The Caves of Périgord (25 page)

“Nothing to stop you taking one,” said the Keeper of the Ibex. “The mating time is soon.”

“My colleague of the horses, you have an unwed daughter,” came the voice, confident now rather than ingratiating. “Come, let us settle everything at once. Give me your blessing and the hand of your daughter and we shall bring Deer into our number.”

By the manes of my horses, the man is as crafty as he is brazen, thought Little Moon’s father. He is making a bargain over this. He has no right to block Deer’s advancement, but seeks to win something for himself in return. In his irritation, the Keeper of the Horses was about to dismiss the idea out of hand, but forced himself to control his tongue. He could have no credible objection to the match. Most of his colleagues would think it a wise move. It would bring honor to Little Moon, to be the woman of such an influential man, and useful to him, to be linked by kinship as well as the craft of the cave. But not like this. And not at all, he suddenly thought, as he studied the big man leaning back easily against his rock, in the circle but still somehow separate from it. This was a man who would do anything to get his own way, use the trickery of the eagle, and seduce the hunters and the fishers to him. Looking at the man’s eyes, shadowed but cruel and somehow contemptuous of fellows in the brotherhood, he knew that the Keeper of the Bulls was a dangerous man, a man too touched by his sense of the power of the bulls that obsessed him. Some of their angry, stubborn spirit had invaded his, just as the Keeper of the Horses felt touched by the grace and lightness of movement in the beasts that he drew.

“This is not a matter for our council,” objected the Keeper of the
Ibex. “This thing of the daughter is between the two of you. Deer has nothing to do with it. The matter of Deer is for us to decide, and speaking for myself, we have decided. The youth is the new Keeper.”

“I must speak to my woman. She will want a say in the future of our daughter,” said the Keeper of the Horses, suddenly seeing how best to seize this moment and get the decision on Deer settled. He wanted to think more about this sense of danger he felt from the Keeper of the Bulls. The man would not be crossed, but he could be guided, and perhaps outmaneuvered. Even as he began to speak, the Keeper of the Horses felt he might pay a heavy price for this day’s work. “But I am glad that you have changed your view and seen the wisdom of your colleagues. We can now tell Deer that we are as one, all agreed, and with the shade of our departed colleague guiding us to the right decision. The Keeper of the Bison will rest happily, now that Deer has taken his place. Let us go and greet our new brother, our new Keeper.” He rose, saw the other Keepers rise with him, and leaving the Keeper of the Bulls alone, walked back into the cave.

Deer filled his mouth with the bitter ocher, and putting his cupped hand to his lips began to blow the reddish-brown color onto the calcite. He had mixed it with care, not too brown, for that would look like the background wall of this narrow part of the cave, far around the corner from the great hall of the bulls. The air was bad here, and the lamp flickered feebly, smoking and making his eyes weep. It was a bad place to work, but the old Keeper had chosen this spot for his great work, and Deer must complete the bison. It was the least he could do for the old man, who had shown him such kindness after his early coldness, as if making up for having Deer banished from the cave. But it was also such a pleasure, taking the outline sketch of the two great beasts, back to back, which the old man had left for him to complete.

He had skill, that old one, thought Deer as he stood back, bracing himself to fill his mouth again with the thick liquid he had brewed. The beast to the front was poised to charge, its horns raised and its massive shoulders tense. The old man had used a flint in the wall to give a different color and texture to the front hoof, a flash of lightness that suggested the ground was about to be pawed. And the other beast to the rear, caught in mid-charge, its mouth gaping open as it sucked air and its horns high and vicious, leaped away. Such movement in both directions, but the whole kept tensely together by that point of stillness where their haunches joined and overlapped. Deer felt ashamed that he had ever doubted the old man’s talent, and humble, for not having seen before the real force of this work he was now completing. Earlier, he had looked at the two beasts separately, and neither one had seemed to him well done. Now that he was working on them himself, he understood that they were not two separate beasts but one mass of force and color held in a balance so tense that he could feel it.

Deer had traced a great double curve with a carefully shaved charcoal twig to guide him, and filled in the bulk of the bison with a paste of charcoal and the two kinds of hard, dark earth that seemed almost to flow when they were placed in a hot fire. That gave the great looming blackness that had appeared to Deer to be too overwhelming, until he had suddenly thought of making the forward beast appear to be in molt. In one of their last conversations, he had excitedly put the idea to the old man, that a great curving band of reddish brown would lighten the composition, and the curve could be used to balance the power of the other beast’s charging motion. And that was how the beasts looked in spring, when they began fighting for mates. The thick dark winter coat gave way to the reddish brown of summer. The old man had nodded and pondered the proposal. That night, he had plucked a handful of the dark winter hair of the bison from the skin on which he slept, and studied it by the firelight before telling Deer that he was right. They would use the red-brown color to show a molting beast.

“You are almost done,” said the voice of Little Moon’s father beside him. “But there is still one trick for you to learn.” The Keeper of the Horses leaned forward and cupped his hand along the charcoal line, and called back for one of the apprentices to join them to watch what he did.

“You can use a hand to guide the blowing of the color, to make a line over which the color will not pass. Otherwise, you will have to paint over it again. See, the line of the hand can follow your charcoal trace. Now you, young apprentice, watch how I put my hand, for you must learn how this is done. Come, Deer, blow your color, just a small amount, so as not to overlap my hand.”

Deer did as he was told, saw how the line of color stopped. The apprentice stepped forward and replaced the Keeper’s hand with his own. Deer filled his mouth once more and blew again.

“Your color is good and thick,” said the Keeper of the Horses. “Now, watch how I use my two hands together down here, where your tracings meet in the pointed curve. You see, my hands are not quite enough, they gape where the two palms meet. So we take a scrap of deerskin from our pouch like this, and you, youngster, fold it small to fill that gap between my hands and cover up to the traced line. Like that, yes. Now, blow again, and the curve will be properly filled with color.”

