The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (5 page)

When Jehan’s
grandparents had made that journey the churches of Geneva had still been
affiliated to Rome; now, fifty years after Calvin’s advent, they preached a
very different faith. Notre-Dame-du-Sex was on the French shore, but Jehan was
not at all certain that the hermitage would still be occupied. The apparatus of
charity that had supported the hermit who gave temporary refuge to Aubert Thun
and the daughter of Master Zacharius had been transformed for several leagues
around the city, just as the environs of Paris had been transformed before St
Bartholomew’s Day.

The rain began before
Jehan had reached the Dranse, but it was no deluge at first and the torrent had
not become impassable. The downfall became steadier as he left the shore,
though, and the further he went up the slopes the greater its volume became. He
dared not stop now, or even relent in his pace. It had taken his grandparents
more than twenty hours to reach the base of the Dent-du-Midi, but they had been
slowed down by Old Scholastique; he reckoned on covering the same ground in
fourteen hours at the most — as he would have to do if he were to avoid
spending the night on the bare mountain.

He had hoped that fifty
years of footfalls might have smoothed the paths a little since his
grandparents’ day, but it seemed that hardly anyone came this way anymore;
parts of the path had all but disappeared. On a better day, the Dent-du-Midi
would have served as a fine beacon, but with its top lost in the clouds he was
unable to sight it.

Jehan Thun was a man
well used to walking, but the gradients in and around Paris were gentle, and he
was glad now that he had had to cross the forbidding slopes of the Jura in
order to reach Geneva, for his legs had been hardened in the last few weeks.
His cape and broad-brimmed hat protected him from the worst effects of the
driving rain, but that would not have been enough to sustain him had he not
been capable of such a metronomic stride. He had walked like an automaton since
St Bartholomew’s Day, but even an automaton needs strength in its limbs and
power in its spring.

It was a close-run
thing, in the end; had he been a quarter of an hour later, he would not have been
able to catch a glimpse of the hermitage before darkness fell. Had he not seen
it in the fast-fading twilight he could not have found it, for no light burned
in its window, and it had obviously been abandoned for decades, but the roof
had not yet caved in. It leaked in a dozen places, but there was enough dry
space within to set down his pack. He lit a candle—not without difficulty, for
all that he had kept his tinder dry.

There was no point in
trying to gather wood to build a fire that would burn all night, so Jehan made
a rapid meal of what little bread he had left before wrapping himself more
tightly in his cloak and lying down in a corner to sleep. Even as he reached
out to snuff out his candle, though, he was interrupted. A voice cried in the
distance, in German-accented French, asking what light it was that was showing
in the darkness. For a moment he was tempted to extinguish the candle anyway,
in the hope that the other traveller would not be able to find him once the
guide was gone — but that would have been a terrible thing to do, even if the
other turned out to be a bandit or a heresy-hunter. Instead, he shouted out
that he was a traveller who had lost his way, and had taken refuge in an
abandoned hermitage.

A few minutes later, a
man staggered through the doorway, mingling curses against the weather with
profuse thanks for guidance to the meagre shelter. He took off a vast
colporteur’s pack, letting it fall to the floor with a grateful sigh. He was
approximately the same age and build as Jehan Thun; even by candlelight Jehan
could see the anxiety in the way the newcomer measured him, and knew that it
must be reflected in his own eyes. He imagined that the other must be just as
glad as he was to see that they were so evenly matched, not merely in size and
apparent health but in the manner of their dress.

“I did not see you on
the path ahead of me,” the newcomer said, “so I presume that you must be coming
away from Geneva while I am going towards it. I don’t know which of us is the
wiser, for they say that Geneva is like a city under siege nowadays. My name is
Nicholas Alther. I was born in Bern, although my course takes me far and wide
in the Confederation, France and Savoy.”

