The Army of the Night

By Paul Collis

It’s 1813. Napoleon’s army needs to retreat from Spain and return to France, but the main pass across the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees is within easy reach of the British forces.
In his search for an alternative escape route, Alaine Bellanger discovers more than just an ancient mountain trail. High up, in a cleft between two peaks, he finds something very strange indeed — and someone even stranger.
But who can he tell?
And who would believe him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Collis
• Release date: Aug 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476056456

Paul Collis

Born in Greater London. Art school in the seventies. The next few decades spent at ad agencies creating TV commercials in London, Milan, New York and San Francisco. Some fishing here, some photography there. Now thinking about the next project...

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The Army Of The Night

Paul Collis

Copyright: Paul Collis 2012

Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction.

All references to actual events and locales, and descriptions of persons living or dead, are purely fictitious and fanciful.

Otherwise, all names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

THE ARMY OF THE NIGHT Copyright © 2012 by Paul Collis.

Registered with the Writers Guild of America, West: 2012.

All rights reserved.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, please visit any .Ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This short story is mentioned in my novel The Scottish Movie, where it is referred to as a story written by Harry Greenville. Harry and his friend, Alan Decastro, use it as the basis of a movie treatment, which they candidly describe as unfilmable. Even so, they retain the faintest hope that, one day, it might be picked up by Ridley Scott, or Steven Spielberg, or…

Hey. You never know.

With thanks to historians, and mapmakers, and keepers of notes.

The Army of The Night

1

Near Toulouse, France. February 1813.

When he heard the insistent tap—tap—tap on the thick glass of his bedroom window it was a surprise, but not unexpected. More rhythmic than rain and sharper than a knuckle, the sound’s metallic source had cut through his slumber but not, he hoped, his wife’s. He looked over to her and saw that she was still asleep. Thankful, he turned towards the shielded candle sitting on a finely carved chest of drawers. It showed him that the clock read five minutes after three; too late for socialites, too early for farmers. The time of thieves and miscreants.

He slipped out from underneath the warm layers of fine linen and soft furs, covered his muscled body with a robe, then reached behind the nearest of the window’s thick velvet curtains. Behind it was a hook, from which he removed a loaded pistol. After parting the drapes he pushed the window open with the muzzle of the gun and aimed it directly at the head of the man sitting on a horse below. The cloaked rider responded by raising his sword; pinned to its deadly tip was a small, soft leather case.

Without a word, the householder took the case and closed the window. The horseman immediately spurred his mount across the courtyard and back towards the road, and the chill darkness of the night enveloped him once more.

2

In 1804, when Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France, the kings of other nations flinched. The fearless general and visionary statesman was now their equal, and he had made it known that his ambitions involved their borders.

Yet, for all the coronation’s pageantry and ceremony, and despite his belief that he personified the ideals of a re-born France, the new Emperor’s feet were firmly on the ground. He understood that he was merely mortal; a thirty-five-year-old Corsican career soldier, descended from the exiled remnants of an obscure strand of Italian nobility. Born with little money and slender influence, he had prepared himself for political office as he prepared himself for battle — with information. And now he would prepare himself for rule in the same way. His ministers were charged with informing him of every facet of the state’s endeavors, every word of news from home and abroad. He surrounded himself with the nation’s most intelligent and knowledgeable men. Many of them knew some of the state’s deepest and darkest secrets. But he — and he alone — had access to them all.

Sequestered deep within the royal vaults and saved from the revolution’s book-burners were chronicles containing all there was to know about the shadowy side of La France. Generations of loyal archivists had hidden manuscripts that dated from the reign of Charlemagne the Great. Some, deceptively bound to resemble tedious tax reckonings or court reports, depicted the true accounts of its royal families, their illicit affairs, their bastard offspring, their treasons, frauds and conspiracies. A pile of dusty volumes described the depravity of cardinals and the ineptitude of statesmen. Several reams of papers catalogued the bribery of bankers and the duplicity of diplomats. Other volumes registered the discoveries of honest men that had been suppressed or stolen by their betters. In short, all of France’s national confidences, good or ill, were there for the reading.

Bonaparte immersed himself in these records at every opportunity, finding them an invaluable source of education and amusement. But his main focus was not the past; it was the future. His ambition was to unify Europe’s nations