Night Herd

On Sunday he wrote to Granier from the toilet.

It was the only room in the mas with a lock. It was at the end of the passage beyond the kitchen, a narrow whitewashed cell with a cracked basin and a window of frosted glass that let in a green underwater light, and a calendar from the same feed merchant in Vauvert that hung in Manolo's kitchen, though this one had been turned faithfully to June. He sat on the closed lid with the cheap phone in both hands and the tap running in the basin, because a running tap was the kind of noise nobody listened to, and typed with his thumbs.

Arrived Wednesday, vouched by S. Accepted as unpaid hand. Household is F.P., daughter M., son G., plus a minor from Vauvert, T.N., who comes daily. No other staff. F.P. is hostile but correct. M. runs the work. G. absent in daylight, said to work nights, unspecified. Night of Thursday to Friday, 03:04, both trucks left the yard with lights off, driver tall, possibly G., second driver not seen. Returned before 06:00 Friday, unobserved. No discussion of it in household. Financial position bad. Insurance letter seen (street runs cancelled from 31/12), bank correspondence, vet arrears. Star bull earns most of the income. No weapons seen. No visitors. Will continue.

He read it over. It was accurate. It was, as far as he could judge, complete. It left out the broom on the ceiling, and the egrets on the backs of the bulls, and the canter along the dike, and the way Gaëtan had said like someone who stopped, and he did not think Granier would want any of those things, and he did not think about why he had thought of them at all.

He sent it. The phone made a small pleased noise. He watched the screen until two grey ticks appeared, and then, after a minute, a reply.

Good. Keep going. Sunday next.

He turned off the tap. He sat for a moment longer in the green light, with the phone dark in his hands, and thought that it was Sunday and that his mother would be at the table on the seventh floor with the crossword and the radio, half listening for the phone. His own phone, the real one, was in a drawer in his flat in Montpellier, switched off, where Granier had told him to leave it. He could not have called her if he had wanted to. He found that this was a relief, and was ashamed of the relief, and put the cheap phone back in the pocket of his jeans and flushed the toilet he had not used and went out.

• • •

"Tonight," Gaëtan said, "we're moving the cows."

He said it at dinner, through a mouthful of bread, as if announcing the weather. Fredo did not look up. Magali did, briefly, and then looked at her plate.

"Where to?"

"The summer grass. Behind the dunes." Gaëtan tore off more bread. "The pasture here's finished. Look at it. You could strike a match on it. Down there there's still green in the sansouire, and the wind off the sea, and the flies aren't so bad. The bulls stay. The cows and the calves go. Forty head."

"At night?"

"It's fifteen kilometres. You want to do fifteen kilometres at noon in July with forty cows and their calves, you go ahead, I'll wave from the shade." Gaëtan grinned. "In the dark it's cool. In the dark there's nobody on the roads. In the dark they walk." He pointed his bread at Yassine. "You're coming. You and Mistrau."

"Mistrau?" said Timéo, appalled and thrilled.

"Mistrau's better at night."

"Mistrau's not better at anything."

"At night he can't see enough to be frightened of it," Gaëtan said. "Everything that bothers him in the day, the herons, the plastic bags, his own shadow, it's all gone. He can't see the heron, so the heron doesn't exist. He just goes." He looked at Yassine with his head on one side. "Like some people."

Fredo set down his fork.

"You'll go by the old dike," he said. "Not the road."

"I know, Papa."

"And you'll be at the pasture before two."

"I know."

"And you'll bring them all."

"I always bring them all."

The old man looked at his son for a long moment across the table, and then at Yassine, and Yassine could not read what was in the look, only that it had weight, and that it was not for him.

• • •

They left at ten.

The moon had not yet risen. It would come up late, Magali said, past midnight, and thin, a slice of something left on the side of a plate. Until then there was only starlight, and starlight in the Camargue was a thing Yassine had forgotten: the whole bowl of the sky crowded to the rim, the Milky Way laid across it like spilled flour, the stars going all the way down to the flat black line of the land so that there seemed to be no ground at all, only a thin dark seam between two skies. He sat on Mistrau in the yard and looked up and felt, for a moment, as if he might fall off upwards.

The cows had been brought into the near pasture before dark. They were waiting there now in a loose black mass that he could hear more than see: the shifting of hooves, the occasional low complaint of a cow, the high thin bleat of a calf that had lost its mother for a moment and found her again. They smelled of grass and dung and warm hide. The dogs went round them in the dark, silent, two low shapes at the edge of seeing.

"Listen," Gaëtan said, beside him. He had ridden up on Tambour with no more sound than before. "Before we start. You've done this?"

"Never at night."

"It's the same. It's easier. They can't see you, so they go by your voice and where you are. You're a wall. That's all you are tonight. You're a wall that moves." He leaned towards Yassine in the saddle, and his voice dropped, not to a whisper but to the pitch you would use in a church. "Here's the thing nobody tells you. In the dark a herd will follow a rider it knows. It'll follow the sound of him. If you're calm, they're calm. If you go steady, they go steady. You could take sixty head anywhere you like in the dark, across anything, if they trust the voice in front of them. A road. A beach. Through a town, if you were mad enough." He laughed under his breath. "My grandfather took the whole herd through Aigues-Mortes once, at three in the morning, because a bridge was down. Through the gate in the walls and out the other side. Nobody woke up."

"Is that true?"

"Probably not. Ask Papa. He'll say it was him." Gaëtan straightened. "You're on the left. Magali's on the right. Timéo's behind. I'm in front. Keep them off the ditches and keep your voice going. Talk to them. Sing, if you like. Mistrau hates singing, it'll give him something to think about."

"I don't sing."

"Everybody sings at two in the morning," said Gaëtan, and rode away into the dark to the front of the herd, and Yassine heard him begin to talk to the cattle, low and continuous, a running murmur with no words in it that he could catch, and heard the black mass shift and turn towards it, and begin, slowly, to move.

• • •

It was the strangest work he had ever done.

For the first hour he could see almost nothing. He could see the stars and the line of the dike against them, a slightly paler black, and sometimes, when a cow came close on his right, the shine of an eye or the curve of a horn. He could see the white of Mistrau's neck in front of him, faintly luminous, like something under water. The rest was sound. Hooves on the dry earth of the dike, a soft continual drumming, broken now and then by the splash of a cow going down into the ditch and the scramble of her climbing out. The breath of the animals, all around him, near and far. The creak of his own saddle. Frogs, in their millions, falling silent in a wave as the herd came level with them and starting up again behind. And through all of it, from the front, Gaëtan's voice, so steady and so low that after a while Yassine stopped hearing it as a voice at all and began to hear it as part of the night, like the frogs.

He talked too, after a while, because Gaëtan had told him to and because the silence on his side of the herd began to feel like a hole that a cow might fall into. He did not know what to say to cows. He found himself telling them, very quietly, about the tram in Montpellier. About the stadium at La Paillade, and the boys on the wall outside the pharmacy, and the smell of frying dough on the Grand Mail. He told them about the bus that came when he was fourteen. The words came out of him without plan, in a low murmur that he hoped did not carry, and the cow nearest him, a big old animal with a calf at her flank, turned her head towards the sound and kept walking, and he kept talking, and after a while he understood that it did not matter in the least what he said.

Mistrau did not put him down once.

He noticed this at about the second hour, when the moon came up, a thin orange paring low in the east that put a faint light on everything without showing anything clearly. The horse had been going for two hours under him like a different animal. His ears were forward. His back, which in daylight Yassine could feel tight under the saddle like a coiled spring, had softened. He walked steady and straight along the left flank of the herd, and when a cow broke towards the ditch he swung out without being asked and turned her back with his shoulder, and swung in again, and walked on, and his breathing was slow and even. Gaëtan had been right. In the dark, the herons did not exist. In the dark, Mistrau only went.

"Good boy," Yassine said to him, under his breath, between sentences about the tram, and the horse flicked one ear back towards his voice and flicked it forward again.

• • •

They came to the summer pasture a little before two, as Fredo had told them to.

He knew they were close before he could see anything, because the air changed. It came cooler suddenly over the dike, and wet, and it tasted of salt, and under the drumming of hooves he heard another sound, very faint and very large, a long slow breathing that went on and on behind everything. The sea. They went down off the dike onto sand. The cattle spread out with their heads down into a flat grey country of glasswort and low scrub that crunched under the hooves, and beyond it, a long pale bank against the stars, were the dunes.

Gaëtan rode back along the herd, counting. Yassine heard him counting under his breath in Provençal, the old numbers, the way old men counted at markets. Then he rode on to where Magali was, and they spoke together quietly, and he heard Magali laugh, a short surprised sound like something knocked over, and it was the first time he had heard her laugh.

"Forty," Gaëtan said, coming back. "And the calves. All of them. Papa will be disappointed, he likes to have something to shout about." He was a shape on a horse, no face. "We'll rest them an hour and go back. Get down if you like. Let him blow."

Yassine got down. His legs nearly went under him; he had to hold the stirrup for a moment until they remembered what they were for. Mistrau stood beside him without moving, head low, the white of him faint in the faint moonlight. Timéo was somewhere behind, singing something under his breath that might have been a pop song. The dogs had lain down at the edge of the herd. Magali had ridden a little way off towards the dunes and sat her mare there, still, looking at the sea that none of them could yet see.

He walked a little way himself, leading the horse, to get the blood back into his legs. Up a low rise in the sand, between clumps of something spiky that caught at his jeans. At the top he stopped. From here he could see over the first line of the dunes, and beyond them, a long way down, the sea.

It was black, and barely moving. The moon laid a thin broken line across it from the horizon almost to the shore. There were no lights on it anywhere. No lights on the shore either, to the left or the right, for as far as he could see; only the dark line of the dunes, and the paler line of the beach, and the slow white fringe where the water came in and went out again, so quietly that he could hear each small wave arrive.

He stood there with Mistrau's breath warm on the back of his neck and felt, for the length of perhaps three breaths, entirely happy. It was a feeling so unfamiliar that at first he did not know what it was.

Then he heard the engine.

It came from the sea, far out, low, so low that at first he took it for something inside his own head, the blood in his ears after the long ride. Then it steadied and he knew it for what it was: a motor, a big one, running slow. Not the putter of a fishing boat. Something heavier and smoother, the kind of sound that is built to be fast and is being held back. He looked for it on the water and saw nothing. No navigation lights. No mast-light, no glow of a cabin. Only the black sea and the broken line of the moon, and somewhere out beyond it, where nothing at all should have been at two in the morning on this empty coast, that patient engine, idling, waiting, and then, as he listened, beginning very slowly to move, and behind him on the sand, where a moment before Timéo had been singing his pop song to the cattle, there was no sound at all.