Falling Idols

A Loaf Of Bread, A Jug Of Wine

The only great figures among men are the poet,

the priest and the soldier.

The man who sings, the man who sacrifices and

the one who is sacrificed.

All the rest are good for the whip.

— Baudelaire

She thought of him as a secret friend, or in more fanciful moments when she dared risk the sin of impure thoughts, a secret admirer. Theirs was so far a relationship conducted via place, not proximity. Perhaps he’d heard her voice, but Sister Giselle had never heard his; and likely he knew her face, while his was a mystery that she found easy to dream of in idle moments. Which was improper, of course. She was the bride of Christ, and there was room for no other.

Were it not for the stable, doubtless they would have had no relationship at all … whoever he was.

She had been born to the farming life in a countryside still healing from the scars of the Great War, and as a girl she’d known much toil. Now, given her youth and experience with beasts of burden and her farmgirl’s strength, care of the horses fell to her. Certainly, Father Guillaume had more pressing obligations in the village and the surrounding countryside, and Sister Anna-Marie was growing too feeble.

Giselle didn’t mind. Horses belonged to God’s flock too, and the scents of hay and oats took her home again, if only in her imagination. She could talk to the four horses while currying them, while drawing them fresh water, while feeding them, talk to them as she might friends who stood patiently by and absorbed every word. They seemed wise and caring, with gentle souls beneath their muscular flanks, and placid brown eyes that seemed nothing if not protective.

Pity, then, that they could never speak in return.

Who has been caring for all of you before I can get to you? she would ask. And is he as kind and gentle as I believe he must be? For you never raise a fuss.

It began three weeks ago, Giselle leaving the cottage that served as their priory and realizing the horses were already well cared for and lacking for nothing. One day, and the next, then a third. Asking around did nothing to assuage her curiosity, and served only to whet it. Father Guillaume had been distractedly amused, had smiled and chuckled with vague superiority. “Perhaps the Lord has seen fit to send an angel.”

She hadn’t thought it nearly as funny as he had.

The next day, this unseen angel began to leave loads of fresh-cut firewood, as well. Giselle’s first explanation was that it had been one of the villagers of Château-sur-Lac, slipping about to perform Christian duty in absolute anonymity. But then, how to account for the fact that someone had been spending nights in the stable? More than one morning she had found a nest of matted hay along the far, rough-hewn wall, and when she lay a hand upon it she fancied it to still be warm from his slumbers. From then on, each night she coaxed Sister Anna-Marie into preparing a plate heaped with whatever remained from the evening meal, and she would set it on a tack shelf in the stable, out of reach of equine muzzles. And mornings she would set out a small loaf of fresh baked bread, perhaps a wedge of cheese, and a small crockery jug filled with wine drawn from the casks in the cellar below their cottage.

The food never went untouched, and not once had she seen whoever came to claim it.

How mysterious. And how thrilling.

“Could it be that your secret friend is a refugee, mmmm?” Anna-Marie smiled impishly at her suggestion, then went back to preparing another evening plate with stewed chicken and vegetables and grapes. She never had to be coaxed anymore. The old nun was likely enjoying the intrigue almost as much as Giselle. “Perhaps he fled one of the coasts.”

Giselle hadn’t thought of that, though it made sense. It was a time of war, but so far Château-sur-Lac had seen little of it. To them the war was planes, far overhead. More than two years ago, France had fallen and Hitler had danced his little jig of victory. Marshal Pétain had signed his armistice with Germany, and only France’s north and west coasts had been occupied, the interior spared. Father Guillaume had been furious, had called the man a traitor to his people. Giselle had, at the time, only just taken her vows, and tried to deal with it more philosophically. Tried to look at it as she might, say, a drastic measure in medicine … say, cutting off an infected limb to save the rest of the body.

As ones who followed a man who had died upon a cross for no fault of his own, surely they could live with sacrifice.

And so she fell to wondering: What sacrifices had been demanded of her mysterious ward, whom she’d never even seen? Had he been forced to forfeit love and the creature comforts of home and hearth, to rely on the bounty of nature and the kindness of strangers for each meal? Had he been forced to trade the company of his fellow human beings for that of animals, or none at all?

Perhaps he’d been a soldier, separated or deserted from his unit in the confusion of Dunkerque, with no choice but to now live and travel by stealth. Or maybe he’d been an artist, living in some garret on the Left Bank of Paris until he gave it up for life in one of the more peaceful coastal cities — Cherbourg, or Brest — and since the coming of the Germans, had submerged his disillusion with humanity in the countryside.

Oh, she felt she knew him already, knew his story. She had to — she’d come up with so many, it had to be one among them.

And probably she would have been content to continue on his own terms, providing the meals until the inevitable day when he moved on and she found the food cold, untouched … were it not for the gift.

On a chilled November morning in the fourth week since his arrival, an hour past dawn, Giselle wrapped her frayed cloak about her and left the cottage. Behind her, Sister Anna-Marie groaned of stiff knees and wrestled fresh logs onto glowing embers. The heavy door thudded shut and she was alone with the world. On the rear stoop sat bottles of milk and cream, left by one of the villagers. She glanced around, like a wary cat, then dipped her finger in the cream and quickly licked it clean.

