“The storm came in anger at what you did. That is what the Keepers have decided. You must come back and make everything as it was.”
“You would give me to the Keeper of the Bulls?” spat Moon. “He would not want a woman heavy with Deer’s child. And you would not want a daughter who would be a Keeper and paint with your fellowship.”
“You are having a child?” he said gently. “My grandchild.”
“Look beside you, Father,” said Moon. “The bison and the bear are your daughter’s work.”
They saw that he had aged as he peered at the paintings in the passage.
“How did you find us?” asked Deer.
“After you left, the chief hunter saw that a log had gone and guessed you went down the great river. He followed you, but found no track, until by chance he found people at the great rock who had seen you pass. He went on searching, and coming back, searching farther each time. Then he found a place where there had been a barrage of trees, and began scouting, thinking that is where you would have stopped. He saw your fire, watched you, and came back to summon the rest of us. It has been a long journey, the longest of my life.”
“We will not come back,” said Deer.
“Then I fear the others will seek to kill you,” said Moon’s father. “They are frightened and angry. They want life to be as it was.”
There was an impatient shout from the cave mouth. Moon’s father turned and called for them to stay back. A head appeared, the chief hunter, and then darted back. Deer smelled smoke, and knew that his fire had been moved to the cave mouth and they were using branches to fan the smoke into the passage. They could be smoked out. He had not thought of that. The Keeper of the Horses began to cough.
“You had better go, Father,” said Moon.
“No, little one. I would hold you again, and see your work.”
Deer considered, remembering the kindness of this man, and his love of painting, and then stepped back, inviting him in. “As Moon’s father, as my friend and teacher, you are welcome here,” he said formally. He crouched behind his puny wall. The smoke was less here.
Inside the cave, the smoke was still thin enough for the old man to see the great landscape and then he stood stock-still as he caught sight of the two great portraits on the end wall.
Deer and Little Moon, side by side, human but on the scale of a great bull, and he tottered as if he might faint.
“What have you done?” he demanded of his daughter, his eyes daring in bafflement from the flesh and blood woman before him and Deer’s giant image of her on the wall. His voice was appalled. “This is wrong …” he said weakly, and then muttered, as if to himself, “but it is wonderfully wrought.”
“Deer painted me,” said Moon. “I painted him.”
“You? Did this?” he whispered. The smoke was hanging heavily in the cave, and Deer’s eyes were watering. Another angry shout came from outside, and then an arrow flashed out of the smoke and snapped on a rock of Deer’s low wall. He moved to his left, so that the rock would cover his body when he drew his bow. Another arrow came, higher this time, and bounced off the side of the passage to clatter inside the cave. He glanced back. Moon and her father, their arms around each other, were huddling against the side wall.
Suddenly, the passageway darkened, and he drew his bow and shot into the smoke. A cry of pain. Then a pause, and then it darkened again, and he shot twice to no effect, seeing a black bulk bearing down on him with spears on each side, and realized that they had taken their skins and stretched them over a wooden frame as a shield. He dropped the bow, took his ax in his right hand and Moon’s spear in his left, and waited.
They were as blind as he, but he was closer to his target, and as the spear points came above his wall his ax flashed down onto each of them, and he jabbed the spear down low beneath the shield to hit the unprotected legs. A foot crashed down on his spear and tore it from his hand. The leather shield was charging into him, and he scythed his ax as he went down, feeling it jar as it hit rock. And then there were men all over him, lashing his arms and legs with thongs, and they dragged him down the passage by his hair into the fierce sunlight and the clean air. He gasped in pain as they hauled him over the coals of the fire and then propped him against the rock.
A shadow of a man stood before him, a man who had once been big and strong, but whose flesh now hung in folds over wasted muscles. Where the bones jutted from the skin, there were weeping sores, and the hands were stiffened claws. Only the eyes were fierce and strong beneath the eagle’s headdress. The Keeper of the Bulls was a dying man, just as Moon’s sketch had foretold, and in his hand was the great club with the beaked head.
