The Caves of Périgord (32 page)

“That bonds us as one on this day of manhood,” he said.

Then he drew another horizontal line to join them at bottom, using the two outermost vertical lines to make a square. “That is the sign of the square, drawn in the blood of our kill, that shows that our friendship of this day can never be broken,” he said, and with his thumb drew a small square on each of the other’s foreheads. He handed the bowl to the woodman and said, “Paint one side of the square on my forehead.” Each of the others in turn drew another side of the square, the hunter’s tongue pursed at the corner of the lips as he concentrated to make the last corner meet.

Without another word, Deer led the other four out of the narrow gallery and into the main cave where the clan leaders and the Keepers stood waiting. They marched past them and out to the sacrifice fire, where they placed the bowl with its remains of bloodied clay on the embers and then added the brush. They stood and watched them smoke, catch fire, and burn, as the older men emerged from the cave and began to skin and joint the sacrificed reindeer, and set up spits of green wood to roast the meat.

“It is done,” said the hunter. “We are men now.”

“Aye,” said the woodman. “We will have women tonight.”

As the sun began sinking and glinting red on the river, the women came singing up the hill, the three maidens leading them with flowers in their hair. The young widows had sewn feathers into the seams of their tunics and their children danced in excitement beside them. The married men took torches, lit them in the fire, and then shuffled into two long lines, making a wide passage that led to the fire, jesting with their women as the young girls, eyes downcast, approached.

Again the Keeper of the Bulls dominated the ceremony, standing in his eagle’s mask by the great horned skull, flanked by the chief hunter with his bow and the chief woodman with his beaked club. Each of them had a clan daughter to be betrothed this day. Standing in line with his four fellows, Deer caught his breath as Moon came forward with the other two maidens to lay flowers before the feet of the young men. Heads down, they backed away, and the two long lines of men began the wedding chant, stamping their feet in steady rhythm as the young widows came with flowers in their turn.

Five newly made young men, and three maidens. Two men who had lost their women in childbirth, and five widows. One of them would go back to a lonely bed this night, waiting for another year.

The chief hunter and chief woodman began lengthening the fire, poking the embers while other men brought dry wood to feed the new flames until the fire was as long as three spear lengths. The oldest woman of the village, not a tooth left in her head, limped up to the bull’s skull and poured a bowl of milk, freshly taken from the breasts of nursing mothers, between its horns, to ensure that all the matings would be fruitful.

The two men who had lost their women stepped forward to the fire, one hunter and one fisherman. The hunter laid a fresh-killed rabbit at his feet, and his bow beside it. The fisherman laid a fat pike on the stone before him, and rested the shaft of his fishing spear beside it. The oldest woman went down to the group of waiting widows, and clearly by some arrangement the women had made among themselves, took two of them, one by each hand, and led them with their children to the waiting men. One hand still clasped to the old woman, each of the widows stretched out her other hand to one of the men. Each took it, and then each couple ran to the long line of fire and leaped, hand in hand, across the flames. It was done.

The old woman went back to the three remaining widows, and led them in line to the five new-made men. One had a babe at her breast, and
another had toddlers clinging to her skirts. For a man who wanted sons, the certainty of fertility was important. The third widow was the fairest of all them all, but had no children with her. Deer remembered the body of her husband, the bold young hunter, being brought back to the village.

From his side, the young woodman with the mark of the beaked club still on his chest, was the first to step forward and offer his hand to the girl with the babe in her arms. She took him, and they ran to leap the fire. Then the young fisherman stepped forward and offered his hand to the childless widow. She turned her face aside to the fire, toward the bull and the immobile man in his eagle’s mask. She had refused the fisherman. Blushing deep red in the thin light of dusk, the young man shrugged and offered his hand to the woman with the toddlers. She took him, and the old woman gathered the children to her as the new couple ran down to jump the fire.

Three young men remaining, three maidens. And the fair, proud widow. Deer’s eyes were fixed on Moon, across the open space before the long fire, and hers on him.

