The Life of Elves (21 page)

There was Riri Faure, André's third brother, who was a forester, fraternizing with every tree and every horned, furry, or feathered creature, and people liked him because he was discerning when he ordered the cutting of the trees, and maintained a balance between poaching and the law, for in this country that cared for neither rigid nor offhand behavior, that balance was more sacred than the Good Lord's commandments. So under his surveillance people conformed to the pleasures of covert hunting, without threatening the principles which preserved the beauty of the forest, and as he knew that any rabbits stolen from the state would have caused greater harm still by spoiling the barley and the wheat, he had decided to turn a blind eye to minor misdeeds, in order that no major ones would ever be committed.

There was Georges Echard, known as the Chachard, and he could be found deep in a workshop that was darker than a cow's bottom, smelling of leather and the grease he used to soften his harnesses and saddles. He lived above his workshop but he rarely went up there; instead, you'd see him burst out from the back of the room, his day's work done, to head out into the forest to go hunting until judgment day. He had never taken a wife, for he was too terrified at the idea he might have to stray from the line that led straight from his saddler's den to the paths of his beloved game, but he was the best of companions, one of those who smile at the crack of dawn, when you can breathe in the lovely light of the coming day, and delight in a flock of thrushes taking off amid the murmur of men who are not yet fully awake. Now he whistled as he headed briskly toward his thickets, and he kept his rifle wedged tightly against his shoulder on its strap so that he could have both hands free in his pockets: this made Maria smile, because she liked such unions of nonchalance and swiftness.

There was Ripol, whose real name was Paul-Henri, and he served as blacksmith in the neighboring village, but had been born in this one, and came back at decisive moments. He had married the most beautiful woman in Burgundy; when she passed by, others would look on with all the deference owed to Mother Nature's finest craftsmanship, but without any excessive covetousness either, because she was reputed to be a mediocre cook and baker, and this aspect, although it certainly is not all of love, did play a role of such notable proportion in the hearts of the men of the lowlands that they were easily consoled for her blue eyes the moment their own wives—and with a smile, if you please—set down before them a beef stew with carrots that would melt in your mouth more easily than all the ice at the end of March.

Finally there was Léon Saurat, who was always called Léon Saurat, because there were so many called Léon in these parts that this was how you had to go about distinguishing the one from the other, and this Léon had the biggest farm in the canton, and he worked it with his two sons, one of whom was also called Léon, out of a special sort of stubbornness that serves these hard-working regions well; the other was called Gaston-Valéry, out of an admirable desire to make up for the brevity with which both father and elder son had been sanctified. These two fine young lads looked after the farm under the regency of their irascible old man, and they were joyful and solid as rocks; it was a wonder to see two such affable characters being watched over by a commander whose granite self sporadically crashed and shattered at the foot of these cliffs of joyfulness, his own sons. At the end of the day, if you happened to stop by the farm, where the mother and the women had set the table for twelve starving farmhands, you might surprise an indefinable smile on the patriarch's sullen mug.

So those were the nine good men who had rallied around André during the council at the cemetery, men who'd been forged the way iron is heated and worked, placed between the hammer and the anvil, with all the respect that smithies have for the substance they are working with, and then set out to cool, to be shaped and sculpted into a noble form. Subsequently, as they had only ever known the roe deer and the hollows, their iron had not rusted, but had been preserved by the very thing their religion forbade them from mentioning, namely, the simple and powerful magic of the natural world, to which could be added the arrival of a little girl who could multiply its essences—so much so that what resonated in their minds, as they hurried to their battle stations, was a thing that had been born unbeknownst to them, born from the deepest waves that emanated from André and which Maria catalyzed, a thing that now resonated in every mind as they prepared for battle, and that took the shape of these words of magic and wind:
to the earth, to the earth or we die!

