The Beating of His Wings

But by then Conn had already been arrested and charged with misfeasance in the face of the enemy and failure to strive. In short, he was accused of not winning a battle, a crime of which he was unquestionably guilty. The rage of the King and the people did not permit any great amount of time to pass and Conn’s trial was ordered to take place in the Commons on the following Wednesday. Just as Conn was being unjustifiably blamed, Cale found himself being unjustifiably praised, much to the fury of Artemisia Halicarnassus. All the credit for heroically saving the remnants of the army and seeing them safely to the Schallenberg Pass had been given to Cale: the idea that the only soldier who’d shown the necessary bravery and skill was a woman was not just unacceptable in a crude sense but impossible to grasp.

‘There’s no point blaming me,’ said Cale.

‘Why not?’

This was hard to answer. He entirely understood her anger but, as he unwisely pointed out, that was just the way things were. ‘There’s no point whining about it.’

‘Take that back!’

‘All right. Whining will make an enormous difference.’

‘I’m not whining. I deserve the credit.’

‘I agree. You deserve the credit for saving fifteen hundred men. Absolutely.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t mean anything.’

‘Yes, you do. What are you driving at?’

‘All right. You deserve the credit for saving fifteen hundred men. They’re giving it to me and I don’t deserve it – but what they’re really saying is that whoever’s responsible for that – which is you – would have beaten the Redeemers.’

‘And you’re saying that I couldn’t.’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Conn did everything right. I couldn’t have done it better.’

‘So of course that’s proof enough. No one could do better than you.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘I admire you.’

‘Not as much as you admire yourself.’

‘That would be asking a lot,’ he said, smiling.

‘I can see right through you, don’t worry. You’re not joking, I know.’

‘You could run that battle a hundred times and Conn would have won fifty of them. What the people are screaming is that whoever saved the fifteen hundred – you – would have won the battle. That’s credit you don’t deserve, even if it’s been given to someone who deserves it less.’

‘You, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Say it.’

‘I don’t deserve the credit. You do.’

She said nothing for a moment.

In the meantime another charge had been added to the accusations levelled against Conn: that he had, in a manner cowardly and craven, set fire to the bridge at Glane and, in order to save his own treacherous skin, condemned thousands to die at the hands of the Redeemers. Of all the counts against him this was the most damaging. It was also the most unfair. Conn hadn’t been within five miles of the bridge and couldn’t, therefore, have set fire to it. But even if he had, it had been a necessary act. The stranded men killed on the left bank would have made it over and survived only to be chased down and killed once the Redeemers crossed to the right behind them. Those already on the right bank survived only because someone took the hard decision to burn the bridge. The person who had set fire to the bridge, disguised by means of an abandoned helmet, was Thomas Cale.

Perhaps no historical subject has been written about so thoroughly as the rise of the Fifth Reich under Alois Huttler. The failure to explain how a man of little education, less intelligence and no obvious talent except for windy inspirational speeches about his country’s manifest destiny to rule the world could come as close as any man in history to achieving this end is obvious. No one knows how he managed the rise from imprisonment for aggressive begging to ruling the lives of millions across vast territories and bringing a level of destruction to the world never seen before in human history. No historian will conclude at the end of a book that there is no explanation for the things he describes. In the case of Alois there is none. That it happened is all the reason that will ever be uncovered. It is a good deal easier to explain satisfactorily how, by the end of the week following the disaster at Bex, Thomas Cale, boy lunatic, had become the second most important military commander in the Swiss Alliance.

Because of his new-found heroic status he had been invited to attend the conference to discuss what to do now that the Redeemers had sealed up Switzerland from the rear and had only to cross the Mississippi to crush Spanish Leeds in a vice. There was no army left to stop them and no one left alive to lead it even if there had been. There were a fair number of speeches given indignantly making it clear that the speakers had never been in favour of attacking the Redeemers in such a disastrous fashion, although solid evidence of their stand was somehow lacking. The only person who’d clearly stood out against the action, Artemisia, went unmentioned, although she had without any fuss been allowed back in to attend the conference.

Before she attended Vipond had tried to mark her card as well as Cale’s.

‘Whatever you say at the conference you won’t say “I told you so”, will you?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ said Artemisia.

‘She won’t say it,’ said Cale.

‘I will.’

Cale looked at her. ‘She won’t say it.’

It was not an order, or even a demand. Indeed it was hard to say what it was – a laying out of an inevitable fact, perhaps. With a sigh, she less than gracefully accepted the advice.

At the conference itself Cale made a point of saying nothing at first in order to let the accusations and hand-wringing go on for long enough for them to demoralize everyone in the room. Then the lamentations began.

‘How long before they come?’ asked the King. It was a morose Supreme Leader of the Allied Forces who replied.

‘They’ll take all summer to build the boats needed to come across the Mississippi. The autumn floods will make the river treacherous and the winter ice more treacherous still. It will be late spring next year.’

‘Can we rebuild an army in seven months and hold them at the river?’ asked the King.

It was the question, or something like it, that Cale had been waiting for.

‘No, you can’t, Your Majesty,’ he said, and stood up. Thin and pale in his elegant black cassock (he was comfortable in them after all the years he’d worn them, although his tailor designed the cut more elegantly and made it out of the softest Sertsey wool), Cale looked like something out of a fairy story to frighten intelligent children. The King, affronted, turned his hand aside and an explanation was given in whispers as to who this was and his (largely undeserved) heroic status.

‘You were a Redeemer, I understand.’

‘I was brought up as one,’ said Cale. ‘But I was never one of them.’ There was more whispering in the King’s ear.

‘Is this true that you commanded a Redeemer army?’

‘Yes.’

‘It seems unlikely – you’re very young.’

‘I’m a very remarkable person, Your Majesty.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes. I destroyed the Folk and after I destroyed the Folk I came back to Chartres and destroyed the Laconic army at the Golan. You had no one to rival me even before Bex. Now I’m all there is.’

‘You’re very boastful.’

‘I’m not boasting, Your Majesty, I’m simply telling you the truth.’

‘Are you telling us you can hold the Redeemers at the Mississippi?’

‘No. It can’t be done. You couldn’t have stopped them there even with an army and now you don’t even have an army.’

There was an outcry at this: that the Swiss and their allies would raise thousands to their cause, that you could take their land but you could never take their freedom, that the people would fight them in the woods and on the plains and in the streets, that they would never give in, and so on. Zog, a very much more sober person than he’d been only a week before, signalled them to stop.

‘Are you saying that we must lose?’

‘I’m saying that you can win.’

‘With no army?’

‘I’ll give you a new army.’

‘That’s very good of you.’

‘Goodness has nothing to do with it.’

‘How can you do this?’

‘If you will see me tomorrow in private I’ll show Your Majesty.’

It’s been said that a confidence trickster gets his name not by gaining the confidence of those he tricks, but by giving them some of his own. The truth was very simple: they were utterly lost and now one person was claiming he could find them again. In such circumstances his implausibility was a sign in his favour: only something unbelievably strange could save them.

At Bex, the Redeemers now had the appalling job of burying the thirty thousand they’d killed there. It was a week after the battle itself and the two days of intense cold directly following the fight had given way, as it often did in that part of the world, to a warm spell. The bodies that stank the worst were those who had died from internal injuries caused by the heft of the poleaxes. The blood stayed inside and rotted and when the Redeemers moved the bodies the blood poured out of the noses and mouths. Then it got hotter still and the bodies began to bloat, so big that on the cheaper armour the rivets burst open with an enormous SNAP! Then the bodies went blue and then black and the skin peeled and those who had to burn them thought they’d never get the smell out of the backs of their throats.

Most news is never as bad or as good as it first seems. This was certainly true of the great Redeemer victory at Bex. Redeemer General Gil was impressed by the skill with which the Office of the Propagation of the Faith had managed to pull off the contradiction involved in praising the courage, strength and sacrifice of the Redeemer army while also suggesting that God had ensured victory was inevitable. As Gil knew from his many protégés who had been in the fight at Bex, it had been a damned close-run thing. The bad news was that Cale had been seen by a handful of Redeemers but he hadn’t heard of it early enough to quarantine them and stop the news from spreading.

‘Tell me exactly what you saw – don’t add anything. You understand?’

‘Yes, Redeemer General.’

He’d decided to see the snipers who’d stumbled into Cale in the woods one by one, starting with the sergeant.

‘Go on.’

‘He was seven foot tall and a great light shone from his face. Around his head was a halo of red fire and the mother of the Hanged Redeemer was next to him all in blue and with seven stars at her forehead and she was weeping tears of sorrow for our glorious dead. And there were two angels holding arrows of fire.’

‘And did they have halos as well?’

‘I don’t think so, Redeemer General.’

For half an hour he tried to get some sense out of the sergeant but someone who believed Cale was seven-foot tall and that his face shone with anything but suspicion and loathing was clearly not going to be of much help. After interrogating two more of the group, whose accounts were even more ridiculous, he gave up.

He was now faced with two questions. Was this just an excess of holy glee, or had they really seen Cale? If so, what did it mean? Why was he skulking in the woods and not leading troops in the battle? It didn’t even solve the problem of what had happened to Cale after the Two Trevors had been killed. Gil had hoped he’d died of his injuries – surely the Trevors must have got in at least one blow before he killed them? They were supposed to be the best murderers in the Four Quarters and Cale was supposed to be sick. Maybe Cale was dead, in which case the stories about him appearing at the battle were even more worrying. Or were they? Was it better to have him alive and without power or dead and turning up seven-foot tall and with a halo, creating God-knows-what havoc among the unwary faithful? If this seemsunusually sceptical for a man of deep spiritual beliefs in the One True Faith, the fact of the matter was that Gil was changing in his old age. As long as miracles and visions concerned people or things he hadn’t experienced directly he’d been ready to accept them without question. But the reality of his personal experience of Cale and the progressively more nonsensical stories about him increasingly stuck in his throat. He had known Cale since he was a smelly little boy, had trained him day after day under Bosco’s instructions, had seen him wet himself with fear after a fight before the blow on the head gave him that odd talent no one could match. It was the work of God, said Bosco. But it was just too hard for Gil to think of Cale as someone chosen by the Lord to bring about the end of everything. In his heart, Gil thought of him as a boy he didn’t like. What Gil did not realize, or want to realize, was that such realism was poisoning his faith. Not to believe in Cale was not to believe in Bosco: not to believe in Bosco was not to believe in the need for the end of the world. To acknowledge this was to question his central place in bringing it about. Better not to go there. But it was easier not done than not thought about.

The more immediate problem was what, if anything, to tell Bosco. Tell him about this miraculous drivel and he’d be certain to be inspired. Not tell him and if he found out there would be trouble. He decided not to take the risk and several hours later he was with Pope Bosco and coming to the conclusion of his report on the unusual sighting of Thomas Cale.

‘Do you believe them?’ said Bosco when Gil had finished. Answering this was tricky. Hedge his reply with thoughtful doubt and perhaps he might be able to shape Bosco’s response. But he decided it was a test and he was right. But even telling Bosco what he wanted to hear presented problems. Too much enthusiasm would make him suspicious and Gil feared what might happen if Bosco cooled any more towards him.

‘I remain reasonably sure, Your Holiness, that Cale has not grown by more than a foot and nor does his face shine with a holy light, but I believe they saw him. The question is: what was he doing there?’

Bosco looked at him but he, too, wanted the old trust between them to return. It was lonely and strange to stand on your own to bring about the promised end.

‘Whatever he thinks his purpose is, he is about God’s business whether he knows it or not. But while God may not have increased his height or blessed his face to illuminate the faithful he’s given us a signal. We must attack Arnhemland now and not wait for another year as you advised. And we must increase the speed at which we send people to the west.’

The private meeting with the King that Cale attended the next day was not really private in the way he’d either expected or hoped. In fact, the King was no more used to privacy than Cale had been growing up in his dormitory of hundreds. Being on your own was a sin to the Redeemers and it might just as well have been the same for the King to all intents and purposes. Unlike Cale, he didn’t seem either to mind or even to notice, unsurprising, perhaps, in a monarch who had a special appointee of considerable power, the Keeper of the King’s Stool, to examine his excrement on a daily basis.

‘You expect us to hand over our army to a boy?’ said Bose Ikard.

‘No,’ said Cale. ‘Keep your army. Do what you want with it. I’ll create a New Model Army.’

‘From where? There are no men.’

‘Yes, there are.’

‘Where?’

‘The Campasinos.’

All were startled; not everyone laughed.

‘Our peasants are the salt of the earth, of course. But they are not soldiers.’

‘How do you know, Your Majesty?’

‘Mind your manners,’ said Bose Ikard. ‘But as it happens you’re not the first to come up with this idea. Twenty years ago Count Bechstein created a company made up of bogtrotters and bumpkins and took them off to the wars against the Falange. I believe one or two who had the sense to desert in the first week might have survived.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘But we do. It will not work.’

‘Yes, it will. I’ll show you how.’

With that he went to work with his designs and plans.

An hour later he finished: ‘The simple fact is this: there’s no other way. If I fail you can have the satisfaction of watching the Redeemers roast me in the town square. That is, Chancellor, if they don’t start with you.’ He turned to the King. ‘All I need is money.’

They might have barely any soldiers but money was something they had in great quantities. After the slaughter at Bex, no one believed, not even Bose Ikard, that surrender was an alternative. It was clear that the Redeemers didn’t recognize the notion of allowing their enemies to give in. Cale was right. There was no other way.

‘You can do this in seven months? You seem very sure.’

‘I told you, Your Majesty. I’m a remarkable person.’

If Cale was not as confident as he claimed, neither was he as desperate as he seemed to Ikard. He had been working on his New Model Army since he was ten years old (or nine – he was not sure about his date of birth). Since then, whenever he’d had a few minutes, sometimes only once a week or once a month, he’d draw a diagram or make a note about something of the working habits and the different kinds of tools the peasants around him were used to handling, the hammers and flails, the sharpened small shovel used by the Folk in the fight at Duffer’s Drift. Even in the worst days at the Priory, when Kevin Meatyard was tormenting him, he’d watch the threshers and pickers at work in the fields with their scythes and hoes and wonder what might be made of them and their way of life. He’d worry about what to do if it worked or not when things became clear. But here was a chance to work on a plan of retreat as well – one which would likely involve heading over a mountain pass with as much cash as possible.

Zog was curious about Cale in the way he might have been curious about a monkey that could write better than a human being or a uniquely elegant dancing dog. He recognized that the boy was someone exceptional but it would never have occurred to him that he was anything but a wondrous freak of nature.

‘Tell me more, dear boy, about your defeat of an entire army of Laconics. Tell me all about it … Tell me all about it … everything … the entire history.’

What Cale thought was that you might as well ask him to tell the history of a storm. He was, of course, about to start when Bose Ikard interrupted.

‘I’m afraid that Your Majesty has an important meeting with the Ambassador for the Hanse.’

‘Oh. Another time, perhaps,’ he said to Cale. ‘Most interesting.’ Then he was on his way out. Cale himself had an appointment too. The next day he was required to give evidence at Conn Materazzi’s trial, to which the Swiss had devoted almost an entire afternoon. The appointment was to make it clear to Cale what his evidence would be.

‘You are the most notorious traitor that ever lived!’

The House of Malls would comfortably seat four hundred, ranged in banks on three sides. Today there were eight hundred, with thousands waiting outside for news. On the fourth side was a judge’s bench occupied that day by Justice Popham, a man who could be relied upon to engineer the correct verdict. Next to it, slightly to one side, was a prisoner’s dock, in which stood an unimpressed Conn Materazzi who looked disdainfully at the prosecuting attorney, Sir Edward Coke, the man who had just shouted at him.

‘You can say it, Sir Edward,’ replied Conn, ‘but you cannot prove it.’

‘By God, I will!’ said Coke, who looked like a bull without a neck, all foul temper and belligerence.

‘How do you plead?’ asked Judge Popham.

‘Not guilty.’

‘Ha!’ shouted Coke. ‘You are the absolutist traitor there ever was.’

Conn turned his hand slightly, as if he had to swat away a horsefly.

‘It does not become a gentleman to insult me in this way. Though I take comfort from your bad manners – it is all you can do.’

‘So I see I’ve angered you.’

‘Not at all,’ said Conn. ‘Why would I be angry? I haven’t yet heard one word against me that can be proved.’

‘Didn’t Fauconberg run away over the mountains because he had betrayed us at Bex? And didn’t that tergiversating sneak also plan to kill the King and his children?’ He sniffed loudly as if it were all too much. ‘Those poor babies who never gave offence to anyone.’

‘If Lord Fauconberg is a traitor what’s that got to do with me?’

‘Everything he did, you viper, was at your instigation!’

At this there was a huge boiling over in the crowd. TRAITOR! MURDERER! HEAR! HEAR! HEAR! CONFESS! THE BABIES! THE POOR BABIES! Popham let them fulminate. He wanted Conn to get the point that his refusal to play the role of abject penitent, as he’d been told to, was doing him no good. ‘Silence in the court,’ he said. The trouble with trying to bribe Conn to go along with his part was that Popham knew perfectly well that sacrificing a goat required that the goat understood that he was it no matter what he said or did not say.

Coke, now red in the face with fury, waved a piece of paper in the air. ‘This is a letter found hidden in a secret drawer in the house of that renegade Fauconberg. On it he states clearly that the vile Pope Bosco intended to pay six hundred thousand dollars to Conn Materazzi and that he would give Fauconberg two hundred thousand to assist him in losing the battle.’ He waved the paper once more and then brought it close to read with an expression on his face as if someone had used it to wipe their arse. ‘It says here, “Conn Materazzi would never let me alone”.’ He turned to the clerk. ‘Read that line again.’ Startled, the recording clerk blushed bright red. ‘Get a bloody move on, man!’ shouted Coke.

‘“Conn Materazzi would never let me alone.”’

Coke looked around the room, nodding his head ingrim triumph. SHAME! called out the crowd. SHAME! TRAITOR!

‘Is this,’ shouted Conn, above the noise, ‘is this … is this all the evidence you can bring against me? A more suspicious person than I might suggest that Sir Edward can recite this nonsense so well, because it was he that wrote it.’

‘You are an odious fellow. I lack the words to express your viperous treason.’

‘Indeed you do lack works, Sir Edward – you’ve said the same thing half a dozen times.’

Coke stared, eyes bulging with a spasm of fury.

‘You are the most hated man in Switzerland!’

‘As to that honour, Sir Edward, there isn’t a gnat’s wing between you and me.’ From one side of the court, those who knew Coke well and therefore loathed him, there was laughter.

‘If Fauconberg was a traitor,’ said Conn (although he knew he was not), ‘I knew nothing about it. I trusted him in the same way that the King and his counsellors trusted him when they, not me, appointed him as my second-in-command.’

‘You are the most vile traitor that ever lived.’

‘So you keep saying, Sir Edward, but where’s your proof? The law states there must be two witnesses to treason. You don’t even have one.’

An enormous bilious smile from Coke, that made him look like a smirking toad.

‘You have read the law, Conn Materazzi, but you don’t understand it.’

Popham cleared his throat. ‘The law you speak of that used to require two witnesses in cases of treason has been deemed to be inconvenient. On Monday another law was passed to repeal it.’

Perhaps in the thrill of answering his accusers Conn had forgotten that the verdict was always certain. If so, he now remembered. But he was rattled all the same.

