The Run

There was no moon. Gaëtan had said there would not be, and there was not.

They left the mas at eleven on a Tuesday, five riders and five led horses, and nobody had explained anything. That was the first thing Yassine noticed, and he went on noticing it all night: that nobody explained. At dinner Fredo had said, "Tonight," to his son, and Gaëtan had said, "I know," and that had been all. Magali had eaten in silence and gone out early to the stables. Timéo had not gone home. At half past ten Gaëtan had knocked on the door of the room over the tack, twice, softly, and said through it, "Boots. Dark shirt. Nothing in your pockets that makes a noise," and gone away again down the stairs.

Yassine had stood for a moment in the dark of the room with the cheap phone in his hand.

Then he had put it under the horsehair mattress, and put on his boots, and gone down.

• • •

The led horses wore pack saddles. Old ones, wood and leather, the kind that hung on the back wall of the tack room under the dust and that he had taken for decoration. Two panniers on each, canvas, empty, folded flat. The riding horses wore nothing that shone. Someone had taped over the buckles of the bridles. Someone had wrapped the stirrup irons in strips of old blanket.

He noticed all of it. He could not stop noticing it. Some part of him had taken out a notebook in the yard and was writing everything down, the time, the number of horses, the tape on the buckles, the way Magali checked each pannier strap twice, and that part of him was calm and precise and entirely separate from the rest, the way it had been in the flat in Nîmes. The rest of him was on Mistrau in the dark with his heart going hard against his ribs and a feeling in his stomach he had not had since the first time he went over the barrier at fourteen.

Fredo was not riding. He stood in the yard by the first truck with a cigarette cupped in his palm and watched them go out of the gate one by one, and did not say anything, and as Yassine rode past him the old man looked up and their eyes met in the dark, and Fredo nodded, once, as if to a man he had hired to do a job.

• • •

They went south. Not by the old dike this time. By tracks Yassine had never seen, narrower, softer, along the tops of banks between flooded fields where the water lay black on either side and the reeds stood up out of it higher than his head. The horses went in single file. Gaëtan in front on Tambour, then Magali, then Yassine, then Timéo, then a man Yassine did not know who had been waiting for them at a gate a kilometre from the mas, sitting on a grey horse in the dark without a light, and who had fallen in at the back without a word. Each rider led a pack horse on a short rope. The pack horses had done this before. You could tell. They walked with their heads low and their ears soft and made no sound.

Nobody spoke. That was the rule, it seemed, although nobody had said so. The only voice was Gaëtan's, now and then, very low, a single word to Tambour that carried back along the line like a hand passed down a row of people in the dark. Doucement. Gently. Là. There.

Mistrau went perfectly. His ears forward. His breathing slow.

They crossed a canal by a sluice gate, the horses' hooves ringing hollow on planks that someone had laid there and that someone, Yassine thought, had laid there for this. They went through a gap in a fence where the wire had been unhooked and left looped back on its post. They went through a stand of tamarisk so thick that the branches dragged at his shoulders and closed behind him like a curtain. Then the ground changed under the horses' feet, went from soft to crunching to soft again, and the air came cold and salt across his face, and he heard the sea.

It took an hour and forty minutes. He knew because he looked at his watch, by feel, the raised dots on the bezel, the way he had learned in a course in Paris that his mother believed he was attending now.

• • •

They stopped behind the dunes.

Gaëtan got down. The others got down. Yassine got down and stood holding Mistrau and the pack horse, one rope in each hand, in a hollow between two banks of sand where the marram grass whispered and the wind came over the top with the noise of the sea in it. He could see nothing. He could see the stars. He could see, very faintly, the white of the horses, and the darker shapes of the people beside them.

The man he did not know went up the side of the dune on foot and lay down at the top on his stomach, like a soldier.

Nobody moved. Five minutes. Ten.

Then the man on the dune made a sound, a short low whistle like a curlew's, and Gaëtan said, "Anèn," which was Provençal and meant let's go, and they went.

Over the top of the dune. Down the other side, the horses sliding on their haunches in the soft sand, the sea suddenly there, enormous, black, breathing. A long pale beach that went away to the left and right into nothing. No lights anywhere. The same beach, Yassine thought, the same kind of beach, as the one he had looked down on from the rise the night they moved the cows. Perhaps it was the same. He had lost all sense of where they were.

And out on the water, close, much closer than before, the engine.

He heard it before he saw it. The same low heavy idle, held back, patient. Then a shape against the faint paleness where the sea met the sky: long, low, black, without a single light, a hull that sat in the water like something that did not want to be in it. It came in slowly. It came in until he could hear the slap of the small waves on its sides, and then it stopped, thirty or forty metres out, where the water must still have been deep enough, and turned side-on to the beach, and sat there rocking.

Men were moving on it. He could see their shapes. He heard a voice, very low, in Spanish. Then a splash, and another, and two men were in the water up to their chests, wading towards the beach with something held above their heads between them.

"Anèn," Gaëtan said again, and walked his horse down into the sea.

• • •

Afterwards, when he went over it, he would find that he could remember everything and nothing.

He could remember the cold of the water, shocking after the heat of the day, coming up over his boots and his knees and then his thighs as he led Mistrau and the pack horse out into it. He could remember the pack horse not liking it and then liking it, settling, standing in the low swell with the water slapping at its belly and its ears pricked towards the boat. He could remember the men from the boat coming past him in the dark, wading, two by two, with the bundles held between them, and the bundles themselves: square, heavy, wrapped in black plastic that shone wet in the starlight, bound with tape. He could remember the smell, which was not what he had expected. Diesel and salt and wet plastic and the hot animal smell of the horses, and nothing else at all.

He could remember Magali beside him in the water, taking the bundles from the men and swinging them up into the panniers on her pack horse, two to a side, without effort, the way she swung a forkful of straw, and checking the straps twice, and moving on.

He could remember doing the same thing. He could remember the weight of the first bundle in his arms, dense and dead, like a sack of wet sand, and the wrongness of the plastic under his fingers, and swinging it up into the pannier, and the pack horse leaning into the weight to take it, and the second one, and the third. He could remember that his hands did not shake.

He could remember thinking, quite clearly, in the part of his mind that was still writing in its notebook: This is covered. Article seven hundred and six, eighty-two. Transport. Detention. Delivery. All covered. And then thinking: Covered by what? And not having an answer.

He could remember Timéo.

The boy was further down the line, standing in the sea up to his waist beside his pack horse, and as each pair of men came past him he took the bundles from them and loaded them, quick and neat and serious, his face, in the starlight, entirely concentrated, the face of a boy doing the most important thing he had ever done. Once he dropped one, and it went into the water with a heavy splash, and he dived for it and came up soaked to the neck and swearing under his breath and heaved it up into the pannier, and the man from the boat beside him laughed, a short low sound, and said something in Spanish that Yassine did not catch.

He could remember that it took less than twenty minutes. He could remember the boat's engine changing note, rising, the hull turning, going away into the dark the way it had come, without lights, until it was a sound and then not even a sound, and the beach was empty, and there was only the sea and the stars and five people standing in the water with ten horses, the pack horses heavy now, low in the back, patient.

And he could remember Gaëtan, standing a little apart from the rest of them in the shallows with Tambour's rein loose in his hand, looking out at the place where the boat had been. Not watching for it. Just looking, the way he had sat on the rise in the dike that first evening and looked south at nothing. In the starlight his face had no expression that Yassine could read. Then he turned, and saw Yassine watching him, and the laugh came back into his face as if someone had switched it on.

"Anèn," he said softly. "Home."

• • •

They went back a different way. Inland, through a long reedbed where the water came up to the horses' knees and the reeds closed over their heads so that they rode in a tunnel of rustling darkness with the stars cut to a strip above them. Then out onto hard ground again, and a track, and at the end of the track, under a line of poplars, the dark square bulk of a truck.

It was one of the Plantier trucks. He knew it by the dent in the cab door, which he had seen every morning for three weeks. Its lights were off. Its engine was off. Its back was open and its ramp was down, and in the box behind the ramp, in the faint starlight, he could see the pale gold of straw, a great deal of straw, piled high.

Fredo was standing beside the cab with his hands in his pockets.

They unloaded the pack horses into the truck. It was done quickly, without a word, the bundles coming out of the panniers and going hand to hand up the ramp and into the straw, and the straw going back over them, forked by Magali and Timéo, until the box looked exactly as it had looked before: a cattle truck half full of bedding, smelling of cattle, the kind of truck that drove down every road in the Gard six days a week in summer and that no one ever looked at twice.

Then two of the young bulls were brought up from a pen behind the poplars that Yassine had not known was there, and walked up the ramp, and stood in the straw on top of everything, blowing and stamping, and the ramp came up, and the bolts went across.

Fredo looked at his watch. He climbed into the cab. Gaëtan went round to the passenger side and climbed in beside him. Neither of them said goodbye. The engine turned over, coughed, caught, and the truck went away down the track towards the road with its lights still off, slowly, heavily, the two bulls shifting in the back, and at the end of the track Yassine saw the lights come on at last, two yellow eyes in the dark, and swing away north.

The man he did not know had already gone. Yassine had not seen him go.

That left three of them, and ten horses, and the poplars, and the frogs starting up again in the ditches as if nothing had happened.

• • •

Timéo was grinning.

He had been grinning, Yassine realised, for some time. Since the beach, perhaps. Since he had come up out of the sea with the dropped bundle in his arms. He stood now in the starlight under the poplars with the rope of his empty pack horse in one hand and his riding horse's rein in the other, soaked from the chest down, his black hair plastered to his skull, his shirt clinging to his thin ribs, shivering a little in the warm night, and grinning, a wide white helpless grin that took up his whole face.

He looked at Yassine. He did not say anything. He did not need to. The grin said it all for him, the way it would have said it to anyone who had stood in the sea beside him that night: You were there. You saw. Now you know. Now you're one of us.

Magali was already mounting, a little way off, her back to them both. She did not look round.

Yassine looked at the boy. He thought about the canal near Aigues-Mortes, and the black tracksuit, and the clean expensive trainers. He thought about the notebook in his head, which was still open, which was still writing, which had written down everything, the time and the place and the boat and the Spanish and the number of bundles and the dent in the door of the truck and the two yellow lights swinging north. He thought about the toilet with the frosted window, and the tap running, and Sunday.

Then Timéo, still grinning, still shivering, reached out in the dark and punched him lightly on the shoulder, the way boys do, the way boys at the bull school used to do when he was fourteen and had run his first clean line, and Yassine heard himself laugh.