Before they called his bluff.
Found out that his skin
Just wasn't thick enough.
Wanted to go back to how it was before.
Thought he had lost every thing –
Then he lost a whole lot more.
A fool's devotion
Swallowed up in an empty space.
The tears of regret
Frozen to the side of his face."
– NINE INCH NAILS,
"I'm Looking Forward to Joining You Finally"
Soft blurred shadows danced across the floorboards and the cat was prancing at their edges, seemingly entranced by the changing shapes and motions. The crow watched from the vantage point of the desk, atop a small pile of books and papers the boy had carried from the next room. They smelt of ink and dust and loneliness and sadness.
The boy too was moving across the floor. The crow listened to the even rhythmic tattoo of his feet against the wooden floorboards and the soft whistling whiplash of the sword's blade through the still air. The boy's red waistcoat seemed even redder by the burnished glow of the many candles he had lit and placed around the room.
His moves had been tentative and clumsy at first, he had held the sword awkwardly and shifted his balance unevenly from one foot another. The crow watched curiously as he performed a series of strange steps over and over, slowly increasing his speed and varying the patterns he wove across the floor. The boy's growing confidence had been palpable as memories of moves learned years ago began to return, and soon the rhythm of the sword and the boy's feet began to blend and complement one another, in a ritualistic dance the crow did not understand, but recognised as somehow important.
The man's brow was furrowed with concentration and his eyes were set on some distant point or place. He had not broken into a sweat, his breathing was even, and his heartbeat was as implacable and steady as a war drum. He slid his sword into the sheath at his side and stood in the centre of the floor, head up, hands by his sides.
"Prepare."
For a moment Grantaire heard his old teacher's voice, clipped and cool, and assumed the correct stance, hands behind his back and weight resting on his left leg, right foot forward.
Enjolras sat at his bedroom table, as he had been sitting for maybe the past twenty minutes. It occurred to him that even with the curtains drawn the early morning light was insufficient to see close enough to shave properly and that he really should re-light the candle. But today the simple act of going to his door to collect his hot water had been exhausting and although he knew he couldn't just sit with his head listlessly propped on one hand for the entire morning, he was too tired to contemplate any further actions at this moment.
A man and woman somewhere nearby began shouting obscenities at one another. Within moments fellow tenants were expressing their protest at this impromptu dramatic performance by thumping the walls. The thuds were distant but Enjolras could feel them resonating in the pit of his churning stomach and if he had eaten anything in the past twenty-four hours, he would have thrown up.
"Draw."
Long ago, this had all been so difficult. But now Grantaire's right hand flew down as if on its own accord and drew the sword so quickly that it made no sound as it left the scabbard. Almost within the same second, the blade was resting lightly against his right shoulder and he was standing upright, his left hand tucked lightly behind his back.
"First position."
For a brief moment Grantaire heard the whistle of a dozen blades and heard the stamp of a dozen feet and suddenly he was fourteen and learning to be a man worthy of his father's name again. He vaguely recalled being unable to become such a man but now that hardly seemed to matter. Now he could not even remember what his father had looked like.
Suddenly, fear and panic rose in him with a gut-wrenching ferocity and he was already halfway out of his seat and half turned around in preparation to defend himself before he realised that what had startled him had only been the sound of somebody making a noisy exit from No. 38. His pulse racing so hard that it made his head hurt, Enjolras slowly sat again. It still hurt to do so.
His jaw ached dully and it was a moment before he realised it was aching because he was prodding it gently with his thumb. The swelling had all but gone down and apart from the cut that still skewed his bottom lip slightly – and the faint discoloration about his eye – the damage done to his face had healed as quickly as he had hoped it would. He had never been sure what hurt more, the wounds themselves or the pain he had seen reflected in the eyes of his friends' whenever they looked at him, no matter how briefly it glinted there.
The other injuries he had been able to conceal.
"Attack," Grantaire said aloud, his voice curiously flat in the silence.
And he moved like lightning across the floor, making the seven basic cuts in quick succession, the candlelight blurring around him causing the rest of the room to go out of focus. In his mind's eye he saw the large practice targets painted on the walls of the room he was taught in, but now the four key points bore faces instead of faded red marks.
