The Caves of Périgord (47 page)

“Untie me,” said Deer to the young hunter beside him, and without thinking, the man bent and began to loosen the thongs.

The last to enter the cave, and the last to leave it, was the husk of the man he knew as the Keeper of the Bulls. As the old man emerged, he leaned weakly against the rock, even the feathers around his beak seeming to droop. Then he gathered himself as if he felt challenged by the new uncertain mood of the vengeful band he had brought here. With a visible effort, his back straightened and he marched across to where Deer lay trying to free himself, and pushed the young hunter aside.

“Evil,” he cried in a voice that echoed like thunder. “Evil that would bewitch your souls, evil that would dry up the rivers and empty the plains and destroy us all.”

He turned as if to confront Moon, but it was a movement that brought the great beaked club high and gave it a whirling force and with a great shout he slammed it down onto Deer’s helpless head.

Moon screamed once as he advanced upon her, the rest all stunned and immobile, and only this still powerful man with the head of an eagle and the great beaked club that dripped blood and loomed high above his shoulder seemed capable of movement.

“Evil,” he cried again, and took the last fateful step, the club whirling down. But Moon had broken the spell, darted forward beneath the blow, and came close to his chest as if to embrace him. Faster than the falling club, she slid to one side with Deer’s flint knife still in her hand. And the Keeper of the Bulls sagged slowly to his knees as his entrails gushed out from the great slash in his belly and slopped to the ground before him. The eagle’s head bent to look at the steaming, bloodied loops, and then lifted to look at Moon as she spun on her heel to slam her foot into the side of his beaked head and send him toppling into the mess that had leaked from his guts. She leaned down and brutally wrenched the eagle mask from the Keeper’s head, and threw it onto the fire. A gush of fresh blood surged from his mouth, and his body stiffened, and then shuddered into death.

She walked slowly across to Deer and studied the crushed and lifeless head, as intently as she had studied him for her sketches, placed both hands on her swollen belly as if to embrace her unborn child, and closed her eyes. The only sound was the crackling of the fire, as its smoke and the stench of burning feathers drifted across the stretch of grass where all stood immobile around the two dead men.

“The evil is gone,” she chanted, her voice thick with grief. She gasped for breath, gathering herself, her jaw working as she fought within herself for control. Her eyes opened but gazed far above the
silent people, looking even beyond the weak morning sun and the new day it brought.

“The evil is gone,” she repeated. “But it has marked us all, divided us all, cost us all. The evil has changed us utterly.”

The smoke drifted and the fresh blood steamed in the morning.

“It has broken the brotherhood of the Keepers, broken the bond of man and wife, broken the bond that tied us to the cave.” Her voice was rhythmic, but softer now, almost lulling.

“Bonds can be forged anew. And the evil has been defeated by life.” Her voice sank yet further, a deeper timbre, almost the low tones of a man. Blood trickled down her trailing hand, gathered into a thick and tear-shaped drop that trembled on the end of her finger and glinted in the sun before it gathered itself and fell.

“The evil has been defeated by life,” she said again, a tone of wonder in her voice, and her thoughts drifted back to that night when she had first bitten blood from the evil man … no, from the Keeper who had himself been captured by evil. She felt the new life suddenly kick in her belly. And she smiled, remembering the warm, lulling touch of the Great Mother, who had come to comfort her in the cave that night before Deer had come for her. It was the Great Mother who had granted her the magic that had finally doomed the Keeper of the Bulls. The Great Mother had given her a man and taken him, given her an enemy and the strength to defeat him. And given her Deer’s child. There was a balance. It seemed very clear to her now.

Her upturned face looked down, and it seemed to her frozen audience that she was aware of them for the first time. She paused, scanning their faces. Her father, her mother, the men who had known her since she was an infant. They needed something from her, she understood, a forgiveness for their part in this horror.

“Deer lives in me and in our work in our cave, and in the beasts we honor in our painting and in the lives of us, our people. Life after life, generation after generation, the people, the beasts, and the land,” she
said simply, the words coming unbidden. “We flow like the river, and always past the same place. We will be here forever. My child. Deer’s child. Your own young.”

