There was a month of this fighting before the Redeemers managed to delay a bastion long enough to catch them with a thousand heavy infantry armed with siege weapons. It took four days to break into the camp and annihilate the occupants. This was a blow to the New Model Army, puffed up by a month of easy victories and despite the warnings of the Purgators and Laconics who trained them that a defeat was inevitable. There was much corresponding joy in victory from Princeps when he heard the news – but it didn’t last once he heard the details: the lives of two hundred Swiss peasants had come at the price of nearly four hundred Redeemers, and another hundred with the crushing wounds that took so long to heal and used up so much in the way of resources. As worrying was the report of one of Princeps’ personal centenars, who he’d ordered to take part in the siege to give him a proper sense of the battle and the soldiers who fought it.

‘It was murderous getting in, Redeemer, as hard as any fighting I’ve ever done. They’d arranged it so that we were easy to hit but to strike back was almost impossible. But once we got inside, that was the shock – they had a few soldiers, maybe fifty, who knew what they were doing and were hard work but the ones who’d been killing us for three days – once we were inside and it was hand to hand – it was like cutting down big children.’

From then on the problem facing Princeps was how to break the shell to get at the soft insides. The problem for Cale was that the creation of the war wagons had been far too successful for its own good. Their successes had been so easy and so comprehensive that the New Model Army was dead drunk on its triumphs. The defeats, when they started to come, winded them badly – there were, after all, no survivors. From euphoric arrogance to demoralized failure was such a short step and so great a fall that an emergency (one might almost have said a panic) meeting was held halfway between the Mississippi plains and Spanish Leeds. Cale was sicker than usual, it had been a bad few weeks, but he was forced into a war wagon filled with mattresses and, along with IdrisPukke and Vipond, tried to sleep his way to Potsdam where the meeting had been arranged with Fanshawe, Vague Henri and the Committee of Ten Antagonist Churches. On the way into Potsdam, he’d decided to get out and ride. For all its padding the converted war wagon was uncomfortable when he couldn’t sleep, and today all his old wounds – finger, head and shoulder – were throbbing and grinding out their claims on his attention (Me, too! they screamed, What about us!) To add to his misery his right ear was aching. He put on a coat and pulled up the hood against the cold and to keep the wind away from his sore ear. This was not something he would normally do because only the Redeemer Lords of Discipline wore hoods and they were not a memory he wanted to revisit. Cale was now, of course, more experienced in the strangeness of the world than many practised hands three times his age, but he was astonished at the electric effect even a word of his presence had on the soldiers camped on his way into the city. The mysterious force that moves rumour with astonishing speed through even the largest and most dispersed military force brought the New Model Army out in droves wherever he went. At first sight he was greeted with adoring silence that quickly burst into ecstatic cheers, as if he were the Hanged Redeemer entering into Salem. Cale was amazed that so many could draw such power from so sickly a hand-hurting, ear-aching, shoulder-groaning weakling such as him. Uncertain how to respond, he thought perhaps he should speak to them; but when he tried the retching, an hour earlier than it was due, silenced him, and it was all he could do to keep it under some sort of control. So he sat, dog-sick, on his horse and looked about at the men, in their hundreds and then thousands, inspired by his mere presence. To them his pale and cadaverous silence was far more powerful than anything he could say, even though he had learnt a dozen inspirational speeches from the writer whose plays he’d found in the Sanctuary library that seemed to cover the entire range of ways in which to manipulate a crowd: Friends, comrades, countrymen, lend me your ears; or: Once more into the breach, dear chums; and the ever dependable: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

But not even a tongue touched with the lighted coals of God himself could have done better than his enforced silence. They did not want anything so fallible as a human being who could talk to them man to man – they wanted to be led by an exterminating angel, not by some bloke. He may have felt like death but he now looked the part. And that was what mattered: he was something fatal from another world, something and not someone, who had made them powerful and all-conquering in the past and now was here to do the same again. They needed him to be inhuman, the essence of death and plague, to be wasted, pale and skeletal because he was those things and was on their side. The cry went up – one or two voices at first then tens, then hundreds and then a roar.

‘ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL!’

Vipond and IdrisPukke, following just behind, no beginners in the seen-it-all-before and surprised-by-nothing stakes, were left amazed and even shaken by what they were seeing and hearing and, above all, what they were feeling: even they were carried along, like it or not, by the power of the crowd. But the preachers and padres and moderators of the Committee of Ten Churches heard it too and recognized it for the devil worship that it was.

‘I expected loss heavier than this – and from the start – getting worse as the Redeemers worked out how to deal with us. These deaths. They can be replaced. I’ve planned for this.’

A tired and irritated Cale was in a furtive meeting set up before the official one with the Committee of Ten Churches was due to begin – it was thought necessary to get their story straight to minimize any religious contributions.

‘But Thomas, darling,’ said Fanshawe, ‘what did you expect? Killing and being killed is a profession. These people are peasants, salt of the earth, of course – no doubt – but fashioned by a lifetime shovelling shit and gleaning turnips – whatever they are … it’s no preparation when it comes to the big red one. You can’t expect it.’

‘We need,’ said Cale, ‘to plan on losing one wagon train in three. I always expected losses like that.’

‘You can expect what you like. It can’t be done,’ said Fanshawe. ‘It’s not in their souls to die in those numbers – any more than it’s in yours to reap cabbages and have carnal knowledge of your more fetching sheep.’

When Fanshawe was gone he left behind a miserable inner circle.

‘Is he right, do you think?’ said IdrisPukke to Vague Henri.

‘Underneath the piss-take? Pretty much. In the fight at Finnsburgh the Redeemers almost broke through. I was shitting myself if you want to know. Now they know what’s coming if the Redeemers win a brawl. Nobody gets used to that.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘No’

There was a depressed silence.

‘I have a suggestion.’ It was Vipond.

‘Thank God someone has,’ said Vague Henri.

‘I’d wait,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘until you heard it before you get your hopes up.’

‘In spite of my brother’s sneers,’ continued Vipond, ‘I think we saw something remarkable today. The conventional view of people like myself is that a leader must be either loved or feared to be effective in a time of crisis – and given that love is a tricky thing and fear is not so tricky – then fear it is.’

‘You want me to make them more terrified of me than they are of the Redeemers?’

‘In other circumstances I don’t see that you’d have any choice.’

‘I can do that.’

‘I’m sure you can. But there may be another way, less damaging to your soul.’

‘My lugholes,’ said Cale, ‘are open as wide as a church door.’

‘Good. You saw your effect today on the very kind of man Fanshawe said was about to break?’

‘Yes, I saw it.’

‘Whatever seized them, it wasn’t love or fear.’

‘What then?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what it is but you could feel it between your thumb and forefinger – I don’t know … belief, perhaps. It doesn’t matter of what kind, in their eyes wherever you are the gates of hell are on their side.’

‘Thanks.’

‘That’s why the noses of the Holy Joes were out of joint. They knew what power was moving through their flock. But seeing is believing, Cale – you need to be out and about, among them every day and everywhere. They need the Exterminating Angel where they can see him. Watching over them, working through them.’

Cale looked at him.

‘You might just as well ask me to fly. As far as what was going on today, I felt it all right, but what it was about you can read in the stars. They saw a bad angel watching over them, I agree – but it was all I could do not to fall off my horse or throw up all over them.’ He smiled, one of the not so pleasant ones. ‘I couldn’t do it if my life and the life of everyone around me depended on it.’

At this point – and in a way that in other circumstances might be regarded as theatrical – Cale threw up on the floor.

In fact, he felt a little better once the vomiting had stopped but the meeting was at an end and so, dish-rag weak, Cale left the Cecilienhoft where it had been held and headed for a night’s sleep at the No-Worries Palace. As everyone knew where he was, a vast crowd had collected outside and at the sight of him great shouts went up.

Despite Bosco’s rare enthusiasm for information, and his desire to improve its quality amongst those who served his cause, it was not easy for Redeemers to pass themselves off as anything other than what they were. They had paid but unreliable informers and also fellow travellers, unofficial converts to the One True Faith whose desire to become Redeemers was as intense as their reasons were vague. They tended to be the despised, the failed, the hurt, the slightly mad, the deeply resentful – and often for good reason. But their limitations were plain enough: they were not disciplined or very competent, however zealous they might be. Had they been capable and rooted, it’s unlikely they would have been such fertile ground for insurrection. But it was one of the more level-headed and skilled of these converts who’d made his way to the Cecilienhoft where everyone knew Cale was planning the destruction of the Pope. There were guards there certainly, but no one had expected or planned for the crush of the soldiers of the New Model Army desperate to see him, along with the people of the city packed together with the mass of refugees evacuated from the Mississippi plain. Indeed, the confusion almost saved Cale from his attack – there was no planned route and so no way of being somewhere he could be expected to pass by. So crushed was he by the crowd that the assassin too was flotsam and jetsam, compelled to follow the flow and swirl of the river of people as it moved forward and back. Sometimes Cale moved away from him, sometimes back towards him. At one point, as the crowd grasped for a touch of his clothes or called for a blessing, an old woman who must have been stronger than she looked forced a small jar into his hand: ‘The ashes of St Deidre of the Sorrows – bless them, please!’ In the general racket he couldn’t properly hear what she was saying; he thought the ashes were a gift and didn’t want to be unkind. Given the state of him she would probably have had the strength to grab it back but the crowd decided and swept her away as she cried out for her dreadful loss.

With Vague Henri and IdrisPukke a good ten yards behind, the exhausted Cale was spilled into a break in the crowd made by the few guards who had been able to stay with him but where his murderer could finally get to him, too. The would-be assassin was no skilled killer and it’s hard to hide the look of someone with slaughter on his mind. It was within a second or less that Cale saw him coming at him and it was his eyes that gave him away. Kitten-weak and weary as he was, millions of nerves came to his aid like angels and, as the man brought the knife down to his chest, Cale took the lid off the jar of Deidre’s ashes and threw it in his face. As anyone will know who has looked closely at the ashes of the dead they are not like ashes much at all, more gravel than anything fine enough to easily blind a man. But Cale was lucky that these relics were fakes and consisted of the clinker from the forger’s fire. The effect was instant: in terrible pain the murderer cried out and dropped the knife to try to clear the spiky cinders from his eyes. The few guards around were quick enough to grab the assassin and they’d already stabbed him three times in the heat of their panic before they realized Cale was shouting at them to stop. Any chance of getting something useful out of the man was gone. Cale stood and watched as Vague Henri and IsdrisPukke joined him. Perhaps it was the mixture of sudden fright and exhaustion, but he thought he had never seen blood so red or ashes so white. The murderer muttered something before his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

‘What did he say?’ asked Cale.

The guard who’d been closest to the dead man looked at Cale, shocked and confused by what had happened.

‘I’m not … I’m not sure, sir. It sounded like “Do you have it?”’

‘You look gruesome,’ said Vague Henri. ‘The Angel of Death warmed up.’

Cale had come back into the room from boaking up in the jakes of his apartment at the No-Worries Palace, a newly built refuge with all the most recent innovations in plumbing. Fortunately he had held off vomiting in front of the crowd; his slow and fragile departure was interpreted by all who witnessed it – and even more strongly by those who didn’t – as a sign of his ethereal detachment from even the most terrifying events. He lay down on the bed and looked so dreadful that Vague Henri repented of his lack of sympathy. He was, in truth, angry with Cale for nearly having died.

‘Can I get you anything?’

‘A cup of tea,’ said Cale. ‘With sugar lumps.’

With Vague Henri gone, Cale was left alone with IdrisPukke.

‘I thought you were feeling better?’

‘Me too … but I made the mistake of trying to do something.’

IdrisPukke walked over to the window and stared out over the newly installed lavender maze.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Vipond is right. Without you to fire them up I can only see it going one way, to be frank.’ Cale didn’t reply. ‘I suppose taking that stuff your witch-doctor gave you wouldn’t help?’

‘Into a hole, six by two.’

‘Pity.’

A thought struck Cale, tired as he was.

‘That woman who gave me St somebody or other’s ashes. I didn’t think the Antagonists believed in relics – or saints.’

‘Antagonism is a pretty broad church, which is to say they have an expansive number of ways of loathing each other. She must have been a Piscopalian – they’re pretty much just like Redeemers in what they believe except they don’t accept the authority of the Pope. The others can’t abide them because of all the ritual and saint worship but mostly because they believe in the Verglass Apocalypse – they think the world was once nearly destroyed by ice as a punishment from God and that in ice it will end.’

‘So?’

‘The others insist that God uses water to discipline mankind – ice is a blasphemous invention from the mind of heretics.’

‘I need to sleep.’

A few seconds later he heard the door close and in seconds he was out.

He was in a valley surrounded by high and craggy mountains swept by wind and lightning. He was tied to a post, arms and legs bound, and a small cat was eating his toes. All he could do was spit at it to drive it off. At first the cat retreated but as he ran out of slobber the cat slowly made its way back to his feet and began eating them again. He looked up and in the distance he could see an enormous puppet Poll laughing and holding out a naked foot, twiddling her toes to show that she still had them and shouting, ‘Eat up, kitty, kitty!’ Next to her, on each of the other mountain ridges that surrounded the valley he saw three versions of himself striking a theatrical pose. In one he was holding his sword pointing at the ground, in another he was kneeling on a high rock with a massively ornate sword held across his chest. The final version of Cale was on the highest of all the ridges, legs akimbo, back arched as if he was about to soar into the air, with his cloak flailing behind him like a ragged wing. But what struck him most was that he was hooded in all of them, his face completely obscured in shadow. I never wear a hood, he thought to himself, and then the cat started eating his toes again and he woke up.

‘I had a dream,’ he said to IdrisPukke and Vague Henri a few hours later.

‘What would it take,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘for you not to tell it to me?’

‘There was three of you?’ said Vague Henri when Cale had finished. ‘I’d call that a nightmare.’

‘You can smirk all you like,’ said Cale, and then smiled himself. ‘I never saw the hand of God so clear in anything.’

‘I can’t say I feel the same,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain it for those of us without a direct line to God Almighty.’

‘Imagine there were thirty of me – spare me the jokes.’

‘All right.’

‘You saw what happened today. I didn’t do anything – I was just there. They did it all; I did nothing. They needed someone to save them.’

‘There’s nothing much to that,’ said Vague Henri. ‘You already have saved them. They want you to do it again, that’s all. There’s nothing magic about it.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I’ve seen generals worshipped by the crowds for some great victory. But they don’t want a man now, they want a god, because only the unearthly can save them.’

Vague Henri looked at Cale.

‘Isn’t that what Bosco wanted you to be?’

‘Well, if you can come up with anything better, you gobshite, be my guest.’

‘Children!’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Play nicely together.’ He turned to Cale. ‘Go on.’

‘They don’t need me – they need the Left Hand of God. So we give it to them. That’s what the dream was telling me – all that standing on a mountain in a cloak and waving a sword. Be seen! it was saying – but where you can’t be touched, show them you’re watching over them. Wherever they fight, there I’ll be; wherever they die, there I’ll be. Lose – there I’ll be. Win – there I’ll be. In the darkest night – or in the brightest day.’

‘But you won’t, though, will you?’ said Vague Henri.

‘All right, it’s a lie. So what? It’s for their own good.’

IdrisPukke laughed.

‘Vague Henri is quite wrong,’ he said. ‘Don’t think of it as a lie, think of it as the truth under imaginary circumstances.’

‘What about the cat eating your toes?’ asked Vague Henri. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It was just a stupid dream.’

Cale should have rested for a week but there was no time and in three days he was back in Spanish Leeds, having worked out the details of his forgeries.

‘Numbers.’

‘Twenty.’

‘Too many.’

‘They don’t have to do anything – they’re not impersonating me. They just have to be good at striking poses. A pantomime is all we need. The theatres are shut so we’ll have our pick.’

‘And if they talk?’

‘We put the fear of God into them. And pay them decent money. And keep them isolated and watched – four people at all times.’

When they arrived back it was to some upsetting news for Cale.

‘We heard you were dead.’

The unusual thing was that, despite the fact it was untrue, the issue of a formal confirmation that Cale was indeed alive didn’t do much to stop the rumour that he was dead from gaining ground. More strongly worded official denials were issued. ‘Never believe anything,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘until there’s an official denial. You’ve been invited to an engagement at the Palace – with the King. He thinks it might be true.’

‘He wishes it were true,’ said Cale.

‘I’m in two minds about what’s at the root of all this – the attempt to kill you at Potsdam, obviously. But I don’t think they want you dead – not yet. No doubt in the fullness of time if you were to fall off a cliff it would be very acceptable. But not now. For the present they’re more worried about the Redeemers than they are about you.’

‘Should I go?’

‘I think so. This is one lie that won’t be doing any good – best to strangle it now. If we can.’

‘But I’m not dead,’ said an exasperated Cale. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘But proving that isn’t so easy.’

‘But I’ll be there. They’ll be able to see me.’

‘What if you’re an imposter?’

One person who had no mixed feelings at all about the possibility of Cale being dead was Bose Ikard. He arranged for priority in invitations to be given to those who had met Cale in the past. But Cale kept his inner circle pretty close – and they weren’t vulnerable to Ikard’s promises or threats.

He decided to pursue another tack: sex. It was not subtle but Bose was too old and experienced to believe there was any particular virtue in subtlety. The walls of his apartments were, so to speak, cluttered with the mounted heads of sophisticated opponents who had looked down on his powers of discrimination as rather crude and had done so right up to the moment he’d had them killed. He’d once had IdrisPukke sentenced to death – a mistake, he now conceded; he’d swapped him for someone whose death, at the time, seemed more pressing. The truth was that Bose was afraid of IdrisPukke because he was an artful man with a penetrating grasp of complex matters, able to put the boot in when it was called for. It was this respectful loathing that fuelled his belief in the rumours about Cale being dead. It was the kind of thing he feared IdrisPukke could pull off. This was why he was talking to Dorothy Rothschild. Dorothy was certainly not a whore but she was something like one: reassuringly expensive, though no fee as such was ever negotiated. Her reward came in the shape of access to power, introductions concerning expensive contracts for this and that – she went on her back cushioned by the expensive silken sheets of enormous influence.

In truth, Dorothy was a deeply interesting woman but she didn’t look like one: she looked like sex. If two frustrated young men with a little artistic flair had thought up the woman of their desires and drawn her on paper she might have looked like Dorothy: hair long and blonde to the point of being white, of medium height, a waist tinier than that of a young boy, breasts bigger than was really plausible on such a tiny frame, legs improbably long for someone under six foot tall. She shouldn’t have been possible but there she was.

She had a corrosive wit, kept mostly under control, born out of her sensitivity, which was considerable. Her intelligence and emotional insight had been set on the wrong path by a dreadful event when she was nine years old. Her older sister, beloved by all, had gone on a picnic to a nearby lake with family friends, where she had drowned when a boat capsized. On hearing the news the dead child’s mother, not realizing her youngest was standing behind her, called out: ‘Why couldn’t it have been Dorothy?’

