The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

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