She stopped, spent, and staggered a little. But the spell she had cast upon them was not quite broken. They hung still on her words. Beyond her forgiveness, beyond her acceptance, they needed yet more from her. A guidance, a direction. She understood that they needed to be told what to do, to be released from this thrall she held upon them. And she knew that she too needed release from that same thrall, and in a last gift from the Great Mother it came to her that her power over them lay in that image of her that had stunned their spirits when they first saw the portraits in the cave. It was not the blood sacrifice that had awed them, but those giant images of her and Deer. It was a greatness she did not need, a weight she could not bear. There might be other men, but there would be no other Deer, and no other portrait. A magic lay there that was beyond her will to comprehend. She knew only that it must not be repeated. And the people still needed her direction.

“Father, I will come back with you,” she said. “But take Deer within the cave, so that he may gaze on my image in death, and then take wood and earth and stones and seal the cave. Our work here is done.”

CHAPTER 21
Périgord, June 1944

M
anners had never seen so many
Tricolores,
so much red, white, and blue suddenly dancing from every bridge and truck and half the windows in every town they passed. He was riding in a police truck, driven by a gendarme driver who would probably still have tried to arrest him a month earlier, and would have shot him on sight a couple of months before that. Now he was helping load explosives. Manners’s stocks of plastique had been used to blow the rail tracks on both sides of the bridges across the Dordogne. The crossings at Mauzac and Trémolat, le Buisson and St-Cyprien, Beynac and Mareil and St-Denis were all sealed, and at each one he had left volunteers cheerfully lighting great fires to heat the straight rails so they could be twisted into knots
around trees. The Germans would have to carry trainloads of their own rails with them if they were to use these routes. Still no time to rest. Every quarry had some authorized stocks of industrial dynamite kept under lock and key at gendarme and Milice stations, and the truck had made the rounds of every one. He had nearly half a ton, and the Vézère bridges had still to be blown at le Bugue and Manaurie.

“Another roadblock,” muttered the driver. Manners resigned himself to more cheering at the sight of his British uniform, more waving of Sten guns and old Lebel rifles, more salutes from old men holding themselves ramrod-straight. But the roadblock stayed closed, and the guns stayed leveled at him. There was a large red flag flying alongside the
Tricolore,
and “Stalingrad” had been chalked on the stone-filled farm cart that blocked the road. His gendarme driver looked frightened. Manners opened the door and stepped onto the running board as a short, thin man with pale knees beneath his shorts walked to the truck and demanded, “What are you carrying?”

“Explosives, for the rails across the Vézère.”

“We need them,” said the man, and the pistol held loosely by his side was suddenly pointing at Manners. “These explosives are requisitioned in the name of the people,” he shouted, for the benefit of the curious faces on the defenders’ side of the roadblock. “You’ll get a requisition paper, properly signed by me. Out.”

“You can’t requisition from me. I’m a British officer and I’m fighting on your side,” said Manners reasonably. “And there’s an SS armored division coming this way from Toulouse unless I blow those rails.”

The man fired a single shot into the air. “Out, I said.”

“Capitaine, capitaine,”
came a loud, delighted voice. “Welcome to liberated France.” It was the big Spaniard from Soleil’s ch‚teau, and he came across to kiss Manners heartily on both cheeks, pushing the thin man casually out of the way. “Comrades, this man is the master of the Sten gun. He builds them blindfolded,” he called. “Clear the road for
the brave
capitaine.”
And he put his own massive shoulders to the farm cart and swiveled it aside for Manners’s truck to pass. “Good luck,” he called, and gave the truck a cheerful clenched-fist salute.

“Full of bloody Reds, this place,” said the police driver as he accelerated away, his hand trembling as he lit a cigarette. Manners grinned at him in relief and carried on trying to work out how much dynamite he would need to do the work of a plastique charge. When he got to le Bugue, not far from the site of his first ambush, he had to go through the town and past Sybille’s house to get to the station. Half a dozen cheering youngsters waving French flags jumped aboard and hung improbably onto the back as he lurched along the rails to the river. A French flag had been hanging from her upstairs window, but her door was closed and there were shutters over the surgery window and he pushed the thought of her bedroom into the back of his mind.

