Relmyer could not justify himself any further. He turned away from them.

‘I am truly sorry. But I would do it all again if I had the chance. I will leave you. I’m going to Mazenau, even though I’m sure that Johann Crich is an invention of our murderer. But you never know. In any case, this business is nearly over one way or the other.’ Saying this, he left. Outside three duels were waiting for him, three possible deaths.

CHAPTER 21

THE two élite hussars were waiting in the sun. NCO Cauchoit had unsheathed his sabre and was amusing himself using it to reflect light into the faces of the passing soldiers. Oh, if only he could annoy one of them into challenging him! But no. They hurried past, pursued by the light, or they let their retinas burn gently, pretending not to notice anything. Cauchoit was having fun when Relmyer came out of the hospital.

‘I’m not waiting any longer, Officer!’

‘Where has your companion gone?’ queried Relmyer in surprise. The NCO glowed, like his blade.

‘I laid that pretentious hussar of the 5th out cold while we were waiting for you. You must have seen his stretcher-bearers as you came out. Let’s fight here! What better place for a duel than a hospital?’

He was almost in ecstasy. Like a lover on the point of climaxing with his sabre.

‘Victory at first blood?’ he proposed.

Relmyer nodded. Yet he had heard that Cauchoit was a sudden death expert. Of the nine ‘first blood’ duels that he was known for, seven had ended abruptly with the death of his opponent (and this figure assumed that the hussar of the 5th Regiment was going to survive). He was nicknamed ‘the widow-maker’ ... Cauchoit had the falsely innocent cruelty of a little boy who finds it funny to throw the cat in the fire.

He took off his pelisse and his dolman and held them out to his friend, the trumpeter, who willingly played the role of coat-stand. Every gifted duellist seemed to have a beatific disciple, a Pagin. Relmyer put his belongings in a wagon stained with dried blood. The sharp sunshine made the white of their shirts dazzling. Cauchoit talked all the time he was warming up, trying to unsettle Relmyer. He mentioned his past successes, hinted that Relmyer was a coward ... For him the duel had already started: his comments were his first strokes.

Relmyer was not listening to him. He found himself in an internal turmoil with which he was all too familiar. His past resurfaced and invaded him, like black water flooding brutally inside him. A man stood opposite and wished him harm. The features of Franz’s executioner imposed themselves on Cauchoit’s face. This confusion of identities, of time, of histories and general contexts generated a hellish chaos in Relmyer’s mind. He was terrified of seeing the man triumph anew and walk away to commit other crimes; the idea obsessed him. He had reached the point where he was no longer paying any attention to what was happening around him, to the extent that he felt he was in a sort of corridor, his only exit blocked by an enemy. Relmyer felt the irrepressible conviction grow in him that he must vanquish this man so that he could escape this tunnel, rejoin the world and resume normal life. It was as if his opponent were the stone in the cellar, which he had to make fall in order to free himself.

Relmyer had to control this whirlwind of emotions and to do this he had his blade, which hid an entire universe. The teaching he had followed, the training sessions, his reflections on the meaning of violence, the ability of mathematics to express the most apparently confusing phenomena in the simplest terms: all these interacted to channel the forces jostling within him. Anger, sadness, rancour, rage, anguish, hate, dismay, painful memories and unresolved grief: he managed once again to make all these currents converge towards one aim. To annihilate his opponent. Cauchoit temporarily became the focus of all his suffering.

Cauchoit strutted gracefully, the beautiful embodiment of death.

‘I find there is something of the chicken about you/ he taunted Relmyer. The way you ran away after we were attacked by the grey mice of the Landwehr reminds me of the stampede in the poultry yard when a fox appears. I would wager that your blood has the ruby colour of pigeon blood!’

Relmyer saluted him with his sabre. Cauchoit responded in the same way, then immediately lunged, trying to stab Relmyer in the side, clashed with Relmyer’s weapon and withdrew for fear of a counterattack. A simple test that he judged conclusive. Then he charged at Relmyer. In response to this head-on tactic, Relmyer

produced a complex compound attack. He pretended to parry a lunge to the throat but at the last minute dodged and feinted towards Cauchoit’s chest to threaten his left shoulder. Cauchoit, caught short, beat a retreat.

Relmyer immediately unleashed a frenetic succession of assaults: attacks, composite attacks, false attacks, attacks to the left side, whipped strokes, feints, jabs, false parries, beats, ripostes, parries, unexpected sequences ... He aimed for one side, then the other, the waist, the head, the throat, the side again, the thigh, the right wrist, the left hand ... Relmyer seemed to be able to do whatever he wanted. During his duel with Piquebois, he had studied his tactics. He had, as it were, ingested them and now reproduced them in his own way. Cauchoit, disconcerted, uselessly parried a false attack to the abdomen and received a circular blow full on the temple, which landed him in the dust.

He got up immediately, put his hand to his head and looked at his bloody palm.

‘It’s nothing! What a relief! I thought for a moment I was bleeding.’

Fury made his cut inaccurate. Relmyer dodged and plunged his sabre into Cauchoit’s thigh, pitching him for a second time to the ground.

‘You can see it better now, Monsieur?’

The trumpeter Sibot looked at his friend writhing in pain but the sight made no sense to him. He persisted in thinking that even though he could see Cauchoit on the ground, in reality it was Relmyer who had been defeated. He took several seconds to take in the true situation. And then hesitation gave way to raw violence. Sibot thrust the point of his sword in the direction of Relmyer’s face, bounding forward like a cat. Had he hit his target, the first blood would have been Relmyer’s, flowing from his burst eye, and at the same time from his brain. But Relmyer had been sharpening his reflexes for a long time and he was able to parry the blow even when his adversary’s blade had already almost completely obscured his vision. He counterattacked immediately, thrusting his sabre into the musician’s shoulder. The bone cracked, blood spurted, the man collapsed and Relmyer found himself

motionless, bespattered and dazed, alarmed by his uncontrollable capacity to trigger violence all around him.

Stretcher-bearers hastily gathered up the two élite troopers. Margont noticed the agitated throng pass in front of him and disappear into the little room where he himself had been sewn up. The floor was roughly flagged. After a few operations and one or two amputations, the accumulated blood was sluiced away with large bucketfuls of water.

Margont and Lefine were silent a moment, amazed at what had happened.

‘When Relmyer is not chasing after death, it’s death that comes to him,’ concluded Lefine, finally.

Shortly afterwards the figure of Antoine Piquebois appeared framed in the entrance. Four hussars of the 8th Regiment accompanied him. They were friends from his old regiment with only one desire: to convince him to become a hussar again. To them, their friend’s invalidity was because he was not thinking straight, not for any physical reason. They surrounded Margont and Lefine.

‘Don’t tell me that you all want to fight a duel with Relmyer!’ said Margont, irritated.

‘Not at all. We’re not at his level, alas,’ Piquebois reassured him. ‘Dear friend, I’ve heard all about your chase and your wound ... You know how I love horses. No beast understands man better! Between man and horse a harmony can be established that ...’ Words failed him. There was a gap in his discourse right there where he would have liked to express the heart of it. A tic played at his lips.