The battle of Bazeilles continues. Please take a moment to leave a review, you'll make my day!
Chapter 32 – The Defence
The pain sewed through Raoul's side like a thread pulled by a needle, jabbing him sharply then abating to a hot dull ache, jabbing again. For a time he could only hover on the edge of awareness. Perhaps he slept, or perhaps he merely drifted on the ebb and flow of pain, counting his heartbeats. It was impossible to tell in the dark. The lamp had burnt out. Vivid colours swam before his eyes, but if the shapes they formed were dreams, he could not decipher their meaning. He desperately wanted water.
This was a cellar. He knew that much, but he could not recall how he had come to be here, nor how much time had passed since he had fallen in the street. Memory played tricks on him: one moment he was firing into the dusty street from behind a barricade, the next he was outside a café in Paris on a hot July evening, anxious of losing Christine in the crowd surging and bubbling through the doors. Then Christine caught sight of someone on the pavement and stopped. There, before Raoul's eyes, her face transformed: her eyes grew dark and strange, the colour rose in her cheeks, her lips parted. A faint blush crept over her skin. It was almost obscene, except that Raoul had never seen her more beautiful, and when she called out – "Erik!" – he had known whom she meant even before he, too, saw a creature with a bandaged face vanish in the crowd. He could not forget Christine's expression afterwards as she turned to him, the twin flames of fear in her eyes.
The sound of approaching footsteps gave him a jolt. A dazzling yellow light near-blinded him and he saw a dark-haired girl holding a candle. Slowly she came closer, until she was standing over him.
"Christine?.." Raoul whispered.
The candle jumped. "No, monsieur. Begging your pardon. I'm Rachel, I'm the maid."
"Oh." Raoul tried to focus. This was not Christine; that had been a momentary illusion. In his delirium he was starting to see things: the Phantom, now Christine... He was so thirsty.
"Forgive me." Raoul forced the words out with his dry tongue. His whole body was throbbing. "I must have ... been asleep, mademoiselle. I took you... for a friend I left... in Paris."
He made an effort to sit up. His head felt too heavy to lift, and he only managed to roll onto his good side and prop himself up on his elbow. Even this small movement set his hip on fire. The plump housemaid in her servant's dress and stained apron looked nothing like Christine; of course not. Next he would believe the Phantom had indeed brought him here. The girl lit the lamp and stood back, wary of the stinking, bloodied soldier.
"I brought you some food, sir. It's only cold; I couldn't light the fire on account of the fighting, but it's as good as what they are having upstairs. Will you eat?"
Raoul thanked her, emboldening the girl to set down the tray she was holding. To his immense relief, she picked up the pitcher and started filling a cup; clean water tumbled into it like diamonds, cool and wonderful. Raoul could barely restain his impatience until she finally passed it to him. He drank deep draughts, feeling the water rush into every part of his body, into his arms and legs, restoring him a little. She poured two more cups before he could stop to speak the question in his mind.
"How did I come to be here?"
"Madame said you are Monsieur Andersson's friend," the girl offered as she cut the cold meat on the tray. She passed him the plate.
Raoul had no idea who this Andersson was, but the sight of meat and bread made him aware of the raging hunger that had lurked under his thirst and drove all questions from his mind. Even his throbbing hip ceased to matter when he bit into the meat and felt the texture of each individual fibre on his tongue, the slight tang of bay leaves and onion. It had been days since he had eaten anything other than the hard biscuit and potatoes that made up their marching rations.
It was only after he had washed the food down with a bit of wine that it struck him that something strange was going on. Why was he being offered meat and even wine? In his time with the army he had seen how farmers barred their doors to half-starved soldiers, afraid to encourage looting. Even in the towns, Raoul had never been offered food except grudgingly. Yet here he was apparently being treated to the same meal the master of the house was having upstairs... He passed his empty plate to the maid, stretching his side painfully.
"You are generous, mademoiselle." He made it a question.
"They are still fighting outside." A slight tremor crept into her voice. "Might be, we'll be feeding the Germans tomorrow."
"Better one of us than them, then."
