The Caves of Périgord (39 page)

When he woke at dawn, the dear, soft length of her against him, he began thinking of all the things he must do. She must have skins to keep her warm, skins to lie on, skins to sling on tripods of sticks that could hold water and be warmed by hot stones. That meant more skins to make the rawhide thongs. And then she must have a tent, which meant more skins and more thongs again. And skins meant reindeer. He must make a bow this day, with the short length of thong that remained to him after making the traps. Arrows he could harden in the fire, but he must find flint and perfect his clumsy skill to make scrapers for her to clean the skins. She would need a knife to cut her food, sharp-pointed awls that could make holes in the skins that she could then sew together with a needle made from reindeer bone. He was thinking of all the tools that he had taken for granted and left far behind in the village, and did not notice her awaken until her hand slipped softly around his neck and pulled him to her.

There were two more rabbits in the traps, and he blew the fire back into life as she skinned them. She began to roast the meat as he went to the stand of saplings by the spring, bending and flexing them to find one sturdy enough to make his bow. His thong was short and his arrows without flintheads, so the bow must be the stronger. His ax cut it down and trimmed it, and then he cut down two more long ones, using
creeper to tie their ends together. He leaned them against the rock. The meat they did not eat could hang up there, safe enough from foxes. There was a pine beyond the spring, and he scraped off the resin with his knife, and back at the fire transferred it to one of the hearthstones to soften.

“I would climb the other ridge today, and see what is to be seen there before exploring to the end of this valley,” he said. “Our valley.”

“We must look for flint,” she said, rising to sling the uneaten rabbit on the poles. “I need a knife and scrapers.” Then she took his ax and cut herself a long, stout sapling, trimming to a rough point.

He sat by the fire to shape the ends of his bow and carve the notches for his string as she fed him. He stood to test it, drawing it almost to his shoulder. Now the arrows. He cut four of the straightest saplings, pointed their ends, and showed her how to harden them in the fire, using spit to stop them burning. Then he sliced the thin grooves into their ends for the feathers he had collected, coated the quills with the soft pine resin and slid them home. As he finished, he saw that she was hardening the point of the spear she had made for herself.

His new bow over his shoulder, and Moon on his arm with her spear over her shoulder, they set off down the slope to the stream. It ran fast and babbled, almost wide enough to jump. He paused on the bank, looking to the stillness under the trees for the ripples that would tell where the fish lay. The stream narrowed just below them, and there were stones enough to build a loose dam to trap them, and willows to weave into a light fence that he could use to trap the fish as he splashed them downstream to the dam. More willows could make a loose basket and Moon could then scoop out the trapped fish. Then he saw the reddened clay by the rocks, and the darker earth that would flow when it was burned, and he felt the promise of color that lay trapped within them and he felt a yearning to be at his work again. And then he heard her call lightly to him, and he turned to see her rushing to the stream, her eyes intent as she gathered her legs for a great leap that took her
almost across the stream to fall just a little short, and land, splashing and laughing, in the water.

He waded across, picked up her fallen spear and held her, her face and hair wet as they had been in the storm and on the river, in what seemed now to be another and barely remembered life. Gently he moved his face toward her, and licked the beads of water from her eyebrows, from her cheeks, and then from her lips. They opened and he felt her warm tongue on his own lips, her hands on him, and they fell to the warm bank and into each other again, into a world so perfectly new and theirs that he was sure no one before them had ever known it before.

“I can weave baskets from the willows to catch fish,” she said much later. And he squeezed her proudly, feeling happier than he had ever been, and they rose and began their climb up the shoulder of the hill to the ridge. Carefully skirting the skyline and taking cover in some shrubs, he looked across and saw the great river glinting to his left. The great tangled dam of trees was half gone, the river running placidly, and no other movement to be seen save for the darting of the birds. She squeezed his hand in relief. Each of them had been thinking privately about the danger of pursuit.

They turned along the ridgeline to their right, aiming for the head of their valley through knots of trees and sudden hollows, welling springs that rose and bubbled and disappeared back into the earth. They crossed another rabbit warren on a warm and sun-baked slope, which took them up to a rolling plateau from which they looked down across the stream to see the rock outcrop where they had made their camp. Gray and bare but rounded, with no jagged peaks, the rock continued on the far side of the valley before rising toward them. They followed the gentle rise of the plateau, walking easily on the soft grassland, until they reached a soft crest and saw range after range of hills rolling away from them dappled with trees and the distant movement of game. None seemed near, but he saw a scattering of reindeer dung and moved
forward to probe the dropping. They were still warm inside. The beasts were close. Not sure enough of his own skills to track them, he took his bow from his shoulder and an arrow from his sack and began trotting with his face into the wind, into a thin screen of low and stunted trees. The winds could be fierce up here.

They scented the deer before they saw them, one stag to their left and three does with their young grazing the shrubs ahead. Moon froze. He crept forward, notching his bow, and thinking he would have time for but one shot. Unless he hit one of the young, and the doe stayed. He had known since he made the arrows that they would not be strong enough for a kill, even if he were sure enough of his skill to aim for the heart. He would have to try for a belly shot, and the long running chase until the beast died.

