Le Voleur des steppes
Joël Champetier
(Chapter 1: Four letters over the heart, p. 1-22)
No one could have said how long the man in the cage had had his eyes open. Lying on his side, unmoving, his legs folded, he was staring at a wild plain stretching as far as the eye could see. A stony desert speckled with sparse bushes.
Night was falling.
The purple sky turned black, except on the horizon where an inconstant light outlined the shape of the clouds.
A storm was coming.
Lightning soon fell on the rocky land, each strike cracking more loudly than the one before.
The man, who had eyes to see and ears to hear, and a chest that could feel each strike of the heavy hand of thunder, only became fully conscious when the first drops of rain splashed on his face.
This new phase in his awakening came with a feeling of almost limitless pain. Huddled up in a cage too narrow to stretch his legs, the man tried to find another, more comfortable position. But none was better than another. His whole being was in pain.
He whimpered like an abandoned child.
A lightning strike hit the ground, very close. The wind blew erratically. The air smelled of ice and hot gravel. The cage swayed, with the grating sound of metal against metal. The scattered rain drops became a raging downpour.
The cage was now tossed about in a barrage of water and lightning. Curling his hands around his mouth, in an instinctive effort to catch as much water as possible, the man slacked his thirst as best he could, as it was the worst of his torments at that moment.
The moaning of the wind changed. There was more time between lightning strikes, longer and longer moments of darkness.
The man reached out a hand to grip the cage bars. He tried to straighten his bruised chest. He groaned with the effort, but still managed to straighten up. He leaned his drenched forehead against the metal bars. His teeth were chattering. Although he was chilled from head to toe, his whole body was burning. In his mind an odd image appeared, that of a burning brand plunged into a water tank. The red, incandescent metal, the smoke pouring out of a furnace, the hissing of the water. The tank became a torrent that fell into a bottomless abyss. In the distance, a woman cried out, a cry of horror and despair. The scream vanished, swallowed by the roaring sound.
The vision had vanished, replaced by a rustling void. The man was still shivering, teeth chattering, his brow against the cold iron.
The cage was no longer swaying. The thunder was silent.
But the rain was falling more heavily.
Sitting cross-legged, the man hung his head on his chest and wiped his eyes, which were blinded by the pouring water. The darkness was absolute now that the lightning had migrated to other, more distant places. As he was slowly coming back to his senses, the man realized that the fiery pain he could feel was especially intense about halfway down his back.
The man carefully felt his bare skin and found the place where the pain was coming from. Close to the spine, below the ribs, he could feel a swollen, tender, crusted wound. The examination allowed him to realize he was only wearing a soaked loincloth. A sensation of discomfort slowly seeped into his consciousness: the loincloth was tight around his hips and thighs. He would have had to move to loosen it. The effort suddenly seemed superhuman, more than he could manage...***
The man in the cage woke up for the second time, with the dazed start of someone who was not aware he had been asleep.
He thought he had cried out, then was not sure. Perhaps he had only dreamt it... Above him, he could see a muddy sky between the bars.
Morning had come.
As he had done the previous night, the man gripped the bars of his cage to straighten up. This time again the effort made him moan.
However he twist himself around, he could not see the wound that was so painful in the small of his back. In the wan morning light, he examined his naked chest, his stringy, goose-fleshed arms, his bony hands with broken nails, his wrists with their dusky skin under which lay veins and tendons. What he had taken for a loincloth in the darkness turned out to be short trousers made of dirty canvas over muscular legs crisscrossed with fresh cuts and old scars.
The man had to wake up a little more to realize how odd it was that his body seemed so strange to him. Where did the wound in his back come from? Under what circumstances had he ended up, bruised and freezing, in this cage?
A new source of discomfort, this time olfactory, made him wince. A repugnant odour had come his way, carried by a capricious wind. It was only for a moment: the slight morning breeze made it disappear as fast as it had come.
Ignoring the pain of his stiff arms and legs, the man stood up to examine his immediate environment.
His head struck the upper part of his swinging prison: it was just a bit too low for him to stand completely straight.