The girl looked offended. "I mean to say, there's no rainy day to save for. They've been at it since dawn. Nearly broke into the house, twice. Here they come again, hear that?" She glanced back the way she had come, as though expecting to see Bavarian guns streaming into the cellar.
Only then did Raoul become aware of the muffled sounds of battle. From here, the guns were no louder than the crackle of logs in a fire, but they indeed seemed to be getting closer. What was he doing in here when the battle went on outside? He had to rejoin his regiment. Quickly, he groped around the earthen floor and realised in dismay that he no longer had his gun. Whoever had carried him here must have left it behind. Apprehension made him sick.
"How long have I been here?"
"Most of the day – it was not yet ten when Monsieur Andersson brought you in, and it's just gone five."
"Five o'clock! I can't stay here, I must get back."
The girl looked at his hip mistrustfully. "You can't walk, monsieur."
Raoul tried to stand, levering himself up against the bench, and at once discovered she was right. The moment he put weight on his leg, the pain shot from his hip down to his heel and up to his shoulder. He cried out sharply, and saw a new bloom of red on the bandage.
"Tut, sir, you'll make it worse with your moving about. And all the same there's no way to leave the house now, not with Monsieur Andersson shooting above."
Could it be somebody from the regiment then, Raoul thought, using the house for cover upstairs? If he was a superior officer, he could report to him instead of trying to seek out the others in the chaos of battle. Yet he seemed to remember looking up at this house from the garden below and thinking the man shooting was a civilian... Unless this was a different house? Raoul frowned, and decided to confess.
"Forgive me, but – I can recall no Monsieur Andersson in my regiment."
"But he isn't from your regiment," the girl said in consternation. "Leastwise, I don't think he is. It's Monsieur Erik Andersson, you know, the architect. From Sedan. Though I suppose you might not know, seeing as you're not from around here." She went on to explain something about a new courthouse in Sedan, but Raoul was still caught up in the first part:
"Erik. Erik Andersson?"
The girl nodded. "Your friend," she reminded him. "You're hurt, monsieur. You should rest. I'll come back if there's any news." She picked up the tray and her candle and went out. Raoul heard her climb up a ladder somewhere out of sight.
He let his head drop back against the bench. Monsieur Erik Andersson. Raoul refused to believe it. He could not afford to believe it; if he did, he would have to assume that the wild incoherent memories of the Phantom bringing him to this house were true. The Phantom was here. He couldn't be here, it was impossible. But he had been outside the café in Paris, in July, hiding behind bandages and a gentleman's suit... Raoul's thoughts whirled and tangled against one another. He could not believe it.
Painfully, he dragged himself up until he was half-sitting on the bench. His right leg was a dead weight as if he had slept on it, and his hip and thigh were swollen tight almost to the knee. Panting with the effort, Raoul managed to loosen the bandage a little. It took several attempts to stand on his good leg, and even then he had to lean on the wall for balance. He thought he might be able to hobble if he could find something to use as a crutch, but the cellar was full of boxes and nothing suitable presented itself. He was forced to half-stagger, half-slide along the bench and the floor towards the doorway.
The battle was more audible from the outer cellar. Raoul could distinguish voices, shots and then the sound of broken glass. It was darker here, as he had not been able to take the lamp, but a square of thin light marked the trapdoor above. He picked a rake from among some gardening tools lined up against the wall and tested to see if it would hold his weight. It did. It made an awkward crutch without a handle, but it was better than nothing at all. Raoul propelled it up the ladder ahead of himself then followed, pulling his body up by his arms and catching each step with his good leg. Right at the top he slipped, and for a split second had a vivid image of himself landing square on his hip, tearing flesh. His foot caught a step before he could fall.
He was lucky. He sat on the kitchen floor above, his hands flat on the cool wood, trying not to look at the bandage. He could feel the blood still seeping into it, and when he moved to stand, a smear of it was left behind on the floorboards. A bullet slammed into the wall, right outside.
