New Moon

The moon was gone. The sky over the marsh was black to the rim and crowded with stars, and the land under it had no shape at all.

They had brought the herd down in the afternoon. All of it this time, the bulls from the far field and the cows from the summer grass, sixty-two head, moved in the slow heat of the late day along the old dike to a long pasture of rush and glasswort that lay between the lagoon and the sand track a kilometre inland from the beach. It was the pasture the Plantiers had grazed every August for forty years. Nobody who saw the herd go by would have looked twice. Nobody did. A car of German tourists had stopped on the road at Le Cailar to photograph them passing, and Gaëtan had lifted his hat to the children in the back seat, and the children had waved.

Now it was eleven at night, and the herd stood in the dark in the long pasture, and the five riders sat their horses at the edge of it under a line of tamarisks, and waited.

Yassine was on Mistrau. He had not been asked. He had gone into the paddock at nine with a bridle over his shoulder and the horse had come to the gate to meet him, which it had never once done, and stood there with its ears forward and its white-rimmed eye looking at him, and let him put the bridle on without a fight. Magali, saddling her mare beside him, had watched this and said nothing.

Gaëtan was on Tambour, at the head of the line. Magali on her mare. Fredo, who had not ridden in front of the others for ten years, on a big old grey gelding called Sultan that had been his before it was anyone's. And Timéo, with his hand strapped across his chest and the reins in his left, on Grisette, because he had said that if they left him at the mas he would walk to the beach on his own, and Fredo had looked at him and believed it.

Nobody spoke.

The rifle was in its blanket in the wardrobe at the mas. Yassine had left it there. Fredo had looked at him across the yard when they mounted, at his empty hands, and Yassine had looked back, and the old man had nodded once, as if this too were something he had expected, and had not said anything.

• • •

The message had gone to Granier on the Saturday, from the toilet, with the tap running.

Monday night. New moon. Beach between the Espiguette and the Petit Rhône mouth, approx. 2 km west of the river, below the gap in the dune fence by the summer grazing. Vessel expected 00:30 to 01:30. T.A. intends to be present. Network personnel will receive on the beach and attempt vehicle evacuation along the dike track northward. Plantier family will not be on the beach. Repeat, will not be on the beach. Request you be there.

Granier had answered in less than a minute.

I will be there. So will you, I imagine. Don't be on the beach either.

Nothing else. No good. No keep going. Yassine had sat on the closed lid of the toilet looking at it for a long time with the tap running, and then he had deleted the conversation, all of it, every message since June, and put the phone in his pocket, and turned off the tap.

• • •

At twenty past midnight they heard the engine.

It came from the sea, as it always did, low and heavy and patient, out beyond the dunes. Then it changed note, slowing, and stopped, and in the silence that followed Yassine heard the sound he had been waiting for and dreading for six days: cars. Not on the sea. On the land. Coming down the sand track from the north with their lights off, slowly, two of them, three, the soft crunch of tyres on shell and sand and the low growl of big engines in low gear.

They passed the end of the tamarisks less than two hundred metres from where the five riders sat in the dark. Yassine saw them as shapes against the stars: two big four-by-fours, high and square, and behind them, lower, sleeker, unmistakable even without lights, the grey saloon.

Arnaud had come to watch.

The cars went on towards the beach. They stopped where the track ran out at the foot of the dunes. Doors opened. Men got out, five, six, seven, and stood in the dark looking round, and someone lit a cigarette, a single orange coal, and someone else knocked it out of his hand with a curse that carried all the way across the marsh in the stillness. They were waiting for the horses.

Gaëtan, at the head of the line, took the cheap phone out of his shirt pocket and looked at it. It lit his face for an instant, white and blue, and then he turned it off and put it away.

"He's asking where we are," he said, very quietly.

"Let him ask," said Fredo.

• • •

Afterwards, Yassine would never be able to say exactly how it began, only that it began everywhere at once.

There was the boat coming in, the hull black against the faint paleness of the sea. There were the men from the cars going down over the dunes towards it, shouting now, because there were no horses and no Plantiers and the boat could not wait. There was a silence, a long one, while they waded out and began to bring the bundles in themselves, and stumble up the beach with them, and swear, and go back for more.

And then the night broke open.