Enjolras picked up the razor and it felt cold and heavy in his hand. The water in the basin was growing cool.
He looked down at the razor and then up again back into the mirror. Although he had been gazing at it for nearly half an hour now, it was only now that he actually focused his vision and looked at his reflection. All his life, people had told Enjolras that he was handsome and as he never considered this important, he had neither believed nor disbelieved.
Once when he was about eight, he had looked into a mirror and tried to see what other people saw that made them say the things they did. And what he saw was a sum of parts that, when added up to a whole, failed to immediately enlighten him. He saw hair that was yellow like his mother's but straight like his father's, eyes that were blue like his father's and a mouth that was a little like his mother's. He was tall for his age, so in that sense he was also like his father, and people said that he had his mother's smile and it was a pity he didn't display it more often. With a child's reasoning, he had therefore concluded that the reason was because he had similar features to his parents and they were called handsome, so that must make him handsome by proxy. And he had left it at that.
The label of "the handsome young Monsieur Enjolras" had followed him relentlessly into adulthood and still he never understood it. But that didn't stop him resenting it, or resenting the silly mademoiselles and matrons who batted their eyelashes or gazed in muted speculation and turned social events of any kind into portents of dread and embarrassment. He had thought that it simply could not get any worse than standing trapped and alone in lavish salons as powdered creatures draped in taffeta and lace and cloying sweet scent rustled and whispered around him, or walking down a street and being painfully aware of voices giggling in his wake, brash and brittle as tin whistles.
Grantaire had been cut only once, by accident, and he remembered vividly the slight sting of the blade as it sliced neatly through the fabric of his shirtsleeve and into his skin beneath. The bleeding had not been severe – his equally young opponent had been more distressed than he – but the sharp shock of tempered steel against his flesh had been unforgettable. He had never seen real harm rendered with a sword, let alone inflicted any.
Not yet.
But then the voices calling him handsome became lower and huskier, cloying as bad brandy, sharp and menacing as the smell of sweat and fear. Rough hands restrained him and forced him to look evil in the face, and it was an evil unlike that which he wrote and spoke about, unlike any he had ever imagined, and it crashed down upon him with a terrifying, brutal, unstoppable conviction.
"Repeat," said that cool dry voice.
And Grantaire did so, but first he hefted the sword from his right hand into his left, altering his stance accordingly. He had been one of the few regulars of Dechésne-Cheron's meetings to be able to use both hands with reasonably equal dexterity, but had never really liked attacking from the left. Now, however, he discovered that transferring all the steps and cuts from right to left came almost as second nature.
A sharp face, twisted and vulpine with malice leered down at him, and Enjolras had wanted to plead and protest, to say, "Why are you doing this? You can't be any older than I!" but other hands were pressed across his mouth making speech impossible and breath nearly so. And then the face had gone out of focus and instead there was a knife so close to him that he could already tell what it would feel like to have cold steel bite through him.
Grantaire ran through the same cuts again, shifting between first and third positions – the two most practical in actual combat.
"Left parry. Up into the second guard position."
He spun sharply on his right heel into a quarter-turn, bringing the sword out, up and back to the left in three quick strokes. Parrying that quickly should have made the tendons in his wrist creak but they did not.
The young man threatened to cut his face and Enjolras could see in his eyes that he had truly, desperately wanted to. Then the cold blade slid slowly across his bruised cheek and down along his throat. In a moment that was shattering in its lucidity, Enjolras thought, Kill me, and truly meant it. But the knife travelled further down and then paused, poised lightly against his breastbone. Then Enjolras understood that just as the others had used him in their way, so this man would use him in his – and he needed only a knife to inflict the damage he desired.
The blade felt like fire across his skin and it hurt all the more because the young man took his time. Enjolras tried to turn his head away but strong hands wrenched it around and down and forced him to look.
"Good. Now right parry and into fourth guard."
And it was done almost before Grantaire had time to plot the move out in his head. He could see the crow fluffing its feathers out of the corner of his eye as he switched hands once again and repeated the exercise.