The rake proved little use in negotiating the stairs from the dining room beyond the kitchen, and on the first landing Raoul discarded it. He could hear someone firing above, the click of the cock followed by the gunpowder charge exploding, and what sounded like two voices, a man and a woman. The man's voice was alternately frightened and soothing; it did not sound familiar. Raoul gripped the banister, dragged himself up, pulled again. The muscles of his arms burned and trembled with the effort.
He all but fell into the attic above. Pain pounded through his side, whipping up a frenzied assault on his head and his senses. He could not feel his arms at all, and his vision pulsed red and black.
"Good God!" somebody exclaimed; a woman holding a hunting-rifle. She was crouching beside a mattress, with a tray of half-eaten food and an open box of cartridges at her feet. Raoul heard her as through a red fog. "Monsieur, what are you doing! How did you get up here?"
Raoul could not spare the energy to answer. There was a man with a bandaged head lying on a mattress. The side of his head was brown with blood. No, Raoul thought, that isn't him. His eyes travelled up until he found the small window, the same one he had seen from the street. A man in shirtsleeves and muddy boots was aiming a rifle. He fired; a German began screaming outside. The woman forgot about Raoul; quick as a mouse, she passed him the gun she had been holding, exchanging it for his, and immediately reached for a new cartridge to reload it. The man took the loaded gun without looking.
"Andersson," Raoul said. The foreign name was no more strange than this place itself, and even as the man turned around, Raoul knew he was right. The Phantom's masked, bandaged face stared back at him. Motes of sulphurous dust flickered around his rifle.
Raoul saw how the woman and her husband watched them. The Phantom straightened his back. He held a loaded rifle. Raoul held nothing, not even the useless rake he had dumped downstairs. This was the man who had strung him up by the neck, forcing Christine to see it.
Raoul said, "I'm alive."
Nothing in the Phantom's face changed to indicate that he heard. Raoul saw that under his filthy matted hair, his eyes were hollow. No hatred, no madness remained, nothing living. Raoul had not feared the gun, but there was something about this hollow-eyed stare that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
Outside, three bullets slammed into the wall in quick succession, spraying plaster. The Phantom did not move. Raoul heaved himself closer to the window and then caught his breath.
"Let me have the other gun," he begged the woman by the mattress. "Please."
She had set the second rifle by the window within easy reach; the Phantom now glanced at it as though he had forgotten it was there. Then he kicked it with the toe of his boot.
Raoul stopped the rifle before it could spin away from him. With a final effort, he lunged towards the window. The gun was loaded; the Bavarians were still below. Three of them had climbed into the front garden and were running towards the door; another moment and they would enter the house.
Without thinking, Raoul sank to his good knee, lined up the shot and fired. He fumbled with the gun, trying to reload it, then fired again. It was only after the second shot that he realised the Phantom was doing the same. A Bavarian's shoulder directly below him burst apart in a red epaulette; he dropped his needle gun. The two others were already down, their limbs angled oddly in the grass. One was an officer, a lieutenant like Raoul.
"You're a fool," Raoul heard the Phantom's voice beside him, low enough to be almost a growl. "If you had stayed below you might have lived."
"I will live."
The Phantom said nothing more, but accepted more cartridges from the woman and fired into the street. Raoul glanced back at the couple, the terrified husband muttering something and the wife with her unkempt hair. He wanted to ask them what they knew of this man, how he had wormed his way into their confidence. It was his duty to tell them they harboured a murderer.
He looked at the rifle in his hands, then at the fallen bodies below. He said nothing, but turned around, adjusted the rifle sash against his shoulder, and took aim again.
The heart of the battle was somewhere away from here, closer to the park, but Bavarian units continued to appear on the Sedan road, and there were barely enough Marines to repulse them. Raoul lost all sense of time and place. His wound became a separate agony, unconnected to his body. The man at his shoulder might have been any other soldier; the windowsill any other barricade. Between the two guns, they could loose two or three rounds each minute if they had to, but there would not be enough ammunition to sustain that and they fired like snipers, taking the greatest care to aim well. Raoul got used to seeing men when he sighted down his gun; he barely flinched now at the recoil. This would not be enough to push back a real charge if the Bavarians thought to storm them in earnest, but thus far they held their ground. The hunting rifles had neither the range nor the power of Raoul's discarded chassepôt. He thought he could see it down there in the dust, and he dreaded that some Bavarian would pick it up.