‘I don’t know how you conceive the law,’ he said quietly.

‘We don’t conceive the law, Conn Materazzi,’ boasted a triumphant Coke, ‘we know the law.’

During the next two hours there was more evidence produced as assorted liars, falsifiers, inventors, actors and bullshitters were brought in to testify to the traitorous remarks before the fight and traitorous tactics during it that proved beyond question that Conn had deliberately lost the battle. ‘I never saw the like case,’ declaimed Coke, ‘and I hope I shall never see the like again.’ In the last hour they moved on to the second charge: that Conn had set fire to the bridge at Glane to preserve his own life at the cost of thousands of his men. Six witnesses were called who swore they had seen him, without his helmet, light the fire himself. The seventh witness was Thomas Cale. It had been made clear to him that the golden opinions he had won had made his evidence particularly valuable and that telling the court what he had seen of Conn’s actions during the battle, and his subsequent setting fire to the bridge over the river was essential if those who still wavered over the granting of money towards his New Model Army were to be persuaded as to the true depth of his devotion to the interests of the state.

‘Your name.’

‘Thomas Cale.’

‘Put your right hand on the Good Book and repeat after me: “I swear that what I am about to say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”’

‘It is.’

‘You have to say it.’

‘What?’

‘You have to repeat the words.’

A pause.

‘I swear that what I am about to say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

‘So help me God.’

‘So help me God.’

By now he was barely audible.

Just as they had rehearsed it the day before, Coke fed Cale the questions and Cale fed back the answers as if they were a conjuror and his amazing dancing bear passing a ball to each other. The questions and answers were designed to demonstrate one thing: that, youthful as he was, Thomas Cale was an experienced soldier, utterly versed in the battle tactics of the Redeemers. He was also asked in detail to set out his heroic and skilful actions in saving the lives of fifteen hundred Swiss soldiers and their noble allies so miserably betrayed by Conn Materazzi.

‘At one point, Mr Cale, you were able to observe the battle from a tree in the nearby woods?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did this give you a complete view of the battle?’

‘I don’t know about complete – but as good as you were likely to get.’

Coke stared at Cale. This was not the straightforward line they’d agreed.

‘Why was someone of your experience not involved directly?’

‘It was prevented.’

‘By the defendant?’

‘I don’t know.’

Coke stared at him. Yet again the bear was not returning the ball as he’d been taught.

‘Is it not the case,’ said Coke, offering him an opportunity to do better, ‘that Sir Harry Beauchamp, at Conn Materazzi’s instruction, told you not to involve yourself in the battle directly, on pain of death?’

‘He told me to stay out of it or suffer the consequence – yes. But he didn’t mention anyone by name.’

‘But it was what you understood?’

This was too much, even for Popham. The forms might be bent but they could not be broken quite so grossly.

‘Sir Edward, I realize that you speak out of zeal for your duty and horror at the defendant’s crimes – but you must not lead the witness to repeat hearsay, particularly when there was none to repeat.’

That Coke lacked a neck seemed to be confirmed by his habit of turning his whole body to look at whoever spoke to him, giving him the look of a statue of hideous aspect. The observant would have noticed a small muscle twitching on his right temple. If he was a bomb, thought Hooke, watching from the back of the court, he’d be ready to explode.

‘My apologies to the court.’ He turned back to Cale, the small muscle still twitching.

‘Is it true that at the Battle of Silbury Hill you saved the life of the defendant?’

‘Yes.’

‘Clear proof, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the witness bears him no ill will. Is that so?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’

‘Do you,’ said Coke, the muscle now twitching on his left temple, ‘bear the defendant any ill will?’

‘No.’

‘Did you put your own life at risk when saving him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Has he ever thanked you for this most courageous act?’

‘I can’t remember, to be honest.’

‘Does this make you angry?’

‘No.’

‘Why not, Mr Cale? I think most of us would be angry at such wretched ingratitude.’

‘The ingratitude of princes is a proverb, isn’t it?’

‘I have never found princes of any kind in this country to be ungrateful, but I believe it of Conn Materazzi.’

‘Well, that was why I wasn’t angry. I didn’t expect it.’

For the first time since he’d come into court, Cale looked directly at Conn. What passed passed between them was odd stuff.

‘Would you tell us,’ said Coke, ‘what was your estimation of the conduct of the battle from your unique viewpoint?’

‘Do you mean from the tree or based on my experience?’

‘Both, Mr Cale, both.’

‘It was a good three hours into the battle, I’d say, maybe more. It looked like it could go either way.’

‘Did you see the defendant on the field?’

‘For a while. It was at a distance, though.’

‘You formed an opinion, based,’ he turned back to the jury, ‘based on your considerable experience, as to his conduct of that tragic engagement?’

There was a pause as if Cale was thinking something over.

‘Yes.’

The muscles in Coke’s forehead stopped twitching.

‘And what was that considered opinion?’

If he was going to be true to his oath, something he had no intention of doing, Cale should have said that Conn had demonstrated outstanding personal and tactical courage. He could not have done better himself – or even as well. Mind you, he might have added he would never have fought the battle in the first place. But no one wanted to hear that. The simple truth – the facts-as-they-stood kind of truth, as opposed to the whole-and-nothing-but truth – was that Conn was a dead man. Defending him because it was the honest thing to do was idle and futile.

Cale genuinely believed he was the only person who could stop Bosco and that without his New Model Army everyone in the city, possibly including Cale, would be dead inside twelve months. It was not just idle and futile to defend Conn, it was wrong. So it was hard for him to explain why he could not bring himself to lie directly in order to ensure a good thing was done as opposed to beating about the bush and risking that good thing. He realized the stupidity of what he was doing and, given a few minutes to think about it, he would have demonstrated to himself that risking the lives of millions to save the life of a shit-bag like Conn Materazzi, however admirably he had behaved at Bex, was wicked, evil, wrong and, worse than all of this, bad for Thomas Cale.

‘He had done all the things that any commander in such a battle might have considered, given the circumstances. Although he might have considered other actions.’

‘Actions that would have been more effective – that’s what you’re saying?’

‘More effective?’

‘Yes – you’re saying he could probably have chosen to behave otherwise and so win the battle.’

A pause.

‘Um. Yes.’

‘Mr Cale,’ interrupted Justice Popham. ‘We come to the heart of the matter here. Are you saying that if the accused had acted differently then defeat would have been averted and victory achieved?’

‘I can definitely say that,’ said Cale, relieved. ‘Yes. Had he acted differently the battle might have been won.’

‘I want …’ What Coke wanted was to get a plain assertion, as had been agreed, that Cale would state unequivocally that Conn had deliberately lost the battle. Popham realized that, for whatever reason, the creature in the witness box had changed his mind, and that by trying to wring an assertion of Conn’s guilt out of Cale, Coke was making things look bad. There were plenty of others to state Conn had lost deliberately and that he had personally set fire to the bridge. This was a horse that wouldn’t run.

‘I think we’ve troubled the witness long enough.’

‘One more question,’ demanded Coke, temple muscles twitching again, and asked it before permission was refused. ‘Did you witness Conn Materazzi setting fire to the bridge over the River Gar?’

‘No. I wasn’t anywhere near it.’

22

Along the banks of the River Imprevu one of its greatest oaks had fallen into the river, its roots undermined by the current created by the rocks that had fallen a few months earlier from the bridge above. A hazard to shipping, the local mayor had ordered the branches to be stripped as far as possible so that it could be hauled to lie flush with the bank. They were lucky in that once the branches had been cut from the tree above the water a flash surge of water from rain in the mountains pushed it over so that the other side could also have its branches removed. Unfortunately, when they were almost finished, a second surge jerked it free of its temporary moorings and flushed the great trunk down the river towards the Mississippi where it would now become someone else’s problem.

That night, after the trial, IdrisPukke cooked dinner, a morose affair. The guests consisted of Cale, Artemisia, Vague Henri, Kleist and Cadbury.

‘Is Vipond angry with me?’ asked Cale.

‘Would you blame him?’ said Cadbury. ‘Isn’t Conn his great nephew or something?’ He looked at IdrisPukke, taunting. ‘He’s even related to you, isn’t he? How’s that work?’

IdrisPukke ignored him. ‘Vipond isn’t a hypocrite. He understands why you felt obliged to give evidence. But he is puzzled.’

‘Include the rest of us,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I never saw anything so stupid in my entire life.’

Kleist said nothing. He hardly seemed to be in the room at all.

‘God,’ said Artemisia, clearly shocked by her lover’s behaviour, ‘has a particular punishment for perjurers.’ It was a sign of her failing affection for Cale that this was a harsher way of construing the events of the day than was strictly fair. Why were her affections failing and so suddenly? Why do they ever? Perhaps she had been impressed by Conn’s lonely courage and compared him, as they stood opposite one another, to Cale, so unblond, so strange and so lacking in nobility or grace.

‘He sends them to bed without any pudding?’ offered Cale.

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so. God always has something nasty lying in wait for naughty boys.’

‘He’s got a devil put aside to torment you through all eternity by shoving a red hot poker up your bottom.’ This was from Vague Henri.

‘Sorry,’ said Cale. ‘He’ll have to go to the back of the queue. Besides, the devil they’ve put aside for me for poisoning wells is supposed to shove a pipe down my throat to fill my stomach full of shit-water. They’ll just cancel each other out.’

‘Going under oath isn’t a joke. He’s going to die because of you.’

‘The only reason he’s alive to be sentenced to death is because of me – so we’re even.’

‘I think we should all calm down,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Wine, anyone?’

No one seemed interested in wine so he started handing out what looked like small crackers wrapped into a small thumb-sized parcel. There was one each and they all stared unenthusiastically at the hard and unappetizing pastries.

‘You’re not supposed to eat them, just break them open. I’ve decided to publish a short collection of my ideas carefully reduced to their essence in one sentence. It’s to be called The Maxims of IdrisPukke. I thought these would amuse you.’ He gestured them to break them open. ‘Now read them out: Cadbury.’

Cadbury, who was becoming longsighted, had to hold the small roll of paper at some distance.

‘It says nothing against the ripeness of a man’s soul if it has a few worms.’

Cadbury suspected, wrongly as it happened, that this particular maxim was supposed to be about him.

IdrisPukke realized his attempt to lighten the mood of the evening had started badly. He gestured to Artemisia. She cracked open the pastry.

‘I would believe only in a god who knows how to dance.’

She smiled weakly but as she grasped what he was driving at her smile broadened a little.

IdrisPukke’s heart sank – but ploughed on as if his plan wasn’t deflating like a child’s balloon. It was Vague Henri’s turn.

‘To act in the world is the only way to understand it. In this life it is given only to God and his angels and poets to be lookers-on.’

Like Cadbury, Vague Henri wondered if IdrisPukke had chosen this especially for him. Was he accusing him of something?

Next it was Kleist, who crumbled the pastry with unnecessary force in the palm of one hand.

‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’

Then it was Cale’s turn. What he read out seemed only to confirm that IdrisPukke was smugly having a laugh at their expense.

‘Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will start to gaze back into you.’

A silence followed. ‘How about you?’ said Cale. IdrisPukke’s heart sank just a little – having heard the others he knew the only saying that was left. He crumbled the pastry and read it out.

‘If there exist men whose ridiculous side has never been seen it is because it has never been properly looked for.’

‘Spot on,’ said Cadbury but he still wanted his own back for what he took to be the criticism of the word-pastry.

‘So, IdrisPukke, isn’t the unfortunate Conn Materazzi a relative of yours, then?’ From that day on Cadbury always mockingly referred to him as ‘the unfortunate Conn Materazzi.’

‘Of some kind – half a grand-nephew, I suppose. Couldn’t abide him myself. Though, to be fair, he was coming along pretty well.’

‘So explain why Vipond isn’t sweating for revenge,’ said Cadbury. ‘I thought the Materazzi were mad for their relations.’

‘My brother merely understands the impossible position Cale found himself in. Obviously he likes Conn and worked hard to support him – not with much gratitude, it has to be said, though there were other reasons for that. But he is neither a fool nor a hypocrite nor lacking in affection. He’s obliged for obvious reasons not to be seen to have anything to do with Cale, but he knows perfectly well that Conn has been a dead man since the line broke at Bex. What puzzles him is that Thomas,’ and here he looked pointedly at Cale, ‘should go to so much trouble to give evidence that neither condemned him nor helped to save him, so that he annoyed all sides for no obvious benefit.’

Everyone looked at Cale.

‘It was a mistake. All right? I knew I couldn’t do Conn any good by telling the truth and that if I went along with the trial they’d give me what I need … what everyone needs. It was just that, when it came to it, I just lost it … for a bit. I had a worthless attack of the truth – I admit it.’

‘Why was it worthless?’ asked Artemisia.

‘Because telling the truth just isn’t going to do any good. There’s one thing standing between all of us and a lot of blood and screaming – the New Model Army. There’s nothing complicated about it.’

‘So why didn’t you give evidence against him?’

‘Because as it turned out it was easier said than done, all right?’

‘Let justice rule – even though the heavens fall.’ IdrisPukke was lightly mocking Artemisia’s idealism but Cale was now in a touchy mood and took it as some sort of criticism.

‘Stick it back in your cracker, granddad.’

The dinner crumbled like one of IdrisPukke’s aphorisms and everyone went home in a bad mood. Outside the evening air was heavy and not so much lukewarm as tepid, vaguely unpleasant as if it was atomized with the dead souls of the sons and husbands of Spanish Leeds gathered to attend the execution of Conn Materazzi in two days. Cale and Vague Henri and Kleist, whose growing misery made the other two feel worse, got back to their elegant townhouse. They were still slightly intimidated by living there, as if expecting someone important to come and chase them out for living above their station. They were used to other people’s servants by now but not their own. It wasn’t that they minded someone cooking and cleaning for them, it was more that the power of servants to creep up on them at unexpected moments reminded them of the unprivacy of the Sanctuary, with its horror of doors and its punishments for being caught on your own. Servants seemed to think they could just appear like Redeemers. They took it badly when Cale insisted they knocked before entering, something they regarded as evidence that he was common. He also made a point of thanking them when they did something for him, a habit that also revealed him as common. The proper thing for any employer to do was to treat them as if they did not exist.

Before they had rung the bell the door, unusually, was opened by Bechete, the over-valet.

‘You have company, sir,’ he said, as he gestured towards the chambre des visiteurs.

‘Who?’

‘They declined to give their names, sir and I would have refused them entry under normal circumstances. But I recognized them and I thought …’ He allowed his sentence to trail off meaningfully.

‘So who is it?’

‘The Duchess of Memphis, sir, and I believe the wife of the Hanse Ambassador.’

‘I’m going to bed,’ said Kleist as if he’d heard nothing.

‘Guess why she brought Riba?’ said Vague Henri. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘Yes. Arbell thinks I’ll come on my own. You go first and be cold with them. I’ll come in a bit. Leave the door open.’

Vague Henri almost knocked – but stopped himself and opened the door a little too energetically to compensate. Both Arbell and Riba stood up, a little startled, and he noticed the disappointment on Arbell’s face. One up to Cale.

‘This is late to be calling, ladies. What do you want?’

‘Good manners, perhaps,’ said Riba. But Vague Henri was no pushover.

‘So it’s a social visit? I’m surprised because there’s been plenty of time to call on us before now. Obviously I was wrong to think you wanted something. I apologize.’

‘Don’t be like this, Henri. It’s not worthy of you.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No. You’re the kindest of people.’ This time it was Arbell who spoke, but gently, not at all the proud Materazzienne.

‘Not so much any more. I had time to think while I was waiting to be beaten to death – about kindness, I mean. You’re a kind person, Riba, but you’d have let me die in Kitty the Hare’s basement. Cale, now, he’s not a kind person but he wouldn’t do that, let me die, I mean. So I’ve gone off kindness. What do you want?’

Vague Henri sensed there was something strange about his own indignation, something that he couldn’t put his finger on until much later. He was enjoying it.

Cale, carefully waiting the right time for a dramatic entrance, thought this was good enough.

‘Why don’t you tell him? I’d be interested to hear, too.’

Seeing her shook him. She was beautiful, certainly, with that touching bloom that had made such an impression on him when they’d met in the corridor. But there are fish-in-the-sea numbers of beautiful women in the world, many of them with that same flush of youth and power – but something about her touched him, always had and always would, like a malign twin of the lost chord, whose discovery the late Montagnards believed would generate a great and infinite calm. He wanted to be loved by her and to wring her neck in equal measure.

‘We were all friends once,’ said Riba, then turned to Vague Henri. ‘Can we talk somewhere?’ she said to him, so sadly and sweetly that, soft and sentimental as he was, he felt ashamed by his outburst. Cale nodded at him and he showed her out, but not before Riba had taken Cale’s hand. ‘Please be kind,’ she said, and was gone.

The two of them stared at each other for some time.

‘I suppose you …’

‘Help him,’ interrupted Arbell. ‘Please.’

Agitated and trying to hide it, he went over to the elegant and uncomfortable chair and sat down.

‘How?’ he said. ‘And why?’

‘They think – the Swiss – that you’re their saviour.’

‘They wouldn’t be the first to get that wrong.’

‘They’ll listen to you.’

‘Not about this, they won’t. It was a disaster and someone has to pay.’

‘Would you have done any better?’

‘I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.’

‘He doesn’t deserve to die.’

‘I can’t tell you how little that’s got to do with it.’

‘Are you so full of hatred for me you’ll let a good man die to get your own back?’

‘I saved his life once already, probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, and if I wanted to pay you back, you treacherous bitch, you’d be dead already.’

‘He doesn’t deserve to die.’

‘No.’

‘So help him.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘No.’

It was a rare and intense pleasure to watch her suffer. He felt as if he could never have enough of it. And yet he also felt the dread of the loss of her, a horror that increased the greater his delight at watching her in pain. It was like scratching an itch that only made the pain worse even as it ecstatically soothed the very same.

She was shaking now and pale with fear.

‘I know it was you who set fire to the bridge.’

This was a bit of a shock.

‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the proof?’

‘I know you.’

‘They’ll need more than that.’

‘And I know two witnesses who know you too.’

This was entirely possible; there were a lot of people at the bridge and maybe some of Artemisia’s men had snitched.

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ said Cale. ‘First it’s tears, now it’s threats.’

‘It was you.’

‘Nobody cares. Whoever set fire to the bridge was a god-damned hero. It just wasn’t me. Even if someone confessed it wouldn’t matter. Someone has to be to blame. Conn’s the one. That’s all. Now take your sniffles and menaces and shove off.’

He stood up and walked out, half of him pleased, the other half devastated. Outside in the hall, Riba and Vague Henri broke off the earnest conversation they were having. She moved towards him and started to speak.

‘Shut up!’ he said, and like a spoilt and angry child stormed off up the stairs to bed.

23

‘What did Arbell Materazzi want?’ asked Bose Ikard.

The meeting with Cale had started badly with another ill-tempered question. ‘What the bloody hell did you think you were playing at?’ This was in regard to Cale’s peculiar performance at Conn Materazzi’s trial. ‘It was made perfectly clear to you what you were supposed to say.’

This was true enough.

‘That was before I realized you had your witnesses queuing up to give the same story. I don’t know why you didn’t go the whole hog and pay them on their way down from the witness stand. I made the whole thing look plausible at least.’

