Battlesaurus (16 page)

“They are idiots, playing at being soldiers,” Jean says, watching the squad march back and forth across the square with Monsieur Claude at its helm. “We have a fool for a mayor.”

Willem murmurs a sound of agreement, but thinks that the mayor is smarter than Jean is giving him credit for. A squad of muskets, with even a small amount of discipline, has a greater chance of killing the raptor than panicking individuals.

The saur-fence has been strengthened with additional poles crossbracing the existing supports. The tops of the sharpened posts have been interlaced with strong rope for added strength.

The preparations have not been limited to the fenceline. The shutters on windows are closed and barred. Lengths of timber are placed inside doorways, ready to brace the doors. Many of the village children have gathered in the church for safety. Monsieur Beauclerc's pinschers are chained at the church doorway. The outside of the church has been strung up with lamps, all brightly lit. Inside, Father Ambroise is doing his best to protect the village through prayer.

*   *   *

Cosette finds Willem at the blacksmith's, where he is helping Jean sharpen crossbow bolts. She stands at the entrance, framed by the doorway, her hair not let down or brushed for bed. Like the others in the village she clearly does not anticipate sleep this night. Lamplight trembles across her face and in the faint glow and the flickering shadows, Willem thinks she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

She says nothing, but waits for him to put down the metal file and newly sharpened bolt and to cross to her. It is as if she dare not enter this place, this dark, smelly, manly place, as if it would corrupt her.

Pieter starts to follow, but stops as Willem makes the stay signal with his hands. Pieter sits back on his haunches and crosses his front legs across his chest indignantly.

As Willem approaches she backs away until she is clear of the entrance, out of earshot of Jean, who has glanced up briefly, then returned to his work.

“My father has wronged you,” she says, “and so have I.”

“It is not important,” Willem says, “not now.”

“It is,” she says. “It was not a firebird that killed my sister. So it was not your doing. I came to apologize.”

“On whose account?” Willem asks, more roughly than he intends.

“On my own account,” she says.

“And your father?”

“He does not yet see the truth, but he will,” she says. She reaches out and takes his hand.

Willem looks away, now feeling bad. “He has lost a daughter and you have lost a sister. You are both suffering.”

She says, “My father is not thinking, he is only feeling. Sense and reason will return when the pain subsides.”

“I believe it,” Willem says, awkward and unsure what to say next. “Thank you for your words.”

“I must go,” she says. “I am helping to look after the children at the church. Besides, I did not mean to interrupt your work.”

“There is much to do,” he agrees, glancing behind at the row of shiny new crossbow bolts.

As he turns back to her, she leans forward, catching him by surprise. She presses her cheek to his and her lips touch his skin momentarily, then she lets go of his hand and is gone, out into the dark of the nighttime village.

He looks after her, a little confused, but with a slowly diffusing warmth that disappears in an instant at the sound of Jean's voice. “Willem!”

Willem turns quickly.

Pieter is standing tall on his hind legs; his body is completely rigid, except for his beak, which twitches constantly.

“Pieter!” Willem calls.

With a squawk Pieter scrambles down the leg of the workbench, across the floor, and up Willem's leg into his arms. The little saur is shaking violently.

“It is here,” Willem says.

“Why have the lookouts not sounded the alarm?” Jean asks.

“It approaches. That is all I know,” Willem says.

Jean rises and takes his crossbow, attaching a quiver of bolts to his belt. “Good. Let us see if it likes the taste of steel. From which direction does it come?”

“I don't know. Perhaps from the river,” Willem says. “It seems to like the water.”

“Then we go to Antonescu's cottage,” Jean says. “It has a high roof and we shall have a good vantage point.”

A heavy wooden ladder leans against one wall of the smithy. Jean picks it up easily in one hand and hoists it onto a shoulder.

Willem places Pieter into a sturdy wooden bucket and covers it with a sack. When they leave the smithy, he braces the door. It is the best he can do to keep Pieter safe.

