A suspicion occurred to him. It was not a comfortable idea, nor a charitable one, but it was swept aside by more immediate problems.
He could hide: lie low, for a while. All this would pass. But there was the coat to think about. He had been rescued—rescued!—by his brother, something that would never have happened under normal circumstances. He could get a new coat. Of course he could. But it would not be his coat.
A shepherd had his coat.
The Marquis de Carabas always had a plan, and he always had a fallback plan; and beneath these plans he always had a real plan, one that he would not even let himself know about, for when the original plan and the fallback plan had both gone south.
Now, it pained him to admit to himself, he had no plan. He did not even have a normal, boring, obvious plan that he could abandon as soon as things got tricky. He just had a want, and it drove him as their need for food or love or safety drove those the Marquis considered lesser men.
He was planless. He just wanted his coat back.
The Marquis de Carabas began walking. He had an envelope containing a love poem in his pocket, he was wrapped in a damp blanket, and he hated his brother for rescuing him.
When you create yourself from scratch you need a model of some kind, something to aim towards or head away from—all the things you want to be, or intentionally want not to be.
The Marquis had known whom he had wanted not to be, when he was a boy. He had definitely not wanted to be like Peregrine. He had not wanted to be like anyone at all. He had, instead, wanted to be elegant, elusive, brilliant, and, above all things, he had wanted to be unique.
Just like Peregrine.
THE THING WAS, he had been told, by a former shepherd, on the run, whom he had helped across the Tyburn River, to freedom, and to a short but happy life as a camp entertainer for the Roman Legion who waited there, beside the river, for orders that would never come, that the shepherds never made you do anything. They just took your natural impulses and desires and they pushed them, reinforced them, so you acted quite naturally, only you acted in the ways that they wanted.
He remembered that, and then he forgot it, because he was scared of being alone.
The Marquis had not known until just this moment quite how scared he was of being alone, and was surprised by how happy he was to see several other people walking in the same direction as he was.
“I’m glad you’re here,” one of them called.
“I’m glad you’re here,” called another.
“I’m glad I’m here too,” said de Carabas. Where was he going? Where were they going? So good that they were all traveling the same way together. There was safety in numbers.
“It’s good to be together,” said a thin white woman, with a happy sort of a sigh. And it was.
“It’s good to be together,” said the Marquis.
“Indeed it is. It’s good to be together,” said his neighbor on the other side. There was something familiar about this person. He had huge ears, like fans, and a nose like a thick, gray-green snake. The Marquis began to wonder if he had ever met this person before, and was trying to remember exactly where, when he was tapped gently on the shoulder by a man holding a large stick with a curved end.
“We never want to fall out of step, do we?” said the man, reasonably, and the Marquis thought, Of course we don’t, and he sped up a little, so he was back in step once more.
“That’s good. Out of step is out of mind,” said the man with the stick, and he moved on.
“Out of step is out of mind,” said the Marquis, aloud, wondering how he could have missed knowing something so obvious, so basic. There was a tiny part of him, somewhere distant, that wondered what that actually meant.
They reached the place they were going, and it was good to be among friends.
Time passed strangely in that place, but soon enough the Marquis and his friend with the gray-green face and the long nose were given a job to do, a real job, and it was this: they disposed of those members of the flock who could no longer move or serve, once anything that might be of use had been removed and reused. They removed the last of what was left, hair and tallow fat and all, then they dragged them to the pit, and dropped the remnants in. The shifts were long and tiring, and the work was messy, but the two of them did it together and they stayed in step.
They had been working proudly together for several days when the Marquis noticed an irritant. Someone appeared to be trying to attract his attention. “I followed you,” whispered the stranger. “I know you didn’t want me to. But, well, needs must.”
The Marquis did not know what the stranger was talking about.
“I’ve got an escape plan, as soon as I can wake you up,” said the stranger. “Please wake up.”
The Marquis was awake. Again, he found he did not know what the stranger was talking about. Why did the man think he was asleep? The Marquis would have said something, but he had to work. He pondered this, while dismembering the next former member of the flock, until he decided there was something he could say, to explain why the stranger was irritating him. He said it aloud. “It’s good to work,” said the Marquis.
His friend, with the
