Out in the Open (11 page)

‘How do you know?'

‘I know.'

‘We'll go somewhere else then.'

‘I can't go anywhere.'

The boy fell silent. If the goatherd couldn't move, then he would have to go in search of water on his own. He remembered the previous days, the sunstroke, the thirst, the night-time walks, and felt afraid. He had only survived then because the goatherd had been there.

‘You'll have to go for water on your own.'

‘I don't know where to go.'

‘I'll tell you.'

‘I'm afraid.'

‘Nonsense, you're a brave lad.'

‘No, I'm not.'

‘You've come this far.'

‘Only because you were there.'

‘No, because you had determination.'

The boy didn't know what to say.

‘Have you seen the halo surrounding the head of the Christ up above?'

‘Yes, it has three rays of light coming out of it.'

‘That's right, well, one represents memory, another understanding and the third determination.'

The boy looked up. He could see the figure silhouetted black against the evening light and could make out the tunic, the hands and the rays. The boy was touched by what the old man had told him and, for a moment, forgot his worries.

‘Christ suffered too.'

‘But I don't want to suffer any more.'

‘Then we'll just have to stay here and die of thirst. That'll soon put an end to your suffering.'

The old man told him that, to the north, there was a village with a well. He wasn't sure exactly how far away it was, but it would take the boy a few hours to get there. He would have to set off soon, along with the donkey, but before the boy left, he still had work for him to do at the castle.

The first task was to bring him the corpse of the brown nanny goat. Then he ordered him to take the collars and bells off the other dead goats and drag their bodies as far as possible from the castle.

It took him until dark to drag the bodies over the stony ground. Every now and then, he would pause and touch his cheekbone with the back of his hand, then wipe away the sweat from his brow. After more than a day in the sun, the intestines of the dead goats were beginning to swell, lethal gases accumulating in the stewpots of their entrails. The crowds of vultures and crows that would soon arrive would be visible for many miles around. Black feathers circling endlessly above the dusty earth. For a moment, the boy considered burning the bodies and thus avoiding any possibility of attracting scavengers and disease, but realised at once that, in the middle of the night, the glow would be seen from far and wide. With luck, the bailiff would assume he had not survived his trial by fire in the tower. However, given the state in which they had left the goatherd, a pyre of burning goats would inevitably lead them to believe that he, the boy, was still alive.

When he had finished piling up the corpses, he went back to the castle and sat down by the old man. For a while, neither of them spoke, the old man too absorbed in his pain, the boy exhausted by his efforts. He was just about to fall asleep, when he felt the goatherd's hand on his elbow.

Following the goatherd's precise instructions, he sharpened the old steel knife, a tool with a blunt point, a notch at one end, and a hilt wound round with string. He used a stone to grind the blade until it had a silvery edge to it. Then he placed the brown goat on its back and, gripping its head between his knees, plunged the knife through its slit throat and sliced down its chest as far as its udder. He had watched his mother gutting rabbits and hares. He himself had killed quail by breaking their necks, but this was entirely different; this was a much larger animal from whose belly oozed bluish innards that slithered out of his hands. He plunged in the knife again to open the goat's swollen abdomen. However primitive the blade, it cut through the stomach lining like a knife through butter. The stench that burst forth rushed through him like a damned soul in flight, making a deep impression in the fresh clay of his memory. He looked away and met the gaze of the goatherd, who was watching in silence from where he lay. He felt the goatherd's eyes urging him on. The boy's clumsy hands were his hands.

That first blast of putrefaction soon dissipated. Before him lay a kind of tub overflowing with iridescent blues and creamy whites, with globular shapes that twisted and turned in every possible direction. The old man was expecting him to gut the goat, then cut it up just as he himself had done with the rabbit and the rat. So overwhelmed was the boy by the complexity of the goat's entrails that he didn't know what to do. Sleeves rolled up, knife in one hand, he looked at the goatherd and shrugged.

‘Stick your hand underneath its guts, feel for the point where they begin and make a cut right there.'

