The Life of Elves (20 page)

“But their powers—in both of them—are still growing. And the people to whom we entrusted Maria are impressive.”

“Father François grew up in one day.”

“He's been an ally from the start.”

“Their sense of the land is as fierce as their courage.”

“The two go hand in hand.”

I
n the distance the wall was growing. From the farmyard the men could see more clearly what was on its way to confront them, and it was a thing they would never have thought possible: the horizon had been transformed into a mountain connecting earth and clouds, and it was coming toward them, rumbling, swallowing up the fields and trees. André was silent. There is no courage without a difficult choice, no character that is not forged by the act of choosing even more than by victory. He looked at the monster striding over the land to destroy his daughter's power, and the shafts of evil coiling in tight eddies, all in a line to form the avalanche, and he did not want to think what would be left of the land by the time the tempest stopped roaring. But André also sensed that the enemy was losing speed as it came into contact with Maria's magic, and examining the crux of this doubt, he knew he would soon have to take a decision.

Someone behind him shouted out. It was Jeannot, pointing into the distance to a spot expanding on the surface of the fields, and they understood that it was water, and that the valley was flooding, the waters rising toward the village as fast as the racing horses of the storm. And although the lowlands, despite their name, were located above the high valley, they suspected, since none of this was natural, that the tongues of water lapping at the land to the south might well advance as far as the houses and cut off any retreat, and this worried André and the others—fellows you might not be able to count on to make a psalm sound spiritual, but who well knew how to avoid being cornered like rats.

 

The men standing on the mound at Marcelot's farm all knew how to drink the wine at a battue because the life they led was a hard one from the moment they saw the dawn, and they had learned from both their labor and their years. And André's first lieutenant, Marcelot, epitomized all the qualities with which the lowlands fashioned their liegemen. When he took a wife, he defied those who warned him that his heart's delight was ten years older than he was, and that she'd already been married to a man whom she had loved and who had died young of the fever. But Marcelot had persisted with that mute form of obstinacy which conceals all the treasures of intuition, because he knew that this woman was destined for him above all others; he knew with an almost mystical knowledge when he was enthralled by her slowness as she made her way through the world, for his days were transformed into an epic of splendor.

Marcelot was not a man of words, nor had his head been stuffed with compartments at school, of the sort which enabled you to express what the body was feeling so that you could share it with others, and he would have been stunned if someone had explained to him that he loved his Lorette because she slowed the natural flow of things, and through the seeming indolence of her ways she offered him the leisure of admiring it to the full. He was not, however, silent and contemplative like André, far from it, and he was appreciated above all for the maxims with which he qualified events and chores. You had to see him uncork a bottle from his cellar, always a fine vintage, the way he'd sniff the cork while dishing out the day's dictum with a mixture of seriousness and derision, the hallmark of a pure heart. He knew that words have a weight that goes beyond their author and, consequently, he both respected and mocked the words he uttered; in the same way, he would take his woodcutter's knife and hew slices of dried salami so enormous that a guest would take no less than three bites to swallow them, and he would dish out his precepts, punctuating his diction with papal nods of his head followed by a childish laugh (
fear doesn't avoid danger
, his favorite, gave half the people in the country a headache, however, because they weren't sure of having fully understood). Then he'd slap a guest on the shoulder and away they'd go in a conversation that would last as long as their desire to drink and tell hunting stories which, as everyone knows, lack all plausibility or proper conclusion. But at regular intervals he would look over at Lorette as she transcended the space in the room with her slow sleeping dancer's movements, and at the intersection of the raw nerves in his body he could sense the magic that turned him to crystal, however mud-grimed his feet or callused his huge hands might be. Love, again; will anything else ever be the subject of these pages devoted to the rebirth of a world that was lost with the ages?

 

Marcelot, baptized Eugène, commonly known as Gégène, took his eyes off the flood and looked at the sky behind the farm. André followed his gaze. They glanced at each other, then the lieutenant said to his commander, with a meaningful air: “That sky looks full of snow.”

André nodded.

A sky full of snow. It was time to decide. No father wants to endanger his child. But André knew that it was futile to imagine he could protect the little lass by keeping her within the four walls of the farm, and he sighed the sigh of those who love and must resolve themselves to letting a child grow up. Then, both resigned and hopeful, he sent for Maria. There was not much time left. The black wall had stopped just beyond the big fallow fields, and you could sense it was just waiting for an order to leap forward. It was a fortress. It was made of rain, whirlwinds and storms, and for all that they were liquid, they seemed as solid as rock; at their base, the water, dark and bristly with spikes, had spread half a foot above the earth. And it was all keening in a way that pierced your guts, because you knew what was brewing in that evil soup was a hateful cry that, in due time, would cause the most resolute souls to weaken.

Bundled in several layers of warm clothes and wearing a big felt hat stuffed with a scarf, Maria went to join her father, and gazed at the enemy with a strangely impassive look. Her own expression grim, Angèle pulled her heavy cape tighter around her. The entire surface of the land seemed sticky with ice. They watched as the temperature dropped, as the cold stirred the invisible air so the movement was perceptible to the naked eye. But just as the abominable rains smelled of death and evil floods, the cold air, crueler with every passing second, pierced the skin with the poison of unnatural ice. André ordered blankets to be handed out, and they all wrapped themselves up thoroughly, then gathered around Maria and Angèle to form a delegation; at its heart stood a little girl not yet thirteen years of age and an old lady who was almost a hundred, and if a bird had happened to fly over Gégène's farmyard that day, it would have gazed down at twelve tiny dots facing a dark rampart of a thousand feet. Marcelot nodded his head in turn as he scanned every corner of the sky, and he summed up fairly well what the others had already thought when he said: “Seasons against seasons.”

