THE BEATING OF HIS WINGS
Paul Hoffman
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2013
Copyright © Paul Hoffman, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket illustration by Peter Bergting. bergting@mac.com
All rights reserved
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
ISBN: 978-0-141-95772-2
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part Four
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part Five
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Appendix i
Appendix ii
For my editor, Alex Clarke, who got there first.
The Beating of His Wings
The Publishers of The Beating of His Wings are ordered by the International Court of Archaeological Artefacts to print this judgment on the first page of each copy.
Moderator Breffni Waltz
38th of Messidor AD 143.830
Summary of Preliminary Judgment dated Republican Era 143.710 from the International Court of Archaeological Artefacts concerning the Left Hand of God trilogy and administration of the so-called ‘Rubbish Tips of Paradise’. These ‘tips’, for the avoidance of doubt, constitute the four square miles centred on the first discovery by Paul Fahrenheit of large amounts of printed paper dating from extreme antiquity. My judgement is preliminary and subject to review in the first instance by the Court of Pleas. However, an immediate decision is required because of the claim by UNAS that irreplaceable documents and artefacts are being lost for ever, citing the routine use of the contents of the Rubbish Tips of Paradise as toilet paper by the nomadic tribes that frequently pass through the site.
The facts of this case are not in dispute and are as follows:
This litigation has its origins in the first landing on the moon by Captain Victoria Ung Khanan some thirty years ago. That within days Captain Khanan discovered she had been beaten to this greatest of all firsts by some 165,000 years was as great a shock, perhaps, as has ever been delivered to WoMankind. The fragile remnants of what must have been an even more fragile spacecraft revealed that it had its origins in a vanished terrestrial civilization we knew nothing about, a civilization which soon became known as the Flag People, after the starred and striped insignia planted next to the craft. As a result, The Unified Nations Archaeological Survey was founded with the sole purpose of searching for evidence of the Flag People on earth itself.
So far this search has proved fruitless and for one simple reason: ice. UNAS quickly discovered that 164,000 years ago a period of major glaciation, now known as The Snowball, covered nearly the entire planet in ice, often to a depth of several miles. Ice that brings low vast mountain ranges has little problem removing the veneer of even the most complex civilization – clearly only the smallest rump of the population could have survived. Further investigation, however, revealed a later and significant period of warming during The Snowball, which for fifteen thousand years caused the ice to retreat far enough and long enough for new civilizations to emerge, before they in turn were swallowed up by the returning ice.
It is at this point in this frustrating story that Paul Fahrenheit emerged to criticize, to put it at its mildest, his colleagues for their obsession with technological solutions to this great problem. He pointed out that trying to find such whispery traces of the past was like ‘looking for hay in a haystack’ unless they used ‘some mechanism’ to guide the technology. The ‘mechanism’ likely to prove most effective in narrowing down the haystack, he argued, was that of legend and folk story. He claimed that real historical events from the distant past could become embedded in what were apparently entirely imaginary stories of gods and monsters and other fantastical tales. His ideas were dismissed out of hand and the relationship between Fahrenheit and his colleagues and superiors at UNAS became what could only be called vituperative.
As a result, in the Ventose of Republican Era 139, Paul Fahrenheit left UNAS in pursuit of what to his colleagues was the very definition of a wild goose chase – in search of what the isolated Habiru people called the Rubbish Tips of Paradise. It was here Mr Fahrenheit thought he might be able to find the first terrestrial evidence if not of the Flag People then of the civilizations that briefly followed.
Four years after Paul Fahrenheit’s disappearance the first volume of a ‘fantasy’ fiction trilogy entitled
The Left Hand of God
was published. It was widely translated into some twenty-six languages but its reception by both audiences and critics was highly polarized: it was greatly admired by some but much disliked by others for its peculiar tone and odd approach to the art of storytelling. How are these two apparently unrelated events connected? It turns out that Mr Fahrenheit was behind the publication of
The Left Hand of God
and a subsequent volume,
The Last Four Things
. These books were very far from the contemporary works of escapist fantasy they were presented as
.
As it happens, Fahrenheit’s belief in the potential of the Rubbish Tips of Paradise was entirely on the mark. To cut a long and bitter story short, Fahrenheit took it into his head not to tell his former employer of his discovery, as he was legally bound to do. Instead, he claimed UNAS would, and I quote, ‘smother the undoubted brilliance of what I have called the Left Hand of God trilogy in a dreary academic translation worked over by an army of self-serving pedants who would bury its vitality under a layer of high-minded dullness, footnotes and incomprehensible and obscurantist analysis.’
Fahrenheit became obsessed with his belief that the modern world should confront these three books in something of the way their original audience might have confronted them. As a result, he took it upon himself to translate them (a considerable intellectual feat recognized even by his detractors) and have them published under his mother’s family name as the above contemporary works of fiction. Who knows how long this curious subterfuge might have worked were it not for Mr Fahrenheit’s indiscreet pillow talk with a young woman, who, it turned out, was not as trustworthy as he believed and who promptly sold the story to a news tablet, which in turn led to UNAS applying to this court for an injunction putting the Rubbish Tips of Paradise under their legal control.
The Unified Nations Archaeological Survey is granted, as requested, complete but temporary control over the site.
However, its suit to prevent the publication of the final ‘novel’ in the Left Hand of God trilogy,
The Beating of His Wings
, in a translation by Paul Fahrenheit, is denied. Publication may proceed under the condition that the summary of this judgement is printed at the beginning of
The Beating of His Wings
. Both UNAS and Paul Fahrenheit are given leave to add an appendix at the conclusion of the work in which they may explain their positions.
There are three fundamental human emotions: fear, rage and love.
J. B. Watson, Journal of Experimental Psychology
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specific world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even into a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.
J. B. Watson,
‘What the nursery has to say about instincts’
Psychologies of 1925
By the time you are fourteen years old the worst thing that will ever happen to you will probably have already taken place.
Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles
PART ONE
I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who
I am, or what I have been doing
.
Aurangzeb
1
A brief report on Thomas Cale, Lunatic. Three conversations at the Priory on the Island of Cyprus.
(NB This appraisal took place after Mother Superior Allbright’s stroke. The notes she filed have been mislaid along with Cale’s admission details. This report needs to be read in the light of this absence and so I will not be held liable for any of my conclusions.)
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Medium stature, unusually pale. Middle finger of his left hand missing. Depression fracture to the right side of his skull. Severe keloid scar tissue in wound in left shoulder. Patient says he experiences intermittent pain from all injuries.
SYMPTOMS
Severe retching, usually in mid-afternoon. Exhaustion. Suffers insomnia and bad dreams when able to sleep. Loss of weight.
HISTORY
Thomas Cale suffers no hysterical delusions or uncontrolled behaviour beyond that of his sour nature. His mid-afternoon retching leaves him speechless with exhaustion, after which he sleeps. By late evening he is able to talk, although he is the most sarcastic and wounding of persons. He claims to have been bought for sixpence from parents he does not remember by a priest of the Order of the Hanged Redeemer. Thomas Cale is droll, not his least irritating affectation, and always tries either to make his interlocutor unsure as to whether he is mocking them or, by unpleasant contrast, to make it abundantly clear that he is. He tells the story of his upbringing in the Sanctuary as if daring me to disbelieve the daily cruelties he endured. Recovering from an injury which caused the dent in his head he claims – again it is not possible to tell with what degree of seriousness – that his already great prowess (he seems boastful in hindsight, but not at the time) was greatly increased as a result of the injury and that since this recovery he is always able to anticipate in advance any opponent’s movements. This sounds unlikely; I declined his offer of a demonstration. The rest of his story is as improbable as the most far-fetched children’s story of derring-do and swashbuckling. He is the worst liar I have ever come across.
His story briefly. His life of deprivation and military training at the Sanctuary came to a dramatic end one night after he accidentally came upon a high-ranking Redeemer in the middle of performing a live dissection upon two young girls, some kind of holy experiment to discover a means to neuter the power of women over mankind. Killing that Redeemer in the ensuing struggle, he escaped from the Sanctuary with the surviving young woman and two of his friends, with more Redeemers in vengeful pursuit. Evading their pursuers, the quartet ended up in Memphis where, plausibly, Thomas Cale made many enemies and (rather less plausibly) a number of powerful allies, including the notorious IdrisPukke and his half-brother, Chancellor Vipond (as he then was). Despite these advantages his violent nature asserted itself in a brutal but unusually non-fatal altercation with (so he says) half a dozen of the youths of Memphis in which (of course) he emerged triumphant but bound for prison. Nevertheless, Lord Vipond again mysteriously intervened on his behalf and he was sent into the countryside with IdrisPukke. The peace of the Materazzi hunting lodge where they were staying was interrupted shortly after he arrived by a woman who attempted to assassinate him, for reasons he was unable to clarify. His murder was prevented not by his own wonderful abilities – he was swimming naked at the time of the attack – but by a mysterious, unseen and insolent stranger who killed his would-be assassin by means of an arrow in the back. His saviour then vanished without explanation or trace.
By now the priests of the Sanctuary had discovered his general whereabouts and attempted to flush him out (he claims) by kidnapping Arbell Materazzi, daughter of the Doge of Memphis. When I asked him why the Redeemers would risk a ruinous war with the greatest of all temporal powers for his sake, he laughed in my face and told me he would reveal his magnificent importance to me in due course. The inflated mad, in my experience, take their importance most seriously but it is a feature of Thomas Cale that his demented state only becomes apparent a few hours after a conversation with him comes to an end. While you are in his company even the most implausible stories he tells cause you to suspend disbelief until several hours later, when a most irritating sensation creeps over you, as if you had been tricked by a marketplace quack into parting with ready money for a bottle of universal remedy. I’ve seen this before in a lunatic, though rarely, in that some are so powerfully deluded and in such a strange way that their delusions run away with even the most cautious of anomists.
Of course, Thomas Cale rescues the beautiful princess from the wicked Redeemers but, it must be said, not by means of the fair and noble fight against overwhelming odds but by stabbing most of his opponents in their sleep. This is another unusual feature of his delusion – that each one of his endless triumphs is not generally achieved by heroism and noble audacity but through brutal trickery and conscienceless pragmatism. Usually such madmen present themselves as gallant and chivalrous, but Thomas Cale freely admits to poisoning his enemies’ water with rotting animals and killing his opponents in their sleep. It’s worth recording briefly one of our exchanges in this regard.
ME
Is it a matter of course with you that you always kill unarmed prisoners?
PATIENT
It’s easier than killing armed ones.
ME
So you believe the lives of others are a matter for sarcasm?
PATIENT
(NO REPLY)
ME
You never consider showing mercy?
PATIENT
No, I never did.
ME
Why?
PATIENT
They wouldn’t have shown it to me. Besides, what would I do but let them go only to find I’d have to fight them again. Then I might become their prisoner – and be killed myself.
ME
What about women and children?
PATIENT
I never killed them deliberately.
ME
But you’ve killed them?
PATIENT
Yes. I’ve killed them.
He claimed to have built a camp to sequester the wives and children of the Folk insurrection and that because of his having been removed elsewhere almost the entire cantonment of five thousand souls died through famine and disease. When I asked him what he felt about this he replied: ‘What should I feel?’
To return to his story. After his brutal rescue of the beautiful Arbell Materazzi (are there any merely plain princesses in the world of the delusional?) he was promoted, along with his two friends, to guard the young woman towards whom he maintained throughout our three long conversations a deeply held resentment as to her ingratitude and disdain for him. This bitterness seems to hold a great sway over him because of his belief that when Memphis later fell to the Redeemers, it did so because the Materazzi failed to execute his plan to defeat them. (He is, by the way, very insistent that his skill in generalship is greater even than his talent for personal savagery.)
Usually sarcastic and matter-of-fact as he boasts of his great rise to power – again, his droll tone makes it seem not like boasting until one reflects upon his claims in tranquillity – he became most indignant as he recounted the way in which he was caught by the Redeemers after the Battle of Silbury Hill (certainly a disaster for us all whether or not Thomas Cale was involved). It is possible he was caught up in the battle in a minor way; his description of the events there has the note of real experience. Like all skilled romancers he can use his actual events to make the imagined ones truly plausible. For example, he frequently expresses repentance for any noble or generous actions he has performed. He says that he risked his life to save a Materazzi youth who had bullied and tormented him – an act of sanctity which he says he now bitterly regrets. When I asked whether it was always bad to act generously towards others he said that in his experience it might not be bad but it was always a ‘bloody catastrophe’. People thought so well of doing good, he said, that in the end they always decided it should be done at the end of a sword. The Redeemers thought so highly of goodness they wanted to kill everyone including themselves and start again. It turns out that this was the reason his former mentor, Redeemer Bosco, wanted him back at any price. Thomas Cale is (of course) no ordinary boy but the manifestation of God’s wrath and destined to wipe his greatest mistake (you and me, for the avoidance of doubt) off the face of the earth. I have treated shopkeepers who thought they were great generals and men who could barely write who thought they were poets of unparalleled genius but I have never encountered an inflation of such magnitude before – let alone in a child. When I asked him how long he’d had such feelings of importance he began to backtrack and – with very bad temper – said that this was what Bosco thought, not what he, Thomas Cale, thought. More circumspectly, I asked him if he believed Redeemer Bosco was mad and he replied he had never met a Redeemer who wasn’t and that in his experience a great many people who seemed to be right in the head, once you got to see them ‘put under grief’, were ‘completely barking’ – an expression I have not encountered before though its meaning was clear enough.
He is clever, then, at avoiding the implications of his delusions of grandeur: in the opinion of great and powerful men he is mighty enough to destroy all the world but this delusion is not his but theirs. When I asked him if he
would
do such a thing his reply was extremely foul-mouthed but to the effect that he would not. When I asked whether he had the
ability
to do such a thing he smiled – not pleasantly – and said he had been responsible for the deaths of ten thousand men killed in a single day, so it was only a question of how many thousands and how many days.
After his recapture by the Redeemer Bosco, his role of Angel of Death to the world was explained to him in detail and he was put to work by his former mentor. This ‘Bosco’ (the new Pope is called Bosco but Thomas Cale clearly likes a big lie) is much hated by Cale although, since buying him for sixpence, training him and then elevating him to the power almost of a god, Bosco is paradoxically the source of all his excellence. When I pointed this out he claimed to know this already, though I could see I had scored a hit to his vanity (which is very great).
He then detailed an endless series of battles, which all sounded the same to me, and in which he was, of course, always victorious. When I asked if, during all these successes, he had not suffered even a few setbacks he looked at me as if he would like to cut my throat and then laughed – but very oddly, more like a single bark, as if he could not contain something very far from high spirits or even mockery.
These numerous triumphs led in turn to his being less watched over by Bosco than formerly. And after yet another great battle, in which he overcame the greatest of all opponents, he slipped away in the resulting chaos and ended up in Spanish Leeds, where he suffered the first of the brain attacks that brought him here. I witnessed one of these seizures and they are alarming to watch and clearly distressing to endure – his entire body is wracked by convulsions, as if he is trying to vomit but is unable to do so. He insists he has been sent here by friends of some power and influence in Spanish Leeds. Needless to say, of these important benefactors there is no sign. When I asked why they had not been to see him he explained – as if I were an idiot – that he had only just arrived in Cyprus and that the distance was too great for them to travel to see him regularly. This great distance was a deliberate choice in order to keep him safe. ‘From what?’ I asked. ‘From all those who want me dead,’ he replied.
He told me that he had arrived with an attendant doctor and a letter for Mother Superior Allbright. Pressed, he told me that the doctor had returned to Spanish Leeds the next day but that he had spent several hours with the Mother Superior before his departure. Clearly Thomas Cale must have come from somewhere, and there might indeed have been some sort of attendant who arrived with him bearing a letter and who spoke with the Mother Superior prior to her stroke. The loss, as it were, of both letter and Mother Superior leaves this case somewhat in the Limbo in which unbaptized infants are said to wait out eternity. Given the violent nature of his imaginings (though not, to be fair, his behaviour) it seems wisest to place him in the protective ward until the letter can be found or the Mother Superior recovers enough to tell us more about him. As it stands, there is no one to whom I can even write to make enquiries about him. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs and it is not the first time by a long chalk that records have gone missing. I will discuss the alleviation of his symptoms when the herbalist comes the day after tomorrow. As to his delusions of grandeur – in my opinion, treating those is the work of many years.
Anna Calkins, Anomist
For weeks Cale lay in bed, retching and sleeping, retching and sleeping. He became aware after a few days that the door at the end of the twenty-bed ward was locked at all times, but this was both something he was used to and, in the circumstances, hardly mattered: he was not in a fit state to go anywhere. The food was adequate, the care kindly enough. He did not like sleeping in the same room as other men once again but there were only nineteen of them and they all seemed to live in their own nightmares and were not concerned with him. He was able to stay quiet and endure.
2
The Two Trevors, Lugavoy and Kovtun, had spent a frustrating week in Spanish Leeds trying to discover a way of getting to Thomas Cale. They had been thwarted by the cautious nature of the enquiries forced on them in Kitty the Hare’s city (as it had now become). It didn’t do to upset Kitty and they didn’t want him to know what they were up to. Kitty liked a bung, and the amount of money he’d expect for allowing them to operate in his dominion was not something they were keen to pay: this was to be their last job and they had no intention of sharing the rewards with Kitty the Hare. Questions had to be discreet, which is not easy when fear is usually what you do, when threats are your legal tender. The two were considering more brutal methods when discretion finally paid off. They heard of a young seamstress in the town who had been encouraging a better class of client to come to her by boasting, truthfully, that she had made the elegant suit worn by Thomas Cale at his notoriously bad-tempered appearance at the royal banquet held in honour of Arbell Materazzi and her husband, Conn.
Who knows what helpful information Cale might have let slip while he was having his inside leg measured? Tailors were almost as good a source of information as priests, and easier to manipulate – the tailors’ immortal souls were not at risk for blabbing a bit of dropped gossip; there was no such thing as the silence of the changing room. But the young seamstress was not as easily menaced as they’d hoped.
‘I don’t know anything about Thomas Cale, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. Go away.’
This response meant that one of two things was going to happen. Trevor Kovtun had by now resigned himself to committing an atrocity of some kind, Kitty the Hare or not. He locked the shop door and brought down the shutter on the open window. The seamstress didn’t waste her time telling them to stop. They lowered their voices as they worked.
‘I’m fed up with what we have to do to this girl,’ said Trevor Lugavoy. This was both true and a way of frightening her. ‘I really do want this to be our last job.’
‘Don’t say that. If you say it’s our last then something will go wrong.’
‘You mean,’ said Lugavoy, ‘some supernatural power is listening and will thwart our presumption?’
‘It doesn’t do any harm to act as if there were a God sometimes. Don’t tempt providence.’
Trevor Kovtun walked over to the seamstress, who had by now realized something dreadful had come into her life.
‘You seem to be a clever little thing – your own shop, a sharp tongue in your head.’
‘I’ll call the Badiel.’
‘Too late for that now, my dear. There are no Badiels in the world we’re about to take you to – no defenders or preservers, no one at all to watch over you. Here in the city you believed you were safe, by and large – but being an intelligent girl you must have known there were horrible things out there.’
‘We are those horrible things.’
‘Yes, we are. We are bad news.’
‘Very bad news.’