The stag’s head rose in suspicion but scented nothing and saw no movement. It bent again to the soft grass. Deer’s breathing felt very loud in his ears as he found space in the undergrowth to stand and draw the bow. The doe was perhaps twenty paces away, her young one a still target as it muzzled at her belly. He sighted and released the string, hearing the sharp sigh of the arrow’s flight and the stag’s warning bark as the beasts turned and fled, leaving the young one frozen in shock, its mother’s milk still wet on its face and his arrow high and deep in its belly, just below its back. The rear legs collapsed, and it began bleating, its shoulders moving in jerks as it tried to turn to follow its mother. She halted and turned, and took a hesitant pace back. Behind her, the stag bellowed. She froze and then moved forward again, to come and lick at her infant. Deer’s second arrow took her in the throat, and as she turned and fled, Deer began to chase. But the stag turned back toward him and pawed at the ground. Suddenly Moon was with him, giving a great shout at the stag, her spear pointed grimly ahead of her. The stag stopped, glaring. Moon shouted again, stamped her foot, and advanced a pace. The stag turned and fled after his wounded doe, and Moon was ahead of Deer as they followed the blood trail.

They came back dragging the gutted bodies of the deer and her fawn on two frames that Deer had cut with his ax. Two long saplings lashed together at one end with creeper, and then a crossbar lashed to the other ends to make a long, thin triangle. Another crossbar and then the two frames were complete for the long haul back down the valley. The rocks above their camp would be too steep, and Deer wanted to avoid the long route by which they had come. So they tried to find a path down the head of the valley, but brush and sudden cliffs and gullies forced them farther and farther off their route.

Finally they came to a group of rocks with a short drop to a stretch of grassland below that led to the stream. Deer sent Moon down the rock and taking the weight of the straddled legs of the first frame, pushed its apex down toward her, rested the width of the frame on the lip of rock, and then scrambled down to join her. They lifted the rest of the frame down, and he scrambled back up for the second, heavier frame that carried the doe. It was then that he saw the dark mouth of the cave between the rocks, as tall as he and perhaps twice as wide. First, they brought down the second frame, and then Deer threw a stone into the cave and listened to hear if he had disturbed any creature within. Silence. He took Moon’s spear and stepped into a short tunnel, dry underfoot and rising gently. He waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness after the sunlight outside and crept forward.

Beyond the tunnel, the cave widened and the roof rose and he was in a chamber that seemed almost light from the whiteness of the chalk that formed the walls. He reached out to touch it, as smooth as the walls of the cave he had known so well, a canvas that cried out for his skill. Feeling with his feet, he felt no dung, no signs of habitation, and there was a cool blandness in the air of the place that suggested no living creature had lived here.

He called for Moon to join him, and she came, her arms and face wet
from where she had been rinsing the dried blood from her limbs in the stream that ran down the rocks. Her eyes grew big with wonder as she entered the broad cavern, and she said, “We hardly need your lamp.”

They explored farther, and found another much lower tunnel at the rear of the cave, where the chalk walls gave way to a browner stone. They heard the trickle of water ahead, sounding muffled as if by an echo, and he had a sense of great space but now there was too little light to see and the ground began sloping steeply under his creeping foot so he turned back. It was then that he saw, below the chalky walls, the glint of smooth, almost polished stone. He bent and tugged, and a fist-sized chunk of flint came away in his hand. There were more stones along the base of the wall, and as he went to the tunnel to show Moon, the light made the flint in his hand almost green.

She had left the cave and was studying the site, the rocks behind them, the running stream and the stretch of meadow that reached down to the stream below. They could see the rock where their camp lay, but the place where they had slept was fringed by trees. They could see far down the valley to the bend beyond which lay the great river.

“This is a good place,” she said, and took his hand. He showed her the flint, and she nodded, as if such bounty was always meant to be. He left her building a fire, and he went down across the stream and through the trees to their old camp, to bring the rabbit from its cache and carefully brush away all signs of their earlier fire. But he spent a long moment looking at the grass where they had first lain together, at the sheltering overhang under which they had slept. There was another rabbit in his trap, and he came back to her burdened and then moved at the fittingness of it, his woman skinning the deer they had caught by their fire, the shelter of the cave behind her, and the promise of walls for his craft.

CHAPTER 18
Périgord, May 1944

T
he ambush site was not perfect, but it was the best Manners could do. They were far enough from a road or track to delay any counterattack from the armored cars. And McPhee was stationed at the only possible approach route with ten men, three Bren guns, and enough Gammon grenades to fashion a mine that could blow the wheels or tracks from any vehicle that tried to use it. Manners had left him checking the rag stoppings in the Molotov cocktails.

The cutting was old and shallow, and ended in a curve that ran alongside a stand of old timber. Some of the oaks were fifty feet high, and the woodmen had sawn their trunks more than half through, supported the gaps with wedges, and pushed mud into the fresh scars in the trees to disguise them. Lacking water, they had all pissed into the earth
to make the mud. Manners had rigged belts of plastique around each trunk. Once the armored train had passed, he intended to blow the trees to prevent it from coming back to bring its guns into the fight. He had placed another camouflaged charge at the entrance to the cutting, to prevent the target train from reversing out of danger. The escape routes were planned, the ammunition was checked, the Mills grenades had their fuses in place. And on the far side of the cutting, Malrand’s Spandau was well dug in and carefully camouflaged. Manners had walked the cutting twice, his foot sore but just about healed, to check if the ambush could be seen.

He was more than nervous. This was the most ambitious operation they had tried. Sixty men and four trucks hidden in the woods, two of them on loan from Soleil. If this went wrong, it would undo almost all that his team had achieved since they landed, and cripple the Resistance in this part of France. But it was worth the risk, and not just because of the importance of the target. This was an operation that had Berger’s Gaullists working hand in hand with Marat’s Communists of the FTP. Getting those two to put aside their differences and work together was a crucial part of his mission. And crippling the Brehmer Division before it became operational made military sense. He bit down the thought that the reprisals against the local civilians would be savage. If half of what Marat said about the Brehmer troops was true, they’d be burning and killing their way across Périgord whether he fought them or not.