The man counted two other cages, both hanging like his from gallows made of a wood so black it seemed oily. The gallows were planted at an equal distance from one another, forming a triangle about twenty feet in side; in the centre of the triangle, three paths converged. Seeing how straight they were and how carefully the cages were placed, the man understood that the whole thing was not due to chance but made according to a precise design.
Two of the paths vanished far into the rocky plain; the third one guided the eye to a bit less forbidding view: a stream swollen with muddy waters flowed toward a grove of thorn trees and coneywhips, and they both meandered towards low hills covered with a grey-black scrubland.
The awful carrion smell, a moment earlier, was coming from the cage on the man's right: a corpse was rotting in it.
It was not as easy to see inside the cage on his left. Multicoloured rags hanging from the bars hid two naked children tightly holding one another, instinctively protecting themselves from the cold, which seemed perfectly sensible to the man who was shivering, his teeth chattering in the wet air.
He looked a bit more closely at his own cage. The bars of the sides and roof were roughly but solidly soldered. Under the soaked straw pallet, closer together, the bars formed a floor, with a round hole in the middle. The black maw of a hole dug into the stone under the cage confirmed the man's suspicion: the opening was designed for the occupant of the cage to relieve himself. He also saw that a section of the floor was hinged, designed to open - which was impossible now since a metal rod kept the trap locked.
Only then did the man realize he was a prisoner. That it had taken so much time for him to do so made obvious his deep state of confusion.
He got down on his knees and slipped a hand between the bars to see if there was any way to get rid of the obstacle, or move it aside. Held in place by some sort of metal mechanism, the bar refused to budge. It was hard to see through the tight iron floor.
A female voice sounded in the morning air; it spoke an unfamiliar language.
In the cage where the man thought he'd seen two children embracing, a young naked woman was staring at him with an interested look on her face. The shivery light from the clouded sky revealed the silhouette of a nubile female, small and shapely. She had big, dark almond eyes in a slender face, with dusky skin burnished by the sun, framed by a black mane whose dirty locks went down to her waist. The man understood why he'd thought he'd seen two people in the cage: the young woman had four arms and four hands.
The prisoner spoke to him again in that staccato tongue, full of open vowels. By her tone and the look on her face, it must be a question.
"I don't understand," the man said, touching his ear.
A sudden light dawned on the young woman's face:
"You speak Estran?"
"If that is the language we are using now, yes."
"Amazing. Almost as much as seeing you alive this morning."
The man did not reply, a silence that was perhaps misinterpreted by his interlocutor, for she hung her head, looking both deferential and disappointed.
"Do you think me too informal? Must I use the honorary pronouns? Would the impersonal register be more appropriate?"
The man was as much confounded by the prisoner's volubility as by the nature of her questions. Reflexive notions of hierarchy and protocol whirled in his mind. A young woman his age should have been more respectful, unless she was the daughter of a superior. The very notion of a "superior" was not completely clear. And there was the fact they were strangers, and naked to boot!
He made an irritated gesture.
"Speak to me as you will."
The young woman gripped the bars with three hands and pressed her face against them to better see him.
"You have to admit that between prisoners the impersonal forms would be kind of pompous, wouldn't they? My name is Sarouelle."
She pushed her hair away from her face and arched her back a little, a teasing smile on her chapped lips. The man saw that there were two pairs of breasts on her chest, the upper ones in proportion to her frame, the lower ones even smaller, which explained why he had not immediately identified them for what they were.
"I was wondering when you'd finally notice."
The man looked elsewhere with a muffled, embarrassed grunt.
"Oh, It doesn't bother me being ogled," Sarouelle hastily said. "As long as you understand that I am not trying to titillate or shock you. I'm just waiting for my clothes to dry, that's all."
The man kept silent for a long time with averted eyes, waiting for a more urgent question to surface in his reeling mind:
"Where are we?"
Realizing that no answer was coming, he glanced at the young woman. She was studying him, a suspicious look on her face.
"You're the first man I've ever met whose first question isn't about my arms."