‘Will you hurt him?’ she said – looking for a way out.
‘We will kill him,’ said Trevor Kovtun. ‘But we’ve given our word to do it as quickly as we can. There will be no cruelty, just the death. You must make a decision about yourself – live or die.’
But what decision was there?
Later, on leaving the shop, Kovtun pointed out that even a year earlier they would have killed the girl in such an unspeakably vile way that any question of resistance to their investigations would have evaporated like the summer drizzle on the great salt flats of Utah.
‘But that was a year ago,’ said Trevor Lugavoy. ‘Besides, I’ve a feeling we’re running out of deaths. Best be thrifty. Cale should be our last ticket.’
‘You’ve been saying we should stop almost since we started twenty years ago.’
‘Now I mean it.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have said anything to me about finishing until we were done – then we could just have finished. Now that you’ve made a thing about this being our last job you’ve turned it into an event, so. If you want to get God’s attention, tell him your plans.’
‘If there was a God who was interested in sticking his nose in, don’t you think he’d have put a stop to us by now? Either God intervenes in the lives of men or he doesn’t. There’s no halfway.’
‘How do you know? His ends might be mysterious.’
They were experienced men and used to difficulties and they were not especially surprised to discover that Cale had gone somewhere else for reasons the girl was unclear about. But they had the name of Vague Henri, a good description of a boy with a scar on his face, and a convincing assurance that he’d know exactly where Cale had gone. Three days of hanging about followed, asking their unsuspicious questions and trying not to be conspicuous. In the end, patience was all that was required.
Vague Henri liked people but not the kind of people who lived in palaces. It wasn’t that he hadn’t made an effort. At one banquet at which he’d accompanied IdrisPukke he’d been asked, with a polite lack of attention, how he’d come to be there. Thinking they were interested in his extraordinary experiences he told them, starting with his life in the Sanctuary. But the details of the strange privations of the place did not fascinate, they repelled. Only IdrisPukke overheard the chinless wonder who said, ‘My God, the people they’re letting in these days.’ But the next remark was heard by Vague Henri as well. He’d mentioned something about working in the kitchens in Memphis and some exquisite, intending to be overheard, drawled: ‘How banal!’ Vague Henri caught the tone of contempt but couldn’t be sure – he didn’t know what it meant, perhaps it was an expression of sympathy and he’d misunderstood. Deciding it was time to leave, IdrisPukke claimed he was feeling unwell.
‘What does barn owl mean?’ asked Vague Henri on the way home. IdrisPukke was reluctant to hurt his feelings but the boy needed to know what the score was with these people.
‘It means commonplace – beneath the interest of a cultured person. He was a drawler: it’s pronounced ban-al.’
‘He wasn’t being nice, then?’
‘No.’
He didn’t say anything for a minute.
‘I prefer barn owl,’ he said at last. But it stung.
Most of the time IdrisPukke was away on business for his brother and so Vague Henri was lonely. He now realized he wasn’t acceptable to Spanish Leeds society, not even its lower rungs (who were, if anything, even more snobbish than their betters), so several times a week he took a walk to the local beer cellars and sat in a corner, sometimes striking up a conversation but mostly just eating and drinking and listening to other people enjoying themselves. He was too used to wearing a cassock to be comfortable in anything else and, like Cale, had got the seamstress to run him up a couple in blue birdseye: twelve ounce, peaked lapel and felted pockets, straight, no bezel. He was quite the dandy. But in Spanish Leeds, a fifteen-year-old in a cassock with a fresh scar on his cheek was hard to miss. The Two Trevors watched Vague Henri from the other side of the snug as he enjoyed a pint of Mad Dog, a beer he marginally preferred to Go-By-The-Wall or Lift Leg.
For the next two hours, to the irritation of the Two Trevors, he chatted away to various locals and was cornered for half an hour by an amiable drunk.
‘D’yew liked metalled cheese?’
‘Sorry?’
‘D’yew like metalled cheese?’
‘Oh,’ said Vague Henri, after a pause. ‘Do I like melted cheese?’
‘Shwat I shed.’
But he didn’t mind. There was something miraculous to him still about the talk, buzz and laughter, the ordinary good times being had by almost everyone except the occasional maudlin boozer or angry bladdered toper. At chucking-out he left with the others, the inebriated and the sober. The Two Trevors followed at a cautious distance.
These experienced men were never careless, they were as prepared for the unexpected event as if one took place daily on the backs of their hands, but their position as they closed on Vague Henri was a little more hazardous than even these careful murderers had reckoned.
Cale’s reputation as an epic desperado had not so much overshadowed Vague Henri’s as caught it in a general eclipse. To the Two Trevors he was dangerous, no doubt – they knew his background as a Redeemer acolyte and that you would have to be unusually hard-wearing to make it to the age of fifteen – but they were not, in truth, expecting a nasty surprise, even though nasty surprises were something they were used to.
Be clear, two against one is hideous odds, particularly when it’s night and the Trevors are the two who want a word with you. But Vague Henri had already improved his chances: he knew he was being followed. They soon realized their mistake and stepped back into the shadows and called out to him.
‘Vague Henri, is it?’ said Trevor Lugavoy.
Vague Henri turned, letting them see the knife in his right hand and that he was easing a heartless-looking knuckle-duster onto his left.
‘Never heard of him. Buzz off.’
‘We just want a word.’
Vague Henri opened his mouth as if in joyous surprise and welcome. ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘you’ve come with news of my brother, Jonathan.’ He moved forward. Had Lugavoy, who was ten yards in front of Kovtun, not been an assassin of a very superior kind he would have had Vague Henri’s knife buried in his chest. Unluckily for Vague Henri, Lugavoy instantly backed away, alarmed by the boy’s oddness as he stepped forward and struck out. The trick that had earned Vague Henri his nickname, the sudden incomprehensible question or answer intended to distract, had failed, if only just. Now they were alert and the balance in their favour once again.
‘We want to talk to Thomas Cale.’
‘Never heard of him, either.’
Vague Henri backed away. The Two Trevors moved apart and then forward – Lugavoy would make the first jab, Kovtun the second. There would be no more than four.
‘Where is he, your friend?’
‘No idea what you’re talking about, mate.’
‘Just tell us and we’re on our way.’
‘Come a bit closer and I’ll whisper it in your ear.’
They wouldn’t have killed him right away, of course. The knife driven in three inches deep just above the lowest rib would have taken the fight out of the boy long enough to get some answers. Never before in his life and only once afterwards was Vague Henri rescued – but tonight he was. In the almost silence of the trio’s scuffling manoeuvres there was a loud CLICK! from behind the two advancing men. All three knew the sound of the latch of an overstrung crossbow.
‘Hello, Trevors,’ said a cheerful voice from somewhere in the dark.
There was a moment’s silence.
‘That you, Cadbury?’
‘Oh, indeed it is, Trevor.’
‘You wouldn’t shoot a man in the back.’
‘Oh, indeed I would.’
But this wasn’t quite the rescue in the nick of time so loved by magsmen and yarn-spinners and their gullible audiences. In fact, Cadbury had no idea who the young person in the peculiar clothes was. For all he knew, he might entirely deserve the fate the Two Trevors were about to hand out to him – the people they were paid to murder usually did. He had not been watching over him but, only in a manner of speaking, the Two Trevors.
They’d had a change of heart about Kitty after talking to the seamstress; it was no longer plausible to imagine he wouldn’t become aware of their presence. So they’d observed the proper form by paying him a visit and, while declining to say what their business was in Spanish Leeds, assured Kitty that it would not conflict with his own. As he pointed out to Cadbury later, who were these pair of murderers to know what did or did not conflict with Kitty the Hare’s multitude of concerns? Kitty invited them to stay as long as they wished. The Two Trevors replied that they would almost certainly be gone by the following Monday. The result was that, at considerable expense and some difficulty, Cadbury had been keeping tabs on them, not the easiest of things to do. The reason he was here in person was that his watchful intelligencers had lost them for several hours and Cadbury had become nervous.
‘What now?’ said Trevor Lugavoy.
‘Now? Now you buzz off like the young man said. And I mean out of Spanish Leeds. Go on a pilgrimage to beg forgiveness for your shitload of sins. I hear Lourdes is particularly horrible at this time of year.’
And that was that. The Two Trevors moved to the wall opposite Vague Henri, but before they merged with the dark, Lugavoy nodded towards him. ‘See you.’
‘Lucky for you, old man,’ said Vague Henri, ‘that he came when he did.’ Then they were gone.
‘This way,’ said Cadbury. As Vague Henri stepped behind him he let go of the overstrung bow and with an enormous TWANG! the bolt shot into the blackness, bouncing between the narrow walls in a criss-cross series of pings. As Vague Henri and his not-exactly rescuer put on some speed down the road, a mildly offended distant voice called out to them, ‘You want to be careful, Cadbury, you could’ve had someone’s eye out.’
It was unfortunate that Cadbury and Vague Henri met under such circumstances. The latter was no fool and was getting less foolish all the time – but if someone saves your life only the most disciplined could fail to be grateful. And he was, after all, still just a boy.
Cadbury’s offer to stay with him for the evening was well taken and Vague Henri very much needed the several drinks he was offered on top of the ones he’d had already. No surprise then that he told Cadbury a great deal more than he should have. Cadbury was, when not murdering or carrying out doubtful business on behalf of Kitty the Hare, an amiable and entertaining presence, and as capable and desiring of affection and friendship as anyone else. In short, he quickly developed a fondness for Vague Henri, and not one like that of IdrisPukke’s for Cale that was particularly difficult to understand. It even had the mark of true friendship, if by that one means the willingness of friends to put aside their own interests for the other’s. Cadbury decided it might be better if Vague Henri were not drawn to Kitty the Hare’s attention in any more distinctive way than he already had been (as an unimportant familiar of Thomas Cale). Kitty was skilled at not letting you become aware of what he knew or did not know.
‘They are hoi oligoi of assassins,’ Cadbury replied to Vague Henri’s questions. ‘The Two Trevors cut down William the Silent in broad daylight, surrounded by a hundred bodyguards; they poisoned the lampreys of Cleopatra even though she had three tasters. When he heard what they’d done to her, the Great Snopes was so afraid that he ate nothing he hadn’t picked himself – but one night they smeared all the apples in his orchard using a strange device they made themselves. They leave no survivors. Whoever it is that Cale has upset, they have money and a great deal of it.’
‘I’d better disappear.’
‘Well, if you can vanish into thin air then by all means do so. But if you can’t evaporate you’re better off where you are. Not even the Two Trevors will ignore Kitty the Hare’s instruction to stay away from Spanish Leeds.’
‘I thought they could get to anyone?’
‘So they can. But Kitty isn’t just anyone. Besides, no one has paid them for such a risk. They’ll look for another way. Just stay out of sight for the next week, until I can say for certain that they’ve gone.’
3
It was mid-morning and Cale was waiting to go mad again. It was a sensation something like the uneasy feeling before a chunder heaves out the poisons of a toxic meal; the sense of a horrible, almost living creature gaining strength in the bowels. It must come but it will take its time, not yours, and the waiting is worse than the spewing up. A juggernaut was on its way, passengered by devils: Legion, Pyro, Martini, Leonard, Nanny Powler and Burnt Jarl, all of them gibbering and shrieking in Cale’s poor tum.
Face to the wall, knees to his chest, waiting for it to be over with, he felt a hefty shove in the back. He turned.
‘You’re in my bed.’
The speaker was a tall young man who looked as if his clothes were filled not by flesh but large ill-shapen potatoes. For all his lumpiness there was real power here.
‘What?’
‘You’re in my bed. Get out.’
‘This is my bed. I’ve had it for weeks.’
‘But I want it. So now it’s mine. Understand?’
Indeed, Cale did understand. The days of invincibility were over for the foreseeable future. He picked up his few possessions, put them in his sack, went over to a free corner and had his attack of the conniptions as quietly as he could.
In Spanish Leeds, Vague Henri was on his way back to his room in the castle, protected as far as the gate by four of Cadbury’s stooges, and with a promise of financial help from his new friend in the matter of the Purgators. Vague Henri detested all one hundred and fifty of these former Redeemers who Cale had saved from Brzca’s knife – for the simple reason that they were still Redeemers as far as he was concerned. But they were valuable because they would now follow Cale anywhere, under the entirely mistaken belief that he was their great leader and as devoted to them as they were to him. Cale had used them to fight his way across the Swiss border, intending to desert them as soon as he and Vague Henri were safe. But Cale soon realized that controlling so many trained soldiers willing to die for him would be extremely useful in the violent times ahead, however much he loathed their presence. There was one weakness in Cale’s plan: how to pay the ruinous amount of money it cost to keep so many in idleness until the expected war started – which, of course, it might not. With Cale gone, Vague Henri desperately needed money for himself and for the keep of the Purgators. He also needed a friend and he had found both in Cadbury, who thought it useful to have someone indebted to him who could draw on such a resource in these uncertain times. It was clear that Vague Henri was unwilling to discuss Cale’s whereabouts and would only say that he was ill but would be back in a few months. Cadbury was too smart to raise Vague Henri’s suspicions by pressing him. Instead of asking questions he offered help – a winning strategy in all circumstances.
Now Kitty had an influence over someone who knew and understood the Purgators and who possessed information about the whereabouts of Thomas Cale. This information might become important in due course and now he knew where to get it should this prove necessary. Kitty the Hare was a person of intelligence but also considerable instinct. When it came to Cale, he shared Bosco’s belief in his remarkable possibilities, if not their supernatural origin; but news of Cale’s illness, however vague, meant that Kitty’s plans for him might have to be revised. On the other hand, they might not. It would depend on what kind of sickness was at issue. Desperate and dangerous times were coming and Kitty the Hare needed to prepare for them. The potential usefulness of Thomas Cale was too great to let the question of his current ill-health entirely diminish Kitty’s interest in what became of him.
A thumb on every scale and a finger in every pie was Kitty’s reputation, but these days most of his concentration was on what was being weighed and cooked in Leeds Castle, the great keep that scraped the skies above the city. Its fame for not having required a defence in over four hundred years was now threatened, and King Zog of Switzerland and Albania had arrived to discuss its defence with his chancellor, Bose Ikard, a man he disliked (his great-grandfather had been in trade) but knew he could not do without. It was said of Zog that he was wise about everything except anything of importance – a worse insult than it appeared, in that his wisdom was confined to skill at setting his favourites against one another, reneging on promises and a talent for taking bribes through his minions. If they were caught, however, he made such a show of punishing them and expressing complete outrage at their crimes that he was generally more renowned for his honesty than otherwise.
All the posh with power, the who whom, the nobs who had gathered in Leeds Castle to discuss the possibility of staying out of the coming war were anxious to become favourites, if they were not already, and to stay that way if they were. Nevertheless, there were many who disliked Zog on a matter of principle. They were particularly agitated at the great gathering because on his way to Leeds he had stuck his royal nose into a village council inquiry (he was a relentless busybody in minor affairs of state) regarding an accusation that a recently arrived refugee from the war was, in fact, a Redeemer spy. Convinced of the man’s guilt, Zog had stopped the proceedings and ordered his execution. This upset many of the great and good because it brought home to them the fragile nature of the laws that protected them: if, as one of them said, a man can be hanged before he has been tried, how long before a man can be hanged before he has offended? Besides, even if he were guilty it was obviously foolish to upset the Redeemers by hanging one of them while there was still, they hoped, a chance of peace. His actions were both illegal and thoughtlessly provocative.
Zog was of a fearful disposition and the news from his informers that a notorious pair of assassins had been seen in the city had unnerved him to the extent that he had come into the great meeting hall wearing a jacket reinforced with a leather lining as protection against a knife attack. It was said that his fear of knives came from the fact that his mother’s lover had been stabbed in her presence while she was pregnant with Zog, which was also the reason for his bandy legs. This particular weakness also caused him to lean on the shoulders of his chief favourite, at that time the much despised Lord Harwood.
There were perhaps fifty hoi oligoi of Swiss society present, most of them beaming with witless subservience as is the way of people in the presence of royalty. The remainder looked at their monarch with much loathing and distrust as he shuffled down the aisle of the great hall, leaning on Harwood, with his left hand fiddling around near his favourite’s groin, a habit that increased in intensity whenever he was nervous. Zog’s tongue was too large for his mouth, which made him an appallingly messy eater according to IdrisPukke, who had in better times dined with him often. Careless of changing his clothes, you could tell what meals he had golloped in the previous seven days, said IdrisPukke, from looking closely at the front of his shirt.
After much royal faffing about, Bose Ikard began a forty-minute address in which he set out the present situation regarding the intentions of the Redeemers, concluding that while the possibility of war was not to be discounted, there were strong reasons to believe that Swiss neutrality could be maintained. Then, like a magician producing not merely a rabbit but a giraffe out of a hat, he took a piece of paper from his inside pocket and waved it before the meeting. ‘Two days ago I met with Pope Bosco himself, just ten miles from our border, and here is a paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.’ There was a gasp and even a single cheer of anticipation. But on the faces of Vipond and IdrisPukke there was only dismay. ‘I would like to read it to you. “We, the Pontiff of the true faithful, and Chancellor of all the Swiss by consent of the King of Switzerland, are agreed in recognizing that peace between us is of the first importance.”’ There was a loud burst of applause, some of it spontaneous. ‘“And …”’ more applause, ‘“and that we are agreed never to go to war with one another again.”’
Cheers of high relief rang up to the roof and echoed back. ‘Hear, hear!’ someone shouted. ‘Hear, hear!’
‘“We are resolved that discussion and dialogue will be the means we shall use to deal with any outstanding questions that concern our two countries and to resolve all possible sources of difference in order to maintain the peace.”’
There were hip hip hoorays for Chancellor Ikard and a chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ all round.
During the commotion, IdrisPukke was able to mutter in Vipond’s ear. ‘You must say something.’
‘Now is not the time,’ replied Vipond.
‘There won’t be another. Stall it.’
Vipond stood up.
‘I am prepared to say without any hesitation or doubt that Pope Bosco has another paper,’ said Vipond. ‘And in this paper he sets out the general scheme for the attack on Switzerland and the destruction of its king.’
There was the distinctive murmur of people who had heard something they didn’t care for.
‘We are negotiating acceptable peace terms,’ said Bose Ikard, ‘with an enemy we know to be violent and well prepared. It would be astonishing only if Pope Bosco did not have such a plan.’
The murmur was now one of sophisticated approval: it was reassuring to have a man negotiating for peace who was such a cool realist. Such a man would not have his pocket picked by wishful thinking. Later, as the meeting came to an end and the conference filed out, mulling over what they’d heard, King Zog turned to his chancellor. Ikard was hoping, with good reason, to be complimented for dealing so skilfully with an opponent like Lord Vipond.
‘Who,’ said Zog, tongue aflutter in his mouth, ‘was that striking young man standing behind Vipond?’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘That was Conn Materazzi, husband of the Duchess Arbell.’
‘Really?’ said Zog, breathless. ‘And what kind of Materazzi is he?’ By this he meant was he one of the clan in general or of the direct line of descent from William Materazzi, known as the Conqueror or the Bastard, depending on whether he had taken your property or given it to you.
‘He is a direct descendent, I believe.’
There was a wet sigh of satisfaction from Zog. From Lord Harwood there was a thunderous look of resentment. The royal favourite, who signed his letters to the King as ‘Davy, Your Majesty’s most humble slave and dog’, now had a rival.
