Fortunes of France: The Brethren

by Robert Merle

  “Ah, but we can make you pay dearly for your retreat,” parried Sauveterre roguishly.

  “Not if we wait until the moon is down to withdraw! And even then,” returned the Gypsy captain, “we still have a few tricks to play. We could, say, burn down your sheds on the island as we leave, and all your wagons and farm equipment along with them. And we could also burn the woods at Taniès as we go by, destroying those chestnut trees that make such fine barrels…”

  At this point la Maligou, who had hurried to our sides with Little Sissy on her arm the moment the shooting stopped, whispered in reverential tones that the Gypsy captain below was the handsomest man she’d ever seen, and that if this stranger knew Mespech so well then it must be by magic or sorcery.

  “My friend,” replied Sauveterre with quiet fury, “I am astonished your cooking is so good. You don’t have enough brains to boil an egg!” And he sent her back to her kitchen. Her buttocks trembling, she departed without a word, more dishevelled than ever, making many occult signs and crosses.

  “Well then, Monsieur,” said Sauveterre after a long silence. “What do you propose?”

  “Five hundred livres to raise the siege of your chateau and leave the region with no damage to your forests, your buildings or your tenant farmers.”

  “That’s a considerable sum.”

  “Come, come, Captain,” said the Gypsy smiling. “You have three or four times that sum in your coffers! You had a good harvest this year, not to mention the sale of your barrels and cut stone from your quarry!”

  Sensing any further talk would be useless, and that the Gypsy would not come down one sol, Sauveterre asked, “Suppose I pay you this ransom, what guarantee will you give me of your good faith?”

  “My word,” said the Gypsy with pride.

  “You can’t cook a roast with smoke,” replied Sauveterre. “I can’t eat promises.”

  The Gypsy laughed. “I shall leave you a hostage, then, whom you can return to me after forty-eight hours.”

  “Done,” said Sauveterre. “On condition that you reveal who informed you about Mespech.”

  “Captain, nothing shall come of nothing! This information will cost you fifty livres more.”

  “You shall have them,” agreed Sauveterre after a moment’s reflection.

  “As soon as I get the 550 livres,” rejoined the Gypsy, “I’ll tie our hostage to the tethering pole here and tell you what you want to know.”

  Another moment of silence elapsed before the Gypsy spoke up in a changed voice: “I’m missing three men. Do you have them?”

  “Yes,” said Sauveterre, “they were killed as they leapt onto our ramparts. I’ll give them a Christian burial and not mutilate them as some do.”

  “But I don’t mutilate anyone!” shouted the Gypsy with sudden heat. “It’s the Moors in my band who do. When they kill a man they want to strip him not only of his happiness but of his manly honour.”

  “You can’t have the second without the first,” replied Sauveterre. “And your Moors don’t piss any farther for having done it.”

  “Of course, but you’re right,” agreed the Gypsy. “And yet I’ve given up trying to change their minds.”

  “Tie up your hostage,” concluded Sauveterre. “I’ll fetch the money.”

  The jute sack containing the 550 livres must have weighed heavy on his heart as Sauveterre lowered it on a rope through the peephole in the tower commanding the entry to the island. It was swung in just such a way as to land on the other side of the spit of water that separated us from it. The Gypsy seized it, and counted out our good livres by the light of the moon. As young as I was, I was infuriated by the injustice of seeing Mespech thus ransomed.

  “Well, Monsieur, what about that information?” asked Sauveterre.

  “Captain,” confided the Gypsy, “your good neighbour loves you dearly. He gave me 500 livres if I would attack Mespech, and promised 500 more if I succeeded! I was operating without much profit near Domme when his messenger caught up with me and told me everything about Mespech, its garrison, resources and the bear traps in the outer fortifications. So we laid out planks to get past the traps. But for your dogs, which no one told me about, Mespech would be ours.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They were so fierce we had to kill them.”

  Sauveterre paused a moment before answering. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever met Monsieur de Fontenac?”