Giselle scurried along the path back to the stable. In the distance, a late-rising rooster called. The morning stillness was a fresh and living thing, the air full of mist that clung to the skin and brought a shiver. As far as the eye could see, a pastoral tableau of rolling hills and flat fields, the distant lake that had given the village its name, and woodland that encroached upon it all with the patience of aeons. She would die here someday, Giselle knew, and be grateful for the life spent here.

The path curved back, halfway toward the church and the stone rectory that sat behind it. At one of Father Guillaume’s windows she saw the yellowish gleam of an oil lamp.

In the stable, the horses stood placidly, each with a heavy blanket draped across its back as they breathed out soft moist clouds. She spoke to them, called them by name, then crossed over the earthen floor to the shelf for the empty plate.

Beside it, positioned with such care that it sat perfectly straight, was a doll. With winsome painted eyes, it gazed out somewhere just over her head. For a moment, Giselle dared not violate it, then reached to gather it in her arms. It looked and even smelled of age, with thin, limp clothes that nevertheless retained a certain grandeur of pre-revolutionary court gaiety. Its head and limbs were porcelain, its complexion milk white but for a rosy blush upon each delicate cheek.

A gift? It must be. For her. For her.

“Are you still here?” she called out, and went running around the stalls for the far wall. As she passed, one of the horses whuffled noisily. “Have you stayed this time?”

The nest was empty. Just a shadowed bed of hay, nothing more. And was he even now crouched outside, within some sylvan hideaway, spying for a glimpse of her when she emerged with the doll in her arms?

She fingered her rosary and prayed for a moment. This was coming perilously close to courtship. Worse, in some hidden cleft within, she wanted it to be so.

Giselle knelt beside the matted hay, lay a hand upon it, felt the fading, radiant warmth. His, and may God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Blessed Virgin forgive her, but she did long to feel it from the source itself. If only once, just once.

She counted, as she might measure a horse, hand-widths down along the matted area where his back and shoulders would have lain, then the tapering length of his legs. She had thought it before, but it occurred to her once again:

He must be enormous.

When she left the stable, doll in hand, it was with the taste of delicious fear that she was about to surrender to forbidden curiosity.

*

Night, barely a moon, the entire countryside dipped in black that seemed to run and pool.

Giselle had kept herself awake for an hour by pinching a spot on her thigh, and for another hour beyond that simply by lying in the darkness, contemplating her faltering courage, and wondering where it might lead if she really did creep out the door and dare look her refugee in the face. Perhaps he’d entertained similar thoughts, was right now lying out there with a deliciously miserable heart and hoping to hear the sound of her feet.

A few feet away, Sister Anna-Marie snorted in her sleep and stirred, then fell silent.

The back door might wake her — there was this to consider. And maybe tonight would be better spent sleeping. There was always tomorrow night…

Oh, enough. There would always be another tomorrow night. Of what good was trepidation? He was but a man, no doubt a shy one, certainly kind at heart. No harm would come from their speaking, and meeting one another face to face so that she could at least know what he looked like. The advantage was his, there.

Giselle eased from her bed, drew her cloak about her and, creeping barefoot across the cold floor, carried her shoes to the back door. From a kitchen shelf she took a lamp and matches.

Out the door, quickly, quietly as she could shut it, and then she was hurrying along the path. The stable loomed ahead of her, a sagging black square punched into the night. At its door she stopped to light the lamp, then slipped inside.

A muted glow surrounded her and cast a tilting shadowplay on the walls, and she eased across the hard-packed earth. The deep bellows breath of sleeping horses was the only sound as she passed them in their stalls. To the far wall, then…

She stopped.

He was there, lying on one side with his broad back to her, curled beneath a heavy horse blanket that rose and fell with his own steady breath. She could see little of the man himself, just a great head of shaggy black hair.

In a young life whose course had run slowly, so straight and free of genuine surprise, this was new: that the risk of change came down to a single moment. She had but to take the step into the next, or turn around and retreat and forever wonder.

Giselle cleared her throat, loudly: “Excuse me? Sir?” And louder still, “Sir? Are you awake?”

A sluggish flex of his shoulders, a stirring of his legs. The moment crawled by, a slow eternity, then whipped ahead in sudden flurry. She thought she saw his face, half turning back her way as he opened one sleepy eye—

And could she trust the lantern’s glow, the peculiar shades of color that it sometimes cast? Was that grimacing cheek indeed a sallow yellow? She saw but a glimpse of it, and there was no time to decide. A groan of terrible anguish came scraping forth from the cavern of his chest as he threw the blanket about his own head and scuttled back against the stable wall. He drew his knees in toward his chest and, with head lowered beneath its makeshift veil, held himself together like some trembling fortress.

“Leave me,” he said. “Leave me to my world, and go back to your own. If you wish to do me one last kindness, then let that be it. Please.”

Giselle took a step forward without even intending to. She was drawn to misery like moths to candles. It was more than her calling, it was the reason for her being. This man spoke in a voice so lashed with agonies, his words were almost secondary, and she could no more leave him than she could deny Christ.

“I mean you no harm,” she said. “I’ve tried to show you nothing but goodwill. Surely you know that by now, don’t you?”

“I know it, yes.” His voice seemed near to breaking. “But this was when I was a stranger to you, who moved by night. There have been others, whose hearts have been kind enough … until they see me for what I am … and at once their hearts turn murderous.”

