Heretic Dawn

by Robert Merle

  To which Malvézie, raising his two empty hands—on which the blood of his many victims had, alas, left no trace—and cried in the most piteous and hypocritical tones, so out of keeping with his ugly butcher of a face:

  “Nay, Monsieur, I am unarmed, as you see!”

  So Samson, having failed to see the ambush from which Accla had saved him, and always ready to believe others, no matter how vile their actions or intent, resolved not to open fire on this scoundrel—which was a most unfortunate decision, as we shall see. But he did continue to hold Malvézie in his sights, which gave Giacomi time to seize his other pistol from his saddlebag and to yell to Malvézie, “Monsieur, if one of your men moves even so much as his little pinky, you’re dead.”

  But in truth none of our adversaries gave any thought to fighting since their two dead companions were lying at the feet of their horses and they could see that my duel with their master was not turning to his advantage.

  For the baron was bleeding profusely now from the wound in his calf, breathing loudly, and seemed out of breath from all the effort he’d made to catch up with me, so that now, trying to catch his breath instead of wasting more of it, he’d stopped shouting insults and was quietly and angrily trying to figure out some new malfeasance he could practise on me to trip me up.

  I could so clearly feel all this sly calculation going on in his pineal gland (which is supposed to be the seat of thought) that I watched him like a cat ready to pounce, tensing my muscles, all my nerves at the ready and taking no chances, my blade never losing contact with his for a second, and my eyes careful to keep track of what he was doing with his left hand—which was lucky. For suddenly drawing this hand behind him, he was going to throw his dagger at my face, I realized, and so I suddenly dropped to my knees, so that his weapon whistled over my head. Fontenac was so confused by my vivacity and so angry to have so futilely lost his dagger, with which he’d been parrying some of my blows, that he seemed to lose heart to the point of retreating several steps, lowering his sword and telling me in the most civil tone: “Monsieur, we’re never going to resolve this combat, let’s end it, I beg you.”

  “Monsieur,” I replied, lowering my sword, “you’ve called my father a knave, my grandfather a lackey and me a coward. Do you withdraw all of these insults?”

  “I withdraw them,” conceded Fontenac in the most hypocritically noble tone. “I owe it to your bravery and to my mercy. And as for your right of passage on my road, I will be generous enough to concede you this as well. Put up your sword, I beg you.”

  I found myself confounded by such base impudence and all the more so as I could see perfectly well that this evasion was nothing but an ugly preface to the baron’s next low blow, and found it so distasteful that I felt literally nauseated by it. I therefore stood my ground, picked up my sword and, deciding to push this villain’s revolting comedy to a bloody conclusion, declared, “Monsieur, I thank you a thousand times for your generous offers, but I have decided not to accept them. I shall pass, instead, over your body.”

  Hearing this, without a word of response, and without giving me time to put myself on guard, he rushed at me like a madman, letting loose a terrible yell, sword extended. But I had anticipated this reaction, stood my ground and raised my point to the level of his face. He continued his mad assault and literally spitted himself on my sword point which penetrated two inches into his left eye and made such havoc in his brain that he collapsed all at once in a heap like a bull in a butchery under the expert knife thrust of the butcher.

  I stood amazed at this thrust, which I hadn’t planned, hesitant to take credit for it, unable even to believe that this man lying at my feet, sealed in his eternal death, this perennial enemy of my family, had died at my hand. I could hardly believe my eyes since, lying there, he seemed even taller than when standing, his face even more vile and wicked than at any time in our dispute, even when he was hurling his vicious insults at me.

  And yet, when I saw he wasn’t moving, I ran towards the road, where I was afraid the battle was raging between his henchmen and my brothers.

  I have to give credit where credit is due: the Sieur de Malvézie, of all of Fontenac’s rascals, was the first to take to his heels when he saw the baron fall, and disappeared without checking to see whether he was dead or not. He was off in a burst of speed, grabbing the priest’s bridle and leading Pincers away with him while the others were drawing their swords and attempting to block our way and give no ground. Evidently they thought they were stronger, being five to our three, having forgotten that we had pistols. But, strangely, our side had also forgotten their firearms, and, unsheathing their swords in response, Giacomi, Miroul and Samson crossed steel with these villains.