An equerry, somewhat hesitant, sidled up to the King. ‘Your Majesty, the people are raising a clamour to see you at the great balcony.’ This impressive platform, known as El Balcon de los Sicofantes, had been built two hundred years before to show off King Henry 11’s much adored Spanish bride. It looked out over a vast mall on which more than two hundred thousand could gather to praise the monarch.
Zog sighed. ‘The people will never be satisfied until I take down my trousers and show them my arse.’
He walked off towards the great window and the balcony beyond, calling out to Bose Ikard casually, ‘Tell the young Materazzi to come and see me.’
‘It would send a wrong signal to many, including Pope Bosco, if you were to see Duchess Arbell personally.’
King Zog of Switzerland and Albania stopped and turned to his chancellor. ‘Indeed it would be a mistake. But you are not to teach me to suck eggs, my little dog. Who said anything about seeing Arbell Materazzi?’
Conn had barely returned to his wife’s apartments when Zog’s most important flunky, Lord Keeper St John Fawsley, arrived to command him to attend the King in two days’ time at three o’clock in the afternoon. The Lord Keeper was known to the older princes and princesses as Lord Creepsley On All Fawsley – like royalty everywhere, they demanded servility and also despised it. It was said that on hearing his nickname Lord St John was beside himself with delight at the attention.
‘What was that about?’ wondered a baffled Conn after he’d left. ‘The King kept looking in my direction and rolling his eyes at me with such distaste I almost got up to leave. Now he wants to have an audience with me on my own. I’ll refuse unless he invites Arbell.’
‘No, you won’t,’ said Vipond. ‘You’ll go and you’ll like it. See what he wants.’
‘I’d have thought that was obvious. Did you see him fidgeting about in Harwood’s groin? I could barely bring myself to look.’
‘Don’t fash yourself, my Lord,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘The King was badly frightened in the womb and as a result he is a very singular prince. But if he’s mad about you then it’s the best news we’ve had in a long time.’
‘What do you mean – mad about me?’
‘You know,’ taunted IdrisPukke, ‘if he looks on you with extreme favour.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Vipond. ‘The King is eccentric, or at any rate, given that he is a king, we’ve all agreed to call it nothing more. Except for a certain over-familiarity with your person you’ve nothing to worry about. You’ll just have to put up with his strangeness for the reasons my brother has referred to.’
‘I thought I wasn’t supposed to listen to IdrisPukke?’
‘Then listen to me. This is a chance for you to do all of us a great deal of good. God knows we need it.’
Arbell, still plump but pale after the birth of her son, reached up from her couch and took Conn’s hand. ‘See what he wants, my dear, and I know you’ll use your good judgement.’
4
Kevin Meatyard might have looked like a sack of potatoes with a large turnip resting on the top but he was tack-sharp and his malice had a subtle ring to it. In other circumstances – if, perhaps, he’d had a loving mother and wise teachers – he might have made something remarkable of himself. But probably not. Murdering a baby in its cradle is, of course, something that should never be done – except in the case of Kevin Meatyard.
We all know we should not judge people by their appearance, just as we also know that this is what we generally do. And this weakness in us all makes this regrettable reality a self-fulfilling prognostication. The beautiful are adored from birth and they become shallow with the lack of effort required in life; the ugly are rejected and become angry. People rejected Kevin Meatyard for the wrong reasons but there were those, not so shallow, who were ready to show him some human sympathy despite his giftless appearance and character. One of these kind people was Headman Nurse Gromek. If he’d never met Meatyard and felt sorry for him then he would have carried on being the blandly good man that he’d been all his life: harmless, competent, pleasant enough, a little blank.
Sensing Gromek’s open-mindedness about him, Meatyard began to make himself useful, making cups of tea, cleaning tables, fetching and carrying, listening and watching for any occasion to lighten Gromek’s considerable load. Gromek began to realize that mealtimes, always an occasion for the awkward among the patients to kick up a fuss, became much easier when Kevin Meatyard was helping him with the serving-up. How was he to know that Meatyard was issuing threats to his fellow lunatics (‘I’ll tear off your head and remove your bollocks through the hole’) and backing them up at night, most successfully, using a twelve-inch piece of twine and the smallest of stones? Whatever pain you’ve ever felt was unlikely to compare with that inflicted by Meatyard putting a tiny pebble between your two smallest toes, wrapping string around them and squeezing tight. He liked best of all to do this to Little Brian in the bed next to the one he had instructed Thomas Cale to sleep in.
Something sly and clever in Meatyard drove him to provoke Cale by making him witness cruelty against the weak – and there was no one weaker than Little Brian. Meatyard, along with the grosser pleasure of causing pain, enjoyed the cries of the boy reaching out to Cale as he lay impassively on his back, neither turning away from nor towards the horror happening next to him. Meatyard could sense Cale’s weakness: a certain compassion for the frail. It was this weakness that had forced him, however reluctantly, to kill Redeemer Picarbo as he was about to slaughter the beautifully plump Riba.
But he’d been strong then; now he was weak and he had no choice but to endure Little Brian’s agony. The trouble was that he could not endure it. What gave Meatyard so much pleasure was that he could feel Cale’s soul eroding in front of him. Meatyard’s coarser appetite for physical suffering was regularly satisfied, and this place was like a sweetshop to a greedy boy, but he also liked to enjoy the more subtle suffering he got from his awareness of Cale’s soul wasting away.
Soon, with Meatyard in charge of the handing out of medicines, even this worst of all occasions for calamity and distress became hushed and orderly.
At night, in Headman Nurse Gromek’s little workroom off the ward, Meatyard would talk to him and listen carefully to all his woes. Over days and weeks Meatyard nourished all the nurse’s many resentments in life, and one in particular. That Nurse Gromek was an ugly man it would be unkind but not untrue to say. This was partly what drew the two of them together: Gromek felt sorry for Meatyard because he was so unprepossessing in the way he looked. This pity was a way in for Meatyard, and soon he found the weakness in Gromek that lay under his decent qualities and ruled over all the others: he was a man with a loving disposition yet not loved by anyone. He cared for women but they did not care for him. When Meatyard cottoned onto this it showed him at his sharpest best. He could feel the disappointment and resentment in Gromek’s apparent resignation to the fact that no one loved him. He could see how angry he really was.
‘It’s wrong,’ said Meatyard, drinking tea and eating toast in the little room, ‘that women don’t mind you looking at them if they think you’re handsome. But if they don’t like your face then all of a sudden you’re a dirty man – a who-do-you-think-you-are-to-look-at-me skank. They put their tits on display for everyone – except for you or me. We’re not worthy to look.’ After a few weeks of this, Gromek was puffed up with rage and as easy for Meatyard to play with as a ball. Soon Gromek, a man who’d had enough of being shit upon by girls, was bringing in women from the ward next door. Used to being treated with kindness in the Priory, these women were trusting and were left unsupervised at night because they were among the milder cases of insanity. Meatyard persuaded Gromek to bring them into his little room knowing he could keep shut the mouths of the patients listening outside. Besides, the patients here were often raving mad and full of stories of the terrors of hell that happened solely in their tortured minds. Now Meatyard brought them experience of the real thing. Wherever he went was hell, but in that hell he made a heaven for himself. There was no angry despair involved in being Kevin Meatyard, no torment in his soul acting out revenge against an unkind world. It was bliss: inflicting pain, tormenting of souls, rape. He delighted in being himself.
At night the lunatics listened to the girls whimpering softly – Meatyard liked a bit of crying but it must be quiet. There was the occasional loud cry of pain, and an answering yelp from a madman in the ward thinking it was the call of his own devils coming at last to drag him down. From time to time Meatyard would pop out to have a smoke, playfully swinging the pebble knotted in his piece of string, and chat to Cale as he lay in his bed, staring at rafters and the black beyond.
‘You take it easy,’ said Meatyard to Cale. ‘And if you can’t take it easy, take it anyway you can.’
It was during one such break, as Kevin Meatyard, having left Gromek in his little room to take his turn with a girl alone, puffed on a snout and gave Cale the benefit of his opinions, that events took an unexpected turn.
‘You have to have the right attitude,’ Meatyard was saying to Cale, who was as usual staring up into the void above. ‘You’ve got to make the best of things. There’s no point just lying back and feeling sorry for yourself in life. That’s your problem. You just have to get on with it, like me. If you can’t do that then you’re a non-runner. This world is a pig – but you just have to get on with it, like me, see.’ He did not expect a reply, nor did he get one.
‘What do you want, Gibson?’
This question was addressed to a man in his late forties who had appeared at Meatyard’s shoulder. The man didn’t reply but stabbed him in the chest with a blade about ten inches long. Meatyard jerked to one side in agony as Gibson tried to wrench the blade free, snapping it off in Meatyard’s chest in the process. It was a cheap kitchen knife that one of the men in the ward had found rusting away at the back of an old cupboard in the cookhouse. Horrified and astonished, Meatyard fell and in a moment half a dozen lunatics were on top of him and holding him down. Cale, meanwhile, rolled off his bed and away from the fight, shaky and kitten-weak after a recent visit from Nanny Powler and the rest of his devils. He watched as four other men piled into the annexe and dragged Headman Nurse Gromek out into the main body of the ward, his struggles much restricted by the trousers around his ankles from which he was trying to free himself.
The lunatics had decided to kill Gromek first in order to give Kevin Meatyard a chance to appreciate properly what was to come and to give him a brief taste in this life of what he could expect for all eternity in the next.
Terror can either make men weak or miraculously strong. Freeing one leg from the trousers around his ankles, Gromek managed to get enough purchase, despite the men holding him, to stagger down the ward and get to the locked door, shouting for help as he went. The lunatic with his arm around Gromek’s neck immediately shifted it to his mouth, stifling his cries enough to make anyone passing think it was just a patient kicking off. As if they were wading upstream in fast water, the five of them lurched down the ward, then two more grabbed Gromek’s legs until his panic-strength gave out and he collapsed onto the floor. Determined to get him away from the door and back to where Meatyard was being held they started to pull Gromek down the central aisle. While this was going on, Kevin Meatyard was loudly but calmly listing what he was going to do to his captors when he got free:
‘I’ll shove you back up your mother’s crack. I’ll piss down your throat. I’ll fuck you in the ear.’
Once they’d dragged Gromek in front of Meatyard, he was pulled upright with his back against the wall so he could get a good view of Gromek’s death.
Without the kitchen knife the lunatics needed to think again. Naturally, anything in the ward that could be used as a weapon had been removed – but even though the bed legs were carefully bolted into place, they had managed to unscrew one. As he was still struggling, grunting and gasping one of the lunatics grabbed Gromek under the chin and yanked his head up to expose his throat so that two of the others could press the bed leg across his neck. A terrible muffled scream erupted from deep in Gromek’s chest as he realized what they were going to do. Terror again gave him unnatural strength and this, combined with the sweat pouring off his face, meant the man holding his chin lost his grip. Two more attempts followed as the watching Meatyard kept up his threats of hideous revenge – ‘I’ll chew off your plums and shove ’em up your winker’ – but even he fell silent when Gromek’s neck was arched back and the leg of the bed held across his windpipe with a man kneeling on each side. It wasn’t quick. The sounds were from out of this world – a wet choking and a crushing of breathing flesh. Cale was transfixed by Gromek’s hands, fluttering and quivering in the air, one of his fingers pointing and shaking as if telling off a child. After an age the shivering hands became taut for a moment, then dropped suddenly to the floor. The kneeling lunatics stayed as they were for a full minute and then slowly stood up. They looked at Kevin Meatyard lying pinned down with his back to the wall.
As they moved towards him, Cale called out to them. ‘Be careful. Make sure you’ve got him tight. Don’t let him get to his feet.’
But why pay attention to the warnings of a boy who’d done nothing but lie on his bed and retch for a couple of hours a day? They moved on Meatyard. The six lunatics who had a hold on him pulled him to his feet and, knowing this was his one chance, Meatyard took advantage of the momentum of the lift and with all his lumpen strength shook them free. Then he grabbed the astonished Little Brian in his arms and ran up the ward using the boy as a battering ram. He got to the door and turned to face them as the lunatics began edging around him in a semi-circle. He squeezed the boy around the throat and made him cry out in fear and pain. ‘Stay where you are or I’ll break his bloody neck.’ Then he backheeled the door, making it rattle and thud as if a giant was trying to get out. ‘Help!’ he shouted as he kicked it over and over. ‘HELP!’
Now the lunatics were scared – if Meatyard got away they were done for. They’d planned to say the pair of them got into a fight over who’d have the girl first and that they’d killed Meatyard while trying to save Gromek.
With Meatyard free and only the word of murderous lunatics against him they’d be shunted off to the madhouse in Bethlehem, where the lucky ones died in the first year and the unlucky ones didn’t.
‘Put him down.’ Cale pushed through the men surrounding Meatyard.
‘I’ll break his neck,’ said Meatyard.
‘I don’t care what you do to him, as long as you put him down.’
It’s a truism that isn’t true that all bullies are cowards – and it was certainly not true of Kevin Meatyard. He was afraid, as he had every reason to be, but he was in control of his fear as much as any brave man might be – although his kind of courage was not bravery. Neither was he a fool and he was at once alert to the peculiarity of Cale’s insolence. Cale was one of his victims and he knew how victims behaved, but for the second time that night they weren’t behaving as they ought to and, to be fair to Meatyard, as they usually did. Cale was behaving oddly and in an odd way.
‘We can all come away from this,’ Cale lied.
‘How?’
‘We say that it was Gromek who took the girl and that all of us, you included, ashamed to let such a thing take place, were forced to drag him off her and he died in the struggle. The girl will back that up.’ He looked over his shoulder, still moving forward slowly. ‘Won’t you?’
‘No, I fucking won’t!’ the girl shouted back. ‘I want him hanged.’
‘She’ll see reason, she’s just upset.’ All the time Cale was closing in on the suspicious but hopeful Meatyard, his mind fizzing as he tried to think what to do next.
‘They nearly squashed his neck off,’ said Meatyard. ‘No one will believe he got killed by accident. I’ll take my chances.’
He backheeled the door again and the first syllable of a scream for help was already out when Cale hit him in the throat with all his strength. Unfortunately for Cale and the lunatics, all his strength didn’t amount to much. It was the precision of the blow that hurt Meatyard, that made him jerk to the left and caused the back of Little Brian’s head to knock the rusty blade sticking out of his chest. In agony from the knife, he dropped Little Brian. Cale hit the heel of his hand into the middle of Meatyard’s chest. When he was ten years old either blow would have dropped Meatyard as if he were standing on a trap door, but he was not ten any more. Meatyard lashed out and missed, but the follow-on landed a clout on the side of Cale’s head. He fell as if he’d been hit by a bear. The blood pounded in his ears and what little strength he had in his arms was draining away to pins and needles. Meatyard took two steps and would have given Cale a kick big enough to land him in the next world, but there was still some brawn left in Cale’s legs so he kicked away Meatyard’s standing foot and he went down with a wallop on the wooden floor. Luckily for Cale, Meatyard was winded and this gave him time to get to his feet. His head was full of wasps, his arms shaky. He had one punch left in him, but not a good one.
In the struggle the lunatics had backed away, as if Cale emerging to take charge had robbed them of the collective will that had brought them this far. It was the girl who saved them. ‘Help him,’ she shouted, rushing forward and leaping on top of Meatyard. This decided Meatyard on his most desperate plan, one he’d thought up while his flesh was crawling as he was made to watch poor Gromek choke to death. He grabbed hold of the girl and swung her like a club at the three men barring his way to the large window on the other side of the room. They let him go because it was keeping him away from the door that mattered. Anywhere else he moved was a trap – so they let him back away to the window and shaped up to surround him for the last time. Earlier, desperation and a lack of anything to lose had given them a reckless courage but now none of them wanted to get their neck broken when more caution would see this to its end. So they gave him more time to back away than they might otherwise have done.
‘Quickly,’ said Cale, on the verge of fainting as the blood swirled in his ears. He felt as if his very brains would burst. Most of them didn’t hear him. Meatyard made his way to the window and the lunatics stood and watched. He was, after all, going nowhere. The window was nailed down but it wasn’t barred because it was on the fourth floor and some sixty feet from the ground. Meatyard knew this, but he also knew, from his voluntary efforts to get on Gromek’s good side by cleaning the ward, that there was a rope anchored to the wall and coiled out of the way behind an old tallboy cupboard. It had been put there many years before as a cheap way of escaping a fire.
The lunatics watched him back off towards the window, then stirred as he reached behind the tallboy and pulled out the long rope. It took them a few seconds to realize what he was going to do and then they moved forward together. Meatyard pulled the tallboy over with an enormous crash and, holding onto the end of the rope, he ran to the window, turning his back at the last moment. The entire frame, much of it rotten, gave way and Meatyard vanished into the night, the rope trailing behind him. It snapped tight for a second then it went loose.
Never tested, the rope was too short. The result was that Meatyard, after falling headlong through the air, had come to a jerking stop twenty feet above the ground, flinging him into a tree which broke the fall that otherwise might have killed him. Good luck, vicious nerve and immense physical strength saw Meatyard limping off painfully to freedom. Cale watched from the shattered window as Meatyard merged into the darkness. He turned away and called the lunatics to him.
‘What happened tonight was that the two of them brought the girl here and got into a fight over her. Isn’t that right?’ Cale said.
The girl nodded.
‘Meatyard killed Gromek and when you tried to take hold of him he smashed through the window – and that’s all you know. Now each one of you is going to walk past me and repeat what I just said. And if you get it wrong, now or later, you won’t need Kevin Meatyard to chew off your plums and shove them up your winker.’
While the well-intentioned people who ran the asylum were shocked at the terrible violence of the death of Headman Nurse Gromek, brutal attacks by deranged patients were not unknown. What caused more shock was that Gromek was abusing his patients in such a revolting manner. Patients who could pay for their treatment – a small number that should have included Cale – were taken into the asylum in order to provide money to pay for the care for those who could not. It was as kindly a place as such an institution can reasonably hope to be and Gromek had been rightly regarded, at least until the arrival of Kevin Meatyard, as an uninspired but trustworthy overseer. Cale’s warning to the lunatics to stick to the story he had outlined taught him subsequently to be more careful when making jokes to people he did not know, particularly those who were not quite right in the head and who were prone to deal with the terrible confusion that existed in their minds by grasping with a grip of iron onto anything they were told with a clear and unambiguous determination. So it was that the unusual repetition of learnt phrases about the incident began to make the superintendents suspicious. Initially the story had been generally accepted – after all, Gromek had raped a number of female patients with the help of Kevin Meatyard and he had been murdered and the person accused had run away and in a desperate manner – but now they were preparing to mine for the truth and would undoubtedly have succeeded in finding out what had really happened had not events turned in Cale’s favour. Vague Henri and IdrisPukke arrived expecting to find him lying in the comfort for which they’d paid and hoping he was on the way to being cured.
‘Must you always,’ said IdrisPukke to Cale when he was brought down to the private room kept solely for important visitors, ‘prove your detractors so unerring in their view that wherever you go calamities follow?’
‘And,’ said Vague Henri, ‘another funeral.’
‘And how is,’ said Cale to Vague Henri, ‘one of God’s greatest mistakes?’
