There were no bombs to be heard in Orcières, only lions and storms. The other explanation for the strange weather was provided by La Bûche. La Bûche was the old blacksmith, a bit deaf from years of pounding metal and a bit addled by too much alcohol. He thought that all the storms were caused by the large metal cages the German had set up for his wild animals. There were three of them, it was said, and one of them was enormous, fifteen metres wide, and taller than the trees. La Bûche claimed that it was the steel that acted like a magnet on the stars … And people believed him. Since the lion tamer had brought all those metal bars on his huge wagon and assembled them on top of the mountain, the weather had changed. Some days it was hotter than Africa, but in the space of half an hour it had clouded over and begun to rain freezing stair rods. It wasn’t normal rain; it was more like stones thrown down by an icy firmament. Before the Hun, Orcières had never experienced so much anger and water. Down below, children cursed the sky, shaking their fists at the rocky overhang, and old people were too superstitious even to glance at the peak. After the torrential rains the soil was so eroded that silt flowed into the river and land turned to sludge. Ground that was already depleted, because there was no one to work it, now slid from the fields and gardens all the way to the houses.

What made it harder to accept was that it had taken centuries to fertilise the soil here. Entire lives had been spent picking stones out of the ground, stones that had then been used to build walls between plots of land. Chalky soil had become arable land through the villagers’ ancestors’ toil. Before the vines died, precious Malbec from the area had made up fifty per cent of the Bordeaux market. It had been a rich region but now, again, the land was being ruined, this time by the rains; it was running away, just as the men had been stolen away. Now everything and everyone was deserting the village.