An hour later, the guts were lying next to the pile of corpses like some goatishly ironic joke or a Dantesque vision of the future or a warning from a hit man. On the way, he had to stop several times to pick up bits of intestine that slipped from his embrace.

During the hours that followed, the old man continued issuing orders to the boy, who silently carried them out like a tool being wielded by the mind of another.

He began carving up the goat, dislocating its legs and then crudely deboning them. He cut as many slices as he could from the resulting lump of meat, placed them on a stone and salted them liberally. At one point, he made the mistake of wiping the sweat from his brow. The salt penetrated the wounds on his sweat-moist cheeks. The pain was such that he clenched his eyes tight shut and felt a kind of hollow forming inside him. He didn't cry out. He merely gazed up at the sky and wept like a St Sebastian full of arrows, his hands burning and his skin cauterised by the salt. He spun round and round, holding his hands out, palms facing him, as if shading the glowing lamp of his face. Had there been a swamp nearby, he would gladly have hurled himself into it. The old man watched this agonising dance and even tried to get up, not that he could have done much to help. The boy knelt down and fell back on the ground, still keeping his hands away from his face. The old man reached out one arm to him and held it there for as long as he could. Then he slowly let it fall and closed his eyes.

In the silky light of the half-moon, the boy unwound the string from the handle of the knife, his eyes still red and his face still stinging. Having hunted around for a couple of sticks and stuck each in a hole in the wall, he then strung a piece of string between the two sticks and on it hung the strips of meat. The result drew a grotesque smile on the bluish stones, a smile that soon attracted the flies. Then he picked up his tools and arranged them around the old man, as if he were a sailor shipwrecked on a beach. Again following the goatherd's instructions, he rounded up the three surviving goats and tied them together using the collars from the bells of those who had been killed. Then he tethered one end to a nearby rock so that they were all within reach of the goatherd's crook. He put the saddle pad and the blanket on the donkey, tied the two empty flasks together and slung them over the donkey's back like a pair of boots.

By dawn, they had finished their preparations for the journey. There was scarcely any breeze, and the stones of the castle wall were quietly doing penance for the heat they had absorbed during the day. The old man and the boy ate what little remained to them: a few crumbs of bread, a handful of raisins salvaged from the ground and some wine. When they had finished, the old man asked the boy to sit down next to him.

‘I'm going to teach you how to milk a goat properly.'

The boy looked at the goatherd in surprise. At any other moment, those words would have filled him with pride. However, it seemed strange to him that, in their current situation, the goatherd should want to waste precious time on such a thing.

‘It's getting late. If I don't leave soon, it will be daylight.'

‘I know it's late.'

‘You can teach me when I get back.'

Several black birds flew past, heading for the well. Their wings creaked as they flew across the dark sky. The donkey, head down, was moving forlornly about in front of them. The boy's eyes filled with tears, but he didn't cry or even sniffle. He simply stayed where he was next to the bent old man, feeling the sky brushing the earth and aware of an ancient murmur emanating from the rocks. He imagined a watermill in a beech wood and horizons like the jagged blade of a saw. The sky penetrating and piercing the earth, and the mountains rising up to meet it. The home of the gods. The paradise the priest had so often spoken of. A green carpet on which the trees rested nonchalantly, unaware of their own lush foliage. Maples, fir trees, cedars, oaks, pines, ferns. Water springing eternally up between the rocks. Cool moss covering everything. Pools where transparency was the norm and whose stony beds glinted in the sun. Rushing streams temporarily tamed and on which the light traced rainbow spirals.

The boy hastily swallowed his tears and got up. Without even bothering to untie it from the others, he led one of the goats over to the old man. Then he sat down next to him and waited while the old man placed the tin in its proper place. When he had done this, he asked the boy to take hold of the teats. The boy formed his hands into loose fists, put them around the teats and squeezed. Then the goatherd positioned the boy's thumbs so that the nails pressed the teats against his other fingers. He put his hands over the boy's hands and, without a word, manipulated the teats, making the milk flow freely. And in doing so, the old man passed on to the boy the rudiments of his trade, handing him the key to a knowledge that was at once vital and eternal. The key to extracting milk from animals or making a whole wheatfield grow from an ear of wheat. They had soon filled the tin and the empty oil bottle, leaving the goats completely dry. They kept the bottle for the old man's breakfast the next day and shared the milk in the tin between them.