Enjolras felt a twinge and involuntarily pressed a hand against his chest. The bandages he wrapped around his torso morning and night were only a precaution now, but there were still times when the healing cuts stung and ached. No one will see ever see it, he had promised himself. No one will ever know. So he had tended the wounds carefully and alone, dreading the thought of infection, even though he felt sick every time he had to look at the pattern of scars the man had left on him. He felt the same nausea every time his reflection caught him by surprise, or whenever someone touched him no matter how casually or briefly, or even just mentioned his appearance.
"Remember the old adage, boys," his teacher said crisply in a high-ceilinged room long ago. "Rage strikes, but revenge stabs." He had said it as though it meant something obvious but nonetheless significant, and neither Grantaire nor any of the other boys had been quite game enough to ask for clarification or discuss it quizzically amongst themselves.
Cutting empty air Grantaire imagined cutting flesh and moved even faster, trying to keep his back to the shadows that flickered and swirled around him. In the shadows, memories of Enjolras paced soundlessly across the floor with uneven step and ragged breath that verged on a sob.
The previous night Courfeyrac had said for what felt like the hundredth time since they'd met how grateful he was that Enjolras put up no contest for the grisettes of the city, and Enjolras had wanted to round on him and tell him to be silent. But he hadn't. He reminded himself that there was only one way to ensure that nobody suspected that anything had changed, so he walked on and said nothing, as if he had not heard.
I'm strong enough to stand tall and face the foes of liberty, he had always told himself. My hands are steady enough to hold a weapon, should the time come when it is required. My voice is loud enough to speak for those who cannot speak. And that is all that matters.
And that had been taken away in one night. How could he defend the people when he couldn't even defend his own body, when it had been so easy for them to smother his pleas for the preservation of his dignity? His form and face had been forcibly changed from something virtually irrelevant into something obscene and shameful, something which he was now not only agonisingly aware of but had absolutely no control over.
"I thought you had a death-wish," Grantaire said aloud as he guarded against an imaginary foe from the left. "But it was the other way around, wasn't it? Death had a wish for you and it found you that night."
A shadow flickered out of the corner of his eye. Grantaire whirled around and parried, crouching into a hanging guard again before repeating the move with his other hand. Speaking the truth aloud did not make them hurt any less, but it somehow made them make more sense.
Once their mad, filthy business was done, the men had told Enjolras, "In case you haven't got the message, not everyone wants to hear what you have to say. If we're forced to call on you a second time, we won't be half so gentle." And in the sudden echoing silence of their departure, Enjolras found himself thinking, If I just stopped breathing right now, I wouldn't care . . .
sacrifice martyrdom suicide murder how thin the line between eh boy
Grantaire lowered the sword, blinking back tears. "They killed him that night. It took seven months for his body to catch up, that's all."
To Grantaire, Justin Enjolras had been nothing short of a miracle. It was as simple as that. He was absolute conviction and absolute purity combined and incarnate, clothed in a fleshly form for which gods would have surely fallen from grace in order to possess. How this sorry time and place could have conceived such a man was as mysterious as it was ludicrous.
"Go ahead and sacrifice yourself," he had told Enjolras one afternoon in July 1830. "But just for the record, I think you're casting the most luminous pearl this world is ever likely to see before swine who'll appreciate the gesture even less than the editor of The Blue Quill appreciated Prouvaire's series of sonnets."
The words were spoken blithely but in his heart of hearts Grantaire had meant them. And because of five men's sick desire to violate and hurt, Enjolras had felt himself weak and worthless. Of his friends. Of his life. Of his cause. So he continued with a steely recklessness that only he understood, daring – and perhaps silently pleading for – someone, anyone, to deal the final blow that would usher the stillness and silence he craved.
"Inestimable worth" were two words that Grantaire thought got bandied around far too much and that was the worth he had placed on Enjolras' life. Heaven and Hell and all the places between should have stopped still in wonder on June 6 1832 as Enjolras laid down his life for what he believed in. Instead, that life had become something small and pitiful that Enjolras placed at the feet of his heartless brazen goddess in an attempt to placate Her and compensate for his hour of fear and shame. For what he had seen as his failure. And because it was all he could think of to do in order to be rid of the taste of his own blood and bile.
And the attempt was made in vain. Gods do not exist, the dead cannot hear, and scars never really fade.
How could any of us have foreseen what would happen to him? To us?
