No sooner has this dark ridge been traversed, beneath the clouded skies, than a glistening appears on the landscape below. Its rolling terrain flattened by this view from above, the valley of Banniere offers a host of discreet undulations to the traveler’s gaze. On either side of the river lies a series of woods and open fields, alternating with near perfect regularity, forming a grid. Through this design the region’s farmers aim to conserve, despite multiple calcareous outcrops, a moisture beneficent for their pastures.

A curious fact: the silken water that flows through these antithetical verdures is known as the Damier, or “Checkerboard.” Like many another in the province, this name has long excited the passions of scholars. As might well be surmised, these fall into two camps, irreconcilably opposed. The one vaunts the virtues of realism: however complex a word’s family tree, its branching genealogy can always be followed back to the origin. In this case, the problem is elementary indeed: no doubt the river took its name from the strange countryside that it irrigates; it was “the river of the damier,” and hence, very simply, the Damier. Certain subtle embellishments, dangerous because valid only in this single instance, have at times been appended to that basic motivation: for instance, that the name’s transference from banks to river replicates the reflective phenomenon by which a watercourse, burrowing virtual depths into its own level surface, borrows the colors and forms of the landscape around it.

The other clan grounded itself in the inalienable rights of poetry. Illusory, they claim, is any search for the origins of words, for words are the provenance of things. Their solution is easily deduced.

Implanted on a bend in the river, Banniere unites some eighty slate-roofed abodes on the Damier’s convex bank. Ribbons of smoke rise in all seasons, soon fraying in a thousand ways with every slight breeze, then finally dispersing. When the air is still, the houses cast their forms and muted hues onto the rippling water, along with the loftier peak of the church.

Before continuing on his way, the traveler is urged to direct his gaze groundward: it is not unusual to find, by the side of the road, in the sandy gap separating the asphalt from the dense intricacies of the grass, several specimens of a sort of red ant to which, in this region, many a living tradition is linked.

The village’s history is a hazy one, owing to a dearth of archival records, entirely destroyed, or nearly so, by a distant disaster, very likely a fire, in the days of the wars of religion. Another fine opportunity, then, for disputes on the subject of origins.

Here, one bygone day, when the weekly market had filled the town square with farmers and villagers, amid livestock, foodstuffs, and diverse entertainments, the customary tumult—laughter, cries, disputations, whispers—suddenly waned. Silence. The sun had emerged from the clouds. Eight strangers stood at one corner of the square, shaking the dust from their tunics. One raised a banner embroidered with the emblematic cross, then planted its shaft in the gap separating four cobblestones. These instigators of the Crusade had come to awaken ardors and strike fear into the soul. Perhaps their orator spun out rousing descriptions contrasting the inferno’s red flames with the delicate azures of paradise. No doubt he evoked the primordial rivalry of goods and evils, and how this subterranean struggle sometimes surfaces in the form of fierce battles, each one apparently decisive, in the heat of which any attempt at indifference equates to support for the opposite side.

The lavish phantasmagoria inscribed in every mind by these words left the audience shaken. Instantly the adolescent’s passions were inflamed. Their elders—fathers or brothers—discreetly sought to distract them from the flag’s snapping billows, amid which the cross, continually metamorphosing, seemed alternately to vanish and to be reborn. In vain: some had been contaminated, and already these efforts to curb the mounting inspirations swelling their breasts struck them as sacrilege. Several ran off at a breakneck pace, eager to snatch up some garment to prepare for the imminent departure; a number of others, their imaginations not nimble enough to call up the splendid Orient, were convinced indirectly, by the determination of family or friends. Few returned, or none. Between those households that had sacrificed some of their number and those that, by chance or prudence, had remained entire, muted rivalries arose, soon exacerbated by the subsequent new divisions of power and land. As the province’s tortuous history wended onward, these conflicts continued to smolder, it seems, and sometimes on strangely petty grounds. Given the crucial role played by the recruiter’s banner, its emblem alternately crushed and unfurled by the wind, the village was given the name that it bears to this day.

The other camp, as might be expected, puts forth an entirely contrary theory.