he could not say either “the Devil” or “Pittonaccio.”
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels Page 9
