Chapter XIX
XIX
Margeride Mountains
The Beast killed with shocking frequency.
As the spring ripened into summer, Antoine and I chased it from corpse to dismembered corpse across Gévaudan.
It covered impossible distances, often striking several villages in a day.
It was both everywhere at once and nowhere.
Most concerning of all, its tracks—when we could find them at all—seemed to be getting bigger and deeper.
Sarmodel’s disapproval grew like the weight of a (very bad-tempered) stone in my mind with each new body and each cold trail. He finally voiced his displeasure one afternoon as we pushed for the third time into the trackless woods north of Chateau d’Apcher, high up in the mountains.
Sebastian, what are we doing up here again? How many times must we cover the same territory?
I am trying to narrow down the Beast’s home range—
Well do it faster! You have been here for weeks, with nothing to show for it but saddle sores.
I know! I know.
And have you considered in your ramblings that I might be hungry? Does it ever cross your mind that—
“Professor, I think I know this place!” said Antoine suddenly, as we forded the shallow stream in search of somewhere to camp. “Yes! I used to come here as a boy. Come, follow me.”
It took us some time (Antoine’s memory was not quite as accurate as he claimed) but we eventually found the place he sought; a rocky ledge overlooking a fast-flowing branch of the stream. Antoine’s eyes brightened as he spied several dark shapes gliding beneath the surface.
I set about securing and caring for the horses.
The day had been very demanding on the poor animals, and I took my time settling them in for the night.
I took special care to check their hooves.
The mountains were notorious for what the hunters called “trail teeth”—small, sharp flakes of slate that were easily wedged inside the hoof and had crippled many a horse in Gévaudan.
Antoine was filling our water flasks in the stream, singing as usual.
“I am sorry to say that dinner will be very spare tonight, sir,” I called over my shoulder, rummaging through our bags. “We did no real hunting today, and it has been some time since we restocked our victuals.”
“Have no fear, Professor,” he called back to me. “Tonight, I will provide for us.”
I turned to find him standing on the bank in nothing but his drawers and undershirt.
“Are you planning to bathe, sir?” I asked. “Brace yourself. The stream is pure snowmelt.”
He wriggled out of his shirt and then his drawers, leaving me quite distracted and unable to speak.
Oh Sebastian. Oh, yes. Sarmodel kindled obscenely. His lust overlaid mine with unspeakable passions; Antoine was suddenly a morsel I wanted between my teeth as much as between my legs.
“I told you, did I not, that I used to come here as a boy?” Antoine said.
He took a long drink from his wine flask and set his shoulders, like a man going into battle.
“There was a game we used to play, the village boys and I, which may serve us well now.” He knotted the legs of his drawers and stepped into the icy stream.
“Though there is some unpleasantness to begin . . .” He waded out until he was knee-deep, gasping and wincing.
With a grin, he lowered his knotted underwear into the current between his knees, letting it balloon out behind him like a fishing net.
“. . . the rewards will be more than worth it.”
“I see that you are outstandingly drunk tonight, sir.”
Antoine simply winked and began to sing to the water. It was a tune I had not heard from him before, in which a baker hawked his wares to local women, with various double entendres around his “hot loaf, rising firm.” “Have you ever seen a fish serenaded?” he asked me after the first verse.
I could not help but laugh. “No, sir, I have not. I do not believe, in fact, that I have ever met a man willing to invite a fish into his smallclothes, with song or otherwise.”
“Silence, unbeliever! I have lured more than fish into these drawers, and they have never failed me.”
He continued his ribald song with another verse about his “bulging bag, full of goodness.” The fat trout in the stream ignored him completely, busy with their own crepuscular foraging. I returned to the fireside, prepared for a very lean evening.
It cannot have been more than a few minutes later that Antoine gave a whoop of excitement. I turned to see him hoisting his drawers from the water, with a long, dark fish thrashing inside one of the legs.
“I told you!” he exclaimed. “I told you it would work!”
But his prey was not so easily captured.
His elation turned quickly to dismay as the fish began to struggle in earnest. He grasped at the linen, trying to trap the slippery creature, but somehow ended up chasing it hand-over-hand up to the opening.
It leaped into the air, silver flanks flashing in the dying light.