This was entirely true. Cale’s half-baked prevarication had indeed had the effect of drawing the sting, if only in part, of the Materazzi claim that the trial was a mere show. Conn’s impressive performance at the trial had won him some sympathy and when at Riba’s urging her husband had raised objections on behalf of the Hanse as to its fairness, Ikard had been able to point to Cale’s testimony as proof that the evidence had not been fixed in advance. It had also benefitted Cale by giving the impression he was honest and had refused to do a bad turn to a fellow soldier even when it was in his interests to do so. Besides, a kind of mania had lifted Cale out of the realm of ordinary men. In a matter of days he had become famous. It was hardly surprising given the hideous circumstances in which the Axis found itself. If ever a saviour was required it was now.

‘Are you spying on me?’ asked Cale, very well aware of the answer.

‘You are the observed of all observers, Mr Cale. You can’t piss in a pot without its significance being discussed at every dinner table in the city. What did she want?’

‘What do you think?’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’

‘You aren’t going to intercede on his behalf?’

‘Would it help if I did?’

‘You could put in a plea for leniency, if you wished. In writing. I’d make sure the King received it personally.’

That was it then.

‘No, it’s nothing to do with me.’

A pity, thought Bose. He would certainly not have passed it to the King had Cale been foolish enough to write such a plea. The King had forgotten his obsession with Conn – or rather he now regarded himself as having been overly influenced by Bose Ikard’s enthusiasm for the young man (as if his Chancellor had had any choice but to go along with his master’s hysterical favouritism). For now, Cale was everyone’s favourite, including the King’s, so it wouldn’t do to be seen to work against him. But Bose was sceptical about the boy’s ability to keep people happy for long. Whatever his skills, politics wasn’t one of them. And in the end ability and talent were nothing in the face of politics. It might have been useful to have a letter in his back pocket.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah,’ said Cale, touching himself just under the chin with the flat of his right hand. ‘I’m up to here with sureness.’

‘Is that supposed to be some sort of pleasantry at my expense?’

‘No.’

‘And are you also sure that you have the men to create your New Model Army?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because I have experienced and knowledgeable advisors who say it’s not possible to create an army out of peasants, not in general and certainly not one capable of beating the Redeemers. Let’s not even consider the lack of time involved.’

‘They’re right.’

‘I see. But it’s possible for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘At the Golan the Laconics inflicted the greatest defeat on the Redeemers in their history. Ten days later the Redeemers inflicted on the Laconics the greatest defeat of theirs. The difference was me.’ Cale had been slumped insolently in his chair but now stretched upright. ‘Is that sneak behind the screen going to join in or am I going to have to go over there and drag him out?’

Bose sighed. ‘Come out.’ A young man, smiling amiably and in his early twenties, emerged. It was Robert Fanshawe, Laconic scout. Cale had last seen him when they’d cut a deal over prisoners after the battle he’d just been boasting about.

‘You don’t look well, Cale, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘I do mind.’

‘You don’t look well all the same.’

‘Well,’ said Bose Ikard. ‘At least it proves you know him.’

‘Know him?’ said Fanshawe. ‘We’re special pals.’

‘No, we’re not!’ said Cale, his alarm at how this might be taken delighting Fanshawe who laughed, revelling in his discomfort.

‘Do Mr Cale’s claims about his importance to the Redeemer victory have merit?’

‘I’m not claiming anything,’ said Cale. Fanshawe looked at him, cool, not laughing any more.

‘Yes, this young man was the difference.’

‘So why are you so sure his New Model Army will fail?’

‘There have been peasant rebellions as long as there have been peasants,’ said Fanshawe. ‘Tell me one that succeeded?’ He looked at them both, head mockingly turned, waiting for a reply. ‘The Laconics have fought six wars against our Helots in the last hundred years – if you can call the slaughter of untrained hillbillies a war. It ends one way. Always.’

‘Not this time,’ said Cale.

‘Why?’

‘I’d rather show than tell.’

‘Excellent. I look forward to your presentation of the details.’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Bose Ikard.

‘I’m not giving a performance so your dunces get to offer me the benefit of their experience. There’s going to be a fight and whoever’s left standing at the end wins the argument. One hundred each side.’

‘The rules?’

‘There are no rules.’

‘A real fight?’

‘Is there any other kind? Bring who you like, how you like.’

‘And you’ll just have your peasants?’

‘I’ll bring whoever I damn well please.’ But it was too hard to resist. ‘There’ll be eighty plebs and twenty of my veterans.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ll be watching Fanshawe getting the shit kicked out of him.’

‘Me? I’m just a Laconic advisor. I couldn’t possibly take part.’

Bose Ikard was suspicious, always, but considered that perhaps it was for the best: he wanted to know what Cale was up to and it was hard to think of a better way than something like this. There were Swiss soldiers who felt they deserved recognition before some miserable-looking boy. Now they’d have the chance to prove it.

‘I’ll get back to you,’ he said. ‘Close the door on your way out, Mr Cale. A word, Mr Fanshawe.’

24

The sun came up on the morning of Conn’s execution with as much warmth and honeyed light as if it had been the Jubilee celebrations of a much-loved monarch. At ten in the morning he was taken from his cell in the Swarthmore, then down to the West Gate and through the Parc Beaulieu to the place of execution on the Quai des Moulins. Five of his men, but not Vipond, or his wife, walked with him, bareheaded and unarmed. There he ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of wine in the Vetch Gallery. From before dawn a huge crowd had been gathering in order to get the best places from which to see the action.

Along with the usual excitement of a crowd who delighted in the hideous suffering of a fellow human being was added the hatred of citizens who held Conn Materazzi responsible not only for the defeat at Bex but for their justified fear that in the spring of next year the Redeemers would be doing very much the same to them as they were now about to do to him.

A brass band of sorts, sponsored by the city’s biggest pie-maker, belted out rough versions of popular songs and blaring versions of boastful martial anthems about Switzerlanders never being slaves. The crowd was a peculiar mixture of unequals: do-bads, thieves, tarts and lollygaggers, carpenters and shopkeepers, merchants and their wives and daughters and, of course, a specially erected terrace for those who really mattered. In all, it was such a crush of spiteful humanity that those not used to it suffered terribly, namely the wives and daughters of the gentility who fainted in the heat and had to be carried out with their plunging necklines all disordered, which got the drunk apprentices going (‘GET YOUR TITS OUT FOR THE LADS!’). As always, it was a bad day for cats: at least a dozen were thrown into the air to bellowing shouts around the great space in front of the place of execution.

In general, throughout the Four Quarters, judicial death came about through hanging, beheading with an axe or burning – sometimes all three, if you were particularly unfortunate. But in Spanish Leeds, commoner and aristocrat were both beheaded after a peculiar manner and by a most unusual executioner. Formally it was called the Leeds Gibbet but the polloi called it Topping Bob. It consisted of a frame of wood about sixteen foot high and four foot wide bolted into a large block. It was something like a French guillotine, although much bigger and much cruder. But unlike the guillotine there is no single executioner for the Leeds Gibbet: there are many. Once the block and axe is pulled to the top of the frame and held with a pin, the rope holding the pin in place is handed out to any of the people below who can get a grasp of it. Those who can’t stretch out their hands to show that they assent and agree to the execution. This, then, was the sight that waited for Conn as he stepped out onto the platform and his death.

His shirt of black silk had been cut around the collar without much skill to leave his neck visible. Black silk shirts, then the height of fashion, were unpopular for many years afterwards. The gibbet, of course, dominated the scene and if beauty is the shape that most conveys the purpose of an object then its ugliness was beautiful. It looked like what it was. It was a pity that none of Conn’s friends had been allowed out onto the platform with him: he deserved someone to witness his bravery in the face of that awful device. Perhaps there were some in the crowd, not many, who sensed the young man’s courage. It was true that he’d shown great courage in battle but that was courage shown where all around were to share a part in the same fate; where there was fear but also fellow feeling and the prospect of honour and purpose. Here it was all isolation among the taunts and the cruelty; giving people the pleasure of watching hideous suffering inflicted without risk to themselves. But there was at least one person there who admired him, who knew the injustice and unfairness, the wrongness of his death. Cale was in the bell tower of St Anne’s cathedral, which looked down on the square – a distance from the gibbet of about fifty yards and a hundred and thirty feet high. He was alone and smoking one of the fine Swiss cigars, a Diplomat No. 4, to which he had become addicted now that he could afford them every day. He couldn’t have told you how he felt – not sick to his stomach, as he’d been at the death of the Maid of Blackbird Leys, but a kind of dead tranquillity in which he seemed, paradoxically, alive to everything: the mocking obscenities, the whistles, the man smiling at Conn and holding two fingers to his forehead, delighting in the horror to come. But he also felt removed, as if the tower had taken him above the fog of malice and pleasure below. A small tribe of dogs chased each other, barking happily, in and out of the legs of the soldiers who faced the crowd from the platform, not armed but carrying drums.

Conn waited to be instructed what to do. A curate approached him. ‘It has been agreed that you may speak but I’m warning you not to say anything against the Crown or the people.’

Conn moved forward. The noise of the crowd diminished a little – a good speech could be dined out on.

Thirty yards away the bookies at their trestles were taking bets on how many spurts of blood there’d be.

‘I haven’t come here to talk,’ said Conn, startled by the firmness of his voice as his stomach surged. ‘I’ve come here to die.’

‘Speak up,’ shouted someone in the crowd.

‘I’d be heard little if I shouted myself to death. I’ll be brief – I’d prefer to say nothing if it weren’t that going to my death silently would make some men think I submitted to the guilt as well as to the punishment. I die innocent …’

Up in the tower Cale heard the word ‘innocent’ but nothing more as the curate signalled the drummers to drown out Conn’s accusation of injustice. Whether he cut it short because of the drums or he didn’t have much to say, Conn finished and walked towards, if not the executioner exactly, at least the man responsible for the workings of the gibbet.

‘I hope you sharpened the blade as duty obliges you. And I’ll have my head cut off at the neck and not topped like an egg as I hear you did with my Lord the Cavalier of Zurich. Botch it and there’ll be no tip. See it done properly and you’ll be glad you killed Conn Materazzi.’

‘Thank you, zir,’ said the almost-executioner, who depended on such tips for payment, ‘we have a new doings to prevent such han unfortunate thing happenin’ agayne.’

Conn walked to the gibbet, took a deep breath as if to swallow back his terror, and knelt down, his neck fitting into a clearly brand new semi-circle made in the wood. The new cross plank above was swiftly put in place with the matching half of the circle and locked into position. Above him, the flat blade in its heavy wooden block was held in place by two pins, each one attached to a separate rope. One of the pins was held in place by a clip and it was the rope leading from this one that the gibbet-master threw into the crowd. He waited until the scrabble for a handhold on the rope was finished then went up a ladder placed against the gibbet and put his right hand to the clip holding the pin in place, so that no one in the crowd could prematurely pull it out. He addressed the people.

‘I will count to three – any man’s hand now on the rope that stays on the rope after the count of three will be whipped.’ Satisfied that those holding the rope were in command of themselves he called out: ‘One!’

‘TWO!’ shouted back the crowd. ‘THREE!’

He whipped the clip free with a great flourish.

The rope and pin whipped loose, the block and blade rattled in the rail and struck with a dreadful bang. Conn’s head shot from the gibbet as if it’d been launched from a sling and flew over the platform and into the crowd, vanishing among the Sunday best of the men and women of fashion.

Cale stared down for a moment. Why this? he thought. Why like this? then he turned away, dropped what was left of the cigar on the stone floor and left.

But just as he could see what had happened, Cale could also be seen. Afterwards it was put about that he had not only smoked during Conn’s death but that he had laughed at the horrible conclusion. In time this did great damage to his reputation.

Arbell was standing at the far end of the room, staring out of the window and holding her baby tightly, slowly rocking backward and forward.

To Riba and her husband it seemed like a very long walk indeed. They stopped a few feet away; both said after they had left it was as if the very air between them and Arbell trembled with terror and held them back.

‘Is it finished?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he suffer?’

‘It was very quick and he was calm and showed great courage.’

‘But he didn’t suffer?’

‘No, he didn’t suffer.’

She turned to Riba.

‘You weren’t there?’ It was an accusation.

‘No, I wasn’t there,’ Riba said.

‘I wouldn’t let her.’ Arthur Wittenberg thought he was helping. He was not.

‘Of course I couldn’t go, I couldn’t,’ said Riba, reassuring.

‘I should have gone,’ said Arbell. ‘I should have been with him.’

‘He would have hated that,’ said Riba. ‘Hated it.’

‘He made it very clear to me,’ said Wittenberg, ‘last night when I spoke to him that he wouldn’t countenance your being there – under any circumstance.’

A lie was seldom told so clumsily. But Arbell was not in any state of mind to judge very much of anything. The baby, who had been very calm because he liked being held tightly, started to wriggle. ‘Yaaaaaaaaach!’ shouted the baby. ‘Bleeuch!’ Finally he managed to free his right arm and started pulling on a lock of Arbell’s hair. Yank. Yank. Pull. Pull. She didn’t seem to notice.

‘Shall I take him?’

Arbell turned away from Riba as if it were an offer to remove the child permanently. Gently she unfastened the baby’s hands from her hair.

At the door a servant called out, ‘Lady Satchell to …’

But the end of his sentence was drowned in the dramatic bustle and noisiness of the woman herself.

‘My darling girl,’ she wept from the other side of the room. ‘My darling girl … what a cauchemor, what a nagmerrie, a kosmorro!’ No single language was enough for Lady Satchell to perform herself in. She was known, even among the Materazzienne, as the Great Blurter. There was no situation that, by her instant appearance, she could not puff up with hysteria. Not even this one.

‘I am so sorry, my dear,’ she said, grasping Arbell to her chest. No trembling shield of grief would put Lady Satchell off. She no more saw Arbell’s pain than the bull sees the spider’s web. ‘It was dreadful, strasny! Terribile! The poor boy – to see that handsome head go weerkats down the Quai des Moulins.’

Fortunately the sheer power of Satchell’s hysterical capacity for stirring caused her to shift into Afrikaans so that Arbell barely understood what she was talking about.

‘And that mostruoso Thomas Cale – I heard from one who was with him he laughed at the Misero Conn as he died and smoked a cigar and blew rings at his disgraziafo corpse.’

Arbell stared at her. It was hard to imagine that someone would go so white and still live. Riba took her by the elbow, pulled her physically away, whispering, ‘Shut your mouth, you heartless bitch!’ and signalled to the two servants at the door.

‘What are you doing? I’m her dear cousin. Who do you think you are, you toilet scrubbing slut to …’

‘Get her away from here,’ said Riba, to the servants. ‘And if I see her here again I’ll make you both wish you’d never been born.’

Lady Satchell was so startled at being manhandled by the servants now gleefully licensed to mistreat one of their betters that she was outside before she could start flapping her mouth again.

Riba walked back to her former mistress, working out her story.

‘Is it true?’ Her voice so quiet Riba could barely hear her.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘But you heard it, too?’

‘Yes. But I don’t believe it, not a word. It’s not like him.’

‘It’s exactly like him.’

‘He saved my life. He saved Conn’s life too, for your sake.’

‘And he perjured himself against Conn because he thinks I betrayed him. There was nothing else I could do. But you don’t know him when he’s against you – what he’s capable of doing.’

Torn between the two of them as she was, Riba’s first thoughts were not generous to her former mistress. If you hadn’t betrayed him, Conn would still be alive. Everything would have been different. Of course, part of her knew that this was unfair, but it didn’t stop it from being true.

‘I told you. I don’t believe a word of it.’ But this was not entirely the case. Which of us, on hearing that our closest friend had been arrested for a dreadful crime, would not think, buried in the deepest recess of our soul, hidden in the shadows concealed in our heart’s most crepuscular oubliette, that it might possibly be true? How much easier then for Arbell to believe that Cale had laughed at her darling husband as he died. She should not be blamed for this lack of faith in Cale – it’s only human to hate the person you have hurt.

‘Is it true?’

‘Sounds bad – so probably it is,’ said Cale. There was no mistaking Artemisia’s suspicious and angry tone.

‘Answer me. Did you laugh at Conn Materazzi when he died?’

He’d many years of practice at not giving away his feelings – control of spontaneous emotions was a matter of survival at the Sanctuary – but a less angry person than Artemisia might have noticed his eyes widen at the accusation. Not for long and not by much.

‘What do you think?’ he said, casual.

‘I don’t know what to think, that’s why I’m asking you.’

‘The thing is – I was in the tower on my own. I could have sacrificed a goat in there and no one would have known.’

‘You still haven’t answered the question.’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘No, I didn’t laugh at Conn Materazzi when he died.’

And with that he stood up and left.

‘I’m impressed,’ said IdrisPukke.

‘Because?’

‘It’s not long ago that you would have told her you did laugh at Conn, just to punish her for asking.’

‘I thought about it.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘Why would she believe something like that?’

‘You are widely referred to as the Exterminating Angel. It’s not so surprising that people fail to give you the benefit of the doubt. Besides, the times need a man with a reputation for unmitigated cruelty – people want to feel that with such a creature on their side they might have a chance of living through the next year.’

‘But they don’t know me.’

‘To be fair, it’s not an easy thing to do – know you, I mean.’

‘She should by now.’

‘Really? She knows you lied under oath with as much ease as if you were telling an old woman that you liked her hat.’

‘Not that again. What was I supposed to do? If I’d confessed we’d both have had our heads bouncing across the square.’

‘I agree. But for all her eccentric skills, Artemisia doesn’t understand things as they really are. She’s one of them. The more money you have, the nicer the world is; if you have money and power the world’s niceness is almost heavenly. To such people the world’s cruelty is an aberration not the normal state of things. You’ve had the good fortune never to believe that anything was fair. You must allow her time to learn that she’s living in another world now. She hasn’t had your disadvantages. The spirit of the times used to move through her and Conn and the King – now it moves through you. This is your time, for however long it lasts.’

‘Meaning?’

‘There’ll come a time when it isn’t.’

‘When?’

‘Hard to say. The thing is that whenever it comes to an end the person whose time it used to be is usually the last to realize.’

25

There’s not much to be said for being sick, except that if you’re sick for long enough it gives you endless opportunities to think. For the permanently unwell there are not enough distractions to fill the endless days and, besides, illness can drain you easily of the energy you need to read or play a game. Then you must think, even if it’s the drifting sort of thinking that floats you aimlessly from past to present, from meals eaten, lovers kissed, to nights of humiliation, bitter regrets. Cale had a talent for this kind of thing. In the madhouse ruled by Kevin Meatyard he had been able to use the skills honed in the Sanctuary for all those years to go into hiding somewhere inside his head. But in those days he’d been as ignorant of the world as a stone: there was his hideous real life and his imaginary world where everything was wonderful. Now the drifting daydreams were all mixed up with the numerous things that had happened to him since then. Daydreaming was not so much a pleasure any more. So he tried to think of useful things – the mulling of ideas, the beating out of plans and working up of notions that had he been well he would have brushed to the back of his mind and left to the dust.

The religion of the upper classes of the Swiss and their allies was an odd affair. It had come as a considerable surprise to Cale that they also worshipped the Hanged Redeemer – but as the true Redeemers had created a religion full of sin and punishment and hell, of things that filled every waking moment, the religion of the Swiss aristocrats and merchants had developed in more or less precisely the other direction: beyond church on Sundays, weddings and funerals, there seemed to be no specific demands made nor any reference to the dire consequences that would result from failing to meet these loosely-hinted-at suggestions. But this was not the case with the working people and the peasants. The latter in particular were extremely religious, so much so that they had a large number of creeds to service them but at the bottom of them all was the Hanged Redeemer. Though each sect considered itself to be the sole true heir of his beliefs, they recognized to varying degrees that they belonged to a family. But one thing that united them was their universal loathing for the Redeemers themselves, whom they regarded as corrupt, idol-worshipping, usurping, murderous heretics. Whatever the differences between the Plain People and the Millerites, the Two by Twos and the Gnostic Jennifers, Cale had talked to enough of them to know that their commitment to destroying the Redeemers was of a kind where death would be a privilege rather than a price. Whatever his own feelings about martyrs he was used to making them work for him. It was a currency that he understood. It was now nearly three weeks after the death of Conn Materazzi, and he had used the time to persuade the various heads of the important religious factions (Moderators, Pastors, Archimandrites, Apostles) that he was as deeply committed to destroying the Redeemers and their hideous perversion of the true teachings of the Hanged Redeemer as only someone who had suffered personally under their yoke could be. Fortunately this did not require Hanseatic diplomatic skills: they were only too ready to believe in him. And hence why all of them were present on the Silver Field at ten in the morning to witness the very far from mock battle between Cale’s fledgling New Model Army and the Swiss. Also present were Vague Henri, IdrisPukke, Kleist and a still frosty Artemisia Halicarnassus. Standing to one side, looking suspicious, was Bose Ikard and an assortment of newly appointed Swiss generals, elevated to their new positions courtesy of the cull of their former senior officers now rotting gently in the grave pits at Bex.

The day after the meeting with Bose Ikard and Fanshawe, Cale had written to demand that, as the fate of several nations hung on his successful attempt to create this New Model Army, the fight of his one hundred against that of the Swiss Knights should be fought with sharp weapons and without rules, except that surrender would be permissible. As intended this alarmed the Swiss who, rightly suspicious, demanded that only blunt practice arms be used. Cale refused. Eventually a compromise was reached: unsharpened weapons, no spikes or points, and crossbow bolts and arrows to have dull tips and bars to prevent deep entry.

The day began with a strange incident involving Cale, which in the telling and re-telling gave rise to a peculiar legend. The person involved was only a very minor member of the country aristocracy who had arrived in Spanish Leeds the night before and had managed to hang onto the coat-tails of some prince or other and was enjoying the attention of the various flunkeys seeing to the needs of the assembled gentry. Not realizing that the white-faced boy standing next to him in his plain black cassock was the incarnation of the Wrath of God and all-round exterminating angel, he had mistaken him for a servant and politely, it must be said, asked for a glass of water with a slice of lemon. The servant ignored him.

‘Look here,’ he said to Cale more forcefully. ‘Get me a glass of water and a slice of lemon and do it now. I won’t ask you again.’ The servant looked at him, eyes blazing with an incredulity and disdain that he took for the worst kind of dumb insolence.

‘What?’ said Cale.

The newly arrived country toff was anxious not to be regarded as a bumpkin of the kind who would allow himself to be intimidated by a dogsbody and took the stunned silence from those around to signal that they were waiting to see whether he was up to dealing with insolence from a servant. He fetched Cale an enormous blow to the side of his face. There followed a paralysed stillness that made the previous silence seem raucous. It was the prince who’d invited him who broke it.

‘My God, man, this is Thomas Cale.’

There is no adjective in any language fit to describe the whiteness of the country gentleman’s face as the blood drained into his boots. His mouth opened. The others waited for something horrible to happen.

Cale looked at him. There was a long pause, a dreadful silence, suddenly broken when Cale let out a single loud bark of amusement. Then he walked away.

Each side had been allowed forty horses and when the Swiss entered the field they certainly looked impressive, the horses pulling at their bits, anxious to get on, and beside them seventy knights on foot, armour carapaces sparkling in the morning sun. Beautiful. Formidable. They took up a line and waited. Not for long. From the other side of the park what looked like a peasant wagon came into view, and another one after it and another – fifteen in all. Each one was led by two heavy shirehorses, bigger than the hunters ridden by the knights by half as much again. As they approached it became clear that these were not the usual wagons for carrying hay or pigs – they were smaller, the sides slanted and they had roofs. By contrast, the fifteen wagons were flanked by ten of Artemisia’s horse scouts, slight men on fast and famously agile Manipur ponies. They were carrying crossbows, not a weapon used much in Halicarnassus. They’d been designed by Vague Henri for use on horseback – light, nothing like as powerful as his own overstrung but very much easier to draw and load. The wagons came to their marked place and then curved round into a circle. The drivers leapt off and unhitched the horses, pulling them into the centre. The gap between the wagons was not very great as the horses had been carefully trained to offset them before they were unharnessed. Each driver quickly removed a detachable wooden shield hung from the back of the wagons, which they slotted between them so that now the wagons and shields formed a continuous circle without gaps.

The Swiss looked on, some amused, the more intelligent suspicious. The only way through the wagons was through the spaces underneath – but this was soon closed as four more planks of wood were lowered through slots in the floor. For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a shout from inside the circle and the outriders started firing their crossbows at the Swiss ranks. Vague Henri’s design might have been less powerful but from a hundred yards the bolts, blunt as they were, hit the massed ranks of armoured men with a ferocious clang. The Swiss had only brought ten archers and they were trained for shooting at massed ranks, not ten men on agile horses. In a five-minute exchange only two New Model Army riders were hit, painfully enough and drawing blood, but they themselves hit more than twenty of the Swiss. Their armour and the bluntness of the bolts prevented any deep wounds but it was clear that a real bolt would have killed or badly wounded nearly all of them. After five minutes there was a trumpet burst from the wagons and the outriders moved back to the circle. A wooden shield was removed to let them in and they were gone.

Then three other walls were taken out and about twenty men with mallets and stakes rushed out and began hammering them into the ground. This was more to the Swiss archers’ taste, but before they could start shooting, volley after volley of arrows emerged from the centre of the wagons, causing huge confusion and yet more considerable injury to the lightly armoured Swiss archers.

Under this fearsome protective cover, the peasants knocking in the posts finished the job and ran back to the safety of the wagons, leaving behind the wooden stakes connected by thin ropes with sharp metal barbs woven into them every six inches. The odd thing about this was that the stakes and barbed ropes only covered about an eighth of the circle, leaving the attackers free to go round this unpleasant obstacle. It was hard to see the point.

With the arrows still raining on them, the Swiss had no choice but to advance and take the wagons in hand-to-hand combat. The blunted arrows were nothing more than nuisance value to men in such high-quality armour and fighting close was their life’s work. Skirting the barbed ropes – several of the knights slashed at them as they went past but wire had been threaded through the rope to prevent such an easy cure – they approached the wagons, determined to break their way in and give the occupants a bloody good thrashing. Although the wagons were neither particularly big nor tall, once they were close there seemed no obvious or easy way in. As they approached they noticed small square holes in the sides of the wagons – six in each. Out of them, crossbow bolts shattered into them, devastating at such short range despite their bluntness. And fast too – one fired every three or four seconds. They were forced to come right up to the wagon sides to grasp the wheels and heave them over. But the wheels had been hammered into the ground with hoops of steel. Then the roofs of the wagons were heaved up and crashed over the side on a hinge with blunted spikes on the leading edge, designed not to pierce the armour of anyone they hit but to deal a crushing blow. Dozens of arms and heads were broken in this move. Then the reason for the low height of the wagons became clearer. In each there were six peasants, armed with the wooden flails they’d been used to using all their lives as much as the Swiss professional soldiers had used swords and poleaxes. Even without the addition of the nails that would have been used in a real fight, the head of the flail moved with such ferocious speed that it crushed hands and chests and heads alike, armoured or not. And still the bolts kept coming. They may not have been able to kill but they caused terrible pain and deep bruising. The Swiss were hardly able to land a blow in return. The killing range of a few feet they were used to, dictated by the length of a sword or poleaxe, had been extended by Cale by no more than a few feet – but it was everything. Men they could have dismembered in a few seconds in the open were made untouchable by strong wood and a few extra feet in height. And now they were vulnerable to an insulting collection of modified agricultural tools wielded with confidence and familiarity by mere peasants. After fifteen minutes of pain and damage they withdrew – angry and frustrated, poisonously impotent. Their retreat was conducted to a mocking but still painful volley of blunt arrows from a dozen of Cale’s Purgators until he signalled them to stop. He watched with great pleasure as the Swiss generals went to inspect the damage to their baffled elite. He was gracious enough not to go with them; even from forty yards away, the effect of the metal flails, clubs, hammers, blunt woodaxes and rocks was clear.

After ten minutes of inspection it was Fanshawe who walked back to Cale, apparently as easy-going and frivolous as usual; but the truth was that he was shaken by the implications of what he’d seen.

‘I was wrong,’ he said to Bose Ikard. ‘It could work. I’ve got questions though.’

‘And I have answers,’ said Cale. They adjourned to a meeting later that day. On the way off the field Bose Ikard caught up with Fanshawe and spoke quietly.

‘Can this really work?’

‘You saw for yourself.’

‘And we can win?’

‘Possibly. But what if you do? What then?’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘You’ve shown your hillbillies that they’re as good as their masters. Are they going to fight and die in their thousands – and they will die – and then just hand it all back? Would you?’

At their meeting that afternoon there were a great many surly questions, all of them dealt with easily enough by Cale. If he’d been them he would have made things much more awkward – he knew there were weaknesses even if they couldn’t see them. The questions from Fanshawe failed to materialize: he could see the flaws too, but also that they could be managed. Cale answered calmly and pleasantly until the very last comment – the suggestion that once it was a matter of life and death the peasants would break in the face of blood and mutilation.

‘Then bring your men back tomorrow and we’ll fight with sharp weapons, and no mercy,’ said Cale, still calm. ‘You won’t be back for a third time.’

Bose Ikard, however, though mulling over the long-term consequences pointed out by Fanshawe, saw that he had no choice but to support Cale: there was no point in long-term thinking if there wasn’t going to be a long-term. He sent away his new High Command and got down to the details of money and the requisition powers Cale demanded.

This did not come easily to the Chancellor: giving away money and power was physically painful to him. But he’d worry about getting them back, as well as the dangers of an armed and trained peasantry, when this was all over. By the end of the meeting, Thomas Cale was the most powerful little boy in the history of the Four Quarters. It felt to Cale, as the letter was signed, as if deep in his peculiar soul a small sweet spring of cool water had started to flow.

Outside, Fanshawe signalled him to one side.

‘You were very quiet,’ said Cale.

‘Professional courtesy,’ said Fanshawe. ‘Didn’t want to piss on your pageant.’

‘And you think you could have?’

‘How are you going to supply them?’

‘Oh no! You’ve seen the big weakness – there’s no fooling you.’

Fanshawe smiled.

‘Then you won’t have a problem answering, will you?’

Ten minutes later they were in an old workshop deep in the slums of Spanish Leeds and Michael Nevin, outdragger and inventor, was proudly showing off one of his new supply wagons. Now he had money to back his ingenuity, the result, while still distantly related to his outdragger cart, was a thing of elegance and style.

‘Move it,’ said Cale.

Fanshawe picked up a two-wheeled cart by the shafts at the front. It was much bigger than the original it was based on, and he was astonished at how light it was. Nevin was a peacock puffed with pride. ‘It’ll shift four times as quick as the supply wagons them junkie Redeemers use, tum right enough and heft near half as much. Don’t over-pack it and you only need one horse ’stead of six bullocks. Push comes to shove you don’t even need a beast – y’could budge it with four men and half a cargo and still resupply near as quick as the Redeemers. I’m salivatin’ right enough. Haven’t I made it to be all things to all men.’ It was a statement not a question.

Cale was almost as delighted with Nevin as Nevin was delighted with himself.

‘Mr Nevin worked with me on the war wagon as well. It was his idea to cut down the size so they can move maybe twice as fast as the Redeemer supply carts. The only way they can move with enough speed to follow and attack us is by sending mounted infantry after us but without supply wagons. Even if they catch up, Artemisia’s outriders will tell us hours before they arrive. We circle up, dig a six-foot trench around the outside, and what will they do? If they attack we’ll cut them to pieces, worse than we did today. If they wait, the outriders will have ridden for more troops to relieve us. Remember, there’ll be two hundred of these forts on the move every day of every week. Even if they can isolate one and destroy it we’ll take ten times as many of them with us.’

‘As easy as that?’

‘No,’ replied Cale. ‘But they’ll lose two men for every one of ours.’

‘Even if you’re right, and I concede you might be, the Redeemers are ready to die in numbers – are your hillbillies?’

Cale smiled again.

‘We’ll find out, I suppose.’

‘Do you really think you can win a battle with your wagons?’

‘Don’t know that either, but I don’t intend to try. It’s like IdrisPukke says: the trouble with decisive battles is that they decide things. I’m not going to crush the Redeemers, I’m going to bleed them.’

26

According to the great Ludwig, the human body is the best picture of the human soul and so, like the body, the human spirit has its cancers and growths and infected organs. Just as the purpose of the liver is to act as a sump for the poisons of the body, the soul has its organs for containing and isolating the toxic discharge of human suffering.

It is an axiom of the hopeful that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you strong: but the truth is that such deadly suffering can be held in isolation in this poison reservoir only for a time: like the liver it can deal with only so much poison before it begins to rot.

Survivors of the Sanctuary had already taken more than their due share of grief. Add to this the loss of his wife and child, and the horror of the events in Kitty’s basement, and Kleist was on the brink of drowning in his past. The day after the mock battle on Silver Field he was delivering a pair of boots he had been working on for the campaign ahead (leather work had been one of Kleist’s designated skills at the Sanctuary) and was heading for the bootmakers in New York Road. Bosco had drummed into Cale that decent boots were third only to food and weapons for an army. Kleist was heading through the market, crowded because the weekly horse fair was on, when he brushed past Daisy carrying their son.

He walked on for a few yards and then stopped. He had barely taken in the face of the young woman – he’d not been looking at her directly and they’d passed in a fraction of a second – but something shivered in him, even though she was older and thinner than his dead wife, much more drawn. He knew it could not be her – her dust was blowing about on a prairie three hundred miles away – and he did not want to look again and drag his misery out of the depths, but he could not stop himself. He turned to stare at her as she moved away through the crowd, baby on hip. But she was quickly hidden in the crush of buyers and sellers. He stood still as a stump and told himself to go after her, but then he told himself there was no point. A shiver of desolation passed through him, his grief now uncontainable, spreading slowly, a slow and malignant leak. He stood for a moment longer but he had things to do and he turned for the bootmaker’s. But from that moment in the marketplace Kleist was on borrowed time.

‘So what do you think?’

For the last ten minutes Cale had been watching Robert Hooke examining a four-foot-long tube of pig iron.

‘Have you tried to use it?’ asked Hooke.

‘Me? No. I saw one like it at Bex. The first time it fired it went through three Redeemers at one go – the second time it blew up and killed half a dozen Swiss. But if you could make it work it’d be a hell of a thing.’

Hooke eyed the ugly-looking contraption. ‘I’m astonished it worked at all.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘I’d need a lot of money.’

‘Of course you will. But I’m not stupid. I know you were working on a tube for your collider. I’m not paying for you to research into the nature of things.’

‘You think all knowledge must be practical.’

‘I don’t think anything about knowledge one way or the other – what I think about is not being on top of a bonfire, one you’ll be joining me on if we don’t find a way to stop Bosco. Understand?’

‘Oh, indeed I do, Mr Cale.’

‘So, is it possible?’

‘It’s not impossible.’

‘Then give me a bill and get on with it.’ Cale walked off towards the door.

‘By the way,’ called out Hooke.

‘Yes?’

‘Is it true you cut off a man’s head because he told you to bring him a glass of water?’

Even for someone as sound as a roach Cale’s workload would have been murderous and he was very far from sound. Necessity forced him to delegate. There were candidates enough: IdrisPukke and a reluctant Cadbury (‘I have criminal enterprises to run’) could be trusted, Kleist even, silent and grim as he was, seemed to want work to occupy his mind. Vague Henri was everywhere doing everything. But it was still not enough. He went with IdrisPukke to ask Vipond for his help.

‘I’m sorry about Conn.’

‘I am,’ replied Vipond, ‘quite clear that you have nothing to be sorry for. There was no choice.’

‘I didn’t laugh at him.’

‘I know. But I’m afraid it doesn’t matter. You must bring in Bose Ikard.’

‘How?’

‘Yes … not easy. He’s an able man in his way but he has the besetting fault of power: it’s become an end in itself. And he’s addicted to conspiracy. Leave him alone for five minutes and he’d start plotting against himself.’

‘I need control of the regular army,’ said Cale. ‘I thought I could build my own separate force. But it won’t work on its own. I need troops who can fight outside the forts.’

‘I understand you promised him otherwise.’

‘Well, I was wrong. The hillbillies are fine as long as they’re protected behind the walls and out of reach. But away from the wagons they’re as dangerous as a bald porcupine.’

Vipond said nothing for a moment.

‘Desperate situations require desperate remedies,’ he said at last. ‘Try telling the truth.’

‘Meaning?’

‘What it suggests. Be frank with him. He knows how desperate things are or you wouldn’t be where you are now. Point out to him that you’ll succeed together or you’ll die together. Or you could try blackmail if that person Cadbury has anything on him.’

‘Not enough,’ said IdrisPukke.

‘Then honesty it is.’

‘And if honesty doesn’t work?’

‘Assassination.’

‘I thought you said it never worked.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Extraordinary.’

To Cale’s surprise his subsequent meeting with Bose Ikard was not just successful but pleasurable. Lies had to be elaborate and there was always something you hadn’t thought of to catch you out. It was a strain, lying. Telling the truth, on the other hand, was easy. It was so true. He liked telling the truth so much he decided that one day he’d like to tell it again. And so it turned out as Vipond had hoped: a lack of choice would drive Bose Ikard towards simplicity.

‘I can tell you that the High Command won’t be convinced. They don’t want anything to do with you.’

‘Then they’ll have to be replaced.’

‘They’ve only just been appointed.’

‘Is this true of all of them or just some of them?’ asked IdrisPukke.

‘If you could remove the triad that might be enough. If.’

‘Are you averse to special means?’

‘Special?’

‘You know: desperate times require desperate remedies.’

Within ten days, two resignations and a suicide had accounted for the triad by way of Kitty the Hare’s red books. As a matter of courtesy and a show of good faith, one of the books was handed over to Bose Ikard, one that contained some unorthodox financial dealings involving Bose Ikard himself. IdrisPukke had, of course, made a copy.

For different reason the Laconics and the Redeemers were societies built on the notion that war was an inevitable constant of human existence. The Axis armies were just armies. Cale was helped in his reforms, however, by the increasing awareness that it was not defeat that was at stake in the war but annihilation. This awareness was made all the greater by reprints of sermons given in the Great Cathedral of Chartres by Pope Bosco himself. In them, Bosco, quoting in precise detail from the Good Book, called on his followers to carry out God’s explicit command that ‘you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. In Makkedah utterly destroy it and all the souls therein. In Libnah destroy it and all the souls therein; and in Luchish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir, they utterly destroyed all them that breathed and they did not spare any, putting to death men, women and children and infants, cattle and sheep and camels and donkeys.’