Two young men brought Moon out of the cave, firmly but gently enough, and her father limped after them. Deer knew them both, his brothers of the ceremony that had made them men. Around him were faces he had known since his childhood, Keepers and hunters, and Moon’s mother hurrying to embrace her daughter, her eyes wide in surprise at the bulge of the child.
“I will not come back,” said Deer, and spat blood and what felt like a tooth from his mouth, repeating himself to say it more clearly.
“No more will I,” shouted Moon.
“You have bewitched us with evil,” said the Keeper of the Bulls, his voice eerily familiar. “You have destroyed our cave and put the sickness upon me. Our hunters find no game and the fish escape our nets and the children cry with hunger. All this you have done.”
“We destroyed nothing,” cried Deer. “You brought evil upon the people. You with your pride and ambition. You brought the new worship. You tried to fool the fates with your false omens of eagles. You set yourself up as lord of the skull, lord of the skies. You put on the head of a beast. You are the evildoer. You destroyed the old customs. You tried to take Moon against her father’s consent. You brought down the sickness upon yourself, the rocks upon the cave, the anger upon the people. It was your madness that we fled.”
“What you destroyed, we made,” called Moon, in a strange high voice, chanting the words, her head held high and her eyes looking far away across the trees and into the morning sky. “What you broke down in lust and anger, we built up in love.
“What you destroyed, we made,” she repeated. “Show them, my father. Show them what had been done under the hand of the Great Mother.”
And the Keeper of the Horses led them one by one into the passage and into the marvel of the cave, and as Moon continued staring far into the sky, Deer watched their awed and frightened faces as they emerged. The Keeper of the Bears was stiff with shock, or was it outrage? The Keeper of the Ibex gazed keenly at Deer, and called to him, “All your work?” And Deer shook his head and said that Moon had shared in it. The Keepers huddled in silence. The young hunters looked uncertainly at Moon. None of them, clearly, knew what to do. The anger and violence of the storming of the cave had passed. Deer’s attack upon the Keeper of the Bulls had sobered them. Moon’s stance and bearing in her pregnancy and chanting as if the Great Mother were speaking through her had awed them.
“Untie me,” said Deer to the young hunter beside him, and without thinking, the man bent and began to loosen the thongs.
The last to enter the cave, and the last to leave it, was the husk of the man he knew as the Keeper of the Bulls. As the old man emerged, he leaned weakly against the rock, even the feathers around his beak seeming to droop. Then he gathered himself as if he felt challenged by the new uncertain mood of the vengeful band he had brought here. With a visible effort, his back straightened and he marched across to where Deer lay trying to free himself, and pushed the young hunter aside.
“Evil,” he cried in a voice that echoed like thunder. “Evil that would bewitch your souls, evil that would dry up the rivers and empty the plains and destroy us all.”
He turned as if to confront Moon, but it was a movement that brought the great beaked club high and gave it a whirling force and with a great shout he slammed it down onto Deer’s helpless head.
Moon screamed once as he advanced upon her, the rest all stunned and immobile, and only this still powerful man with the head of an eagle and the great beaked club that dripped blood and loomed high above his shoulder seemed capable of movement.
“Evil,” he cried again, and took the last fateful step, the club whirling down. But Moon had broken the spell, darted forward beneath the blow, and came close to his chest as if to embrace him. Faster than the falling club, she slid to one side with Deer’s flint knife still in her hand. And the Keeper of the Bulls sagged slowly to his knees as his entrails gushed out from the great slash in his belly and slopped to the ground before him. The eagle’s head bent to look at the steaming, bloodied loops, and then lifted to look at Moon as she spun on her heel to slam her foot into the side of his beaked head and send him toppling into the mess that had leaked from his guts. She leaned down and brutally wrenched the eagle mask from the Keeper’s head, and threw it onto the fire. A gush of fresh blood surged from his mouth, and his body stiffened, and then shuddered into death.