Although the hour is late, the village square is abuzz with movement, men with weapons, tools, or just sticks. Women with lamps. The faces are strained, lips pressed tightly together. Heads flick around at the slightest sound.

Monsieur Lecocq, the eeler, sees them. His eyes take in the ladder and the crossbow and he crosses quickly to them.

“What is happening?” he asks.

“Go to the church,” Willem says. “Tell them to sound the alarm.”

“What have you seen?” Monsieur Lecocq asks.

“Do as he asks,” Jean says. “There is no time for questions.”

Monsieur Lecocq nods and has turned toward the church when a sound comes echoing from the direction of the forest. A deep, undulating, gurgling howl. A primal bellow. It sounds just once, and lasts little more than a second, but that is enough.

Around them everyone stops. All eyes turn toward the river. There is a moment when the entire village seems frozen in tableau: a Christmas ornament, porcelain figures posed on a painted backdrop.

Then the illusion is broken as everyone begins to run, all in different directions. Some to their homes to barricade themselves inside. Others to their weapons. Some seem to run aimlessly in one direction, then another, panicked by the sound to the point of folly.

“What in God's name was that?” Jean asks.

“I do not know,” Monsieur Lecocq says.

Jean begins to run and Willem runs with him, leaving Monsieur Lecocq still standing openmouthed and unsure.

The church bell now sounds. The alarm seems unnecessary. The bellow of the beast was warning enough.

Fran
ç
ois meets them at the edge of the square. “Where is it?” he asks. He does not carry his ax, but rather a hatchet in each hand. The blades look newly sharpened. Willem wonders where he got them and suspects they belonged to the old Romanian woodcutter.

“We are mounting Antonescu's roof to look for it,” Jean says.

“Remember that this creature can climb,” Willem says.

“I hope so,” Jean says, raising his crossbow.

At the cottage, Jean flips the ladder up against the wall. Fran
ç
ois tucks the hatchets into his belt and is the first one up. Jean steadies the ladder for Willem, and then climbs himself.

The tar pit is beginning to flame, combining its light with that of the torches on the saur-fence, lighting up the lavender along the riverbank. There is a mild moon but it is behind a cloud, and does not assist.

As Willem clambers from the ladder onto the spongy thatch, he sees Fran
ç
ois standing on the apex, near the chimney, one foot on either side of the roof. The light from the fires below throws him into silhouette, backlit with a skittish yellow glow. His arms are extended and held high, a hatchet in each hand. He is ready to face the saur.

Willem scuttles on hands and feet over the reeds of the thatch and stands behind Fran
ç
ois, balancing himself with a knee against the stonework of the chimney.

Nothing is moving. Not on either bank of the river, nor on the now-barricaded bridge. Not that Willem can see. The torches and the tar pit are a hindrance, not a help, the brightness of the flames burning his eyes and throwing everything behind them into deep dark.

Willem blocks the flames with his hand and scans the trees of the forest, straining his eyes, imagining that he sees vague shapes up in the high branches. But there is nothing.

“Where did that roar come from?” Jean asks.

Below them people are climbing up on the supports of the saur-fence, trying to locate the source of the sound.

Jean is right. It sounded close. Yet they can see nothing. It is as if the meat-eater is invisible.

“That is no firebird,” Fran
ç
ois says so quietly that at first Willem doesn't realize he has spoken, until the meaning of the words creeps into his brain like a tendril of fog.

“Where?” Jean asks.

“In the river,” Fran
ç
ois says. His words are slow and disconnected.

“There is nothing in the river,” Jean says. His voice comes from right behind Willem.

Willem cannot see it either.

“That is no firebird,” Fran
ç
ois says again, and this time Willem looks to the center of the river, still shading his eyes from the fires. Then he sees it.

There are eyes in the river, two pale disks against the dark of the water. They gleam dully in the light of the fires. The water is rippling slowly alongside the eyes, and by following the ripples forward, Willem finds nostrils, also jutting out of the water. The eyes blink slowly. The nostrils close to narrow slits, then open again.

