She pointed. Christophe hissed at the children and gestured for them to stay in the courtyard. He followed Gaëlle along the dirt path, past the muddy pond and the mirabelle tree. Her gait was uneven and Christophe placed a steady hand on her shoulder. They took a left at the edge of the property where the wild heather grew in thick pink shrubs. Heat was rising from the fields in drunken fumes. Christophe noticed a thin column of smoke rising from the tree-line in the distance, but there was no time for that now. Even if they were alive, the old men were of no use to him. He did not care whether they lived or died. They could keep their eggs.
Gaëlle had stopped in her tracks and was pointing ahead. In the distance appeared the shape of a wounded animal dragging itself along the intersecting hedgerow. The child veered from left to right on his hands and knees. Christophe and Gaëlle watched Florian’s limbs jolt uncontrollably. The boy collapsed and lay still for a moment, but as they neared he struggled and rose again.
Florian had severed the snake’s neck and its bloody head was rolling around in his mouth. The pain had started in his cheek and shot quickly to the top of his head where it had wrapped around his neck. Now it travelled down his back like the little black stick slithering through the wild grass near the ferns. He got close as he always did, to understand, but also to drink from it. The snake had golden discs for eyes with small black slits running down the middle. Its body was the color of old leaves and wood, with dark patches of burnt soil. What’s left after a fire.
So he approached the snake very slowly, his mouth in an O and his teeth making space for the kill. Of all the snakes he had hunted, this was the fastest. It wove in and out of the grass as he chased it through the trees. They reached a clearing and the snake paused. The boy crept closer and lunged. He bit the snake and the snake bit Florian, inside his mouth and through his cheek. His jaw clenched until the he felt the snake’s spinal cord sever between his teeth and that’s when the hurt began. Florian had never felt such pain. He fell to the forest floor and rolled onto his back. Eyes turned to the treetops, Florian saw the leaves were fangs sinking into his face through any opening possible. He tried with his eyelids to block the venom falling like bright rain from the sky. The trees were children and the children reached through his eye sockets and ate from his skull with sharp spoons, scraping for the soft tissue at the bottom of the bowl. Soon his entire body was racked with pain and his throat tightened and Florian’s breathing became difficult.
Christophe could not see the fang marks, but the boy’s face was bloated and his neck was no better. So it had finally happened. But all the precautions were for naught if he didn’t act quickly. After a short struggle, Christophe slung Florian over his shoulder and began the journey back. This time Gaëlle had no trouble keeping up with the old man, who was considerably slowed by his burden.
The heat had left the smaller children irritable and tired. They played joylessly beneath the loose rays of waning sunlight. Lea sat hunched in the grass nearby, chewing her toenails and muttering to herself. Sabine wore no expression, the other children like fireflies adrift in the dim caverns of her consciousness. Marc slept beside her in the fetal position.
Only Lea noticed Christophe when he reappeared at the top of the path, Florian struggling fiercely in his arms. She put her shoes back on and followed them into the farmhouse.
Christophe laid the boy on the dinner table and examined his torso for puncture wounds. Florian’s jaw was locked tight and he bit Christophe’s fingers when the old man tried to part his lips. Christophe slapped him twice across the face and pried his teeth apart like those of a stubborn horse. This time Florian ceased struggling altogether and kept his mouth open. The slap had awakened memories of being nursed by Christophe after the long winter, and this relaxed some part of his mind.
Inside Florian’s mouth Christophe found the bloody viper’s head. He washed the wound with water and dried it with a rag. A single puncture. So the snake had only thrust one fang into the boy’s cheek. The poison of the other, finding no flesh to pierce, had probably squirted loosely into the boy’s mouth, without which Florian would already be dead.
Let us hope the vials have not gone bad, thought the old man. He had no doubt they were past their expiry date, but that didn’t mean much.
Florian lost consciousness while the old man was in the cellar. He had become a thin whisper of air making its way through a swollen windpipe. He was the silken thread of a spider wriggling in the naked ether with nothing to fasten to. Already he could sense the place of shines appearing in the distance. Then from the miasma emerged the hand of some implacable being. From it a single fang and from the fang came a new venom to flood Florian with dull wet pain.
The boy was barely breathing when Christophe injected the anti-venom. Lea climbed into the soot-marked fireplace and stood there observing the dinner table, her mood affected neither by the bloody cuts on the Florian’s supine body nor his terribly disfigured face. Aware of a subtle shift in his peripheral vision, Christophe turned towards her as if another snake might be lying there in wait. In Lea’s face, the old man saw the expression of his wife looking down at him from the blackened stone. One of his hands remained on the boy’s chest, and beneath it Florian’s flesh slowly loosened as his breathing became more steady. It was the face of all women, yes, the way their eyes were set apart, but also their nose and mouth and the way all of these functioned together to make them known as themselves. Here was his wife breathing, just Lea, a child, certainly not his wife, but every wife, quite human, face peering at him, only to turn to ash and recede into a black mist.
For a single moment love had returned to suffocate the simple calm of Christophe’s organized mind. False and traitorous hearts, the hearts of whores and thieves. When their time comes. How much they would suffer and in what way. If only he could… I cannot think, he thought, I cannot think and I don’t know where I am. Here in the farmhouse of course. Surrounded by them. Children. I must calm myself. Make the boy drink some water when he can. Feed him well for the next few weeks. And in the meantime bathe the children, cut their nails and hair if needed, one after the other, in the usual manner, beginning with the smallest and most restless, and ending with my wife.
The old man lifted Lea out of the fireplace and when her feet touched the ground she immediately dropped to her knees and crawled beneath the dinner table. The old man’s legs were purple and grey, and his face. His face again. It was the same uncertain look she remembered from the night of the soup. Lea felt the familiar vinegar spreading again through her belly. The child’s face itched beneath the skin where she couldn’t reach. Lea rubbed her nose and clenched her fists until her fingernails pushed into her palms and her toes curled into little balls. She crouched there in the shadows listening to the muffled sound of Christophe handling Florian’s body on the table above her. Someone had bent the boy right out of shape. He was like a piece of clay rubbed in beetroot.
9.
The children fell into single file and waited to be ushered into the bathroom. Florian could not turn his head to observe this motley string of grievers, and he heard only the sound of their footsteps as they shuffled by. The boy’s eyes remained open, staring fixedly at the ceiling’s wooden beams, the crude white plaster hiding straw and mud, and this pain, worming its way through his marrow, out into the fingertips, and pooling in the toes, which hung like heavy black pebbles, pinning him to the table. From the next room came the sound of a small rain. Florian’s hands were cold and his head blistered until it was pocked with tiny holes, all of them whistling hot air.