And they knew he was referring to the seasons of the Devil, and those of the Good Lord.

 

As for André, he did not believe the struggle had anything to do with matters of faith. He called to Father François and asked him to go back and look after those who had stayed at the church. The priest kissed Maria and wondered if he would ever see her again in this orchard life, which he at last knew was eternally theirs, and he blessed the old auntie, putting all his heart into what he hoped would be of some comfort, however uncertain the fiction of it. Then he set off for the church, placing himself in the hands of fate. The men waited, not saying a word, observing the column of destruction as it grunted and growled like a dog, and God knows what they were thinking, every single one of them, men who'd never set foot outside their own region, and had seen no more of life than the one or two fields mowed into windrows. But André was looking at Maria. He had known that her vision went beyond the visible, ever since one dawn when he had welcomed a survivor as a daughter into his arms, and he had felt a strange tingling that initially blurred his vision then burst into a field of images where he could see scenes from the past as sharply as if they had just occurred. Similarly, he had glimpsed the paths of the future in such great quantity that he could not make out any one of them clearly, but later some returned to his memory, the day when what they depicted actually happened—such as when the little girl placed her hand on Eugénie's shoulder in the room where Marcel lay dying.

“I need to see,” he said to Maria.

She pointed at the dark wall, which had fallen silent.

“There can be no miracle,” she said.

André nodded, accepting a new piece of the puzzle that had been taking shape for nearly thirteen years, and which echoed what the earth had been telling him on that day when their fortune was being decided. So he placed his hand on his little girl's shoulder and, instilling in his silent, regal gaze that depth of feeling that is called the grace of fathers, he said, “Don't be afraid, I just want to see.”

She went closer to him and put her hand on his shoulder. Like Eugénie before him, the father reeled from the shock. Such were the powers of the little girl, who exercised the powers of nature to enhance her own power as a human being, a catalyst. Her gaze took in the territory of the struggle with a masterly understanding, of the sort no commander in chief, all through the history of armies, had ever possessed, and André saw everything within a gigantic perimeter, every detail finely drawn, as if by the craft of a demented miniaturist. Then Maria withdrew her hand and the contact was broken. But he had seen. It was enough. He called to Gégène and the men tightened the circle, while Angèle went and sat to one side, keeping watch with her eye of the Lord over the maneuvers of the storm-clad devil.

He told them what he knew: “In the fallow field to the east, there are strange horsemen, perhaps a hundred of them; to the south, something is lying in ambush behind the wall, and that's the real danger; but behind us there is also some odd movement in the sky.”

Gégène scratched his nose, which was as frozen as the icicles hanging from the drainpipes. “Strange, how?”

“I don't know what they're riding.”

“Odd, how?”

“A lot of mist.”

“That is where I must go,” said Maria.

André nodded.

“The church?” asked Gégène.

“In the target for their first strike.”

“Your orders?”

“Four lads to defend it, two will stay here, the three others will go to the clearing with Maria and me.”

“Where do you want me to go?”

“To the church, if you can leave your wife with Jeannot and the mayor.”

“Done.”

Then André turned to Maria. “Your orders?”

And she answered, “No one under the roofs.”

“General evacuation,” said André to his men. “Let's go.”

 

They split up, as agreed. But before going any further, it is time to tell who these warriors were, as they set off to force an entire region to leave their farms behind, because if you believe this is little more than mere happenstance, you have been failing to grasp something they know as surely as the sky is about to fall on their heads. In reality, there is only fiction, there are only stories, and even then, one has to know how to separate the noble wheat from the chaff. As it happened, their kind obstinately smelled the good wood of the forest and the grass steaming in the early hours of virgin dawns, and it was not only that they had received the legacy of a countryside that had been preserved, that had seen the last of the blood heirs, that knew nothing yet of the lackeys of money: they were still conscious of the fact that what they owned surely deserved to be told in a story somewhere. Let others try to make sense of it. Gégène summed it up fairly well on bidding Lorette farewell, once he'd made her and the others leave the farm; he kissed her and said,
It'll be worth a song, at any rate.

So, there were ten men.

There was Marcelot, who hunted, tilled the fields, drank, feasted, and jeered like any man forever protected by the sanctuary of love, and in that respect he was basically just one of those great mystics with his feet planted on the ground; let's watch him as he pats the priest on the shoulder and conveys the orders of Maria's father, and we'll see a man who would make a fine soldier—yet his mind is somewhere up in the stars.

Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter.

Then there was Julot, born Jules Lecot not long after a first great war and long before a second one, from which he was saved in the nick of time by the age limit; he was the mayor of this lost, enchanted village. He was in charge of the region's road menders, and everyone agreed that you'd be hard put to find a better mayor, for a reason that was even more elementary than the first days of creation, namely that he was the best whip in the six cantons, and that fact alone—for the position requires perseverance, cunning, enthusiasm and the patience of a saint—was enough to propel a man into the mayor's office, it was obvious, because those were the very qualities you needed to govern a place. Add to that his intimate knowledge of every corner of every thicket, and he was clearly the most excellent man for the job, and all that was still required was an appetite for freshly drawn wine and the venison from after Lent—and didn't he have that as well? Need one say more.