‘Speak for yourself,’ replied Vague Henri.
Cale resentfully explained that not only had he gone to humiliating extremes to avoid trouble, he had been too sick to do anything even if he had wanted to. The details of Meatyard’s bullying he kept to himself.
He gave them a detailed account of the truth, the lies he had made everyone tell to cover it up as well as the peculiar bad luck that had put him in the lunatic ward in the first place. IdrisPukke went off to see the newly appointed Director of the asylum and gave her hell about the treatment given to such an important person. What kind of institution was she running? he’d asked, and other rhetorical questions of that sort. In a short time he had gouged a promise from her to end the investigation into the events of that night, and to have Cale brought under the personal daily care of their most skilled mind doctor and at no extra expense. IdrisPukke demanded and received a further promise to cut the fees for Cale’s treatment in half.
By no means all of his anger was simulated. He had not expected a cure, given that Cale’s collapse had been so great, but he’d hoped for an improvement both because of his great affection for the boy but also because he wanted to work with Cale on a much grander long-term strategy for dealing with the Redeemers. But Cale could not even speak for long without pausing to rest and gather his thoughts: and besides, there was the dreadful look of him. When Cale gave away in passing that today was an unusually good day, IdrisPukke realized that the help they desperately needed from Cale might come too late, if it came at all.
IdrisPukke demanded the Director summon the mind doctor who was to take care of Cale so that he could put his mind at rest as to his quality. The Director, knowing that IdrisPukke had to leave the next day, lied that the doctor was away on retreat and would not return for another three days.
‘She’s an anomist,’ said the Director.
‘I’m not familiar with the term.’
‘She treats anomie, diseases of the soul, by talking, sometimes for hours a day and for many months. Patients call it the talking cure.’ He could be reassured, said the Director, that she was a healer of uncommon skill and she had made headway with even the most intractable cases.
Although he was not sure he believed her about the convenient ‘retreat’, IdrisPukke could sense the sincerity of the Director’s admiration for the supposedly absent woman. He took more hope from this, because he wanted it to be true, than his pessimistic nature would normally allow. That nature would have reasserted itself in full measure when, five minutes after he left to return to Cale, there was a knock on the Director’s door which was opened even before she could say ‘come in’. The woman who entered, if it was a woman, was of a very curious appearance and holding in her left hand something so strange that not even IdrisPukke, with all his many experiences of the singular and the fantastical, had seen anything like it.
5
Kevin Meatyard was unwell. He had a badly sprained ankle, a dislocated shoulder, a large cut on the left side of his head and assorted welts, cricks and tears. But none of them would kill him. It was the knife in his upper chest that would do that. The Island of Cyprus was not an island at all but a large isthmus that ballooned out into the Wooden Sea. Its system of parochial justice extended fifty miles into the hinterland so that even small villages had a special constable – even if he was only the blacksmith. Meatyard had every reason to believe he would be followed although he also realized it would be too expensive and difficult to keep half a dozen men on the road for long. The problem for him was that he knew he must stay away from any place where he could get the knife removed and the wound cleaned. In the end, he trusted in his constitution to keep him alive long enough to get so far away that no one would have heard of him. So it was that while Kevin Meatyard was trying to leave Cyprus on a road out of the way of nosy strangers, the Two Trevors were trying to enter Cyprus on a road out of the way of nosy strangers. So it was less of a coincidence than it might have been when the two assassins came across Kevin Meatyard lying in a heap beside a small pond. For obvious reasons, while out in the bundu even people very much less experienced in wickedness than the Two Trevors regarded a body lying in the road as something it would be wise to pass by on the other side of. On the other hand, they and their animals were parched. Having satisfied themselves it was not a trap (and who knew more about bushwhacking than they did?) Trevor Lugavoy threw a large rock at the lumpily prone body and, getting only a faint groan in response, decided that whatever danger there was could be avoided by keeping a close eye and not touching him.
A few minutes later, with the horses still slurping the deliciously sweet water, Kevin stirred and awkwardly got to his feet, watched carefully by the two men. He started to walk over to the pond to get a drink but, still unsteady and weak, he collapsed with such a hefty thud it made both Trevors wince.
It might be thought that given their bloody profession the Two Trevors were men without compassion. But while it was certainly the case that they were no nicer than other people, neither, except when they were being paid to kill you, were they very much worse. This was particularly true the older they got and the more superstitious. They were beginning to wonder if a few acts of generosity might be of some help if it turned out that one day there might be an eternal act of reckoning – though they both knew in their heart of hearts that they would have to rescue an epic number of children from a vast number of burning buildings to weigh much in the balance after all the evil deeds they’d been responsible for. Still, it was mean-spirited to leave a clearly wounded man lying within a few feet of a desperately needed drink of water. They frisked him, then woke him up and gave him a drink from one of their own cups.
‘Thanks,’ said a truly grateful Kevin, after downing five straight cups of what felt like life itself.
‘Look, John Smith,’ Kevin had, of course, given them a false name. ‘You’re not going to make it to Drayton – it’s fifty miles away, rough going too. That,’ he nodded at the broken blade in Meatyard’s chest, ‘comes out now or we loan you a spade and you can start digging.’
‘What’s a spade?’
‘An implement,’ said Trevor Lugavoy, ‘that can be used for digging holes several feet deep and six foot long.’
‘You can do it?’ said a doubtful Kevin. ‘Take this out without killing me?’
‘Pretty far gone, boy – I’d say seventy/thirty.’
‘For?’
‘Against.’
This let out of Kevin what little air was left.
‘D’you think there’d be a proper surgeon in Drayton?’
‘You aren’t going to get to Drayton. And even if you did, which you won’t, he’ll be the local barber. And he’ll want paying. And some questions will be asked. Have you got any money? Have you got any answers?’
By now the Two Trevors were beginning to feel their patience wane in the face of Kevin’s lack of gratitude.
‘My generous friend here is as good as you’ll get within two hundred miles. You’re lucky to have him. And you don’t have much choice. If you want to stay out of heaven, I’d do some grovelling.’
The mention of heaven concentrated Kevin’s mind and he made a good fist of apologizing to the now miffed Trevor Lugavoy. After which, Lugavoy got on with it. In fact, he could have earned a fair living as a surgeon. Moved to become skilled for practical reasons, he also took pride in his ability and had paid for tuition from Redeemer surgeons considered by all to be the best, not that this was saying much. He had paid a high price for the medical pliers with which he grasped the little that was left of the blade sticking out of Meatyard’s chest. It was out in a moment, accompanied only by a hideous scream of agony.
Worse was to come, as it was clear from the two pieces missing from the blade that there was more to do.
‘Don’t move or I won’t answer for the consequences.’
Meatyard was skilled at handing out pain, but he could take it, too.
‘Well done,’ said Trevor Lugavoy, who was, after five minutes digging about in the wound that must have felt like five days, reassured that there was nothing left behind. ‘That’s what kills you,’ he said to the traumatized Meatyard. He cleaned the wound with several gallons of water and began to pour a mixture of honey and lavender, calendula and powdered myrrh. Kovtun, seeing he was about to use the ointment, pulled Lugavoy to one side and pointed out that it was expensive and they might very well need it themselves. Lugavoy agreed in principle but pointed out that all their efforts would be for nothing if the wound got infected – which it would.
‘I take pride in my work. What can I say? Besides, he showed a good deal of courage. I’d have screamed louder. He deserves a bit of generosity.’ So that was that. They decided to stay and watch over him in the night; next morning they left him with some rations (not much, at Kovtun’s insistence) and were on their way. Though just before they left, a thought occurred to Kovtun.
‘You heard of the Priory?’ he said to Kevin.
Fortunately for Meatyard his expression of alarm could easily be turned into one of pain. ‘No, sorry,’ said the ungrateful boy and at that the Two Trevors were gone. Two minutes later Lugavoy was back. He dropped a large block covered in waxed paper, an impulsive addition to the rations they’d already left him.
‘Make sure,’ he said to Kevin, ‘you eat a quarter of this a day. It’s good stuff food-wise though it tastes like dog-shit. The Redeemers call it Dead Men’s Feet. There’s an address inside. If you live, go there and they’ll give you work. Tell them Trevor Lugavoy sent you – and nothing else, y’hear?’
If you’d asked Trevor Lugavoy whether virtue was rewarded he would have been both surprised and amused, not because he was a cynic (he regarded himself as having been through all that) but rather that experience had led him not to see the world as a place of balance. On this occasion, however, while returning to ensure that Kevin Meatyard had enough nourishing food to give him the best chance of survival, his kindness was rewarded: he noticed that he was being watched from a hill about three hundred yards away. As he turned back to join Trevor Kovtun he was pretty sure he knew who it was. He caught up with Kovtun rather quicker than he expected to – Kovtun had dismounted and was on all fours with his belt undone, putting two fingers down his throat trying to make himself sick. After a few more unpleasant sounding tries, he succeeded. There was blood in his vomit.
‘Any better?’
‘A bit.’
‘We’re being followed.’
‘Damn, buggery, bollocks and bullshit,’ said Cadbury as he sat down half a mile from the Two Trevors. ‘They know we’re following them.’ Cadbury looked at the girl who had been waiting for him at the bottom of the hill while he was spying on Trevor Lugavoy. Behind her, set apart, were a dozen disagreeable-looking men.
‘You let them spot you,’ said the girl. She was a stringy-looking thing, but it was the kind of string that you could rely on to take a hard strain, with an odd face – had you seen it in a painting you would have called it underdrawn. It seemed to have something missing, a nose or a pair of lips, except that they were all there.
‘You think you can do any better, be my guest.’
‘It’s your job, not mine.’
‘When it comes to tracking people as good as those two you can’t get too close and you can’t get too far away. It’s just bad luck.’
‘I don’t believe in luck.’
‘That’s because you’re a kiddywink and don’t know your arse from your elbow.’
‘You’ll see what I know. An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks it.’
‘Will I? How hair-raising.’
But for all his mockery he found the girl’s presence decidedly creepy, not least because she was always quoting from some religious tract that had, apparently, an opinion on everything. But she spoke these proverbs and sayings an odd way, so that you couldn’t make out what she was driving at exactly. Was she trying to make him uneasy? He had good reason to be jumpy.
Three days earlier, Kitty the Hare had called him in to discuss what was to be done about the Two Trevors and their search for Cale, in the light of the certainty that there was only one thing the Two Trevors did with anyone they were looking for once they found them.
‘Do you know who’s paying them?’ Cadbury had asked.
‘The Redeemers, probably,’ Kitty cooed. ‘Spying things out is not really in their gift. Fanatics find it hard to blend in, as the disgracefully illegal but entirely justified hanging ordered by Zog so clearly established. But it could be the Laconics.’ It was a matter of policy as well as amusement to Kitty never to give a completely unambiguous answer. ‘They’ll struggle to recover from the injury he did to their numbers. Neither could you rule out Solomon Solomon’s family. He has a talent for antagonizing people.’
‘You could say the same about us.’
‘Indeed you could, Cadbury.’
‘You don’t think he’s too much trouble?’
‘Oh, indeed I do,’ replied Kitty. ‘But that’s the way it is with the young. It’s a question of possibilities. His capacity for ruin needs shaping and I’d very much rather be behind him than in front of him. But there may easily come a time when that will not be the case. You might want to keep that in mind.’
The door opened and Kitty’s steward entered with a tray.
‘Ah,’ said Kitty, ‘tea. The cup that cheers but not inebriates.’
The steward laid the table with cups and saucers, plates of ham sandwiches, seedcake, and biccies with custard then left without a word or a bow. The two of them stared at the table but not because of the treats on offer.
‘You will have noticed, no doubt, Cadbury, the table’s laid for three.’
‘I had, yes.’
‘There’s someone I want you to meet. A young person I’d like you to keep an eye on. Give her the benefit of your experience.’ He moved toward the door and called out, ‘My dear!’ A moment and then a girl of around twenty years appeared and gave Cadbury the most dreadful fright. The sense that you have seen a ghost from the past is disturbing to anyone, but imagine how much worse it is when you were the one responsible for that ghostliness. The last time Cadbury had seen her was while they had both been spying on Cale at Treetops – a chore that had finished with him putting an arrow in her back. In the perpetual gloom required by Kitty the Hare to shield his so-sensitive eyes, it took him a few moments to realize that this was not the late Jennifer Plunkett nor her twin but a younger though disturbingly similar relative. It wasn’t just her looks that gave the similarity but the same disfiguring blankness of expression.
‘Meet Daniel Cadbury, my lover.’ This peculiar endearment was addressed to the girl and was merely an alternative to ‘my dear’ but deliberately more disconcerting. ‘He and your sister were old friends and often worked side by side. Daniel, this is Deidre Plunkett who’s come to work with us and share her very considerable skills.’
Even though he realized his mistake quickly enough, there was reason for Cadbury still to be unnerved: the surviving relatives of people you had murdered were generally best avoided.
Kitty had insisted that Cadbury bring Deidre with him in the attempt to track down the Two Trevors: ‘Take her under your wing, Cadbury,’ he’d said. But the question for Cadbury was what kind of mockery was involved here. Jennifer Plunkett had been a murderous nutcase who, without ever speaking to the boy, had conceived a deep passion for Cale as she spent days watching him swimming naked in the lakes around Treetops. Cale had laughed and shouted for joy for the first time in his life as he swam and fished and ate the wonderful food prepared by IdrisPukke, and sang horribly out-of-tune garbled versions of the songs he’d picked up while he was in Memphis: Weigh a pie in the sky. The ants are my friends. She’s got floppy ears, She’s got floppy ears.
Jennifer had been convinced that Kitty meant Cale harm: this was not the case, in fact, or at least probably not the case. Jennifer had tried to stab Cadbury in a bid to protect her beloved and when she failed had run towards the astonished Cale screaming blue murder. It was at this point that Cadbury had put an arrow in her back. What choice did he have? Afterwards, he had decided it might be better if he told Kitty that Cale was responsible, startled into action by the sudden appearance of a murderous screaming harpy. ‘Honesty is the best policy’ may not be a virtuous guideline (the man who believes that honesty is the best policy is not an honest man) but it was one he should have followed in this instance. Not only was he now left with the problem of what to do about Deidre Plunkett, but also of working out whether her sudden appearance was just a coincidence or Kitty’s revenge for having been lied to. If the latter, the question was what sort of lesson his employer had in mind.
At any rate, he took Deidre with him to negotiate with the Two Trevors. If things went fat-fingered, which they easily might, there was a chance the Trevors might solve the problem for him. On the other hand, they might solve all his problems permanently.
‘You’re coming with me, keep your cake-hole shut and don’t make any sudden moves.’
‘You’ve no call to talk to me like that.’
Cadbury didn’t bother to reply.
‘The rest of you,’ he said to the others. ‘Keep back but in calling distance.’
They ignored Kevin Meatyard on their way past, it being clear he wasn’t going to be any trouble given the state he was in, and in a few minutes they caught up with the Two Trevors.
‘Can we talk?’ shouted Cadbury from behind a tree.
Lugavoy nodded the two of them forward. ‘That’s far enough. What do you want?’
‘Kitty the Hare thinks there’s been a misunderstanding and he’d like to resolve it.’
‘Consider it resolved.’
‘He’d like to resolve it personally.’
‘We’ll be sure to drop in next time we’re passing.’
‘Your friend looks a bit peaky.’
He was, in fact, the colour of half-dry putty.
‘He’ll live.’
‘I’m not sure you’re right about that.’
‘Who’s your skinny friend?’ Lugavoy asked.
‘This young lady is a most deadly person. I’d show her more respect.’
‘You look familiar, sonny.’
‘Keep going, mister,’ said Deidre, ‘and you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.’
‘My apologies, but she’s very young and doesn’t know any better.’
‘Don’t be apologizing for me,’ said Deidre.
Cadbury raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘What can you do?’
‘As I see it, Trevor, you’re not going to make it to wherever you were planning to go so the question of your intentions coming into conflict with Kitty the Hare’s interests doesn’t apply for the foreseeable future. If you want your partner to live, I don’t really see what the problem is.’
‘What’s to stop you killing us as we sleep?’
‘You shouldn’t judge others by your own low standards.’
Trevor laughed. ‘Point taken. But still I worry.’
‘What can I say? Except that it’s not in Kitty the Hare’s mind to do so.’
‘And what is in his mind?’
‘Why don’t you come back to Spanish Leeds and ask him?’
‘So he doesn’t trust you enough to tell you?’
‘Are you trying to hurt my feelings? I’m touched. The thing is that while Kitty the Hare has considerable respect for you both, it so happens you’re on a path that brings your interests into conflict with his. He prefers his own interests.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘I’m glad that you think so. Are we agreed?’
‘Yes.’
‘We have kaolin. That should make him feel better.’
‘Thanks.’
Cadbury gestured to Deidre Plunkett. She brought out a small flask from her saddlebag and, getting down, walked over to Kovtun.
‘Take an eighth,’ she said. Cadbury put two fingers in his mouth and let out a whistle so shrill it made Lugavoy flinch. In response the dozen men waiting over the hill emerged in three staggered sets of four and spread out wide.
‘Nasty-looking bunch,’ said Lugavoy. ‘But someone knows what they’re doing.’
The skilled approach-work he so admired was being directed by Kleist; the villainous-looking types he was controlling were Klephts, and so rather less dangerous than they appeared. Cadbury had hired them in a hurry because so many of his usual thugs had been struck down with the squits, in fact the same typhoid from which Trevor Kovtun was suffering and from the same source in a water pump in the centre of Spanish Leeds. The rise in the number of people taking refuge there on the rumours of a war with the Redeemers was already exacting a price. It was all very unsatisfactory but the Klephts did look the part and they had clearly fought against the Redeemers and were still alive – no mean recommendation. About Kleist he knew nothing – he was not a Klepht but he seemed always to have the ear of the Klepht gangmaster who, for some reason, was called Dog-End. In fact, Kleist was mostly in charge but it was thought best not to have a boy seen to be their leader.
On their way back they had to pass by Kevin Meatyard.
‘Can we take him with us?’ said Lugavoy.
‘Not enough horses. Besides, I don’t like the look of him.’ Cadbury signalled to Kleist, who was nearest. ‘What’s your name, son?’
‘Kleist.’
‘Give him some food – enough for four days not more.’ Kevin had already hidden the rations given him by the Two Trevors.
Kleist approached Kevin slowly: he didn’t like the look of him either.
‘All right?’ he said to Kevin, as he got down and started rifling the ration saddlebag to see what was least palatable and so best for giving away – the staler bread, the harder pieces of cheese.
‘Got a smoke?’ said Meatyard.
‘No.’
Kleist set out what could only be described as an ungenerous interpretation of four days’ worth of edibles onto a square of cloth.
‘Where you from?’ asked Kleist.
‘None of your fucking business.’
Kleist’s expression did not change. He stood up, looked at Meatyard and then kicked sand all over the food he’d just laid out. Neither of them said anything. Kleist got on his horse and left to catch up with the others.