There were suggestions, entirely true as it happened, that these blood-curdling sermons were fakes. But though it was true that they had been made up by Cale and Vague Henri and printed in secret, most people became reluctantly persuaded they were real and for two reasons. From the few refugees who had recently made it across the Mississippi from the territory now occupied by the Redeemers, there were numerous reports of the mass evacuation of entire cities, moving to the north and then the west. But there was also the disturbing truth that all the religions of the Four Quarters shared a belief in the same Good Book, and though most chose to ignore the many occasions on which God had demanded the divine massacring of entire countries, down to the last dog, it was no longer possible to do so in quite the same way. The inconvenient truth was that the promise of an apocalypse, whether local (Man Hattan, Sodom) or universal (the end time of Geddon), was woven into the very fabric of their oddly shared beliefs.

For the next six weeks it was duck soup all round as Cale’s new government department, the Office Against the Redeemers (the OAR) found itself pushing at open doors everywhere. Partly this was due to fear of the Redeemers and partly fear of Thomas Cale: the story about him cutting off a man’s head for ordering him to bring a drink of water was now accepted truth. ‘You have a talent for being legendary,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I wonder if that can be entirely a good thing.’ His access to Kitty the Hare’s red books also encouraged co-operation. After the replacement of the triad, everyone, for the moment, now relied for their position on Thomas, with the result that a new enthusiasm about his plans for everything began to permeate the halls of power. Much was done and much quicker than the OAR could have expected. But all this good news couldn’t last, nor did it. But the blow, when it came, was unexpected in its expectedness.

Two months into their preparations they had planned the first delivery of supplies of food, uniforms, weapons and the wagons so central to their campaign. The boots, mostly designed by Cale and Kleist, had been contracted in detail according to a strict model – the Redeemer way. The same with the food. The same with the weapons – from the high quality but simple flails to the newly created crossbows designed for speed of loading and close fighting rather than power. Standing in the food depot, where the first lot of rations had been delivered, Cale watched as box after box was broken open to reveal tack biscuits infected with maggots and weevils. Those that weren’t were either tainted by rancid fat or adulterated with God-knew-what to make them not just inedible (soldiers could endure the merely inedible if they had to) but worthless in providing energy to fighting men. In the previous four hours he had been through the same routine with all the other supplies: the boots were already falling apart, the crossbows couldn’t fire a bolt powerful enough to break the skin of a child suffering from rickets. The wagons seemed to be built to their specifications but a thirty-minute ride with half a dozen of them showed they’d barely last a week of serious use.

‘I want those responsible,’ said Cale, as cold as anyone had ever seen him.

But this turned out to be a good deal trickier than it seemed. Corruption in the matter of military supplies was rooted not just in the suppliers but in the people the suppliers corrupted in order to get the contracts. It was so grown into the business of procurement that those involved did not think of it as fraud. Worse than the fact that it was an ingrained habit was that control of procurement was exclusively in the gift of members of the Royal Family. It should not be thought that they actually did anything for the money except endure the strain of opening up their pockets, but the amount they expected for doing nothing was so great that there simply wasn’t enough money left to provide decent weapons and food and make any kind of profit.

Warfare seemed almost easy next to this. If the OAR could not resupply quickly enough, and with the right quality of equipment for the likelihood of an early spring crossing by the Redeemers, they were finished. Yet the people responsible for creating this disaster were beyond Cale’s reach.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Bose Ikard who, to be fair, saw the problem clearly enough.

‘It has to stop. It has to be taken out of their hands. It’s mad. Don’t they realize the Redeemers will destroy them as well?’

‘They’re royal. Their lives are themselves a form of insanity. They are princes of the blood – a real power – an anointed power created by God flows through their veins. They’re not the same as you or me.’

‘And I thought the Redeemers were mad.’

‘Welcome to the rest of the world,’ said Ikard. ‘If I intervened I’d be in a cell within an hour. What good would that do you? There must be a solution.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s up to you. You’re in charge now.’

‘Do I have your support?’

‘No. But whatever you do, make it dazzle.’

Gil had known for some time that Cale had managed to cover himself with, mostly, stolen glory from the great Redeemer victory at Bex, but everything he could learn was vague and generalized, not much better than the gossip people knew on the streets. He also had a third-hand account of Conn’s trial and a first-hand account of his execution, along with the widely believed rumour that Cale had laughed and smoked as Conn’s head bounced along the Quai des Moulins. If only, he thought, the claims made in Spanish Leeds about Redeemer spies were true – the only people he had in his pay were criminals, the only fellow travellers were outsiders and inadequates. But Gil was beginning to realize that it was no longer a case of separating fact from fiction when it came to Cale – it became important not to dismiss, however ludicrous, the stories of him being seven foot tall or blinding an assassin by holding his hand up in the air (though the story about him cutting off someone’s head because they’d told him to get them a glass of water struck him as all too plausible). Something about Cale caused people to clothe him in their hopes and fears – the fact that they were afraid of him and yet had ridiculous expectations of his ability to save them were bound up together. And it wasn’t just the stupid and desperate – look at Bosco. He was the cleverest man he knew and yet nothing could shake his belief in Cale. But that didn’t stop Gil from trying.

‘He’s becoming powerful, Your Holiness.’

‘Then,’ said Bosco, ‘it shows that Ikard and Zog are more intelligent than I gave them credit for.’

‘He either knows or can guess what we intend to do. This is a great threat to us.’

‘Not so, I think. His knowledge of our plan to attack through Arnhemland could have been serious – but at that time he was not able to persuade anyone to listen. Now we’re at the Mississippi in the north and have sealed off the Brunner Pass to Leeds in the south it’s perfectly obvious what we’re going to do. What he knows or can guess doesn’t matter.’

‘Only we’re not going to be facing some chinless wonder of Zog’s. He knows what he’s doing.’

‘Of course. What else would you expect from the Left Hand of God?’ He was smiling but Gil was not sure what kind of smile it was.

‘What does the fact that he directly opposes us say about your plan to bring about the promised end?’

‘I thought it was our plan – and God’s plan.’ Still the same smile.

‘I deserve better, Your Holiness, than to be mocked for a slip of the tongue.’

‘Of course, Gil. I stand corrected. The Pope begs your forgiveness. You have always been the best of servants to the harshest of all causes.’

The smile had gone but the tone of his apology was still wrong.

‘What does it mean, Your Holiness, that Cale is against us?’

‘It means that the Lord is sending us a message.’

‘Which is?’

‘I don’t know. It’s my fault that I can’t see what he’s telling me – but after all I am one of his mistakes.’

‘Why doesn’t he just tell you?’ This was dangerous stuff and once he’d said it Gil wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

‘Because my God is a subtle God. He made us because he did not want to be alone – if he has to tell us what to do and intervene on our behalf then we’re no more than pets, like the lap dogs of the rich sluts in Spanish Leeds. God hints because he loves us.’

‘Then why destroy us?’

Why not, thought Gil to himself as soon as he said it, follow up a blasphemous question with an even more blasphemous one? But he’d not taken into account how intelligent his odd master was.

‘I have often thought that myself. Why, Lord, ask me to do this terrible thing?’

‘And?’

‘God moves in a mysterious way. I think perhaps he is more merciful and loving than I had thought. I was arrogant,’ he added bitterly, ‘because I was so angry at what mankind had done to his only son. I now believe that once all our dead souls are gathered together he is going to remake us – but this time in his own image. I think so. I think that’s why we must do this revolting thing.’

‘But you aren’t sure?’

Bosco smiled, but this time it was easy to read – it was a smile of simple humility.

‘I refer you to my previous answer.’

It was clear the audience was over and it would be best to get out before he said something even more stupid. Gil bowed.

‘Your Holiness.’

He had his hand on the door when Bosco called out to him.

‘I will have some plans sent to you this afternoon.’

‘Yes, Your Holiness.’

‘It will take some effort but I’m sure it’s necessary – better safe than sorry and all that. I want you to move the shipyards on the Mississippi back a hundred miles or so.’

‘May I ask why, Your Holiness?’ His voice clearly showed he thought the idea was absurd – but Bosco seemed not to notice. Or had decided not to.

‘If I were Cale, I’d try and destroy them. It’s wise to be cautious, I think.’

Outside, as he walked down the corridor, one thought was repeating itself in Gil’s mind: I must find some way to leave him.

27

‘What will you do?’ said IdrisPukke.

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘You haven’t thought of anything, have you?’

‘No, but I will.’

‘Be careful.’

‘I meant to ask,’ said Cale, ‘if you’ve finished the plans about going over the mountains?’

‘As near as.’

‘We might need them sooner than you think.’ He was obviously thinking about something else. ‘Does this plan include the Purgators?’

‘No.’

‘It should.’

‘You’ve got very sentimental.’

‘Sentiment has nothing to do with it – except my loathing for them has clouded my judgement. It’s time to count my blessings. Two hundred men who’ll do whatever you want, no questions asked, are worth having, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You’re not going to like this,’ said Cale to Vague Henri.

‘Don’t tell me there aren’t any cucumber sandwiches.’ Vague Henri was only partly joking. He was unusually partial to cucumber sandwiches, which had been invented only ten years before by the Materazzi dandy Lord ‘Cucumber’ Harris when the vegetables had first been imported to Memphis and no one knew what to do with them. Every day that he was not out and about taking care of business for the OAR Vague Henri took high tea at four o’clock (cucumber sandwiches, cream cakes, scones) and pretended it was done to mock his former betters. In fact, he looked forward to high tea as the greatest pleasure in his life next to his very frequent visits to the Empire Of Soap in the Rue De Confort Sensuelle.

‘The princes of the blood – they’re going to get away with it.’

The three of them had discussed the retribution against the princes (Cale and Vague Henri always included Kleist even though he seemed indifferent to anything but his own particular tasks), as well as the manufacturers who bribed them, in terms of what should happen and how extreme and how public the acts of violence committed towards them would need to be.

‘Why?’ Vague Henri was no longer in a good mood. His fury at the shoddy material that had been delivered was as intense as Cale’s.

‘Because getting away with things that other people don’t get away with is what they’re good at.’

‘So you’re not going to cut their heads off and stick them on a spike?’ This had been Vague Henri’s preferred solution.

‘Worse than that.’

‘Go on.’

‘We’re going to have to reward them,’ said Cale.

‘You want to give them a bung?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘We’re not strong enough to move against them. I talked to IdrisPukke and Vipond and they put me right. There isn’t time to start a revolution. Bosco took twenty years to take down his enemies in Chartres and even then he had to move more quickly than he wanted to. We can’t kill a dozen members of the Royal Family – we can’t even afford to upset them too much. We have to bribe them to get out of the way. We need to make them anxious and then offer them a way out. Not too anxious, and a generous exit. Tricky but possible.’

‘And the factory owners?’

‘We can do whatever we like to them.’

There was a short silence.

‘Bollocks!’ shouted Vague Henri, truly frustrated and angry. ‘Promise that if we’re still alive when this is over we’ll come back and fuck them up. Tell me we’ll do that.’

‘Put them on the list,’ said Cale, laughing. ‘Along with all the others.’

Let us consider the acts of Thomas Cale and how they came about: the saving of Riba from a dreadful death, though only after he had run away; the somewhat reluctant return to save his not quite friends; the vandalous breaking of the beautiful Danzig Shiv; the killing of men in their sleep; the rescuing of Arbell Materazzi; the killing, sans merci, of Solomon Solomon at the Red Opera; the restoration of the Palace idiot, Simon Materazzi; Arbell saved again; the much regretted deliverance of Conn at Silbury Hill; the signing of the warrant of execution for the Maid of Blackbird Leys; the poisoning of the waters at the Golan Heights; the destruction and invention of the camps, in which five thousand women and children died of starvation and disease; the strangling of Kitty the Hare; the burning of the bridge after Bex; and perjuring himself at Conn Materazzi’s trial. To these he now added the kidnap and murder of the twenty merchants he held responsible for the trash delivered to his depots the week before. Naked as worms, the men were strung up in front of the palacios of the royal princes of the blood who had accepted bribes from them. Their bodies were horribly mutilated, noses and ears cut off, lips and fingers stitched together holding a coin in their tongueless mouths and clenched hands. Their left eyes were gouged, their gallbladders – held to be the seat of greed – removed. Around their necks a sheet of paper, later distributed in hundreds throughout the city, revealed the terrible nature of their crimes against every man, woman and child whose lives they were prepared to sell in pursuit of money. The pamphlet was signed ‘The Knights of the Left Hand’.

To be strictly fair to Cale and Vague Henri, the men had been murdered as quickly and painlessly as time and circumstances allowed. The terrible torture inflicted on them as a lesson to the rest was done after they had been killed. History cannot judge: history is written by historians. Only the reader in possession of the facts can decide whether he could have acted otherwise in the circumstances or reasonably seen the consequences of his acts.

On the walls of the palacios from which the bodies were hung a sentence was written in old Spanish, it being an affectation of the aristocracy that they should speak a language among themselves of a kind not spoken in Spain for several hundred years.

Pesado has sido en balanza, y fuiste hallado falto.

Broadly speaking this could be translated as ‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting’ – an observation that would be found meaningless to hoi polloi but menacing enough to the twelve princes of the blood involved in taking money from the dead men hanging upside down outside their mansions. Cale let them fret for twenty-four hours and then IdrisPukke, on behalf of the OAR, delivered a large paper bag of money to compensate them for the loss of revenue from their entirely legitimate contract with the late factory owners that the OAR had now been obliged, in the face of grave national emergency, to take over in the greater interest of all. The twelve princes of the blood acquiesced because they were not sure what else to do: they had been threatened although they did not know precisely how, and rewarded although they did not know precisely why.

Not only was there very little fuss concerning the kidnapping, torture and murder of men who had faced no trial, let alone their accusers, rather there was a clamour to root out anyone else involved, and much support from the slums upwards for the Knights of the Left Hand and their methods.

A week after Spanish Leeds had been set alight by the murders, Robert Hooke received a visit from Cale to hear his initial report on the possibility of manufacturing guns.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the idea of guns,’ said Hooke, as they looked over the expensively bought shooting iron. ‘It’s the practice that’s the problem. The villainous saltpetre that’s packed in at this end – it’s too much for the iron. That’s why it explodes. Simple as that really.’

‘Then get better iron.’

‘It doesn’t exist. Not yet.’

‘How long?’

‘No idea – months, years. Not enough time anyway.’

‘So that’s it?’

‘Mmm … no … maybe not. I was talking to Vague Henri. He told me he’d made his crossbows much easier to load – but it means they’re much less powerful.’

‘We don’t need them to be powerful – they’re for close range fighting – a few feet.’

‘You never said that.’

‘So?’

‘So? It’s everything. What’s the maximum range you’ll be fighting at?’

‘A few yards mostly – our men will be behind wooden walls – as little man to man fighting as possible.’

‘Will the Redeemers have armour?’

‘Some, but not much. But I suppose they’ll start using more.’

Hooke looked down at the shooting iron. ‘Then you don’t need this.’ He held up a large lead shot the size of a chicken’s egg. ‘You don’t need this either.’ He gestured Cale over to a table covered by a cloth and drew it off like a conjuror at a children’s party revealing a magic cake.

‘It’s just a wooden mock-up – but you can see the principle.’

It was similar to the shooting iron – a tube sealed at one end and open at the other – but cut longways in two so you could see the inner workings.

‘The thing is,’ said Hooke, ‘is not to overload it. You need the right amount of villainous saltpetre – as little as possible – and something light to be exploded out the other end.’

‘How light?’

Hooke opened up a small canvas bag and spread its contents on the table. It was just a collection of nails, small shards and nuggets of metal – even a few stones. It was hard to be impressed. ‘The main thing is to get the size of the charge right. Every time. No offence but your men’ll overdo it. And then I thought – why not put a uniform charge in a little canvas bag, easy to load, always the same charge? Then I thought, why not do the same with the metal and stone shot? Then,’ he said, warming to his brilliance, ‘I thought – why not put them both into another bag? Easy to load, and damn quick. Brilliant.’

‘Will it work?’

‘Come and see.’

Hooke ushered Cale outside where two of his assistants stood next to an iron pipe, much like the shooting iron, held in a wooden vice. About ten yards away was a dead dog strapped to a plank. Hooke, Cale and the assistants took cover behind a pouisse. One of the assistants lit a taper on the end of a long stick and carefully eased it out to the shooting iron. As he was trying to expose as little of himself as possible it took several tries to light the pan. Able to watch through a set of drilled holes, Cale saw the villainous saltpetre in the pan flash, followed a few seconds later by a BANG! – loud, but not as loud as he’d expected. They waited a few seconds and Hooke walked out through the dense smoke, followed by Cale, and over to the dead dog. He’d expected to see something terrible but at first he thought the shot must have missed. It hadn’t – at least, not entirely. Once Hooke pointed out the wounds there were clearly half a dozen bits of nail and stone embedded quite deep in the animal’s flesh.

‘It might not kill. But you get hit by this and you won’t be taking part in anything more than groaning in agony for some time. And the thing is – if you only use it at mass ranks close in, each shot will wound two or three or more every time.’

‘How many times a minute to load and fire?’

‘We can do three. But we’re not in battle conditions. I’d say – conservative – two.’

They spent another hour discussing the men and materials he needed and where the new shooting irons could be cast and how reliable the supply would be.

‘There shouldn’t be a problem. The stress on these will be much lower so it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with the quality we need. Besides, I suppose it’s pretty clear what’ll happen if they deliver anything second-rate.’

He looked at Cale thoughtfully.

‘Everyone knows it was you.’

Cale looked back at him.

‘Everyone knows it was me who laughed at Conn when he died. Everyone knows it was me who cut off a man’s head for ordering me to bring him a drink of water.’

Hooke smiled.

‘Everyone knows it was you.’

‘Everyone,’ said Bose Ikard, ‘knows it was him.’

‘There was an old lady,’ said Fanshawe in reply, ‘who swallowed a bird.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘You see, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider that she swallowed in order to catch the fly that she swallowed.’

‘You mean something but I’m too irritable for your cockiness.’

‘I was merely suggesting that even if the cure for the disease is not as bad as the disease, Thomas Cale might be very bad indeed for you.’

‘But not you?’

‘Indeed he might. The Laconics are outnumbered four to one by serfs.’

‘Our peasants are the salt of the earth, not slaves. We don’t kill them without compunction. So we’re not afraid to go to sleep in case they cut our throats. We are one nation.’

‘I truly doubt that. But of course you’re in the middle of a wonderful experiment to test your confidence. It will be so interesting if Cale pulls it off to see whether your people are happy to go back to a life of sheep-shagging and forelock-tugging.’

‘What’s your point, if you have one?’

‘That you have to know when to stop swallowing. Do you want to know how the song ends?’

‘Not particularly,’ said Bose Ikard.

‘But it’s enchanting. “There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead of course.”’

28

‘Fanshawe has offered to supply a hundred Laconics to train the New Model Army.’

The three boys, Kleist ever more silent, were eating oysters in lemon juice with IdrisPukke, accompanied by a dry, flinty Sancerre to cut out the saltiness.

‘Obviously you can’t trust him,’ said IdrisPukke, enjoying the puzzle concerning what Fanshawe was up to as much as the oysters and the wine. ‘But in what way can’t you trust him?’

‘He doesn’t expect me to believe he’s doing it out of the goodness of his heart. He doesn’t think I’m that stupid.’