“Then they’ve missed what’s obvious to me. That your heart is far kinder than theirs.” Giselle took another step closer, and another, and knelt just a metre away. “What could change them so?”

Beneath the blanket, he seemed to recoil. “My countenance … it is more hideous than you could possibly imagine.”

“I’ve seen and tended to faces afflicted by disease, and all the injuries that can happen on farms. I never once quit loving the person behind such a face. So I promise I’ll not turn away from yours.” When she got no reply, she tried another route. “I don’t even know your name.”

Again, a heavy stirring beneath the blanket. “I was never given one. So, in time, I gave one to myself, the only name that would suit me: Nomad.”

Had he been so abandoned as a child, no one had even bothered to grant him the simple gift of a name? This was more than sorrowful, this was a moral crime. She told him her own, then said, “Let me see you, Nomad. Please, let me see you.”

He seemed to consider it awhile, like a king weighed down by ponderous burdens of the heart. Then the lowered head rose, the blanket with it. “Move back a few paces, then, if you really mean to see me for what I am.”

And he stood.

It was one thing to contemplate his enormity of stature in impressions left in a bed of hay, quite another to behold it in person. He seemed to simply keep uncoiling from the stable floor, taller, and taller still. She’d always thought herself big-boned, born to robust farming stock … yet here was someone who stood nearly three heads taller than she.

One brutish hand rose from within the blanket, to pull it slowly away, and for the first time she met his dull and watery eyes. Saw his yellowed skin, his blackened lips, the tangled cascade of coarse hair whose locks bunched about his shoulders like throttled snakes. His face was like none she had seen, ever, more total in its noble ruin than any ravaged by disease or wound. And her heart shattered for the sufferings others must have heaped upon him, for no matter how powerful his shoulders or broad his back, both must surely have broken under the strain.

Giselle groped inside for words, but there were none. We are all beautiful in the eyes of the Lord? How easy to say, with her own complexion like milk. The last thing Nomad needed was to hear sanctimonious platitudes.

So, instead, she stepped forward to where he stood atremble, reached up, and touched his face. Which soon dampened with his tears.

“There are hours yet before dawn,” she said. “Please share with me where you’ve come from.”

*

In the hour past dawn, Nomad refused to leave the stable with her, and no amount of coaxing would draw him out to join her in a walk to the rectory. Father Guillaume should be told, but moreover should be introduced to this wandering soul. Such conversations the two of them might have. What endless lifetimes of humanity had Nomad witnessed, as an outsider. If anything, humanity could learn from him, and benefit. Let it begin with her, and with the Church. Let it begin here.

“But why?” he pleaded with her. “You have your hopes and your optimisms, but these are born of your naivety. You have seen so little of the world, you have no way of knowing how much it can hate. Of hope and optimism I have none … because instead I have experience. I know the reception I’ll meet with.”

“For everything and everyone, a place,” she told him. “This is what I believe and I believe because this is what I’ve seen. No one can be truly happy until they find that place. I am, because I have. I belong to God, and to the Church, and to Château-sur-Lac. And if I can help you find that place for your life, then it will prove that mine has fulfilled some of its purpose as well. Don’t you see?”

He said he did, and that he dared not turn his back on her before she had her chance to try.

Giselle ran from the stable with her cloak billowing behind her, into the fresh damp chill of morning. She raced along the path to the rectory, whose window was filled with the jaundiced glow of a lamp.

How unlikely she would be doing this if other circumstances had asserted themselves. That Nomad was nothing as she’d imagined was a blessed relief. His ugliness and profound misery were easy to contend with, compared to the handsome face and shy, seductive demeanor that might have been his. And had he possessed these, had he been that Parisian artist in self-imposed exile? Perhaps she would still be making this trip to the rectory, though to instead confess and mourn her broken vows.

She banged on the cottage door, and when it opened, Father Guillaume stood as she had never seen him. He’d already donned his cassock, but had yet to shave. His thin-jowled face seemed to sag, his graying hair was still mussed from the pillow. And behind his round spectacles…

“Have you been weeping?” she asked.

“Yes.” He peered at her as if only now realizing who it was. “You’re out of breath. You too have heard?”

Giselle frowned. “Heard what?”

Father Guillaume waved it aside briskly, almost gratefully, and wiped at his eyes. “You’re out of breath. There must be a reason. Come in.”

She crossed the threshold and they sat at the scarred old table where the Father took his meals when he preferred to dine alone, with his Bible or his meditations. A fresh log was beginning to blaze away in the fireplace, atop old embers.

“The man who’s been passing his nights in our stable,” she began, “the one who’s done so much with the horses, and left so much firewood behind for his keep … he’s no longer a stranger. I’ve just now left a conversation with him that lasted though half the night. Father, he’s more deserving of our pity and our help than anyone I’ve ever met. Ever.”

Giselle recounted the long and sorrowful story, of one man created by another, then rejected not only by his creator but the whole of humanity, as well. Condemned by fate to wander for nearly two centuries, as he neither aged nor died, as people and their reaction to him never changed, only the world around them. And she thought of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, of that immense paternal deity reaching out his muscular arm to touch the fingertip of Adam. What jealousy would Nomad feel were he to see that? And given paints and brushes, what would his own rendition look like: extended fingers become a clenched fist, with the back of the creator turned away in abhorrence?

