No point in carrying the containers to his boat, Yves reasoned. The harbor was as unsafe a place as he could imagine. He would hide the canisters near his home, and the next day bring them to Emma. She would know who needed fuel most, and how to deliver it.
Odette held a finger to her lips and Fleur nodded, following her into the occupying army’s abandoned commissary. The shelves stood floor to ceiling, stretching back along both sides for the length of the tent. There was so much: flour, sugar, coffee, it seemed endless. A sack of potatoes stood a full meter tall.
“It is like the vault of a king,” Odette whispered. Fleur nodded with wide eyes.
Then they spied the eggs, indented trays that held four dozen, stacked twenty trays high.
“Perfect,” Odette said. “Nice and light, and we’ll return for more when it’s safer.”
“Emmanuelle,” Fleur chirped.
“Yes,” Odette continued. “We’ll bring these to Emma. She’ll know what to do.”
With that she lifted a dozen or so trays and hurried away. Fleur paused, snatched four eggs from the next tray to tuck in her apron pockets, and scurried to catch up.
Emma intended to check on Yves, to see if he had managed to fish that day, people would be wanting their dinner, but the war would not let her anywhere near. The battles were like hornets’ nests, fierce angers in one place with relative quiet a kilometer or so away. She pulled the wagon numbly along the village’s western edge, as close to the fighting as she dared. Perspiration beaded on her brow, a fever from her injuries, and she staggered in the road. Someone was coming, she could tell, skipping toward her—who would skip on a day such as this?—but her head was spinning and she needed water. Slipping off her harnesses, she tried to reach the canteen in the back of her wagon. But her legs felt like lead, her eyes fluttered. Emma dropped to her knees, then tumbled forward in the dirt.
The skipping person was Monkey Boy. At last he had found someone to tell everything. But before he could reach her, she had been shot. Five hundred and ten, and he stopped in the road.
But she was moving, one arm twitching. Monkey Boy ran till he reached her body on the ground. Rolling Emma onto her back, he recoiled at her battered face. He examined the rest of her, and there was no bleeding place. She had not been shot. Also she was still breathing. Still five hundred and nine, then.
Monkey Boy had a secret, which was that climbing trees all day makes a body strong. Arms like ropes, back muscles like cables. He lifted Emma onto his shoulder as if she weighed as little as a puppy, and laid her in the back of the wagon as gently as if that puppy were asleep. She murmured, and he saw her lips were cracked.
Rummaging in the wagon’s bins, he found the canteen. The top unscrewed, he poured a splash in her mouth. She coughed, eyes opening with a wince. But when she saw who it was, Emma took the canteen, and drank from it for many loud gulps.
Monkey Boy scurried to the front of the wagon. Spying from high in the branches, he had seen her do this many times. Often he had imagined himself in this very situation, leading the wagon, being important. He slid his arms into the harnesses. While Emma recovered in back, he pulled in the direction of the special sycamore. Instead of telling her, he would show.
As they drew nearer to the coast, soldiers from both armies passed them. At one point they saw three of the Allied invaders hunched around a machine gun, and one of them put a finger to his lips. Monkey Boy froze. Five of the occupying soldiers rounded the corner, bent low and arguing in hushed voices. Before they noticed, though, the machine gun fired a great loud burst, and all five men lay sprawled in the road. Startled, Monkey Boy pressed a palm to his chest. Five hundred and fourteen.
Soon he and Emma reached the sycamore, perched on a promontory so steep and rocky the occupying army had not fortified it, and the invading army had not attacked it. Under the tree’s broad paternal arms, Monkey Boy cooed like the messenger pigeon from a day before. This tree was a difficult climb, because the first branch began so far up the trunk. But an idea flashed in his head: the wagon could provide a boost.
Monkey Boy towed it into place. The fighting popped and banged and roared, some of it less than a hundred meters away. He set blocks behind the wheels, as he had seen Emma do. Then he skipped around to the back of the wagon and pulled on her good arm.
“What do you think you are doing?”
“Come see.” He raised her up, starting a fireman’s carry.
“Get off of me.” Emma yanked back so hard her injured arm banged the wagon’s hull. She closed her eyes, the pain rising like a fire, then retreating slowly like a coal going dim.
“So sorry,” Monkey Boy said, bobbing like a duck in small waves. “So sorry. But you have to see. You want to see.”
“What are you talking about? What do I want to see?”
He pressed his hands together as if in prayer. “Please come see. I should not be the only one.”
“See what?” she said through gritted teeth. “Tell me.”
He jumped away, then back, unable to contain himself. “This.” He threw his hands in the direction of the beach, again and again. “This, this.”
“Monkey Boy,” Emma said, her voice as steadying as she could make it. “Calm down. What must I see?”
He stretched his arms wide and smiled with the whole of his face. “How they save us.”
Later that day, Emma herself could not describe how they managed it. Monkey Boy removed the wagon slings and tied them to his shoulders. She slid them up her legs to the thigh, then hooked her good arm around his chest. And the boy she thought of as half simpleton, half elf, stood on the platform of the wagon and lifted them both up into the largest tree on the coast, as hidden as squirrels but with a view as for eagles.
Soon they were standing where the thick first branch met the trunk, and from there he climbed like it was a ladder, hand and foot, up and away from the wagon, Emma’s face burrowed into his back while she clung and gritted her teeth and told herself: He will not let you fall. This is not how you die.
“There,” Monkey Boy said at last, his back warm and breath hard, but his voice still a youthful chirrup. “Here we all are.”
At first Emma could not see. She had to step out of the harnesses, her good arm hugging the trunk, until she was clear of him. Then she pressed herself to the tree and slid inch by inch around to the side that faced the ocean.
When she opened her eyes, Monkey Boy sat five meters out on a limb, swinging his legs. He grinned and pointed. “That way.”