Even an emotional clod would have been marked for life by this and Dorothy was very far from that. But the wittiness she developed to deflect the world often outraged it and she was constantly having to apologize for this or that wounding remark. She had married young but within two years her husband had been killed in a war vital to the survival of the nation for reasons that no one could now remember. As a person from a family of minor importance she had naturally been visited by minor royalty, a matriarch set aside for state condolences. She’d been asked by her regal visitor if there was anything she could do for her – the proper answer being no.

‘Get me another husband.’ It was out before she knew it. It resulted in the appalled matriarch giving her an angry telling off for making light of her late husband’s tragic sacrifice.

‘In that case,’ said an unrepentant Dorothy, ‘how about going and getting me a pork pie from the shop on the corner?’

It was this outrage that led to Dorothy being ostracized from all but the margins of society and ending up, after many adventures on the wilder shores of love, as the greatest and least perpendicular of all the great horizontals of the four quarters. It was this reputation that brought her to the chair opposite Bose Ikard.

‘So I want you to charm the little monster.’

‘Won’t it be too obvious?’

‘That’s really your problem. I can have you introduced innocently enough, then it’s up to you.’ He passed a file over to her. ‘Read this.’ He began offering his opinions but she was more concerned with finding room in her vanity bag for the file, slowly emptying its contents onto the desk in front of her in order to create room. Eventually the file was squeezed into place and she began refilling the bag with the objects she had put on the table. Last among them was an extremely old, dried-up apple that had been lurking unseen at the bottom of the bag for over a week. Bose Ikard was staring at the apple with disapproval: it hardly spoke of her reputation for sophisticated entrapment. ‘Don’t mind that,’ she said, seizing the ancient apple with mock delight. ‘It was given to me by my nanny when I was a little girl and I can’t bear to part with it.’

Cale’s visit to Potsdam had produced an upsurge in morale among the troops and a renewed determination to fight that diminished in power in proportion to the distance from Potsdam. It gave IdrisPukke time to create his troupe of imposters but that was all. Getting actors wasn’t difficult but getting ones that could be relied on to keep their mouths shut was more of a problem, as were the costumes. After the first day of try-outs it was clear that they had a major difficulty: the actors were too small, which is to say they were normal height, but Cale’s dream of a powerful cloaked figure standing on a lonely mountain crag to encourage the faint-hearted came up against a practical snag: once the costumed actors were at any kind of distance – a precaution necessary not to give the game away – no detail about them could be recognized: not the grand gestures, the menacing hood or even whether they were kneeling or standing. They were just black specks and, worse, black specks against a black background.

‘We have to make everything big,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Big costume, big gestures, big everything. A pantomime larger than life.’

Within a week he’d hired every theatrical fabricator in Spanish Leeds and for two hundred miles around and built several giant costumes with stilts and extended arms and huge shoulders and enormous heads.

‘The head’s about right,’ said Vague Henri to Kleist, when they were shown it. ‘Not sure about the rest of it.’

‘Kiss my ears,’ replied Cale.

‘It’s got to be like this or we’ll have to think again.’

In fact, IdrisPukke did both. The puppet Cale could be made to work in the right place, with fires behind it to create enough light to see it and with puppeteers to wave his ten-foot-tall cassock about so it looked as if he were braving great winds. But they also had to go back to a version of their first model, with padded shoulders and false arms, made by a man who usually built the mannequins for the magician’s trick of sawing the woman in half using imitation legs. ‘In pantomime,’ he said, ‘everything has to be big, it’s true, but it’s got to be the right kind of big.’

This second version had to be viewed from a much closer proximity but in the twilight where it couldn’t be seen so clearly. Best of all for showing it off was the magic hour, the time before evening falls when the light allows even the crudest shape to take on the glow and power of another world.

‘Why,’ said Cale, ‘is everything always more difficult than you think? Why is stuff never less difficult?’

Feeling ill and irritated he arrived at that evening’s festivities in a very bad mood. That the entire evening had been set up to try to discover whether or not he was dead made him even more snaky. ‘If they’re looking for an excuse to take me on, let them try.’ He had taken recently to muttering to himself. This time it was loud enough to attract Vague Henri, who was in the next room writing a letter about boots.

Vague Henri put his head round the door.

‘Did you say something?’

‘No.’

‘I heard you talking.’

‘I might have been singing. So what?’

‘It wasn’t singing, it was talking. You were talking to yourself again. First sign of madness, mate.’

That night Bose Ikard made a point of re-introducing Cale to the comparatively few people who had spoken directly to him, all of whom had been instructed to ask him as many complicated questions as possible. His success in drawing Cale out reached its height when he was introduced to the King – his longest response to the supreme head of state was, ‘Your Majesty.’ For the rest it was a single word or a shrug. In desperation, Bose Ikard brought in Dorothy. She entered the room and it was no exaggeration to say that there was something like a gasp at her appearance. She was wearing a red velvet dress cut shamefully low and red velvet gloves that covered her arms a good deal more than the dress covered her breasts. Her waist was cinched skinny-boy-thin, the skirt of the dress was decorous enough when she was still, but when she moved it revealed her left leg almost to her hip. With her crimson lips and white-blonde hair she should have looked like an expensive tart – but she could carry it off in a way that simply caught you in the chest, whimpering with desire. And this was an effect by no means limited to the men. She stopped and talked to a few of the most important people in the room, her lovely smile revealing teeth like little pearls, all except one of them that was a little snagged, an odd proportion, which only made her seem more beautiful. She stopped for a little while to talk to Bose Ikard and positioned herself so that Cale could see and appreciate her gorgeousness. Then, when she noticed he had observed her two or three times while pretending to look indifferently around the room, she walked directly up to him. She’d decided that bold would work best with him, bold and beautiful.

‘You’re Thomas Cale. Chancellor Bose Ikard has bet me fifty dollars that I won’t get more than two words out of you.’

There was, of course, no such bet and she did not expect him to believe her. Cale looked at Dorothy thoughtfully for a moment.

‘You lose.’










32

Perhaps one day a great mind will discover the exact point in any given situation when the person who has to make the decision ought to stop listening. Until that day it’s no wonder that prayer, divination, or the disembowelling of cats are as useful strategies as any. Stupid advice sometimes works; intelligent advice sometimes fails. The appearance of Cale’s puppets had been a surprising success. Everyone agreed that the will of the New Model Army to fight had improved beyond measure – a will as important, perhaps, as weapons, food or numbers. It was so successful that it was decided the troops needed even more of it. The problem was that the Redeemers also had a will to fight that was founded on more than clever illusions: death for them was merely a door to a better life. So it was argued – not unreasonably – that if fake Cales could do so much good, how much more would the troops benefit from the presence of the real one. Mysteriously, morale amongst the New Model Army had increased as much in areas where the puppets hadn’t been seen as where they had. Clearly then just a few short appearances by Cale himself might tip the balance.

Vague Henri was begged and cajoled and nagged until news arrived of another hideous victory by the Redeemers at Maldon. Everyone was shaken by this defeat, even Vague Henri, so he agreed to approach Cale. Had he known all the facts of the loss at Maldon he wouldn’t have done so. A few weeks later it became clear that the rout had not been the result of Redeemer superiority but was entirely due to the stupidity of the New Model Army commander, who had allowed the Redeemers to escape to high ground and ensured defeat from a position where victory would have been inevitable.

In fact, if anything, the flow of victories was moving slightly in favour of the New Model Army, except nobody knew it. So it was that, based on a false proposition reasonably arrived at in the face of compelling evidence that was completely mistaken, Vague Henri persuaded Cale to tour the battlefield in person. Cale was deeply reluctant but Vague Henri said it wouldn’t be for long and they’d travel in a wagon-train much bigger than the standard one. Cale had been feeling a little better and his personal carriage had been fitted with springs so that it was much easier for him to rest on the move. Things were critical, apparently. It was a crisis. Something Must Be Done. What choice did he have?

The first five days of the seven-day tour went well. Cale’s presence – away from anywhere dangerous – was a tonic for the troops far beyond expectations. It continued to be a great success right up until the moment when it turned into an appalling disaster – one that was set to deliver absolute victory into the hands of the Redeemers by means of the deaths of Cale and Vague Henri on the same day.

To avoid an unseasonably heavy storm coming down from the north, Vague Henri had halted the train. Unfortunately the same storm had also threatened a large expeditionary column of Redeemers, who had decided to avoid it by turning for the safety of their own lines. It was this coincidence of circumstances that brought a force of some fifteen hundred Redeemers, chosen to go this far because of their skill and experience, to blunder into Vague Henri’s unready wagon-train which, big as it was, had only some six hundred soldiers. Worse than that, many of them were not so skilled and experienced: Vague Henri had made the mistake, pressed as he always was for time, of handing the choice of soldiers over to someone too easily bribed to allow persons of rank and influence (already the New Model Army was falling into bad habits) to buy the great status offered by being able to boast they had served with the Exterminating Angel himself.

Vague Henri immediately ordered the wagons circled. As soon as Cale emerged to investigate the noise he spent five minutes looking over the Redeemers, who were putting themselves in order about eight hundred yards away, and told Vague Henri to stop.

‘Why?’

‘That small lake there.’ It was a tarn about three hundred yards away. ‘Form a semi-circle against the lake shore, same size as here – then with the wagons left over form another semi-circle inside.’

Vague Henri was able to catch the wagons still on the move so there was no delay putting the horses back in harness or digging up the pegs used to fasten the wheels firmly to the ground. The Redeemer in charge realized that now was a good time to attack but he was a cautious man and delayed too long, wary of being drawn into a mysteriously cunning trap. By the time he decided to move, the New Model Army formation was in place, the horses being uncoupled and the wheels hammered.

The central question for both sides was the same and neither knew the answer. Was help on the way? Vague Henri had sent out four riders for help as soon as he saw the Redeemers. For the Redeemers the question was whether they’d caught all of them. Without help or extraordinary luck it was only a question of time before they overran the stockade – unless they’d failed to catch all of the New Model Army riders. If so, help might be on the way eventually. Even then they were in a good position, with odds of better than two to one in their favour. They were also in a better position than they knew, given that half the soldiers in the wagon-train were made up of inexperienced administrators of one kind or another. Cale, more than anyone, believed in the importance of good administrators but not here and not now. It took about twenty minutes for Cale and Vague Henri to realize that they were not being protected by the engine of violence they’d worked so hard to create.

‘This is your fault,’ said Cale.

‘Put me on trial when it’s over.’

‘You’re only saying that because you know you’re going to die here.’

‘And you’re not?’

Now you’re worrying about me? It’s a bit late.’

‘Stop whining.’

There was a bad-tempered silence – then they got on with it.

‘We need height,’ said Cale.

‘What?’

‘We need a platform in the middle of that,’ he said, pointing at the small semi-circle of wagons. ‘It doesn’t need to be more than about six feet up – but we’ll need room for twenty crossbowmen and as many loaders as you can. The Redeemers are going to break through the first wall so we’ve got to turn the space between the two into a slaughterhouse – that’s all I can think of to keep them back.’

Vague Henri looked around, working out what he would use to build the tower and protect it. It would succeed up to a point. It wouldn’t make much difference if all his riders had been stopped.

‘You look terrible,’ he said to Cale.

In fact he could barely stand. ‘I need to sleep.’

‘What about that stuff Sister Wray gave you?’

‘She said it could kill me.’

‘What? And they’re not going to?’

Cale laughed. ‘Not if they know it’s me. I’m probably all right.’

‘But they don’t know it’s you.’

‘It might buy us time if they did.’

‘Too clever.’

‘Probably. I’ll sleep on it. Sort out the experienced men and divide them into the good and the better. Of the best I’ll need seven groups of ten. Put the weakest in the first group of wagons and wake me an hour before you think the Redeemers are going to break in. Now walk me slowly to my carriage so they don’t see their Exterminating Angel fall over on his face.’

On the way, a terrified-looking quartermaster walked over to them and reported there had been a mistake with the boxes of villainous saltpetre used to charge the handguns. Three-quarters of their supply turned out to be bacon, which was packed in identical crates. The quartermaster was surprised to be calmly dismissed. There was a reason.

‘This is your fault,’ said Vague Henri to Cale.

It was true, it was Cale’s fault – months before he’d realized they were spending a fortune and huge amounts of time making crates of every different size and shape for their supplies, so he’d standardized them. A simple but clever idea promised to destroy them all.

Cale had expected he might, if he was lucky, get two or three hours. Vague Henri woke him after seven. It always took him a couple of minutes to become wakeful in any way but he could see immediately that there was something different about Vague Henri. More than Kleist, and very much more than Cale, he’d always retained something of the boy about him. Not now, though. There was no point in delaying so he took the tiny packet of Phedra and Morphine out of his drawer and poured the dose straight into his mouth. Sister Wray’s dire warnings whispered in his ear. But she’d given it to him because she knew there would be days like this.

Cale followed Vague Henri outside. In the hours he’d been asleep hell had arrived. All the wagons in the first wall were in a terrible state – walls broken, wheels smashed; half were pulled to the ground by Redeemer ropes and six of them were on fire. In the inner semi-circle the dead and the wounded lay in ragged lines of around two hundred – and though there were screams, mostly it was the horrible silence of those in the kind of pain that was going to kill. And yet Cale could see Vague Henri had preserved the line without using two hundred of the most skilled and experienced. Cale looked directly at him and Vague Henri stared back: something, something had changed.

‘What you’ve managed here,’ said Cale, ‘not even I could have done it.’ If they ever praised each other, which was rare, it was always with an edge of mockery. But not this time. Vague Henri felt the effect of this praise as deeply as it was possible to be affected by the deep admiration of someone you love. A short silence. ‘A pity,’ said Cale, ‘you let it happen in the first place.’

‘Well, it’s a pity,’ replied Vague Henri, ‘that because of your stupid boxes we’re all going to die.’

The first wall of wagons was still holding, if not for much longer – already the Redeemers were pulling at the burning wrecks. Cale thought he had about ten minutes. He shouted the fresh troops forward and gathered them in their prearranged groups of seven.

He gave them, of course, the speech he’d stolen from the library in the Sanctuary.

‘What’s the name of this place?’ he asked.

‘Saint Crispin’s Tarn,’ said one of the soldiers.

‘Well, he that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will strip his sleeves and show his scars and say “These wounds I had at Crispin’s Tarn.” And then he’ll tell what feats he did that day. Then shall our names be as familiar in the mouths of everyone as household words from this day to the ending of the world. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.’

Cale did not make the usual offer to let any man go who did not wish to fight – no one that day was going anywhere. One day his trick speech would fail to work but not today. ‘Each one of you,’ he shouted, and the drug was beginning to do its work, his voice was strong and carried above the noise behind, ‘belongs to a group of seven named after the days of the week because I’ve not had the time and the privilege to know you better. But each one of you is now responsible for whether the future lives or dies. Keep your shields touching. I want you close enough to smell each other’s breath. Don’t lag behind, don’t charge ahead – that’s the style I want and the spirit. You know the calls – listen as well as I know you can fight and you’ll do well.’

He stood forward and pointed to either side of the semi-circle.

‘Monday there. Sunday at the far end. Everyone in order in between.’ He waved at them to go.

Vague Henri meanwhile had gathered up the remaining weakest fighters and now led them forward to reinforce the wagons not on fire.

A few minutes more of the tug-of-war with the burning wagons and then they collapsed; the Redeemers pulled what was hooked to their chains back and away to leave what now looked like gaps in a row of broken teeth. Vague Henri had just enough time to return and enter the small semi-circle in front of the tarn and organize his crossbowmen on the stumpy ragged tower of earth and stones and wood.

Five minutes and then the first Redeemers entered through the largest gap to Cale’s left. Now he could feel the poison pumping in his veins – not real strength or courage but jumpy, edgy and overstrung. But it would have to do. He realized his judgement was twitchy too; part of him wanted to rush the Redeemers in the breach and fight. Vague Henri had been instructed to save what remained of their failing supply of crossbow bolts and only try to hit the centenars. The centenars dressed exactly like other Redeemers for precisely this reason but Vague Henri could tell them even through the smoke. One went down, hit in the stomach, and then another.

‘Wednesday!’ called out Cale. ‘Walk on!’ They moved forward in a line – the Redeemers waited – clear now for them what attitude to take.

‘That’ll do!’ called out Cale and the Wednesdays stopped, leaving the Redeemers confused – they’d expected to defend the breach but they were being encouraged in. This wasn’t right. Cale raised his left hand to Vague Henri and five bolts from his overstrungs encouraged the Redeemers to do the right thing – or the wrong one – and advance.

However bad things looked for the wagon-train, the Redeemers were worried too. It had taken them too long to get this far. With such odds they’d expected to overrun the wagons and be on their way before reinforcements came. They knew that if they’d got all the New Model Army outriders they had all the time in the world. But they couldn’t be sure. So, fearing they were pressed for time, they moved past the wagons and into the half circle.

‘Tuesdays!’ shouted Cale. ‘Come by! Come by! Quickly. Quickly.’ The Tuesdays moved forward, the left edge slightly faster, taking the group in an anti-clockwise move to seal the space to the Redeemer right. ‘Thursdays! Away to me! Quickly!’ The Thursdays moved anti-clockwise and blocked the moving Redeemers from spreading to their right. The replacement centenars would have withdrawn at this to the breach but they’d been told to push on.

‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’ they screamed and hit the New Model Army lines of shields with their own – here it was mostly cut and shove and the crash of sword and mallet against shield with everyone trying to get in a blow without being caught themselves. But the problem was that the Redeemers were by far the better soldiers in an open fight and it was telling much quicker than Cale had hoped. But he’d planned for it – hoping to stall them here to get time for reinforcements to arrive – if they were on their way. But too soon his men were beginning to fall back. Cale, in his fifteen-year-old pomp, would have used the rest of the days of the week to support the retreat back to the semi-circle around the tarn. He would have seen that he’d got it wrong and backed away in as good order as was possible. The only reason he was able to take to the fight was because of Sister Wray’s drugs – but she would have seen almost immediately that he was reacting badly: his face was flushed, his pulse racing and his eyes like pin-holes. Seeing the three days of the week were being pushed back and about to collapse he raced forward, picked up a hideous looking poleaxe from a wounded soldier and grabbed a short mallet abandoned in the ground then burst through the line of the Wednesdays and launched himself into the astonished Redeemers.

Wide-mouthed the dogfish loves to swim

The fishes go in fear of him

Filled with rage and drug-powered to insanity, Cale lashed at the Redeemers around him with the blunt-toothed poleaxe – a thug’s weapon wielded by a thug with savage handiness and utmost craziness: brutal the crushing insults to teeth and to faces, blunt the breaking of scalps and of fingers, the splintering of knees and elbows. His hammer to their chests caused their hearts to stop as they stood, shattered spines and cheekbones; he hammered ribcages, fractured bones, legs tore, noses burst. Even Redeemers were stunned at the violence – and then the discouraged of the New Model Army, seeing the madman who’d come to their rescue, rushed to his aid and startled their betters as if they were taunted by Cale’s delirious poison, unhinged by the blood and the shit smells and the horror.