When she finished, Father Guillaume slowly rose from the table, moved idly toward the fireplace where he warmed his hands and shook his downcast head.

“I’ve heard of … of it. I can’t bring myself to call it ‘him.’ And for years I thought the story itself was not much more than the product of a fevered mind.” He moved across the room to a cabinet of plain oak, very old. Here Father Guillaume kept his meager wealth of books: his Bibles and history, and old volumes by Aquinas and Spinoza and others. His finger glided over spines and he removed one aged volume and returned with it to the table.

“It’s a jumbled collection of letters and a journal and a recounting of much of that very story you just told, though in this case, from the pen of the supposed scientist, Victor Frankenstein. This part was written by an English sea captain named Walton who encountered the both of them on the frozen north seas. I found it not long after the end of the Great War, at a bookshop in London. I thought at the time I might send it along to Rome, so that it might be condemned for its blasphemies, its heresies, but I never did. I never in my most fantastic dreams believed it to be true.”

Father Guillaume lowered his head a moment, rubbing bunched fingers into his reddened eyes, then looked up. “You must drive it away, Sister. Tell it to leave.”

Surely her ears deceived her. Even so, not her eyes. The Father’s face was stern and unyielding. “Nomad is not an ‘it,’ Father, he’s a man. Maybe his beginnings were different than yours and mine, but he doesn’t feel any less. He doesn’t need love and mercy any less. On the contrary, he needs them even more.”

“He, then,” said Guillaume, harshly. “He is an abomination in the eyes of God! He has no right to exist!”

“But he does. No matter how quick you are to turn away, he still will be there.”

“This abomination you’re so quick to defend … it deliberately murdered a child in Switzerland. Maybe more than one.”

“And here at home,” she explained, “Gilles de Rais murdered many dozens of them. He went to his trial and execution repentant. Would you be the one to judge him beyond forgiveness?”

Father Guillaume simply glared, would not answer.

“I thought not,” she said gently. “Then please … why not extend the same mercies to Nomad? He’s certainly had none of the advantages of an aristocrat who should have known better.”

“But his birth was more atrocious than that of the most lowly animal.” Father Guillaume pushed away from the table with a groan of misery, and despite the disappointment, she felt mostly pity for him. What had he endured to leave his mind and heart so closed on some topics? “Very well — he’s done no one any harm in the weeks since he first came to hide here. I suppose it would be unchristian to drive him away. But Giselle … please keep him out of my sight. And if he wishes to go, don’t discourage it.”

She winced. “You have no more charity for him than that?”

“On the contrary. I think it’s far more than he’s accustomed to.”

Oh, but the Father’s arguments were slippery ones. Certainly she’d pushed her luck challenging his authority to the degree she had. At least there was something to build on, and perhaps over the next few days his heart would soften.

She readied to leave, then stopped at the door, remembering. “Father? Why were you weeping when I first knocked?”

He stood in the center of his cottage, looking lost within his cassock. He seemed to want anything but to answer. Finally, “Did you hear the motorcar just before dawn?”

Giselle shook her head. “Nomad and I, we were deep in our conversation…”

“A cousin of Henri Sanson, driving in from Nantes to bring Henri the news. Henri came to me … and I should think that most of Château-sur-Lac knows by now.” The Father shook his head and sought his chair. “The Allies have invaded North Africa. Germany has decided to break the terms of the armistice … and occupy all of France. The war? It’s come home, Giselle.”

Her knees weakened at the threshold, and she steadied a hand against the doorjamb. What a fragile cloak was security. It felt as if, for two-and-a-half years, they of the interior had made their own separate peace, then lived much as before. Ripped away, now, and they had no promise of anything. Only this: Their lives as they knew them were all but over. And how would they be treated by those first troops of the occupation who came down into their shallow valley to claim it for their own?

At the moment, she felt suddenly as if she had more empathy with Nomad’s life than that brought by hours of conversation. She now understood how it must feel to await a life of indignity and loathing. This country knew already, even if it had come before her time: The German army made harsh masters.

“I’ll toll the bell,” she said. “We should all gather. We should pray.”

“Yes,” he murmured, and nodded. “Yes. We should.” He drew a long breath that trembled with impotent rage. “What anyone prays for silently, in their own heart, is between them and God. But I will have no one in my church praying for a single German … unless it’s that he find his way back to the border. Or an early grave.”

She thought to argue — didn’t Germans too have immortal souls? — but the urge passed after a moment. His rebuttal would be swift — the Germans had forfeited their souls the day they decided to invade Poland — and would leave no room for objections.

So she instead left, for the church, for the rope, for the clarion bell that would unite them all. If they no longer had peace during war, they at least had each other.

While Nomad, it occurred to her, had no one.

*

It came, soon enough: the war.

More planes overhead. On tranquil mornings and still evenings and moments during the day when cows fell silent and conversations ended, from the roads just beyond the valley came the sound of mechanized caravans. The low mingled rumble of engines and rolling tires and the crushing tank-treads of the Panzer divisions … these would drift down the gentle slopes on crisp November air, like the first drafts of a wind that would soon turn bitter and furious. It was, Giselle thought — and Sister Anna-Marie agreed — almost worse this way than if the Germans had arrived in the village immediately. They had no faces this way, no eyes to beseech in hopes of finding pity. They could only be imagined, and invariably imagination conjured ogres in uniform.

