“And how much would a public official charge for one of these?”
“Quite a bit,” said Brizeux cheerfully, “but in your case des Loges here has elected to … pay your bill for you.”
Crawford glanced at des Loges and began to wonder what, exactly, the ancient man expected in return; but Brizeux had now initialed the passport and was flipping through the pages to show him what his new signature looked like, and
Crawford pushed the worry away.
“You’ll want to practice it until you can do it instinctively,” said Brizeux, grinning up at him as he handed the document across.
It occurred to Crawford that Brizeux resembled young Keats—not in much, for Keats was young and burly and Brizeux was gray and frail, but very strongly in the eyes. The eyes of both of them, he realized, had the same unhealthy brightness, as if they were infected with the same rare kind of fever.
When they were outside again des Loges began hobbling back toward the wagon.
“No! We’ll take a regular coach back,” said Crawford in slow, carefully pronounced French. “I’ll pay for it.” His feet had been throbbing painfully ever since he had stopped pulling the wagon, and he could feel them swelling in the borrowed shoes.
“No doubt you could satisfy the coachman, but what I’d need to be paid isn’t yours to offer,” laughed des Loges, not looking back or pausing.
“Wait, I mean it. I would think you’d prefer it yourself, that can’t be the most comfortable position to be in all day—or all night, in this case. Why don’t we just—”
The old man had stopped, and was looking back at him. “Didn’t you look at the wheels?” he demanded in his barbaric French. “Why do you think I asked you if you wanted stone shoes?”
Crawford walked bewilderedly to the wagon, crouched beside it and spat on one of the wheels and rubbed off the caked mud. The rim of the wheel was studded with flat stone ovals—no wonder the grotesque vehicle had begun to seem ponderous during the day! He looked up at the old man blankly.
“Your wife never told you?” asked des Loges in a quieter voice. “Travel over stone doesn’t age us, you and me. A family courtesy, you might say. I wore stone-soled shoes for more years than I can count, but age crept up anyway, when I’d change them or take a stroll barefoot for a treat, and now I just don’t have the strength for it anymore. I’ve got a stone base to my walking stick, though, and I make sure to lean on it. Every little bit, right?”
“Uh … right.”
“I’ll give you a pair of stone soles before you go. And wear them, you hear me? You’ll be good for centuries more, easily, just so you don’t insulate yourself from your wife.”
“But I’m not married, certainly not to one of these … things.” His fever suddenly seemed much worse, and his breath was as hot as a desert wind in his head. “Am I? Could my wife have been one of them?”
“Assuredly—a fellow-husband can tell it just to glance at you, even without the evidence of your finger.”
Crawford shook his head uncomprehendingly. “But she’s dead … so I can hardly keep from insulating myself from her.” “I really doubt that she’s dead.”
Crawford chuckled dizzily. “You should have been there. Crushed like a press-full of grapes for wine, she was, and on our wedding night.”
Des Loges’s walnut-wrinkled face softened in what might have been pity. “Boy, that wasn’t your wife.” He shook his head, then climbed into the wagon. “I got your passport—now pull me home so that you can do your part of the bargain.”
Crawford considered just walking away, hiring a carriage to take him at top speed to the Swiss border, and leaving this old man to walk, or hire some child to pull his wagon—but, almost in spite of himself, he remembered Appleton with the horse and money, and Keats with his luggage.
He bent over stiffly and picked up the harness.
Twilight had fallen before they were five miles south of Auray, but des Loges refused to consider spending the night in an inn, even when Crawford pointed out that there was no moon tonight to see by; and so Crawford plodded on, wondering feverishly if there would ever again be a time when he wasn’t dragging this wagon around the Brittany hills.
The moon was indeed in its dark phase, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he discovered that he could nevertheless see it as a faint ring in the sky. The ground seemed to have a dim glow too, and several times when he heard noises in the surrounding fields he glimpsed patches of phosphorescence moving behind the wild shrubbery; and when an owl sailed past he was able to follow its silent flight for several long seconds before it swooped toward some small animal.
As the miles unrolled away behind, Crawford settled into a comfortable, metronomic pace, and when a pebble worked its way into his shoe through a gap at the side of the sole, he was reluctant to break his stride and take the shoe off—but after a few seconds he realized that the pebble wasn’t at all uncomfortable. It might have been a fever-born delusion, but that foot, the whole leg, in fact, felt much less tired, springier; and so when he did pause it was to find another pebble and poke it into his other shoe. Behind him, des Loges laughed softly.
This time he wasn’t startled by the valley of the standing stones, even though at night the figures looked much more like motionless men lined up across the miles of nighted plain for some unimaginable purpose. Luminous mists played over the stones in the starlight, and Crawford, dizzy and sick, thought the mists greeted him; he nodded back and waved his maimed hand.
It was past midnight when he pulled the wagon up beside the inverted half-boat that was des Loges’s house. When they had got inside, the old man gave him a cup of brandy and showed him a corner he could sleep in.
At noon the next day Crawford was awakened by the old man calling to him from outside. He came stumbling out of the tiny house, blinking in the glaring sunlight, but it wasn’t until he walked out to the rocks and looked down into the tide pool, and saw old des Loges sitting in the water next to the angular rock, that he remembered escaping from the ship and acquiring a passport.
And now you’ve got to do him this favor, he thought as he squinted around and scratched under his unfresh shirt. I hope it’s something you can do quickly, so as to be on the road again before the sun moves too much farther west. Nothing like the sleep-late life of a fugitive! He shook the pebbles out of the battered shoes, pulled them on and then climbed down the sandstone boulders to where des Loges sat.
The old man was dressed in the same dun cassock he’d been wearing the day before, and the clear seawater was rocking and swirling around his upper chest. The roughly hewn pyramidic stone was submerged, but Crawford could see that a segmented necklace of silver and wooden beads and some kind of onionlike bulbs was draped around the base of it—the buoyant wood and vegetable sections arched upward and waved in the currents, but the silver sections held the strange jewellery down on the sand.
Crawford glanced around again, uneasily, for all at once he knew that something bad was supposed to happen here, and he didn’t know what direction it was likely to come from.
The old man was grinning up at him. “Married in the mountains, divorced by the sea!” he piped. “It’s high tide now, but after you’ve liberated me, do please break that garlic necklace, will you? I’m not selfish, and I do like to pay my debts.”