The Horseman on the Roof (36 page)

Half an hour later, they emerged into fields. Night had fallen. Here too the grain had not been cut. The flattened crops covered the ground with a phosphorescent glow.

They passed by farms, silent and dark.

“I don't much like these houses without lights,” said Angelo. “And still less this smell that comes from them. What are we to do now?”

“You used your little saber very ably.”

“It's far too little to get us into the town we caught sight of earlier on. That must lie somewhere ahead of us, in the darkness. There's bound to be a barrack for these soldiers who are patrolling and barricading the roads. They must be talking there already about a woman who carries big horse pistols.”

“Let's stay at the edge of the woods,” said the young woman. “At least until daylight. And let's push as far ahead as we can, if you're still sure, of the direction given by your star.”

“Now that we're no longer under the trees, I've a better one,” said Angelo. “There's the Great Bear. Before I met you I saw, from the top of the hill, the whole line of troopers barring the roads. It ran from east to west. Let's ride on the Bear, which is due north: then we're bound to be getting farther from the soldiers. Unless the whole region has been filled with them, but I don't believe that. Have you any food?”

“Of course. Am I destined to be your commissary?”

“Far from it. I don't set out without biscuits myself if I can help it. Besides, the hardest thing is getting something to drink.”

“Have you forgotten that one of my virtues is to have tea about me?”

“But we can't light a fire before dawn. This country's black as a pot, and before midnight there'll be a good fifty foragers straining their eyes every which way with the simple hope of nabbing us beside our teapot. I can teach people lessons they don't forget, but they'll never forgive you for not having collapsed in a faint and for having stood up to them with a pistol bigger than your head. Cavalrymen like women to scream. If on horseback you can't even scare a woman, what chance have you got on foot? Believe me, they're busy thinking it all out in their minds; they're thinking of everything, even that one is obliged to drink boiled water in a country full of carrion. They're counting on that to trip us up.”

“You know some queer horsemen?” said the young woman.

“Horsemen,” said Angelo, “generally ride on horses. They never like it to be a waste of time.”

And he told a story of barrack life.

They had reached a hillock.

“Can you manage to get through the night without drink or food?” said Angelo.

“Perfectly well, if necessary.”

“That would let us get away without giving the impression that we're running like poor idiots who've had a little luck and taken to their heels.”

“Who do you think is getting that impression? The night's like ink. We're a hundred leagues from all that.”

“One's never a hundred leagues away, and we know nothing about anything. This is what I suggest. It smells good here. We're clearly in a pine wood. Let's stay in it till daybreak. I want to see what I'm doing when the soldiers begin their games.”

“Do you think they've the time and the desire to play one? They have other fish to fry; mounting guard in particular.”

“I know how they mount guard,” said Angelo. “I know also how the tiny brain of a corporal who's been unhorsed by a civilian works. I could repeat, word for word, the story he's telling at this moment. The two dragoons have taken the measure of my sword play; it's not every day that someone sends their blades flying out of their hands with a cabbage-chopper. They're mad to find us, and have the last laugh. We surely interest them much more than cholera.”

“Then we haven't been very clever,” she said.

“I'm never clever when I'm insulted. And all in all, we're better off here than in quarantine, which is where they'd have put us, after a lot of bad jokes, what's more.”

The scent of the pines was exquisite. They must have sweated copiously all the summer, and now in the coolness of this autumn night their sap was yielding its most delicate perfume. Even the horses rejoiced in it; they instinctively followed a soft path under the trees, and from time to time gave little sighs of pleasure.

“I'm like you,” she said, “I don't much like last laughs.”

“They're peasants who've been given sabers and are stupid from being insulted twenty-four hours a day. The day they find themselves on top, they don't show much mercy.”

“Let's stop here, then.”

They dismounted. Angelo recognized an ilex from the sound made by the night brushing against hard foliage. They entered the shelter of its branches. It was warm in there. The ground was dry, springy, and crackling.

“Let's not unload the horses,” said he. “Are you sure of yours?”

“He stayed with me three days in front of the barricades. No doubt I lacked initiative, but I fed him well. I knew I should end by doing something rash.”

“That's not the name I'd apply to what we've done.”

“Perhaps it's the name for what we shall do tomorrow.”

“We shall do what has to be done.”

“Anything rather than wait about stupidly for that unclean death. You can't imagine how welcome those soldiers were. The sight of their sabers was a joy. Naked steel is comforting. I'm not afraid.”

“So I saw.”

“But I have a horror of vomiting.”

“There's no need to do that here,” said Angelo. “Don't think about it. The soldiers were welcome for me too, and we were welcome for the soldiers. We're all in the same boat. Everyone has a horror of something.”

There were hardly any stars, no wind, and a great silence. Now that for once Angelo was playing at war with really hostile cavalry, he was throwing himself into it heart and soul. He thought of the young woman as of baggage wagons in the rear, to be protected at all costs.

“You're still not quite at ease?” she said.

“I'm afraid of grocers when they have guns,” said he. “Panic has given a taste for adventure to people who were used to dozing by their hearths. They're cats who've suddenly had their tails trodden on; they lash out with their claws at random.”

“They won't come this far.”

“I'd feel easier if I knew what's at the bottom of the hill. If it's a town or a big village, the local worthies will certainly be out on patrol.”

“Don't you rather see them with every chink stopped up and their noses under the sheets?”

“Death's been tormenting them for three months, they've exhausted every resource of that kind. Now they need action, it doesn't matter what sort.”

“I see their point. To tell you the truth, I myself took to the roads with pistols for scapularies.”

“But you have somewhere to go.”

“In theory, yes. I'm going to my sister-in-law's: she lives in the mountains, above Gap. But that's just an idea like any other.”