  Scarcely had I reached the road before I saw my poor Accla lying dead, and was so transfixed with grief that I was frozen to the spot—and would have been run through by one of Fontenac’s men had not Giacomi deflected his sword at the last second with the pistol he was holding in his left hand but hadn’t thought to fire.

  “’Sblood!” I screamed, suddenly drunk with anger. “Shoot them!”

  “What?” gasped Giacomi. “Fire on men who have only steel to oppose us!”

  “Fire, Giacomi!” I cried. “Do we have to risk another life besides Accla’s?”

  And since neither Giacomi, nor my younger brother, nor Miroul, to my unbounded rage, would do what I told them, I seized a pistol from Samson’s saddlebag and immediately dropped one of their men in his tracks. This was too much for the rest of them. Wheeling their horses away, they fled from us at a gallop.

  “And Malvézie?” I cried. “What’s happened to that scoundrel?”

  “He fled,” said Samson, turning his innocent face towards me all shining with happiness to see me safe at last.

  But I couldn’t bear the news of Malvézie. “How on earth could you let him escape?” I shouted. “Miroul, your horse!” And throwing myself in the saddle, I cried, “Friends, let’s after him! We have to destroy this nest of hornets while we can if we ever want peace!”

  I didn’t wait for them, but put spur to horse and was off. But Miroul’s gelding had lost a shoe and was galloping very gingerly on one leg, limping painfully over the rocky road, and so I was myself pained to see Samson pass me, then Giacomi, and even Miroul on the baggage horse he’d quickly unloaded. As I followed lamely behind, almost in tears of rage to see myself so relegated to the rearguard of my little army, I spied in the distance one of Fontenac’s henchmen, who, separating himself from the others, had struck out across a large field near the les Beunes river, and so I urged my mount after him, thinking that she’d gallop more easily on the grass. And I was right. She regained her heart with every step and so I managed to catch up with the fellow before he reached the edge of the woods that bordered these fields.

  “Ah, Monsieur!” he pleaded, seeing me swooping down on him. “Mercy! Don’t kill me! I’m not one of the baron’s soldiers, just his basket-maker.”

  “You would have killed me, however, basket-maker or not!”

  “I was forced into it, Monsieur! The baron’s orders! But I bear you no grudge, Monsieur, neither you nor your family, since I’m Little Sissy’s father.”

  “What!” I cried, open-mouthed in surprise, and lowering my sword. “You were the captain of the Gypsies…”

  “Well, Monsieur, not really the captain. I just pretended to be when I was with the sweetling and the sweetling was so credulous…”

  That he should use the word sweetling to describe la Maligou, who was now so large of paunch, pendulous of breast and wide of posterior, struck me as so ludicrous that I burst out laughing so hard I nearly fell from my horse. The Gypsy derived great relief from seeing me laugh and laughed with me, realizing that I wasn’t going to kill him. “But you know,” I said through tears of laughter, “the sweetling you’ve described claims that you took her by force fifteen times that night in the barn!”

  “Fifteen times!” gasped the Gypsy. “That’s tw
elve too many! And of force there was but very little.”

  I broke out laughing again, and may the delicate ladies who are reading this please remember that the animal spirits in me that had been so constrained and repressed by the anxieties of battle needed just such a joyful occasion to let themselves go.

  “Well, my Gypsy friend,” I said finally, “you’ve entertained me too well! I’m going to pardon you.”

  “Can I run away?” asked the Gypsy.

  “I’m afraid not. You’re my prisoner. Rules of war. Throw down your sword and dagger. I’ll have someone fetch them. Walk ahead of me to the road.”

  We reached the road just as Samson, Giacomi and Miroul were returning, somewhat abashed, I thought, to have been unable to catch up with Fontenac’s henchmen before they barricaded themselves in his chateau, so that the upshot was that I, who was in the rearguard, was the only one to bring home a captive—whose testimony, as you may imagine, was to be of great help and consequence in the future.

