Page 68 of She, Wolf, Him.

36

THE MOB

GASPARD

They bound him at the crossroads where the gibbet stood in my father's time, and swore he would hang before the sun was high.

— TESTIMONY OF A VILLAGER, LATER SUPPRESSED

Boots in the lane. A dozen pairs and more, keeping one pace, and no talk over them. Men walk together like that to a burying or a fight, and nobody has died today.

I put down the needle and the torn cuff I've been mending and stand still to read the sound, as I'd read ground. The step is slow, which is worse than fast. Slow means they've already agreed. Torchlight comes up through the shutter seams and slides wrong-ways along the ceiling boards, and I was twelve the last time a light moved like that above my head.

They'll expect me to run. Behind the house lies country where I could lose them before the first rise, and every man in that lane knows it. A hunter runs. So does a guilty man, and no village has ever told the two apart. So the back window stays shut. If I run tonight I run for good, and there's a watch in this parish that only I know wants keeping.

Fists on the door, three strikes, the wood jumping on its bar. Pascal's voice, level, pitched to carry. "Out, hunter. Walking or carried."

"I'm coming," I say, through the wood. "Keep your fists off my door."

I lift the bar and step out under the torches with my hands where they can see them.

The light makes strangers of the lot of them. Faces I've drunk beside, faces I've taught to tell a dog's print from a wolf's, gone flat and bright-eyed, the way faces go when a crowd has finished being men one at a time. The boar-spear is grounded at Pascal's side, butt set in the frost, not raised, and the grounding frightens me more than a point would. Men don't ground their spears till the outcome is settled. The arguing happened somewhere up the lane, in rooms I wasn't in, and what has come down to my door is the verdict, walking.

"There he is," someone says, to no one. The murmur climbs, settles, holds.

Hands take my arms, my collar, my coat, more hands than the work needs. Nobody puts a question to me.

The old gibbet stands at the crossroads below the village, the seigneur's justice from a time when the seigneur still sent justice up this far. Its arm has hung nothing in my lifetime but ice. They plant torches in a ring, and where the frozen mud refuses the butts, men stand and hold them, which tells me they mean to stay for as long as this takes.

Bertrand does the binding. Wrists behind me, then a lashing to the post, the strongest hands in the parish putting the same care into rope that they put into iron, no hurry in it and no temper. He keeps his eyes on his work start to finish, the one man tonight who won't spend a look on me. When he's done, he sets my coat collar straight where the crowd dragged it askew, of all things, and steps back into the dark between the torches.

They put me on my knees in the frozen ruts with the post at my back, and Pascal lays out the case.

He doesn't shout. He has Reynaud's old trick of the level voice without ever having asked for it, grief having taught him in one season what the seminary taught the priest in ten. "A stranger rode in at the start of the dying," he says, to the ring, not to me. "And the dying stayed. We paid him, fed him, drank his health. He hung a wolf on God's own wall and swore the terror was finished. And with the month scarce out, Margot Delacroix lay on the church trestle." He lets the name do its work. "The sweeps find nothing. The frost finds nothing. And the one man in Saint-Élie abroad in the black of the night, past bar and bell, is the hunter. The Berthou woman has watched him from her shutter since the burying. Armed. Standing at lane-mouths. Studying the houses where honest folk sleep."

"The Father named him on those steps," he says. "The Father, who read us all like his own breviary. He named him, and the Father is dead, and the naming stands."

"Ask yourselves when he walks," Pascal says, still to the ring. "Then ask when it kills."

"Always," somebody says, at the back. "He's always out."

Nearly every fact in it is true. The sum is wrong.

From somewhere in the dark ring a woman's voice says the rest of it, the part Pascal is too careful to put his own name to. "Maybe it's no wolf he goes out to meet."

Cheap, when nobody can see who's saying it.

"The Beast has a tongue in this parish," the same voice says, softer. "It speaks with a man's mouth."

"The Berthou girl near went," a man says, at the front. "My neighbour's child. Whoever's answering it out there, I want to see his face when it's done."

I could give them my nights, hour by hour. Every hour of them stands at the head of one woman's lane, and I'll kneel here till the rope comes before I hand this crowd her name to chew on.

"You need a name for this," I say to Pascal, because he's the only one in the ring still man enough to be worth words. "I know the need. I've sold names for my bread. But mine's the wrong one. Come morning, whatever you've done with me, what's in your woods will be in your woods still. You'll only be short the one man paid to go in after it."

"Then we'll be short him," Pascal says. "And sleep."

"Answer me one thing." Pascal again, and this time to me. "Look at me and answer. When you hung that wolf, and told us finished. Did you know it wasn't."