6
Life is like a pond into which an idle child drops a pebble and from that act the ripples spread outwards. Wrong. Life is a stream and not a stream in spate, just an ordinary piddling sort of stream with its routine eddies, whirls and no-account vortices. But the vortex and the ripple uncover a root, and then another, and then they undermine the bank and the tree by the stream falls down across the stream and diverts the water and villagers come to find out what has happened to their supply and find the coal unearthed by the falling tree and miners come, and whores to serve the miners and men to manage the whores and a town of tents and mud becomes a place of wood and mud, then bricks and mud, then cobbles to pave the street, then the law arrives to walk the cobbles that pave the streets, then the coal gives out but the town lives on or it dies away. And all because of a piddling stream and its piddling whirls and vortices. And so it is with the life of men, driven by the many-fingered hand of the invisible.
The visit that would have brought death to Thomas Cale at the hand of the Two Trevors was stalled by a drink of water from a tainted well, its messengers herded back to where they came from by a long-time friend who couldn’t really care less whether he lived or died, back to a city where the wife of the long-time careless friend was wandering the streets with her newborn girl, thinking her husband dead who was now returning towards her and who, in a few days, would pass no more than thirty yards from her in the great crowds that now crushed inside the walls of Spanish Leeds. Over and again their paths would nearly cross but for the little whirls and vortices pulling them a fraction this way and then a fraction that.
Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, sometimes lionish, sometimes very like a whale, but all the most cheerful philosophers agree that even the blackest cloud has a silver lining. And during the days and nights of wretchedness when Kevin Meatyard ruled, Cale discovered that the old ways he had of dealing with suffering came back to him. In the Sanctuary he had learned to withdraw inside his head, vanish to other places in his mind, places of warmth and food and marvellous things – angels with wings who did whatever you said, talking dogs, adventures without pain, even death without tears and sudden blissful resurrections, peace and quiet and no one anywhere near. Now for a couple of hours a day he could do the same when the retching and the madness gave him some elbow room. Daydreams came to his defence; for minutes at a time he found himself back among the lakes at Treetops, swimming in the cool waters, picking signal crabs out of the streams, thinking about the word he’d found one day for the sound of water on small stones as he pulled the crabs apart and ate them raw with the tops of wild garlic, just the way IdrisPukke had shown him. And then at night, as the long-winged bugs in the wood made their wonderful pulsating racket, they would talk and talk and he’d lap it up, sitting on one of the chairs that were almost like beds as IdrisPukke poured him a light ale and handed out the accumulated wisdom of half a century, insight, as he frequently pointed out, you couldn’t buy at any price.
‘People treat the present moment as if it is just a stopping point on the way to some great goal that will happen in the future, and then they are surprised that the long day closes; they look back on their life and see that the things they let go by so unregarded, the small pleasures they dismissed so easily were in fact the true significance of their lives – all the time these things were the great and wonderful successes and purpose of their existence.’
Then he would pour Cale another quarter pint, not too much.
‘All utopias are the work of cretins and the well-intentioned people who work towards the foundation of a better future are half-wits. Imagine the heaven-on-earth where turkeys fly around ready-roasted and perfect lovers find perfect love with only a little satisfactory delay and live happily ever after. In such a place, men and women would die of boredom or hang themselves in despair, well-tempered men would fight and kill to be relieved of the horrors of contentment. Pretty soon this utopia would contain more suffering than nature inflicts on us as it is.’
‘You sound like Bosco.’
‘Not so. He wants to wipe cats from the face of the earth because they like to eat fish and catch birds. You might as well wish for a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb. But you’re half right, in a way. I agree with Bosco up to a point – it’s true that this world is hell. But while I, too, am appalled by humanity as a gross caricature I also feel sorry for it: in this hideous existence so full of suffering, we are at one and the same time the tormented souls in hell and the devils doing the tormenting. We are fellow sufferers, so the most necessary qualities to possess are tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity. We all need forgiveness and so we all owe it. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. These are virtues, young man, in which, and I mean this kindly, you are sorely lacking.’
At this last offering, Cale pretended to be asleep, accompanied by exaggerated snores.
But drifting into the past was a place full of traps. He wanted to remember the first time he had seen Arbell naked – bliss it was to be alive that night. But the pleasure and pain, love and anger, lived too much cheek by jowl for this to take him into another world. Better to stick to wonderful meals, to memories of teasing Vague Henri about the enormous size of his head, of listening to IdrisPukke and getting the last word with everyone. But also he would think and argue with himself and try to work out what he really knew: that the world was like a stream full of gyrations, twirls and weedy entanglements, and that wherever you went the water always leaked through your fingers.
The room they had now given him was simple enough: a reasonably comfortable bed, a chair and a table, a window that looked out over a pleasant garden full of slender elm trees. It had two luxuries: he slept on his own and he had a key to lock himself in and everyone else out. They’d been unwilling to provide one at first but he had insisted with a degree of vague menace and, having asked the Director of the Priory, they had warily given him what he wanted.
There was a light tap on the door. He looked through a small hole he had drilled through the thinnest part of the door and, satisfied, he unlocked it with a quick twist and stood well back. After all, you never knew.
Suspicious, the Priory servant stayed where he was.
‘There seems,’ he said, ‘to be a hole in the door.’
‘It was like that when I got here.’
‘Sister Wray has asked to see you.’
‘Who?’
‘I believe she has been asked by the Director to investigate your case. She is very highly respected.’
Cale wanted to ask more questions but as is often the case with awkward people he did not like to appear ignorant to someone who clearly disliked him – and for good reason, as this servant was the very person Cale had menaced about having the key. ‘People with charm,’ IdrisPukke had once said to him, ‘can get others to say yes without even asking the question. Having a real talent for charm is most corrupting. But don’t worry,’ he added, ‘that’s not something you’ll ever have to worry about.’
‘I’ll take you to her now,’ said the servant. ‘Then I’ll see about the hole in the door.’
‘Don’t bother. It creates a nice breeze.’
He put on his shoes and they left. The servant was surprised to see, given all the fuss he had made, that the obnoxious young man did not bother to lock the door behind him. But as long as he was not in there Cale couldn’t care less who else was.
In silence they walked through the Priory. Some of it was built recently, other parts were older, other parts older still. There were tall and grim-looking buildings with gargoyles grimacing from the walls, then a sudden change to the elegant and well-proportioned, mellow stone structures with large windows of irregular glass that in one piece reflected the sky and in another the grass, so various and changeable that the building seemed to be alive inside. Eventually, through passages in great walls, the silent pair emerged into a courtyard more pleasing in its scale and engaging simplicity than anything Cale had seen even in Memphis. The servant led him through an arch and up two flights of stairs. Each landing had a door in thick black oak to either side of the staircase. He stopped outside one on the top floor and knocked.
PART TWO
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’
7
‘Come in.’ It was a soft and attractive welcome. The servant opened the door and stood back, ushering Cale forward. ‘I’ll be back in an hour exactly,’ he said and pulled the door shut.
There were two large windows to Cale’s right, which flooded the room with light, and at the far side, sitting by the fire in a high backed chair that looked comfortable enough to live in, was a tall woman. Even sitting down Cale could see she was more than six foot tall, somewhat taller than Cale himself. Sister Wray was covered from head to foot in what looked like black cotton. Even her eyes were covered with a thin strip of material in which there were numerous small holes to allow her to see. Strange as all this was, there was something much stranger: in her right hand and resting on her lap was some sort of doll. Had one of the children in Memphis been holding it he would not have noticed – the Materazzi girls often had dolls that were spectacularly splendid to behold, with madly expensive costumes for every kind of occasion from a marriage to tea with the Duke. This doll was rather larger, with clothes of grey and white and a simply drawn face without any expression at all.
‘Come and sit down.’ Again the pleasant voice, warm and good-humoured. ‘Can I call you Thomas?’
‘No.’
There was a slight nod, but who could know of what kind? The head of the doll, however, moved slowly to look in his direction.
‘Please sit.’ But the voice was still all warmth and friendliness as it completely discounted his appalling rudeness. He sat down, the doll still watching and – though how, he thought, could it be so? – taking a pretty dim view of what she was looking at.
‘I’m Sister Wray. And this,’ she said, moving her covered head slightly to look at the puppet on her lap, ‘is Poll.’
Cale stared balefully at Poll and Poll stared balefully back. ‘What shall we call you?’
‘Everybody calls me “sir”.’
‘That seems a little formal. Can we agree on Cale?’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘What a horrible little boy.’
It was not especially difficult to surprise Cale, no more than most people, but it was no easy thing to make him show it. It was not the sentiment that widened his eyes – he had, after all, been called a lot worse – but the fact it was the puppet who said it. The mouth didn’t move because it wasn’t made to, but the voice most definitely came from the puppet and not Sister Wray.
‘Be quiet, Poll,’ she said, and turned slightly to face Cale. ‘You mustn’t pay any attention to her. I’m afraid I’ve indulged her and like many spoilt children she has rather too much to say for herself.’
‘What am I here for?’
‘You’ve been very ill. I read the report prepared by the assessor when you arrived.’
‘The moron that got me locked up with all the head-bangers?’
‘She does seem to have got the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Well, I’m sure she’s been punished. No? What a surprise.’
‘We all make mistakes.’
‘Where I come from, when you make a mistake something bad happens – usually involving a lot of screaming.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What’s there for you to be sorry about? Were you responsible?’
‘No.’
‘So, what are you going to do to make me all right again?’
‘Talk.’
‘Is that it?’
‘No. We’ll talk and then I’ll be better able to decide what medicines to prescribe, if that seems called for.’
‘Can’t we drop the talk and just get to the medicine?’
‘I’m afraid not. Talk first, medicine after. How are you today?’
He held up his hand with the missing finger. ‘It’s acting up.’
‘Often?’
‘Once a week, perhaps.’
She looked at her notes. ‘And your head and shoulder?’
‘They do their best to fill in when my hand isn’t hurting.’
‘You should have had a surgeon look at you. There was a request but it seems to have gone missing. I’ll sort out something for the pain.’
For half an hour she asked questions about his past, from time to time interrupted by Poll. When Cale, with some relish, told her he had been bought for sixpence Poll had called out, ‘Too much.’ But mostly the questions were simple and the answers grim, though Sister Wray didn’t dwell on any of them, and soon they were discussing the events of the night Gromek was killed and Kevin Meatyard escaped. When he’d finished she wrote for some time on the several small sheets of paper resting on her left knee as Poll leant over them and tried to read, and was pushed back repeatedly out of the way like a naughty but much loved dog.
‘Why,’ asked Cale, as Sister Wray took a couple of silent minutes to finish writing and Poll took to staring at him malevolently, although he also knew this could not be so, ‘why don’t you treat the nutters in the ward? Not enough money?’
Sister Wray’s head moved upright away from her work. ‘The people in that ward are there because their madness is of a particular kind. People are sick in the head in as many ways as they’re sick in the body. You wouldn’t try to talk a broken leg into healing and some breaks in the mind are almost the same. I can’t do anything for them.’
‘But you can do something for me?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
‘If you’d let her, you naughty boy.’
‘Be quiet, Poll.’
‘But it’s right.’ An unattractive little smirk from Cale. ‘I am a naughty boy.’
‘So I understand.’
‘I’ve done terrible things.’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence.
‘What happens if the people paying for me stop?’
‘Then your treatment will stop as well.’
‘That’s not very nice.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Just stopping – when I’m still sick.’
‘Like everyone else I must eat, and have somewhere to live. I’m not part of the order that runs the Priory. They’ll keep you in a charity ward but if I stop paying my way they’ll turf me out.’
‘Yes,’ said Poll. ‘We haven’t had Redeemers to look after us all our lives.’
This time Poll went uncorrected.
‘What if I don’t like you?’ said Cale. He had wanted to come up with a stinging reply to Poll but couldn’t think of one.
‘What,’ said Sister Wray, ‘if I don’t like you?’
‘Can you do that?’
‘Not like you? You seem very determined that I shouldn’t.’
‘I mean decide not to treat me if you don’t like me.’
‘Does that worry you?’
‘I’ve got a lot of things to worry about in my life – not being liked by you isn’t one of them.’
Sister Wray laughed at this – a pleasant, bell-like sound.
‘You like answering back,’ she said. ‘And I’m afraid it’s a weakness of mine as well.’
‘You have weaknesses?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then how can you help me?’
‘You’ve met a lot of people without weaknesses?’
‘Not so many. But I’m unlucky that way. Vague Henri told me I shouldn’t judge people by the fact that I’ve been unlucky enough to come across so many shit-bags.’
‘Perhaps it’s not just luck.’ Her tone was cooler now.
‘What’s your drift?’
‘Perhaps it’s not just a matter of chance, the dreadful people and the dreadful things that have happened to you.’
‘You still haven’t said what you mean.’
‘Because I don’t know what I mean.’
‘She means you’re a horrible little boy who stirs up trouble wherever he goes.’ Yet again Poll went uncorrected and she changed the subject.
‘Is Vague Henri a friend of yours?’
‘You don’t have friends in the Sanctuary, just people who share the same fate.’ This was not true but for some reason he wanted to appal her.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ said Sister Wray. The Priory servant stood at the door silently. Cale, uncertain and angry, got to his feet and walked across the room and onto the landing. Then he turned, about to say something, and saw Sister Wray opening a bedroom door and quickly closing it behind her. All the way back to his own room he considered what he’d seen, or what he thought he’d seen: a plain black-painted coffin.
‘Tell me about IdrisPukke.’ It was four days later and their sessions began at the same time every day. Poll was on Sister Wray’s lap but leaning all the way back on the arm of the chair and drooping over the side to signal her utter boredom and indifference to Cale’s presence.
‘He helped me in the desert and in Memphis when we were in prison.’
‘In what way?’
‘He told me how things were. He told me not to trust him or anybody else – not because people are liars, though a lot of them are, but because their interests are not your interests, and that to expect other people not to put what matters to them ahead of what matters to you is stupid.’
‘Some people would say that was cynical.’
‘I don’t know what cynical means.’
‘It means believing others are motivated only by self-interest.’
Cale thought about this for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said at last.
‘Yes, what?’
‘Yes, I understand what cynical means.’
‘Now you’re just trying to provoke me.’
‘No, I’m not. IdrisPukke warned me when he didn’t have to that I should remember that sometimes what mattered to me and what mattered to him would be different and that even if he might bend a little in my favour other people mostly wouldn’t – when push came to shove they’d be forced to choose what was best for them. And only the biggest dunce would believe that other people should put you ahead of themselves.’
‘So, no one sacrifices their own interests for others?’
‘The Redeemers do. But if that’s self-sacrifice you can shove it up your arse.’
Poll slowly raised her head from behind the sofa, looked at him then collapsed backwards with a groan of contempt as if the effort had been utterly worthless.
‘And yet you’re very angry with Arbell Materazzi. You think she betrayed you.’
‘She did betray me.’
‘But wasn’t she just consulting her own interest? Aren’t you being a hypocrite for hating her?’
‘What’s a hypocrite?’
‘Someone who criticizes other people for the same kind of things they do themselves.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Poll from behind the arm of the chair.
‘Be quiet, Poll.’
‘No, it isn’t the same,’ he said, looking straight at Sister Wray. ‘Twice I saved her life, the first time against all reason or odds – and nearly died for it.’
‘Did she ask you to?’
‘I don’t remember her asking to be thrown back – which is what I should’ve done.’
‘But isn’t love putting the other person first, no matter what?’
‘That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. Why would anyone do that?’
‘He’s right,’ said Poll, still with her head obscured by the arm of the chair.
‘I won’t tell you again,’ said Sister Wray.
‘Laugh if you like – I was ready to die for her.’
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘I am,’ said Poll.
‘She told me she loved me. I didn’t make her do it. She told me and made me think it was true. She didn’t have to but she did. Then she sold me to Bosco to save her own skin.’
‘And the rest of Memphis – her father, everyone? What do you think she should have done?’
‘She should have known I would have found a way. She should have done what she did and then thrown herself into the sea. She should have said that nothing on earth, not the whole world, could make her hand over someone she loved to be burnt alive. Though before they’d set fire to me they’d have cut my balls off and cooked them in front of me. You think I’m making that up?’
‘No.’
‘Whatever she did it should have been impossible to bear. But she put up with it well enough.’
There was a long silence in which Sister Wray, experienced as she was in the anger of the mad, wondered why the very walls of the room did not catch fire so dazzling was his rage. The silence went on – she was no fool and it was Cale who ended it.
‘Why do you have a coffin in your bedroom?’
‘May I ask how you know?’
‘Me? I’ve got eyes in the front of my head.’
‘Would you be reassured if I told you it has nothing to do with our business together?’
‘No. Nobody likes a coffin and me less than most. I’ll have to insist.’
‘Don’t tell that nosy boy anything,’ said Poll.
‘Go and look for yourself.’
Cale had more or less been expecting her to refuse to tell him anything although he had no idea what he’d have done if she had. He stood up and walked over to the far door and considered what he might be letting himself in for. Was it a trap? Unlikely. Was there something horrible inside? Possibly. What if it wasn’t a coffin and he was mistaken and would look foolish? The door was shut tight so he couldn’t just push it open. He could kick it open but that would look bad if there weren’t a couple of villains waiting on the other side. Would you rather, he thought, be dead or look stupid? He snatched at the handle, pushed it open, then quickly glanced around the room and dodged back again.
‘Cowardy cowardy custard,’ sang Poll. ‘Your shoes are made of mustard.’
There was no question it was a coffin and the room was empty. Empty except for whatever was inside the coffin. He turned into the bedroom, leant his head back and his arm forward and flipped the lid off then jumped back, windy as you like. He stared at the contents for a few seconds. It was plain wood, no lining. There were even a few wood shavings in the corner. For a moment he felt a surge of pure terror in his chest and thought he was going to throw up. Then he shut it away. He stepped back into the main room, closed the door behind him and went back to his chair.
‘Happy now, you big sissy?’ said Poll.
‘Why do you have an empty coffin in your bedroom?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Sister Wray. ‘It’s not for you.’
‘I do worry. Who’s it for?’
‘Me.’
‘Worried about cheesed off patients?’
She laughed at the idea – a lovely sound, thought Cale. Is she beautiful?
‘I belong to the order of Hieronymite nuns.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘Also called the Women of the Grave.’
‘Never heard of them either. Don’t like the sound of them much.’
‘No?’ He had the sense that she was smiling. Poll moved her head forward and raised her floppy right arm in a way that managed to indicate loathing and contempt.
‘The Hieronymites are an Antagonist order.’ She stopped, knowing this would be a disclosure of some significance.
‘I never talked to an Antagonist before. Do you wear that thing on your head because you’ve got green teeth?’
‘No. I mean I don’t have green teeth and I’m not hiding anything, though I suppose that would be a good enough reason. Did the Redeemers really tell you that Antagonists have green teeth?’
‘I don’t remember them actually telling us. Not Bosco anyway. It was just sort of generally known.’
‘Well, it’s not true. The Antagonist Hegemony, a kind of religious committee, declared the Hieronymites to be an extreme error and dissolved the order. They ordered us, death being the alternative, to carry a coffin with us for a hundred miles so that everyone would know not to give us water or food or shelter. We carry the coffin and an ounce of salt.’
‘Because?’
‘Salt of repentance.’
‘And did you? Repent, I mean.’
‘No.’
‘So we’ve something in common.’
‘We don’t,’ said Poll, ‘have anything in common with you, you godless killing swashbuckler.’
‘Don’t pay any attention to her,’ said Sister Wray.
Cale expected her to continue but Sister Wray could see he was interested and wanted him to be at a disadvantage.