Now more Redeemers poured in from behind but made things worse as their panicking comrades tried to escape the mad-infected counter-attack. Cale was stepping on the wounded living to get in his blows on the retreating enemy. He was in such a mania that he’d have been a terror holding a baby’s rattle in either hand. The drug released in a flood the pent-up anger against the men falling back in front of him – the whining and begging of men who were dying and the crowing and gloating of his men at his shoulders – these are the signals and the sounds of a battle, the terror and pain and the singular rapture.

The Redeemer advance collapsed and but for one centenar, who kept his head and pulled away men who were standing like stumps to be slaughtered, they might have had a blow hard enough to make them leave. As they retreated Cale had to be held back from following – lucky for him, as once in the open beyond the outer rim of wagons he’d have been killed. No drug would have helped him there. The leader of the Fridays managed to hold Cale in the kind of grip possessed only by a six and a half foot tall former blacksmith. He held him back long enough for Vague Henri to arrive and talk him back to the semi-circle in front of the tarn. Now it was dark and as Vague Henri gave Cale over to a field doctor, with whispered advice about a medicine that had gone wrong, he tried to work out how to cover the breach.

Had the Redeemers attacked the same point again they would have been through in a few minutes but they were, understandably, amazed at what had happened and, believing the New Model Army had found some berserk mercenaries, decided that they should try a different approach. For the next two hours they attempted an attack on the outer perimeter with the intention of setting all the wagons on fire and then pulling the burnt remainder out of the way to give them a clear line of assault to the semi-circle backed onto the lake. Vague Henri held them off until two hours past midnight and then ordered the survivors to retreat to the tarn and watch the Redeemer engineers pull the outer perimeter apart. At four in the morning the last attack began.

The Redeemers gathered on the inside of the perimeter and sang: Alleeeeluuuueeeeaaaa!

Alleeeeluuuueeeeaaaa! Lit from behind by the red embers of the burnt-out wagons they looked like some monstrously armed choir from hell. To the left, other Redeemer soldiers began to sing.

Death and judgement, heaven and hell.

The last four things on which we dwell

.

To the right:

Faith of our fathers, living still we will be true to theetill death.

In a harrowing way it was beautiful – though that thought never crossed the fearful minds of those watching and listening.

Brought back to the wagons in front of the tarn, Cale had been taken to the tent for the wounded behind the stumpy tower built by Vague Henri. His mind seemed a little clearer but his body below the waist was shaking uncontrollably in a way that looked faintly ridiculous. Vague Henri told the doctor what he’d taken.

‘Give him something to calm him down.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ said the surgeon. ‘You shouldn’t be mixing these drugs – it’s not safe. As you can see, you can’t tell what’ll happen.’

‘Well,’ said Vague Henri, ‘I can tell you what’ll happen if you don’t get him into a condition to fight.’

It was hard to argue with this so the surgeon gave him Valerian and Poppy in a dose large enough to put down the former blacksmith who was now standing over Cale in case he made a run for it.

‘How long to see if it works?’

‘If I told you I’d be a liar,’ said the surgeon.

Vague Henri squatted down in front of Cale, who was shaking all over and breathing in and out in short bursts.

‘Only fight when you’re ready. Understood?’

Cale nodded between shakes and breaths and Vague Henri walked out of the tent knowing this was likely to be his last night on earth and feeling all of two years old. He climbed up the makeshift hump in the middle of the semi-circle – tower was too grand a word for it – and exchanged a few words with the fifteen crossbowmen and their loaders. Then he turned to the rest of the men – his men – at the barricades. He thought that at this time of all times they deserved the truth.

‘First,’ he lied, ‘I’ve heard that reinforcements are on their way. All we have to do is hold out till mid-morning then we’ll make them sing a different tune.’ There was a loud cheer, which made an odd clash with the music of the Redeemers.

Did they believe him? What other choice was there? Everything for Vague Henri was now about the art of delay. He decided to offer the Redeemers talks about surrender, not really thinking it worth the risk. When the messenger failed to return he was furious with himself for wasting a man’s life when he knew, really, what the answer would be. You’re weak and useless, he said to himself. He turned to the immediate problem: the shortage of bolts. He’d been setting the loaders to making the new ones all day so there was a good supply but keeping the Redeemers back for long enough would probably need more by far than he’d stockpiled. If reinforcements arrived at all it had better be by nine in the morning. After that no one would need to worry any more.

The plan he’d put together was simple enough: the raised platform gave them a line of sight everywhere to the front except for an arrow’s shadow about six feet in front of the wagons. Any Redeemers who made it to the shadow would be able to fight the defenders without being picked off by the crossbows on the tower. Vague Henri’s job was to keep the Redeemers back from the wagons so that only a comparatively small number in the protective shadow could fight hand-to-hand with the defenders. But this plan, he was sure, depended more on Cale than on him: the defenders on the wagons needed an exterminating angel on their side if they were to make it through the night.

Still singing, on came the first line of Redeemers, slamming their shields with their swords in slow accompaniment to the dirges Vague Henri had been forced to listen to as a boy morning, noon and night. Through a stroke of luck he’d discovered a second case of overstrungs when there should only have been three for an entire camp: close-quarter fighting didn’t require such long distance power so they were only used for sniping, and then hardly ever. On another occasion this mistake might have been a disaster but today incompetence had been a glorious gift. With ten of these crossbows against them the Redeemers would be getting a nasty shock on their way to the wagon barricade.

So it proved. The Redeemers were expecting to come under fire from the much weaker crossbows Vague Henri had designed for close in-fighting, and against which their shields were a pretty good defence. They hadn’t even started to advance when bolts from the overstrungs took out four centenars, four others and wounded a further two. Worse was to come. Almost immediately another volley of five from the other overstrungs, handed to the crossbowmen by their loaders, again struck the dense Redeemer ranks with the same result. Taken by surprise, there was enormous confusion about what to do and for a moment Vague Henri thought they were going to retreat out of range. He was almost right but then one of the centenars, lashing to the left and right and screaming bloody murder, blocked the way and drove them forward.

‘Run! Run! Run! Get under the safety of the wagons!’

As the eight hundred or so Redeemers made a chaotic dash for the shadow of the wagons where the bolts couldn’t reach them they took heavy losses from the crossbows on the mound and as they got closer the less powerful crossbows in the wagons had greater effect. Worse still for the Redeemers, too many had come to attack the wagons – there wasn’t enough room in the shadow for all the priests who made it there. More than two hundred were left directly in the line of fire from the mound. After a short period of carnage in which more than fifty Redeemers were killed, the centenars managed to work out their mistake and drove back only three-quarters of the number of men that just a few minutes before they had driven forward.

The Redeemers at the wagons fought on, protected from Vague Henri but not from the defenders inside the wagons, now under intense and deadly pressure. Still, the defenders were well protected and died only at a rate of one of them to six Redeemers. It was Vague Henri who held the balance. As Redeemers slowly died in front of the wagons they had to be resupplied by Redeemers now hiding in the dark back, beyond the old perimeter. Once enough Redeemers had died the centenars raced forward from the dark in groups of thirty or so to replace them. Life and death for the defenders depended on the rate of fire from the stumpy hillock and how many Redeemers the crossbowmen could kill as they made their dash from the dark across the open space to the relative safety of the wagons.

A murderous rhythm was being beaten out by Vague Henri and the defenders and they’d survive only as long as that rhythm stayed the same. If they ran out of bolts or the wagons were breached the fight was over. Vague Henri now believed it was over anyway. If only Cale was here, he kept thinking to himself. He’d know what to do.

By now the exterminating angel was snoring away in his carriage, being watched over by the former blacksmith, Under-sergeant Demsky. Briefly visited by the surgeon a few hours into this second fight, Demsky was told that Cale would be unconscious for hours and that Demsky would be of much more use in the field.

‘I should watch over him,’ said Demsky.

‘If those Papist scum get over the wagons,’ said the surgeon, ‘all you’ll be watching over is his death and then your own.’ Cale snored on. The surgeon’s point was impossible to disagree with and after a brief check they left Cale to the dark.

Half an hour later Cale woke up, the Valerian and Poppy mixture having worn off. The same could not be said of the Phedra and Morphine that Sister Wray had so fearfully given him. Even more demented than before he’d fallen into his herb-induced sleep, he picked up a poleaxe and rushed outside. His carriage had been moved to the safest place on the far side of the small hillock and about thirty feet from the water of the tarn. Under normal circumstances he would have been seen within a few steps, even in the dark – but it was two hours into the battle and everyone was wrapped up in the fight for survival going on in front of them. This was why only Cale saw the line of Redeemers in the lake, wading their way towards the completely exposed rear of the camp along some kind of raised shallow that they’d discovered, the width of two men. The water was still waist-high and their progress was slow but there were enough of them to turn the fight in a matter of minutes. Roaring for help, which went unheeded due to the great noise of the battle, a naked Cale – the surgeon had stripped off his blood-glazed clothes – ran into the lake and waded towards the startled Redeemers – a lone boy, completely naked and screaming at them.

Not even the gentlest and most loving dove of peace could fail to thrill at the majesty of his angelic violence – no hero had ever fought with such strength and graceful skill, such divine rage and cruel magnificence. As each Redeemer came on he dealt out such savagery to arms and legs and heads that soon the shallows of the lake were awash in severed limbs and fingers and heels and toes – all the frigid lake incarnadined with Redeemer blood as they came on at him relentlessly to be martyr-fodder in the cold black water.

If anyone in the battle behind him had found the time to look back into the lake they would certainly have seen something not soon forgotten. For an hour, lashing around him in the water, the hallucinating Cale fought madly against an endless line of Redeemers who did not exist, deadly foes magnificently vanquished who were entirely figments of his drug-drenched imagination. After an hour of deluded heroism all his mind-enemies were dead. And so, exhausted but triumphant, he made his way back to his carriage while the real battle continued, touch and go, and fell into a peaceful sleep.

On the mound, Vague Henri could feel the sweat dripping down his back as if, realizing he was going to die, fear beetles had hatched from his spine and were making their escape. On and on it went and the pile of bolts that were keeping them from a horrible death diminished like sand in a timer that would never be reversed. Then, at first unnoticed, the sky began to lighten and the pale red of dawn began to bathe the wagons below in a delicate pink and then the sun moved up above the horizon and a breeze blew up, dispersing somewhat the smoke that hung over the fight. Then the fight stopped and a peculiar silence fell on the men, Redeemer and New Model Army alike. Surrounding them on the low rise that overlooked the tarn, at a distance of a mile or so, were perhaps five thousand soldiers who had marched through the night to save their exterminating angel.

The Angel of Death himself was fast asleep and he was still asleep half an hour later when Vague Henri came to check on him, along with the surgeon and Under-sergeant Demsky. They looked down on him for a minute or two.

‘Why is he so wet?’ asked Vague Henri.

‘All the herbs, probably,’ said the surgeon. ‘The body’s way of trying to get rid of all the poison inside. He is our saviour – what can be said in praise of him that’s good enough?’

It would be hard to say whether Cale’s supernatural reputation inflated more from his (as it was now believed) single-handed destruction of the Redeemers just as they were about to claim victory, or the fact that having completed this extraordinary feat he’d retired to sleep through the remainder of the fight, as if he knew, indeed had in some way guaranteed by his single intervention in the battle, that victory was certain whatever the Redeemers then did or did not do.

It was a mark of Vague Henri’s maturity and the strength of his moral fibre that he was able to find a sufficiently strong chamber in his heart to lock away for ever his incandescent fury that all the credit for the success of that most crucial night went to Cale. Mostly, at any rate.

I won the battle of Crispin’s Tarn.’

‘If you say so,’ replied Cale whenever Vague Henri brought it up in private, which was quite often. ‘I can’t remember much about it.’

‘You said that not even you could have kept the Redeemers out.’

‘Really? Doesn’t sound like me.’

Of the real attack Cale had launched against the Redeemers he could only recall the odd fleeting image. For some time afterwards, all that remained of his heroic attack on the non-existent Redeemers in the tarn itself was the occasional strange dream. But soon even that faded. Vague Henri had his revenge for being robbed of the credit in a manner that would have been applauded by all fifteen-year-olds at all times and in all places. So impressed and grateful were the people of Spanish Leeds that a public subscription was filled ten times over to provide a fitting reminder of the heroic victory at Crispin’s Tarn. At the site of the battle a stone statue was erected, in which an eight-foot Cale stood on the bodies of dead Redeemers while those about to be hideously slaughtered cowered before his unearthly mightiness. Vague Henri had bribed the stonemason to alter the inscription at the foot of the statue by one letter so that it now read:

In eternal memory of the heroic deeds of Thomas Cake










33

In the two weeks after the battle of the tarn Cale felt horrible and slept on and off almost continuously. When he was awake he either had a vicious headache or felt he was about to throw up and often did. One of the ways he found to take his mind off his misery was to lie in a dark room and remember all the wonderful meals he’d eaten with IdrisPukke: sweet and sour pork, angel’s hair noodles with seven meats, blackberry crumble with the berries just picked and served with double-thick cream. Then, a double-edged pleasure, he’d think about the two naked girls and what it was like to touch them and be inside them (still a notion that astonished him whenever he thought about it – what an idea!). As long as he could avoid the hatred he felt for Arbell and the guilt – and such a complicated guilt – over Artemisia, then it seemed to help him vanish to a place where pain was dulled, including those. Often he would remember specific days and nights and fall asleep while thinking about them. After two weeks he woke up one morning and felt much better. This happened from time to time, the sudden arrival of several days of feeling almost normal – as long as he didn’t do much. A few hours into this oasis he began to feel very strange; an intense desire would not leave him alone. It was so strong that he felt it was impossible to resist. Probably, he thought, it was caused by nearly dying at Crispin’s Tarn. Whatever the reason it was driving him mad and it was not going to be resisted.

‘Do you have hanging gimbals?’

‘No.’

‘Any history of thrads?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have a history of the drizzles?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like a pigeon? That would be extra, of course.’

‘No.’

‘A Huguenot?’

‘No.’

‘A gob lolly?’

Like all obnoxious boys of his age, Cale was wary of being made a fool of.

‘Are you making this up?’

The sex-barker was indignant.

‘We are celebrated, sir, for our gob lollies.’

‘I just want …’ Cale paused, irritated and awkward, ‘… the usual.’

‘Ah,’ said the sex-barker, ‘at Ruby’s House of Comforts we supply the unusual. We are notable for the unconventional most of all.’

‘Well, I don’t want it.’

‘I understand,’ said the disdainful barker. ‘Sir requires the mode ordinaire.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Would sir want to avail himself of our kissing service?’

‘What?’

‘Kissing is an extra.’

‘Why?’ Cale was more bemused than indignant.

‘The fille de joie at Ruby’s are women of quality and hold kissing to be of all acts the most intimate. They are therefore obliged to ask for extra.’

‘How much?’

‘Forty dollars, sir.’

‘For a kiss? No thanks.’

In a sex-barker’s working life awkward customers were the rule but the pale young man with the dark circles around his eyes (though pale and dark didn’t do his unhealthy colours justice) was now really and truly getting on his nerves.

‘All that remains is for the young sir to provide proof of age.’

‘What?’

‘At Ruby’s House of Comforts we are strict on such matters. It’s the law.’

‘Is this a joke?’

‘Indeed not, sir. There can be no exceptions.’

‘How am I supposed to prove how old I am?’

‘A passport would be acceptable.’

‘I forgot to bring it with me.’

‘Then I’m afraid my hands are tied, sir.’

‘Is that extra too?’

‘Very droll, sir. Now piss off!’

There was laughter at this from the waiting customers and the tarts arriving to take them away for their rented ecstasy. Cale was used to being denounced, he was used to being beaten, but he was not used to being laughed at. Nobody smirked at the Angel of Death, the incarnation of God’s wrath. But now he was just a sick little boy and how he burned for his former power as they sniggered. If he had not been so weak it’s hard to see how he could have controlled himself under such provocation – they would have seen the terrors of the earth to shut their gobs. But watching him from the other side of the room was a very large man with a hard look in his eyes. Despite the scorn-acid eating into his soul he was obliged to walk away, already working out a plan to do something hideous to spite Ruby’s House of Comforts in due course. So it was lucky for Ruby herself that, hearing the raised voice of her barker, she had come down to see what was up. She was even luckier that she recognized Thomas Cale.

‘Please!’ she called out, as Cale went to open the door. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. My person here,’ she signalled towards the barker as if he were something that had waited too long to be thrown into the bins, ‘is an idiot. His stupidity will cost him a week’s wages. I’m most dreadfully sorry.’ Cale turned around, enjoying the look of aggrieved injustice on the barker’s face.

‘Two weeks’ wages,’ said Cale.

‘Let’s agree on three,’ said Ruby, smiling. ‘Please come through to the privatorium. Only our most honoured guests are taken there. And everything tonight, of course, comes with our compliments.’

‘Even the kissing?’

She laughed. The boy, it seemed, was willing to be smarmed.

‘We’ll find places you didn’t even realize could be kissed.’

Although the barker was no wiser as to the identity of the boy, he’d never seen Ruby treat anyone with such deference. But it was more than deference, she was afraid. At any rate, he realized three weeks’ wages were the least of his troubles.

In the privatorium was a sight to bulge the eyes of any boy, no matter how wicked. There were women everywhere, cocooned on banquettes of goya kidskin, on sofas of yellow velvet and day-beds covered in bittersweet vicuna from the Amerigos. Tall women, short women, tiny women, large women – brown and white and yellow and black women, one of them covered from head to foot except for one breast with the nipple painted poppy red. Another dressed like the innocent daughter of a Puritan was modestly clothed in white linen and a black dress – except that she wept tears of sorrow and held up a sign: I have been kidnapped. Help me, please! Others were naked and seemed to sleep. One young girl, her feet and hands bound inside a wooden frame, was being tormented by a woman tickling between her outstretched legs with a swan’s feather.

‘Dutch champagne!’ called out Ruby to a pageboy wearing leather blinkers. She turned to Cale. ‘It’s the best vintage in a hundred years.’

She gestured for him to choose one of the women in the room, trying to give Cale the impression she was at ease, but something terrified her about the white-faced boy and she hoped he would decide quickly. She was astonished at what he said next.

‘I want you.

Ruby was in her early fifties and had retired from whoring more than twenty years before. During that time such requests had been made but delicately or firmly rejected as the case might be.

‘But these are some of the most beautiful women in the country.’

‘I’m not interested. Only in you.’

Ruby knew how to make the best of herself, it was true. She had considerable skill in paint – enough, not too much – and she could afford the best efforts of the dressmakers of the city. She had by no means let herself go but she loved her food and was pleasantly lazy. And the truth was that she had never been beautiful. She had made her way to the top of a craft that took a dreadful toll on most through her warmth and wit. Her neck was too long for most tastes, she had a small nose but of an unusual shape and lips so full they verged on the peculiar. ‘When I’m tired,’ she used to joke, ‘I look like a tortoise.’

But Cale thought she was gorgeous.

She was a woman of strong mind, and harsh if she needed to be, but what could she do? This white-faced boy could not be refused. Faced, then, with the inevitable, she put on the smile she had contrived over thirty years on her back to come easily and gestured him towards the door, watched by the open-mouthed and excited tarts.

