The three men watched from the balcony, impressed, as the huge swaying banners came down the hills from two directions. The young men carrying them under the burning sun were red-faced with strain, deadly serious. The crowd chanted prayers to keep them going, to keep them up. Sometimes they dipped with the strain of it. As they approached the square various other groups from neighbouring villages, some come in little flotillas along the coast, carrying their own saints, their own banners, merged with the other crowds and fell in step with the procession. A group of dressed-up children led a lamb, also dressed up, around the church; the priest pronounced blessings. The bell in the tall spire began to toll for vespers. At this sound everyone surged around the enormous spiky mass of the bonfire, which was now festooned with bits of ribbon and flowers. A thin wire stretched diagonally upwards from the very top of the mound across the graveyard to the church tower.
‘We have the best view up here,’ said Aubry, comfortably. ‘It’s quite a spectacle.’
‘The best place for the procession,’ agreed Le Coadic, ‘but for the fire you need to be with the crowd. Besides, we have to find Mari-Jobig. She wants her… she wants to do the dedication soon, I think.’
‘The fire will be much better from here,’ said Aubry. ‘I’m staying.’ He gestured to the bottle of wine on a small table beside him and directed a faintly pleading look towards Z, who smiled at them both, and patted the pocket with the small wooden box. ‘I’ll come down with you now and find our companion,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but I agree with Aubry: the effect will be truly spectacular from up here. I’ll be back, my friend, as soon as Sant Yann has blessed our little offering, to help you with that bottle and watch the rest from the gods.’
She was waiting for them just outside the entrance; her stiff face turned to greet them, imperturbable as ever. She held out her mutilated hand like a beggar for coins: ‘Ma biz.’
Z reached into his pocket and drew out the box. He held it in front of her and became suddenly very serious.
‘Tell Marie-Josèphe,’ he said, looking straight at her. ‘Tell her that what lies in this box is precious to people in places far beyond Breiz-Izel, far even beyond the big hospitals and the doctors in Paris. Tell her that in the Holy Land, where the blessed Sant Yann prepared for the coming of our Saviour, there are people, men and women, marked with the same affliction as herself. For their sake she must return this finger to me untouched. Once inside the church you may open the box for the blessing at the altar, but you must not touch what is inside or the power of it will be lost. The doctors in Paris, myself among them, need the power preserved, so that one day this disease will not afflict your people, or the people in the Holy Land. They will,’ he could not resist a flourish, ‘be cleansed as the leper in the River Jordan, whose corrupt flesh became as the flesh of a little child.’
He looked at Le Coadic. ‘Does she understand?’
‘Komprenet?’ asked Le Coadic.
‘Ya,’ said the woman, and took the box from Z’s reluctant hands.
Around them the murmuring noise of the crowd was swelling into a chant: an tân! an tân! They looked up at the church tower, where two or three figures were busy fussing over something at the end of the stretched wire. As the crowd found its voice, a box could be seen trundling its way slowly down the wire towards the huge pile of wood.
Mari-Jobig, between the two men, gave a little grunt of satisfaction. ‘The “dragon”,’ explained Le Coadic, across her. ‘It’s a mechanism packed with fireworks that – well, you’ll see in a minute. They used to have an angel. More poetic, but it was banned, for some reason.’
The box arrived with an audible clunk. There was a popping noise. It was difficult to see quite what happened then, and for a while it seemed as if nothing had. The chant subsided, the people stood subdued; then someone spotted a few thin wisps of smoke, and a pale flowering of flames in the yellow afternoon sun.
Tân! yelled the crowd with relief and surged forward, and then back again as the flames fastened onto the bigger chunks of wood, and fingered and grabbed at the scraps of ribbon and lace, and shrivelled the flowers, and roared.
They had followed Mari-Jobig into the heart of the crowd and found themselves now only a row or two back from the fire. Le Coadic was absorbed in watching a blind man, stood closer than anyone else could bear, his dead eyes turned full into the blaze, his wrinkled face streaming with sweat and tears. Z touched his arm and leaned towards him.
‘Shall we go to the church now?’ he said ‘I’d like to get this over with. I’ve seen enough from here.’