She punctuated her remark by flapping her right hands, then her left, then alternated between her upper and lower hands. All these movements had the cage swinging and creaking. The young woman burst out in a crystalline peel of laughter.
"You should see your face! You haven't had many opportunities to see four-armed women on your steppe, have you?"
"I don't understand what you're saying."
"The guards who put you in there said you are a robber from the steppes."
"It's possible."
"Aaah," Sarouelle said, glancing sideways, "now we're acting mysterious."
She looked at the swollen corpse, in the third cage, from which a repugnant fluid was now oozing and dripping.
"Between people soon to be dead, you know, mysteries..."
"I am not acting mysterious. I don't know why they put me in here. I don't even know my name."
Sarouelle stared at him for a while with half-closed eyes, her snub nose up in an expression of scepticism.
"You've lost your memory."
"It would seem so."
She held one hand out between the bars, her index finger pointed at the man's chest.
"I see something written there. I can't read it from here."
The man looked down at his torso. Waking up, he had barely noticed the four letters tattooed on his heart, as in truth his whole body had felt so strange and unfamiliar to him.
He studied the tattoo, black on his brown skin: Y, A, R, G.
"Yarg..."
He'd spoken in such a low voice that the woman in the other cage, on the other side of the road, couldn't possibly have heard him. He repeated it, in a normal voice:
"Yarg."
"That's your name?"
He studied the tattoo again, making sure he'd correctly read the letters upside down. Yarg. Yes, the word evoked a feeling of familiarity... deep, intimate... A feeling that, for an odd reason, somewhat reassured him.
"I think it's my name, yes."
"See?" the young woman said with a satisfied tone that seemed a bit absurd to him. "You were beaten. They hit you on the head and you temporarily lost your memory. Don't worry, your memories will come back in time."
Yarg did not answer, concentrating on his mental effort to tear through the veils separating his consciousness from a past he guessed was very close. A past which was all confused movements, diffuse lights, muted echoes.
The young woman was right. His amnesia was only temporary. It couldn't be otherwise. He would soon remember not only his name, but all the memories that make each person unique, different from all others. He would soon remember what it meant to be a robber from the steppes, if that was how the guards whom he didn't recall either had introduced him to the young woman... Sarouelle... Her name was Sarouelle.
The morning sun had timidly appeared between two banks of clouds. Its rays warmed Yarg's icy cold body. Alas, they also warmed the rocky plain, and the breeze that had blown the corpse's smell away weakened. Soon, the putrid carrion smell became so thick that Yarg had the feeling the air around him was viscous, a foul phlegm that he had to, however, inhale in order to stay alive.
Sarouelle too had fallen silent. Sitting on the straw of her cage, she seemed resigned to wait for the wind to come back.
The morning silence was shattered by a flurry of barks coming from the hills. Someone said a few words - commands, in a woman's voice - and the dog answered with a yelp.
Sarouelle sat up.
"They're bringing us food."
Yarg got up too. What with the carrion smell, he had trouble knowing whether he was hungry. But he was sure he was thirsty. A burning thirst, because the few sips of rain taken from the storm were only a memory now.
On the path coming from the hills a robust older woman appeared, dressed in a stern black dress with a hood. She carried a basket, but still walked at a brisk pace. A big black and red dog was loping around her, exhibiting the usual signs of canine exuberance.
At about a hundred feet of the gallows, the old woman stopped. Despite the distance, Yarg clearly heard her disgusted mutterings. But the dog pointed his snout at the corpse with an interested look.
The old woman began walking again, repeating her commands for the dog to heel. When she arrived at Sarouelle's cage, she frowned disapprovingly.
"Showing off your ass again! That's all you like to do, eh?"
"I'll dress when my clothes are dry."
"If you had an ounce of decency, you would have kept your undergarments on. But no! You like to exhibit your shameful parts! It's your perverse nature, shocking good people."
"I am here against my will," Sarouelle said reasonably. "Let me go. I promise you I will go so far away that no good people of this region will be in danger of staring at any part of my body, shameful or not."