Dusk was gathering when the man beside him spoke. It had grown quieter outside, the black smoke in the direction of the church spoke of desperate attempts to finish the battle by nightfall. Somebody had set a building on fire; Raoul could smell charcoal on the wind.
"They're falling back. It's too dark to shoot, Vicomte. Your army is going to hold the town tonight."
It took a moment for the import of the words to sink in. Raoul came to himself, gasping as his wound flared again in full force, as though it had been lying in wait for him.
"They're falling back," the Phantom repeated more loudly, for the benefit of the couple behind them.
Raoul felt the gun fall from his hands onto the floor as he slid against the wall. The room spun briefly, making him queasy. His hands were black with oil from the rifle. There were more bodies outside than he cared to see.
The injured man was asleep on the mattress, his wife sat beside him with her head on her folded arms. When the Phantom spoke, she looked up as though she scarcely believed it.
"The Bavarians are leaving?"
"No," Raoul said, "They'll be back tomorrow."
"But they are leaving now?" The woman's pale face flicked between him and the Phantom, seeking reassurance. The Phantom lifted the sash of the rifle over his head and held it before him with both hands on the stock, as though he would lean on it. He swayed slightly.
"It's as the Vicomte said," he muttered. "They will be back. With reinforcements."
Raoul looked over at the Phantom and saw his bandage had slipped. The last pale sunlight that cut almost horizontally through the window outlined the knot of scars near his nose.
The man on the mattress stirred and sat up, grimacing. He checked the cartridge box, then craned his neck to look up at the Phantom. "We have twenty rounds left, Andersson. That's all. If they come back, we die here."
"They will come back." The Phantom's voice was emotionless; whether with exhaustion or with something else, Raoul could not tell.
"I'll go out there when it gets dark," Raoul heard himself offer. "There are plenty of guns there. And the Bavarians will have cartridges. The medics will not take them."
The woman and her husband both gasped. Phantom half-turned towards him. "Robbing the dead, Vicomte?"
Raoul had no answer for him, nor did the man seem to expect one – but as he looked at the Phantom's badly masked face with its bandage askew, a slow horror began at the base of Raoul's spine and spread upwards like a tide of ice. He was weeping. Droplets formed in the corners of his hollow eyes, and crept down his unshaven cheek.
As though he was completely unaware of his own tears, the Phantom merely scowled at Raoul's scrutiny and then gave a small shrug:
"If you think you can get outside with that leg, Vicomte, and avoid being shot like a turkey by the snipers who will no doubt remain through the night – then by all means, try. But don't suppose I will carry you a second time."
The man on the mattress tried to object, but Raoul interrupted him.
"I don't," he said. He observed the tears rolling down the Phantom's cheeks and the man's utter unawareness of it with a sort of morbid fascination. There was something less than human in this disconnect, as though the Phantom was no longer entirely aware of himself. The crooked mask only added to that impression. Finally, Raoul could stand it no longer.
"Your mask," he said.
The Phantom lifted a hand to his face and felt the gap that left his scars visible to all. Raoul expected him to tug it into place, but he merely stretched his lips in disdain.
"Your leg, Vicomte."
Raoul looked down at himself. His hip was bleeding again. The movement when he turned from the window must have torn the wound anew. He tried to adjust the bandage.
"I will call for Rachel," the woman announced, as though she had now decided to assume the role of a hostess. "We will have dinner."
"An excellent idea," her husband chimed in.
Raoul raised his head and met the Phantom's gaze. The mask was in place and the tears were gone.
"Yes," the Phantom said, "food would be most welcome, Madame Egrot." When she had gone downstairs, he lowered his voice so that only Raoul heard the rest.
"Well, Vicomte. How does it feel to be a murderer?"
Raoul flushed with disgust. "I am no murderer."
The Phantom did not argue. He glanced at Monsieur Egrot, who was watching the exchange between them with no sign of following it, then at the two rifles on the floor between them. He fingered something in the pocket of his shirt, then simply leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes.