The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

teemed with long-gone life. A bear was emerging from a cave, a great bull with flaring horns stood beside his cow, and a herd of short and sturdy horses, almost like Shetland ponies, were moving to drink.
    “It’s marvelous,” breathed Manners, lost in the painting. The gunfight might never have been. This was another world, an innocence, and a lost perfection. To think that this had been waiting on the walls around him when he first stumbled upon this hiding place for his weapons.
    “I do not believe this,” said François, as he moved the torch yet again, and a huge face leaped at him from the rock. A handsome youth, half-smiling and with lively eyes, a slim face and firm jaw and long, curling hair. Then the woman appeared, lovely in that combination of shyness and assurance that had first attracted Manners to Sybille. He thought, I could fall in love with her. I have already.
    “Our ancestors,” said François. “Les premiers Français.”
    “You could be right, sir. He looks a bit like you,” said Lespinasse. So he did, that sharp intelligence with the fine features and slightly dreamy eyes.
    “Right,” snapped François, bringing them back to reality, and suddenly Manners could smell again the cordite and the blood in the air. The spell had broken. “Let’s get the guns out.”
    He and François linked their belts together to haul the containers along the passageway. François climbed up, propping the torch in the tree roots, and with Manners and Lespinasse heaving and François hauling, they managed to wrestle them up and out, to roll onto the wide stretch of grass.
    “You two stay down,” said François. “And I’ll push the bodies down to you, one by one. We’ll have to leave them in the cave. If the Communists and Spaniards didn’t kill us in retaliation, the Americans would.” Manners felt almost grateful to him, for putting the nightmares of retribution into words.
    Little Florien, the Russian, Marat, and finally McPhee, flopping down headfirst. Lespinasse took the shoulders and Manners took the feet, and half dragged them down along the passageway and laid them, side by side, in the center of that splendid tomb that had already disappeared again into darkness. As they crawled back out, Lespinasse in the lead, Manners knocked into the slab of rock he had pushed aside earlier, and in the torch glow, he saw the shape of a bull on the whiteness of the chalk. He picked it up to study it more closely, and found it not as heavy as he had thought. It seemed the natural thing to take it with him.
    François had rigged the small charges of plastique while they were laying out the bodies. One beside the tree root, another in the rocks on the shelf above. That seemed oddly fitting. The place had been opened by a German mortar. British explosives could seal it again. They manhandled the containers down to the road and into the truck. Then they went back for their guns, and to light the fuses. After the explosions, they checked that the place was sealed. And then they went back down through the trees, Manners slithering clumsily with his rock in his hand. Lespinasse and François took the Citroën, and Manners drove the truck. In Le Bugue, he stopped in the square where the old men played boules, and let himself in the back gate into Sybille’s yard. The place was dark, the door locked, and her bicycle was gone. He slipped his slab of rock behind the rabbit hutch and left. Then he climbed into the truck and drove woodenly on toward Terrasson and a last, despairing effort to stop an armored division, his mind locked in an ancient landscape and his heart yearning simultaneously for Sybille and for a girl who had been dead for thousands of years.

CHAPTER 22
Time: The Present
    E verything about Malrand’s house was the same, except that Lespinasse was waiting for them inside, looking grim and formidable-beside the big fireplace, and there had been different security men outside. The big security man nodded cool recognition at Manners as Malrand came forward to kiss Clothilde and Lydia, and shake Manners’s hand.
    “There is champagne, of course, but I need something stiffer,” said the President. He was dressed in stout shoes and old corduroys and a worn leather jacket, and they made him look his age. “Major, perhaps you’ll join me in a scotch?”
    “I hear from Lespinasse that you came close to your goal when you were stumbling round la Ferrassie,” Malrand went on. “There is a lost