This climate of fear … in it, did Nomad feel more at home?

Giselle had been forced to lie to him to spare his feelings, telling him that Father Guillaume soon would meet with him, but that he was ailing, and for now it took all his strength to give heart to his parishioners. Nomad did not question, and from her lips, at least, the lie was believed.

She tried to get him to move into the priory, where he could at least enjoy the warmth of a fire. They would fix up a corner for him, or perhaps a nook in the cellar. But no, he steadfastly refused, preferring to remain in the stable and the daily company of the horses who, he said, never judged or turned their eyes away or cried out at the sight of him. When parishioners came up the hill, from the sprinkling of cottages and farms below, to seek spiritual guidance from the Father or the sisters, he was careful to wear an empty grain sack, cut with eye holes, to protect them from a possible fright.

His was the life least changed by this shift in the tides of war, and Giselle tried to spare him an hour or two each day, simply to talk. He listened wonderfully, and spoke with a hesitant and self-conscious eloquence on more books than she could ever hope to read … Milton and Plutarch, Dante and Dickens, Descartes and Steinbeck and Twain. Of countries he knew, but little of borders. He crossed at timberlines and often didn’t realize he was in a new land until he overheard a new language spoken.

War? Nomad had lived through them before, and for him they were no different than peace. He was an aberration to invader and defender alike, and in that spirit, Giselle supposed, he lived under a constant declaration of war from all nations. Their talks opened more than her eyes, it felt as if they shed light into her soul as well…

Until at last the occupation came to Château-sur-Lac.

It was preceded by the sounds of battle, the fabric of the day rent by machine gun fire and the crack of rifles, the dull thud of grenades and explosions greater still. Two columns of ominous black smoke rose in the distance. A partisan ambush, no doubt. Prayers for its victory rippled through the village.

And went unheard.

The battered victors came over the hills and streamed into Château-sur-Lac, sons of the Hun from a generation before. Teutonic faces grimed with soot and sweat and blood; gray tunics and coal-scuttle helmets and high black boots; carbine rifles and Schmeisser machine pistols and potato masher grenades. And every man who had just lost a good friend to partisan fire had replaced him with a lethal anger burning in his eye. Peasant blood would run just as red.

Barely over twenty of them, all told: half a dozen surviving wounded, the rest able-bodied. Teenage boys fought alongside hard, seasoned veterans.

The villagers were rousted from their homes, forced to gather in the central village green, before the tiny cafe and bakery. A battered but still operable motorcycle came roaring up the hill to the church. Out of the sidecar leapt a private who rounded up priest and nuns at rifle-point, and began to march them back down to join the rest while the cyclist buzzed a circuit around rectory and priory and barn to make sure they hadn’t missed anyone.

The thought of Nomad, gargantuan child that he was in some respects, back there alone, elicited surprisingly little worry in Giselle. In his vast span of days on this earth, he had learned nothing quite so well as how to hide.

Pity the rest of them had not learned so valuable a skill.

They were gathered within a perimeter of uniforms. Some in tears, others in sullen quietude, most of the older ones calm and resigned, as ones who were watching history repeat itself. Father Guillaume moved among them, as did Giselle and Anna-Marie, but how much comfort could cold hands provide under the watch of muzzles colder still?

The officer who came striding forth from a tight knot of his men silenced them with a pair of shots into the air from his Luger sidearm. His face was tightly seamed. Prematurely graying blond hair strayed from beneath his helmet to cling wetly to his upper forehead. When he spoke, he had no need of an interpreter. His French was deliberate but no less understood.

“I am Untersturmführer Streckenbach,” he called out, “and you will give me all the cooperation due the Third Reich. Who refuses, will be shot. In a few moments you will be questioned and asked to surrender whatever weapons you may have in your possession. Who refuses, will be shot. Your homes will then be searched. Who is found to be lying … will be shot. Understood?”

Giselle stood with clasped hands and listened to the scarcely audible murmuring around her. How little malice the man actually spoke with. He might have been placing an order in the bakery.

“For tonight,” Streckenbach went on, “your home will be ours. We have just suffered the loss of our radio at the hands of some countrymen of yours. For their actions, I do not hold you responsible, unless you are found to have aided them. For your own actions, you will bear every responsibility. Until a messenger can be dispatched to send back new orders and evacuation for our dead and our wounded, you will accord us your hospitality.”

He suddenly craned his neck, scanning faces in the crowd. “Where is the priest … ah, there you are.” Beside her, Giselle felt Father Guillaume go suddenly rigid. “I wish to see you in a few minutes.” The lieutenant flicked one finger toward the door of the cafe, and in a moment a young private was at his shoulder to ensure he found the way.

Giselle met his eyes only once as he was led away from the crowd. The Father’s eyes, resigned and bitter, retained something crushed as well. Something broken that could never be restored. Did they kill priests to demoralize an occupied village? She prayed not. There was no need. Château-sur-Lac was full of compliant people.

She continued to pray until her concentration was shattered, as two soldiers departed on motorcycle and in sidecar, down the road and away to the west, buzzing like a horsefly until they were gone, simply gone.