  “Only his messenger. An Italian named Bassano. I am supposed to meet him at dawn at Flaquière.”

  “Where in Flaquière?”

  “The big walnut tree at the crossroads.”

  “And will you meet him?”

  “Not if you grant me another twenty-five livres.”

  “Ten,” countered Sauveterre.

  “Fie then!” said the Gypsy. “Monsieur, we’re not going to haggle over this.”

  “What do you stand to lose if you don’t go? Bassano will have no money on his person since you’ve failed.”

  “It’s not so much what I shall lose,” replied the Gypsy, “it’s what you stand to gain by going in my place.”

  Sauveterre did not pursue the discussion, and the twenty-five livres were delivered to the Gypsy by the same system.

  “You will find me faithful to my word,” said the Gypsy. “And I trust you will abide by yours.”

  “Most assuredly. Where shall I send your hostage when the forty-eight hours have elapsed?”

  “He’ll know how to find us. I bid you adieu, Captain. I regret that the necessity of survival and feeding my band has constrained me to such villainy, for I am a good Christian and aspire as much as the next man to find grace after death in the hands of the Lord.”

  “Monsieur,” answered Sauveterre, not without some effort, “no one can foretell the judgement of God. But if your salvation is so important to you, I hope that you may be saved.”

  Here Jonas began to grumble something, but Sauveterre cut him short with an unmistakable gesture and the Gypsy, dropping the bantering tone he’d adopted from the outset of the conversation, said simply, “Thank you, Captain. I shall remember your words.”

  The Gypsy and his band departed, as they had come, swimming to the far bank, holding their blunderbusses high over their heads. A while later we heard the sound of their horses’ hooves and the creaking of the wagons that must have brought them to Mespech. When, on Sauveterre’s orders, Jonas went down to the island to untie and unhood the hostage (for they had cloaked him from head to toe), he had a happy surprise: he found himself face to face with a girl whose beauty outshone the moonlight. Her hair was brown, her black eyes ablaze, her lips full and her body lithe and vigorous to behold.

  Having untied her, Jonas gazed down on her from his full height without a word, and the wench, raising her head defiantly, said, “Well, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and have your way with me. Isn’t that the warrior’s right?”

  “It’s not desire I lack,” gasped Jonas, who, given his long period of celibacy in the quarry cave, was already much moved by the sight of her and struck even more by her effrontery. He added, squaring his Herculean shoulders, “Nor, so it seems, do you.”

  “I’ll defend myself tooth and nail,” snarled the wench, but with the air of someone who, after a long struggle, is prepared for defeat.

  “You’re not a virgin?!” asked Jonas. “Is such a thing possible living among those Gypsies?”

  “It’s not like you think! They have their laws and their rites. And by the Holy Virgin, I am a virgin.”

  “Don’t blaspheme here, Gypsy woman,” said Jonas, lowering his voice. “And least of all in the name of the Virgin! How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “You’re certainly old enough, then,” sighed Jonas. “Well, we at Mespech have our laws and rites too. You have to say ‘I do’ in front of the priest—or the minister: all of which is farce and charlatanism if you ask me, given how clearly nature calls. But, what are you going to do? I didn�
�t invent our customs. My pretty, if I took you now, the captain would send me away and I’d starve again. I’m sorry to miss this dance, pretty fox, but I must think about feeding this hulk: belly before ballet.”

  “Ah, so your captain is saving me for his own bed!” sneered the wench, with an undulation of her hips and a toss of her dark mane of hair.

  “Don’t believe it for a minute!” laughed Jonas good-naturedly. And more softly, “To the captain, all women are trickery and sure perdition of his soul. The captain’s mind is on heaven and not such pretty knockers as we have here.” So saying, he lightly touched each of her breasts with the tip of his finger. “But by God! He’s wrong, for a prettier little weasel I never did see, Gypsy though you are.”

  “I’m not a Gypsy, I’m a Moor,” corrected the wench with pride. “They call me Sarrazine. But I’m a Christian.”