“It cannot be,” Jean says.

“It is a crocodile,” Fran
ç
ois says.

He is wrong. This is much bigger than any crocodile.

The eyes turn to face the village. They blink once again, languorously.

“It's in the river,” someone cries from the fenceline, and more people climb up to get a glimpse.

“Get away from the fence!” Willem shouts. Don't they remember what this creature did to the fence by the church?

His foot slips on old crumbling thatch and he has to clutch at the chimney for support. It takes him a moment to relocate the circles that are the eyes, and when he sees them they appear to be floating upward, as if detached from the body. But it is not the eyes, Willem realizes. It is the whole head of the creature that is rising from the river. The water has been a kind of camouflage, allowing the saur to sneak up on its prey. And its prey is the village.

Water streams from the snout. It is no crocodile. A crocodile is low and squat. It cannot raise its head like this. The eyes, now well above the water, flare with the lights from the tar pit and the flaming brands.

Up, up comes the head: heavy, ridged skin; long, straight teeth in a single, even row jutting out over the lower jaw. Willem cannot watch, and yet he cannot take his eyes off it. His heart does not seem to be beating in his chest. The head does look like that of a crocodile, yet it is intolerably large. And still it rises, water draining in long rivulets, creating dancing strings in the firelight.

Then the river itself seems to flex and bulge up behind the creature. But it is not water. In the dim light Willem sees what it is surely impossible to see. The river is the monster. The monster is the river. What he had thought was a dark shadow behind the creature is actually the backbone of the beast and that is now high in the air as the bulk of the creature emerges from the water.

“It cannot be,” Jean breathes. “It is like an elephant with the head of a crocodile.”

“It is bigger than that,” Willem whispers. “Much bigger.”

He looks at the saur-fence and at the ropes and extra poles that strengthen it. They now seem so puny, so inconsequential.

People still cling to the fence, where they have climbed to get a view.

The front legs have just emerged from the water, more like arms with long bony claws for hands. The surface of the river wallows as water surges in to fill the void created as the saur stands upright on great tree trunks of hind legs.

It snorts, and misty vapors jet from its nose, orange in the firelight.

A slapping sound comes from behind the animal. Its tail is flapping back and forth on the surface of the river, splattering huge sheets of water to either side.

It takes a step forward, toward the village, and now Willem realizes that however large he had thought this creature, he was wrong. It has been standing in the deep of the river, and only now as it moves toward the bank, and shallower water, is its true size being revealed.

“Get away from the fence!” Willem screams down at the onlookers, frozen in place.

“Get out of there!” Jean joins in, waving his arms.

Still the onlookers pay no heed and it is not until the monster steps out onto the riverbank, crushing the lavender plants, that they tumble and scatter, then run, shrieking, away from the fence.

This meat-eater did not climb the tower to take Monsieur Antonescu. It did not need to climb. It is as tall as the church tower.

Willem watches as the giant saur stops at the fire pit, its eyes caught for a moment by the leaping flames. Willem hopes for the briefest of moments that the fires will deter it, but it shakes its great head and simply steps over. It towers over the saur-fence, then lifts one of those great hind legs, pushing through the fence as though it was made of matchsticks. The newly intertwined rope splits like cotton.

The beast roars again, the same gurgling, low-throated sound, and Willem feels the thatch of the cottage vibrate beneath him.

There are shouted commands from behind him and he turns to see Monsieur Claude's musket squad: two kneeling, two standing behind them. The front row fires, then the back, but if there is any effect on the beast, other than angering it, Willem can't see it.

Perhaps they have missed; perhaps the musketballs cannot penetrate the thick, scaly skin. The small troop scatters, the men running as the beast roars and steps toward them.

It passes right next to the cottage, so close that he feels he could reach out and touch it. It seems to be sniffing around, picking a victim. Willem is conscious of Jean's presence above him and looks up to see Jean standing over him, his crossbow to his shoulder.