All around him, the dead giants of stone were stirring.
When he touched them, they still seemed no more than rocks. Unmoving, unseeing; the same they had been all his life. For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives before his. But today, as the thick summer mist spun its cloak around them and around him, he would willingly swear an oath that the standing stones of Carnac were coming to life. They were becoming flesh and blood again, the giants rising from their graves. He tried to tell himself it was the mist, only the mist, creating the impression the stones were living, breathing, moving. It couldn’t be anything else, could it?
But even if the giants were coming to life, the game still had to be played. It still had to be won.
‘Unan, daou, tri, pevar, pemp…’ One, two, three, four, five…
‘…eizh warn ugent, nav warn ugent, tregont!’ Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.
He opened his eyes, looked around to check that the nearest standing stones were not really sprouting limbs and tearing themselves out of the soil of Brittany, then shouted with all the force his ten-year-old lungs could muster, ‘Ready or not, here I come!’
Thierry Kervran ran toward the closest stones, checking behind each. There was no sign of his quarry, not even in the hollow under a stone that had been pulled down years before to clear a path for a horse and plough. He ran down one line of stones, then up another. The lines were much longer, but surely Vincent couldn’t have run any further during a count of thirty? Thierry zig-zagged through the stones, one part of him still hunting Vincent Radoux, the other evading any newly resurrected giants that might be pursuing him.
Vincent said they weren’t giants. He said they were King Arthur’s knights, turned to stone by Morgayne the Sorceress after the Battle of Camlann. But what did Vincent know? His father had been guillotined the autumn before last for being a traitor to the Republic, a royalist and a believer in the old religion, so perverse ideas ran in the Radoux family. Melanie scoffed at both of them, saying the stones were just stones. Sometimes he didn’t know why they still played with Melanie.
Thierry checked the ruined charcoal-burner’s hut on the far side of the furthest stones. Nothing. Vincent had vanished. What if a giant had risen up and swallowed him? Or, in the impossible event that Vincent’s theory about the stones was correct, what if Morgayne had snatched him away to her lair in the Forest of Broceliande?
Thierry stopped running, put his hands on his knees and tried to breathe more slowly. Perhaps if he stayed still and listened, he might hear Vincent’s mocking laughter in the distance, giving him a sense of where he was.
The mist seemed to be clearing slowly. There were glimpses of sunshine over to the east. And there were voices, very faint, very far away, from somewhere in the direction of Carnac village. Voices he recognised, calling his name.
‘Thierry! Thierry, where are you?’
Vincent calling out in Breton, Melanie in French. Melanie had disappeared somewhere before the game began. She was always doing that. Girls were very strange beasts, Thierry had decided on his last birthday.
‘You’ve spoiled the game!’ Thierry shouted as he ran toward them.
‘Forget your stupid game!’ bawled Melanie, her voice as commanding and unchallengeable as ever even though she was the same age as Vincent and Thierry. ‘Come and see this! Come and see what I’ve just seen!’
He could see his friends now, their outlines wraith-like in the mist. But before he reached them, they both turned and began to run toward the village.
‘See what?’ shouted Thierry as he struggled to keep up with them.
‘You just wait! It’ll be worth it!’
Melanie was easily outpacing the two boys. The only sister of five older brothers, children of a father who had been killed fighting for the Army of the North, she had grown up having to compete for every crumb and race for every prize. As he drew level with Vincent, Thierry glanced across to his friend.
‘What’s she seen that’s so important?’
‘Dunno, she didn’t say.’
‘Why do we always do what she tells us?’
Vincent shrugged.
‘She’s Melanie. Of course we do what she tells us.’
A familiar hill rose out of the mist ahead of them. Everyone in Carnac knew the hill wasn’t natural, and Vincent was convinced it covered the tomb of King Arthur himself. Melanie was already halfway up it, intent on reaching the small, ruined chapel that crowned its summit. In the olden time before the revolution, the time that the children could now barely remember, the time of priests and kings, it had been called the Chapel of Saint-Michel. The local sans-culottes tore it to pieces a couple of years earlier when the news of the sometime queen Marie Antoinette’s execution reached Carnac. Now it was an empty, roofless shell, but on a clear day it was possible to see far out to sea, all the way over to Belle-Île and beyond.
Melanie was leaning against the whitewashed wall of the chapel, grinning at her two breathless friends as they finally made the summit.
‘You’re snails,’ she said mockingly. ‘I should be the one they call up for the Army of Italy or the Marine Nationale in a few years’ time, not you two.’
Thierry ignored the barb.
‘So what have you brought us to see?’ he snapped.
She said nothing, but pointed to the south, toward the sea. The mist was clearing more rapidly over Quiberon than it was from the higher ground above Carnac, the ground where the ancient stones stood. Thierry took in the familiar sights – the impossibly thin strip of land that stretched out like a crooked finger far into the sea, the flat promontory of Quiberon at the end of it, the ramparts of Fort Sans-Culotte at Penthièvre with the large Tricolore flying from it. But today there was a new sight in the bay.
‘Sixty-five,’ said Vincent under his breath, ‘sixty-six—’
‘Sixty-nine or seventy,’ said Melanie. ‘I’ve already counted them. Nine warships, I think, the rest merchantmen.’
‘Transports,’ said Vincent. ‘See the boats pulling away from them, making for the beaches?’
‘What’s it mean?’ asked Thierry. ‘Is it the Lorient squadron, bringing in a new army against the Chouans and the Vendéeans?’
The children were silent for a few moments, staring hard at the spectacle out in the bay. But despite the lingering mist and the distance between them and the multitude of boats heading for the shore, they were able to make out the preponderant colour worn by the disembarking troops. It was certainly not blue, the uniform of the French Republic’s armies. It was red, a colour associated by every Frenchman, woman and child with one power alone. Then a slight breeze that would shortly dispel the last of the morning mist ruffled the grass on the summit of the great mound of Saint-Michel, the ensigns on a few of the ships in the bay began to stir, and Melanie pointed at a ship distinguished by a long narrow white pennant flying from its foremast.
‘No,’ she said, the matter no longer in doubt. ‘It’s the English. The English are invading France.’