There had been one other moment when Grantaire knew that he could have just walked away, or tried to persuade the others to walk away. It had been a week after Enjolras had made his first big speech to them all and Courfeyrac had tried to swear eternal loyalty. The first time that they had understood that Enjolras was being serious when he said, I cannot guarantee you longevity, or even immediate safety.
The crow cawed softly.
the past's beyond your reach now boy don't go there
But the boy was already there.
Bossuet had been halfway through making some confused and forgettable argument in defence of Coquard, a rather eccentric spokesman for reformation in education, when Giradin, the manager of the Café Musain stumbled into the back room. His fleshy face was an even deeper shade of crimson than usual.
"The police!" he gasped.
All conversation ceased immediately and Grantaire was unsurprised to see all eyes turn to Enjolras, who was already on his feet.
"How many?" Enjolras asked.
"Three. Louison's keeping them talking in the front room. I think they're doing a sweep of the entire Place Saint-Michel."
"Right." Enjolras' gaze snapped back to the rest of the group. "Everyone out and quickly. Once you're at the end of the rue de Gres, split up, no groups larger than four, and make your ways as casually as you can to the university. We'll reconvene and headcount in the main courtyard at five o'clock."
Already the sound of chair legs scraping on floorboards was sounding throughout the room. Bossuet glanced quickly at Grantaire as if to say "Stick with us," and he and Joly were out the second door and pushing past a startled dishwasher, two other students on their heels.
Enjolras was still talking, the words clipped and calm. "Feuilly." Feuilly was already moving away and Enjolras needed to place a hand on his arm to catch his attention. "Go on to Laurence's, it's only a couple of shops down from here. Make sure that he knows what's happening and that there's nobody with him who can't be accounted for."
Feuilly nodded once, quickly, and gently shouldered the still spluttering Giradin to one side as he exited.
Grantaire felt Courfeyrac's hand on his shoulder and the man's voice in his ear, sharp, telling him to get up. But the wine was buzzing in him and his legs were suddenly wonderfully warm and heavy and he found himself idly wondering what the police would say to find a sole drunkard alone in a room with a map of the old France hanging on the wall. Then Courfeyrac was being thrust towards the door by a forceful hand and another face loomed out of the blurring darkness. A face with piercing blue eyes.
"MOVE!" Enjolras spat the word as though it were something filthy.
And Grantaire found himself suddenly on his feet and stumbling with the rest of the crowd towards the door. He was already out on the street before he realised that Enjolras' hand was no longer on his shoulder and propelling him by force.
Then Bossuet and Joly were flanking him, both of them talking fast and walking faster. The rest of the students were already scattering and melting into the rest of populace out and about in the surrounding streets. Courfeyrac was bounding towards them, holding his hat on with one hand, looking more alert than Grantaire had ever seen him.
"There's more police that way," he said, pointing. "Come on."
They followed him through a small cluster of street vendors and around another corner into a wide doorway where they huddled, silent, as they listened to the unmistakable tramp of feet with a mission and saw three broad-shouldered men in navy coats make their way briskly past their corner.
"I tried to tell you," Grantaire said, words slurring into one another. "Politics turns all men into vermin, be they marauding rats or frightened mice hiding from hungry cats."
"Shh!" Bossuet followed the three policemen with his eyes, still on edge.
Joly blew his nose unhappily. "It's happening again. Why do I always let my friends talk me into doing stupid things?"
Courfeyrac leaned over and gave the smaller man a pat on the shoulder. "Look on the bright side," he said consolingly. "We will never be bored again."
Cold tears coursed down Grantaire's cheek.
We never should have stayed. But we couldn't leave.
He ran his thumb back across the edge of the blade. He felt its bite and before the cut healed over again a thin stream of blood seeped across the blade. He thought of the other blade slick with Enjolras' blood.
"I know I'm a poor excuse for a champion," he said quietly, "but I'll stand as yours. I've sent one man to Hell tonight and the others will follow, I swear. They'll pay for what they've done. They will know the fear that you did and when they look into my eyes they'll see all their sins remembered."
With a wry, cold smile he raised the sword in a formal salute. A soldier prepared to go to war with a crow's harsh cry as his clarion call.
If he had to cut through a thousand men to find Enjolras again, then so be it.