  “Oh that’s all well and good!” chuckled Jonas, but again careful to lower his voice. “When it comes to a roll in the hay, I’m not particular about someone’s religion.”

  The tone of the conversation changed when Jonas brought his hostage into the great hall, where Sauveterre and the rest of us (all except Faujanet, who was left to guard the ramparts), were enjoying a repast of rye bread, salt pork and a jug of wine.

  “Sarrazine,” said Sauveterre drily, giving her the briefest of looks, for the emotion produced by this bright-eyed girl on Jonas and the twins could hardly have escaped his notice, “you will not be our prisoner long. I shall let you out of your cage tomorrow at dawn.”

  “I’ll never find the Gypsy captain,” moaned Sarrazine, “for he never told me where he was headed.”

  “Never told you?” cried Sauveterre half rising from his stool.

  “No, Monsieur!” replied Sarrazine, shaking her pretty mane. “It was to gag my cries of rage that the captain hooded me. I already understood his scheme, you see, when he tied me to that pole. He just wanted to give me to new masters like a dog no one wants any more.”

  “And what had you done to deserve his wrath?” asked Sauveterre, examining her severely.

  “I loved him too much,” said Sarrazine, “and since he wanted none of me, I attacked him with a knife.”

  “A villainous action,” commented Sauveterre. “Like the lust which begot it.”

  “Ah, Captain, you are right!” confessed Sarrazine, her head hanging, but her sweet breast palpitating enchantingly. “And I am so troubled by remorse that every day I pray to God to pardon me this hot-blooded nature He has bequeathed me.” But a prayer so confected had absolutely no chance of meeting with Sauveterre’s approval.

  The awkward silence that followed was suddenly broken by my mother, who, anticipating Jean de Siorac’s return to Mespech, shrieked vehemently, “What are we going to do with this shameless wench? She can’t stay here!”

  “We shall take counsel on this,” said Sauveterre, who was not going to let a woman get the upper hand, even if she were the wife of his beloved brother. “The day is dawning,” he added, “and I have another task ahead of me. Jonas,” he continued, rising, “bring me my helmet and my corselet.”

  He was referring of course to his rendezvous with Bassano, which until that moment he had hesitated to meet, fearing some treachery of the Gypsy; but Sarrazine’s story had removed his reservations. The Gypsy had pocketed Fontenac’s 500 livres, the 575 livres at Mespech and, by a most amusing trick, had purged his band of a murderess. Having won at every gamble, why would he risk his ante? At this very moment, bantering and self-satisfied, he was far from Mespech in search of other prey.

  Of his encounter with Bassano, Sauveterre gave no account, not even in his Book of Reason, and the Siorac brothers, who accompanied him, were as mute as ever.

  About an hour after they left, one of the twins returned, requesting a strong rope, which led us to believe that a tree was going to bear a hanged man. But which tree it was and how it transpired we found out only very much later, and not from Sauveterre, but from our father, in whom Sauveterre confided. From the few words that escaped my father here and there over the years, we learnt a secret that was meant to have gone to their graves with the Brethren.

  I have no doubt in my mind that Sauveterre’s intention was to take Bassano alive, make a prisoner of him and use him to bear witness against his master. But Bassano, as soon as he saw Sauveterre in the early-morning light, rushed at him, sword drawn, and before Sauveterre had time to unsheathe his own weapon, Bassano bore him a blow that would have killed him had he not been armoured with his corselet. When the Siorac brothers saw this, they shot the assailant and laid him out cold at the feet of the assailed.

  As for the tree on which they hanged the cadaver, it turned out to be the same used by the Fontenacs for their manorial “justice”. It was a hundred-year-old tree standing on a pech, no more than ten toises from their chateau, almost under the manor lord’s windows, from which it was his custom, as it was of his ancestors before him, to watch the spectacle of the many poor beggars who had been condemned to the rope.