Later, once he was mounted on the donkey, he took one last look at the goatherd, who was lying down now, his beard sticky with rivulets of dried milk. He appeared to be asleep or unconscious. A fine breeze touched the boy's cheek, reminding him that, only a while before, his face had been like a fiery planet.

‘Be very wary of the people in the village.'

The old man's voice emerged from some indefinable place, from somewhere beyond exhaustion.

The boy turned his gaze north, towards his uncertain fate. Then he slung his knapsack on the packsaddle and dug his heels into the donkey's sides, to which the donkey responded by emitting a series of sour belches and breaking into a trot that carried them away from the castle.

THE WAXING CRESCENT
moon hung in a clear night sky. Thousands and millions of stars, many of them already dead, winked down at him from above. He had to head north along the towpath until he reached a lock. From there, he was to follow a gentle downhill path for about two hours until he came to a small oak wood, from where he would be able to see the village. The well was in the village. Assuming he didn't get lost, he should, according to the old man, be within sight of the houses by dawn.

Boy and donkey travelled beside the dried-up aqueduct, from which side channels occasionally branched off, only to vanish into the barren fields. Empty, bluish fields. From time to time, the boy nodded off and almost lost his balance. Then he would briefly become more alert and beat the donkey with his stick, and while this succeeded in eliciting protests from the poor, startled creature, it failed to make it trot any faster. The boy was aware that they were only moving at a walking pace, but he still preferred to ride rather than walk, so as to preserve the little strength he had for when they reached the well.

‘Be very wary of the people in the village
.' Each time the donkey stumbled, the boy would wake, pondering the old man's words with a mixture of disquiet and satisfaction. He didn't know if the goatherd had said this because his own life depended on him returning with the water or simply out of a desire to protect him. Then his neck would droop and his head would once again fall onto his chest and he would again become lost in the magma of his thoughts and memories. The hole he had dug, the palm tree, the poultice, the arrow slit, the goatherd's penis, the bailiff's cigarette ends.

The boy spotted the sluice during one of his brief waking moments and, after that, he did not fall asleep again. To urge the donkey on, he dug his heels into the donkey's sides and squeezed its flanks with his thighs, but received no response. When they arrived, he dismounted and, for the last few yards, led the donkey by its halter, before releasing it to nose around for dry stalks to graze on. The boy scrambled up the bank to the tank into which the water from the aqueduct had once flowed. The aqueduct formed a T-junction here. Two iron sluices operated by winding gear controlled the flow of water. From his vantage point, he looked southwards down the gap-toothed channel until it became lost in the darkness. The bottom of the aqueduct was nothing but dry mud. He turned then and looked north, where the path curved down towards the plain. No oak woods and no villages, only bare, eroded slopes ribbed with stones.

Just as the old man had predicted, the boy reached the wood shortly before sunrise. He tethered the donkey to the low branch of an oak tree and walked over the bed of serrated leaves and empty acorn cups as far as the northernmost edge of the wood. From that dark fringe of trees, he had a clear view of the village, which consisted of perhaps twenty houses, a single street and a church situated midway between the wood and the village. A few yards from the church was a cemetery, and above the cemetery wall he could see the swaying tops of three cypresses like upended paintbrushes. The same slight breeze stirred the branches above his head. The occasional empty acorn fell onto the soft ground that crunched underfoot, and he was reminded of his own empty belly. The village showed no signs of life. He could make out a few enclosures that might be corrals, but there were no sounds of any farm animals. Maybe it was deserted, he thought, or maybe it was simply too early for people to be up and about. He decided it would be best to make his first foray without the donkey. Then, if the conditions were right, he would return for the donkey, load it up with water and lead it back to the castle.