*

Servant of God or not, Father Guillaume looked for things to hate about this man. This Hun. There was plenty to find. He hated the small scar that curled out from the corner of the left eye, hated the cleft in the chin. He hated the straight posture and the blue of his eyes and the gray of his uniform and the sharp tangy sweat-smoke smell of him, and most of all he hated the very fact of this man’s existence, and how they were now forced to breathe the same air in this rustic cafe. I can never eat here again, thought Guillaume. I’ll see him and smell him even then.

“You despise me,” said Streckenbach, “Your eyes make no secret of it, and I find it perfectly understandable. I don’t ask your goodwill, only your cooperation. Wine?”

He poured from a bottle and savored the bouquet and nodded quietly as Guillaume told him no. He then gulped like a Philistine at a stream and Guillaume hated that too.

“Occupying officers often seek out the mayors of the villages they enter,” the lieutenant told him. “That may be of value, but I find greater worth in men of God. You priests are natural born mediators, sworn to keep the peace. You know the hearts of your flock better than anyone. Better than I can ever hope to.”

Father Guillaume’s stomach curdled. “I’ll tell you nothing about a single one of them.”

Streckenbach refilled, toasted him ironically with the glass and poured it down. “Nor do I ask that of you. As I say, you hear their confessions and know their hearts. You know who lives peacefully, and you know who’s prone to impulsive behavior. What I require of you is to keep them pacified, any among them with, shall I say, ideas.

“Regardless of what you may think of me and the army I serve, I have no desire to leave dead villagers behind. Whether or not I do, is largely your responsibility. Understood?”

Guillaume shut his eyes and nodded slowly and agreed. How sad a day this was, and would that he’d been born deaf so that he would not have to hear himself acquiescing like a toady.

“Dismissed,” Streckenbach said, and of course that was but one more thing to hate.

*

As they were his people, and he their shepherd, he went from home to home to comfort whom he could. Some families had been forced out and into the cottages of neighbors, as their own homes were appropriated for makeshift barracks and, in one case, a ward for the wounded.

The pile of confiscated weapons grew, with hunting rifles and shotguns and pistols, even implements of daily life on the farm such as pitchforks and scythes. Their lives were no longer their own in Château-sur-Lac, and even God seemed very far away.

Late afternoon, Guillaume left the heart of the village and trudged back up the hill to his church and rectory. For a minute, at the very least, he stood over and contemplated ruts dug into the earth by a heedless motorcycle. He stamped them flat, smoothed them over until no trace of tire remained, then bypassed both home and church. Onward, to the cool dim recesses of the stable.

He found it inside, that hateful thing whose very existence mocked the divine creation beneath its feet. It stood in one of the stalls, stroking the sculpted neck of one of the horses and murmuring into its ear. Beside it the beast looked like a Shetland pony to a normal man.

Such was his first sight of this abomination: the ghastly face, the gigantic stature, the clothing that looked crudely sewn together from existing garments to meet the task of covering its outsize frame. Guillaume saw, and could believe in devils.

“You came,” it said, like a child who feared to trust its own delight.

Guillaume swallowed down his disgust and tried to offer a reassuring smile. “You doubted?”

Nomad patted the horse’s mane, then hurried out of the stall with great jerking movements. Crossing the stable with the self-conscious embarrassment of one who lived in the humblest of abodes yet sought still to be a proper host. The sight was a travesty of everything human, and at last it bid him join itself, seated on bales of hay.

“Giselle?” it asked. “Is she…?”

“Come to no harm.”

And how could something so appalling as that face show such relief? It must have been a trick of light.

“Not yet,” Guillaume added, and yes, that face showed its true wretchedness at once. “With the Germans, who can tell what they will do? Who can wake up each morning with the assurance that there’s no bullet or bayonet for them that day?”

Nomad plucked loose pieces of straw from the bale, let them fall to the floor. “Is there no love in them for anything good and kind and gentle?”

“None. They love only conquest.”

Guillaume watched the thing go through the motions of thought and anguish. These seeds he was planting were falling on fertile soil, he could tell, needing only the proper watering to bear the terrible fruits for which he hoped.

He pressed on: “You have a great and tremendous rage within you, do you not?”

“I once did,” said Nomad, in a voice of something lost. “I once, long ago, told my creator, ‘If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.’ And how I devoted myself to that heinous mission. But now I believe that even devils must tire of provoking suffering, when suffering faces are all they see. And I have even come to believe that those same devils must despair themselves as amateurs when compared to the likes of Mankind. You have, yourselves, taken over their task with so much more efficiency.” Nomad lifted his gaze, then his arm, to the stable door and beyond. “How many wars have I seen? I no longer remember. So what fear can I cause that would not be welcomed over an invading army?”

“Ah,” said Father Guillaume, and he must not be swayed by this creature’s pretense to remorse, “but what of the fear you might bring to the invading army itself? Is it possible that your natural inclinations might then be put to a greater good?” He let that sink in, then clinched it: “If for no other’s sake than that of Giselle’s.”

The thing turned a wide, watery eye upon him. “How can you wear those robes and ask this of me?”

“I care more for the oppressed than the oppressor. It’s no more complicated than that.” He drew a breath and tried not to choke on the next words. “And if you do this for me, for Giselle, I will then offer you my hand, in friendship … and in love.”

“Love,” said Nomad, musing the sound and taste of the word, as if something foreign. “Then I ask one thing of you beforehand. Please, allow what I do to be a holy task. Bring me your sacraments.”

Guillaume drew back, could not help himself. “What?”