"Quibbler!"
The old woman spat on the ground, and then she saw Yarg. Her startled reaction seemed almost a caricature.
"Shouldn't you be dead?"
Yarg didn't reply, which did not appease the newcomer.
"What, not one word? Do you speak another tongue? Are you deaf?"
"Neither deaf nor dead."
"Ha! Another wily one! You're two of a pair, you and the whore. If you are so clever, how come you're in the cage and I'm outside, eh? Yeah, yeah... I didn't bring anything for you. You don't bring food to a corpse."
The old woman flipped open the cover of her basket. The dog, quicker than her, plunged its snout inside and came out with something blackish. It ran away so fast that Yarg couldn't see what it was.
The old woman ran after the thief with scandalized gestures.
"Amos! Bad dog! Come back here! Come, give it back!"
The dog stopped beyond the third cage, contrite but not enough to make it come back. Very excited, it jumped up and down, its eyes fixed on the old woman, the brownish-black thing firmly held between its white fangs.
"Give it to me, Amos! Give me the sausage!"
The dog, its ears laid back on its head, at last let its loot fall in the dust.
"You rascal!" the old woman cried furiously, retrieving the meat, now all sticky with drool.
The dog rolled on its back, whining like a puppy. The old woman hissed:
"This is no time to play!"
Seeing its mistress was no longer paying attention to it, the dog jumped back on four legs and, its tongue lolling askew, it followed her, staring at the coveted object with watery brown eyes. The old woman threw the piece of sausage into Sarouelle's cage, took half a slightly mouldy cabbage out of her basket and slipped it in between the cage bars. Finally she held out a canteen.
"Did I hear correctly," Sarouelle said, "you didn't bring anything for the new prisoner?"
"Should I go back and forth to the village again? The sermon writer shouldn't have told me he was dead! Go on, whore, drink. I'm not gonna hold that canteen for you all day long."
The young prisoner took the canteen and drank several draughts from it. She gave it back to the old woman.
"You didn't drink it all."
"I didn't on purpose."
Sarouelle picked up the sausage, wiped off the dust and dog drool on one of her pieces of clothing hanging to dry, then she tried to divide it in two. The meat was tough: she had to tear it with her teeth to get a piece off it. Once the cabbage was also torn in two more or less equal parts, Sarouelle held out the half portions through the bars.
"It's for Yarg. That's his name. Give him the rest of the water, too."
The old woman in black hit her chin with a thumb in an impatient gesture and, without a word, gave the canteen and the food to Yarg. He first took the water, which he drank so eagerly that he felt giddy with relief. For a very short moment, anger swelled in his chest and he was ready not to give the canteen back to the old woman. But he realized the futility of this reflex and let the old woman take it back. With no further ado, she left, followed by the dog who looked back a few times, disappointed.
Yarg saw that Sarouelle, sitting on the straw, was eating the cabbage and the sausage. He tried to eat too, but the smell of the meat mixed with the rotten miasma thickening the air. His stomach spasmed and he had to make a deliberate effort not to throw up the precious water he'd just drunk. He fell back on eating the cabbage: the smell was different enough from that of the corpse, it did not make him nauseous.
"Don't be choosy," Sarouelle advised, seeing he wasn't eating everything. "You'll find out they don't bring us meat every day."
"I'll wait for the wind to rise."
The young woman nodded.
"It stinks, doesn't it? I've gotten used to it."
Yarg made a gesture signifying his assent. His frugal meal, and especially the water he had drunk, had given him some of his strength back.
"Have you been here for a long time?" he asked.
Sarouelle pushed back a long wisp of black hair from her face, staring at the sky as though she was thinking hard.
"In the beginning, I counted the days. Then I lost track. More than fifty, less than sixty. Is the order of magnitude enough for you? It doesn't matter much, you have to admit."
She touched some of her clothes. Since they were not dry yet, she placed them at right angles with the ever more burning rays of the sun. These manipulations allowed Yarg to find out that the sky blue rag was a bodice trimmed with coloured threads, the purple piece a kind of dress; the yellow striped fabric were pants with laced legs; all the clothes were dirty and torn.