‘Who on earth was that funny-looking kiddiewink?’ said the Puritan maiden who could now stop weeping.

‘You’re such a stupid slut!’ said the girl who’d now stopped tormenting her partner with the swan’s feather. ‘That was Thomas Cale.’

The Puritan’s eyes widened in delighted horror. ‘I hear he came back from the dead and keeps his soul trapped in a coal-scuttle.’

Ruby Eversoll might not have believed in revenants or imprisoned souls but she knew enough hard facts about Cale to be afraid. She had once been owned by Kitty the Hare and while she was delighted by the news of his death, and how long and horrible his dying, she was aware of what kind of creature you would have to be to be capable of murdering Kitty in his own home. The fact that he was just a sick-looking boy only made him more unsettling. As she unlocked the door to her apartment she realized she was trembling. Ruby Eversoll had not shaken with fear in a very long time.

Cale would have been astonished if he’d known what Ruby was feeling. If he was not, perhaps, as apprehensive as most boys of fifteen or sixteen would have been in the same circumstances, he was still nervous – slightly out of his depth, slightly ashamed at paying someone to have sex with him, but also agitated at the unfamiliar pleasures of a woman so very different from Arbell or Artemisia. At the thought of his late lover he felt a stab of something – something like loss, something like remorse. But that was all too confusing so he put it away and concentrated on the statuesque Ruby.

‘Shall I undress?’ asked Ruby.

‘Um … yes, please.’ It certainly didn’t sound very commanding but Ruby was too agitated to notice.

Ruby was a professional; Ruby knew her job. Very slowly she began to unclip the hooks and eyelets at the front of her dress from the top down. As she opened each of them Cale became transfixed by her breasts. Held in and forced upwards by the engineering talents of her dressmaker, with each unclasping the soft roundness, held up by the dress, seemed to swell as if they were desperate to be free at last. He did not notice he’d stopped breathing. She dropped the corset to the floor, undid her skirt and stepped out of it. Now all she wore was a white silk shift. Oddly, and to Ruby, incomprehensibly, she felt deeply awkward as she undid the ties down the front of the tissue-thin shift and then shrugged it to the floor and stepped away. Cale’s lungs, if not Cale himself, decided it was time to breathe – and it was the gasps from Cale that began to tell Ruby that perhaps she had misunderstood something.

Above the waist she was naked now. Even as a slim young woman she had been proud of her breasts. She was no longer slim, or anything like it, but whatever her pleasure in butter and eggs and wine had added, and it had added a great deal, her breasts had retained something of their youthful lift. They were, to put it simply, very large, the pink nipples enormous. Cale, used only to the sight of the lithe Arbell and the tiny Artemisia, for whom the word delicate was gross, stared as if he was seeing a naked woman for the first time again. How was it possible, he thought (though thought was nearly paralysed), for the same creature to be so different? He had not, of course, shared Vague Henri’s gawping epiphany while spying on the abundant Riba when she was bathing in the Scablands. Reaching to one side, Ruby undid the drawstrings at the side of her pale blue pantalettes and let them drop to the floor. It was as well that Cale had been undergoing a period of feeling stronger that week or else he might have dropped dead on the spot and the future of the world taken a very different turn.

There was an intense stillness in the room as Cale, utterly struck, looked at Ruby. Ruby began to feel her dread of the boy recede and the almost forgotten pleasure of intoxicating someone with the power of her body reassert itself. Slowly, enjoying each step more, she walked towards him and, holding out her arms, there was no other world, folded Cale into her body. That moment, the sense of being wrapped in a paradise you could smell and touch, would stay with him until the day he died, to be turned over in his mind whenever he was at his lowest point, a refuge against despair.

But now he was burning with greed. He dragged her onto the bed and began as if he wanted to eat her up. His mouth and hands were everywhere, fascinated by everything about her. Her belly was fat, nothing like the boy-flat tummies of Arbell and Artemisia. Ruby’s stomach was round and pillow-soft and shimmered when he touched it like one of the curds in the banquets of the Materazzi. She was all curves and folds and he touched her everywhere, his delight so great that she began to laugh. ‘Patience,’ she said, and got to her knees. He knelt behind her, lips devouring her neck and experienced, according to the Hunterians, one of the seven great pleasures the world has to offer – holding a pair of weighty breasts in the palms of both hands.

As if desperate to discover the other six, he pushed Ruby back onto the bed and began kissing her nipples with such unrestrained hunger that he went too far.

‘Ow!’ she squealed.

He sat up – shocked and alarmed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

The nip had been really painful but he was so remorseful and she so taken aback by the intensity of his desire for her that she could do nothing but reach for his cheek and smile.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, and fanned her face with her other hand. ‘Just slow down a little.’

‘Tell me what to do,’ he said sweetly. Now she felt how hysterical she’d been to project such dread around such engaging regret and such innocence.

‘Well, I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm but just try to draw the line at eating me up.’

In the hours that followed, Cale experienced another three of the remaining six great pleasures (about two of them it is, quite rightly, against the law of the land to be anything other than silent).

Kleist’s observation that wherever Cale went a funeral was sure to follow had become a commonplace. Certainly the general view of the hideous events that took place in Ruby’s House of Comforts later that night was that it proved that truisms get that way by being true. It was, of course, unfair to suggest that Cale was responsible for what happened, and preposterous to state that it was clear evidence of his supernatural status as some kind of earthly surrogate of death himself. But, as Vipond was later to observe to his brother, if Cale hadn’t insisted on getting into an argument with the sex-barker that evening it would have ended with only a slight bruise to his sense of his own importance.

‘So it was his fault,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘that some dog-shit gatherer cut the throat of a high-class tart because he thought she was laughing at the size of his penis?’

‘Of course not. But it’s not coincidence either – he may not be the Angel of Death but there are some people born to cause trouble in the world. And he’s one of them.’

Shortly before ten o’clock that evening, as Cale lay pleasantly exhausted on Ruby’s bed (blankets of Linton cashmere, sheets of Eri spider silk), a man in his early thirties arrived downstairs at the House of Comforts for a once-in-a-lifetime experience of beauty. He was a purist – which is to say that he spent his days collecting pure from the streets of Spanish Leeds. Pure was what the local tanners, who required its noxious substances to soften leather, called dog-shit. If the sex-barker had realized his profession the man would not have been let through the door, but the purist had known better than to present himself at such a special place in the clothes of the lowest of the low. He’d hired a suit and had a wash at the municipal bathhouse and a shave at the barbers. He was so nervous about being rejected he’d also drunk more than he’d intended. But had it not been for his row with Cale earlier that evening, the barker would probably have decided that the purist didn’t look quite right and was just a little too much the worse for drink. It was a question of tone: Ruby’s was a high-class place and the purist didn’t pass the test. But on this night he did. The barker was peeved; more, he was miffed. He’d been humiliated because of Cale and so that night he decided to take it out on his fat slut of a boss and let the purist in.

The shriek that reached them as Cale lay with his head on Ruby’s left breast was one he knew horribly well: the terror of someone who realized they were going to die.

‘My God!’ Ruby started to her feet and began to dress but Cale was at the door and trying to lock it shut when it burst open, knocking him backwards. Having killed one of the whores, the purist had panicked and headed the wrong way into the dead end of Ruby’s apartment. Already the shouts of the bodyguards – Ruby had four – made it clear he could not retreat. He stepped into the room, locked the door behind him and grabbed Ruby around the neck, pulling her towards the window. Terrified as he was, he saw that three floors up there was no escape here.

Cale, who had taken a hefty blow to his forehead, slowly stood up.

‘That hurt,’ he said to the purist.

‘Get me out of here or I’ll cut this bitch’s throat as well.’

The evidence of death was all over the man – it covered his face and the hired suit and the oddly small knife he was holding at Ruby’s neck.

‘Can I put my trousers on?’

‘You’ll stay where you are. Move and she’s dead.’

‘How am I supposed to get you out of here if I can’t move?’

Cale could hear talking outside. Then one of the bodyguards called out.

‘The Badiels are on their way! You can’t get out. Let the woman go and we won’t hurt you.’

The purist pushed Ruby (who was impressively calm under the circumstances, thought Cale) towards the door.

‘Tell the Badiels to let me go. If they try to come in I’ll cut her throat. Then I’ll cut the boy’s throat as well.’

‘Can I talk to them?’ Cale asked.

‘You shut the fuck up or I’ll cut her throat.’

‘I don’t think you will.’

‘Just watch me.’

‘Why waste a hostage when if I talk to them I could help you out?’

‘How could a scrawny chit like you be of any use?’

‘Let me talk to them and find out. What have you got to lose?’

The purist thought for a moment but thought wasn’t coming easily. The bleakness of his situation was closing in.

‘All right. But watch what you say or I’ll cut her throat.’

Cale walked to the door.

‘That’s far enough,’ said the purist.

‘Who’s in charge out there?’ called out Cale.

A short silence.

‘I am.’

‘Can you tell me your name?’

Another silence.

‘Albert Frey.’

‘All right, Mr Frey, I’d like you to tell this gentleman who I am.’

‘I don’t give a fuck who you are,’ said the purist.

Frey had a problem. An intelligent man, he’d decided not to refer at all to Cale on the grounds that he’d be handing the killer a hostage who would give him even more power. Was this really what Cale wanted?

‘It’s all right, Mr Frey,’ said Cale. ‘You can tell him.’

Another pause. ‘The young man in the room with you is Thomas Cale.’

The purist looked at the pale and skinny naked boy in front of him and compared the sight with whatever legends he’d heard. The mismatch was simply revealed.

‘Bollocks!’ said the purist.

‘It isn’t bollocks,’ said Cale.

‘Prove it then.’

‘I don’t see how I can.’

He nodded at Cale’s groin. ‘P’raps you can piss poison all over me. Can you?’

‘Unfortunately I had a slash just before you came in. It might take a while.’

‘I hear Thomas Cale keeps his soul in a coal-scuttle. Is that right?’

‘I don’t even know what a coal-scuttle is.’

There was a thunderous bang on the door. The purist, startled, dragged Ruby back and pressed the knife harder to her throat.

‘Mr Cale!’ boomed a voice.

‘Yes!’

‘You shut up!’ shouted the purist.

‘Are you all right?’

Cale raised his left hand, palm outward to ask the purist’s permission. Too scared to speak, the man nodded his agreement.

‘I’m Over-Badiel Ganz,’ said the man. ‘Tell that evil-doer that if he comes out he’ll get a fair trial.’

The purist gave a frightened gasp of derision. ‘And then be taken straight to Topping Bob to cut my head off.’

‘Do you hear me!’ shouted Ganz. ‘Come out of there and no one will harm you.’

Cale raised his voice.

‘Over-Badiel Ganz, this is Thomas Cale.’

There was a silence – a nervous one.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If you say another word until I tell you to you’re going to be very sorry. Do you understand?’

Another pause.

‘Yes, sir.’ This time he was barely audible.

Cale stared at the purist. ‘You’re completely wrong, y’ know, about them cutting your head off.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘About eight months ago, give or take, I signed a warrant on a young girl, sixteen or seventeen years old, and the next day she was taken into the Square of Martyrs in Chartres and they hanged her, then took her down and revived her, then the executioner cut her open and while she was still conscious cooked her bowels in front of her. You see, the thing is I liked her. I liked her a lot.’ He called out to Ganz. ‘Did you hear that, Over-Badiel? That’s how this man is to die, you understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Cale looked back at the purist.

‘Now, even though I don’t like you I’m going to make a deal with you.’

‘I’ll cut her throat – that’s the deal.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Cale. ‘I’m sick to death of hearing you tell me what you’re going to do. She’s just a whore.’

‘When I cut her throat I’ll do the same for you.’

‘No, you won’t.’ He smiled. ‘All right, you probably won’t. Me being naked and all that is a disadvantage, true. But I’m not a helpless girl. I know what I’m doing.’ He was bluffing. He might have felt well enough for once to experience four of the seven pleasures with Ruby but without the Phedra and Morphine anything more arduous was well beyond him.

‘I’m the one with the knife.’

‘All right, so you kill me. They’re still going to slice your tonk off and cook it in front of you.’

With all the talk, and what talk it was, the purist had time for the horrible events and the horrible predicament they’d put him in to take effect. He was visibly shaking.

‘What’s the deal?’ he said, voice catching.

‘The deal is you let the tart go and I’ll kill you.’

Ruby had been impressively calm until then and, to be fair, her eyes bulged only a little.

‘Are you taking the piss? I’ll cut her throat.’

‘So you keep saying. You know as well as I do you were over and done with the moment you killed that girl. You can’t take that back. You either let me deal with you now and it will be quick and painless or you wait a few days and become a legend for suffering. Fifty years from now people will still be saying, “I was there.”’

Now the purist began to cry. Then he stopped and terror became anger and he tightened his grip on Ruby. Then he began weeping again.

‘It’ll be quick,’ said Cale. ‘I’ll be the best friend you ever had.’

There was more weeping and more panic but then he loosened his hold on Ruby and she eased herself away. The purist, now crying uncontrollably, stood with his arms down by his side. Cale went over to him and slowly took the knife from his hands.

‘Kneel down,’ he said softly.

‘Please,’ said the purist, though it was not clear why. ‘Please.’ Cale was remembering that Kitty the Hare had said that too before he died.

Cale put his hand on the man’s shoulder and eased him downward.

‘Say a prayer.’

‘I don’t know any.’

‘Repeat after me: Into my hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’

‘Into my hands, O Lor …’

A sudden stab from Cale under his left ear. The purist fell forward and lay absolutely still. Then he began to jerk. Then stop. Then jerk, then stop.

‘For God’s sake, finish him,’ called out Ruby.

‘He’s dead,’ said Cale. ‘His body’s just getting used to it.’

An hour later, just before Cale left the House of Comforts, and while they were finishing a drink alone, Ruby said to him, ‘I felt there was something dreadful about you earlier on. Then I thought you were lovely. Now I don’t know what to think.’

She was tired, of course, and though she’d seen more than a few bad things this was the worst night of her life. Still, it wasn’t what Cale wanted to hear and he left without saying anything more.

PART FIVE

The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.

John Bright










34

There have been six battles fought at Blothim Gor. No one remembers any of these fights except in the name: ‘Blot’ is ancient Pittan for blood, as is ‘him’ in the language of the Galts, who wiped them out and stole their land. ‘Gor’ means the same in old Swiss. Blood, blood, blood – a fitting place for the first use of Robert Hooke’s hand-shooters. The war on the Mississippi plains had lasted six months by the time he got the balance of metals, powder and ease of use. Until then the fighting could have gone either way. The butcher’s bill was hideous, the Redeemers’ willingness to die in their thousands was beginning to edge out the advantage of the war wagons and the fraying soldiers inside them, born to cut wood, milk cows and dig potatoes. What kept them fighting was the sight, and rumours of the sight, of Thomas Cale. In the dying light of dusk he would appear on buttes and on cragged ridges and rocky wolds, still, except when the wind blew his cloak behind him like a wing, watching over them: pathfinder, dreadful guardian steward with his legs akimbo or kneeling, watching with his sword across his knees, shadowy predator, dark custodian. And then the stories began to make their way through bastion after bastion of a mysterious pale young man, no more than a boy, who would turn up wherever the fight was almost lost and battle side by side with the wounded and the lost, his presence calming their fear and radiating it back into the hearts of their almost triumphant enemy. And when it was over, and impossibly they had won, he would bind the wounds of the living and pray, tears in his eyes, for the dead. But when they looked for him again he would be gone. Scouts returned with stories of being trapped by the Redeemers when all hope was lost and they had surrendered themselves to a dreadful fate when an ashen young man emerged from nowhere, hooded and thin, and fought beside them against impossible odds only to prevail. Yet when the fight was over he was gone, sometimes to be seen watching from a nearby hill.

Ballads were written and spread within the week to every wagon on the Mississippi plains. Many had been written by IdrisPukke himself, after these stories had filtered back to Spanish Leeds. He hired dozens of travelling singers to go around the wagons singing his folk songs. But they also picked up the ones written by the men of the New Model Army themselves, clumsier, more sentimental than those written by IdrisPukke but mostly more powerful, so much so that when the returning singers played them to him he could feel the thrill along his neck and arms, finding himself moved and shaken even though he knew they were just propagation.

‘What is truth?’ said Cale, when IdrisPukke told him, shamefaced, about how the songs made him feel.

Cale, for whatever reason, perhaps shame or a cooler head even than IdrisPukke’s, claimed that while the circus, as he referred to the twenty puppet Cales, had its effect in keeping the New Model Army from disintegrating through the spring and summer campaign, their resilience owed as much, or more, to his ability to keep the wagons supplied with decent food and weapons and new men with good boots and warm clothes – all delivered through the lightweight carts that Nevin had made for him and which could move so fast even over bad terrain that the Redeemers were rarely able to interdict them. No one, he said to IdrisPukke, wants to sing a heroic song about a decent pair of boots and lightweight supply wagons.

Even so, it was a damned close-run thing. It was Hooke’s killing machines that brought the Redeemers to their knees on the Mississippi plains. Until then, they were using new tactics against the wagons, Greek fire and a lighter battering ram under a hood of bamboo to protect them from the blows and arrows of the bastions. They also had an advantage because of their belief that death was merely the door to a better life and, of course, that the life they left behind was a desert. But Hooke’s guns offered not only more slaughter than even the Redeemers could deal with but also horrible injuries, each blast wounding as many as six men at a time with ragged cuts that could not be stitched or easily cleaned so that the wounds became septic and refused to heal. And Hooke’s was not the only inventive mind concerned with dealing out pain and injury: it had occurred to the peasants that if they mixed a little dog-shit with the contents of the handguns they could ensure that the hideous wounds inflicted by them would fester most painfully.

Within three months the New Model Army was back over the Mississippi and with a bridgehead at Halicarnassus they were able to defend, despite the murderous counter-attacks of the Redeemers, for the same reason it had been the last place to fall.

Up until Bex the war against the Redeemers brought only defeat; after Hooke’s handguns it was only victory. But there was not an easy triumph in any battle, from the clash at Finnsburgh between barely enough men to fill a public house (and where the only member of the Swiss royal family died during an unlucky visit to bring a tonic to the troops) to the five hundred thousand who drew up to face one another in the battle for Chartres.

Who remembers the individual battles in any war, more than the occasional name, let alone what happened there or why it was important – or even the war itself? Which of you has forgotten the battles that led Thomas Cale to the walls of the Sanctuary itself? Where are the cenotaphs remembering Dessau Bridge or the battle at Dogger Bank? Where are the memorials to the First Fitna, the siege of Belgrade, the Hvar Rebellion or the War of the Oranges? Who can tell you about the Strellus and their matchless defence of the grain silo at Tannenberg, or the slaughter at Winnebago, or the defeat at Kadesh where twenty thousand men froze to death in a single night? Where are the henges at Pearl Harbour or Ladysmith? Where are the shrines, the headstones as far as the eye can see, for Dunkirk or the fall of Hatusha, for Ain Jalut and Syracuse or the massacre at Tutosburg? And why remember the first day of the Somme with so many tears when more died more horribly at Towton in an afternoon? After a three-month siege of the Holy City, the total deaths were how many? No one was counting any more.