 

Thus an entire region was wrenched from its places of refuge. The men tried to find spots that offered as much protection as possible from the wind and the first strike, and everyone tried not to look at the dark wall, while they shivered from a chill that was like nothing they'd ever known. And yet everyone obeyed a feeling which, in the slack hours of that apocalyptic day, acted like a little brazier flickering in that part of the self that is called the core, or the heart, or the middle—it hardly matters, in fact, the name hardly matters as long as the thing exists, and that was the deep understanding of the bond cementing the men and women in these lands, the bond that was spreading its invisible order and strength throughout the region. They felt they owned the wisdom of things that go the way they must go, and they knew they were being commanded by capable leaders who knew how to make decisions by counting plowed fields rather than chimerae. They did not know, at least not with any knowledge that can find its way into speech, that this certainty came from the fact that André, who had lived fifty-two years in exaltation of the earth, amplified its song in each of them. But even if they did not know it, they felt it, and drew their strength from this infectious proximity to fertile furrows and valleys.

Jeannot and the mayor had stayed at the farm, and stood ready to dispatch little couriers, namely those young people in the canton who ran faster than rabbits, to keep the other officers abreast of anything deserving of their attention. Marcelot, Riri, Ripol and Léon Saurat had gone to the church, where they shared an understanding with a certain priest who had become one of them, and with whom on that day words were as useless as a cotton parasol. André, finally, had set off on the path to the clearing, with Maria, Chachard, and the Saurat sons at his side. This was what the pulse of destiny had led to: these men and this little girl hurrying toward a clearing more frozen than the ice floes, observing how everything had succumbed to the desperate silence of an entire transformed forest. But on they went, and soon they reached their goal.

A strange goal, or so André put it. While only a short distance away the forest pathways were numbed with icy silence, a sudden rustling of sounds and vapors greeted them the moment they crossed the line of the last trees. Stunned, they stopped and gazed out at the sight. The cold that had been gnawing at their bones seemed a touch less biting under an open sky, and they wondered if this was the effect of the mists floating in an abnormally shaped space. André had stopped the three men behind him in their tracks; he looked at Maria then again gave the order to move ahead. They carried on to the center of the circle where the mists were coiling upon themselves in a slow, thick, but still transparent dance. It was astonishing: the banners of fog were as opaque as walls and yet as clear as water. You could see through invisible whirlwinds, and yet in spite of that they were more impenetrable than stone!

Finally, the whispered murmurings in the central opening seemed to them to be the fairest thing in this life. A confused sensation came over them—that voices were slipping into the hollow of these light pulsations, but they could not actually distinguish them from the vibrations that were causing the rustling in the clearing. Chachard, who had climbed up the hill at a good pace, like some dandified woodsman, never taking his hands from his pockets, now came close to tearing the linings of those pockets when he suddenly drew out his fists—such a scene, he could hardly leave them in his trousers—and, unusual for them, the two Saurat sons' jaws dropped as if granting to gravity all the honor of their stupefaction. But as for André—he was looking at Maria: his gaze did not turn away, or coerce.

 

She was standing motionless in the middle of the clearing, and the mists had begun to choreograph a strange, complex dance around her. At last she could see what had once been only a foreboding, what she had been expecting all these long months since the letter from Italy and the dream with the white horse.

She saw.

She saw the furor to come, and the arrows of death.

She saw departure, if she survived the attack.

She could distinctly perceive voices that others could only guess at.

 

the rebirth of the mists

the rootless the last alliance

 

Something tore inside her and split the firmament of her inner vision with streaks of ink that slowly diluted then disappeared in a last pearly wash of light.

She could feel the waves of her power roiling and rushing forward.

She could hear the voice of the little pianist from the night of healing.

 

Maria

Maria

Maria

 

The men were waiting. They were still cold, but not as cold as they had been in the valley, and they looked at the mists swirling around the wee girl petrified by a cold that did not come from without.

