Ned swung the chair up. He cracked the animal on the head with all the power fear had given him. The impact knocked Ned into one of the outdoor tables and he fell over it, hitting his shoulder hard. The dog cartwheeled in mid-air, landed on the street. It lay on one side, didn’t move.
Ned got up quickly. The lean man was surrounded by three other animals, all of them big, dark grey, feral. These weren’t anyone’s pets off leash, Ned thought.
People were still screaming from farther along the street and in the market square, but no one came to help. He did see someone on a cellphone. Calling the police?
He hoped. Again, without really thinking, he stepped forward. He shouted, trying to get the animals’ attention. One of them turned immediately, teeth bared. Wonderful, Ned thought. When you got what you wanted, you really needed to be sure you’d wanted it.
But the man in the leather jacket moved then, swift and unnervingly graceful. He slashed at the distracted dog with his knife. The blade came out red, the animal went down. Ned moved forward, wielding the awkward chair, feinting with it like some ridiculous lion-tamer, facing one of the last two dogs.
He really didn’t know what he was doing. He was a distraction, no more, but that was enough. He saw the bald-headed man leave his feet in a sudden, lethal movement and the reddened knife took another animal. The man landed, rolled on the road, and was back on his feet.
These were more like wolves than dogs, Ned realized. There was nothing in his experience of life to fit the idea of wolves—or wolfhounds—attacking people in a city street.
But there was only one left.
Then none, as the last animal showed its teeth in a white-flecked snarl and fled through the market square as people backed away in panic. It tore diagonally across, down a street on the far side, and was gone.
Ned was breathing hard. He put a hand to his cheek and checked: no blood. He looked at the man beside him. He saw him wipe the bloodied knife on a blue napkin retrieved from the ground beside a toppled table. Ned set down his chair. For no good reason, he righted the table. His hands were trembling again.
The man looked at him and grimaced. “Curse his soul,” he said softly. “He thinks he is amusing.”
Ned blinked. He shook his head as if he had water in his ears, like after a high-board dive, and he hadn’t heard rightly. “Amusing?” he repeated, stupidly.
“He plays games. Like a wayward child.”
People were approaching, cautiously.
“Games?” Ned repeated again, his voice high-pitched, as if it hadn’t broken yet. He was aware that he wasn’t holding up his end of this conversation very well. “I…that thing went for my throat.”
“You did choose to come out,” the man said. “We invite our fate, some of the time.”
He said it the way you might comment on the weather or someone’s new shirt or shoes. He brushed at his jacket and looked at the crowd around them. “I suggest departing, unless you want to spend an evening answering questions you can’t answer.”
Ned swallowed. The man looked at him another moment. He hesitated. When he did speak, Ned had to strain to catch it.
“She is worth it, always and ever,” was what he heard.
Then, before Ned could say anything, or even begin to think of what he might say, the man spun around and began to run, north up the road towards the cathedral.
For an uncertain moment, Ned looked at the frightened, concerned faces around him. He shrugged, gestured vaguely, and then took off as well.
He ran the other way, across the market square, hearing urgent shouts in his wake. Someone even grabbed for him. Ned slashed the brief, restraining hand away, and kept going.
He sprinted until he was out of town.
Only on the Route de Vauvenargues, leading east towards the cut-off to the villa, did he settle into a proper stride. He was in jeans, wasn’t dressed for a run, but he had his Nikes on, and he badly needed to be moving just now.
Somewhere along the way he started to swear under his breath, rhythmically. His mother hated it when he swore. A failure of imagination, she called it.
His mother was in a civil-war zone where people were dying every day. Ned’s shoulder hurt, his cheek was banged up, and he was scared and angry in pretty much equal measure. He actually felt as if he might be sick for the second time in a day.
Amusing? Someone had meant that to be funny?
It occurred to him that the man—he really needed a name—had said pretty much the same thing about the skull and sculpted head yesterday.
Ned could almost smell the hot breath of the animal that had leaped for him. If he hadn’t grabbed that chair on the way out—he had no idea what had made him do that—he’d have had teeth ripping into him.
How amusing. Just hilarious. Put it on America’s Funniest Home Videos with all the other cute little animals and men falling over tables. And how extremely grateful that arrogant son of a bitch had been, come to think of it. Not a word of thanks.
We invite our fate, he’d said.
Whatever the hell that meant. Ned, rubbing his shoulder now as he ran, muttered a few more words that would have got him into trouble if either parent had been there to hear.
Well, they weren’t. And they weren’t going to be much good to him in this. Whatever this was, anyhow.
She is worth it, always and ever.
He was pretty certain that was what he’d heard.
As he turned off the main road, taking their own uphill lane, the words hit him hard, a different sort of blow. Tidings from that still-distant, really complicated adult world he seemed to be approaching. And from somewhere else, as well, a place farther away, that he also seemed to be entering now, like it or not.
A few dozen strides later it occurred to Ned Marriner that if he’d wanted to, or had been thinking clearly enough, he could have taken those last words as a thank-you of sorts, after all. A confiding, explanation, even an apology from someone not obviously inclined to any of those things.
As the villa came in sight at the top of their roadway, beyond a sloping meadow and the lawn, framed against the trees that sheltered it from the wind, he was thinking of a rose placed yesterday beside a sculpted figure that was not the Queen of Sheba.
The others were on the terrace having a drink as Ned came up the gravel drive. The sun, west over the city, sent a long, slanting light. It fell on the cypresses, the house, the water in the pool, and on the four people sitting outside, making them look golden, like gods.
“You should see yourselves,” Ned called, keeping his tone cheerful. “The light’s amazing.”
In a moment like this, he thought,
