The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [83]
“She would be a great honor for me,” said Deer simply, hanging his head. Now he knew why her father had done it this way, raising him up with the news that he would be a Keeper, and then casting him down with this warning that Moon would be given to another. A thought came to him.
“Do you know she has the talent, your daughter?” he said.
“I know. So does her mother, but women are women. There is no place for them in the cave. The brotherhood would never allow it.”
“The brotherhood seems suddenly to be allowing a lot of strange new things,” Deer retorted. “Did the brotherhood know of this new thing of the eagle’s head and the bull’s skull? Did the other Keepers support the Keeper of the Bulls in this?”
“No, and many are troubled by this.”
“And yet this is the man to whom you would entrust Little Moon?”
“I have not decided. But one of the new things that you must consider is that I may not have much choice. The Keepers may be disturbed, but the hunters and the fishermen and the flint men—all seem to welcome the new ways, and to welcome the power of the man who brought them.”
“But you are her father. Nobody would go against your decision in this.”
“No, but these are strange times. Fathers can fall sick or have accidents. Young suitors can meet with mysterious deaths. These are dangerous times, Deer.”
CHAPTER 12
Périgord, 1944
They had walked all night loaded down with the remaining explosives. The new recruits carried the ammunition in sacks, staggering-over the heavy ground along the hills that flanked the north bank of the river Vézère. Now they were shivering in a shallow cave, unable to light a fire, and not nearly as far north of Les Eyzies as Manners had wished. He was more tired than he could remember being, and more dispirited than he had ever been in the desert, even fleeing from Rommel’s tanks amid the wreckage of a broken army. At least then there had been a sense of refuge, a strong base on the Nile where his unit could regroup and refit, the promise of a bath and a square meal.
It was the meal that was making him guilty, an omelet of fresh eggs and a glass of wine and a handsome woman sitting across the table, with Jean Sablon singing “Vous, qui passez sans me voir” on the windup gramophone that needed a new needle. He had not heard the song since his schooldays, on holidays with his parents at Cap d’Antibes. The waiters would sing it late at night as they stacked the chairs on the tables. He had told Sybille about that, falling in with her own mood of nostalgia for another time, before the war.
He should never have gone with her. She could be shot just for sheltering him in her home. And an officer should not eat until he had taken care of his men, far less relax in a comfortable room with curtains at the front window and the sight of a small garden through the French windows at the rear. He could taste the omelet now, the garlic and the butter, and hear Sybille’s casual comment, “A vet never goes hungry—the farmers see to that.” He had stayed no longer than it had taken him to eat and smoke a cigarette, but he had felt the lure of peacetime stealing over him, a reluctance to rise and go.
Sybille had been matter of fact, in a way that intrigued him. He thought of self-confident girls back in England before the war, and the nervous ones who came out to Palestine and India looking for husbands. The fishing fleet, they called them. And he thought of the nurses and secretaries and coding clerks he had seen on the arms of staff officers when he was back in Cairo on leave from the front. Sybille was like none of them, with their instant gaiety and relentless energy for tennis and horses and dances. And she wasn’t like the women of wartime London with their brittle hunger for fun and parties, and the haunting way they sobbed in cinemas. Sybille had simply cooked, and ate, and asked him about his family and put another record on the gramophone. It was Charles Trenet, singing “Je Chante,” which