 

Maria

Maria

Maria

 

There was an explosion of such violence that they all flung themselves to the ground. The enemy was acting at last. The dark wall bore down upon them with a roar, striking with all its might at the last houses in the village and at the church. As it struck, it shattered, and the extent of its deformity became visible. Worse yet, the advancing tide revealed the mortal ambush that was yet to come, and seething tornadoes, charged with deadly rains, opened the way for the black arrows, as they shrieked and fired their lethal blades and ice.

The roofs collapsed.

The first seconds were the most terrible. It was as if all the plagues of the Anti-Christ had converged at the same time upon the villagers, stripped as they were of any shelter or protection. The rain fell hard and heavy, with drops that wounded like fragments of stone, leaving gashes that did not bleed but seemed to stab the skin with needles of pain, and into those gashes slipped an icy, abnormal chill. The wind swept away the roofs, not in the usual way, which was to carry them off, but by causing them to implode, and Gégène and his men blessed Maria for protecting them from this fury. Finally, the most terrifying assault came from the black arrows: they sped like lightning over the first segment of their trajectory, slowed down half way and now, suspended in the tempest, seemed to be endlessly readjusting their sights, preparing to take aim. Then they rushed forward and the nightmare began: they did not touch their victims, but exploded a few inches away, flinging them to the ground with the force of a shock wave that shattered bones. Several villagers fell. But almost all of them had already been lying down when the attack began, and, with the frail ramparts of their bodies, the stronger tried to protect the weaker, while wind and arrows made the waves in the air as dangerous as land mines. Worse yet, the water level was rising, and they watched as, impossibly, the waters climbed the slope for no other reason than the fact that an evil power had willed it . . . alas . . . an entire region flooded by the assault of the missiles of hatred, turning the elements of life into weapons of torture and death. The villagers lay flat on their stomachs on the surface of the universe, and they felt like rats on a sinking ship.

 

Everyone had flung themselves to the ground, except for two men who, despite the fury, refused to submit, and it was something to see, the priest and the yokel standing proud in the tempest, while the whirlwinds and arrows seemed to spare them, miraculously, even as the charge overwhelmed the entire valley. Minds prone to hasty conclusions will say that this was either courage or folly, but it was simply the fact that when the arrows exploded in the storm, the good father and the peasant were enlightened by an understanding that showed them what weapons they must take up in this war. In truth, Gégène and Father François sensed this was as much a battle of mind as of matter, and they knew they must fight with their hearts as well as their rifles—indeed, the arrows seemed to be ignoring the two valiant souls, who did not bow their heads even when everything around them was collapsing. Moreover, when they saw this, Riri, Ripol, and Léon Saurat, who had never felt so heavy from his old rheumatism, nor so intoxicated from the sudden burst of energy that set his sixty-nine-year-old self on his feet, now stood up as well and began organizing the defense, remarking that the arrows were locked onto targets on land.

Just as there are certain days when soldiers must be made to sit, there are some battles which require one to stand and face the salvos: without a word, the five men rallied like sheep dogs around their herd, and in no time they had driven those who could still walk to the center of the square, where they made them line up, back to back, in a tight circle: the arrows seemed to abandon the head-on attack, although they continued to explode all around the church. There was a moment's respite. But they knew it would not last for long, because the waters were approaching, and Gégène lifted his head in the direction of his farm, then the woods, looking more worried with each passing minute as he wondered what Maria was doing, and whether his Lorette would survive.

The nave of the church collapsed with a crash, as if struck by a cannonball, and fragments of stone flew in every direction. At the Hollows Farm, where Maria's mother had stayed behind, the frost united with gusts of wind fit to sink a ship at sea, and although the roof was still intact, the walls of the stable had begun to give way, and the farmyard was submerged by gravel tossed here and there on the rain. In the woods the animals had gone to ground, but the cold was even more biting beneath the foliage than in the open plain. All through the land the ravages of nature reduced to nothing the mildness of days it had once woven, hurling to the ground everything that used to stand proud under the sky, and it made you wonder how long anything could resist a tempest which, in mere minutes, had destroyed so much of what human genius had taken centuries to build.