Light. White light, enormous, from the dunes on both sides of the beach at once, floodlamps on poles that had not been there an hour ago, turning the beach and the sea and the men standing in it into a stage. A voice on a loudhailer, huge and flat and inhuman, POLICE, POLICE, NE BOUGEZ PLUS, and from the sea, out beyond the black boat, a second light, blue and white and turning, and the roar of a much bigger engine coming in fast. The customs. The navy. The men on the beach dropping what they were holding and running, scattering, some into the sea, some up the dunes, most of them back the only way they knew, towards the cars.

"Now," said Gaëtan.

He did not shout it. He said it the way he had said anèn at the edge of the dunes the night of the first boat. And he turned Tambour out from under the tamarisks into the dark pasture, and began to talk to the herd.

• • •

Sixty-two head of cattle. Bulls and cows and calves, black in the black night, and five riders and a voice.

Yassine was on the left, where he had been the night they took the cows to the sea. Magali was on the right. Fredo and Timéo behind. Gaëtan in front, talking, low, continuous, a murmur with no words in it that went out across the pasture like a current, and the herd heard it and lifted its heads and shifted and turned towards it, the way it always had, the way it had turned on the old dike in the starlight, and began to move.

In the dark a herd will follow a rider it knows, Gaëtan had said. A road. A beach. Through a town, if you were mad enough.

They took it onto the dike track.

The track ran north from the beach between the lagoon on one side and the long pasture on the other, raised a metre above both, just wide enough for a car, the only way out for anything with wheels. And the cars were coming up it now from the beach, three sets of headlights suddenly blazing, swinging and jolting as the four-by-fours came off the sand onto the hard track at speed, with the floodlamps behind them and the loudhailer still roaring and somewhere back on the dunes the sound of a shot, flat and small and far away.

The herd went up onto the dike in front of them like a black wave.

Yassine saw it in the headlights. He would see it for the rest of his life. The bulls coming up out of the dark pasture onto the track in a single shouldering mass, heads low, horns up, the lyre shapes of the horns all suddenly white and shining in the glare, and the dust going up off them gold, and the cows crowding behind with their calves, and the whole herd filling the track from edge to edge, from the lagoon to the pasture, a wall of black bodies and white horns a hundred metres long between the cars and the road.

And at the front of it, stopped dead in the middle of the track in the full blaze of the first headlights, a single bull.

Eleven years old. Rust along the spine. The left horn notched near the tip.

Fangas.

He did not move. The first four-by-four came at him and braked, slewing, its tyres screaming on the hard earth, and stopped with its bumper a metre from his chest. He did not move. He stood there in the white glare of its lights with his head low and his scarred horns up and the dust settling round him, and looked at it. The way he had looked at the rail on the morning of the tri. The way he had looked at the man in the linen jacket across the rail of the near pen. As if he knew exactly what it was.

The second car stopped behind the first. The third, the grey saloon, behind that.

Somebody in the first car leaned on the horn. The sound went out across the marsh, long and stupid and enormous, and the herd heaved and shifted and pressed tighter, and did not break. Somebody got out of the car with something in his hand. Yassine saw him in the headlights: Bruno, big and slow and heavy-shouldered, in his black T-shirt, lifting his arm.

The shot was very loud.

• • •

Things happened very fast then, and very slowly.

Tambour reared. Gaëtan was at the side of the track by the lagoon, between the herd and the water, and the horse went up on its hind legs at the shot with its forelegs pawing at the air, and Gaëtan went with it and then didn't, came off sideways, and fell, and Yassine heard him hit the stones of the dike and heard the sound he made.

The herd surged.

The bulls at the front of the herd, the ones nearest the cars, came forward. Not a charge. A shove, a heave, the whole black mass of them leaning in on the first four-by-four, horns scraping on metal, a sound like the end of the world. Bruno went back against the door of the car and the gun went off again into the sky and someone inside the car was screaming. Fangas had not moved at all.

Mistrau did not bolt.