Now that his body had warmed up a bit, Yarg realized the young woman had shown good sense in getting undressed: his wet trousers were icy on the small of his back and his thighs. While he could do nothing to fight against the awful smell of the corpse or alleviate the pain of the wound on his back, he could at least get rid of that source of discomfort.
With stiff movements, he took his trousers off. The dirty and yellowed fabric had perhaps been white once. He hung it out to dry, turning his back on Sarouelle, as much to offer it to the warm caresses of the sun as to hide his male attributes from the young woman... even though these were a rather sad sight, all shrunken by the cold under the thick black pelt on his groin. Instinctively, he knew that all that was happening to him was unseemly, an assault on his dignity.
"You have an ugly wound on your back. Does it hurt?"
"Yes."
"Looks like it was made by a sword. Or maybe a dagger?"
"It's possible."
"You don't remember that either?"
"No."
"Odd, though, this amnesia thing. It's true you have a hard life, you robbers from the steppes. The Rebècq guards who brought you here were not very forthcoming on the circumstances of your capture. Normally, they should have bragged more. They are not the ones who wounded you. I can see from here that it goes back several days. Here's how I reconstruct the events: during a robbery attempt, one of your victims tried to defend himself and stuck his dagger in your back. Or you were attacked by a hostile clan. Or it's the aftermath of ritual combat: it's common in the steppes, they say. The wound weakened you and made you less watchful. The village guards found you and, since they needed a third scapegoat, they captured you. You fought back, they beat you too hard, believed you would die from your wounds and were berated by the sermon writer who'd asked for a live victim: it stinks less and is more impressive for travellers who go through this crossroads. And so the guards didn't brag when they put you in the cage. That explains everything."
A sensation he had not yet felt shook Yarg's stomach. A spasm bubbled up into his chest and came out of his throat as a rough, clipped burst of laughter, a sharp pain shooting through his wound with each cough.
"Yes, that would explain everything."
Sarouelle did not seem offended by the irony of her companion in misfortune.
"Admit that I made you laugh."
Still sitting cross-legged on the straw, she put all her hands behind her and stretched with a wide yawn, her four dark nipples pointing to the sky. Despite Yarg's frail physical condition, Sarouelle's teasing as well as the youthful body she showed off with no apparent shyness were beginning to awake in him a sensation other than amusement, one more primitive and animal.
He looked elsewhere. The sky had cleared. A blue dome dotted with dense little white clouds was hanging over the rocky plain. On the horizon, Yarg saw some movement.
Travellers had just appeared. Here, the eye could see far: their approach seemed to take an eternity. Gradually, Yarg could make out that it was a man and a child, both dressed in a grey tunic and leggings. The man guided a mule yoked to a half-wagon in which a woman was sitting among bundles and canvas sacks.
After watching also the horizon too, Sarouelle just made a fatalistic face:
"It's the miller. He won't help us."
"Have you already asked for help to free yourself?"
"What a question! Do you think I like it in this cage? I ask everyone who passes by to try to find a way to get me out, of course."
"Without much success."
"You're wrong. I convinced Janot, the previous guard, to run off with me. Unfortunately, the sermon writer sent the dogs after us. We were caught. I was given no food for two days. Margouille - that's the old woman who takes care of us - told me that Janot was whipped and sacked from his post. (Sarouelle nodded sadly). I promised him I would sleep with him, but we were captured before he could benefit even once from my gratitude."
The miller and his family did not linger. Hiding his face with one hand, frowning with disgust, the man forced the mule to go faster. The trio barely glanced at Yarg when they passed between his cage and that of the corpse. After the half-wagon turned onto the road leading towards the low hills, they continued on, completely ignoring the young woman sitting in the third cage.
"This stench is going to hinder our efforts to arouse pity," Sarouelle said. "If the village's sermon writer managed to find another live expiatory victim, we would be rid of that smell. I hope you won't judge me too harshly for expressing such a selfish desire."