‘So what did you do wrong?’ he asked at last.
‘We pointed out that in the Testament of the Hanged Redeemer, although he doesn’t actually say that heresy should be forgiven, he does say that we should love those that hate us and forgive their trespasses not once or twice but seventy times seven. St Augustine says that if a person falls into heresy for a second time they must be burnt alive. A Hanged Redeemer who said that if a man strikes you on the cheek you must turn the other and let him strike you a second time is not a God in favour of burning.’
‘I heard he said that from the Maid of Blackbird Leys – about turning the other cheek, I mean. But if you turn your cheek when people hit you they’ll keep hitting you until your head falls off.’
She laughed. ‘I understand what you say.’
‘You can understand all you like – I’m right, whatever you think.’
‘We’ll agree to disagree.’
‘They burned her.’
‘Who?’
‘The Maid of Blackbird Leys.’
‘Why?’
‘She was saying the kind of stuff you were saying. She’d got hold of a copy of the Testament too. No coffin and no salt though, she went straight to the fire.’
‘When you say she got hold of the Testament, you mean a secret copy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Antagonists don’t have secret copies of the Hanged Redeemer’s Testament. It’s an obligation to read it – it’s translated into a dozen languages.’
‘P’raps,’ he said, ‘it’s a different Testament.’
‘Some things must be the same if they burned her for saying that the Hanged Redeemer is a God of love and not punishment.’
‘If it’s that obvious why did they punish you for saying the same thing?’
‘That’s the way mankind is.’
‘God’s greatest mistake.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Me neither – it’s God who’s mankind’s greatest mistake.’
‘Wash your mouth out with soap, you impious sack of shit.’
This time Sister Wray did not rebuke Poll.
‘Looks like,’ said Cale, triumphant, ‘you need to teach your little friend about forgiveness.’
‘Perhaps,’ replied Sister Wray, ‘you’ve exceeded your limit.’
‘Seventy times seven,’ Cale laughed. ‘I’ve got loads left. You won’t get off that easy.’
‘Possibly. It depends on how great the sins you committed are.’
‘Does he say that, the Hanged Redeemer?’
‘No.’
‘There you are then.’
‘You’re not telling me the truth.’
‘I never said I would. Who are you? I don’t have to tell you anything I don’t want to.’
‘About the Maid of Blackbird Leys, I mean.’
‘I did what I could to save her.’ He wasn’t feeling so triumphant now. ‘That’s all there is.’
‘I don’t think that can be true. Am I wrong to think there’s more to say?’
‘No, you’re not wrong.’
‘Then why not tell me?’
‘I’m not afraid to tell you.’
‘I didn’t say you were.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘I agree. Yes, I did.’
He stared at the grid of tiny holes that covered her eyes. Maybe she was blind, he thought, and this was a waste of time. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
‘I signed the licence for her to be justified.’
‘Justified?’
‘Burned on a pile of wood. Alive. You ever seen that?’
‘No.’
‘It’s worse than it sounds.’
‘I believe you.’
‘I oversaw her being burned.’
‘Was that necessary – to be so closely involved?’
‘Yes, it was necessary.’
‘Why?’
‘None of your business.’
‘But it bothers you?’
‘Of course it fucking bothers me. She was a nice little girl. Brave. Very brave but stupid. There was nothing I could do.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘No, I’m not sure – maybe I could have jumped on a magic rope and swashbuckled my way out of a square of five thousand people and twenty-foot-high walls. Yeah, that’s what I should have done.’
‘Did you have to sign?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you have to be there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you have to be there?’ she asked again.
‘I went because I thought I should suffer … for signing … even though there was nothing else to do.’
‘Then you did all you could. That’s my opinion.’
‘That’s a relief.’ Quiet but acid. ‘Do you think she would have thought so?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? Do you forgive me for what I did to her?’
‘God forgives you.’
‘I didn’t ask about God. Do you forgive me?’
8
Of arms and the man I sing, and of cheese; of the rage of Thomas Cale and of adequate supplies of oats for the horses delivered in the right place at the correct time; I sing of thousands going down to the house of death, carrion for the dogs and birds, and of the provision of tents, of cooks, water for ten thousand in the middle of the barren wilderness; I sing of a sufficiency of axle-grease and cooking oil.
Think of a picnic with family and friends, consider the failure of all to meet up at the proper time and place (‘I thought you said twelve o’clock’; ‘I thought the meeting place was at the elm tree on the other side of town’). Consider the endless wrongness of things, consider the jam mislaid, the site of the picnic shared with a swarm of bees, the rain, the angry farmer, the row between brothers festering for twenty years. Now imagine the bulls of war let loose to bring about the ending of mankind. To bring about the apocalypse requires cheese, cooking oil, oats, water and axle-grease to be ordered, the order made up and the order delivered. That’s why Bosco was not fighting but wasting the time of kings, emperors, supreme rulers, potentates and their armies of ministers and under-secretaries of this and that with an endless blizzard of treaties, pacts, protocols, pledges and covenants all designed to create as much space and time for the essential trivia required in order for the wiping out of the human race to be made possible. The end of the world had been postponed until the following year.
As nothing really happened in a hundred walled towns for month after month throughout the four quarters, other more imminent threats emerged: disease, fear, the failure to plant a crop, the inflation of money, a longing for home and the hope that everything would somehow sort itself out. The refugees began to return home. As a result, in Spanish Leeds the typhoid abated when an old midden, opened for the influx of alarmed peasants and which had leaked human excrement into the water supply and caused the plague, was shut down because it was no longer needed. Trevor Lugavoy recovered, as did Kevin Meatyard who turned up at the address he’d been given and started work humping sacks of grain around the city.
The Materazzi lived on like a great family fallen on the worst of times. They had no money but they did have capital of sorts: the brains of Vipond and IdrisPukke and the always reliable gold standard of snobbery. Even the surliest barrowboy-done-good, having made his fortune in bacon or horse-glue, discovered when confronted by the supercilious hauteur of the Materazzi women that something was lacking in their lives: they were as common as muck and only a Materrazi beauty could begin to remove that taint. Imagine the thought of having a wife with a thousand-year-old-name, one that could be passed on to the children. What a triumph! Underneath the stroppy bluster your barrowboy soul would no longer ping an imperfect note. And all you needed to become one of the who whom was the most fair-minded egalitarian of all: buckets of cash.
The Materazzi men may have been shits but they were not snobs in the way their wives and daughters were. They treated the rich common-persons of Spanish Leeds with the affection they gave to their horses and dogs. So well were these horses and dogs beloved that they imagined they were equals. It must be said, though, that the Materazzienne, as the women came to be called in Spanish Leeds, were not always prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and marry into a family who’d made their money in glue or marmalade. But in time, the reality of what was required when you were special but had no special abilities meant that many were forced to make their way, weeping, down the aisle to a future husband who had made his money in rendered fat or pork scratchings. Vipond had strong-armed a tax on these unions but the flow of money was nothing like as much as he needed, for all his furious urgings to the heads of the Ten Families to ‘beat some sense’ into their daughters. His old policy of adding his brains to Materazzi money now had to bend to the former. In this, IdrisPukke and Thomas Cale were what he had instead of a treasury. IdrisPukke’s return from the Priory with news of what had happened was a disappointment, if for less personal reasons than those of his half-brother. He admired Cale and was fascinated by him but there was no personal affection. Still, he’d hoped that the boy would be nearly better by now.
‘Is Cale worth pursuing?’ he asked IdrisPukke. ‘Be frank with me. There’s too much at stake not to be.’
‘What are you asking me to be honest with you for?’ came the bad-tempered reply. ‘You don’t have the right to make a demand like that from me. He is what he is.’
‘There’s no arguing with that.’
‘If you want to drop him then you can drop me, too.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic – you’ll burst into an aria next. I misspoke. Let’s imagine I never said anything.’
So, strapped for cash though he was, Vipond sent a messenger to Cyprus every two weeks to meet Cale’s requests for information: maps, books, rumours, such reports as Vipond and IdrisPukke could borrow or steal. In return, but slowly, came his maps and his guesses and certainties about what Bosco would do, and how he could be frustrated, and the minimum number of troops and resources it would take. It was slow for one reason: Cale was sick and he was not improving. There were times when it seemed he was on the mend, sleeping for twelve hours a day instead of fourteen, being able to walk for half an hour a day and work for the same. But then the attacks, the retching and terrible weariness came back. For no reason that he or Sister Wray could determine, the illness ebbed and flowed according to laws entirely of its own.
‘Perhaps it’s the moon,’ said Cale.
‘It’s not,’ replied Sister Wray. ‘I checked.’
Poll was sure what was wrong. ‘You’re a very naughty boy and all shagged out by wickedness.’
‘P’raps Woodentop is right,’ said Cale.
‘Perhaps she is, though she has a nerve calling anyone else naughty. You are worn out by the wickedness of others. The Redeemers poured it into you and now your soul is trying to spit it out.’
‘There can’t be much left.’
‘You haven’t swallowed a bad pork chop – you’ve swallowed a mill.’
‘One of those things that blow round with the wind?’
‘No – like a salt mill. A magic salt mill, like in the fairy tale.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Once upon a time the sea was filled with fresh water. One day a fisherman pulled up an old lamp in his nets. When he started to polish it up a genie came out who’d been imprisoned in the lamp by an evil magician. As a reward, the genie gave him a salt mill that produced salt for ever and ever. Then the genie flew away but the old fisherman was so exhausted that he dropped the mill and it fell to the bottom of the sea where the salt just came pouring out, never stopping. That’s why the sea is salty.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘We must stop the mill from grinding. We need to find some medicine.’
‘About time.’
Sister Wray did not react. Poll was not so reticent.
‘You ungrateful hooligan.’
‘Grateful for what?’ he said, still looking at Sister Wray who turned to the puppet.
‘He has a point. We must do better.’
‘Is that dummy part of your religion?’
‘No. Poll is just Poll.’
This made it all seem stranger than it had at first sight. It was true that he’d been startled on first meeting them. On the other hand he was used to, expected even, anyone dressed as a priest or nun to proclaim abnormal beliefs and behave in an outlandish manner.
The Redeemers’ prayer before breakfast stated their firm belief in the Eight Impossible Things. Almost every minute of every day for his entire life they had told him something about devils flying above him in the air or angels at his shoulder weeping when he sinned. Deranged behaviour and mad beliefs were normal to him. He was not even very impressed by Sister Wray’s talent for the different voice that seemed to come from Poll – he had seen voice-throwers outside the Red Opera on bullfight days.
One day he knocked on Sister Wray’s door but there was no answer. He was perfectly aware that he should knock once more but he opened the door after the shortest pause possible. He hoped, of course, to find Sister Wray without her obnubilate (she had told him what her veil was called when he asked). Surely she wouldn’t wear it when she was on her own? He might even enter to find her naked. Would she be big-breasted and with red nipples the size of the dainty saucers they used at Materazzi tea parties? He had dreamt of her like this. Or would she be ugly and old with the skin hanging from her chest like damp washing on a clothesline? Or something else he hadn’t thought of? His distant hopes were to be disappointed. He entered quietly – cats would have begrudged him. She was in her chair but asleep and lightly snoring, as was Poll – though in a completely different tone and rhythm. Sister Wray’s snoring was like that of a small child, soft and low. Poll’s was like an old man dreaming of grudges.
He sat down and listened to them phewing, susurrating and wheezing for a while, and considered searching her bedroom. He stood up, decided against it, and instead moved to her side and began lifting her veil.
‘What are you doing, thou wretched thing of blood?’
‘Looking for something I lost,’ said Cale.
‘Well, you won’t find it there,’ replied Poll.
Cale dropped the lower edge of the veil as carefully as he had picked it up, then went and sat down as guiltless as a bad cat. Cale sat for a full minute while Poll stared at him.
‘Are you going to wake her up?’ he said to Poll.
‘No.’
‘We could talk,’ said Cale, affably.
‘Why?’
‘Get to know each other.’
‘I know,’ said Poll, ‘as much about you as I want to.’
‘I’m all right when you get to know me.’
‘No, you aren’t.’
‘You think you understand what I’m really like?’
‘You think I don’t?’
Sister Wray slept on.
‘What have I ever done to you?’
It wasn’t an aggrieved question, just a matter of curiosity.
‘You know very well.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘She,’ said Poll, looking up at Sister Wray, ‘is all nobility and grace and generosity.’
‘So?’
‘Her weakness, though I love her for it, is that these great gifts that she passes on to others smother her proper fear of you.’
Though he tried not to show it, Cale was rattled by this. ‘She’s got no reason to be afraid of me.’
There was a gasp of impatience from Poll.
‘You think that the only thing people should be afraid of is what you can do to them – that you could punch them on the nose or cut their head off? She’s afraid of what you are – of what your soul can do to hers.’
‘What’s that strange buzzing noise in my ears?’ said Cale. ‘It sounds like words but they don’t make any sense.’
‘You understand what I’m talking about. You think it just as much as I do.’
‘No, I don’t, because everything you say is camel-shit.’
‘You know … you infect other people … you know exactly, you snivelling little chisler.’
‘I don’t snivel. No one’s ever heard me snivel. And it’s lucky for you I don’t know what a chisler is.’
‘Or what?’ said a triumphant Poll. ‘You’d cut my head off?’
‘You don’t have a head. You’re made of wool.’
‘I am not,’ said an indignant Poll, quickly. ‘But at least I don’t suffer from soul murder.’
Then for the first time he heard Poll gasp – a guilty sigh of someone who’s let the cat out of the bag.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing,’ said Poll.
‘It’s not nothing. Why so guilty? What are you afraid of?’
‘Not you, anyway.’
‘Then tell me, wool-for-brains.’
‘You deserve to be told.’ Poll looked away at the sleeping Sister Wray, still snoring like a two-year-old. A pause. Making up her mind. Then Poll looked back at Cale with all the kindness, it seemed to the boy, in the eyes of a weasel he had once come across while it was eating a rabbit. It had raised its head and looked at him for a moment, utterly indifferent, and then gone back to its meal.
‘I heard her talking to the Director when she thought I was asleep.’
‘I thought you two knew everything about each other – little heart-pals.’
‘You don’t see anything about the two of us. You think you do but you don’t.’
‘Get on with it. I can feel my left leg going to sleep.’
‘You asked for it.’
‘Now I can feel my other leg wants forty winks.’
‘Soul murder is the worst thing that can happen to you.’
‘Worse than death? Worse than five hours dying with your giblets hanging out of your tum? Your liver dribbling out of your bread basket?’ Cale was laying it on thick but not thicker than it was.
‘Soul murder,’ said Poll, ‘is living death.’
‘Get on with it, I’ve got fish to fry.’
But the truth was he didn’t much like the sound of it, nor, even if Poll did have wool between the ears, the look in her eyes.
‘Soul murder is what happens to children who take more than forty blows to the heart.’
‘Do blows to the head count? Never had one to the heart.’
‘They killed your joy – that’s what she said.’
‘You wouldn’t be lying at all? I was wrong about the wool – that nasty tongue of yours sounds like it’s made from the arse hairs of a sheep-shagger – most likely I should think that was a considerable possibility.’
‘I don’t think your joy is dead.’
‘I don’t care what you think.’
‘Your joy is all in laying waste to things – blight and desolation is what makes your soul glad.’
‘That’s a bloody lie – you were here when I told Wray …’
‘Sister Wray!’
‘… when I told her about the girl I saved in the Sanctuary. I didn’t even know her.’
‘And you’ve regretted it ever since.’
‘I was joking.’
‘Nobody’s laughing – nobody does when you’re around, not for long.’
‘I got rid of Kevin Meatyard.’
‘Says you.’
‘I saved Arbell Materazzi.’
‘It wasn’t your soul doing the thinking, was it? It was your prick.’
‘And I saved her brother.’
‘That’s true,’ said Poll. ‘I agree that you did good there.’
‘So you’re wrong – you said it yourself,’ said Cale suspiciously.
‘I didn’t say your heart was dead, lots of soul-dead people have a heart, a good heart. I bet you were a lovely little boy. I bet you would have grown up a real goody-goody. But the Redeemers got you and murdered your soul and that was that. Not everybody can be saved. Some wounds go too deep’
‘Drop dead.’ He was rattled.
‘It’s not your fault,’ said a delighted Poll. ‘You can’t help yourself. You weren’t born bad but you’re bad all the same. Nothing can be done. Poor Cale. Nothing can be done.’
‘That’s not what she believes,’ he said, looking at Sister Wray.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘She never said that.’
‘She didn’t have to. I know what she thinks even before she thinks it. You’re going to make her suffer, aren’t you?’
‘Sister Wray?’
‘Not Sister Wray, you idiot – that treacherous slut you’re always whingeing about.’
‘I never hurt her.’
‘Not yet, you haven’t. But you will. And when you cross that river we’re all going to suffer – because once she’s dead there’ll be nothing to stop you. You know the river I’m talking about, don’t you?’
‘There’s that buzzing sound in my ears again.’
‘It’s the river of no return – THE WATERS OF DEATH – and over that river is the MEADOW OF DESOLATION. That’s where you’re heading, young man, despair’s your destination. You’re the salt in our wound, that’s what you are. You stink of misery and pretty soon the smell is going to fill the whole world.’
Poll was beginning to shout.
‘I’d be sorry for you if we all weren’t going to get it in the neck as a result. You’re the angel of death all right – you stink of it. Cross over the river of no return into the land of lost content, the valley of the shadow of death …’
Poll had raised her voice so much that Sister Wray came to with a loud snort.
‘What?’ she said.
There was only silence. ‘Oh, Thomas, it’s you. I fell asleep. Have you been here long?’
‘No,’ said Cale. ‘Just got here.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not feeling very well. We could continue tomorrow if you wouldn’t mind.’
Cale nodded.
Sister Wray stood up and walked him to the door. As he was about to leave she said, ‘Thomas, Poll didn’t say anything to you while I was asleep?’
‘Don’t believe a thing that snivelling little chisler tells you!’ squawked an alarmed Poll.
‘Be quiet,’ said Sister Wray.
Cale looked at her. This was odd stuff to grasp even for a boy who had drunk deeply and at a very early age from the fountain of the strangeness of others.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It didn’t say anything and I wouldn’t have paid any attention even if it had.’
9
‘That’s easy for you to say. Have you ever allowed another man to fondle you?’
‘Not as far as I can remember.’
Conn was arguing with Lord Vipond, watched by Arbell and a fascinated IdrisPukke.
‘Has the King ever touched you?’ asked Arbell, not altogether patiently.
‘No.’
‘Then why all this fuss?’
‘Every philosopher can stand the toothache,’ said Conn to his wife, ‘except for the one who has it.’
This was a reference to one of IdrisPukke’s most carefully polished sayings.
‘Well,’ said Vipond, ‘if you’d like to swap banalities …’ this was aimed at his brother … ‘why don’t you consider this one: every problem is an opportunity.’
