Citadel (92 page)
‘Alaïs,’ he said under his breath.
He had been waiting so long for her to come back to him. He would not be robbed of the chance to see her again. Baillard saw the man lift his arm and aim his weapon.
‘Where’s the Codex, old man?’
‘It is not intended for you,’ he said.
Through the thin material of his jacket, Baillard found the cold metal of his gun and pulled the trigger.
The man’s eyes flared open with surprise as the bullet hit him in the heart. He stared, swaying on his feet, then blood jetted from his mouth and he dropped to his knees, his gun still grasped in his hand.
‘You shall not take it,’ Baillard managed to say.
He was no longer in any pain. Rather, he was aware of a dreadful longing. He could hear them now. He could hear the land itself beginning to move, the graveyards opening as life was breathed back into the bones of those who dwelt in the earth. His words had summoned them. The ghost army had awoken and was beginning to walk.
The ancient words lay beneath him, the papyrus slippery now with his blood. Drowning.
Those who died so others might live, those who gave their lives and now live
.
Was that to be his fate?
As consciousness slipped away, Baillard saw Guillaume Breillac staggering up the hillside. His left arm hung limp by his side and there was blood on his face, but he was on his feet. It seemed to take him an eternity to cover the ground from the edge of the path. He stopped briefly beside the man Baillard had shot, then bent down and put his hand to Baillard’s neck to check for a pulse.
‘Who was he?’ Baillard managed to ask.
‘Sylvère Laval,’ Guillaume replied. ‘Authié’s man.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes.’
Baillard closed his eyes. He felt Breillac struggle to pick him up. He tried to speak, to tell him to save his strength, but his voice was too weak. He knew he was not mortally wounded – Guillaume Breillac neither – though he thought they would be forced to rest in the Vallée des Trois Loups awhile.
Baillard realised he was smiling. Because now, so clearly, he could hear the voices in the mountains. The whisperings of the ghost army reclaiming the land that was rightly theirs.
He hoped – prayed – it would be enough. That it was not too late.
COUSTAUSSA
S
andrine knew the bullet had gone wide. The sound of Authié’s voice had sent a memory of pain, of humiliation, sharp through her, making her hand shake.
She raised her gun again, but sensing someone behind, she swung round. This time she hit her target. A grey uniform went down, blood spurting from his right thigh. He managed to drag himself to cover and lifted his Mauser K98 rifle.
Sandrine threw herself sideways. She saw the flash of unburnt propellant and heard a distinctive sharp crack as the bullet nicked the wall, then ricocheted into the ground.
‘I want her alive!’ Authié shouted.
She located his position through the smoke. He had taken cover behind the black Citroën at the corner of rue de l’Empereur. Trying not to look at the corpses of Jacques and Ernestine Cassou, Sandrine emerged from the alleyway. Keeping low, and with her left shoulder hard against the wall, she crouched down, looked along the sight, lining up the notch and the front blade post. She fired. The front nearside tyre exploded.
Another grenade landed in the Place de la Mairie, striking the southwest corner of the square this time, blowing out all the windows of the Cassou house on the corner. From every window, the explosion of glass shattering, glinting, spiralling silver like a child’s kaleidoscope. Smoke clouds of blue and pink and yellow, like the air around the old aluminium factory in Tarascon, blotted out the blue Midi sky. The corner of the Sauzède house crumbled, its sharp right angles giving way to a disordered jigsaw of jagged, wrecked stone.
Out of the corner of her eye, Sandrine saw Liesl. They had moved the weapons cache from the
capitelles
. Now Liesl was leading the old men and women back into the streets holding antique Saint-Etienne revolvers, World War I .32-calibre Webleys. Even a couple of Labelle carbine bolt-action cavalry rifles.
A Gestapo officer dropped to one knee. He pressed the butt of his SMG hard into his shoulder, then pulled the trigger. Sandrine heard the sickening whump as rounds smashed into an old man at the front of the group. The hot lead burning through bone and muscle, ripping through liver and heart and stomach. Another explosion, to Sandrine’s left, near the cemetery.
Then she glimpsed Suzanne’s trademark cropped hair. And, behind her, a glint of metal. A beam of sunlight glancing, fleetingly, on the metal tip of a rifle. Sandrine narrowed her eyes. Not a K98, so far as she could make out, but a British Lee Enfield. The tip of the rifle jolted as the soldier got into position. Ready for the shot.