Later the same day, after the city fell, Cale and Vague Henri stood in the Sistine Chapel under its glorious ceiling depicting God creating man – hands outstretched to one another in eternal love.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Vague Henri.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Cale, and meant it. ‘Have it painted white.’

There was a knock on Gil’s door that immediately seemed to say ‘I am a timid and guilty person.’

‘Come in.’

It was a timid and guilty person: Strickland, Bosco’s body servant, a man whose sense of his own miserable inadequacy and innate worthlessness hung about him like a personal fog.

‘There was no one in the ante-room,’ said Strickland. ‘So I knocked.’

What Gil wanted to say was: So what? Get on with it. What he actually said was: ‘How may I help you, Redeemer?’ In fact, he was extremely curious. Not even Strickland would have acted so guiltily if he’d been instructed to come. Something must be up. He hedged and ummed and then came out with it.

‘His Holiness has been in his room for six days and nights without food and only a cup of water once a day, which he’s instructed me to leave outside his locked door.’

While the denial of pleasure was more or less a permanent state of affairs for the Redeemers, fasting for more than a day was regarded with suspicion. Fasting for six days was forbidden: such extremes brought about strange results. Most of the Redeemer heresies, including Antagonism, had begun with mad visions brought on by starvation. But Gil wasn’t surprised, exactly. The gaps between audiences with Bosco had become ever longer – three weeks was not uncommon. The more victories won by Cale, and these days there were only victories, the more meetings were cancelled because the more incomprehensible was God’s plan to bring about the remaking of the human soul. For Bosco, Cale was not the executioner of the plan but rather the plan’s incarnation on earth. Now that incarnation was at the outskirts of Chartres and certain to take it, Bosco and ten thousand Redeemers had withdrawn to the Sanctuary. ‘God means something by this,’ Bosco had said. ‘He’s telling me but I can’t hear.’

Gil’s decision to leave had come up against the problem of all such decisions: it was easier said than done. Where would he go? What would he do? How would he live? The withdrawal to the Sanctuary had helped. Not even Cale could break into this place – not a thousand like him. Two thousand men, let alone ten thousand, could keep this place for ever – and the army wasn’t made that could stay outside it for more than a few months. So Gil decided to wait and see and put one or two devices into operation. Perhaps Bosco would starve himself to death but he doubted it. Something told him that there was trouble in this. He stood up.

‘Let’s go to his rooms.’

Taking several men with him he made his way to Bosco, trying to work out what he was going to do – but when he arrived at the tiny corridor leading up to Bosco’s apartments the Pope was standing in the doorway and smiling.

‘Gil, my dear!’ he said. ‘When I tell you what all this means you’ll laugh at me for failing to see something so very obvious. I couldn’t see for looking. Come in, my dear fellow. Come in.’ And in this mood of jubilation an alarmed Gil was hurried into Bosco’s most private rooms.

So now the armies of the Axis turned south towards the great barbican and buttress of the Redeemer faith, to the fountain and the origin of it all: the great catastrophe itself. There was not much of a sense of triumph as the siege army camped outside the hulking mass of the tabletop mountain on which the Sanctuary was constructed. Chartres was not built to be held against an army and yet it had needed three months of blood and suffering before the New Model Army were able to get inside its defences. The Sanctuary was a problem of a different order. No one had come close to taking it in six hundred years. It was hard to see how anyone could: it was vast enough to feed itself on the miraculously fertile soil transported from the Voynich oasis and there were vats to store water for two years or more. But on the arid scrub that surrounded it even dog grass and arse-wipe struggled to survive. In summer the heat was unbearable even though the nights were freezing, and in the winter, only four months away, it could get so cold it was claimed birds fell out of the sky frozen solid. This was an exaggeration, of course, not least because there wasn’t anything much for birds to live on. It was also the case, for reasons no one understood, that winters were sometimes almost mild. Mild or not, the scrublands before the Sanctuary were not suitable for men to live in and particularly not men in such large numbers. But there were many more difficulties than merely feeding twenty thousand soldiers in hostile circumstances miles from anywhere in a landscape which, for two hundred miles in every direction, had been scoured of every source of food, every well poisoned and every building burnt.

Cale was nicely looked after, it had to be said, in comfortably outfitted wagons with leaf springs and a decent mattress to keep him comfortable on long journeys, and another larger wagon in which to work and meet the great and the good. For all their success, the forces gathered around the Sanctuary represented, in part, those as hostile to Cale as the Redeemers gawping down at him from the walls of the Sanctuary. Once they realized the Redeemers must lose, the Laconics had changed sides and had contributed an army of three thousand to the Axis, which was now camped alongside the New Model Army. The Laconic general notionally in charge, David Ormsby-Gore, was in fact answerable to Fanshawe, whose central problem was whether to move against Cale now, when there would be many opportunities, or wait until the Sanctuary fell and then get rid of him. The trouble with waiting was that it was now clear that conquering the Sanctuary might take a long time, easily long enough for the Redeemer Fifth, Seventh and Eighth armies, who’d retreated to their vast territories in the west to regroup after their mauling at Chartres, to counter-attack. The Laconic Ephors wanted Cale dead out of a desire for revenge for the defeat at the Golan, but Fanshawe was more concerned for the future. It was a long time since he’d learned that Cale had not only declined to expel the Helots but had made sure they had been trained to create an insurgency against the Laconics. Once Cale had defeated the Redeemers, or at least forced them back beyond the Pale, he feared he would have enough power and sympathy for the Helots to train and supply them. He might even intervene directly to support a rebellion. In fact, looking for a cause of any kind, other than that of his own survival, was very far from Cale’s mind.

‘When it’s all over, we could buy a nice house,’ said Vague Henri. ‘What about that Treetops place you’re always going on about?’

Cale thought about this pleasant notion. ‘Hard to defend. Treetops. It’s a bit too close to a lot of people with ungenerous thoughts. We need to go over the sea.’

‘What about the Hanse? I bet with all that money they’ve got nice houses. One with a lake or a river.’

‘Best to go where we’re not known. I hear good things about Caracas.’

‘We could bring the girls with us.’ The girls in the Sanctuary were a difficult subject between them.

‘They might already be dead.’

‘But they might not.’

‘All right. I agree: a nice house with lots of girls in Caracas then.’

‘Do they have cakes in Caracas?’

‘Caracas is famous for its cakes.’

There was no more time to work on the future because IdrisPukke arrived unexpectedly with bad news from Spanish Leeds.

‘They’re planning to impeach you,’ he said.

‘I suppose,’ said Cale, ‘impeach isn’t a good thing – not medals and a parade an’ that?’

‘No. More like put you on trial in secret in the Star Chamber followed by a private meeting with Topping Bob.’

‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ asked Vague Henri.

‘Does it matter?’

‘It does to me,’ said Cale.

‘Set fire to the bridge after Bex.’

‘They can’t prove I did it.’

‘They don’t need to. Besides you did set fire to it. Also perjury is a capital case.’

‘They told me to lie.’

‘But you still did it. The summary execution of Swiss citizens.’

He did not say anything in reply to this accusation because it was also true.

‘The illegal raising of taxes.’

‘They agreed to that.’

‘You have it in writing?’

‘No. What else?’

‘Isn’t that enough? Just setting fire to the bridge would have the entire population of Switzerland fighting to get their hands on the rope.’

‘What choice did I have?’

‘Don’t ask me, ask them. An impeachment before the Star Chamber doesn’t at all require that the accusations are true in order for a guilty verdict – but it doesn’t help that you actually did all these things.’

‘You could march on Spanish Leeds yourself.’ This from Vague Henri.

‘Not without taking the Sanctuary first.’

Cale turned to IdrisPukke. ‘Why aren’t they waiting to get me until after it falls?’

‘They’re worried it will take too long – or that if it doesn’t the New Model Army will do exactly what Vague Henri says.’

‘But the New Model Army is still Swiss – and the King rules by the will of God. The same God they believe in.’

‘They’re peasants, not Swiss citizens – and they’re not peasants any more. Wars change people.’

‘It’s asking a lot,’ said Cale.

‘Try asking it.’

‘Not till we’ve taken the Sanctuary. Then we’ll see.’

‘And your invitation to Leeds?’

‘I’m pretty sure you can find the right words. Besides, it may not be as long as the whingers think – taking down the Sanctuary. Hooke will be here tomorrow with a new engine.’

‘And if it works, what then?’

‘I’ll worry about that when it happens.’

‘To be honest, I don’t think you can afford to do that. You need to start making plans now.’

‘We were thinking,’ said Vague Henri, ‘of going to Caracas.’

‘I’m afraid this isn’t the time for stupid jokes. I’d say the chances of you being allowed to retire to a peaceful retreat are approximately none.’

‘No rest for the wicked?’

‘Something like that. You have many talents, Thomas, and making enemies is one of them.’

‘Nobody likes us,’ said Vague Henri. ‘We don’t care.’

IdrisPukke looked at him. ‘You’re being more than usually trying, Henri. I wonder if perhaps you might like to stop.’ He turned his attention back to Cale. ‘You’ve shown yourself to be a great tactician, but the time for tactics is coming to an end. Where are you going? That’s the question for you now.’

But Cale was only a boy when all was said and done and he had no idea where he was going and never had known.

The next day Hooke arrived with three of his new howitzers: big fat barrels of steel, in principle the same as his all-conquering hand-shooters but so strongly built that they could fire a ball of iron the size of a small melon. It took several hours to set up the howitzers in their ugly wooden cradles and work out their elevations for the first assault on the walls of the Sanctuary, which were uniquely strong because the stones had been mortared together with a mixture made from rice flour, which set like the hob of hell.

Confident of success, Hooke had arranged for all three to be set off by men in specially padded armour. The army who gathered to watch pressed in so closely that the firing had to be delayed while they were pushed back, a process so laborious that Cale decided to let them stay. A wiser head prevailed in Hooke and eventually the watching soldiers were far enough back to satisfy him that the firing could go ahead. The three men in their special armour lumbered with their torches towards the howitzers and lit the fuses. There was a short fizz of powder and then a massive and almost simultaneous explosion, which burst two of the howitzers into a dozen pieces, cutting down all three of the armoured men and shooting back into the crowd of soldiers and killing a further eight. The third gun fired as it was meant to and sent the massive cannon ball smashing into the wall of the Sanctuary, where it simply bounced off, leaving behind a small dent. There would be no quick end to the siege of the Sanctuary.

But if it were not to be quick or even reasonably so then it was hard to see how he could avoid it collapsing. With winter coming on Cale would have to disperse the army before it fell apart through lack of food, water and the momentum needed to keep such disparate groups – predictably the New Model Army and the Laconics already hated each other – in the field in such hostile conditions. Even Cale was surprised to realize how little safety his great successes of the last few months had brought. In many ways, he wasn’t much safer than, say, the day after Deidre had slaughtered the Two Trevors. He’d expected to reach a position of power that offered a respite, a defence, an asylum, but he could see that while he really did have power, great power, it wasn’t made of the solid stuff he’d thought it would be. He’d thought it would be like a wall, but it wasn’t: it was like something else he couldn’t put his finger on.

But however elusive the question of how powerful power really was, he clearly had a great deal of it and that was why he was able to do something very foolish. He’d become obsessed with knowledge and feared never having enough of it. It was to him like the soother he saw in the mouths of infants. He saw very early on that information was odd stuff: you could easily end up with too much, or most of it was wrong or, even worse, correct but in a half-baked or misleading way. Still, he fancied himself, with some reason, as a good sifter of the stuff and had learned never to trust one source, not even the source he valued most in the world: IdrisPukke. It was true he felt a certain shame about this but not enough to stop him. The most important of these alternatives was Koolhaus, who had grown ever more disdainful and obnoxious the more he was able to demonstrate his superior intellectual gifts to the world. It was never enough for Koolhaus to be right, someone else had to be wrong as well – and he wanted them to know it. This was a weakness, perhaps a crippling one, as was the fact that his emotional grasp of the world was rather crude. Nevertheless, as a source of information and an evaluator of it he was invaluable. There was also Kleist. Intelligencing was the kind of work he was good at and which kept him busy: it was enough to distract to a certain extent from the fact that he was dangerously close to the sharp knife or the expensive narcotic from which he would never wake up. Kleist was not ready yet but he thought about it often. He made it through many bitter nights comforting himself with the thought that he could bring things to an end. Then there was Simon Materazzi. Cale had given Simon the freedom to go wherever he wanted. Simon could tell him what was happening in the camps and the streets. It was Simon who was the first to let him know that the puppet Cales were working to raise spirits and the first to let him know when the endless defeats and the slaughter that followed had demoralized the troops to such an extent that they couldn’t go on working any more. But by then Hooke had perfected and made hundreds of the shooters that were to change everything and give the men the one thing that made manipulation of their trust unnecessary: success. It was from both Koolhaus and Kleist that Cale received the same information at almost the same time, and from IdrisPukke shortly after: Arbell Materazzi had been given permission to leave for the protection of the Hanse. It revolted and shocked him how much it hurt to read that she was leaving. Even he realized the stupidity of feeling as if she had betrayed him all over again. He never stopped, not really, thinking about her. He realized, and this proved it, that she never thought about him at all, unless as someone to be avoided. No amount of anger with himself at the grossness of his stupidity could stop his useless and childish heart from crying out above his fury: How could she? How could she?

If you despise him or find his weakness detestable or even merely irritating it was no more than he found himself. She was an infection in his soul and that was that.

The idiocy of what he did next was obvious to him even as he did it: he wrote to Kleist and told him to take however many troops of the Spanish Leeds garrison of the New Model Army he needed to arrest her and bring her to the Sanctuary.

‘Fucking idiot!’ said Kleist, on reading his order. But at least it gave him something interesting to do.

‘Windsor has the crab.’

‘Really? Bad luck,’ said Fanshawe. ‘He’s sure?’

‘Had one of the quacks look him over. He’s a dead man.’

‘It’s an ill wind, I suppose,’ said Fanshawe.

‘Possibly Windsor would take a different view,’ said Ormsby-Gore. Ormsby-Gore did not care for Fanshawe. He talked too much and he had a diplomatic way of telling him what to do that he suspected was not as diplomatic as it sounded. What were really orders were dressed up with ‘I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea if …’ or ‘I could be mistaken but it might be worth trying …’ and so on. The Laconic way was to say what you had to say with the fewest words possible, a habit Ormsby-Gore took to extremes. For Fanshawe to be so roundabout in his orders felt like he was taking the piss.

‘Still, you have to admit,’ said Fanshawe, ‘it’s convenient and he has volunteered.’

The crab, a tumour that grew in the neck and was said to look like one, was a disease that afflicted Laconic males. About one in every fifty developed this condition, which was held by their enemies to be caused by everything from their hideous soup – made from blood and vinegar – to engaging in too much buggery with young boys. Given that it was invariably fatal and that long illnesses in Laconic society were notable by their absence it was the tradition that anyone so afflicted would offer themselves for a suicide mission as a means of making themselves useful.

‘How bad is it?’

‘Bad.’

‘But we have some time?’

‘Suppose.’

‘It might not be necessary to wait too long.’ He paused, hoping that Ormsby-Gore would be forced to speak. Fanshawe recognized this was childish but it gave him considerable pleasure. ‘What do you think?’

A pause. ‘Your patch.’

‘Still, I’d be very interested in your opinion.’

‘Act,’ said Ormsby-Gore, not because he believed they should murder Cale immediately but because it offered him the chance to use the fewest number of words.

‘You know, Ormsby-Gore, you could be on to something. Those howitzer thingies of his were the most appalling bloody shambles. What a cauchemar! Don’t you think?’

‘Don’t speak French,’ said Ormsby-Gore.

‘I know what you mean,’ agreed Fanshawe. ‘I’ve often regretted that I do.’

He didn’t have the slightest interest in Ormsby-Gore’s opinion but the question of when to kill Thomas Cale was still a problem. Hearing rumours about Hooke’s arrival he’d been pretty sure something like the howitzers was on the cards. If they had worked and the Sanctuary fell quickly then in the confusion it might have been possible, even probable, that an arrow in the back from a Redeemer would be taken at face value. The Swiss wouldn’t go looking for an explanation and with Cale dead they’d go back to holding the whip hand in the Axis again. There was only the New Model Army to worry about – they hated the Laconics and if there were a sniff of their involvement in Cale’s death there’d be trouble, particularly if they were stirred up by IdrisPukke and that rather engagingly yummy Henri boy. But, handled with care, the circumstances might mean there’d be no suspicion at all. Bad luck and handkerchiefs all round. The thing about sieges was that, once you were stuck into one like this, what mostly happened was nothing. Killing him and trying to make it look like something else was almost impossible to get away with when nothing much was happening. Windsor and his crab turning up was an unexpected benefit because he wouldn’t expect to survive the event – but it was more risk than Fanshawe was willing to take. An opportunity might come but he decided to wait.










35

‘You’re under arrest.’

Kleist was rather pleased with the way he’d used the bridge over the River Chess to cut Arbell Materazzi’s escort in two. Not that it would have made much difference if they’d taken them armed only with wet towels. They were kids. The Materazzi rump had mostly died at Bex. The few that were left had been dumped by Cale and sent to guard Redeemers in the prison camp at Tewkesbury in order to avoid any chance of one of them distinguishing himself in combat. Whatever he owed Vipond, helping to ensure a Materazzi revival was not going to be part of the repayment.

‘On whose authority?’ Arbell was with a young man, softly spoken. ‘It’s Mr Kleist, isn’t it?’

‘You are?’

‘Henry Lubeck – Consul to the Hanse.’

‘You’re free to go, Lubeck.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Kleist, but you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Be a good boy and fuck off out of it.’

‘It’s all right, Mr Lubeck,’ said Arbell. ‘This person is a creature of Thomas Cale’s. You’ve a lawful warrant, of course?’

Kleist took out a piece of paper and a lead pencil – these days he was always having to write things down – wrote ‘You’re under arrest’ and signed it. He was about to hand it to her but stopped. ‘There should be a charge.’ He thought for a moment and wrote ‘For tax evasion’.

‘What about my escort? What will happen to them?’

‘They’ll be disarmed and come with us. We’ll let them go in a couple of days.’

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘It’s a surprise. But don’t worry, you’ll find it interesting. You might learn something. Tell your people not to do anything stupid. Five minutes and we’re on our way.’

A coincidence is a peculiar thing. We all know that every time we happen on someone we know in an unexpected place there must have been a hundred such meetings in our lives that never quite came about – that long-lost love was eighty feet away instead of five; or they were five feet away but we happened to be looking in the opposite direction. And so on. Each coincidence implies hundreds of near-coincidences almost happening but not quite. There’s something unpleasing about the loss of all those chances for something wonderful that might have changed our lives but for a few feet or an undistracted glance.