  Since Miroul needed to fetch his baggage horse, we had to return to the field where we’d had our first confrontation with the baron, and once there, seeing my Accla lying dead on the road, I was seized with enormous regret that I’d laughed at the Gypsy’s stories when I should have been weeping over the death of my poor mare.

  Upon reflection, I ordered Miroul to leave the baggage horse there, and the captive with it, and to gallop to Mespech to notify the Brethren, who, with all of our household, must be out haying in one of the fields around Marcuays, since our mill was quite deserted—so that our pistol shots wouldn’t have been heard by anyone, except by some of the labourers and inhabitants of Taniès, whose frightened faces we could see peering over the walls of the town, but who didn’t dare come out into the road to find out what had happened, knowing that no good will come from a labourer who sticks his nose into barons’ quarrels.

  I also told Miroul to bring back a wagon to carry the bodies of the baron and his men since it wasn’t right to leave them exposed at night to be pillaged by men and devoured by wild animals.

  After Miroul galloped off, I sent Giacomi and Samson down to the field to ascertain whether Fontenac was indeed dead as I believed, and I remained alone with my Accla, sitting on the embankment above her body and drifting into a reverie, thinking about all the adventures we’d had together—ever since the day when Fontenac had given her to my father to thank him for having cured his daughter of the plague, and my father had given her to me and I’d become her master. But could I really say I was her master, since we were in some ways one body together and I only commanded her by obeying her innate horse’s inclinations?

  Accla had shared every one of the incredible perils that I’d known for these past seven years: in the battle of la Lendrevie after the plague in Sarlat, in the Corbières hills when we fought the highwaymen, in Nîmes on the terrible night of the “Michelade”, and in the woods of Barbentane when we saved the Montcalms and Angelina from those bloodthirsty bandits. ’Tis true that she wasn’t without her little mare’s caprices, and was at times so stubborn and uncooperative it drove me crazy, biting and kicking other horses unbelievably hard and never allowing herself to be passed on the road, always needing to be first in everything: on a gallop, with her oat bag, at the water trough and at the smithy for shoeing. But she was as tender as a lover with her master and never felt my approach without a soft “pfft” from her nostrils, placing her long fine head on my shoulder, pushing me in the back with her muzzle to ask for treats which she never got enough of; so gracious and light-footed in her paces that it was a delight to see her trotting in the pasture, her mane waving in the wind like a girl’s head of hair, touching the ground so lightly that you’d have thought she merely caressed it. She never failed me, no matter how perilous things got, as if she had an instinct for battle, responsive to every touch of the boot, so valiant that it left me breathless, fearing neither war cries nor the clashing of swords, nor even the explosions of the firearms, her ears seemingly attentive only to the sound of my voice, trusting me as if I were her God. Alas, my poor beauty, Accla, I’ll never see your magnificent black eyes again, so bright yet so soft. If only I could have saved Samson without your having to suffer this terrible death from the bullets that were intended for him.

  I was plunged in this melancholy when, hearing the sound of hoof beats and the sound of wagon wheels, I saw my father and a dozen of our people burst onto the road from the direction of the mill, cross the little bridge and head towards me at a gallop. I jumped to my feet as my father dismounted, and what a homecoming embrace we gave each other!

  “Thank the Lord,” he said in a voice choked with emotion, holding my head tight against his to hide his tears, “you’re safe! And my Samson as well! And Miroul! And Giacomi! The traitor must have got wind of your arrival and posted a watchman in Sarlat to signal your arrival and prepare this nasty ambush. My two younger sons! What a devilish business! What a blow it would have been if he had succeeded!”

  Samson arrived at this moment and we were both warmly welcomed by all the Mespech community, all of our servants wishing to hug and embrace us, overcome as they were with joy at seeing us safe and sound after the terrible fear they’d had at the thought of losing us while they were out haying. And that was only the men of our household. You can imagine what it was like when we reached the chateau and the wenches got involved! There were tears, cries, caresses, jokes and questions to last a lifetime! And after these expressions of love and welcome from all of them, my father pulled us away and led us to the library, where Sauveterre was ensconced, laid up for the past two days with terrible pain in his bad leg—and in a very bad mood, it appeared.