“That's the way I'm going,” said Angelo. “I'm going back to Italy.”

“Are you Italian?”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“You speak French without an accent,” said she. “I admit, though, that when I surprised you in my house, and you surprised me too, you had rather a foreign way of speaking.”

“I don't think so. I used to talk French with my mother, even in Italy. I think in French, and I believe that's the language I used, the moment I saw you with the candlestick.”

“You must have been taken aback?”

“I was anxious for your sake.”

“That's what I call a foreign way of speaking. You had the knack of reassuring me straightaway.”

“Who could have wished anything else?”

“Let's not draw up a list of them, if it's all the same to you. I'd already had to deal, two or three times, with thin, badly shaved, crazy-looking men, who talked what is known as French.”

“I know them: they're the better sort of people in those famous patrols. They don't like to imagine that death is independent. They have an absolute need to find somebody responsible and to treat him accordingly.”

“Let's say, then, that your solicitude and your skill with the saber come from a country that I call foreign and you call Italy.”

Angelo had never been so Italian. He was passionately pursuing his dearest whim. He was making an inventory of the noises, the echoes, and even the most innocent sighs of the night. Nothing now had savor or sense for him except to discover thereby under the compact darkness the shape of the surrounding country. He saw in his imagination a valley with murmuring poplars. He had made out the course of a little stream along which clumps of reeds were rustling; fixed, about a hundred yards to his left, the limits of a small, probably narrow valley, filled with tall trees and perhaps containing houses; identified a sort of solemn rumbling, rather high up in the sky, as being that of a chain of mountains that must rise up some leagues away. He kept posting sentinels everywhere. He was on his guard against every approach.

He heard a curious noise. It was like the flapping of sheets on a clothesline. It was moving through the air, sinking and rising; it came up from the valley, approached and passed overhead, not very high, faded, returned, then slid off into the distance. Something had dropped as it passed into the branches of the ilex, from which, after a moment, there came a cooing, a tender summons, sad as a pigeon's, but somehow imperative.

“They were birds,” said Angelo. “At all events, this is a bird.”

“It has a funny voice: almost like a cat in springtime.”

“It settled on our tree when the whole flock brushed by us. There are more coming.”

It was true: a heavy and calm beating of wings was approaching.

Angelo remembered all his encounters with the birds, particularly in the village where he had seen the cholera for the first time, and later on the roofs at Manosque.

“They're no longer scared of man, now that they can eat as much of him as they like,” he said.

And he described how he had had to defend himself against swallows, swifts, and clouds of nightingales.

“These seem to be going still farther,” said the young woman. “Listen to them: wouldn't you say they were wooing us?”

There was, in those voices descending from the ilex and the pines, a sort of persuasive tenderness, an amorous force that sought to compel, gently but resolutely.

“It's an urgent courtship,” she said. “And they're full of hope, it seems.”

Angelo threw stones at them, but was not able to silence them or drive them away. They had the patience of angels. They said what they had to say diligently and soulfully. Apparently it had for them the sense of indisputable logic. After having expressed themselves directly and with some authority, they paused and waited for a surrender to their prayers. Then they began again, requesting the same thing and giving the excellent reasons they had for doing so, lingering over their velvety trills, very gentle, very enchanting, very sad. Finally, after perhaps an hour of this, they began to put a certain sharpness into their demands. The two horses were frightened and began to pant and shake their bridles.

Angelo went to calm the animals.

“They're trembling like leaves,” he said.

“So am I,” said the young woman. “You know what they want?”

“Of course. I can't understand why the soldiers have set up so many barricades. This part of the country is no better than the one we've left. Here comes something else as well.”

At the bottom of the hill there were rustlings in the undergrowth, then a sound like wheels on stones and stifled whispering.

“People,” said Angelo.

“I can't hear anything.”

“It isn't soldiers. There are women and children, and they're carting their furniture. They're fugitives like us. They've been attracted by the smell of the resin.”

“I can hear nothing but the wind in the pines.”

“There isn't any wind. It's the creaking of axles and a voice speaking, probably to a horse.”

“If there were horses, ours would have already scented them. I can hear something creaking, but it's a branch.”

“Don't think I've been upset by the birds,” said Angelo. “I assure you, there are people who've come this very instant to huddle at the foot of the hill.”

“The birds have certainly upset me,” said the young woman.

“Would you like us to move on?”

“That wouldn't be any help. It's an idea we're carrying about with us. No, I've got goose flesh, but that's for me to deal with.”

They spent a most unpleasant night. In the morning Angelo hastened to verify the existence of the camp of fugitives. He searched in vain; he found no trace of it.

It was now light enough to kindle a fire without undue risk. The first thing was to find a spring from which to fill the teakettle. The landscape bore no relation to the one Angelo had pictured. It was a small, austere valley made beautiful by autumn. Two or three poor farms stood at the center of a diminutive circle of fields between oak woods and wastes of gray stones.

The wind rose. The dawn was red and presaged rain.

“I'm going to look for water,” said Angelo. “Wait for me.”

“I'll come with you.”

“No, take a rest, now that we can see a little. And guard the horses. I'm going up to those farms. There must be a well there, but those thickets may have eyes and we don't know what's hidden under all those oaks. We'd better continue to take precautions. I'll keep low and I shan't be seen.”

“I've been lacking in initiative,” thought Angelo. “Alas, Giuseppe, you have too much confidence in me. I think you're betting on the wrong card. When it comes to fighting for liberty, I'm not even worthy to pull your boots off. What'll become of the least little revolution if I can't stop always following in someone else's footsteps? The old sergeants know more about it than I do. Under fire, one should be as coarse as barley bread; otherwise nobody can stand up to it. I haven't the gift. With a couple of well-timed oaths, that woman would stop being frightened. And so would I.”