‘So how stupid does he think you are?’

There was a delightful snigger from Vague Henri at this. Nothing from Kleist. He seemed not to be listening.

‘I think Fanshawe’s realized we might stop Bosco and they want to be on the … not losing side.’

At this point they were joined by Artemisia.

‘Oysters, my dear?’ said IdrisPukke.

‘No, thank you,’ she said sweetly. ‘Where I come from we feed them to the pigs.’ He was highly amused by this, rather to her surprise, because she’d intended to take him down a peg: for some reason she wrongly suspected him of condescending to her. He turned back to Cale.

‘How is he intending to explain the presence of so many Laconics to the Redeemers?’

‘It’s only a hundred. He’s going to claim they’re renegades.’

‘All right. You don’t believe him. But again, how don’t you believe him?’

‘I don’t know. Not yet. But I need his instructors whatever his reasons. Losses are going to be high. We need to churn out replacements at five thousand a month. And that’s cutting it fine. It’s going to be a damn close-run thing.’

‘It’s an idea,’ said Kleist, ‘worth discussing, I think.’ When he spoke these days, which was rarely, it was about details. He seemed to find some peace in the minute particulars of the heel of a boot or the way the leather was stitched to keep out the wet. ‘We’ve been assuming they aren’t going to try to come across the Mississippi in the winter.’

Artemisia groaned in irritation.

‘I’ve told you – the Mississippi doesn’t freeze over like other rivers, not completely. It becomes a mass of ice blocks breaking and crashing into each other. Treacherous doesn’t begin to describe it. They’re not coming over in numbers until well into the spring.’

‘I believe you,’ said Kleist, quietly. ‘But you said they couldn’t come over in numbers.’

‘So?’

‘But it would be possible to cross …’

‘Not with an army or anything like it.’

Kleist didn’t react to the irritated interruption, he just kept on in his dull monotone. ‘But it would be possible to cross a small force.’

‘What good would that do?’

‘I don’t mean for the Redeemers to cross in small numbers, I mean for us to cross in small numbers over to them.’

There was a short silence.

‘To do what?’ said Cale.

‘You said it would be close.’

‘It will.’

‘What if you had more time … months, maybe a whole year?’

‘Go on.’

‘The Redeemers are building boats over the winter for an invasion in the spring. Do you know where they’re building them?’

‘I don’t see …’ said Artemisia.

‘Do you know where they’re building them?’ Now it was Kleist doing the interrupting.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The section on the North Bank between Athens and Austerlitz is packed with boatyards but the Redeemers have moved the factories back, along with the builders, to Lucknow so they can control construction of the fleet.’

‘So all their boats are in one place?’

‘Mostly, as far as I know.’

‘So if you could get a force of, say, a thousand across the river in maybe early spring, could you attack Lucknow and burn their fleet?’

‘I couldn’t get a thousand across,’ said Artemisia. ‘Or anything like it.’

‘How many then?’ said Cale, clearly excited.

‘I don’t know. I’d have to talk to the river pilots. I don’t know.’

‘Two hundred?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘It would be worth the risk,’ said Cale.

‘It would be my people taking it,’ said Artemisia.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cale. ‘That’s true. But if it could be done.’

‘I’d have to lead it,’ she said.

Cale wasn’t happy with this.

‘I need you here and alive. Your outriders are the eyes and ears of the fortress wagons.’ This was true enough, but it was not the only, or even the main, reason. ‘Besides,’ he lied, ‘it’s an unbroken rule that the man … the person who comes up with the plan has the right to put it into operation.’

Artemisia stared at Kleist. ‘You have an extensive knowledge of riverwork and know the North Bank of the Mississippi in Halicarnassus?’

‘No.’

‘I do have an extensive knowledge of riverwork and, as it happens, I own the North Bank of the Mississippi in Halicarnassus.’

This even made Kleist smile.

‘I withdraw,’ he said. Cale looked at him, not pleasantly.

‘There’s another problem,’ said IdrisPukke.

‘Are you an expert on riverwork and Halicarnassus as well as all your other achievements?’

‘No, my dear, I know nothing about either. This is more politics.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Everything comes down to politics one way or another. Is this a risky venture, would you say?’

‘Of course.’

‘You might easily fail then?’

‘Cale’s right,’ said Artemisia. ‘If there’s even a limited chance of causing such damage we should take it. It’s my life and those of my people.’

‘I wasn’t so much, I’m afraid, worrying about the lives of two hundred people – there’ll be many sets of two hundred dead before this is over. I was worrying more about what the implications for everything else would be if you fail.’

‘I admit I don’t follow, but then that’s the point, isn’t it? You want me to seem like a stupid girl.’

‘Not at all,’ replied IdrisPukke. ‘But think about it. If you attack in late spring this will be the first action of the New Model Army against the Redeemers. Yes?’

‘He’s right,’ said Cale, seeing a hope of stopping her.

‘The army at large doesn’t need to know anything unless we succeed,’ said Artemisia.

‘I was talking about politics,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘You can keep it from the army and the people if you’re careful, but can you keep it from Bose Ikard and the High Command?’

‘I’ll persuade them it’s a risk worth taking.’

‘But politicians don’t like risks, they like deals. Remember that they’re so afraid of the Redeemers that they’re ready to put a mad boy in charge.’

‘He’s talking about you,’ said Vague Henri to Cale, ‘just in case you didn’t realize’.

‘They’re on the razor’s edge, all of them. Then the first thing you offer them is an abject failure – they’ll be begging Bosco for negotiations while the ashes are still warm on this young woman’s bonfire. You can live without this victory – you might not be able to live with a defeat.’

‘It’s worth the risk,’ said Artemisia.

‘I’m not sure that it is,’ said IdrisPukke.

Cale had been given his chance and he was careful not to turn it down.

‘This is a new idea. We need to think about it.’

‘Think about it and say no, that’s what you mean,’ said Artemisia.

‘Not true. Talk to your river pilots. See what they have to say. Work out a plan. When you have we’ll talk about it again.’

When Artemisia had left, Cale turned on Kleist.

‘We haven’t had a peep out of you in months but suddenly we can’t shut you up!’

‘You should have told us she was just along to improve the view – all we’ve heard from you till now is what a war genius she is.’

This was true and he couldn’t think of the last word. He had it anyway. ‘Bollocks!’

A few hours later Cale suffered another attack of the conniptions – longer and more violent in its retchings than usual. The demon, or demons, that inhabited his chest seemed to live in their own world, woke and slept on their own time, regardless of anything Cale did or did not do. They were unaware of the daily life of the boy they inhabited, indifferent to whether things went well or badly, if he was loved or hated, was kind or pitiless. The herbs worked up to a point, as he found out when he tried to stop taking them and the chest devils dry-heaved into existence two or three times a day instead of three or four times a week, which was bad enough. As for the Phedra and Morphine, he’d not had any reason to take it again and he wasn’t looking for one. The horrible down after he’d used it had lasted two weeks and made him feel as if he’d had a sip from death in a bottle. He did try offering the herbs to Kleist but he irritably refused, saying there was nothing wrong with him and he didn’t need Old Mother Hubbard’s helper to keep him going.

Even at best Cale had to work in short bursts, resting all the time and sleeping twelve hours or more a day. However much of a disadvantage this was in some ways – he felt horrible nearly all the time – it did produce some useful effects. He could not stay in any meeting for more than a few minutes and there were plenty of them to squeeze the life out of any action that needed to be taken. Never a friendly presence to most, his attendance at any gathering was tense to the point where he seemed almost on the edge of furious violence. Because he had no choice, his already decisive character tore through complex and dangerous decisions as if he was ordering meat for the guards back in Arbell’s house in Memphis. Oddly, somewhere inside his damaged mind he was sometimes at his sharpest: there was a place there cut off from the outside world he’d been building since the first moment he’d arrived at the Sanctuary. Through all those years of long use this place of retreat was as tough as the skin on an elephant’s foot – and needed to be to keep out the madness that was destroying the rest of him.

Do this. Give him that. Take those. Put it there. Do it again. Release these. Hang them. None of this denied the debt he owed to his friends. He smiled when he said, ‘Bring me solutions, not problems. You solve it. Every time I have to answer a stupid question think of it as hammering a nail into my coffin.’

And for the moment it worked. Each one of them could rely on the fear and dread and hope that Cale’s reputation inspired. Even Vipond, a man of power if ever there was one, and who knew now even better what its nature was having lost so much of it, was amazed at what he could only describe as the magic others invested in Cale.

‘I’ve told you,’ said IdrisPukke, who relished any chance to condescend to his half-brother. ‘The spirit of the times is in him. He has great abilities but that’s not why, or not mostly why, he’s in the ascendant. Look at Alois Huttler – you could find a thousand dunces like him giving out their half-baked opinions in any public house in the country. But Alois had the spirit of the times in him. Until he didn’t.’

‘When people are faced with annihilation,’ observed IdrisPukke, ‘it’s not difficult to see why they want to believe the Left Hand of God is behind them.’

On this occasion he was sounding off about Cale in his presence. Vague Henri gurned at his friend.

‘Pity all they’ve got is you, then.’

‘Your sickness,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘is becoming a kind of blessing.’

‘I’m glad you think so.’

‘Not for you personally, of course. But didn’t Bosco tell you that Thomas Cale is not a person?’

‘Yes, but he’s mad.’

‘But not stupid. Am I right?’

‘You might not be always right, but I agree you’re never wrong.’

Laughter at this. IdrisPukke shrugged.

‘Perhaps in his madness he recognized something we’re only beginning to see ourselves. People find it easy to shine their dreadful hopes on you – the left hand of death, indeed, but on their side. It may be that the less you’re seen to do – the less of a person who’s like them – the more powerful you are.’ He sighed with enormous satisfaction. ‘I’m impressed by myself.’ More laughter. ‘We can make use of this.’

Against the weariness of being sick was the pleasure of working on the tactics of the New Model Army. The training was going better than Cale had imagined. Protected by the wagons, and using weapons based on tools they were used to working with for hours every day of their lives, the confidence of the peasant soldiers soared. The most effective of these hillbilly weapons was the threshers’ flail – a pole of four or five feet long linked by a chain to another pole of eighteen inches or so. These men were used to using them for ten hours a day after harvest and the swinging heads generated such a powerful force they could badly injure a knight in full armour let alone the less protected Redeemer men at arms. But above everything they worked on finding out every weakness of the war wagons. Vague Henri had the Purgator archers shooting in massed ranks at the wagon forts to work out how to protect the occupants and came up with bamboo-covered walkways and small shelters into which anyone caught in the open during such an attack could run to protect themselves. It wouldn’t take the Redeemers long to try to use something like fire arrows to set the wagons alight so he had the Swiss soldiers – who would be mostly used for attacks outside the fort and so were not being used for much during attacks – train in teams to put out fires before they took hold, mostly using buckets filled with earth and using water only if they must. They objected to this with puzzling intensity. They were soldiers and gentlemen – it was demeaning digging dirt and so the peasants should do it. All their resentments at the bewildering changes they had been forced to endure came out in this single issue of putting out fires. Out of nothing, Vague Henri found he had a mutiny on his hands. Cale was always mocking him by saying what a nice boy he was. Up to a point this was true, but because they were used to Cale as contrast there was a general misunderstanding about Vague Henri and what he was capable of. He seemed very normal in a way that Cale was clearly not, but he had experienced the same corrosive brutality and deadliness of the Redeemer life. It was a part of him too. Realizing he was on the edge of something disastrous his first instinct was to deal with the problem the Redeemer way: kill a couple of the noisier protestors and leave them to rot where everyone could see their mistake. Whether he would have been ready to do this and sleep well afterwards was fortunately not put to the test. There was something of good nature but also something of calculation that made him look for another way first.

Vague Henri, Cale and Kleist had talked at great length over how real they should make the practice fighting. The Redeemers took the motto ‘Train hard, fight easy’ to extremes. Mock Redeemer battles weren’t always easy to distinguish from the real thing other than that in the former they allowed the survivors to live. All three feared the result of pushing the practice battles too hard would be to create more problems than they solved and for the same reason as for the summary execution: the souls of the Swiss, peasant or gentleman, weren’t accustomed by long habit to brutality. But the Swiss soldiers had to be taught respect one way or another. ‘Right,’ said Vague Henri to his gentlemen soldiers. ‘You think you’re so much better than they are. Prove it.’ He followed this by going to the peasants in the New Model Army and telling them that there were doubts in Spanish Leeds they’d be up to the task of a real battle – they were, after all, peasants and would be bound to run when the going got tough. He’d avoided saying that this was the view of the Swiss soldiers because soon they were going to have to fight together. It was enough: they were incensed. But there was more at stake than just repeating the battle and the lesson of Silver Field: both sides had to be defeated this time.

Three days later, with Cale – a fascinated spectator – they watched the gloves-off attack by Swiss men at arms and mounted knights on the country bumpkins. It was nasty stuff, but the Swiss, for all their skill and determination, were at a huge disadvantage because they took ten times as many blows for each one they could land. After a bloody hour they withdrew and Vague Henri showed his final and very convincing hand. He pulled up four hundred fire-archers and got them pouring in three or four a minute each for ten minutes. By the end the peasants were driven out as the thirty wagons burnt like the seventh circle of hell.

It was a brutal and expensive point but it was well made – both sides realized they would live or die together.

‘I’ve been to see IdrisPukke about this, twice, but he keeps pissing in my ear,’ said Fanshawe. ‘I want them rounded up and sent back.’

‘For what reason?’ said an exhausted Cale, not much in the mood for anything except sleep.

‘As if you care about reasons.’

‘I do now – so what are they?’

‘These two hundred and fifty Helots belong to the state.’

‘That would be the state that’s signed a treaty with the Redeemers.’

‘We’re helping you in practice, aren’t we?’

‘I don’t think we should go down the road of your good intentions. We can if you like.’

‘The Helots threaten our existence as much as the Redeemers threaten yours. There are four times as many of them in Laconia as there are of us. They’re here to learn from you how they can kill the state that owns them. If you don’t want to be seen to be working against us let me deal with them.’

‘Let’s get this straight. I’m the one who deals with things here. You go anywhere near them and I’ll have you swinging off the nearest maypole upside down and with your nose in my pocket.’

There was a silence – not very pleasant.

‘Then we’ll leave.’

Another silence.

‘I’m not sending two hundred and fifty men back to be executed,’ said Cale.

‘What do you care?’

‘Never mind what I care about. I’m not doing it.’ Fanshawe, nevertheless, could see a concession was coming. ‘I’ll move them on.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I’ll have them escorted over the mountains by some unpleasant people I know and told to get lost.’

‘And if they refuse?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Can I trust you on this?’

‘I don’t give a sack of rancid badger giblets for your trust one way or the other. I want you to stay and I promise I’ll get rid of them. Take it or leave it. That’s all there is.’

It made sense to Fanshawe that his instructors were much more valuable than a couple of hundred untrained peasants so he decided to give way – though as ungraciously as possible in order to leave Cale with the impression he was deeply unhappy with the outcome. He wasn’t particularly.

The next day Cale woke up from a sixteen-hour sleep still tired, and to find IdrisPukke had arrived for a short meeting.

‘You should have told me about Fanshawe kicking off over the Helots,’ said Cale.

‘Not in my opinion,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘You made it clear that we, by which I mean me, were supposed to bring you solutions and not problems. You should have refused to see him. In fact, you should refuse to see anyone – cultivate your mystery. The more you talk to people the more human you’ll seem to them and so the more comprehensible and therefore weaker. You’re not the incarnation of the Wrath of God, you’re a very sick boy.’

‘Don’t bother polishing it, will you?’

‘If I must – you’re a very remarkable, very sick boy.’

‘I think we should give the Helots some help.’

‘Why?’

‘If we beat the Redeemers, it’ll come at a price. We’ll be the weaker. There’s every chance the Laconics will take advantage. So, if they’ve got to deal with slaves, newly trained slaves, there’s less chance the Laconics will be making a nuisance of themselves with us.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Meaning?’

‘You haven’t fallen for one of those generous impulses that affect you from time to time?’

‘Such as?’

‘You sympathize with them – you identify with them as people struggling to be free of an ugly oppressor.’

‘Would that be so bad?’

‘That’s three questions in answer to my three questions: rude but revealing.’

‘I hate to be rude.’

‘You’re walking a thin line, boy, we all are – you can’t afford to take on a cause you don’t have the power to support.’

‘I’m not. But I don’t see why we can’t send the Helots to the east to train with the Purgators there.’

‘I agree.’

A pause.

‘So you’ll send them?’

‘I already have.’

‘Great minds think alike.’

‘If it pleases you to think so.’

Cale rang a small silver bell to signal he wanted his tea. He felt absurdly self-important doing something so precious but it saved the effort of going to the door and shouting. Tea arrived immediately as the butler had merely been waiting for the bell. IdrisPukke looked on with anticipation at the assortment of sandwiches laid before him, crusts removed and cut into dainty triangles: cheese, egg, and horsemeat with cucumber. There were pastries from Patisserie Valerie in Mott Street: cream selva and wild strawberry millefeuille and almond frangipane with its intoxicating whiff of sweet cyanide.

‘Finding things to spend your money on?’ said IdrisPukke.

Cale smiled. ‘Eat thou and drink; tomorrow thou shalt die,’ he said – a line spoken to him three times a day before meals at the Sanctuary.

‘No arguing with that,’ said IdrisPukke, taking a large bite out of a veal pie with a boiled egg in the middle. ‘Koolhaus came to see me looking for a job.’

‘He’s already got a job,’ said Cale.

‘He’s an able young man – very. We know him and he knows us. It’s a waste. He can make himself useful.’

‘I’m not going to leave Simon deaf and dumb again. Offer him more money.’

‘He’s ambitious. We could lose him and it would be best to keep someone who knows a great many of our secrets inside the fold. He could be a great nuisance, too.’

Cale munched absentmindedly on a red velvet cupcake.

‘All right. Put him to work with Kleist or Vague Henri for a month. See how it goes. If he’s got the right stuff send him to keep an eye on things in West Thirteen. But he takes Simon with him.’

‘Arbell will try to stop him.’

‘If Simon lets her then he’s out. Send Koolhaus on his own.’

They sat in pleasant silence for a few minutes enjoying their tea.

‘You should go and see Riba,’ said IdrisPukke at last.

‘Because?’

‘We need to make more use of her.’

‘I tried that already. She’s learnt gratitude from her old mistress.’

To his great irritation, IdrisPukke laughed.

‘You’ve got a very elevated expectation of other people’s capacity for gratitude.’

‘Not any more, I haven’t.’

‘I disagree; you asked her to betray her husband – and a brand new husband at that. You didn’t even give her time to become disillusioned with him.’

‘Well, I’m glad you think it’s funny. I stopped that ungrateful cow from being disembowelled while she was still alive by that mad bastard Picarbo.’

IdrisPukke kept on eating a cake during this rant and when he’d finished eating put down his plate and said, ‘You know I’d forgotten what a drip you can be.’ Cale was startled but not by the refusal to grant that his resentment was entirely justified. ‘You think you’re so much above everyone else – don’t deny it.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Cale.

‘Then why are you so surprised that other people don’t live up to your standards? You can’t have it both ways, sonny. You need to make your mind up. Or in future stick to performing your magnanimous acts of self-sacrifice for the benefit of the heroic and exceptionally virtuous.’