Jehan knew that the
complications of Geneva’s political situation extended far beyond matters of
religious controversy; although the city was allied with Bern it was not a
member of the Swiss confederation; and its position as a three-way juncture
between Switzerland, Savoy and France created tensions over and above the residue
of Calvin’s reforms.

“My name is Jehan Thun,”
he admitted, a trifle warily. “I’m stateless now, although I’ve recently been
in France.” Jehan watched Nicholas Alther carefully as he spoke his name; there
was a manifest reaction, but it was not the same one that the name had usually
evoked in Geneva, and Nicholas Alther did not make the same attempt to conceal
it. “Thun?” the colporteur echoed. “There was once a clock-maker in these parts
named Thun.”

“That was a long time
ago,” Jehan said, very carefully.

“Yes,” Alther agreed. “He
was a fine mechanician, though, and his work has lasted. I have one of his
watches in my pack — my own, not for trading.” So saying, the colporteur
rummaged in one of the side-pockets of his capacious luggage and brought out a
forty-year-old timepiece. Jehan Thun observed that its single hand was making
slow progress between the numbers ten and eleven. “You doubtless have a better
one,” Alther prompted, as he put the device away again and brought out a cheese
instead.

“No,” Jehan confessed. “I
have no watch at all.”

“No watch!” Alther
seemed genuinely astonished. He offered Jehan Thun the first slice of cheese he
cut off, but Jehan shook his head and the other continued, punctuating his
speech with the motions of his meal. “Perhaps you are not related to the old
clockmaker — but your French has a hint of Geneva in it, and I doubt there was
another family hereabouts with that name. Aubert Thun must have been one of the
first men ever to use a spring to drive a clock, or at least a fusée regulator
in place of a stackfreed — and the escapements he made for weight-driven clocks
will preserve his reputation for at least a century more, for they’re still in
use in half the churches between here and Bern. He was a greater man than many
whose names will be better preserved by history, although I don’t recall
hearing of anything he did after he quit Geneva.”

Jehan Thun looked at the
colporteur sharply when he said that, wondering whether Alther might have the
name of Calvin in mind, but all he said, reluctantly, was: “Aubert Thun was my
grandfather.”

“Did he abandon his
trade when he went away?” the colporteur asked.

“No,” Jehan admitted, “but
there are locksmiths and clockmakers by the hundred in Paris, which means that
there are escapements by the thousand and far more watch-springs
than anyone could count. He had the reputation there of a skilled man, but
there was no reason why rumour of his skill should carry far. It has surprised
me that his name is still remembered here; he told me that he was only an
apprentice to the man who first used springs in Genevan watches and first put
verge escapements into the region’s church clocks.”

“Is that true?” Alther
replied, his features expressing surprise. He had wine as well as cheese, and
offered the flask to Jehan Thun, but Jehan shook his head again. Alther took a
deep draught before continuing: “I heard the same, but always thought Master
Zacharius a legend. Even before Calvin, Genevans were reluctant to think that
anything new could be produced by the imagination of a man; everything had to
be a gift from god or an instrument of the Devil. The tale they tell of Thun’s
supposed master is a dark and fanciful one, but nothing a reasonable man could
believe.”

Jehan knew that the
conversation had strayed on to unsafe ground, but he felt compelled to say: “I
agree, and I’m sorry to have found people in Geneva who still look sideways at
the mention of my grandfather’s name. Master Zacharius did go mad, I fear, but
the stories they tell of him are wildly exaggerated.”

“And yet,” Alther
observed, “you’re coming away from Geneva. Are you, by any chance, heading in
the direction of Évionnaz . . . and the Château of Andernatt?”

Jehan suppressed a
shiver when Alther said that. Colporteurs were notorious as collectors and
tellers of tales, for it oiled the wheels of their trade; Alther’s stock was
obviously broad and deep. He said nothing.

“I’ve seen the château
on the horizon,” the colporteur went on, eventually, “and that’s more than most
can say. No one goes there, and it seems to have fallen into ruins. Whatever
you’re looking for, I doubt that you’ll find it.”