  What Bertrand de Fontenac thought when he awoke to the sight of his bloody messenger dangling from the branches of the justiciary oak, no one knew, for he brought no complaint before any judge and was entirely silent on the matter, having fully understood this wordless language adopted to send the desired message from one chateau to the other.

  *

  The glorious news of the capture of Calais by the Duc de Guise reached Sarlat at the end of January, but we had to wait three more months, until the first leaves of spring, before my father returned home safe and sound with his three soldiers.

  I remember the exact date of his return—25th April 1558—since it fell on my seventh birthday and because the day before I’d had a major bone to pick with François de Siorac. François, as eldest, always put on great airs which he never had the courage or strength to defend, for, despite his eleven years, he was scarcely taller than I, and displayed an indifference to physical exercise that was far from engendering my respect. He must have sensed his weakness in this domain, for he avoided the vigorous exercises which Samson and I enjoyed, preferring more tranquil pursuits, such as fishing, which I had little taste for since it required such immobility. This was the subject of the dispute that erupted between us.

  At Mespech, along with la Maligou, I was always the first one up in the morning, unable to keep to my bed once I was awake. I was quite surprised, then, one morning, while I swallowed my bowl of warm milk in the great hall, to see François emerge and, from the minute he entered, speak to me in an unbearably haughty tone. It was a habit he had adopted from my mother and one which must have been contagious, for Cathau copied it as well, but only when speaking to la Maligou. (With Barberine she wouldn’t have dared.) “My brother, it is my intention to go fishing in the pond this morning. You will accompany me. You will carry my lines and buckets; you will tie the hooks to my lines and bait them.”

  I had so often, and so reluctantly, completed such disgusting tasks under his orders, hating the role of valet to which my elder brother reduced me, that this time I followed my instincts and replied firmly: “No, Monsieur my brother” (for it was thus that he requested I address him), “I shall not go.”

  “And why not, if you please?” snapped François, his eyebrow raised proudly over a menacing eye.

  “Because I have no taste for fishing.”

  “It matters little whether you like it. You will do what you’re told.”

  “Not a bit of it,” I responded, looking him right in the eye. This bravado astonished him and he was some time regaining his composure.

  “I am your elder brother,” he said finally. “You owe me obedience.”

  “I owe obedience only to my father and Uncle de Sauveterre.”

  “And to our mother,” added François.

  “And to our mother,” I concurred, feeling a bit guilty for having forgotten her and annoyed that François had noticed this omission.

  “And to me,” continued Fr
ançois.

  “Not on your life.”

  “Are you forgetting that someday I shall be master of Mespech, and you but a little doctor in Sarlat?”

  This wounded me deeply, but I held my temper and said as proudly as I could: “I shall be a great physician in a large city, like Paris, or Bordeaux, or Périgueux.”

  “Large or small,” sneered François with the utmost scorn, “what will you be doing if not healing plague and smallpox victims?”

  “I shall do as my father does, and does willingly, without recompense of any kind.”

  Here François must have felt on shaky ground, for he returned to his fishing project. “Never mind your clamourings. I require your service as your elder brother and you must obey.”

  “Monsieur my brother, I said no.”

  “In that case, I shall have to punish you.”

  I rose and walked towards him with determination.

  “Or I shall have you punished, which amounts to the same thing,” added François hastily.

  I sensed his retreat and pressed my advantage, for I was outraged at the thought that this ninny would someday be lord of Mespech, as he loved to remind me. Besides, I resented the fact that he so frequently evoked my father’s death, the thought of which, ever since Ricou’s reading of the testament, had plunged me into the deepest apprehension.

  “I despise your fishing,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “It’s sport for a villein, not a gentleman, who should prefer hunting, horse riding or arms.”

  “Arms!” laughed François. “I shot at the Gypsies on the island while you were snoring away on your pile of stones!”

  “I was not snoring!” I cried indignantly.

  “Oh yes you were!” returned François. “And at your side, this milking girl’s son whom you’ve befriended.”