The three fathers of the maidens stepped from their place among the men, and their mothers came forth from their place among the women, and each stood by their daughter.

The old woman came for the first group, led by a sturdy flint man with thick, scarred hands, and brought them to the men. Again, there had been an arrangement, this time within the clan. The flint folk often stuck together. The young flint man with the ax sign now smeared on his chest stepped forward and offered a grinning girl his hand. She took it, and her father clasped their two hands in both of his, and released them to run hand in hand to leap the fire.

Deer was trembling now as the old woman limped back to their small knot of waiting parents and maidens. She took the fisherman by the hand, and led him and his woman and his daughter toward the men. Deer’s eyes were fixed on the Keeper of the Horses, his arm affectionate on Moon’s shoulder. Her face was white, her body immobile.

The fisherman’s daughter came to stand before Deer and the young hunter, the only two men remaining. She was fair-haired, with a round and cheerful face and plump hands, and her eyes darting excitedly from one young man to the other. Her breasts strained against the skin of her tunic and the flowers in her hair were blue. Deer closed his eyes and begged that she find favor in the eyes of the hunter. He opened them and glanced at his last neighbor, his stomach churning and not daring to breathe, and saw the lad’s face alight with joy as the girl beamed devotedly at him and they each stretched out a hand at the same moment to the other. They had arranged this already, Deer thought, and a great wave of relief swept through him and he wished them well as they trotted, hand in hand and eye fixed upon loving eye, to leap the fire.

And now there was nobody and nothing in his thoughts save Moon. No fire, no lines of chanting, stamping men, no knots of women with their raucous laughs as each couple ran off, no sound of children nor crackle of flames. Not even the childless widow, standing proud and lonely where she had been rooted since she refused the young fisherman.

There was nothing but Moon, walking toward him, her head up and her eyes alight for him. His vision cleared, and he saw her mother smiling fondly at him, and the Keeper of the Horses looking proud and pleased, and there were bright tears in Moon’s eyes and his own filled and the old woman cackled as she felt their young excitement. She was his. He was a man and a Keeper and Moon was his. Deer’s hand came up unbidden, and Moon’s lifted to grasp it, and then came a great shout of “Hold!” and the Keeper of the Bulls strode toward them.

The childless widow turned a pace toward the commanding figure with the eagle’s head. He was not alone. His friend the chief hunter strode at one shoulder, and the chief woodman, with his great beaked club over his shoulder, at the other.

“Hold,” the Keeper of the Bulls repeated. And as he stopped, the
chanting of the men died away, and a great hush fell. They stood in tension, the Keeper of the Bulls and his two attendants, equidistant from the childless widow and the Keeper of the Horses and his woman and daughter. They formed a triangle from which Deer felt suddenly excluded.

“You have forgotten, old woman, that one womanless man remains,” said the Keeper. “And a womanless man takes precedence over a newmade youth.”

The childless widow, her face light with anticipation, clutched one hand to her breast, and gazed fixedly at the imposing man. This was why she had refused the fisherman, Deer understood. There was an arrangement here, he told himself, clamping down on the knot of dread that gripped his belly.

Moon looked in horror at the eagle’s head and at the beaked club that rose beside it. They seemed to blur and merge together, man and club, beak and beak, each as cruel and imperious as the other. Her throat blocked, she tore her eyes away to Deer, and then to her father.

The old woman broke the moment, shuffling to the childless widow and taking her hand, and bringing her to stand between Deer and the Keeper of the Bulls. For the young woman, it was as if Deer had never existed. Her entire being was in her eyes and they were fixed upon the Keeper of the Bulls. Her hand kept twitching, as if rising to take him of its own accord.

Turning to the Keeper, as if all this was now settled, the old woman led the widow toward him. He ignored her, and the great beak pointed steadily at Moon.

Then he moved, two brisk paces and without waiting for the old woman or for her father or for anything but his own implacable resolve, he reached out and seized her wrist, and hauled Moon with him toward the fire.