Le Coadic pulled himself out of his trance and nodded, looking around for Mari-Job. She had vanished in a sea of black dresses and white coiffes.
Up on his balcony, Aubry had started wistfully on his third glass of wine. He was hot, and felt ill, the low pressure affecting him with a dragging lethargy. Although he could not admit it even to himself he was also already aching a little with the loss to come. He picked them out again, near the fire this time, the lanky crumpled figure of Le Coadic in his blueish-grey jacket. Z, indefinably neat and self contained, with a kind of brightness around him. He looked again. They seemed, from their arms, to be arguing. Mari-Jobig was much harder to find in the crowd and he soon stopped trying. What he could see, though, and what everyone on the ground was too busy to notice, were the first rainclouds to reach Brittany in a fortnight, massing up ahead on the coast. Rain, he felt, would be a huge relief.
When he looked back down again the scene had changed. The focus of the crowd had shifted from the roaring fire to a small black-cloaked figure standing on the churchyard wall, with a stick in one hand and something small clasped in the other. He could see Z, and then Le Coadic, pushing their way towards her. All he could do was watch.
They had both spotted her at the same time, clambering awkwardly onto the wall, but it was Z who moved first, cutting through the massed and pushing crowd in a way that left Le Coadic baffled, struggling to keep up. Don’t frighten her, he tried to call after him, don’t frighten her! The crowd was excited by this departure from the ritual, and everyone strained forward to hear. When Le Coadic finally got close enough he grabbed Z’s shoulder and held him firmly.
‘What,’ hissed Z, all his suavity evaporated by the flames, ‘what in the name of all the devils is the woman going to…’
‘Don’t frighten her,’ panted Le Coadic, ‘just don’t frighten her!’
‘I have to get the box before she does something stupid.’
‘Listen. She’s explaining. About the miracle.’
The familiar rasping voice was fighting the crackle of the fire and the crowd’s excitement, but her jubilation was unmistakable.
‘Aotrou Sant Yann.’
‘I’ve got to get her down.’
‘He let it happen!’
‘In a minute, when she’s done.’
‘The knife came down.’
‘She’s probably drunk; she’ll open the bloody box.’
‘I felt no pain!’
‘She’s not drunk.’
‘Aotrou Sant Yann.’
‘She’ll open it anyway; I’ve got to get up there. Help me, man; round the back.’
‘See what I bring.’
‘Don’t let her see you for God’s sake.’
‘Ar biz torret / heb poan ebet! A finger cut off. With no pain!’
Z had pushed himself to the front of the crowd, as near Mari-Jobig as was possible with the heat from the fire raging at him on one side. He saw Le Coadic climb over the wall further down and start making his way up through the thinner crowd on that side.
She held the box high in her mutilated hand, then lowered it. Z shouted up at her with all his authority.
‘Marie-Josèphe! Do not open the box!’
She looked down at him and the frozen face cracked a sideways smile. He moved forward as if to grab at her feet, her skirts, and she prodded him hard in the chest with her staff. The crowd gasped; Z fell back into their arms, spitting his fury.
‘Le Coadic!’ He yelled. ‘Stop her!’
Le Coadic, reaching up behind her, called her name as calmly as he could in all the din, but she scuttled sideways along the wall towards the fire, into the zone too hot to bear. There, silhouetted against the flames, she threw down her stick and brought her free hand to try and open the box.
‘Don’t open it!’ roared Z.
‘Mari-Jobig!’ called Le Coadic. ‘Let me help you!’
Her bent hand scrabbled at the catch. Sweat poured down her lumpy face; her skin flamed red.
Behind the low wall, moving into the unbearable heat, came Le Coadic with his arm outstretched and concern in his eyes. She glanced at him, and carried on fumbling at the box, muttering, determined. At last it flipped open, and with a curious twisting movement she picked up the finger in her stiff hand and waved it triumphantly above her head. Just as Le Coadic reached up to pull her down there was a howl of fury, as Z leapt onto the wall and ran along to grab the finger. She stepped back from them both, into air, and fell into the fire; as the flames wrapped themselves around her both men saw her impassive face, her startled eyes.
‘Poan ebet!’ She shouted, astonished. And was gone.