IdrisPukke poured Cale a cup of tea and tinkled the bell. It was a mocking present from Cadbury for Vague Henri, bought when he discovered he ordered high tea every afternoon.

‘You rang, sir,’ said the butler.

‘More tea, Lascelles,’ said IdrisPukke.

‘Very well, sir,’ said Lascelles and left.

‘You claim you expect nothing of others yet you clearly expect some of them to give up everything. Why?’

‘Only people I risked my life to save.’

‘There’s a difference between what people ought to do and what they’re capable of doing. You’ve never had a wife or a father to split your loyalties. I’m sure it cost her a great deal to turn you down which is why you should show some backbone and make use of her guilt. She’ll want to help you prove she’s not thankless.’

‘They should have trusted me.’

‘No doubt. But they were afraid.’

‘I know what it means to be afraid.’

‘Do you, now? You see I’m not sure that’s true – or not true enough.’

Lascelles came back with the tea and after that IdrisPukke changed the subject.

29

‘You’re still angry with me,’ said Riba, more statement than question.

‘No. I’ve had plenty of time to cool down. I realized I asked too much from you.’

She was not convinced by his claim of forgiveness but it was equally necessary for her to act as if she were. Guilt and policy demanded it – her husband wanted to establish good relations with the newly powerful Cale.

‘How are you?’

‘As you can see,’ said Cale, smiling.

She said later to her husband, ‘He was pale the way yellow-green is pale.’

‘And you?’

‘Very well.’ There was a pause as she struggled to decide whether to tell him. But she wanted to – and desperately.

‘I’m going to have a baby.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’re supposed to say: “How wonderful, my dear, I’m so very happy for you.”’

‘I am … I am happy for you.’ He laughed. ‘The thing is I can’t believe, not really, that a small person can grow inside another person. It doesn’t seem possible – that it could really happen.’

‘It’s true,’ said Riba, laughing herself. ‘When one of the maids let me see her tummy when she was seven months I screamed when I saw the baby turn over and her stomach bulging – it was like watching a cat in a bag.’ They both smiled at each other – affection, calculation and resentment layered one on top of the other. ‘Now you have to ask me when I’m due.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘When am I going to have it?’

‘When are you going to have it?’

‘Six months.’ Another pause. ‘Now you ask if I want a boy or a girl.’

‘I don’t really care.’

She laughed again – but nothing, of course, could be the same.

‘I want your husband’s help.’

‘Then I’ll arrange for him to come and see you.’

‘I’m not being insulting, but I want actual help not what the Hanse have been offering up to now.’

‘Which is?’

‘You tell me. Better than that – show me.’

‘I’m just his wife. I can’t speak for him, let alone the Hanse.’

‘No, but you can speak to him. You can persuade him not to beat around the bund with me. There’s no time. I mean it. If he stays on the sidelines and I win I won’t forget – by which I mean I’ll close down the Hanse from here to the life to come.’

‘What if you don’t win?’

‘Then he’s got nothing to worry about, has he?’

She was uncertain about what to say. ‘It’s not just a question of what he believes or wants. The Hanseatic League don’t have much experience of the Redeemers. They think their reputation is just scaremongering. That’s what they want to believe. You mustn’t say I told you this but they won’t send troops, not at any price. There’s nothing he can do about that – and if you ask for them the Hanse will keep you waiting for an answer for months.’

‘What can I ask for?’

‘Money, perhaps.’

‘I don’t need money – I need administrators, people who know how to order and supply, warehousing, delivery – all the stuff the Hanse knows how to do. I don’t need money, five hundred good people will do.’ It was a figure plucked from the air. ‘With so few it doesn’t have to be official. The Hanse don’t have to be seen in it. But I want them and I want them now.’ He looked at her, and smiled. ‘I lied about the money. I want the money as well.’

As Riba got into her cab to leave she was watched from two storeys above by Vague Henri. He was remembering the time he hid behind a small hillock in the scrublands and watched her bathing naked in a pool, all gorgeously chubby curves but muscularly plump and wetly soft, and he was recalling the tingling in his chest as she unmindfully parted the folds between her legs. But that was another world.

Two minutes later, Vague Henri joined Cale for what was left of afternoon tea.

‘How was it?’ he asked.

‘Nobody loves us,’ said Cale.

‘We don’t care,’ replied Vague Henri.

That night Cale held Artemisia in his arms for the last time. If their nakedness and embrace implied warmth there was a great cold distance between them for all the touching of their skin. Cale, inexperienced in the reasons why she never closed her eyes any more when he kissed her face, was unsure what he felt or what to do about it: he’d never liked someone and then stopped liking them before. How could something so close as being inside someone – how strange it was, how strange – turn into such a vast distance so quickly?

‘I want to cross the river,’ she said.

‘It’s complicated.’

‘That’s what people say when they’re about to say no – to their children, I mean.’

He pulled away from her and sat up, looking for his cigars. He only had half of one left. He lit up.

‘Must you smoke?’

‘Worried for my health?’

‘I don’t like it.’

He didn’t reply but he did carry on smoking.

‘I want to go.’ Still he didn’t say anything. ‘I’m going to go.’ He turned to look at her. ‘I’m going to go, no matter what you say.’

‘You might have noticed,’ he said at last, blowing a long stream of smoke into the room, ‘that I’m the person who tells people what to do.’

‘Oh, so what will you do, Your Enormity, have me arrested? Will you hang me up outside the Prada as an example?’

‘You’re raving. You need to take something.’

‘I’m going.’

He looked at her.

‘Go then.’

This took some of the wind out of her sails.

‘Is this one of your little swindles?’ she said at last.

‘No.’

She stood up, quite naked, almost like a miniature woman compared to Riba.

‘I understand. I see right through you to the other side. This is a good way to get rid of me.’

‘So I’m the villain if I let you go and the villain if I stop you from going.’

‘You’re prepared to let me risk my life and the lives of hundreds because you haven’t got the guts to finish with me. Let me save you the trouble – I don’t want anything more to do with you. You’re a liar, and a murderer.’

The insults had let him off the hook. She had made the decision for him and a wonderful sense of relief flooded through him. ‘Well?’ he said, as she put on her clothes.

‘I’m going.’

‘You mean you’re going now or you’re going to cross the Mississippi?’

‘Both.’ She stood up, put on her shoes, walked through the door and took care not to slam it shut.

‘What do you want me to do about it?’ said Cale to IdrisPukke after he’d told him he’d given Artemisia permission to cross the Mississippi. ‘Should I have her killed?’

‘You were brought up very careless. Why does your mind always turn so quickly to murder?’

Cale laughed. ‘I was, yes. But now I have you to tell me right from wrong.’

‘You misunderstand me if that’s what you think. It’s true that sometimes, not very often, moral rules collide and you offend no matter what decision you make. But the world isn’t a wicked place because people don’t know the difference between right and wrong. Nine times out of ten the right course of action is clear enough but for one thing.’

‘Which is?’

‘That it doesn’t suit people’s interests or desires to do what’s right. Granted they have impressive ways of dealing with the anxiety that results – by burying it deep at the back of their minds, or better still, telling themselves that the bad course of action they’re about to take is really the best course of action. The moralist never lived who could tell you anything clearer than the Golden Rule.’

‘There’s a Golden Rule?’ mocked Cale.

‘There is indeed, sarcastic boy: treat others as you would want to be treated. Everything else in morality is just embroidery or lies.’

Cale didn’t say anything for a while.

‘How,’ he said, at last, ‘am I supposed to apply that to sending tens of thousands of people either to die or to kill tens of thousands of other people? In order to survive I’ve had to lie, cheat, murder and destroy. Now I have to do the same so that millions of others can survive with me. How does your Golden Rule help me there? Tell me, because I’d like to know.’

‘But I concede there are other times when morality is very tricky. That’s why we have so many moralists to tell us what to do.’

‘Anyway,’ said Cale, ‘I have my own Golden Rule.’

‘Which is?’ said IdrisPukke, smiling as well as curious.

‘Treat others as you would expect to be treated by them. It always works for me.’ He helped himself to another cup of tea. ‘So why are you against the attack over the Mississippi?’

‘I wouldn’t say I was against it. To be honest, I’m not sure. The thing is that if she fails …’

‘And she might not.’

‘She might not. But if she does, then her failure weakens you at the exact point you need a failure least.’

‘But if she succeeds?’

‘That might not be such good news as first it seems.’

‘A massive blow to the Redeemers and an extra year to prepare – not good news?’

‘Nobody likes you. You agree?’

‘They’ll like me if I’m a success.’

‘Will they? They’ve put you in a position of such power because they’re afraid …’

‘Terrified.’

‘Yes. Terrified is better. While they’re scared witless they’ll put up with you. But now Artemisia is one of them, not any longer one of you.’

‘Is she? They didn’t think so when she was the only one to crimp the Redeemers six months ago.’

‘That was when the alternative was themselves – now the alternative is you.’ He laughed.

‘You think they’ll put her in charge?’

‘No. But they’ll start thinking that they over-estimated you. They’d like that. Don’t forget they’re already thinking about what to do with you, not just if you fail but also if you succeed. If a man threatens the state, kill the man.’

‘It works just as well the other way round: if the state threatens the man, kill the state.’

‘Exactly … that’s exactly what they fear … that you’re going to kill the state if you get too powerful. So a great success by Artemisia, which gives them another year for preparation … they’ll have the time to be a lot less terrified of the Redeemers who are now beatable by someone who isn’t Thomas Cale, beatable by just a woman, in fact. You need her to succeed like you need a hole in the head.’

Cale sighed.

‘You’re sure you’re not making this more complicated than it is?’

IdrisPukke laughed.

‘No, I’m not sure at all. When I heard that Richelieu was dead – now there was a subtle mind – I didn’t think: Oh, Richelieu is dead. What I thought was: I wonder what he meant by that? To be a politician is to see there might be a disadvantage to the sun coming up in the morning. Do you mind if I have the last Eccles cake?’

Cale had been looking forward to eating it himself. IdrisPukke had already had one.

‘No,’ he said. IdrisPukke, like all great diplomats, assumed that this meant No, you have the last cake and not otherwise. He took a large bite. They sat in silence for a moment.

‘Kant,’ said IdrisPukke.

‘What?’

‘Imamuel Kant. Philosopher. Now dead. He said that if you want to know whether your actions are moral you should universalize them.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘If you want to know if a course of action you’re about to undertake is wrong you should ask yourself: what if everyone behaved like that?’

This seemed to intrigue Cale. IdrisPukke could see him thinking back over his past: the men killed in their sleep, the poisoned wells, the execution of prisoners, signing the death warrant of the Maid of Blackbird Leys, killing Kitty the Hare, the death of factory owners hung up outside the houses of hoi aristoi. It took some time.

‘Well?’ asked IdrisPukke at last.

‘The Maid of Blackbird Leys was a good person … courageous, but a dope like Imamuel Kant. What if you ask the same question about your good actions? What if everyone behaved like that? What if everyone took on the Redeemers like her by putting up posters and preaching? They’d end up exactly the way she did – in a pile of ashes. If you fight cruelty with kindness it’s the kindness that goes away not the cruelty. I’m sorry about the camps and what happened to the women and children of the Folk. I have bad dreams. But I didn’t mean it to happen.’

‘Traditionally the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

‘Well, it wasn’t a good intention, exactly. If I had to do it again I’d do it differently – but I don’t. I have bad dreams instead. But not every night. If you do something terrible you either throw yourself over a cliff or get on with it.’

They sat in silence for a while.

‘Except for that shit-bag Solomon Solomon, I never acted out of malice. Well, him and a few other people.’

‘You laughed when they killed Conn Materazzi – and you cut off a man’s head for telling you to bring him a glass of water.’

Cale smiled, not needing to point out neither was true.

‘It’s only fair to tell you,’ added IdrisPukke after a short silence, ‘that Imamuel Kant also said it was always wrong to tell lies. He said that if you decided to hide a friend who’d come to your house and said a murderer was after him, and then that murderer came to your door and asked if your friend was there because he had to kill him – well, then it would be wrong to tell a lie. You’d have to do the right thing and give him up.’

‘You’re making fun of me.’

‘No. I promise. He really said that.’

‘Tell me, IdrisPukke, if you faced the extermination of you and yours at the hands of the Redeemers, who would you want standing between you and them – me or Imamuel Kant?’

Most of us experience days like this: from the moment the sun rises like a ribbon until it sets in rosy fingers everything goes wonderfully well, except for the things that go even better – money arrives unexpectedly in large amounts, beautiful women stroke your arm as if they thought nothing was more wonderful than the touch of your skin, a chance remark allows you to see that everyone who does not love you holds you still in high regard. Who is so unfortunate not to have had days like these? Cale was so fortunate that he’d been having these days for three months, pretty much, in a row – and this for someone who was held to have flocks of bad luck owls always hovering around his head. Not just funerals but disaster usually seemed to follow him everywhere. But not for the glorious ninety days in which everything he attempted nearly always worked. The Hanse administrators arrived within three weeks along with the geniuses of the order book, of freight deliveries, of incentive schemes for work of quality (backed up by threats of violence from Thomas Cale). They centralized the planning of transport so the bacon arrived maggot-free, the tack biscuits unshared with the weevils, and devised paperwork so that when wagons or weapons or blankets needed to be replaced there was something in the storehouses waiting to supply that need. The training of the peasants in their wooden forts staggered the hopes of them all as the peasants absorbed with eagerness the harshness of their instruction by the Laconics and the Purgators. No mutinous grumbles, only backbone and getting on with the job. Vague Henri and the miserable Kleist worked at every weakness the Redeemers might find in Cale’s design and tactics and seemed inspired at creating solutions to the limitations that they found. The atmosphere of breaking with the past, of revolution and metamorphosis, seemed to be in the air itself. Not yet aware that Cale had lied about helping the Helots, Fanshawe, an establishment maverick of the kind that every sensible rigid society looks to find a place for, discovered he very much enjoyed destroying entrenched attitudes as long as they weren’t his own.

Every decision seemed to turn out better than hoped: Koolhaus the sullen was as good as his ambition was enormous; he seemed to have the entire campaign down to the last round of cheese sorted in his brain. Within a month he was back with Cale and IdrisPukke. He either knew everything or knew how to find out about it. He seemed barely human, as if he was in possession of a magical device that could search a vast memory and provide an instant answer. Koolhaus was irritating and objectionable and had the imagination of a brick, but as a bureaucrat he was something of a genius. As for Simon Materazzi, he found war was a generous mother to those who were dismissed in more peaceful times. Anxious to be rid of his aristocratic burden, Koolhaus had spent many hours weaning Simon off the sign language and working out how he might learn to lipread. Yet again driven by self-interest, Koolhaus turned his considerable brain to the invention of an unheard-of skill. Just as anxious to be rid of Koolhaus as Koolhaus was to be rid of him, Simon worked for hours a day at perfecting this ability. The two of them had already been planning their divorce when Cale’s offer arrived and led to their final weeks together. But while Koolhaus was finally able to rub the faces of others in the superiority of his skill at almost everything (barring skill with people or anything original) Simon discovered the immense pleasure and even greater usefulness of having people ignore him while he listened to everything they had to say. The Laconics were in the habit of throwing children born lame or blind into a chasm outside the capital, so someone like Simon was a novelty and they treated him as if he were an amusing monkey. Simon took his revenge by making use of the complete ease with which they talked in front of him to keep Cale informed in surprising detail about what they were up to. Interestingly, even had Simon been born a Laconic he would have lived. There was one exception to their otherwise iron rule: a child of the Laconic royal family, no matter how sickly, would never make the long fall onto the rocks of that terrible place. So it was and ever shall be. It amused the Laconics to see Simon and Koolhaus chattering silently away, hand to hand, in the beautifully fluent way they had of speaking. They would gesture Simon over to them at night and write down words for him to teach them how to sign them. They enjoyed making a condescending fuss of him and they had no idea that if they spoke while facing him he could read nearly every word they were saying – including the light-hearted abuse directed at him. When Koolhaus was recalled to Spanish Leeds, Simon made a deal with him to become his replacement, leaving an old schoolfriend of Koolhaus to stay and pretend to translate for him so that the Laconics would not become suspicious.

‘Are you sure he can do the job?’ said Cale, when Koolhaus returned.

‘I thought you were his friend?’ said Koolhaus.

‘Can he do the job?’

‘Yes, he can do the job.’

Koolhaus decided that Simon’s skills – won with as much effort from him as from Simon – would be better kept to himself. The useful things he might, and indeed already was learning, would enhance Koolhaus’ reputation for being a man with all sorts of things at his fingertips. The preparations for the crossing of the Mississippi were also going well and waited only for the weather and Cale’s final say-so.

There were a few wasps in Cale’s honey but the one that affected him the most directly was the introduction of rationing, a move demanded by the bureaucrats of the Hanse to prevent panic-buying, hoarding and shortages of goods that were vital for the New Model Army. Their arguments had been reviewed by Koolhaus at Cale’s instruction and he’d concluded their case was unanswerable – rationing was as vital to the defeat of the Redeemers as the provision of weapons.

‘It will, of course,’ said Koolhaus, reporting to the OAR, ‘be necessary for the sake of public morale that these restrictions apply to everyone. There can be no exceptions,’ he declared piously, ‘except, of course, for the Royal Family.’

As it happened, Koolhaus made his declaration while Vague Henri was in the room, having returned to Spanish Leeds briefly to discuss his preparations in the west with Cale. No sooner had the words ‘Royal Family’ passed his lips than Koolhaus, still inexperienced but a quick learner, realized he’d made a serious mistake. Perhaps worse than serious. ‘The temperature dropped so quickly,’ said a delighted IdrisPukke later to his brother, ‘I thought the North Pole had stopped by for a cup of tea. God, that Koolhaus is a cocky little sod.’

Cale stared at Koolhaus, while Vague Henri drew out a dagger he had specially made for himself based on the Danzig Shank and carved, for reasons he refused to explain, with the word ‘if’ on either side of the handle. He raised the dagger as if he were going to cut off Koolhaus’s head but only stabbed it down into the middle of the beautifully inlaid walnut table at which they were sitting. Vague Henri’s hatred of the aristos of Spanish Leeds had festered from a general disdain, born of the natural resentment of the nobody for the privileged, to a particular loathing based on the way he had been treated while Cale was in the lunatic asylum at The Priory. The idea that he would have to go without his beloved cucumber sandwiches while the Royal Family carried on unaffected was more than he could bear. So he put his foot down. There was a short pause.

‘So,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘we’re agreed: rationing for all – the Royal Family and present company excepted.’

After Koolhaus and IdrisPukke left, which was almost immediately, Cale turned to Vague Henri and nodded at the knife firmly stuck in the middle of the table.

‘I’m not paying for that,’ said Cale.

‘Nobody asked you to,’ replied Vague Henri.

There was a peevish silence.

‘Why’, asked Cale, ‘couldn’t you have just banged your fist on the table? Look at it, it’s ruined.’

‘I said I’d pay.’

Another silence.

‘Bloody hooligan.’