The difficulty and the golden chance they were discussing involved King Zog of Switzerland and Albania, who’d taken a very particular shine to Conn Materazzi. Many, of course, felt the same about the tall and beautiful blond young man, so strong and graceful with his easy manners and openness to all. The cocky little shit of less than a year before had needed to grow up and had done so in such an appealing way that he surprised even his admirers. Arbell, who had once had a crush upon the spoilt young boy – though she treated him with coolness and even disdain as a result – now found that she was falling in love with him. A little late perhaps, given that they had been married for more than seven months and had a son whose early arrival, yet plump size, had been the subject of some ungenerous rumours. Though certainly more biddable than before, and considerably so, he had his limits, one of them being his aversion to everything about his royal admirer: his stained clothes (‘I can tell you everything he has eaten in the last month’), his tongue (‘It flaps about in his mouth like a wet sheet on a washing line’), his hands (‘Always fidgeting with himself and his favourite’s trousers’). His eyes (‘watery’). His feet (‘enormous’). Even the way he stood (‘Repulsive!’).
‘The King,’ said Vipond, ‘holds all of us in his hands – and more besides. Every country nervous about the Redeemers looks to him for a sign of what they might do. Without him, the Materazzi will descend into a kind of nothing – that’s to say your wife, your child and you.’
‘So you want me to lick his arse?’
‘Conn!’ A sharp rebuke from his wife.
There was an unpleasant pause.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Conn at last.
‘I’ve heard worse,’ replied Vipond.
‘Can I say something?’ asked IdrisPukke.
‘Must you?’ said Vipond.
IdrisPukke smiled and looked at Conn.
‘My dear boy,’ he began, winking at Conn so the others couldn’t see – a sign that he was on his side in conspiring against the other two.
‘If he touches me, I’ll cut his bloody head off,’ Conn said, interrupting IdrisPukke’s attempt to handle him.
IdrisPukke smiled again as the others sighed and grimaced in exasperation.
‘You’re not going to cut his head off because you’re not going to let him touch you.’
‘And what if he does?’
‘You stand up,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘look at him as if you’d seen more lovely things coming out of the back end of a dog and leave the room in silence. You say nothing.’
‘If that’s the best you can do, don’t let us keep you,’ said Vipond.
‘The King is a snob,’ replied IdrisPukke, ‘and, like all snobs, at heart he’s a worshipper. All his life he’s been looking for someone who looks down on him to adore. Conn looks like a young god – a young god with a bloodline that goes back as far as the great freeze. He’s wonderstruck.’
‘I can think of another word,’ said Conn.
‘Maybe that, too. But he wants you to treat him with contempt. He won’t dare touch you. Every time you look at him – and don’t look at him except once or twice a meeting – you pour every quintilla of your loathing and disgust into it.’
‘That won’t be hard.’
‘There you are, then.’
With this unexpected resolution, IdrisPukke chatted away about a dinner he’d been at the previous night and then Arbell eased Conn out of the door and the two brothers were left on their own.
‘I thought that went very well.’ It was not IdrisPukke talking in honeyed tones of self-congratulation but Vipond, whose scowl had vanished completely, to be replaced by a look of considerable satisfaction.
‘Do you think she caught on?’
‘Probably,’ replied Vipond. ‘But she’s a smart little miss. She won’t say anything.’
‘You’re wrong, by the way’ said IdrisPukke.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said, “Every problem is an opportunity.”’ IdrisPukke walked over to the window to catch the last rays of the setting sun. ‘What I actually always say is, “Every opportunity is a problem.”’
Vague Henri was disturbed, but in an unusual a-fish-has-just-fallen-out-of-the-sky-in-front-of-you way. Two days earlier he had reached into his pocket to pay for a pack of cigarillos at Mr Sobranie’s Health Tobacco shop and discovered that his loose change was gone and had been replaced by a carrot. More precisely, a carrot that had been not very skilfully carved into the shape of an erect penis with the word ‘YOU’ cut into the testicles. Eventually he decided that he’d been the victim of some smart alec street lurcher. The question why a skilled thief would steal the loose change in his left pocket but not the wallet in his right, which had nearly thirty dollars in it, he put to the back of his mind. But now the oddly peculiar thing that he had put to the back of his mind couldn’t stay there any longer because it had happened again. This time he had discovered a hard-boiled egg, with the two staring eyes of a village idiot and a mouth with the tongue flapping to one side drawn on the shell. On the reverse of the egg was a statement:
VAGUE HENRI
TRUE
All through the night Vague Henri turned over in his brain what the significance of the two gibes might be and whether they were a threat or not. Then there was a knock at the door; he answered it, taking the precaution of hiding a long knife behind his back. But his visitor had the sense to stand well back.
‘So, it was you?’
‘Who else would it be?’ said Kleist. ‘Nobody else knows what a prick you are the way I do.’
Vague Henri was so pleased to see his old friend that the bollocking that followed for running off on his own when they were in the Scablands lasted barely five minutes before they were sitting down and smoking two cigarillos of Mr Sobranie’s Health Tobacco and drinking what remained of a bottle of hideous Swiss wine. Both of them, of course, had extraordinary events to speak of. ‘You first as you’ve sinned the most,’ said Vague Henri and was astonished as Kleist, without warning, began to weep uncontrollably. It was half an hour before Kleist had recovered enough to tell him what had happened. As he listened Vague Henri grew pale and then red with anger and disgust.
‘There, there,’ he said to the weeping boy, patting him on the shoulder because he didn’t know what else to do. ‘There, there.’
It’s not all the world that is a stage but each human soul: the cast list in each of our souls is long and varied and most of the characters queue in the wings and down the dark passages and into the basement, never to be auditioned for a part. Even for the ones who do make it onto the stage it’s only to carry a spear or announce the arrival of the King. In this expectant but likely to be disappointed line of inner selves waiting for the chance to strut out in the world we usually find our inner fool, our private liar, our unrevealed oaf and, next to him, our wisest, best self; our hero and then our coward, our cheat and saint and next to him our child, then next our brat, our thief, our slut, our man of principle, our glutton, our lunatic, our man of honour and our thug.
Called unexpectedly to the front of Vague Henri’s soul queue that night was a most dangerous character (for Vague Henri at any rate): the part in him that believed in justice and fair play.
Cale dealt with his past through being in a state of almost constant rage, Kleist by disdain for everything that might touch his heart, Vague Henri by being cheerful in the face of adversity. The strategies of the first two had failed (Cale had gone mad and Kleist had fallen in love) and now it was Vague Henri’s turn. The idea that one of them could have married and made another human being, an actual baby, pink, small and helpless, touched him with rage at the Redeemers so deep that the deaths of Kleist’s wife and son at their hands burnt like the sun. So he called on the maddest of all his cast of characters: the one who wanted life to be fair, who wanted those who had done harm to be punished and justice for all.
While an exhausted Kleist snored in miserable oblivion on the bed, Vague Henri smoked his way through the last snout of his Health Tobacco and worked on his spidery and ill-advised conspiracy. Demoted to the back of the line in Vague Henri’s inner cast list, his wiser self was calling to him: delay, fudge, avoid, put off as long as possible the moment when you must commit yourself and others to the business of death. But it was the voice of rage that had his ear.
If IdrisPukke had known what Vague Henri was planning he would have had a stroke – instead he was enjoying the absolute success of his plan to manipulate Conn in the matter of the King. With every disdainful look and every sigh of contempt Zog was only the more enthralled by Conn. He’d finally reached snob heaven: he’d met someone who was worthy to look down on him.
Swift though his rise had been, and along with it that of the Materazzi in general, even Conn’s most star-struck admirers were astonished at the announcement that the King was to make him commander of all the armies of Switzerland and Albania. This extraordinary and apparently foolish step, given the threat to their existence that faced the Swiss, was less opposed than it might have been because everyone had been expecting the job to go to Viscount Harwood, King Zog’s now former favourite, a man of no military experience or indeed talent of any kind. It was reliably said that, on learning of Conn’s preferment, Harwood retired to his bed and cried for a week. The more scurrilous rumours, probably untrue, whispered that his penis had shrunk to the size of an acorn. In light of this, Conn’s appointment was less absurd than it first appeared. He had changed a good deal since the ruinous shambles at Silbury Hill. He had come very close to a hideous death there and been forced to endure rescue by someone he’d once bullied and despised. Even IdrisPukke, who had burst into laughter on hearing the news of his appointment to such a ludicrously powerful position, began to realize after a few days of meetings with Conn and Vipond that defeat, death and humiliation at Silbury had been the making of the young man. Here was someone who had been brought up to fight and who had learnt his bitter lessons early. In addition Conn, as Vipond had advised him to do, listened carefully to IdrisPukke and was clearly and genuinely impressed by the work he had done on the coming war with the Redeemers. Conn was not to know that much of the intelligence had been supplied by Thomas Cale.
‘But what if Cale comes back? How is Conn going to take to that?’ said IdrisPukke.
‘Does he know?’ asked Vipond.
‘Does he know what?’
‘The thing it would be better if he didn’t know.’
‘Probably not. If we’re thinking of the same thing.’
‘We are.’
‘Is he likely to come back – Cale, I mean?’ asked his brother.
‘Apparently not.’
It was an unhappy reply and it would have been even more unhappy if he could have seen the boy who he continued, to his surprise, to miss so much. The circles around Cale’s eyes were, if anything, darker – the skin ever whiter with exhaustion at the retching that afflicted him sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for hours. Some days were better – there were even weeks when he thought perhaps it was lifting from him. But the attacks always returned eventually, greater or lesser according to their own devices and desires.
During one of these better weeks, Sister Wray said that she wanted to climb to the top of a nearby hill, both in search of the truth of the rumours that blue sage and orange neem grew at the top and because the view of the sea and mountains was said to be the best in Cyprus.
‘It may be a hill,’ said a breathless Cale, a few hundred feet into their climb, ‘but it feels like a mountain.’
It was as well they started early as Cale had to rest every few hundred yards. At their sixth stop he fell asleep for nearly an hour. Sister Wray went for a wander up and down through the dry scrub and crumbly earth. Even though there had been little rain in the last few months, everywhere, hidden amongst the scraggy burberry bushes and thistle trees, were the tiny pleasures of purple knapweed, rock roses, the tiny eggy flowers of thorowax.
When she got back Cale was awake, and looking pale and even more black around the eyes.
‘We’ll go back.’
‘I won’t make the top but we can go on a bit longer.’
‘Big cry-baby pansy,’ said Poll.
‘One day,’ replied Cale, his voice a whisper, ‘I’m going to unravel you and knit someone a new arsehole.’
Some fifteen hundred feet above them, and two hundred feet below the top of the hill, was a V-shaped rift cut into the hill by the winter rains. It was the easiest way up, and waiting for Cale and Sister Wray to pass through it were the Two Trevors and Kevin Meatyard. Kevin was all puppyish excitement but the Two Trevors were uneasy. They were too well aware that the iron law of unintended consequences seemed to apply even more sharply to the planned act of murder than to other enterprises. They always designed their assassinations as a story where the chain of events could be upset at any point by a trivial detail. They had failed to kill the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo because the carriage driver, a late replacement for the usual driver who’d cut his arm that morning while replacing a wheel as a precaution, had panicked over the hastily given instructions over where to go and taken a wrong turn, not once (the Two Trevors had taken this into account) but twice. Had they succeeded in killing the old buffer who knows what the consequences might have been – but they didn’t, so something else happened instead.
The return of the Two Trevors to Spanish Leeds had been something of a welcome anti-climax. Kitty seemed to believe their reassurances that while they could not reveal their client’s business they were not in any way a threat to Kitty’s interests (not true, as it happened, but neither realized that the other had a stake in Thomas Cale). Kitty guessed that the Redeemers were probably involved but while the political situation was so confused he didn’t want to antagonize them without good reason. He’d considered, of course, disappearing the Two Trevors into the rubbish tips at Oxyrinchus just to be on the safe side. But he now decided that being on the safe side meant letting them go – much to Cadbury’s irritation, given the trouble he’d been put to in order to bring them back. In addition to their lives, the Two Trevors had a lesser stroke of luck: they’d discovered where Cale had taken refuge when Lugavoy had his ear bent by Kevin Meatyard’s boastfulness. A delighted Kevin had discovered Thomas Cale’s reputation as some sort of flinty desperado and was determined to let everyone know that he’d given this celebrity hardcase any number of bloody good hidings. No one really believed him but Kevin’s appearance, as well as his violent boasting, made people nervous. If the human body was the best picture of the human soul, Kevin was clearly someone best avoided. Hence the complaints to Trevor Lugavoy from Kevin’s employer and hence their jammy discovery of Cale’s precise whereabouts. ‘I don’t like ridiculous good luck,’ said Trevor Kovtun, ‘it reminds me of preposterous bad luck.’
The three of them had arrived at Yoxhall, the town outside the Priory, just the day before Cale and Sister Wray’s trip up Biggin Hill. For a hundred years Yoxhall had been a spa town where the reasonably well-off came to take the waters and visit their relatives in the Priory, which had grown up there in the belief that the local hot spring was beneficial in the treatment of those suffering from ‘nerves’. It was out of season and easy to get lodgings with a view of the main gate of the Priory. It wasn’t possible to arrive at an exact plan until they’d thoroughly examined the site and laid out a strategy or two for escaping. While they were eating breakfast early that morning, an excited Kevin had rushed down from overlooking the gates to report that Cale, and some sort of strange nun he’d seen about the place a couple of times when he was incarcerated, were headed towards Biggin Hill. They followed, realizing that more suspicious good luck was offering them a golden opportunity even though the Two Trevors didn’t believe in golden opportunities. It was clear Cale and the nun were heading for the top but they kept stopping to rest so the three of them were able to get well ahead, even though they had to take a much steeper route to scrutinize the cut in the hillside that Kevin assured them would be an excellent place for an ambush. He turned out to be right – he was ugly and offensive but not stupid. In fact, when he wasn’t boasting or making people uneasy he was astute in a distastefully coarse way.
In addition to their dislike of unexpected good fortune, there was also the problem of the nun or whatever she was. It was more than just a professional reluctance to kill someone they hadn’t been paid to, but a moral uneasiness. The Trevors weren’t deluded enough to believe that everyone they killed had got what was coming to them, though it was usually true. Indeed it was probably always true. Why would anyone spend the huge amounts needed to hire the Two Trevors on someone who was innocent? But however ideal a place this was to slaughter Thomas Cale – who unquestionably deserved what was coming to him – there was no way they could leave either a witness or someone to raise the alarm. Therefore it was with peculiar mixed feelings that they watched as Cale and the nun turned back. There were no mixed feelings from Kevin Meatyard: he punched the ground with frustration and swore so loudly that Trevor Lugavoy told him to shut up or he’d be sorry. They waited an hour and then made their silent and bad-tempered way back down the hill.
The Trevors were not the only observers that day. Watching from a beautifully kept maison de maître at the bottom of Biggin Hill were Daniel Cadbury and Deidre Plunkett.
Their late arrival that morning in pursuit of the Two Trevors meant that it was only when Cale and Sister Wray returned, followed an hour later by the two men and their lumpy companion, that Cadbury realized he’d come close to failing to protect Cale. Either something had gone wrong or for some reason the Two Trevors were following Cale but were not intending to kill him. But what could they be up to if it wasn’t a killing?
Even though it was off-season for Yoxhall there was enough business from the families of the wealthy mad to keep things ticking over. Cadbury didn’t want to risk going into the town and stumbling into the Two Trevors so he decided to send Deidre instead. They had, of course, seen her briefly when he brought them back to Spanish Leeds but she’d been dressed in her usual sexless serge outfit. Something could be done about that.
Cadbury ordered the bumpkin who looked after the house to fetch a dressmaker.
‘You do have dressmakers?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Tell him to bring a selection of wigs. And keep your mouth shut, and tell the dressmaker to do the same.’ He gave the bumpkin two dollars, and five for the dressmaker.
‘Do you think five dollars was enough?’ he said to Deidre when the old man had left. He wasn’t interested in her opinion concerning the hush money, he was just trying to get her to talk. He needed to find out if she was aware that he had murdered her sister. The more time he spent with this woman, who was even more peculiar than the late Jennifer, the more it preyed on his mind. Deidre rarely said anything much. But whenever he asked her a direct question she would reply with some gnomic saying – or what seemed like one. Whatever she said was delivered with a faint smile and in a tone so laconic that it was hard not to think that she was mocking him. At times she seemed as silently knowing as a smug Buddha. But what was she wise and silently knowing about? Was she just biding her time?
‘Enough is as good as a feast to a wise man,’ she said, in reply to his question about the money. Was there a glint of scorn flickering in the depths of those flat and unresponsive eyes? And if so, what did it mean? Did she know and was waiting? That was the question. Did she know?
As there was nothing else to be done until the bumpkin reappeared, he tried to read. He brought out his new copy of The Melancholy Prince, the old one having fallen apart during a visit to Oxyrinchus to arrange for the removal of a corrupt official responsible for the city’s rubbish tips. He was corrupt in the sense that he was holding back on Kitty the Hare’s share of the profits, owed to him by virtue of the fact that it was Kitty the Hare who had paid the bribe to put him in charge. When he sadly decided to throw away his crumbling copy of The Melancholy Prince – so many memories – he was intrigued to see that his soon-to-be victim had rather cleverly divided the local bins into different ones for food, miscellaneous trash and paper. According to his contract with the city he was supposed to take the paper to Memphis, where he claimed it could be sold to offset the cost of disposal and hence explain why his bid for the contract was lower than that of his rivals. This was a lie. In fact he took the paper out into the nearby desert and buried it.
Now Cadbury opened his new copy and began reading, but though it was pleasurable to read again the familiar words (‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember’d’), Deidre’s silent presence put him off.
‘Are you much for books at all?’ he asked.
‘Of making many books, there is no end,’ she replied. ‘And much study is a weariness of the flesh.’
Was there a smile there? he thought. There was definitely a smile.
‘You don’t think that knowledge is a good thing, then?’ Cadbury’s tetchy sarcasm was not at all in doubt.
‘He that increases knowledge,’ she said, ‘increases sorrow.’
This actually did annoy him. Cadbury was an educated man and took his own learning, and the learning of others, seriously.
‘So you don’t take the view that the unexamined life isn’t worth living?’ More sarcasm.
She did not say anything for a moment, as if allowing his outburst to land in the dry air of the room, dusty with motes in the shafts of sunlight coming through the small windows.
‘For him that is joined to the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion.’
To Cadbury this seemed like a threat, the more threatening because delivered even more flatly than usual.
Was her sister the dead lion? Was he the living dog?
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘some new clothes will cheer you up.’
She smiled, a rare event.
‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’
Twenty minutes later the bumpkin returned with the dressmaker, weighed down with holdalls. Cadbury had explained that he wanted Deidre to put on a dress and a wig – her hair was cut almost to the skull – and go to look for the Two Trevors. He couldn’t imagine they would recognize her; once the dressmaker was finished, neither did Cadbury. The dress and the false hair did not transform her into a beauty. If anything she looked even stranger than before – like a doll, an automaton that he’d seen demonstrated at Old King Cole’s Palace in Boston. Once the powder and lip rouge had been painted on, Deidre looked very strange indeed, as if someone had described a woman to a sculptor blind from birth, who’d then had a stab at making one that had turned out impressive in its way, given his limitations, but still not entirely convincing. Still, it would certainly do the trick. No one was going to recognize her.
By now it was dark. He paid off the dressmaker and the bumpkin, gestured Deidre over to the largest window and raised up the lantern so she could see herself reflected in the glass. He thought her expression softened for a moment as she swayed back and forth and then he saw an expression of pure delight.