“No,” shrieked Moon, jerking and trying to free her hand as she was pulled half off her feet, and dragged to the fire by this birdman.

“No,” shrieked the childless widow, clawing at her cheeks.

“No,” cried Moon’s mother, her hands at her mouth in shock.

“No,” cried Deer, advancing to free Moon until the chief hunter stepped into his path, his eyes cold and his bow drawn, an arrow pointing at his chest.

“No,” shouted the Keeper of the Horses. “This has not my consent.” The chief woodman grinned and held out his beaked club to block the path.

“No,” cried Moon, a firmer voice now, and she gathered her feet beneath her, ceased to resist. Then as the big man drew her close she darted her head down to sink her teeth deep into the muscled forearm of the Keeper of the Bulls. Her head moved like a fox worrying at a rabbit, and bright blood spurted and the man’s grip relaxed on her wrist as he doubled over in pain, the headdress tumbling from him. And she darted under his reaching hand and ran, swifter than a deer, sprinting away from the stunned, immobile villagers to leap the bull’s skull and vanish into the darkness beyond the fire.

CHAPTER 15
Périgord, 1944

A
s the spring days lengthened, Manners found himself experiencing moments of pure happiness, even beyond the snatched hours with Sybille. They came when he was alone, usually when he was cycling to a training session or meeting or just going to reconnoiter a likely ambush site, and they were always associated with a sense that he had been magically transported into a time of peace. This was not Sybille’s melancholy fantasy, he knew, but his own. It was composed of English folk songs rather than the chansons of Paris boulevards, of flat and bitter beer rather than rough wine, of Cheddar rather than goat cheese. He had never felt more English than during this time in France.

Still, the illusion of a peaceful English countryside was as captivating as it was plausible in these quiet forest track ways and along grassy
country lanes where lambs staggered to their feet and peasants sowed seed by hand now that there was no fuel for tractors. He was sleeping warm and dry in a
borie,
one of the circular stone huts with a thick slate roof that the shepherds and woodsmen had dotted through the remote countryside. Food was sufficient, if not plentiful, and the streams were no longer forbiddingly cold and his clothes were dry. Even in the old farmhouses on an evening, as he gave lectures on the art of organizing arms drops and the correct way to fold up the fallen parachutes, the placid faces of the old peasants over their pipes and glasses of pineau took him back to that distant time before the war. He loved the way the farmers’ wives would always blush and throw their aprons over their grinning faces as he warned them against saving the parachute silk to make lingerie as the Germans were known for checking under women’s skirts.

Above all, his forged papers were good. London had equipped him with an identity card that showed him born in Quebec of French parents, who had returned to Brittany in 1937. That would account for his accent. And they had given him a
certificat d’exception
to excuse him from military service on grounds of bleeding ulcers. Sybille had come up with the work papers, listing him as a vet’s assistant in training, which gave him the perfect excuse to be roaming the countryside on the rare occasions when he was stopped by the SOL, the
Service d’Ordre Légionnaire,
the volunteer police that Vichy had formed.

But he knew it was an illusion of peace, even though the only Germans he had yet seen were those he had shot from afar or blown up as they rode the sandbagged trolley at the front of the train. The Milice he had seen too often for comfort and the paramilitary GMR; the
Groupes Mobiles de Reserve
staged irregular and nervous sweeps in lorry convoys along the roads that paralleled the railways. They had ambushed one, and fled from another when Malrand’s captured Spandau had run out of ammunition. McPhee had destroyed two of the precious radio direction-finding trucks and damaged another in an ambush outside St-Cyprien
Manners had arranged five successful parachute drops, and Berger’s band had now swollen to forty men, and had spawned a separate group of twenty led by Frisé, which was based in the forest near Bergerac. All of Frisé’s men, and most of Berger’s, had learned simple demolition, and Marat’s men had been given London’s approval for some arms.