30

Along the upper reaches of the icy Mississippi something stirred. Lower down the river something else stirred as well. Artemisia Halicarnassus was cursing the good weather that had been such a blessing for Cale during the training of the New Model Army. In a normal winter, as the temperature shifts back and forth between freezing and slightly above freezing, the river was hard to read, even for the experienced: the melting but still massive blocks of ice that had broken off upstream would jam together to form great dams which might stick for weeks and then, with a day of warmer temperatures, suddenly give way and flow down like a slow avalanche, sometimes for miles, until they hit more dammed ice, at which it might jam again or cause a great collapse and start an even bigger flow. But the unseasonal warmth this year had made this process even more treacherous and unstable than normal.

But Artemisia had men around her who had lived on the river for sixty years or more. There was a large field of unstable ice jammed about five miles upstream but the temperature had dropped to around freezing, lessening the chance of a break. The danger was from large river-bergs from upstream crashing into the groaning, cracking and unstable dam of ice. But for ten miles upstream of the blockage the skilled and experienced were sprawled along the bank, each man tied by a line of string and signalling with different kinds of tug to the next man down the size of the river-bergs as they passed them by. On the ice jam itself men were stationed to watch upstream and gauge the stability of the ice they were standing on. Once darkness had come the crossing soldiers, wrapped against the cold as thickly as an expensive present, endured an ecstasy of edgy waiting. Then the word to risk it came. Twenty boats, carrying seven hundred men armed like hedge pigs, were launched into the narrowest crossing for many miles in either direction.

But not even the sharpest river pilot with the greyest beard could see under the ice where the great bergs jutted downward towards the silty bed and created vicious eddies in the current that carved great swathes out of the bottom of the river. These turbulent and restless undertows came and went with the shifting ice above. The oak tree, water-fat, passed the berg-watchers on the shore unseen, no more breaking the surface in its massive thickness than a hunting crocodile. Then it hit the ice dam with a thud like the low bass of the deepest note in a cathedral organ. It was felt by the lookouts on the ice itself as much in the bowels as in the ear. They waited for the great crack that might split the field and loosen the dam of bergs – and kill most of them. It never came. Pushed underneath the ice by the current the oak tree began to roll – down it went like the Jesus whale, down to the bottom of the dam where a few hours before two great fangs of ice had formed. Around them the current, powerful but slow, became in a moment frenzied, unstoppable and mad, driving the great trunk, sodden and three times its former weight, faster and faster as the current was squeezed more and more between the jagged ice and the riverbed. Sideways on, the tree trunk battered between the two great crags of downward-pointing ice, sending strange but incomprehensible tremors to the blind watchers above as it boomed and bashed deep beneath them. And then it was free, the now shooting current taking the tree’s super-saturated weight into a rapid but shallow climb to the surface so that it kept momentum from the currents speeding from underneath the ice. At eight miles to the hour, even an ordinary runner could have kept pace with it as it headed towards the fleet of boats – but it was not the speed that mattered but its size and terrible sodden weight. Still, only so much damage might have been done had it not glanced a mid-stream rock with its snout; the great leviathan of trunky wood began to turn flat towards the slowly crossing fleet.

Despite all efforts to prevent it, the twenty boats had been bunched together by the day’s strange currents and they were no small boats – thirty-five men in each. The oak did not so much smash into them as roll them up and under as if they were hardly there – barely a cry went up before each boat was at once struck beneath the water and turned over on its side. Because of the crowding, eleven boats went down in less than fifteen seconds. The tree moved on into the cold, wet dark leaving behind three hundred and eighty-four drowned men and one drowned woman.

As IdrisPukke finished telling Cale his grim news the sun came out and a warm shaft of light came through the partly stained glass windows, projecting delicate blues and reds onto the table and illuminating the bright dust in the air.

‘It’s certain?’ said Vague Henri.

‘As these things ever are. My man is reliable and said he saw her body before he left.’

‘What was the cause?’

‘It’s thought a wall of ice that broke away from a bigger field upstream. Bad luck, that’s all.’

‘But you predicted it,’ said Cale, softly.

‘To be unfair to my prodigious powers of foresight, I always make it a point to predict more or less every possible outcome. It could have as easily succeeded as it failed.’

‘Can it be kept a secret?’ asked Vague Henri.

‘Had they all lived or all drowned, perhaps. Not now … I’d say that …’

‘She’s a great loss,’ interrupted Cale, awkwardly and in an odd tone of voice.

‘Yes,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘She was a remarkable young woman.’

Nobody said anything. There was a knock on the door and Lascelles the butler crept into the room.

‘A letter for you, sir,’ he said to IdrisPukke, who took it and waved Lascelles away, waiting until he left the room before speaking. ‘There’s something iffy about that man. His eyes are too close together.’ He opened the letter. ‘Apparently Bose Ikard knows about the crossing and Artemisia.’

‘How?’ said Vague Henri.

‘The same way that I knew about it, I suppose.’

‘No … how do you know Bose Ikard knows?’

‘Kitty the Hare’s red books are like windows into the souls of the great and good of Spanish Leeds. Little birds everywhere sing.’

‘What’s he going to do?’ asked Cale.

‘He’s got two choices, I’d say: go along with what we say until he has a chance to use it when things get really bad; or use it to arrest us now and make peace with the Redeemers.’

This startled Vague Henri, who had planned to be cock-of-the-walk for at least six months more. ‘You really think he’ll do that?’

‘On balance? No. It’s not enough to be sure of victory. He knows the consequences if he gets it wrong. He’ll lay it down in the cellar till he can use it. But we have to be quick off the mark, present this as a heroic effort treacherously betrayed – noble woman, daring raid, heroic. Last words.’ Cale looked at him. ‘Sorry,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I’ve lived too long and have too many bad habits. But we won’t honour her memory by allowing it to be seen as a total disaster. It has to be seen as a heroic failure.’

‘It was a heroic failure.’

‘Only if we present it as one. People need stories of individual daring, of courage and selfless sacrifice, of near victory and treacherous stabs in the back.’

‘Let’s hope we get them then,’ said Vague Henri.

‘Hope has nothing to do with it,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I have my people writing them now. They’ll be posted all over the city by tomorrow morning.’ He turned to Cale, feeling himself mean-spirited and cynical. ‘I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a pity death took her off so soon.’

IdrisPukke left the two boys, the soft sunlight beaming through the windows as if the house were a domestic cathedral blessed by angels.

‘When are you away?’ Cale said at last.

‘Tomorrow. Early.’

Another long silence.

‘I’m sorry for your loss, too,’ said Vague Henri. ‘Don’t know what else to say. I liked her.’

‘She didn’t like me. Not in the end.’

Another silence.

‘Well,’ said Vague Henri, ‘you’re easy to get wrong.’ A snort of derision from Cale. Vague Henri continued trying to be comforting. ‘It wasn’t your fault. It’s just how things are.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cale, after a moment. ‘I don’t know how I feel about her now she’s dead. I don’t feel the right way, that’s for sure.’

PART FOUR

‘Now go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’

1 Samuel 15:3

31

The Redeemers crossed the Mississippi in April, and to a landing largely unresisted. The scouts they sent out across the gently rolling plains, which extended for three hundred miles from the south bank of the river, returned with the news that almost every village, town and city was deserted and not only of people. All animals, from pigs to cows to rabbits, were gone along with the population. The fields were left unsown with wheat or barley and left to the poppies, which had come early with the unseasonably warm weather. ‘It’s beautiful,’ said a Redeemer scout on his return. ‘I doubt if the fields of heaven itself can match it: mile after mile of poppy and eyebright, hellebore and Deptford pinks, touch-me-not and fine-leaved vetch. But damn all to eat for fifteen days in any direction. Unless you’re a cow or a horse.’

The scout had presumed too much on Cale’s generosity. He had no intention of allowing the Redeemers to feed their animals. As soon as the ground was soft enough he’d ordered the women and children out into the fields and instead of sowing wheat and barley had them planting Crazy Charlie, Stringhat and Stinking Willy – all poisonous to ruminants. There was considerable anger at this: ‘What will happen,’ they cried, ‘to our animals when we return?’

‘I’d worry about that,’ said Cale, ‘if you return.’

However, he’d carefully mapped the poisoned areas, which reassured them though that hadn’t been his intention – he had just wanted to know where it was safe to feed the horses that drew the war wagons.

It was General Redeemer Princeps and his Fourth Army who’d come across the Mississippi first, veterans of the destruction of the Materazzi at Silbury Hill. Princeps knew very well what Cale was capable of, having followed carefully much of the boy’s plan for the invasion of Materazzi territory when he was still at the Sanctuary. He knew that once he crossed the Mississippi there would be ugly things waiting for him and his men. He hadn’t expected the landing to be unopposed, but had expected the decision not to plant. But he hadn’t expected the sowing of toxic herbs to poison his horses and sheep. It took several weeks to bring in fodder and longer to find anyone who could identify the plants causing the problem. He’d expected he would have to hold a bridgehead on the south bank while the Axis tried to push them back into the Mississippi. Instead, he had three hundred miles to do with, so it appeared, as he wished. Cale had turned the prairie into a flowery wasteland. Supplying a large army in this desert of red and yellow and pink would mean a significant rethink and more time. For now, Princeps stayed close to the river and organized the means to support a new plan to advance on Switzerland. It was a week into this hiatus that a five-hundred-strong force of mounted Redeemer infantry – their horses now muzzled against the poisons waiting for them in the grass – encountered a most peculiar sight: some kind of round wooden fort, not large, containing about three acres and with a ditch dug all the way around it.

When Redeemer Partiger was brought forward by his scouts to take a look, he said a quiet prayer to St Martha of Lesbos, patron saint of those who required protection from the unexpected. She had earned her place among the list of the holy because of the strange nature of her martyrdom – she had been forced to swallow a six-sided hook on a string, with hinges on each hook so that the device could travel through her digestive system without catching. Some twelve hours later, when her executioners felt the hook had travelled far enough, they hauled on the string and pulled her inside out. In Redeemer dogma, ingenuity was always portrayed as a threat and hence the need for a saint with a specific responsibility to intercede to protect the faithful from its perils.

‘Send someone forward under a white flag,’ said Partiger.

Several minutes later, a rider under a flag of truce approached to within about fifty yards of the war wagons.

‘In …’

Whatever he was going to say was cut short by a crossbow bolt in the middle of his chest.

‘Why has he stopped?’ said Partiger – then very slowly the messenger slumped to one side of the horse and fell off.

The watching Redeemers were outraged at this breach in the rules of war, despite the fact that they never acknowledged such laws themselves. Given this, there was certainly no particular disadvantage to killing the herald but it was, in fact, an accident. The sniper who’d shot the messenger had merely taken a bead on the man as a precaution – but the wagons were cramped inside and a nervous former hop-picker had moved and jogged his arm.

‘I wonder what he wanted?’ called out someone and there was a nervous burst of laughter.

Partiger considered what to do next. The Redeemers were skilled enough at siege warfare but the trebuchets they used were extremely heavy and the few they’d brought were all on the other side of the Mississippi because there were no important walled towns within three hundred and fifty miles of the river. It would take several weeks to get one here. Besides, the fort wasn’t very big and it was of wood not stone. Despite his understandable uneasiness at the novelty of what was in front of him, he knew he’d be expected to find out what sort of novelty it was so he couldn’t just go around it. However strange, it did not look particularly formidable. He ordered an attack by three hundred. Fifty of them were armoured cavalry – an innovation by the Redeemers themselves – the rest were more lightly-protected mounted infantry.

Partiger watched as his men spread around the wagons with the intention of attacking from four directions. While they were waiting, Partiger struck up a conversation with his newly appointed second-in-command, Redeemer George Blair. He did not trust or like Blair, who was part of a new order of Sanctuarines, established by Pope Bosco himself to ‘aid fidelity in all Redeemer units and ensure actions free of doctrinal or moral errors.’ In other words, he was a spy whose task it was to ensure that Bosco’s new religious attitudes and the martial techniques that went with them were obeyed without question.

Partiger somewhat surprised Blair by engaging in a conversation that had nothing to do with the attack on the wooden fort.

‘I was thinking,’ said Partiger, ‘of embarking on the Seventy-four Acts of Abasement.’

‘What?’

‘The seventy-four acts of homage to the authority of the Pope.’

‘I know what they are,’ said Blair, irritably. ‘I don’t understand the relevance – a battle’s about to start.’

Am I being tested to say the wrong thing? thought Partiger. He decided he was.

‘We must keep our eyes on eternal life even in the midst of death.’

‘There’s a time for everything. This isn’t it.’

‘But surely,’ continued Partiger, ‘if I were to wear dried peas in my shoes and abstain from drinking water on hot days and whip myself with nettles in an act of mortification of a kind that the saints endured, and which leaves us aghast with admiration,’ he had learned the phrase about being aghast by heart from a papal letter, ‘then would I not be more open to the wisdom of God and a better leader to my men?’

Finally Blair turned to look at him square on, aghast himself, but not in admiration.

‘Yes, you are, of course, correct. I’d say that the more pain you inflict on yourself the better.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I understand self-flagellation with a whip made from scorpion tails is especially effective in this regard.’ He turned back to the battle, leaving Partiger to consider scorpion tails. It sounded painful. Still, he remembered Padre Pio’s words: When mortifying the flesh, make sure that it hurts.

Eight hundred yards away, the battle had begun. At first there were only feints from three groups of ten cavalry, meant to trigger a response so that they could size up the strength of the occupants. There was none. Close up, they could see the ditch around the wagon was not particularly deep but was full of sharpened sticks. One of them rammed their heaviest lance into one of the wagons to see how stable and well-built it was. Nothing to write home about, he said, when he returned. So it was decided to rush in from all four sides, the signal being a volley of forty or so arrows into the centre of the fort. The arrows went up, the men rushed the wagons and Cale’s New Model Army and its way of making war came to its first great test.

The trouble for the Redeemers was that they lacked any of the basic tools – no ladders, no battering rams and only a few ropes. Once they got into the ditch they dropped down only a few feet, but with the sides of the wagon walls at six foot tall they were nine feet away from their wooden-wall-protected opponents. As soon as the Redeemers attacked, the slot windows were partly opened and Vague Henri’s light crossbows went into action. They were shot at a distance of only a few feet – they were so close to their opponents it didn’t matter they were so much less powerful. In the restricted space bows were useless but the crossbows were devastating, particularly now they could be reloaded so quickly. The roof of the wagon was double-hinged so that it could be pushed up and over to either side depending on circumstances. This time they flew off with the roofs crashing backwards to the inside of the fort. Immediately half a dozen peasants and one Penitent stood up and, with most of their bodies protected by the wall of the wagon, started to stab and swing down into the mass of Redeemers standing in the ditch. The flails with lead balls and spikes did huge damage crushing the flesh under the Redeemers’ light armour, though it could penetrate too. Excitable in their success and inexperience, some of the polemen leant out and exposed too much of their upper bodies, and a couple went down to archers.

‘Keep under guard! Stay in! Stay in!’

The Purgators in each wagon had to keep pulling back the over-eager peasants as they enjoyed the thrill of hurting an opponent without them being able to hit back. The Redeemers, ten times the soldiers of the men who were wounding them with every blow, were impotent. They were four feet further away from their enemy than they could reach. They couldn’t get under the wagons either, and the wheels were covered with earth to stop rope from being tied around the spokes. Their position was hopeless. After five minutes they withdrew – but not without being picked off by the crossbow men, now able to stand up and take good aim at the retreating priests, many of them moving slowly because of the blows to their upper thighs and knees.

The peasants stood and cheered. The Purgators told them to shut up.

‘They’re going to get better every day at taking us on. Can you say the same?’

This quietened them down but they were delighted with their first mouthful of killing.

The Redeemers withdrew back to Partiger, who was bemused as well as angry. He berated the men while Blair walked around and examined the wounded.

‘Didn’t you inflict any damage?’

‘We think we got a handful,’ said one of the centenars.

‘A handful? We have thirty dead. And for what? Anyway, that was the archers, not you. How many did you kill?’

‘You can’t kill someone if you can’t reach them.’

‘Don’t answer back!’ shouted Partiger.

‘What about the grappling hook?’ asked Blair. There was only one in the whole unit. No one saw the need for more.

‘I only got it on the side for thirty seconds before they cut it,’ said the sergeant who’d used it. ‘But I got a good pull on it from my horse. More might do it – but the wagon was tethered down far in. We’ll have to pull them apart not just topple ’em. Stronger horses, bigger hooks and chains not ropes might do it. But they can pick off the horses real easy.’

‘What about fire? They’re just made of wood, yes?’

‘Might work, sir, but wood won’t burn ’less you can get a lot of fire going.’

‘Arrows?’

‘Real easy to put out. I’ve seen some used at Salerno had oil and packing to set a fire. Never done it myself.’

‘A word,’ said Blair to Partiger. They walked to one side. ‘Any ideas?’

‘A siege, perhaps?’

‘They’ve probably got more food than we have. Besides – why are they here? There’s nothing worth protecting.’

‘Look, Redeemer,’ said Partiger. ‘We’re not really equipped, as you say. We should withdraw and report this. This is for siege troops not mounted infantry.’

This was a fair point. ‘Did you notice anything about the wounded?’ said Blair, knowing that he had not.

‘The wounded?’

‘Yes. Their wounds – they’re mostly crushing wounds: head, hands, elbows.’

‘Yes?’

‘They’re not going to heal quickly – or at all – most of them.’

‘Your point, Redeemer?’

‘What if it’s deliberate?’

They didn’t get time to continue the discussion. Fifty Swiss cavalry emerged from the fort and swept through the unprepared Redeemer camp, killing a hundred and scattering the rest. Within fifteen minutes they were back inside the protective ring of wagons just as the sun went down.

The traumatized Redeemers pulled out from their position during the night but within an hour of dawn the Swiss were back as they tried to retreat. They were badly hampered in their efforts to withdraw by the numerous wounded from the attack on the bastion, which had delivered much more in the way of broken arms and smashed knees than the fatalities of the unexpected Swiss attack just before dark. The dead could just be left behind. The Swiss kept up a continuous long distance sniping from the dozen heavy-duty crossbows Vague Henri had assigned to each wagon fort. Every few minutes there were skirmishes from the more expert Swiss cavalry, who would race in and pick off stragglers then run away before the able-bodied Redeemer guards could respond. By the time they left off and returned to the bastion, Redeemer numbers were half what they had been when they first set eyes on the fort three days earlier. The New Model Army had lost ten dead and eleven wounded.

Blair, though not Partiger, survived to give a report and to urge a swift response. But it was an odd story and entirely isolated so no one in the lower levels of authority Blair could reach took him seriously. But over the next few weeks the general headquarters of the Redeemer Fourth Army were forced to change their opinion. The bastions started turning up in increasing numbers and causing terrible casualties. Now aware of the danger, they sent out heavily armed counter forces equipped with ladders, siege hooks and siege torches but by the time they arrived the bastions were long gone. Once he was made aware of the problem, Princeps, furious at the delay, doubled the number of his patrols in order to identify bastion sites quickly and bring larger forces to bear on them. But it was here that Artemisia’s scouts came into play: operating mostly on their own, they were able to provide constant information about Redeemer movements. In effect, each wagon fort operated at the centre of a web of information up to fifty miles in all directions. Any small Redeemer force they could ignore, anything somewhat larger they could resist and anything larger than that they could move with half an hour’s notice and have vanished by the time a major force had arrived. There was no catching them either – Michael Nevin’s wagons could move much faster than any Redeemer army. The Redeemers were caught in a trap: small, light units could catch up with the bastions but were not strong enough to break in; heavy units that might have succeeded were too slow.