“My destination might
lie further in the same direction,” Jehan pointed out.

“There is nothing
further in that direction,” Alther
retorted. “Évionnaz is the
road’s end. I’ve travelled it often enough to know.”

“The world is a sphere,”
Jehan said, knowing as he said it that it was not an uncontroversial opinion,
and hence not entirely safe. “There is always further to go, in every
direction, no matter how hard the road might be — and the Dents-du-Midi are not
impassable at this time of year.”

“That’s what I thought
before the rain set in,” Alther grumbled, following his cheese with some kind
of sweetmeat — which, this time, he did not bother to offer to his companion, “but
the people of Évionnaz think the world has an edge, no more than a league from
the bounds of their fields. They never go to Andernatt.”

“I have not said that I
am going that way,” Jehan said, rudely. “But if I were, it would be no one’s
business but my own.” He felt that he had said too much, even though he had
said very little, and he indicated by the way in which he gathered his cloak
about himself that he did not want to waste any more time before going to
sleep, now that the colporteur had finished his meal.

“That’s true,” Alther
agreed, shrugging his shoulders to indicate that it was of scant importance to
him whether or not the conversation was cut short. “I’ll venture to say,
though, that you’d be unlikely to meet the Devil if you did go that way,
whether or not there’s anything more than a ruin at Andernatt. There are half a
hundred peaks on this side of the lake alone where Satan’s reported to have
squatted at one time or another — and that’s not counting dwellings like this
one, whose former inhabitant was reckoned his minion by the Calvinists down in
Geneva.”

“I’ll be glad of that,
too,” Jehan assured him, and said no more.

Jehan Thun and Nicholas
Alther parted the next morning on good terms, as two honest men thrown briefly
together by chance ought to do. They wished one another well as they set off in
near-opposite directions. Whether Alther gave another thought to him
thereafter, Jehan did not know or care, but he certainly gave a good deal of
thought to what Alther had said as he made his way towards Évionnaz. It was a
difficult journey, but when he finally reached the village, huddled in a narrow
vale between two crags, he was able to buy food and fill his flask. He passed
through with minimal delay into territory where the paths that once had been
were now hardly discernible. No one in the village asked him where he was
bound, but a dozen pairs of eyes watched him as he went, and he felt those eyes
boring into his back until he had put the first of many ridges between himself
and the village.

Jehan no longer had
precise directions as to the path he must take; he had not dared to mention the
château in Geneva. All he had to guide him now was vague advice handed on by
his grandmother, which told him no more than to steer to the left. Inevitably,
Jehan soon became desperately unsure of his way. While the sun descended into
the west he wandered, searching the narrow horizons for a glimpse of the ruins
that Nicholas Alther claimed to have seen. At least the sun was visible, so he
was able to conserve a good notion of the direction in which Évionnaz lay, but
by the time he decided that he would have to turn back he knew that it would be
difficult to reach the village before nightfall.

Then, finally, he caught
sight of a strange hump outlined on a slanting ridge. He was not certain at
first, given the distance and the fact that he was looking at it from below,
that it really was the remnant of an edifice, and it seemed in a far worse
state than he had hoped, even after hearing Alther’s judgement.

Because it lay in a
direction diametrically opposite to the route that would take him towards
Évionnaz, Jehan Thun knew that he would be in difficulty if there were nothing
on the site but broken stones, but he had to make the choice and he was not at
all confident that he could find his way back to his present location if he did
not press on now He decided that he must trust to luck and do his utmost to
carry his quest forward to its destination.

Again he reached his
objective just as night was falling, and again he saw no light as he toiled
uphill towards the crumbled stonework, until he lit his own candle — but this
time, there seemed at first glance to be no roof at all to offer him shelter,
merely a tangle of tumbled walls, cracked arches and heaps of debris.