‘Suzanne!’ she shouted. ‘To your right.’
Everything seemed to happen at once. A single shot rang out. Sandrine watched the rifle drop to the ground, then the soldier – not Suzanne – fell. Marianne stepped out from the cover of the building. Briefly, Sandrine saw them kiss, then Suzanne continued down the rue de la Condamine and Marianne ran back towards the church.
As Sandrine gave a sigh of relief, she felt the cold, hard barrel of a gun pressed against her temple and a hand reaching out to take her P38 from her hand. Watching the battle unfold, she had forgotten to guard her own position.
‘It’s over,’ he said.
Sandrine began to shake. Authié’s voice, the pressure of his body against hers, taking her back to the villa on the route de Toulouse.
‘Where is it?’ he whispered in her ear.
‘I don’t have it,’ she forced herself to say.
He jabbed the barrel against her skin. ‘I don’t believe you.’
Sandrine tried to kick back at him, but Authié smashed her forward into the wall and she felt her top lip split. A gentle trickle of blood seeped, warm, into her mouth. Then he was dragging her back by her hair towards the square.
‘Where are you taking me?’
He punched her. ‘Tell me where it is,’ he said, his voice rising.
Winded, Sandrine couldn’t speak. She felt a dull ache, a tug, in her abdomen and knew she was bleeding.
‘Where is it?’ he repeated.
‘I don’t have it,’ she managed to say again.
As Authié held the gun against her head, his finger poised on the trigger, they heard a noise. A sound, a rumbling like thunder in the mountain. His hand wavered and he looked up.
‘What was that?’
S
andrine glanced up at the sky, but it was completely clear. An endless blue, no clouds. Then she heard it again, a deep reverberation that seemed to come from the centre of the earth. She felt a spark of hope. Had Raoul come back? Was he here with men from Tarascon, from Salvezines, to help?
She looked around. The soldiers were also gazing up. The men and women of Coustaussa too, all staring, confusion on everyone’s faces. The guns had fallen silent.
Without hesitation, Sandrine drove her heel back into Authié’s shin, throwing him momentarily off balance. He recovered straight away and let off a shot, but she managed to throw herself under the car and roll to the other side, then stagger across the road into the alleyway between two buildings. The pain in her abdomen intensified. She felt something tear, rip.
Authié fired, two more bullets into the wall. He couldn’t see where she’d gone. He looked mad, his eyes darting wildly from left to right in his desperation to find her.
Some of the
miliciens
were starting to retreat. Sandrine couldn’t see what they were looking at, only that their faces had gone from confusion to fear. Then the ground started to shake. She wondered if it might be a tank, though the idea was absurd. Now even the sky seemed to be shaking too but, although the noise was getting louder, it wasn’t the sound of a plane.
‘Come forth the spirits of the air.’
Sandrine heard herself utter the words, though they didn’t seem to leave her mouth. Then she began to hear other voices. More like the sound of the wind in the trees than words, yet she thought she could make out what they were saying. Voices, and the sound of a multitude of marching feet.
‘Come forth the spirits of the air.’
She watched the MP40 slip from a young soldier’s grasp. The man behind him was gripping his weapon so hard, his fist was white with the strain of it. He jolted, then turned and ran.
Terror took hold. Some were transfixed, petrified, as they stumbled back, held in thrall by whatever they thought they saw. She caught fragments, muttered imprecations of the Devil and the dead, prayers she didn’t understand. She watched as the body of a young soldier turned black, his tongue protruded and his eyes brimmed with blood.
‘Teufel.’
Terrified by something more than the guns and the bombs and the mortars destroying the square, the soldiers were scattering.
‘Geister.’
This, a word she did understand. Ghosts.
‘Monsieur Baillard,’ she whispered. He had done it. He had summoned them, as he had promised he would. And they had come.
Now all the soldiers were turning, starting to run, making no attempt to take cover. They were brought down by a storm of bullets. Friendly fire or hit by Suzanne and Lucie, Sandrine didn’t know. In the corner of the square she saw Liesl leading the villagers away to safety. Marianne was shooing a gaggle of children out of the church and towards the woods. The Gestapo and Milice forces trampled each other in their desperation to get away. They fell as they staggered over fallen comrades, the bullets seeming to come from all sides. Some had wounds as if they’d been shot, others as if they’d been attacked with a spear or javelin. Stabbed with the blade of a knife.