Yarg was baffled by such a candid confession, expressed with such equanimity. Was it a form of irony?
"You're a weird bird, sitting there in your cage."
"If I were a bird, I'd be a magpie," Sarouelle instantly replied. "Chatty, with black feathers."
She came closer to the bars of her cage and studied her companion in misfortune, her eyes sparkling vivaciously.
"You don't remember your name, or where you come from, or if you ever saw a four-armed woman. But you know birds are kept in a cage."
Yarg was struck by the aptness of this remark. After thinking a moment, he muttered, as if apologizing:
"The picture just appeared in my mind. The same way I know you should have only two breasts. Still, I'm unable to recall having ever seen a naked woman before."
Sarouelle sniggered.
"You must be a virgin? Yeah, sure!"
Yarg gestured indifferently and the conversation was interrupted again.
As the sun moved across the blue sky, its rays were becoming hotter. Not only did Yarg stopped being cold, but he realized he would soon feel exactly the opposite. It was impossible to believe it had rained the night before. Far off on the horizon, through the shimmering veil of the air above the warming plain, a group of slender silhouettes appeared. They slowly became clearer, and Yarg saw it was a small troop of riders; the sound of hoofs pounding the earth preceded them.
There were seven riders, followed by two pack animals. Yarg, who understood it without being able to determine from where he took this knowledge, knew that the troop was commanded by five soldiers - those who were clean-shaven with short hair, all dressed in the same sinople shirts under a leather corselet and wearing on their head the same leather helmet with a metal visor. Whereas the two men dressed in a simple leather tunic, grey with dust, were servants, armourers or mechanics, or all of the above.
Sarouelle sat up too.
"Those are new ones... Let's get dressed, you never know!"
She pulled on her hanging clothes, jumped into her yellow striped pants, put on her tunic and bodice; each of her movements had the cage swinging and grating. She hastily knotted the lacings that closed her bodice, and pushed her tunic up so she could lace the legs of her pant just above the knees; each pair of hands was knotting one lace.
Yarg only had his pants to put on, which were still a bit damp, though they did not feel as unpleasant now that the sun had warmed the fabric.
While she was adjusting her clothes with one pair of hands, Sarouelle was trying to tidy up her hair with the other.
"How do I look?"
The first word that came to Yarg's mind was "bizarre" and the second was "sweet." Both words seemed inappropriate, and he chose to keep silent.
The soldiers were close enough now to smell the stinking corpse. They expressed their disgust, laughing and swearing.
"There's a dead man over there, and he's on the ripe side."
"Or else Garillon farted again!"
The hilarity was replaced by perplexity when they saw Sarouelle waving a hand through the bars.
"My lords, my lords, free me!"
"What is that? A girl?"
The soldiers reined in their horses. One of them protested: it stank too much, they ought to keep going. The rider at the head of the troop, perhaps an officer if his red-collared shirt and the instep of his boots of the same color were to be trusted, ignored his companion and prodded his horse closer to Sarouelle's cage.
He called out to her in a gruff voice:
"What sort of a creature are you?"
"Only a maid who has two more arms than what most people are used to." (Her voice broke). "Brave soldiers, I ask your help in the name of justice. The corpse that you see here is that of my father, a rich merchant. We were attacked, robbed of our money and clothes. My servant, in the other cage, tried to defend us, and look: they stabbed him with a dagger."
The officer barely glanced at Yarg.
"Your 'servant' is mean-looking. And only whores dress like you do."
A sad, wounded look appeared on Sarouelle's face.
"I am not a prostitute, my lord, but I shall reward you for your generosity with the only treasure that could not be taken from me. Know that I am sensual and that I am pining for a man's embrace."
The answer was welcomed by an explosion of raucous mirth.
"Ho-ho, well said!"
"You won't let her pine away like that, will you Captain?"
One of the younger soldiers dismounted and came to Sarouelle's cage, merrily encouraged by the rest of the troop. This lack in discipline made the officer frown, but he did not call them to order.