Yassine felt him gather under him at the first shot, felt every muscle in the horse's back go tight as a fist, the way it had gone the first morning in the yard when Magali let go of its head and it went straight up into the air and put him on the ground. He felt the horse decide. And then he felt it not go. He felt Mistrau stand, trembling, in the dark at the edge of the herd with the shots and the horn and the screaming and the headlights, and stay where he was, his ears flat back, his whole body shaking, and not go, because Yassine was sitting him, and Yassine's weight had gone down and back without his telling it to, and Yassine's voice, which he had not known he was using, was going on and on, low, continuous, the way Gaëtan's did, saying nothing, saying the names of tram stops in Montpellier.

He turned the horse along the edge of the herd towards where Gaëtan had fallen.

Behind the cars, back towards the beach, there were lights coming. Blue lights, turning. More headlights. Figures running up the track in the glare, helmeted, armoured, shouting. The BRI. Granier's people. Coming up the dike from the dunes behind the stopped cars, so that the cars were caught between them and the herd, with the lagoon on one side and the pasture on the other and nowhere at all to go.

Bruno dropped the gun. Yassine saw him do it. He stood against the door of the four-by-four with the bulls pressing against it and the lights coming up behind him and opened his hand and let the gun fall onto the track, and put his hands on his head.

In the grey saloon at the back, nobody moved. Its doors stayed shut. Its engine was running, quietly, the sound of a car whose driver had never in his life had to hurry. Through the windscreen, in the glare of the lights behind it, Yassine could see a figure in the passenger seat sitting very still with its hands in its lap, looking straight ahead past the two stopped cars at the single black bull standing in the middle of the track.

Then the armoured figures reached the saloon and pulled its doors open, and a voice that Yassine knew said, quite calmly, "Monsieur Arnaud. Get out of the car, please."

• • •

Gaëtan was on the ground at the edge of the dike, half on the stones and half in the reeds, with the black water of the lagoon a metre below him. He was trying to sit up. There was blood on his face, a lot of it, black in the bad light, coming from somewhere above his eye, and he was holding his left arm against his chest with his right, the way Timéo had held his hand, and his face was white and he was swearing, steadily, in Provençal, in a voice that was almost his own.

Yassine came off Mistrau and down onto his knees beside him in the reeds.

"Don't move."

"Tambour," Gaëtan said. "Where's Tambour?"

"He's fine. He's with the herd. Don't move."

"I think I've broken something. I think I've broken everything." He laughed, and stopped, because it hurt. "Did we do it? The herd. Did they hold?"

"They held."

"Fangas?"

"Fangas is standing in the middle of the road," Yassine said, "looking at a German car like it owes him money."

Gaëtan laughed again, and swore, and laughed. His good hand had found Yassine's sleeve and was holding it. Behind them the night was full of lights and engines and voices, the loudhailer, the radios, men shouting orders, the herd lowing and shifting on the dike, and somewhere back towards the beach the roar of the customs boat circling. A pair of headlights had swung round on the track behind them and lit them both, kneeling and lying in the reeds at the edge of the lagoon, white as day.

Footsteps on the stones of the dike above them. Several. Running. A man's voice, raised, sharp, cutting through all the rest of it, a voice Yassine had heard in a hot office on the fourth floor and in a cold white car in a supermarket car park and in a dark car on a salt road below the gold walls, a voice he had never once in his life heard raised.

"Lieutenant Belkadi! Belkadi! Are you hit? Stay down, stay where you are, keep your hands where they can see them, there are men here who don't know your face—"

Yassine looked up into the light.

Granier was standing on the edge of the dike above him in a black vest with POLICE across it in white, a radio in one hand, his face in the glare of the headlights grey with exhaustion and fear and something else, something Yassine had never seen on it before. Behind him two of the armoured figures had stopped, rifles lowered, looking down at the man on his knees in the reeds.

Yassine did not move. He did not put his hands up. He knelt there in the reeds in the white light with his friend's blood on his trousers, and felt the hand on his sleeve go still.

He looked down.

Gaëtan was not looking at Granier. He was not looking at the lights, or the armoured men, or the herd, or the cars. He was lying on the stones at the edge of the black water with the blood running down the side of his face into the reeds, and he was looking up at Yassine. Just looking. His hand still on Yassine's sleeve. His mouth a little open, as if he had been about to laugh at something and had forgotten what it was. And in the headlights his face was quite white and quite still and entirely naked, and there was nothing in it at all that Yassine could bear to read, and nothing in it that he would ever be able to forget.