‘Who is this?’ she said. ‘Who comes out of the desert like a pillar of smoke scented with myrrh and frankincense?’ And then she laughed.
‘I’ve never heard you laugh before,’ said Cadbury, mystified.
‘There is a time to laugh,’ said Deidre, as she swayed back and forth admiring herself in the window, ‘and a time to weep.’
Having taken Cadbury’s instructions as to what she should and should not do (‘Don’t be seen by the Two Trevors and don’t kill anyone’), she was gone for nearly two hours, during which Cadbury had plenty of time to consider what his grandmother had meant when she repeatedly told him that worrying is the Devil’s favourite pastime.
If he’d known the truth about Deidre he would have been less worried for his own sake but even more concerned for the successful accomplishment of their business. Deidre Plunkett, if not an imbecile, was certainly at the high end of simple-minded. Her mother, a devout member of the Plain People, who feared her daughter’s oddness more than her lack of understanding, read out loud to Deidre daily from the Holy Book in the hope that its wisdom would drive away her strangeness. In this she failed, not least because of the influence of her equally odd but much more quick-witted sister, the late Jennifer. Devoted to Deidre, Jennifer showed her greater powers of intellect by devising games for her sister, the least appalling of which involved torturing small animals to obtain a confession, putting them on trial on trumped up charges and then inventing hideously complicated executions. Though Deidre’s powers of understanding were weak she was naturally cunning when it came to killing in the way a wolf is cunning. No wolf can speak or count but a mathematician who speaks a dozen languages would be unlikely to last an hour with a single wolf in a dark wood on a cold mountain. And she was not so simple that, by keeping her mouth shut and adopting the enigmatic nearly-smile her sister had taught her, she hadn’t gained a reputation for shrewdness and acumen, one which seemed ably supported by her talent for murder.
Anyone who tried to strike up a conversation with Deidre soon felt awkward under an empty gaze that, paradoxically, seemed to suggest profound and dismissive guile. Her terse replies, terse because she rarely understood what was being said to her, seemed to imply she regarded anyone speaking to her as a wordy fool. The enigmatic, often vaguely menacing, quotations from the bible of the Plain People were triggered by the words of whoever was talking to her. In this way her replies always seemed relevant if mockingly at odds. In other circumstances a savvy operator like Daniel Cadbury would have seen through her, but fear (not guilt, mind, because Jennifer had tried to murder him first and had unquestionably got what was coming to her) and worry that she knew everything and was biding her time blinded him to the truth, one of these truths being that Deidre had taken a liking to him. The fact that she fancied him was what made her, in fact, more talkative than usual – the only way she had of flirting with him was by waiting until a word triggered off something she recognized from the Holy Book. Unfortunately much of the Holy Book consisted of rather brilliant threats of one kind or another against unbelievers, hence Cadbury’s feeling that there was something menacing about her way of talking to him.
Deidre had been gone nearly an hour and a half when he could endure no more. He decided to risk the clear chance of walking into the Trevors and find out what was going on.
She may have been disguised but she was easy to spot, so odd was her appearance and manner. It was just as well Cadbury found her when he did because she’d come to the attention of a trio of what passed for dandies in that part of the world: top hats, red braces and pointed slippers. The four of them, Deidre with her blonde wig, mad eyes and painted cheeks, looked like the bad dream of an unhappy child.
‘Any more like you at home, gorgeous?’ mocked the gurrier, who clearly regarded himself as the Mr Big. Deidre stared at him then let out a kind of strangulated whine, her best attempt at playing the reluctant coquette.
‘How about a blow dry in the entry?’ said one of the others. Deidre did not know what either a blow dry or an entry was but she knew violence when she heard it. The third top-hatted gurrier grabbed her by the arm. ‘Kissy-kissy!’ he said, laughing.
Cadbury was about to step in when a man in his fifties called out nervously to the gurriers, ‘Leave her alone.’ All three turned to Deidre’s saviour.
‘Why don’t you come and make us, fatso?’
Already pale, the man turned paler and didn’t move. Cadbury decided to pretend to be a relieved lover finding his lost sweetheart (‘There you are, my dear. I’ve been looking for you for half an hour!’). But he was too late. The gurrier’s grip on Deidre’s arm tightened as he turned away from her. Her left hand was already in her pocket and pulling out a short knife with a wide blade. With all her skinny strength she punched it into his back between the sixth and seventh ribs, tearing her right arm free as he fell, crying out. The leader jerked away and turned so that the blow aimed at his back struck him in the stomach, followed by a strike to the heart. The third gurrier tried to speak, holding his hands out to protect his chest and stomach. ‘I …’ But he never finished what he had to say. Deidre’s knife took him through the eye. She looked around the crowd to check if anyone else was coming for her. But the crowd was still and soundless, unable to make sense of the painted doll of a woman, the savage emptiness of her eyes and the blood on the ground.
Cadbury walked towards her in the silence, broken as he approached her by the eyeless third man calling for his mum. ‘My dear,’ said Cadbury, ‘my dear,’ careful to bring her back from whatever ecstasy had taken hold of her. She blinked, recognizing him. Slowly he placed his open palm on her hand, careful not to hold or grip as he urged her away.
Unsurprisingly no one followed, and turning and twisting in the pretty but narrow streets they were secure enough for the moment, the peaceful town’s watchmen not being used to more than an occasional late night drunken fight. The result of everything turning to vinegar in such a fashion was at least clarity: get out, keep going. But waiting in Spanish Leeds for Cadbury was an expectant Kitty the Hare, and explaining to him how this fiasco had taken place along with the probability of Cale being lost to the Two Trevors didn’t bear much thinking about. Cadbury needed to show that he’d made a serious attempt to do something to recover the situation. There could be no greater contrast than between Bosco and Kitty the Hare, except that they both thought that Thomas Cale was a talisman for the future. (‘The spirit of the age, my dear Cadbury, possesses some people and the thing to do when you find one is to ride on their tails until they burn themselves out.’)
Reaching a small trough set into the wall of a church Cadbury told Deidre to wash off the make-up while he tried to work out what to do. The problem was one of time: it was like deciding when to leave the flats of an estuary as the tide turned – keeping just a few seconds ahead made the difference between strolling up on the foreshore in good time or being drowned.
He looked at Deidre. All the water had done was smear the rouge and black kohl and powder all over her face. She was a vision of something out of the eighth circle of hell.
‘Did you see anything of them – the Two Trevors?’
‘No.’
‘And that lout of theirs?’
‘No.’
He was trying to work out how to get to Cale at this time of night – presumably they wouldn’t just let you walk into a madhouse unannounced – but he was also considering where to hide Deidre. If the Two Trevors hadn’t murdered Cale when they had such an easy chance that morning they were hardly likely to try to get up to anything tonight. So he didn’t need Deidre with him, but finding somewhere to hide her where they could cut loose as soon as he’d finished warning Cale – he didn’t have time for that. And then the answer became clear: who looked more like a madwoman than Deidre?
Quick now, the tide is coming. Pulling Deidre behind him he made for the Priory, its tall clock tower dominating the edge of the town. In less than five minutes he was knocking on the heavy front door.
10
A small door within the Priory’s main gate opened up.
‘We’re closed. Come back tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry I’m late,’ Cadbury said. ‘But it was … the wheel on the carriage broke … it was all arranged. She’s very ill.’
The gatekeeper opened a flap on the lamp he was holding and pointed it at Deidre who had her head bowed low. A shake on her sleeve from Cadbury made her look up. Familiar with the harrowing of the face that lunacy caused, still the man gasped at her staring eyes, black smears and mouth that looked as if it had melted too close to the fire.
‘Please,’ said Cadbury, and pressed a five-dollar piece into the man’s hand. ‘For pity’s sake.’
Compassion and greed melted the keeper’s heart. There was, after all, not so much to be wary of. This was a place people tried to break out of, not to break into. And the girl certainly looked like she needed to be locked up.
He let them in through the small door.
‘Have you got your letter?’
‘I’m afraid I left it in my travel bag. That’s why we don’t have any cases. The driver will bring them in the morning.’ It sounded horribly unconvincing.
But the gatekeeper seemed to have given up on questions. Except for one: ‘Who was the letter from?’
‘Ah … my memory … oh … Doctor … ah … Mr …’
‘Mr Butler? Because he’s still in his office over there. Lights still on.’
‘Yes,’ said a grateful Cadbury. ‘It was Mr Butler.’
‘Is she safe?’ the gatekeeper said quietly.
‘Safe?’
‘Do you need a guardian?’
‘Oh no. She’s very tender-hearted. Just … not right.’
‘Busy night tonight.’
‘Really?’ said Cadbury, not interested in anyone’s night but his own.
‘You’re the second unexpected arrival in the last ten minutes.’ Cadbury felt his ears begin to burn. ‘Two gentlemen from Spanish Leeds with a royal warrant.’ He looked up, having found the key to unlock the second gate allowing them into the Priory itself. ‘Sent them to Mr Butler, too – there’s nothing in the logbook, of course. The paperwork in this place couldn’t be any more bloody useless if the patients were in charge.’
The gatekeeper let them through and pointed over to the other side of the quadrangle and the one window still lit.
‘That’s Mr Butler’s office.’
Once they were through and the second gate locked behind them Cadbury stopped to think what to do next.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Deidre. It was rare for Deidre to begin a conversation but she had an animal talent for dangerous action and felt instinctively at ease now where normally she was on the edge of understanding what people were saying to her.
‘The Two Trevors are here looking to kill Thomas Cale.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Don’t know,’ he said, looking over at Butler’s window. ‘The man in that room could tell us but he’s dead.’
‘Then call out to Thomas Cale.’
‘What?’ He was still so surprised by her manner that he had trouble picking up on her line of thought.
‘Go up that,’ she said, pointing at the bell tower. ‘Ring it. Call out a warning.’
He had begun to suspect there was something witless about Deidre. But, predator-sharp, she’d seen the situation instantly and she was right. Wandering around a place with perhaps three hundred rooms, armed warders and unlit quadrangles was a sure way to get killed, especially with the Two Trevors waiting in the dark like a pair of ill-disposed spiders.
‘You hide down here,’ he said. She didn’t reply and, assuming her consent, he moved quickly through the shadowed side of the quad and into the unlocked bell tower. She waited to be sure he was out of sight and then, keeping to the shadows, made her way to the centre of the Priory.
Cadbury climbed the stairs, feeling his chest begin to rasp and worrying that in order to warn Cale he had to give away his own position, a position with only one exit. He was going to have to leave very quickly down two hundred steps in the dark. Once he was at the top he took two full minutes to recover for his escape. He pulled the bell rope four times. The deafening ring would get the attention of everyone within a mile. He let the ringing die away, took a deep breath and bellowed. ‘Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you!’ He rang the bell once more. ‘Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you!’
With that he went back down the stairs, hoping that the Two Trevors had more to worry about than him. If Cale really was the virtuoso roughneck he was cracked up to be then they were now in trouble. If that didn’t satisfy Kitty the Hare that he’d done his best, then Kitty could get stuffed. He’d collect Loopy-lou Plunkett and worry about what to do with her later.
Coming to the last few steps of the tower he stopped, took out a long knife and a short one, his preferred combination when fighting two people, and burst into the quad as if he’d been blasted by Hooke’s gunpowder. He was across the quad and into the safety of the shadows in a few seconds, desperately trying to control the wheezing he was suffering from his exertions as it treacherously called, or so it sounded to his ears, a deafening appeal to the two vengeful Trevors to find him and cut his throat. But they did not come and soon he was breathing almost silently. Slowly he began to feel his way to the point where he’d left Deidre. But Deidre was gone.
By now the quad was filling up with the curious mad, the wealthier and non-violent mad, at any rate, those who had access to the bulk of the Priory, all wanting to break their routine by coming out of their rooms to find out what all the fuss was about. Added to their number were alarmed doctors and nurses trying to usher them back to safety. Some of the more highly strung got the wrong end of the stick: ‘Help!’ they cried. ‘They’re coming to get me. Murderers! Assassins! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it! Help the poor struggler! Help the poor struggler!’
The fuss certainly helped Cadbury to move more safely within the crowd in the hope of finding Deidre and getting out without, he hoped, having to deal with either of the Two Trevors.
Before all of this, Cale had been sitting in the Priory cloisters with Sister Wray, discussing the existence of God – it was on Cale’s insistence, a challenge to her born out of his bad mood at failing to make it to the top of the hill.
‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘be taking your ill-temper out on me – but in case something else inside you is listening I’ll tell you about God. When I was upon the hill today, looking out over the sea and sky and the mountains, I could feel him everywhere. Don’t ask me why, I just could. And don’t worry, I know just as well as you do that much of life is hard and cruel.’ She turned her head and he had the strongest sense she was smiling. ‘Well, not perhaps quite as well as you. But hard and cruel as it is I still feel his presence. I still find the world beautiful.’ She laughed, such a pleasant sound.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Tell me what you saw when you were up there. With the mountains and the sea and the sky. Tell me honestly.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I saw a river delta easy for a landing from the sea but impossible to defend. Up from that I saw a river plain – you could bring an army up easy … but then it narrows and a land slip cuts it in two, about eight feet deep. You could defend for days against four times the men. But there’s a small bypass to the left cut into the hill. If they took that it would be over. But there’s also a path to the back of the valley. If you timed it right you could pull your men back in packs of a hundred or so and get them out even though it’s constricted. They could cover the remainder from the hills when they needed to abandon the line. But any attempt to follow with numbers and you’d be jammed tight like a cork in a bottle.’ He laughed. ‘Sorry, not what you want to hear.’
‘I’m not trying to reform you.’
‘Don’t mind if you do. I’m sick of myself. Sick of being like this.’ He smiled again. ‘Redeem me all you want.’ A pause. ‘Can you make me better?’
‘I can try.’
‘Does that mean no?’
‘It means I can try.’
Another silence, or as much as the pulsing thrum of the tree cicadas would permit.
‘What about you?’ he said, after a minute or two.
‘When you saw the sun over the mountain today did you see a round disc of fire somewhat like a gold dollar?’ Sister Wray asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I saw an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”’
Yet another silence.
‘Quite a bit different then,’ Cale said eventually.
‘Yes,’ said Sister Wray.
‘There is no God,’ said Cale. He did not intend this as an insult. He did not intend to say it at all. It burst out of him. He felt Poll moving up his arm and whispering very quietly in his ear, so that Sister Wray would not overhear, ‘Blasphemous cunt!’
At that moment something extraordinary happened, a coincidence so outrageous that it could only be encountered in either an improbable fiction or life itself: four resounding clangs sounded from the bell tower and a powerful voice from above shouted: ‘Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you.’ But Cale misunderstood – although Cadbury’s shout was intended as a warning he interpreted it as a threat from the heavens, to punish him for his sacrilegious outburst.
At once he looked around into the dark and realized that the cloister was a natural trap – a box with only one entrance, four times longer than it was wide with a covered walkway creating deep shadows on all four sides. The bell rang out again, followed by the shout, ‘Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you.’
Sister Wray began to rise. He grasped her arm and at the same time pushed against the ground, so that the wooden high-backed bench on which they were sitting toppled backwards.
As they moved through the shadows of the cloisters, getting into position, the bells and the warning astonished the Trevors. Having separated to move either side of the covered walkway, both decided to let fly with their small overstrungs – but by toppling backwards on the bench Cale was a fraction faster and the bolts moithered overhead with a venomous zip. On his feet, Cale grabbed Sister Wray with his other hand and dragged her backwards into the darkness of the covered walkway. He dumped her forcefully next to a statue of St Frideswide and whispered, ‘Stay here – don’t move.’
There was only one course possible for his killers. One of them would stay near the only exit to his left, while the other would already be moving up the other walkway to close in on him from the right. Cale was in a pinch. If he tried to make the diagonal run across the open centre of the cloisters they’d have plenty of time to put a bolt in him front and back. He couldn’t stay where he was.
‘Give me your habit and your veil. Quick.’
She did not waste time being shocked, but she was afraid and fumbled at the line of buttons. ‘Quickly!’ He reached for the front of her habit and ripped it apart. She gasped but did not flap and helped him haul it down to her feet. Then, without asking, he lifted off her veil. Too much afraid to stop and stare at what he saw, Cale stepped into the habit and dragged on the veil, ripping away the small, perforated patch that covered her eyes. ‘Don’t you move,’ he said again and, black habit pulled up to his knees, launched himself into the middle part of the cloister. But he didn’t try for the long diagonal run to the exit but sprinted straight across by the shortest way towards the opposite side. Lighter than the deeply shadowed walkway, it was still only dimly lit by the clouded moon and the poor light and black habit made his movements indistinct and odd. Thrown by the strange appearance of the nun, and wary of a decoy being used to force them to give their position away, the Two Trevors hesitated and let the figure go as it flapped into the unseeable shadows of the walkway.
Cale had given the Two Trevors a problem: what was simple had become complicated. They were, of course, not long in working out what had probably happened. But only probably. It was probably Cale wrapped in the nun’s habit. But only probably. Perhaps she was young and fit. Perhaps Cale had threatened to cut off her head if she didn’t make the dash. Perhaps the nun had decided to sacrifice herself for Cale and got away with it. Lugavoy had the exit covered and it was clear that he must stay there; it was Kovtun at the top of the cloister who had to decide whether Cale was still to his left or now to his right dressed head to toe in black. And he had to be quick. The warning from the tower meant that they were being looked for. The problem about being quick was that it meant they might easily make a mistake. But to act more slowly meant dealing with the guards of the more dangerous lunatics farther inside the Priory. He was now in a trap himself – to one side a presumably harmless nun, to the other a homicidal maniac. He was unnerved even more by a strange convulsive sound like an animal bellowing in the dark.
He was not to know, of course, that his position was considerably less serious than he thought. He wasn’t to know that the sound was nothing more than Cale chucking up his guts at the terrible demands he had made of his miserably collapsing constitution. But Kovtun had to move and his skill and instinct made him choose correctly. He went back the way he’d come, closing in on the distressed and exhausted boy. Cale was unarmed, not that it would have made much difference if he’d been holding the Danzig Shank itself, and he knew that he must make his move to the exit or die where he was. He was soaked in sweat, his lips full of pins and needles. He moved towards the exit slowly – any faster and he would have fallen down. Fortunately for him, the still spooked Kovtun was following pretty gingerly himself. Neither Cale nor the Two Trevors had time on their side but all three knew that too little patience could get them killed. Cale was on all fours, feeling his way towards the right-hand corner of the cloister, heading for the exit and whoever was waiting there and trying not to breathe too hard or give himself away by throwing up again. Behind him, Kovtun was slowly beating up the walkway. Cale realized the greatest obstacle to his having any chance of getting out was the moonlight coming through the large entry into the cloisters. Anyone trying to make it through would be lit up like St Catherine on a wheel. He shuffled forwards to the edge of the light and braced himself to run, hoping to catch whoever was guarding the exit by surprise. Behind him he heard the sound of Kovtun scuffing his foot lightly on an uneven slab. He ran for it – one second, one and a half, two seconds – and then felt a huge crack to the side of his head as Trevor Lugavoy, who’d been waiting just the other side of the line of moonlight, stepped in and struck him with the heavy end of his overstrung. It would have taken a lot less to knock Cale down in his dreadful state and he fell like a sack of hammers, collapsing with his back to a statue of St Hemma of Gurk.
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