The soldier leaned under the cage and studied the lock. One of the armourers joined him. After much pushing, pulling and shaking, the armourer gestured disappointedly.
"There's an iron lock, with a strip that acts as a spring. Maybe with a pin we could push it."
"It wouldn't be enough," Sarouelle said. "You need a kind of key. Force the trapdoor with your sword."
The solider smiled morosely:
"You're very pretty, my dear, but not so much that I would ruin my sword."
"Enough," the officer said. "Get back on your horses, you two, we're not going to burden ourselves with a whore."
"Yep," groused another. "And it really stinks here!"
Reluctantly, the young soldier and the armourer got back on their horses. Sarouelle watched the departing riders with a crestfallen look.
"If the officer hadn't been there, I'm sure I would have managed to persuade the young one. Pity, such a pretty boy."
Yarg sat down on the straw, now almost dry. Staying up too long with his head bent to the side was too uncomfortable.
Sarouelle sat down too, smoothed her dress and leaned back against the bars, two hands behind her neck, two others listlessly caressing the iron of the cage. They kept silent for a long time, then Sarouelle exclaimed:
"A dead man and a man of few words. Wonderful company!"
"Amnesia limits subjects for conversation."
"Ask me some questions, then. I'm talkative, but not so much so that I would talk to myself endlessly."
"Where are we?"
"I thought I'd told you. We are very close to Rebècq, a small city on the road that crosses the Northern Steppe. Do those names mean anything to you?"
"No."
"Sunport? Casson? The Mad Mountains?"
Yarg's only answer was a weary gesture. Sarouelle sighed, making a rather theatrical face.
"We're really starting at the very beginning!"
"Are you really a prostitute?"
"I have been educated in all that pertains to seduction," the young woman answered without seeming offended by this choice of question. "Dance, music, the art or conversation, hairdressing, jewellery, the combining of perfumes, wines and foods. But also more sensual arts like massage, intimate caresses and so on."
Yarg let out a vague grunt that could be taken for assent. He straightened up, folded and stretched his stiff arms and legs; the chain of his cage grated in the steel ring that held it. He stared with vague hope at the rocky horizon in the south, and the bare hills in the north. The three roads were all deserted.
The young prisoner sitting in her cage on the other side of the path no longer spoke. For the first time since he woke up, she looked despondent. Yarg felt pity for her, and he tried to think of some comforting comment, but nothing came to mind, except the feeling that any show of niceness would be against his nature. Was he not a rough and fierce robber from the steppes?
Yarg sat down.
The silence went on and on.
After the heat of the day, the feeble breeze diminished until it was completely gone. The carrion smell came back in force, even more punishing in the heated air.
Suddenly, the corpse's cage creaked. Yarg was startled. A big black bird with dishevelled feathers had landed on the cage, its beady eye fixed on one then the other of the still living prisoners. Then it looked at the dead one. Deciding that neither Yarg nor Sarouelle would be able to disturb it, the bird slipped through the bars and alighted on the swollen corpse, at which he pecked tentatively. Then, with more boldness, he attacked the flesh energetically. Two of his ilk joined him. Outraged by the intrusion, the first bird tried to push away the two scroungers with raucous cries, its beak snapping. He was answered with corresponding energy and the same tone. The arrival of a fourth bird only made things more complicated. After a few moments of frantic bickering, the birds apparently accepted that a truce would be less exhausting than the pursuit of hostilities. Each went to work on one part of the corpse, energetically pulling pieces of bloody flesh through the bars.
Yarg stared at the birds' activity for a while, but soon the rays of the sun, burning more and more hotly, became really unpleasant. He felt a pang of envy towards Sarouelle who had pulled her dress off again to hang it on the cage. The young woman lay in the shadow of her improvised awning and suggested that Yarg cover himself with straw during the hot hours.
"Or you will burn, naked as you are."
Yard took her advice. Lying on the side opposite his wound, and despite the hard iron bars, despite the heat, the smell and the repugnant noise of the birds' feast, he managed to doze off and let the time slip by...
© 2007 Éditions Alire & Joël Champetier
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