The sacks that Simon had brought from the St Denis supermarket had all gone, along with most of those brought from St Cyprien. The sacks from the Sarlat hypermarché had not yet arrived.
‘The aircraft have taken off and are on their way,’ came a tinny but familiar voice coming from Prunier’s mobile phone. ‘Estimated time of arrival is twenty-seven minutes.’
‘Alain, is that you?’ Bruno said loudly, startling Prunier as he leaned his mouth close to the phone.
‘Bruno, yes, it’s me. Where are you?’
‘Up at the castle with the catapults. I’ll doubtless see you later.’ He backed off, apologizing to Prunier and explaining that the air force communications man down below in the car park was his cousin.
There was time for six more shots from each of the two trebuchets before they ran out of sacks. And then they heard the first, faint growl of the aircraft coming up over the river from the west.
‘They’ll pass us, turn over Domme and come in from the east, with the sun behind them,’ said the fire chief, facing the TV camera and speaking into the director’s microphone. ‘They’ll drop just a little ahead of the leading edge of the fire, so the wind will help spread the water over the unburned wood and deny the fire the fresh fuel it needs to advance. Each of the aircraft will be dumping six thousand litres of water with fire retardant. After the big fires in Provence, we bought four more of these special firefighting planes.
‘The aircraft are purpose-built Bombardier four-one-five models, originally designed in Canada as an amphibious aircraft that can operate from land or from water, and can scoop up water from lakes or reservoirs,’ he added, as the camera swivelled upwards to get a shot of the three aircraft passing overhead.
Every eye followed them as they turned and came back, dropping lower and lower until they roared almost overhead, no more than a hundred metres above the brow of the hill. They banked to follow the line of flames and then one by one dumped a great red trail of water mixed with retardant. Was it the first rays of the rising sun that made them that colour, Bruno wondered, or was it the fire retardant? At that point the car from Sarlat arrived with its trunk full of sacks.
Three aircraft, each with six thousand litres, thought Bruno. And the trebuchets had thrown maybe five thousand litres in all, certainly less than a third of what the aircraft had delivered. But they had done wonders for the morale of the exhausted pompiers and volunteers, and Bruno had little doubt which of the firefighting methods would dominate the TV news reports later in the day. In the past week, the viewers had grown accustomed to film of the firefighting aircraft.
Prunier and the fire chief were looking at the mobile phone that was connected to the small drone that lifted from the car park below and soared up, over the brow of the hill to film the effect of the water dumpers.
‘Very impressive,’ said Prunier, as Bruno came alongside to look down at the sight of the fire tamed. The creeping red edge he’d seen before on the images from the drone had gone, replaced by long dark stretches of doused trees with steam rising rather than smoke.
‘We’ll need another dump, just one more,’ said the fire chief. ‘In the meantime, the men from the Middle Ages may resume their bombardment.’
‘I’m not sure we can do much more with this smaller one,’ said Rossillon, from where he was scrambling with his carpenter over the structure that may have been smaller but still dwarfed them. ‘The throwing arm seems to have sprung.’
‘In a noble cause,’ said Bruno solemnly. ‘Fallen on the field of honour.’
They loaded the larger of the trebuchets with another sack of water but somehow Bruno could tell that Rossillon’s heart wasn’t in it. The sense of urgency, of their use as the last chance to save the castle, had gripped them and given exhausted men new strength. But now that the aircraft had arrived, that mood had dissipated. Every man could do the maths as well as Bruno. They might as well have pissed on the flames for all the good they had done. All that work, all that enthusiasm, for delivering just a few thousand litres, seemed pointless in retrospect.
‘You men may be feeling that your work was in vain but believe me, it wasn’t,’ came the voice of the fire chief. He was addressing the volunteers and the trebuchet crews rather than the cameras, but Bruno guessed the man knew he was being filmed.
‘I know fire and your medieval catapults made the crucial difference in that hour before dawn when the aircraft finally arrived. I was about to order an evacuation of this side of the river, abandoning this magnificent fortress and museum to the flames. But I saw the flames die a little with each sack you hurled at them. Well done, all of you. Monsieur Rossillon, you and your team have defended your castle in the great tradition of this mighty stronghold of Castelnaud. Pompiers, policiers, militaires, men and women and all the volunteers, my congratulations. This was the last battle of Castelnaud, and you have won.’
He raised his hand to the peak of his helmet and saluted them all as a great cheer roared up from two, perhaps three hundred throats.
‘I always suspected he had political ambitions,’ murmured Prunier in Bruno’s ear. ‘Now I’m sure of it.’
‘Still, it was a pretty good speech, off the cuff and unrehearsed. He certainly knows how to inspire people,’ Bruno said.
The fire chief strolled across to Rossillon who was checking the sling ropes of the trebuchet.
‘With your permission, monsieur,’ said the fire chief, taking the sledgehammer