He tried three sticks of dynamite, which was enough to blow the rails and sleepers out of their beds, but not enough for the damage he wanted. So he tried two charges of ten sticks, and blew an impressive crater in the rail bed. Feeling pleased with himself, he repeated the blasts at the farther end of the bridge and added ten more sticks for luck, as a cheerful and swelling crowd gathered to watch. A middle-aged woman came running down from a small hamlet of honey-colored stone, carrying a dusty bottle, and handed it shyly to his driver.

“Have you come by parachute?” asked a small boy.

Manners grinned at him. “Flew in by special plane,” he said. He got the driver to push them all back to somewhere near safety as he lit the fuses and sprinted for cover. He almost didn’t make it, the blast stunning him just after he landed in the ditch, and a thick rain of small stones from the rail bed pattered onto his back. He limped back to the truck, feeling the worse for wear, when the small boy darted up to him and asked, “Where’s the rest of you?”

“Coming,” he said. “Coming soon,” and the crowd cheered and
started shouting “Winston Churchill,” and breaking into the “Marseillaise” when he waved wearily to them and tried to explain that they should throw the rails into the river.

But as the truck jerked away, he thought it was a very good question. There was something frighteningly premature about this local mood of liberation, with the Allied armies still coming ashore on the beaches four hundred miles to the north. And there were an awful lot of German troops between them and Manners, and an entire armored division heading straight for him and all those flimsy roadblocks and kids with their French flags and Churchill V-signs. And for Sybille. When they got to le Buisson, and saw the dead Milice men in the square and a fat man with his trousers around his ankles hanging grotesquely from a lamppost, he felt even more worried.

“Cheer up,” said the driver and broke off half the ham sandwich that someone had given him at le Bugue. The bottle was between his knees. “Have something to eat. This eau-de-vie is the real thing. And there’s lots of dynamite left.”

“I know, but too many road bridges,” said Manners, chewing appreciatively. “Take the road along the river to Siorac and then Souillac. I want to know what chance we have of stopping the bastards now they can’t come by train.”

He had four bazookas back in the cave, the only weapons he had with a chance of slowing the German armor. Something like two hundred tanks and self-propelled guns that were almost as good. Being SS, they’d probably be equipped with Mark V Panther tanks, which were a generation ahead of anything he had faced in the desert. A bazooka wouldn’t even dent the frontal armor of a Mark V. All he could hope to do was slow them, force them to stop and deploy, organize standard attacks with artillery and infantry. He might delay them for a few hours if he was lucky. Twenty thousand men, and over two thousand vehicles. They would have to disperse against air attack. At fifty yards between vehicles, which was the minimum the British Army decreed for
armored units, the Das Reich division would cover fifty miles of road. They would use at least two roads, probably three if they could. Still ten to fifteen miles of vehicles on each road, a big traffic jam if it had to stop and bring forward heavy weapons. They would put a reconnaissance battalion in the lead, with motorbikes and armored cars and a company or two of Panzergrenadier infantry with mortars. Maybe a couple of self-propelled guns if they were expecting trouble. Could he let the reconnaissance battalion pass, and then ambush the soft-skinned vehicles behind? No, that would have to be a simple hit and run, and he needed sustained fire if he were going to force them to halt and deploy. He would have to try and stop them head-on.

They were coming from Montauban, just north of Toulouse. They would have to come through Cahors and Figeac, and then their route to Normandy would be through Brive or Périgueux. The question was, where would they cross the rivers? They were the only choke points he had. His map showed fifteen bridges across the Dordogne, and he had just four bazookas. He had to work out which road they would take and use the remaining dynamite to demolish the main bridge, and then ambush their alternative crossings. It was hopeless, and probably lethal for any of the Maquis who manned the ambushes with him. But he had to try.

There was only one glimmer of a chance. If his pinpricks were relentless and frequent enough, if the great armored beast were stung so hard and so often, it might just forget about its charge to Normandy and stop long enough to lash out at all the little hornets that were tormenting it. It was not what he would do, and not what any professional soldier would do. Normandy was the crucial battlefield for an armored division, not the soft belly of the Périgord. But the SS were not always coldly professional soldiers. They were political soldiers, driven by their mad creed. They might just be provoked into the stupidity of reprisals. With quickening excitement, he realized that they could even be driven into losing the one thing they did not have: time.