  However, his severe black eyes (whose sudden wrath I so feared when I was younger) softened when he saw us, and he embraced us, albeit with dry eyes (though I thought I detected some trembling in his lower lip despite his implacable Huguenot austerity). He had to hear the whole story, which I recounted as clearly as I could and which he listened to very diligently. After this, he sighed deeply and said, “When you cut down a fig tree, you have to destroy its roots. Otherwise it will grow back again and leave a new tree in its place. You were well advised to kill Fontenac in a loyal duel, but, duel or no duel, you should have dispatched that dog Malvézie. My nephew, you fought well, but didn’t kill anything. Our troubles are not over, quite the contrary.”

  On Sauveterre’s advice, and so that no one could claim that his testimony had been extorted by torture, we did not keep the Gypsy at Mespech, but sent him off under careful escort to Monsieur de Puymartin, who was a papist but one of our good friends who had fought alongside my father against the rascals at la Lendrevie after the plague in Sarlat.

  Puymartin consented to employ him as his basket-maker. The Gypsy had no desire to return to Malvézie at Fontenac’s chateau after testifying before Ricou, the notary, about what he’d seen on the les Beunes road.

  The day after the duel, Monsieur de La Porte, the police lieutenant in Sarlat, paid a visit to the Brethren at their request, bringing a clerk and a doctor, and examined at my father’s behest the body of Fontenac. La Porte determined that, as Giacomi had suspected, the baron was wearing a coat of chain mail under his doublet, and, asking the doctor to examine the wound to his eye to discover whether it had been caused by bullet or sword, they concluded that it could only have been caused by a blade. My father then showed them the bodies of Fontenac’s men who’d been killed in the encounter, as well as the two arquebuses they’d used to fire from the bushes and that bore, engraved in their stocks, the name of the artisan in Sarlat who’d made them. When presented with them, the man remembered having sold them to the brigand baron the previous Easter.

  But Monsieur de La Porte was not yet satisfied, as he was extremely meticulous and prudent in these matters and he insisted on hearing, separately, one after the other, the witnesses and actors in this drama, namely, Samson, Giacomi, Miroul and myself. As he was concluding his investigation, Puymartin arr
ived with Ricou, the notary, and three of his men, and passed on to La Porte the testimony that the notary had written in Provençal under dictation from the Gypsy. But Monsieur de La Porte would accept Ricou’s report only after it had been translated into French, since there was a royal ordinance that required that all evidence submitted in courts of justice be in the language of the north. So while the notary laboured over his translation, La Porte asked me to write down the details of my duel with the Baron de Fontenac. He waited till I’d finished my work and the notary had completed his before departing.

  He took his leave very politely, as was his wont, his eyes always very glacial, without giving his opinion on anything or making any pronouncements, abiding scrupulously by the letter of his office. However, the way he smiled suddenly when he said goodbye to my father suggested that he considered his work done.

  And so it was, but the same was not true of that of the judge, who, as Monsieur de La Porte had warned us, arrived a week later at sunset, without any escort (which might be explained by the fact that his country house was so near to Mespech). Samson and I and the Brethren were the only ones to speak with him. The five candles of the candelabrum, lit in honour of our host, despite our Huguenot economy, illuminated the honest, square, ruddy face of this Périgordian gentleman, sitting above his white ruff collar.

  “Monsieur,” he began, “I have not forgotten your valiant conduct during the outbreak of the plague in Sarlat and how, not content to provision the starving inhabitants with a huge side of beef, you were the only one, with Puymartin, to dare confront the butcher of la Lendrevie and to defeat his band of brigands. And so I have come here, not in my role as judge of the seneschalty, but in my own person, to warn you that a plot is being hatched against your house. Things are taking a very bad turn against your sons that I don’t like at all!”

  “What?” exclaimed my father. “The baron set up a dastardly ambush and now you’re nitpicking over my sons’ behaviour!”