She walked slowly across to Deer and studied the crushed and lifeless head, as intently as she had studied him for her sketches, placed both hands on her swollen belly as if to embrace her unborn child, and closed her eyes. The only sound was the crackling of the fire, as its smoke and the stench of burning feathers drifted across the stretch of grass where all stood immobile around the two dead men.
“The evil is gone,” she chanted, her voice thick with grief. She gasped for breath, gathering herself, her jaw working as she fought within herself for control. Her eyes opened but gazed far above the silent people, looking even beyond the weak morning sun and the new day it brought.
“The evil is gone,” she repeated. “But it has marked us all, divided us all, cost us all. The evil has changed us utterly.”
The smoke drifted and the fresh blood steamed in the morning.
“It has broken the brotherhood of the Keepers, broken the bond of man and wife, broken the bond that tied us to the cave.” Her voice was rhythmic, but softer now, almost lulling.
“Bonds can be forged anew. And the evil has been defeated by life.” Her voice sank yet further, a deeper timbre, almost the low tones of a man. Blood trickled down her trailing hand, gathered into a thick and tear-shaped drop that trembled on the end of her finger and glinted in the sun before it gathered itself and fell.
“The evil has been defeated by life,” she said again, a tone of wonder in her voice, and her thoughts drifted back to that night when she had first bitten blood from the evil man … no, from the Keeper who had himself been captured by evil. She felt the new life suddenly kick in her belly. And she smiled, remembering the warm, lulling touch of the Great Mother, who had come to comfort her in the cave that night before Deer had come for her. It was the Great Mother who had granted her the magic that had finally doomed the Keeper of the Bulls. The Great Mother had given her a man and taken him, given her an enemy and the strength to defeat him. And given her Deer’s child. There was a balance. It seemed very clear to her now.
Her upturned face looked down, and it seemed to her frozen audience that she was aware of them for the first time. She paused, scanning their faces. Her father, her mother, the men who had known her since she was an infant. They needed something from her, she understood, a forgiveness for their part in this horror.
“Deer lives in me and in our work in our cave, and in the beasts we honor in our painting and in the lives of us, our people. Life after life, generation after generation, the people, the beasts, and the land,” she said simply, the words coming unbidden. “We flow like the river, and always past the same place. We will be here forever. My child. Deer’s child. Your own young.”
She stopped, spent, and staggered a little. But the spell she had cast upon them was not quite broken. They hung still on her words. Beyond her forgiveness, beyond her acceptance, they needed yet more from her. A guidance, a direction. She understood that they needed to be told what to do, to be released from this thrall she held upon them. And she knew that she too needed release from that same thrall, and in a last gift from the Great Mother it came to her that her power over them lay in that image of her that had stunned their spirits when they first saw the portraits in the cave. It was not the blood sacrifice that had awed them, but those giant images of her and Deer. It was a greatness she did not need, a weight she could not bear. There might be other men, but there would be no other Deer, and no other portrait. A magic lay there that was beyond her will to comprehend. She knew only that it must not be repeated. And the people still needed her direction.
“Father, I will come back with you,” she said. “But take Deer within the cave, so that he may gaze on my image in death, and then take wood and earth and stones and seal the cave. Our work here is done.”
CHAPTER 21
Perigord, June 1944
Manners had never seen so many Tricolores, so much red, white, and blue suddenly dancing from every bridge and truck and half the windows in every town they passed. He was riding in a police truck, driven by a gendarme driver who would probably still have tried to arrest him a month earlier, and would have shot him on sight a couple of months before that. Now he was helping load explosives. Manners’s stocks of plastique had been used to blow the rail tracks on both sides of the bridges across the Dordogne. The crossings at Mauzac and Tremolat, le Buisson and St-Cyprien, Beynac and Mareil and St-Denis were all sealed, and at each one he had left volunteers cheerfully lighting great fires to heat the straight rails so they could be twisted into knots around trees. The Germans would have to carry trainloads of their own rails with them if they were to use these routes. Still no time to rest. Every quarry had some authorized stocks of industrial dynamite kept under lock and key at gendarme and Milice stations, and the truck had made the rounds of every one. He had nearly half a ton, and the Vezere bridges had still to be blown at le Bugue and Manaurie.