Sandrine was struggling to comprehend what she was witnessing. The girl she had been and the woman she was now, brought face to face at this single moment in her life.
Was this it? Was this the promised salvation? Or was it a different sort of justice the Codex promised?
Then, in the centre of the killing field, Sandrine saw Authié again. He wore a look of mute terror. His grey eyes were wild with horror, fixed on the graveyard on the corner of the rue de la Condamine. Finally, this was her chance. She ran back to the square and snatched a weapon abandoned on the ground. Not her gun, but one that would do.
‘Authié,’ she shouted. ‘This was what you were seeking. This is what the Codex brings to you. To men like you.’
He swung round to look at her. For a split second, she saw a flash of the old Authié. The man who had hunted her down, who had brutalised her and stolen her future from her.
‘Men like you,’ she repeated.
Before he had a chance to respond, Sandrine raised the gun and fired. This time, she did not miss. Two shots. One to stop, one to kill.
For an endless moment, Authié stood swaying on his feet. Then he fell forward, his body hitting the corner of the car, then sliding to the ground. A ribbon of blood was smeared on the bonnet, red against the black. Straight away, like the others, the bullet hole in his forehead began to blacken and his tongue to swell. White pupils filling with blood started to rot in their sockets.
Sandrine dropped the gun. Her legs went out from under her. She clamped her hand over her mouth in horror. Authié was dead. She had killed him. But at what cost?
‘Coratge, sòrre.’
A shiver went down her spine. The same voice, but this time as clear as if someone had been standing beside her. Sandrine raised her head. She didn’t want to look. She was frightened to look.
She struggled to her feet. If Monsieur Baillard was right, then she would not see what Authié had seen. What the treacherous and murderous men who had come with him to Coustaussa to murder them all had seen.
Slowly, Sandrine turned around.
At first she thought the smoke had floated back to the square. Then she realised it was a haze, like a summer mist.
Come forth the spirits of the air
.
To start with, she could see nothing distinct. But then the impression of movement, a shimmering in the atmosphere. Slowly, they emerged. Row after row after row of people, beyond a glass sea. Not people, but outlines. Indistinct shadows of white and red and black, pale green robes, faces hidden beneath hoods and shadow and flame.
And the number was ten thousand times ten thousand
.
Steadily, Sandrine walked towards the army of light. Thousands of women and men standing side by side. One face grew clearer. A girl – like her, perhaps – smiling. Sandrine felt a sensation of peace, of recognition. A whole life perceived in an instant. A woman, known in life as Alaïs Pelletier du Mas. She wore a long green dress, drawn tight at the waist, with a red cloak around her shoulders and her dagger strapped to her belt. Her long dark hair fell unfettered down her back. Her expression was gentle yet resolute, peaceful with the knowledge of one who had died once and would die again. Her eyes were clear and bright and alive with the wisdom of all she had seen, all she had suffered. All she had tried to teach those who came after her.
Even though they were strangers, now other lives emerged from the ranks of the ghost army. Beside Alaïs stood Rixende, a woman who had died to save her mistress and for her faith. In death, now, a friend as she could not be in life. Standing, too, in the vanguard of the army of the air, a girl with long copper hair. Parisian by birth, but in courage and spirit and honour a daughter of the Languedoc. Léonie Vernier. And, more recent still, their spirits not yet at rest in the cold earth, those who had died in the last days and weeks, in the company of those long departed.
Alaïs looked to her husband, Guilhem, in whose sleeping arms she had lain. Sandrine saw their memories, hidden in the caves of the Sabarthès. She saw his lips shaping the words imprinted on her own heart. In this world and the next, echoing down the centuries.
Mon còr
.
Sandrine felt the pattern of the syllables, the vowels, the consonants, though the words were not spoken aloud. Did not need to be spoken out loud. Here, in the army of the dead, time and space and the temporal order of things meant nothing. Were nothing. Here was only light and air and the memory written in blood, and that did not fade. Here, the cares of the world were set to flight.