“The bread, the wine. The blessing.”

This thing was asking too much, and for what? He doubted very much that it even possessed a soul, and surely, in all its years, no priest would have offered it baptism. He would play no part in desecrating the Eucharist. Would not see his church reduced to giving legitimacy to monstrosities which by all that was right and holy should not exist at all. He would not, would not—

“As you wish,” Guillaume heard himself say, and felt his feet take him to the door.

*

She came suddenly awake in the night, and moved only enough to reassure herself of the warm, familiar nest of her own bed. She blinked, then looked over at Sister Anna-Marie, whose slow and even breaths continued undisturbed.

Had she been dreaming? Something had pierced sleep.

There — again, and Giselle sat upright in her bed, as at once the world expanded beyond her to include the whole of her village.

From below, down the hill, came the crack of a rifle, lonely and desolate and full of terrible foreboding. A cry, then, of mortal anguish, and next a rip of machine pistol fire. The after-ring of each sound hung in the silent crystalline perfection of the November night.

Giselle cast aside the quilts and bolted from her bed, then wrapped her cloak about her and didn’t bother with shoes. For a moment she paused near Anna-Marie’s bed, in debate. The old nun slept deeply. Well, let her sleep on. Perhaps she was dreaming of fields in summer, and youth.

Giselle ran into the night, the grass chilly and damp beneath her feet, and as the sounds, with increasing frequency, continued to roll up the hill, she pounded on the Father’s door. There was but a moment’s pause before, calmly, he called for her to enter. He sounded as if he’d been awake all night.

Giselle shivered within her cloak, and found him sitting at his table. No lamp burned, but he’d left the curtains at his dining window pushed aside. He was a black cassock and a pale face immobile in a silver-blue flood of moonlight.

“Sit,” he said, with hand proffered toward a chair. “We’ll wait.”

“Do you not hear?” she cried. “They’re killing the people—”

“No.” Slowly, Father Guillaume shook his head. “They are defending themselves. And I dare hope they finally know the taste of defeat.” He tilted his ear — such bliss! — as if the faraway crash of shattering wood were a faint strain of music. “After so many lifetimes of avoiding the eyes of men, how silent and stealthy must that creature be, when it wishes. And how powerful.”

Giselle felt her knees go weak and she collapsed onto the chair he had offered.

“And what lengths it will go to for the sake of love.”

“You set Nomad to this killing?” she cried. “How could you? How could you?”

“Because it is what Nomad does, Giselle. It is what Nomad is.” She sought his eyes but they were beyond seeing; his round spectacles were flat replicas of the moon. “In my own heart God is first, and my flock second. On their behalf, He did not answer. So I turned to one that would. Though perhaps Nomad was the answer to prayer.”

Bile rose in her throat and she forced it down. “How dare you presume such a thing.”

Father Guillaume spread his hands. “Samson slew an army of Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Did it just happen to be there? And God smiled. So before you judge … listen.”

She had no more heart with which to argue — it hurt too much. Hers must be the same as the grieving hearts of mothers who see their sons grow out of playful innocence to be hanged as convicted murderers. All mourn for the dead, yes, but they mourn no less for the passing of what potential might have been fulfilled in the living.

And so she listened.

To the frantic cracks of rifles, the bursts of automatic fire. Here a scream, there the concussive blast of a grenade. And still the cries went on. The brittle sound of splintering, as she learned to distinguish wood from bone. Learned to distinguish cry of fear from cry of mortality, and the breaking point in a long, suffering wail when the former became the latter.

And so she listened.

As the deliverance of Château-sur-Lac went on, and on, and on.

*

They didn’t leave the table until after moonlight gave way to dawn, and for two hours or more it had done so in silence. Dawn came with none of its usual innocence and hope, but instead a pall of guilt and apprehension, heavy as clouds.

“Get up, come along,” Giselle told him. “At least see what you’ve done.”

They left the rectory and trudged out upon the hill, far enough beyond the church so that it did not block their view of the village below. Beneath the lightening sky they gazed down upon an eerie tableau where nothing moved but a wafting haze of smoke, and in a place or two, the licking tongues of dying fires. Several bodies in gray uniforms lay strewn about, more than one broken into impossible angles. Another hung limp in a charred black hole blasted through the stone wall of a cottage. Yet another had been slammed halfway through a roof. One in the street had been run through with a shattered length of timber. And the rest? Giselle hoped not to have to see them, inside their charnel houses.

“Where is everyone else?” said Father Guillaume. “I dared believe by now they would be rejoicing.”

“They’re terrified even to look out their windows. Would you be any different, if you didn’t know?” Giselle looked at him without pity. “Be proud. He served you well.”

She left him to dog her footsteps through the clinging mist, and returned to the rectory, the warmth of its fire that had fed well through the night. Giselle huddled at the table and wondered why she hadn’t gone back to the priory instead, then realized she had more to say. She waited until Guillaume hunkered at the fire to add a fresh log.

“Tell me,” she said. “How do you justify this before God? Aside from your feelings about the Germans — I know those well enough — but instead, Nomad? How do you justify condemning him to carry such added burdens to his soul?”

Father Guillaume straightened at the fireplace with a weary groan. “Nomad doesn’t have a soul, Giselle.”

“By what authority do you make that decision?” she cried.