Kleist’s near wonderful event that day was that his wife Daisy and their child were in Arbell’s column, where they would now have to stay for at least three days. It wasn’t, though, altogether an amazing chance that she was there. Daisy had recently been dismissed as kitchen char to a merchant family for stealing vegetables – not one or two carrots and the odd potato, but sacks of the things. Once she’d left they discovered that her larceny extended to small but valuable items of jewellery. As a result the Hermandad came looking for Daisy and she realized it was time to be gone. The problem was that she had no useful skills – she was a useless charwoman – and she had a baby and no one was leaving Spanish Leeds; with the front line of the war moving ever westward they were only coming back. After several anxious days, unwilling to risk the Hermandads on the city gates, she had been forced to bribe the cook in Arbell’s train to take her on as a washerwoman for no pay. This at least got them out of the city and once she was out it made sense to stay with the protection of the column. There were entirely untrue rumours of Redeemer fifth columns. Fed up with hard work for no pay she had been planning to disappear from Arbell’s entourage in the middle of the night along with whatever was valuable she could lay her hands on, but the arrival of the New Model Army had put an end to that. It was now too dangerous to run for it. It might be thought inevitable that in a column of only two hundred-odd people, most of them soldiers, that a meeting with what she thought was her dead husband was bound to take place. But she made a point of staying out of sight (just in case) and even when she was obliged to come out of the washing wagon it was placed at the end of the line so that no one had to look at the more menial servants going about their manky tasks. Lay down your bet, then, for the great game always playing behind our backs – for Daisy a life of grim uncertainty, for Kleist a solitary death. Roll the dice, spin the wheel, shuffle the pack. Play.

Kleist had spent the first day riding at the front, quite comfortably numb, the weather warm, the constantly changing scenery a narcotic to his cancerous distress. Despair with its fifty shades of grey can give the soul wounded days like this. He only went back down the line once, when Arbell was finishing her evening meal. He missed Daisy clearing up the dirty plates by nearly two minutes.

The next day there was a shout to halt and he rode back down the line to see what was causing the delay – a broken spoke on an ancient wagon wheel. Daisy had been sent to bring up water to the nobs and she arrived just as Kleist, seeing he would just have to wait until the wheel was fixed, turned back to the front. She caught a brief but clear enough sight of him. But he had changed; he was gaunt where he had once been jaunty and vigorous in his own cool way. And of course he was long dead in the gullies and barancas of the Quantock Hills. How could he be this big kahuna on a horse with the power to make even the aristos shut up for once?

On the third and last day Arbell’s followers were told they could clear off. Kleist, after a bad night, went down the column to check that no one was hanging on to Arbell who might be a nuisance. She was attempting to take five of her entourage with her, including two men who were clearly used to handling themselves.

‘You can have two maids. That’ll be enough.’

‘And who’s to protect me?’

‘Oh, we’ll do that, Your Highness. You’re as safe as Memphis with us.’

‘You think that’s funny?’

‘Not really – but it’s hot and it’s the best I can do at the moment. Two maids.’

‘Three.’

‘How about one?’

To make the point that this was the end of the conversation he turned his horse away and stepped it down the line as if he wanted to check that his orders were being carried out. Daisy was about fifty feet away, sideways on and bending down to pick up their daughter, who kept trying to run away under the wheels of the turning wagons. This time he saw her face clearly enough, but a year can be a long time for someone her age and she had filled out, no longer a lanky girl but a young woman. Something in the way she moved stirred now unpleasant memories and had she laughed rather than just smiled to herself at the little girl’s desperate efforts to get free of her protective embrace he would have recognized the sound anywhere. And then she had the child firmly embedded on her hip as it reached out with pudgy hands to pull Daisy’s now much longer hair and she moved on past a covered wagon and out of sight. There was no numbness now but a terrible surge of loss and grief. He wanted to get away and spurred the horse back towards the front of the column and signalled the horsemaster to move the convoy on.

It was the moment of the final entry for Kleist into the black place where the doors are shut and the windows are barred. Except for one thing. As he rode ever farther away from the millions of joys he had so nearly stumbled upon, he could not entirely forget the image of the young woman which had given him such dreadful pain: the easy to dismiss familiarity of the way she moved. It made sense to get away from the cause of such agony. Going back to look at her would only make things worse.

But all the same he turned around. Then he stopped. It was foolish. Pointless. Ridiculous. He turned around again and rode away from the woman for several minutes, making it impossible to go back to wound himself further for no reason. Too far now. Then some pointless hope of something, of at least seeing an echo of everything he’d lost, made him turn again. He wanted to rush and not rush. But a certain composure returned to him, a sense that he was headed for a last, thin ghost of a reminder of her presence. You could not call it hope, because she was dead, but it was movement away from the black room. Impatient, he drove on, now he had made the decision, anxious to see it through. Look at her, get it out of your system and stop this idiocy. He raced past the end of his own column and then towards the meandering remainder of Arbell’s former followers. As he arrived they looked at him warily – what new thunder here? He ignored them and slowly began to search among the untidy line. Then he saw her just ahead. With hips that Daisy had never had, he almost said nothing – she was not even a distant simulacrum of the girl he’d lost. Something terrible collapsed in his heart. He turned the horse away at the pointlessness – but the horse, having been pulled about more than it thought fit, jibbed at another clumsy pull and snorted in irritation. Daisy looked round at the unexpected intensity of the sound, wary of harm to the little girl. Kleist stared at her. Still ignorant, she stared back, leery of the peculiar-looking young man, then alarmed as she saw his already pale face go white. He let out a dreadful cry as if he were dying.

Then it came to her. She drew in a breath as deep as if it had to last for the rest of her life. He was off his horse and tried to get to her so quickly he slipped and fell in the mud, then up and slipped again, utterly ridiculous. ‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ he shouted, then grabbed her and the child in a mad embrace. But she couldn’t speak, she could only stare. Watched by the astonished onlookers, they knelt in the mud, unable to weep, and simply groaned. The toddler found a new toy in playing with her father’s hair, casually accepting of the joyous agony wrapping her in its arms. ‘Honour!’ shouted the baby – although it could not have been what she really said, that was what it sounded like to the watching servants. ‘Honour! Honour!’

Imagine then the jumbled brew of mixed and bruised emotions that arrived at the siege camp in front of the Sanctuary a few days later, the traumatized joy of Kleist and Daisy and the seething fear and anger of Arbell Materazzi.

Cale had already prepared a fenced-off compound for Arbell, well-guarded and away from the nosy in the walled tent city that had grown up near the walls of the Sanctuary. He’d considered carefully whether to wallow in the pettiness of ensuring the compound was as uncomfortable as possible or to show Arbell that he was somebody to be reckoned with through his ability to provide luxury even in a shithole like the scrubland in front of the Sanctuary. Fortunately for Arbell, he chose the latter. He was also regretting in a half-baked way his decision to bring her here at all – it’s not given to many people to do whatever they want and he was discovering another facet of such immense clout: absolute power tends to confuse absolutely.

Arbell and her two maids were met by her new guards several miles from the camp and removed to her comfortable prison so that no one would see her. Kleist barely noticed; he could barely contain himself as he took his wife and child to see Cale and Vague Henri.

As soon as he came into their command post, where they were failing to come up with a solution to the impregnability of the Sanctuary, they could see a miraculous change in his manner, not just because he was happy where he’d been for so long miserable, but that he had about him an intensity that made him seem almost mad. With him came the wide-eyed Daisy, holding her baby on her hip. In garbled bursts of rapturous speech the story flowed out of him, disjointed and hard to follow. But the basics were clear enough: this was the wife and child come back from the dead. For the three of them one thing united them – astonishment that life could ever be so madly kind. They were beside themselves; surprised, no, shocked by joy. They hugged Daisy, hugged the baby, then hugged Daisy again and demanded a repeat of the whole story, full of questions about where she’d been and who with. And though she was mortified when Kleist told them why she’d been on the run from Leeds, they were delighted, particularly Vague Henri, whose loathing of the ruling class of the city had only increased with his absence. They ordered food and drink and gave her an official pardon for all crimes in the past, and, as they were so happy, in the future as well. And then Daisy noticed that Kleist had gone completely white. As she reached for him he fell off his chair, hit his head – an appalling blow on the leg of the table – and threw up. The quacks were called and he was taken up carefully by the guards and put in Cale’s luxurious wagon.

‘He’s just overwrought,’ said the doctor. ‘Not surprising, really – I’d have a stroke if it had happened to me. He just needs some peace and quiet with his wife and child. He’ll be all right.’

‘I’ll leave my steward with you,’ said Cale to Daisy. ‘Anything at all you want, just tell him. We’ll come back later.’

‘Make it tomorrow,’ interrupted the doctor.

‘… we’ll come back tomorrow. Anything at all.’

They went back to the command centre and had several drinks and a smoke.

‘He has a baby. Amazing,’ said Vague Henri.

‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’

‘Yeah. It all got a bit too much, that’s all.’

But he was not all right. Certainly he recovered in a manner of speaking, but he was shook, as the Irish say. And over the next few days he remained shook, always a slight trembling and the stance of someone who’d just taken a blow, an overwhelmed look, a dazed look. During a brief visit the next day the two of them, puzzled because it didn’t seem to make sense that he might be worse, began to realize that they might be wrong: their experience of suffering in their lives (brutality, death, violence) might have been unusually intense but it was not necessarily broad. On the way to talk to the doctor, the other unfortunate subject surrounding Kleist’s return involved them in a bitter discussion: Vague Henri, until Kleist mentioned it in passing, had no idea that he’d come to the Sanctuary dragging Arbell Materazzi with him.

‘You’re a bloody idiot.’

‘Yes.’

‘And now?’

Cale didn’t say anything.

‘This could stir up a lot of those snakes you’re always going on about.’

‘I don’t think so. Nobody loves us – but nobody loves her either. The Materazzi are nothing – just a nuisance.’

They walked on in silence for a while.

‘What does IdrisPukke say about it?’

‘IdrisPukke doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to know.’

‘And you’re sure of this because …?’

‘He told me.’

‘So what are you going to do with her?’

‘Let her poach delicately in her own juices.’

In fact, he discovered that keeping Arbell interned nearby but not having to see her gave him a certain ease. He had control of a kind he’d lost: he knew exactly where she was. That was something else about power he’d noticed, something good this time: it was like drinking – it made the world glow. At dinner with Vague Henri that night he was unusually silent. After half an hour without speaking he looked at Vague Henri and asked casually, ‘Do you think I’m mad?’

‘Yes,’ said Vague Henri. But it was an odd question oddly asked and he was spooked.

With every day that the Axis stood outside the Sanctuary gawping at the walls Cale’s power was slipping away. Increasingly, the only option was to disperse the army, leaving a rump to keep the Redeemers from getting out. But then all the Redeemers had to do was wait for the forces in the west to counter-attack and lift the siege the following year, or even the next. Then it could be resupplied and used as a base to move against the Axis. The Hanse were already complaining about the cost of their mostly Hessian mercenaries, the Laconics couldn’t be trusted and now new religious squabbles had broken out on all sides. Cale knew that the Redeemers had the resources to regroup and that Bosco would be putting all his energy into buying the means to copy Hooke’s handguns. If he succeeded, Cale’s greatest advantage would be lost. To make things worse, the poisonous but incomprehensible religious differences that had caused the ten churches of Switzerland to split from one another were re-emerging now that the threat from the Redeemers was fading. Preventing these religious schisms from infecting the unity of the New Model Army was an increasing headache. Cale needed to kill the war quickly and that meant taking the Sanctuary. But the Sanctuary didn’t want to be taken.

He was sure there must be a way because there was always a way. Under Bosco’s brutal discipline he’d been forced to stand for hours in front of maps and a flat board littered with bits of wood to signify troops and towns and rivers and impossible odds and made to work a way out of intractable problems. If he didn’t, he took a beating. If he took too long he took a beating. Sometimes he even took a beating when he got it right. ‘To teach you the most important lesson of all,’ said Bosco. When he asked what it was, Bosco beat him again. ‘Perhaps if I hit you a couple of times?’ offered Vague Henri. Cale decided instead that they should walk around the problem. These days his safety meant having people around him all the time, something he hated, so taking a hefty guard with them they went for a ride around the walls of the Sanctuary, making sure to stay well back. He’d stop and look, stop and look. There was a solution. There was always a solution. He found it in the Little Brother.

‘Now you point it out,’ said Vague Henri, ‘it’s obvious.’ And it was. It was so obvious that it was clear the Sanctuary must fall. Nothing could stop it. In two months they’d be inside the walls.

The next day he gathered the considerable number of interested parties, their mutual hostility growing ever more irksome, and took them through his plan. First, not with any great skill, he drew the outline of the flat-topped mountain on which the Sanctuary was built. His drawing didn’t have to be up to much for the assembly to recognize what it was: its shape haunted their dreams.

‘Something’s missing’ said Cale. ‘Any offers?’

‘The Sanctuary.’

‘Yes. But not that. Something else.’

Silence. Cale went back to the drawing and added an outcrop of rock about fifty feet higher than the table-top mountain and with a slope on its far side, but with a gap of about eighty yards between the outcrop and the mountain proper. ‘This ridge is called the Little Brother. This gap between it and the walls of the Sanctuary – we’re going to fill it in.’ He drew a line between the two, ending at the very top of the Sanctuary wall.

Do rooms gasp? This one did. As Vague Henri had said, once it was pointed out it was obvious.

‘The gap’s enormous. It’ll take years,’ said someone.

‘It’ll take a month,’ said Cale. ‘I’ve had Mr Hooke do the calculations.’

‘That would be the Mr Hooke who killed eight of my men with his exploding pile of crap?’

‘Without Hooke,’ said Cale, ‘most of the people in this room would be rotting quietly in the Mississippi mud. So shut your gob.’ He then went into detail about Hooke’s calculation – the volume of barrows of earth and the number of men they had to deliver them.

‘Their archers’ll pick us off by the hundred.’

‘We’ll build defensive roofs for them to work under.’

‘They’ll be heaving rocks over the walls too – they’ll have to be bloody strong roofs.’

‘If you’re telling me soldiers will die, yes, they will. But we can work from the top of the Little Brother as well if we need to. In the end it’s just filling a hole. When it’s done, they’re finished.’

Later Ormsby-Gore and Fanshawe discussed the day’s events.

‘My men are soldiers, not bloody navvies.’

‘Don’t be such a bore, darling,’ said Fanshawe. ‘I feel as if all my birthdays have come together. He really is a clever old thing. Pity he’s got to go.’

The trouble with nay-saying doom-mongers is that they’re bound to be right eventually. No matter what great enterprise you set out on, things will always go wrong. So it was with the attempt to fill in the gap between the Little Brother and the Sanctuary. The predicted rain of arrows could be protected against with covered walkways but these could be easily smashed with rocks that were much heavier than expected because the Redeemers, once they saw what was intended, had come up with a sling device, based on the trebuchet, that could heave rocks weighing several tons two hundred feet from the walls. Nothing the Axis could build would sustain that kind of weight falling from such a height. No one, of course, was foolish enough to say ‘I told you so’ to Cale’s face but if words were fog it would have been difficult to find your way around the camp.

The problem was solved in a few days and merely involved more effort. Barrels of rocks and stones were hauled to the top of the Little Brother and heaved over the edge. It was a sweaty, arm-bending, sinew-stretching curse but it worked. By the time Hooke devised a rail on which wagons could be pulled up the hill using counterweights it didn’t even speed them up much. Day by day, day by day, the gap was filled. Even if it was slow, every member of the fractious Axis could see progress and also the inevitable result of where that progress was leading. The promise of success brought harmony of a sort. The Swiss became more patient and put their plans for impeachment and a quick evacuation back until after the Sanctuary had fallen. Even the Laconics started pretending to treat their allies as equals: Fanshawe wanted the Sanctuary taken and with it the opportunity to paste Cale with no questions asked.

Every night Cale would walk over to the compound where he was keeping Arbell. At times the temptation to go in was almost unbearable but his dreams about her kept him out. They took place in any number of different places he didn’t recognize (Why? he thought. Why not places that I know?) but it was always him hanging about, skulking like the lunatic draper in the mad ward at the Priory, who’d been left standing at the altar by the woman he adored and who spent the days weeping and asking everyone if they’d seen her. But the one constant in Cale’s dreams was the look on her face when, heart full of dreadful hope, he walked up to her. The look she gave him was bad enough in his dreams without seeing it in reality. So he watched the warm light inside the tent and the shadows lengthening and contracting as she moved about – though he knew it might just be the maids seeing to the boy or combing her hair. He tried to stop himself going to watch, of course, and sometimes succeeded but pathetically rarely.

He had become very used indeed to the comfort and solitude of his comfortable wagon, now occupied by Kleist and his family, and to replace it had put several dozen expert carpenters and former upholsterers turned soldiers, who would have been better employed on the siege, to create something even more sumptuous.

Kleist was a cause for worry. He was at once happy beyond words at the return to life of his wife and child and also shattered by the cruelties that preceded it. The sway of the one could not affect the weight of the other.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

The doctor shrugged, as if to indicate that it was obvious. ‘He was brought up in this awful place.’

‘So were the two of us,’ said Vague Henri.

‘Give it time,’ said the doctor. There was a difficult silence. ‘I’m sorry, I misspoke. I didn’t mean … um … to be unduly alarmist.’ But he very nearly did mean it, he just didn’t mean to express himself so bluntly. ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’ was his philosophy; if you bent a sapling out of shape while it was young it was obvious it would grow up even more deformed. Pleased as he was with his woody metaphors he was wise enough to prune this one back. ‘What I was … driving at was that obviously people are affected by their past but it’s just as important to recognize that even the same physical diseases affect different people differently – so how much more so with mental diseases.’ The two boys just stared at him. ‘I mean, even the strongest people mentally can only take so many shocks – Mr Kleist had the shock of being brought up in this place, then the delightful shock, but still a shock, of falling in love and marrying and becoming a father. Then the shock of discovering them murdered and burnt to ashes. Then the torture you told me about and being taken to the edge of death itself in the most painful and revolting way.’

‘But now he has them back,’ said Vague Henri, desperate for Kleist to be well.

‘But it was just another shock – do you see?’

‘No, I don’t see,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I was brought up here as well. I was in the cells with him at Kitty the Hare’s place. All right, I didn’t lose a wife and child but …’ But what? He couldn’t think of an objection – look at what had happened, even to Cale.

The doctor was going to suggest that Vague Henri tried in future to live a more tranquil life, just in case; but he had the sense to keep it to himself this time.

‘What should we do about Kleist?’ asked Cale.

‘He needs calm. Get him away from here for one thing and to somewhere free from any strain or disharmony.’

Cale smiled. ‘If I knew somewhere like that, I’d go myself.’

‘That would probably be a good idea,’ said the doctor, unable to help himself.

‘That shit-bag Bose Ikard and his pals are out to get us,’ said Cale to Kleist and Daisy. ‘It’s time that some of us weren’t here.’

Neither of them, wary, said anything.

‘People are always out to get you, aren’t they?’ said Daisy.