They all stood back, and admired the way the colors now met without blurring. And then, without need for a word, all gathered around the haunch of the bison to repeat the trick where the traces formed another point as the red-brown color dwindled away at the root of the beast’s tail. Again the two hands, again the folded scrap of deerskin, again the gentle blowing, as they panted in the bad and smoke-filled air. Then it was done, and they all staggered back down the narrow passage, clambered up and around the bend in the rock, and out through the great cave into the open air to fill their lungs and clear their blurring eyes.

“It is done,” said the Keeper of the Horses when their breath had
eased. “You are the new Keeper, a full member of the brotherhood. It was decided this day.”

“All were agreed?” asked Deer.

“All were agreed, eventually. All admire your talent. And all will be impressed by the way you completed the old man’s work. They are probably clustered around now to look, while we take our air.”

“Then when will the ceremony take place?”

“It is not decided, Perhaps the night before the time of mating. That might interest you. A man now, and a Keeper, you will be able to take a woman of your own.”

Deer studied him cautiously. Little Moon’s father must know that Deer had already made his choice. Would he even have raised the topic if he had not been prepared for the question Deer must now put? Would he have backed Deer so strongly to become a Keeper if he did not think Deer worthy of his daughter’s hand?

“There is only one maid whom I would take at the mating,” he said, more boldly than he thought he could.

The man was silent, studying him carefully, a half-smile on his face. He looked down at his hands, still stained with the ocher that Deer had blown in the cave. He rubbed the sides of his palms together, and watched the grains crumble and fall, some of them sparkling in the sunlight. The color bonded him to Deer in a certain way, he thought, Deer’s breath and the liquid from Deer’s mouth, where they had worked together.

“I seek your Little Moon,” Deer plowed on.

“You are not alone in that,” said the Keeper placidly. “The Keeper of the Bulls also seeks my Moon.” The shortened name was what they called her in the privacy of the family. The Keeper caught himself; he was treating Deer as if they were already kin.

“But he is old and….” Deer’s voice trailed off. “Little Moon herself would not take him.”

“What my Little Moon wants is not the most important thing in this.
I have to take the decision, with my woman, and think what is best for us, for the brotherhood of Keepers, for the village. And he is a very powerful man, renowned among the villages up and down the river. It is a great honor for Moon.”

“She would be a great honor for me,” said Deer simply, hanging his head. Now he knew why her father had done it this way, raising him up with the news that he would be a Keeper, and then casting him down with this warning that Moon would be given to another. A thought came to him.

“Do you know she has the talent, your daughter?” he said.

“I know. So does her mother, but women are women. There is no place for them in the cave. The brotherhood would never allow it.”

“The brotherhood seems suddenly to be allowing a lot of strange new things,” Deer retorted. “Did the brotherhood know of this new thing of the eagle’s head and the bull’s skull? Did the other Keepers support the Keeper of the Bulls in this?”

“No, and many are troubled by this.”

“And yet this is the man to whom you would entrust Little Moon?”

“I have not decided. But one of the new things that you must consider is that I may not have much choice. The Keepers may be disturbed, but the hunters and the fishermen and the flint men—all seem to welcome the new ways, and to welcome the power of the man who brought them.”

“But you are her father. Nobody would go against your decision in this.”

“No, but these are strange times. Fathers can fall sick or have accidents. Young suitors can meet with mysterious deaths. These are dangerous times, Deer.”

CHAPTER 12
Périgord, 1944

T
hey had walked all night loaded down with the remaining explosives. The new recruits carried the ammunition in sacks, staggering-over the heavy ground along the hills that flanked the north bank of the river Vézère. Now they were shivering in a shallow cave, unable to light a fire, and not nearly as far north of Les Eyzies as Manners had wished. He was more tired than he could remember being, and more dispirited than he had ever been in the desert, even fleeing from Rommel’s tanks amid the wreckage of a broken army. At least then there had been a sense of refuge, a strong base on the Nile where his unit could regroup and refit, the promise of a bath and a square meal.

It was the meal that was making him guilty, an omelet of fresh eggs
and a glass of wine and a handsome woman sitting across the table, with Jean Sablon singing
“Vous, qui passez sans me voir”
on the windup gramophone that needed a new needle. He had not heard the song since his schooldays, on holidays with his parents at Cap d’Antibes. The waiters would sing it late at night as they stacked the chairs on the tables. He had told Sybille about that, falling in with her own mood of nostalgia for another time, before the war.

He should never have gone with her. She could be shot just for sheltering him in her home. And an officer should not eat until he had taken care of his men, far less relax in a comfortable room with curtains at the front window and the sight of a small garden through the French windows at the rear. He could taste the omelet now, the garlic and the butter, and hear Sybille’s casual comment, “A vet never goes hungry—the farmers see to that.” He had stayed no longer than it had taken him to eat and smoke a cigarette, but he had felt the lure of peacetime stealing over him, a reluctance to rise and go.

Sybille had been matter of fact, in a way that intrigued him. He thought of self-confident girls back in England before the war, and the nervous ones who came out to Palestine and India looking for husbands. The fishing fleet, they called them. And he thought of the nurses and secretaries and coding clerks he had seen on the arms of staff officers when he was back in Cairo on leave from the front. Sybille was like none of them, with their instant gaiety and relentless energy for tennis and horses and dances. And she wasn’t like the women of wartime London with their brittle hunger for fun and parties, and the haunting way they sobbed in cinemas. Sybille had simply cooked, and ate, and asked him about his family and put another record on the gramophone. It was Charles Trenet, singing
“Je Chante,”
which he remembered from Haifa before the war.