“By the authority of the Church!” He returned to the table and sat heavily, angrily, in his chair.

“Then the Church is wrong!”

Guillaume pointed wildly in the direction of the village. “That creature was never conceived like a man. Even a horse, or an ox, or a dog comes into this world by natural birth, but we don’t consider them to possess souls. How much lesser a being than them is Nomad, then? In Nomad I endangered nothing. Because there is no soul within to endanger!”

She drew into herself then, feet like ice, heart like broken fragments of stone. There would be no arguing with the Father, for there was nothing in his mind left open. And what of Nomad? She could not believe that he too lay below in a cottage, one more casualty of the night. Had he wreaked his havoc, then fled, unable to face her? He had to know she could forgive him anything.

Sadly, though, there were more immediate and pressing matters to be concerned with.

“What of the Germans’ reinforcements?” she asked. “They will come, you know. Later today, tomorrow. How do you propose to explain where the first have gone?”

“It’s not our duty to explain anything a German decides to do,” he said. “We take the bodies and we bury them, or hide them beneath haystacks, or haul them by ox-cart to the lake and weight them with stones and sink them to the bottom. We clean up their blood. And they remain the secret of this village. For as long as it takes.” He shook his head. “They were here, and they left. That is all we know.”

Giselle tried to keep from shivering. Dawn was cold, but this priest’s heart was colder still. How gentle he’d seemed, for years, while concealing the scheming heart of a murderer.

She was about to leave his table when she heard a scraping outside the door. Heavy feet upon flagstones, unsteady, and then the door swung open.

He filled the doorway, Nomad did, then entered with the slow and painful gait of one who ignores wounds. She sought his eyes, and when their gazes met, the yellow smoldering fury in them seemed to soften, and she knew him capable of tears he would never allow. He had purpose, and now, at least, she was not it.

He strode past her, and after a brief pause to glance about the cottage, continued to the bookcase where Father Guillaume’s dusty and cherished volumes sat like wise old friends. One arm swung up, to add something to their company.

“For the love of God!” Father Guillaume screamed. “You brought that here? Here?”

Giselle shut her eyes, quickly, grateful she could, so she didn’t have to see those of Lieutenant Streckenbach staring dimly from across the room. His mouth hung frozen half-open in perpetual surprise, and by now the skin of the head was waxy and pale.

“I thought you would be pleased,” explained Nomad, in loss and sorrow and the pain of lifetimes of broken promises.

He shuffled a few more steps to sag to the floor, before the hearth, and when Giselle moved to help him he seemed to plead with his eyes, No, I am beyond your help forever, and she could only gaze upon him in tears. His rude clothing was splotched with blood, surely not all his own, but then, surely some of it had to be. How many wounds could such a formidable body withstand? How many bullets, how many blows, how many piercing slivers from the heart of a grenade?

From the floor, he looked over to Father Guillaume, who sat in his chair, shocked into silence by a revulsion beyond even his own comprehension. Had Judas looked this way, Giselle wondered, in realizing the enormity of his crime?

“I have a soul,” said Nomad, in blood and quiet dignity, and she then wondered how long he had been outside to listen. “I do. I can feel it, and I know that is what it is, because nothing else could ache so deeply. Though I may not have been born with a soul, I know that I have built one of my own over time. With every year I live … with every deed, with every sorrow and indignity and wound I suffer, with every humiliation and hour of loneliness … I know I build that soul a little more. These things that tear human hearts to pieces? These are my bricks, and my mortar.”

Father Guillaume managed to find his voice after all. “You take much for granted.”

Nomad seemed almost to laugh. “And you do not?”

And thus Giselle wondered: Did she, as well?

For a while Nomad turned his head to gaze into the fireplace, where the fresh log was beginning to blaze anew. “I planned once to kill myself. On the frozen north seas, I left my creator behind in the bed where he died, and I told the captain of that vessel that my only intention was to then build my own funeral pyre, and climb atop it, and let the winds take my ashes to the sea. What a fine dream that was…

“But as I made my way south again, another dream took hold, and on that day when snow and ice were behind me, and wood to burn before me, I knew I could not. Because of my incomplete soul.”

He stood, a long and painful process, and left the comforts of the hearth.

“Every day I build that soul a little more. And whether it takes another year, or ten, or a thousand, only then will I consent to die. So that I can stand whole before whatever God there may be … and demand of Him one thing: ‘Why?’”

Giselle bit her lip and drew blood. Better this pain than that of having nothing to say to him, no balm to soothe either an anguished brow or soul. With eyes shut, she felt his vast presence pass her side, then pause, as a huge, callused palm caressed her cheek with such tenderness it belied the fury of the night.

“I remember something from a poem,” he said. “A poem about love, and simple pleasures. I remember but a few words … ’a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thee.’ I once dared hope that even these simple things would not be beyond me, if only for a day.” He withdrew his hand and reserved his last baleful look for Father Guillaume. “Only poets tell no lies.”

Giselle lowered her head to the tabletop as she listened to the thud of the door and the scrape of his unsteady feet across flagstones as he was lost to the mist, the smoke, and the everlasting dawn.

A spellbound wretch

In his futile gropings,

In order to flee a serpent-filled place,

Looking for light and a key;

One damned descending without lamp,

On the edge of an abyss whose stench

Betrays the wet depths

Of endless stairways with no rail…

— Baudelaire