‘Oh, indeed they are, Mrs Kleist. But the Swiss are sitting on all our money. We want Kleist to take as much as he can carry and put it beyond reach – set up somewhere we can retire to when the balloon goes up.’ The balloon, or balon, was a red flag used by the Redeemers to signal that an attack was imminent.

‘Where?’ said Kleist.

‘We were thinking somewhere over the sea. The Hanse is pretty welcoming to the wealthy. And Riba owes us.’

‘Does she know that?’ asked Daisy. ‘My husband told me when you were in the desert he suggested you should leave her there.’

‘She’s right, he did,’ said Vague Henri.

‘But we never told her that,’ said Cale. ‘Besides, Riba was the cause of everything. She knows she let us down about Kitty so this is her chance to make it up.’

‘Why not send Vague Henri?’ said Kleist. ‘She won’t mind helping him.’

‘I’ve got to stay here.’

‘Yes?’ said Kleist. ‘Why?’

There wasn’t the slightest hesitation.

‘The night before we make the assault on the Sanctuary I’m going to go in heavy-handed to take the quarters where the girls are being held. So you’re really the only person who can do it. Besides, you’re the only one of us with a wife and family.’

So it was settled. Kleist would return to Spanish Leeds and with Cadbury’s help – Cadbury was very keen also to get some of his money out of harm’s way – he’d get out of Switzerland with all their money and as much as they could sell off in the meantime.

‘You were a bit harsh on Riba,’ said Vague Henri, when Kleist and Daisy had left.

‘I’ll squeeze Riba dry if I have to – and it still wouldn’t be enough.’

There was a bad-tempered silence. It was Cale who decided to make things up. ‘That was pretty quick thinking when he asked why you weren’t going.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘What?’

‘No, it wasn’t quick thinking,’ said Vague Henri. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid. He probably killed them months ago, years even.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Based on?’

‘Based on I don’t think so.’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean?’

No isn’t clear enough?’

‘I’m not asking your permission.’

‘Look, I may have gone along with some half-wit notion of yours that we’re equals – nobody else thinks that. You’ll do as you’re bloody well told.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Yes, you will.’

‘No, I won’t.’

This bickering went on for some time. There were threats from Cale to have him arrested until the siege was over and invitations from Vague Henri to shove his threats up his arse. But what broke the deadlock was an appeal to Cale’s heart, peculiar object that it was.

‘Annunziata, the girl I told you about – I love her.’ This was not true. He cared deeply about her, more than the other girls although he cared deeply about them too. Why the desire to save them was so intense he could not say. But there it was. He had better insight into Cale’s soul than his own. Everyone has a sentimental spot for something, even, or especially, the wicked. It was said that Alois Huttler found it hard not to weep when he saw a puppy and that he kept a painting in his bedroom of a little girl feeding a lamb milk through a horn. At any rate, Cale could hardly deny the power of love, given its hold on his own soul. It was, after all, the source of much of his self-pity that he had risked his life so madly to save Arbell.

Two days later Kleist and Daisy were lined up in their heavily guarded train, with Cale and Vague Henri there to see them off.

‘What’s to stop me lepping off with the money?’ said Kleist, hands shaking like an old man.

‘Because,’ said Cale, ‘you can trust us.’

‘Trust you?’ said Kleist, ‘Oh, right. Trust you.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Daisy. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Tell you later.’

‘I’ve written to Riba,’ said Vague Henri. ‘She’ll be all right.’

‘And if she isn’t?’

‘Mrs Kleist seems to have her head screwed on. You’ve got money – you’ll work something out.’

‘Thanks,’ said Kleist, and seemed to mean something particular by it, but Cale wasn’t sure what.

He shrugged, awkward.

Holding the little girl, Daisy kissed both of them on the cheek but said nothing. Then Cale and Vague Henri watched them leave, a strangely desolate experience for them both.










36

Over the next two weeks the man-made ridge from the Little Brother loomed towards the top of the Sanctuary walls while Vague Henri practised climbing in the dark with his hundred volunteers. One man died on the first night, screaming as he fell, a noisy accident that would have had the lot of them killed if it had been the real thing. A climb of this type would only be possible with the right kind of half-moon – if they could see too easily then they could be seen too easily. Luckily the right phase was expected at the same time as completion of the ramp. It was decided to climb in small groups of ten further around the side of the Sanctuary where the climbers would be mostly obscured from any watching guards. They’d collect on the mountain just below the walls and then move up as it became dark; one of Artemisia’s alpine climbers could take a line to the top and pull up a rope ladder designed by Hooke.

‘It’s the stupidest bloody thing I’ve ever seen,’ said Cale.

‘Mind your own beeswax,’ replied Vague Henri.

As the ramp came closer the builders became more vulnerable once again to the arrows, bolts, rocks and boulders thrown at them by the Redeemers – an assault as hideous as it was desperate. They slowed the progress but it was not enough, as the Redeemers must have known. Then, twenty feet from the walls, construction stopped. To complete it would have allowed the Redeemers to attack across it themselves. Hooke had provided a wooden bridge affair, covered in on the roof and at the sides and about forty feet long. When Cale decided to attack, the bridge would be pushed along the ramp to close the gap, like a plank going over a river. It was wide enough to take eight soldiers shoulder to shoulder. Hooke had also provided an unpleasant way of clearing away anyone in front of the bridge, a variation on Greek fire. He had built several great pumps to spray a large area in front of the emerging soldiers, which would cover every Redeemer within fifty yards in a liquid fire.

‘God forgive me,’ said Hooke.

‘Just remember they’d happily do the same to you – they would’ve done it already if I hadn’t saved your skin.’

‘That’s supposed to make me feel better, that I’m no worse than they are?’

‘Suit yourself. I don’t really care.’

The last few days before the attack over the ridge passed at a feverish speed, an unpleasant sensation for Cale and Vague Henri, as if they were rushing towards something out of their control. Now that it was coming, what they were doing seemed unbelievable to them. They were going back to the place they hated most in all the world and yet which had made them; and they were going to clean it out. Two days away and they were pin-eyed with agitation – but also self-possessed and still.

IdrisPukke, who had returned to witness the taking of the Sanctuary, was made uneasy by the two boys, though tense enough himself. ‘They were like the old adage,’ he said later to Vipond. ‘Those houses that are haunted are most still – till the devil be up.’

If there’d been any moisture in the air you would have said there was a storm coming. At night the grasshoppers stopped their usual throbbing racket. There seemed to be fewer sand-flies trying to get at the moisture in the soldiers’ mouths.

People with the luxury of living quiet lives look down on melodrama, on sensational action, on exaggerated events intended to appeal to coarser emotions than their own. The life they lead, they think, is real: the day-to-day ordinary is how things truly are. But it’s plain to anyone with any sense that for most of us, life, if it’s like anything at all, is like a pantomime where the blood and suffering is real, an opera where the singers sing out of tune, wailing about pain and love and death while the audience throw stones instead of rotten fruit. Delicacy and subtlety are the fantastical great escape.

It was late afternoon when Vague Henri came to see Cale before he started the climb up to the Sanctuary walls.

‘Can’t believe,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to break back into that shithole.’ Cale looked at him.

‘I wanted to run your funeral arrangements by you.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘I thought we’d wrap you up in a dog blanket and dump you out of the crapper in the West Wall. If I can get a band together we’ll play “I’ve Got a Luverly Bunch of Coconuts”. You’ll like that.’

‘You’re not,’ said Vague Henri, ‘a very nice person.’

‘I’m telling you not to go on with this bloody bollocking bollocks, aren’t I? Those girls are dead and if you go up there you’ll be as dead as them.’

‘I’m touched that you care.’

‘I don’t care. Don’t think it. I just feel sorry for you, that’s why I’ve put up with you all this time.’

‘If I don’t go I won’t be able to sleep at night. That’s the honest truth. I’m afraid not to go.’

‘You’ll get used to it. You can get used to anything. And there are worse things than not being able to sleep.’

‘Can’t stop now – it’d look bad.’

‘I’ll have you arrested.’ It wasn’t a threat but a plea.

‘No. Don’t do that. If I found out they were alive I’d hate you.’

Why?

‘I just would.’ Vague Henri smiled. ‘Give us a kiss.’

‘No.’

‘Your hand then.’

‘What if it’s catching, what you’ve got?’

‘Not you. You’ll be all right.’

‘But you won’t.’ He was angry now that he could see persuasion wouldn’t work. ‘You’re still a Redeemer, that’s it.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, you’re not a fucking swine, not you, but you can’t wait to sacrifice yourself for something. It all went into your head, all that camel-shit about …’ He stopped, unable to find the words. ‘You’re just another martyr – and don’t worry I’ve got a martyr’s funeral ready for you – we’ll sing “Faith of Our Fathers” … We will be true to thee ’til death … Remember that bollocks? Do you want it before or after the coconut song?’

‘You have been practising that, haven’t you?’

‘Just go – I can’t be bothered with you any more.’

‘I’ll be all right. I can feel it.’

‘Yes? Fine. Go away.’

‘I think you’d come with me if you could.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘You say it because you have to say it, being you.’

‘That isn’t it. All things being equal, and if it didn’t involve a terrible risk to my own life, then yes, I’d help you. I like to see good deeds done, I do, but your price is too high. I can see I’m a disappointment to you – but the honest truth is that I’d rather live than see justice done.’

Vague Henri shrugged and went off to climb back into the Sanctuary.

Cale had felt exhausted before Vague Henri came to say whatever it was he’d come to say. Now he felt as if he’d been wrung out. After he’d taken the Phedra and Morphine to deal with Kitty the Hare he took Sister Wray’s advice not to use it much more seriously. He felt sometimes as if he was so weak that he might just stop breathing. When they were younger, Vague Henri had heard from one of the Redeemers that a sudden loud noise could kill a locust. They tried, dozens of times, but it never worked. Now he felt as if a sudden loud noise could see him off quite easily. All the more reason, then, to stay away from the Phedra and Morphine. But he knew he couldn’t get through the next twenty-four hours without it. Just once more, he thought. Wipe the Sanctuary clean and then off to the Hanse with all the swag and then it’s cucumber sandwiches and cake for ever and ever.

He had a couple of hours’ sleep, though his guard had to wake him, and then took exactly the dose of the drug that Sister Wray had instructed. By now he realized she hadn’t been exaggerating about its poisons building up – every week now, sometimes for half an hour at a time, he had the sense that someone was frying something in his head.

Half an hour later he was standing on top of the Little Brother as Hooke finished preparing his huge wooden tunnel for its final move onto the walls of the Sanctuary. The peak of the Little Brother had been built up by forty feet, so that the tunnel could be pushed downhill to the gap between the infill and the walls that the tunnel would bridge, allowing New Model Army troops to spread out quickly and in large numbers. There was no hiding the plan from the Redeemers so no guesswork was needed to see that they would do everything to stop the attack where it began. Establishing that bridgehead was going to be a murderous business. It was the attackers’ only weak point – something that wouldn’t be lost on Bosco.

The assault began as soon as it became light in order to give them all the daylight possible. Cale expected a disaster of some kind but, though there were a thousand decisions to be made, there were no earthquakes or sudden plagues, no mysterious parhelions to disturb the superstitious. There was only mounting dread at what was coming.

At just before five, Hooke came to tell him they were ready. Cale walked up the last few feet to the top of the Little Brother and looked across to the Sanctuary. His heart beat faster, his head felt as if it were bursting as he looked out over his former home, seeing the still shadowy places where he had spent so many thousands of days in fear and dread and misery. So much cold, so much hunger, so much loneliness. He stared for a long time. Such a shattering moment called for a great shout. But something caught his eye inside the Sanctuary, to the right. It was the quarter where the girls were kept. From its furthest edge a spidery line of smoke wafted gently into the air. He gave the slightest of nods to Hooke and it began.

‘Ready!’ called out one of the centenars.

‘Set!’

‘Go!’ A huge cry of HEAVE! went up. The enormous structure shook but didn’t move. HEAVE! Again it shook but again nothing. HEAVE! This time it shifted a few inches. HEAVE! Now a foot. HEAVE! Now two. Now properly onto the reinforced slope the tunnel went with the pull of the earth. But the worry was about stability not speed. Men rushed back and forth between the front and sides of the tunnel, calling to each other and to Hooke, looking for the rubble to give way and let the tunnel dig in or some other disaster they hadn’t thought of. A couple of times they had to stop and levers, thirty-foot long and by the dozen, were brought to lift the structure where it had cut into the still loose soil. But there was no attack from the walls. Cale would have been pouring everything he could onto the heads of the attackers. And all the time, one after the other, fires were started along the edges of the ghetto where the girls were kept.

‘Where are the Redeemers?’ asked Fanshawe as they headed into the hut where they kept the maps of the Sanctuary. Inside were half a dozen officers from the New Model Army and three Laconics, led by Ormsby-Gore. IdrisPukke was also there.

‘I don’t know, but they won’t be doing anything pleasant, I’m sure of that.’ He decided to change his plan. ‘I want five hundred of your men to go in right after the first rush.’

Fanshawe looked over at Ormsby-Gore. ‘All right with you?’

‘That isn’t what was agreed,’ said Ormsby-Gore.

In a formal sense there were no soldiers less cowardly than the Laconics. But in practical terms it was as if they were rather chinless. The problem was that it took so much effort and time and money to engineer one of these hideous killing machines, and there were so few of them, that though they were happy to die, they weren’t all that willing to fight. Each one of these monsters was as valuable as a rare vase.

Cale, made even more bad-tempered than usual by the drugs and what might be happening to Vague Henri, looked Ormsby-Gore directly in the eyes, not a wise thing to do under the best of circumstances. ‘There are no agreements here,’ said Cale. ‘You do as I say or else I’ll cut your bloody head off and kick it down the mountain.’

There are people you can say this kind of thing to and people you can’t. Laconics in general, and Ormsby-Gore in particular, belonged to the category of people you can’t. The last syllable of the last word was barely out of Cale’s mouth when Ormsby-Gore, exalted among an already exalted society of homicidal freaks of nature, pulled a knife and stabbed Cale in the heart.










37

Or would have done if it had been anyone other than Thomas Cale who was made wildly hyperactive by a drug that had a fair chance of killing him at some time in the next twenty-four hours. The speed and power of the blow was Ormsby-Gore’s undoing. Missing his chest by a fraction, Cale spun his attacker round, pulled him in close and had his own knife at his throat. The onlookers might have been astonished by the speed of what had just happened but what held them in absolute silence was the barking mad expression in the boy’s eyes.

Even IdrisPukke remained silent, fearing that any movement or sound would set Cale off. From outside there was silence for the first time in hours. How long a second is when life or death is in the room. Then came an enormous SNAP! from outside, followed by a crash and the cry of a furious engineer.

‘The fucking fuckers fucking fucked!’

No one in the tent said anything and no one moved. Except Cale. Unable to contain himself at the heart-rending exasperation of the engineer he started laughing – not the mad hysterical giggle of the frenzied lunatic but the ordinary laughter of someone struck by the absurdity of what was happening. Fanshawe took his chance.

‘I’m just going to take away Ormsby-Gore’s knife,’ he said softly, holding up both of his hands. ‘You understand that, my dear fellow, don’t you?’ Ormsby-Gore stared at Fanshawe in a manner that indicated he did not understand in any way whatsoever. The trouble with people who are not afraid of death, thought Fanshawe, is that they’re not afraid of death. So he must find something else.

‘The thing is, darling’ he said, ‘if you don’t drop the knife I will, with Thomas Cale’s permission, take out my own and then I’ll cut your bloody head off and kick it down the mountain myself.’

For Ormsby-Gore this was quite a different matter: to be executed on the field of battle for disobeying an order would mean unforgivable disgrace and unending infamy for him and his family. He dropped the knife almost as quickly as he’d drawn it.

‘May I?’ asked Fanshawe, taking both Ormsby-Gore’s hands in his own to reassure Cale that he had him under control. Cale let him go and Fanshawe eased Ormsby-Gore to a steady position, moved him outside and quietly had him arrested and taken away by four of his own men. He went back into the tent.

‘Might I suggest that he be dealt with in whatever way you choose after the Sanctuary has fallen? It would be a pity to distract the troops, don’t you think?’ Fanshawe didn’t like to think how the Laconic soldiers or the Ephors at home would react to the execution of Ormsby-Gore but he cheerfully expected that Cale would be dead before it became an issue.

Cale didn’t say anything, giving barely a nod to signal his agreement, then went outside to find out what had caused the snapping sound and the engineer’s lament. A large container full of gelatinous Greek fire had been brought up to be loaded into the tunnel for the final push to the Sanctuary walls. It was volatile stuff and didn’t take to too much shaking about. Unfortunately it had fallen off a rail on the top of the embankment. They had tried to ease the container back onto the rail using an oak lever. The snap was the sound of the lever breaking. The container rolling down the hill and smashing against a pile of rocks was what occasioned the heartbroken oath from the engineer.

Hooke, now used to the difference between a battlefield and a chemical workshop, had already called up a replacement, which needed only a few minutes’ work before it was moving quickly towards the tunnel.

‘Are you well?’ said Idris Pukke, who had followed him out.

‘It won’t happen again,’ Cale replied. ‘Probably. You might want to let people know it might be best not to disagree with me for a few days.’

‘I’m not sure that will be necessary.’

It wasn’t clear Cale had heard.

‘I’ve missed something – I’ve missed something important.’

‘What do you mean?’ IdrisPukke was alarmed – like everyone else he saw the fall of the Sanctuary as inevitable however costly.

‘Why aren’t they attacking? They should be attacking now. Bosco knows something that I don’t.’

‘Then stop.’

‘No.’

‘Why?’ But it was a question to which IdrisPukke knew the answer. ‘You told Vague Henri not to go. I told him not to go myself, for what it’s worth.’

Cale looked at him. ‘If we don’t go soon they’ll take him prisoner. Do you know what they’ll do to him?’

‘I can guess.’

‘I’m sure you can. But I don’t have to because I’ve seen it. Except this will be worse. They’ll burn him. In minimus via.’

A sergeant interrupted them.

‘Sir, Mr Hooke says the tunnel is ready to load.’

‘Wait a moment, Sergeant.’ He turned back to IdrisPukke. ‘You’re an educated man – know what it means?’

‘It’s not familiar, no.’

‘It means “In the smallest way” – it means they’ll burn him on a pile of sticks not big enough to boil a can of water. I’ve never seen it myself. Bosco told me about it. He said it took twelve hours. So no, I can’t stop.’

‘You don’t know for certain that’s what he’ll do.’

‘I don’t know for certain that Bosco knows something I don’t. Nobody knows anything.’

‘If Vague Henri were here with us, you’d stop.’

‘But he isn’t.’

‘You know that if we don’t take the Sanctuary before winter then they’ll have reinforcements before we can come back. There are members of the Axis already at each other’s throats. The Swiss want your head to bounce down the street. God knows what will happen if you fail here.’

‘Who says I’ll fail?’

‘You do.’

‘I said I don’t know what’s going on.’

‘Then wait.’

‘And if I do? Suppose now is the right time. Suppose if I wait I’ve given them the chance to … I don’t know what … something I haven’t thought of. What if Bosco’s ill and this is my best chance? Nobody knows anything.’