“Another roadblock,” muttered the driver. Manners resigned himself to more cheering at the sight of his British uniform, more waving of Sten guns and old Lebel rifles, more salutes from old men holding themselves ramrod-straight. But the roadblock stayed closed, and the guns stayed leveled at him. There was a large red flag flying alongside the Tricolore, and “Stalingrad” had been chalked on the stone-filled farm cart that blocked the road. His gendarme driver looked frightened. Manners opened the door and stepped onto the running board as a short, thin man with pale knees beneath his shorts walked to the truck and demanded, “What are you carrying?”
“Explosives, for the rails across the Vezere.”
“We need them,” said the man, and the pistol held loosely by his side was suddenly pointing at Manners. “These explosives are requisitioned in the name of the people,” he shouted, for the benefit of the curious faces on the defenders’ side of the roadblock. “You’ll get a requisition paper, properly signed by me. Out.”
“You can’t requisition from me. I’m a British officer and I’m fighting on your side,” said Manners reasonably. “And there’s an SS armored division coming this way from Toulouse unless I blow those rails.”
The man fired a single shot into the air. “Out, I said.”
“Capitaine, capitaine,” came a loud, delighted voice. “Welcome to liberated France.” It was the big Spaniard from Soleil’s ch‚teau, and he came across to kiss Manners heartily on both cheeks, pushing the thin man casually out of the way. “Comrades, this man is the master of the Sten gun. He builds them blindfolded,” he called. “Clear the road for the brave capitaine.” And he put his own massive shoulders to the farm cart and swiveled it aside for Manners’s truck to pass. “Good luck,” he called, and gave the truck a cheerful clenched-fist salute.
“Full of bloody Reds, this place,” said the police driver as he accelerated away, his hand trembling as he lit a cigarette. Manners grinned at him in relief and carried on trying to work out how much dynamite he would need to do the work of a plastique charge. When he got to le Bugue, not f
ar from the site of his first ambush, he had to go through the town and past Sybille’s house to get to the station. Half a dozen cheering youngsters waving French flags jumped aboard and hung improbably onto the back as he lurched along the rails to the river. A French flag had been hanging from her upstairs window, but her door was closed and there were shutters over the surgery window and he pushed the thought of her bedroom into the back of his mind.
He tried three sticks of dynamite, which was enough to blow the rails and sleepers out of their beds, but not enough for the damage he wanted. So he tried two charges of ten sticks, and blew an impressive crater in the rail bed. Feeling pleased with himself, he repeated the blasts at the farther end of the bridge and added ten more sticks for luck, as a cheerful and swelling crowd gathered to watch. A middle-aged woman came running down from a small hamlet of honey-colored stone, carrying a dusty bottle, and handed it shyly to his driver.
“Have you come by parachute?” asked a small boy.
Manners grinned at him. “Flew in by special plane,” he said. He got the driver to push them all back to somewhere near safety as he lit the fuses and sprinted for cover. He almost didn’t make it, the blast stunning him just after he landed in the ditch, and a thick rain of small stones from the rail bed pattered onto his back. He limped back to the truck, feeling the worse for wear, when the small boy darted up to him and asked, “Where’s the rest of you?”
“Coming,” he said. “Coming soon,” and the crowd cheered and started shouting “Winston Churchill,” and breaking into the “Marseillaise” when he waved wearily to them and tried to explain that they should throw the rails into the river.
But as the truck jerked away, he thought it was a very good question. There was something frighteningly premature about this local mood of liberation, with the Allied armies still coming ashore on the beaches four hundred miles to the north. And there were an awful lot of German troops between them and Manners, and an entire armored division heading straight for him and all those flimsy roadblocks and kids with their French flags and Churchill V-signs. And for Sybille. When they got to le Buisson, and saw the dead Milice men in the square and a fat man with his trousers around his ankles hanging grotesquely from a lamppost, he felt even more worried.
The Caves of Perigord Page 34