“Whoreson!”
Antoine managed a last valiant attempt to catch his prey, succeeding for a few seconds in grasping the fish with his hands.
Then, with a final flick of its powerful tail, the trout slapped Antoine once on each cheek—one-two!
—like a woman affronted, and slipped free.
With a startled cry, Antoine staggered back and toppled into the frigid stream.
He was laughing even as he resurfaced, naked and empty-handed.
I would struggle to push the image from my mind, both in the coming days and in the years that followed.
I remember Antoine climbing drunkenly to his feet in the stream, his wet, naked skin shining like the fish that had just bested him.
I remember the faint blue veins visible just below his collarbone, and the thickness of his body hair as it descended toward his manhood.
I remember his blond hair stuck to his face and his maple-colored beard shedding drops of water like rain. I remember all of it, still.
“My lord? Are you hurt, sir?” I asked, somewhere between helpless laughter and helpless arousal.
“I am not,” he said, his teeth chattering.
“But you have witnessed the loss of my dignity and my drawers to a trout—I think you may safely dispense with your ‘my lord’s and ‘sir’s.” He gave me another smile.
“Find me a dry blanket and promise never to mention this again, and you may call me Antoine, as my friends do.”
Do not misunderstand.
For all of his surprises, Antoine was in many ways entirely consistent with a young French nobleman of the time.
He was a keen reader, a self-proclaimed polyglot and a critical thinker.
1 He could play the harpsichord. He had learned the fine arts of the hunt: the gun, the knife, the kill and how to care for his horse and gear.
The more practical arts—most notably setting a fire—had clearly been left to others.
Each night he knelt, tongue-in-teeth, smacking his flints over whatever tottering pile of twigs he had constructed.
And each night, I offered cheerful advice (which was just as cheerfully ignored) until I could stand it no longer and did it myself.
He watched me closely with suspicious, narrowed eyes, sipping on his wine flask, hoping to re-create my technique the next time.
And the following night, invariably, the ritual would play out again.
I soon learned not to underestimate him, however. Though he couldn’t track a herd of oxen through a snowdrift, he was a far better marksman than me, and was responsible for a large proportion of the game we killed. This was doubly impressive given that he was usually drunk by lunchtime.
I also probed gently into his unmarried status—a nobleman who was still a bachelor at nineteen was certainly enough to raise eyebrows.
“I am betrothed to the Lady Ninette Voltours d’Apcher,” he replied evenly. He said the name very precisely, as though it were something he had committed to memory. “We are to be married in the spring, when she comes of age.”
“Congratulations—a fortuitous alliance for both your families, Antoine.”
Antoine made a wry face. “‘Fortuitous’ is perhaps not the word. Lady Ninette is the fourth of the Baron d’Apcher’s daughters to whom I have been betrothed.
The first died of consumption before we had a chance to meet.
The second—her twin sister—did not survive a fall during a riding lesson.
And Annalise, the third, succumbed two years ago to a fever caused by the scratch of a cat, to hear it told. ”
“Perhaps condolences instead, then? My God, Antoine—three dead brides? That’s some atrocious bad fortune. Let us hope at least that you may welcome your latest betrothed to a land free of the Beast come springtime.”
“Indeed! May she survive so long,” he said dryly, raising his flask.
Oh, I like him, said Sarmodel. And what is this cat sickness? Can we get some?2
It sounds like superstition to me. And no, we can’t.
Antoine was looking at me sidelong. He indicated the gold fede ring (a useful sham) on my left hand. “And what of your wife? You speak little of her.”
“My beloved Livia awaits me back in Padania,” I replied easily. “Though we have not been blessed with children,3 she busies herself with the affairs of the household.”
“There is always hope,” he said. “How long have you been married?”
“A long time,” I answered. “A very, very long time.”
1. All of which made him, much like me, an insufferable know-it-all.
2. Infectious diseases are popular, if unpredictable, subjects of demonic experimentation. Leprosy, bubonic plague and Spanish flu have all earned their creators (Oribet, Veles and Caligern, respectively) endless torrents of anima and bragging rights to match.
3. Can you imagine? If memory serves, Livia was in fact in Africa somewhere at the time, sourcing diamonds for me.