‘You know what you’d do if Henri was here and not there.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you were going to tell people not to argue with me?’

‘I didn’t think I was included.’

‘Well, you’re wrong.’ He called to the sergeant, ‘Give Mr Hooke the signal to load.’

With a few shouts it began.










38

‘I want a favour,’ said Cale.

Fanshawe brought up the five hundred Laconics Cale had asked for and was told they’d be sent in immediately after the first wave of the New Model Army. Not many were expected to survive.

‘A favour? Of course. Probably.’

‘I want a hundred of your men to relieve Vague Henri as soon as it’s clear what’s going on.’

‘That’s a big favour – it’s a hefty risk.’

‘Yes.’

Fanshawe looked down at the map of the Sanctuary and its inner buildings.

‘It’s a bit of a maze there, old boy. Getting lost would be easy and costly. But if you were there to take them in and guide them …’

Cale was fairly sure that Fanshawe had been thinking hard about what he was going to do about him. He didn’t need to think very carefully about the chances of either him or Vague Henri emerging alive from the fog of battle.

‘Unfortunately I’m needed here – but I’ve arranged for three of my Penitents who know the ghetto better than I do to take you to it.’

Fanshawe considered declining, not that he’d expected Cale to be stupid enough to agree, but it would look bad to refuse. If there were to be any questions about who was responsible for Cale’s tragic death at some time during the next twenty-four hours it would do no harm to have demonstrated to the New Model Army that the Laconics had been right behind their leader in a risky enterprise to save his closest friend.

Fanshawe went off to make the arrangements and Cale, collecting IdrisPukke on the way, went back to the summit of the Little Brother and a small tower that had been erected on top to give him as clear a view as was possible. Then it began. The ropes holding up the front of the tunnel were lowered slowly and it transformed into a massive ridge to cover the thirty-foot gap to the top of the Sanctuary walls.

Still there was nothing. There was a pause of a minute or so, a series of indistinguishable shouts and then the hand pumps, manned by twenty soldiers to build the pressure, were primed to bursting for two minutes. More shouts. A pause. Then the pumps were let loose by Hooke and the liquid in the containers burst out of a set of eight barrels like the spray from the world’s greatest fountain. Hooke lit the eight torches underneath and there was an explosive roar like the crack of doom and the spray ignited in a vast arc of flames, covering the walls in front and a hundred yards to either side. For twenty seconds this hideous device deafened everyone behind it – then Hooke, frightened it would explode, turned it off. For a minute longer the liquid burned like the lake of fire at the centre of hell and then, almost as if it had been blown out, it vanished. There was no delay – the New Model Army, lower legs protected against the heat – were through the tunnel and onto the bridge as quickly as they could to take advantage of the devastation before the Redeemers could respond.

‘YOU’LL BE FINE! IT’S ALL GRAVY FROM HERE!’

‘GET YOUR EYES ON! GET YOUR EYES ON!’

‘VALLON TO THE EDGE! VALLON … YESSSS! TO THE EDGE, YOU SHITHEAD!’

‘OVER THERE! OVER THERE! LOOK WHERE YOU’RE FUCKING STEPPING!’

‘MURDER HOLE! MURDER HOLE!’

‘HERE, BUDDY! HERE!’

But there were no bodies horribly burned. There were no survivors of the fire ready to beat them back. The shouts stopped. Then there was nothing but a terrible noiseless solitude on every side. This only raised the horrible tension, the soldier’s terrible fear of the unexpected worst: when and in what way would the blow come? They moved on packed together against the hideous fight to come. ‘SLOWLY! SLOWLY! EYES ON! WATCH FOR IT! WATCH FOR IT!’

Adding to their fear was the black smoke from the Greek fire, which covered everything in front of them in a thick smog. As they moved forward, every ordinary thing assumed the shadowy obscurity of some hideous threat, only to be revealed as a pile of barrels or a holy statue offering blessings to the saved. So a halt was called. Two thousand men, shoulder to shoulder, even the Laconics waiting behind them spooked and shaken at the terrible uncertainty of something hideous to come.

Very slowly – it was an almost windless day – the smoke began to patch and smudge, each clearing spot seeming to reveal a menace that never came. Then a small gust and then a harder one whirled and revolved the smoke into beautiful spins and rolls. The wind blew through clearly and what they saw was the defining vision of the lives most of them expected to lose that day. Everywhere, from every post, every batten in every one of the roofed walkways, from wooden frames driven into the courtyards in their hundreds, everywhere they looked were thousands of Redeemers hanging by the neck.










39

The New Model Army was well used to slaughter by now and the Laconics were, of course, a society given up entirely to its requirements. But this was not death as they knew it and so, despite the fact that what they were seeing meant that they would survive the day and that this multitude of hanged men were their most bitter enemies, a mood of creepy uneasiness settled on them all as they moved slowly through the Sanctuary. Each new prospect, each square, each courtyard, each covered pathway, each prayer garden contained only row after row of the hanging dead. The only sound was of creaking ropes, the only thing moving the slight drift and swing of bodies stirred by the light winds.

Slowly they moved inside the buildings of the Sanctuary; they could not do otherwise. In every corridor, at intervals three foot broad and long, Redeemers hung by their necks from the roof into which single hooks had been set in concrete. In every room. In every office. Every alcove. Every chapel. In the six great churches there must have been a thousand each on a dozen different levels, as silent as the decorations suspended from the tree of mortality on the Day of the Dead. The order came to halt and the Laconics and their Penitent guide headed into the recesses of the Sanctuary, hampered at every step by the bodies they set swinging back and forth as they made their way to the ghetto and Vague Henri.

Against the strongest advice to stay out of the Sanctuary until it had been thoroughly searched (‘It’s obvious, sir, they’ll hide and wait for you to come.’) Cale arrived, wide-eyed with bleak astonishment. They were right but he could not bear to wait and, closely surrounded by Penitents (what were they thinking?), he moved into the old spaces now bizarrely transformed into a priestly abattoir. How oddly his soul reacted to being back again. It was not like returning to a former home because he realized that something about what Sister Wray had said was right: he had been here in the past, he was here now, he would always be here.

The Penitents kept him in an ambulacrum where they’d cleared a space of hanged Redeemers and where he was out of everyone’s line of sight. Within a few minutes they brought him a boy that one of the New Model Army had found hiding in a box.

‘He means a confessional, sir,’ said a Penitent.

‘What are you?’ asked Cale.

‘An acolyte, sir.’

‘So was I. You’re all right, don’t worry. No one’s going to hurt you. What happened here?’

It was understandably garbled stuff but simple enough. Bosco had addressed five hundred of his closest followers and announced that, because of Thomas Cale’s treachery, he had decided to remove the faithful from the earth and never to think of mankind again. As a reward for their fidelity they were to be permitted to join God in eternal bliss by the same means as the Redeemer himself.

‘All of them went along with this?’

‘Not all, sir. But the Pope created a group of counsellors to assist all those who needed spiritual support.’

‘But not you.’

‘I was afraid.’

‘You’ll be safe now.’ Cale turned to one of the staff sergeants of the New Model Army. ‘Get him away from here. Get him some new clothes and get my cook to feed him. Make sure he’s safe. Why, for God’s sake, isn’t there any news about Henri?’ He sent two more of his Penitents. Five minutes later, when he had decided to go himself, dangerous as it was, Fanshawe turned up looking uneasy.

‘What’s up?’ said Cale.

‘I’ve had some news back but it’s the usual mess of stuff.’

‘But you’ve heard something?’

‘You know as well as I do the first news is always horse-shit.’

‘I understand. What is it? Tell me what you’ve heard.’

‘Have it your own way. The news is that your friend is dead. I spoke to someone who said they saw him.’

‘Did they know him? How well?’

‘He’d seen him around and about. Who hasn’t? The place is an inferno apparently – you know what it’s like: nothing makes any sense at first. He’s probably heard the same thing about you.’

Cale called out to his Penitents and was heading to the ghetto when, from an entrance blowing light grey smoke into the courtyard, a figure walked out. Even though the smoke obscured him and his face was black, the way he moved gave him away immediately. Then Vague Henri recognized Cale – and also that he was staring at him in a peculiar way.

‘What?’ he said, defensive.

Cale looked him over for a while.

‘There was a rumour you were dead.’

Taken aback by this, Henri gave the impression he was considering how reliable it was.

‘No,’ he said, at last.

Cale kept looking at him.

‘What happened?’

Vague Henri smiled.

‘Nothing much. We got in real neat. We only took out half a dozen on the way to the girls. Now I can see why.’

‘They didn’t attack?’

‘No.’

‘What about the fires?’

‘We scared the shit out of the nuns. One of them spilt a pan of hot fat – the place went up like a hay-rack – spread under the floorboards and everything. That’s why the fires kept breaking out all over. Got a bit scary.’

‘Are the girls all right?’

‘Fine. All of them.’ He laughed. ‘Bosco put them on half an acolyte’s rations – thin as a hair now.’

‘A hare?’

‘Yeah – on your head.’

‘Oh, I thought you meant, you know, a rabbit kind of hare. Doesn’t make sense, a rabbit, does it?’

‘No.’

‘I wonder why he didn’t kill them?’

‘I suppose,’ said Vague Henri, ‘there’s good in everyone.’

They both smiled. Cale nodded at the bodies hanging all around the courtyard.

‘What do you make of this?’

‘I don’t make anything of it,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘Fucking good fucking riddance.’ Then he laughed; humour certainly but horror also. ‘Didn’t see it coming, though.’

‘Bosco told them this was how they’d get to heaven.’

Vague Henri nodded.

‘Find him yet?’ Cale asked.

‘No. Want to?’

‘One way or the other. He’ll be in his room, maybe.’

‘Not,’ said Vague Henri ‘a good idea to go wandering around without being firm-handed.’

‘I’m impatient. Really, I can’t wait.’

Windsor, the cancer-infected Laconic tasked with killing Thomas Cale that day, was feeling particularly unwell. He was not long for the world one way or the other. He’d seen Cale talking to Vague Henri and tried to get to a high vantage point where he could get a decent shot. He put on a cassock he’d stripped off one of the Redeemers. He’d hoped for a good deal more confusion and days of fighting to give him an opportunity but now everything was static and soldiers were milling about in their thousands, gloomy and depressed by the hanging dead; having been wound up so tight and then it all being over there was nowhere for their horrible mix of feelings to go but inside.

Unfamiliar with the Sanctuary and its twists, Windsor got lost on his way to a walled ledge he’d spotted, and by the time he arrived it was only to see Cale and Vague Henri leaving the square on a reconnoitre which could only be considered seriously ill-advised. Though, of course, if they’d done the wise thing and stayed where they were, Cale would have had only a few seconds to live.

Windsor got rid of the cassock – there were plenty spare where that came from – and headed off in pursuit of the two boys, though not with any great optimism that he’d find them in the vast confusion of the place. On the other hand, there were now Laconics wandering all over the Sanctuary so there would be no problem stalking them. He paused only to vomit, something he now did three times a day.

It was no easy progress for Cale and Vague Henri – although the floors were clear, everything above two feet was packed with hanging priests and their headway was slow and singular as they pushed their way through the packed mass of dangling bodies. Just as he expected, Windsor was quickly lost, but while staring out of a window he noticed that though he couldn’t see the two boys themselves they gave away their trail by the movement of bodies swinging back and forth in their wake. He decided that it would be quicker, even with brief stops to check their progress, to crawl under the priests rather than push through them. The thought had also occurred to Cale and Vague Henri but not only did they find the idea of crawling under their former masters objectionable, the truth was that they were enjoying themselves. The general soldiers might have been cowed by the Redeemers’ grim willingness to embrace death in such a terrible and determined fashion but Cale and Vague Henri were made of sterner stuff – this hideous end struck them as entirely deserved and better than anything they could have thought up for themselves. It was no exaggeration to say that once they’d got over the initial shock they were thrilled by what had happened, an ecstasy of satisfaction that all their pain had been in some measure reimbursed. These deaths were very sweet to both of them, a sweetness that required to be made complete by a confrontation, dead or alive, with Bosco himself.

At one point Windsor came within forty yards of them but the darkness and the maziness of the place defeated him again: he took a wrong turn and crawled off under the vault of pointy feet ever further into the inner snarl of the Sanctuary.

As Cale and Vague Henri came to the end of the largest of the corridors they heard a sound. At first it was hard to make out, stopping and starting – it was a scratching sound and a scrabbling sound like a trapped animal, a small one, trying to escape. It was a desperate sound: scratch and scrape, silence, scratch and scrape. In the increasing darkness and silence it tightened the skin on the back of their skulls. Scratch and scrape, silence, scratch and scrape. Then an odd scuffing fluttery sound. Slowly they moved to the end of the corridor, where it turned right and also opened up into a space the size of a large room. Twitchy, they lowered themselves to the ground and saw what was causing the sound: manic, sandalled feet, flapping and scrabbling at the floor and wretchedly trying to get contact with something solid to support the weight of its body. The knot must have slipped or the rope stretched. As the corner of the corridor turned there was enough space for them to sit back against the wall without the lines of turned down feet in their faces.

‘Getting too dark to see,’ said Vague Henri.

Scrabble, scrabble, scrape.

‘It’s pretty close – just the other side of this latitude here.’

Scrape, scrape, scrabble.

‘That sound – it’s giving me the shrinks.’

‘Then let’s get away from it.’

Keeping close to the stone, they eased along the wall of the Latitude. Scrabble, scrape, scrabble, scrape. Then suddenly a wild and desperate scratching and rasps as the choking man, raging to breathe, lashed out for purchase on the floor.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Vague Henri and pushed through the hanging dead and grabbed the choking Redeemer by the waist to ease his weight and cut him down with his knife.

The dying Redeemer, almost gone, took in a breath of air and regained consciousness – but only of a sort. An overseer of the hanging itself, he had been among the last to hang. The rope had seemed all right but it turned out to be inferior stuff and had stretched to allow the tips of his toes to take enough of his weight to keep him alive for hours. When Vague Henri took him by the waist he was able to breathe and started to wake up from the death nightmare he’d been trying to run away from: a devil was coming for him, bug-eyed and fat with gappy teeth, all pink and white with a slimy, drippy, red erection and laughing madly, like a pig might laugh.

It was not Vague Henri but this horrible demon holding him in his arms – reaching for anything to save himself he pulled out a sharpened pencil he’d been using to count off his list of those he was to hang and, with the strength of the utterly terrified, he stabbed at the creature holding him who cried out and fell away, dropping the Redeemer and finally breaking his neck.

‘Ow! Ow!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Bastard stabbed me.’

Cale started pushing his way through the hanging bodies that mocked him by banging into him and each other. There was a little more space around the now dead Redeemer – when he’d come to hang himself there was room left over. Vague Henri was feeling around under his arm and towards his back.

‘He stabbed me,’ he said, indignant. ‘He stabbed me with a fucking pencil.’

The Redeemer, soul now in everlasting bliss, or not, did indeed have a pencil grasped in his right hand.

‘Lucky that’s all it was. Bloody stupid bloody thing to do.’

‘Shut up – have a look.’

He held up his left arm and turned his back. It took a while to find the hole in the wool – Cale had to cut his way in to get a proper look.

There was indeed a pencil-shaped hole – but not much blood, though it was pumping a bit.

‘What’s it like?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want one – it’ll sting a bit.’

‘It does.’

‘It’s not too bad. Let’s go back, get it seen to.’

‘It’s all right. We’ve come this far. Give me a couple of minutes.’

He took a few deep breaths and then began to recover.

‘How far?’

‘Just down the corridor a bit.’

‘Do you think he’ll still be alive? He might be waiting to take you with him.’

‘He probably won’t even be there.’

‘Bet you a dollar.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘What would be the point?’

‘I feel a bit wobbly,’ said Vague Henri. He looked it, too. Beads of sweat, small ones, had begun to cover his face and he was looking pale. He sat down, using the wall to support his weight. Cale didn’t like the look of him.

‘Let me see the wound again.’

Vague Henri turned to his right. Now it was pumping blood slightly, so not too bad, but there was more than he expected. It must have gone in a bit deeper than he thought. But even as Cale looked the blood stopped flowing. He eased Vague Henri back to rest against the wall but by now he was already dead.










40

IdrisPukke was standing in the main square of the Sanctuary talking to Fanshawe, whose mind was elsewhere, wondering if Windsor had managed to kill Thomas Cale. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice at first that IdrisPukke had stopped talking. Then everyone around them went silent as well. Across the large square Cale was walking slowly towards them, carrying Vague Henri piggyback, as if he were a small child who’d fallen asleep after a too-exciting day. For a moment no one moved, unable to grasp what they were seeing. Were they fooling about? They often did. Cale stopped and then hitched the boy further up his back as if he were about to slip off. Then a dozen men ran towards them and he allowed them to take Vague Henri into their arms. IdrisPukke and Fanshawe walked slowly up to him. Vague Henri was dead – they had too much experience not to recognize the terrible absence.

‘What happened?’ asked IdrisPukke.

Cale didn’t seem to hear. ‘He’s not going back into a room in this place. Get one of the tables out of the refectory over there. They’re big – you’ll need a dozen men.’

It was clear he didn’t want to talk so they stood for five minutes with Cale as he looked around the Sanctuary as if he was trying to remember where he’d left something, with Vague Henri being held carefully in the arms of four of his own people. Then the table, clearly as hefty as Cale had said and some thirty-foot long, was hauled into the middle of the square. Cale took Vague Henri from the men and laid him carefully in the middle and then arranged the body at first with his hands by his side and then folded on his chest. Death had already drawn his top lip back over his front teeth, mocking him with the rabbity smile of the dead. It was with some difficulty that Cale pulled it back into shape. Then his eyelids started to open and Cale couldn’t get them to stay shut. He signalled one of the sergeants to give him a white scarf he was wearing; he folded it several times and then put it over Vague Henri’s eyes like a blindfold. Still no one said anything until one of the soldiers gasped: ‘Good God!’

Everyone looked up except for Cale, who was lost in a world of his own, staring down at his friend. Around him there was silence so intense that it finally pierced the fog of his disbelief that Vague Henri was gone for good. He looked up. At the far end of the square, barefoot, dressed in white linen and with the penitent’s noose around his neck, Pope Bosco XVI was walking towards them with a gentle smile on his face. He was much thinner than when Cale had last seen him and the linen tunic was much too large which, along with the gaping of his mouth as he made the effort to walk, gave his face the look of a chick not quite ready to leave the nest. It took the old man almost a minute to make it over to the group standing next to the huge table and whose eyes moved silently back and forward between Cale and the old man shambling towards them. Cale did not move nor blink but watched Bosco entirely transfixed. It seemed to those watching that the old man and Cale had become the only people who existed in the square. Bosco stopped, still smiling lovingly at the boy.

‘I’ve been waiting patiently for you – to explain everything and to ask your forgiveness for the terrible suffering I caused you.’

Still Cale did not move or say anything. He looked as if he would never speak again.

‘I could not understand how God was speaking to me through all your many victories over us. Waterless and without food I prayed for day after day. I could see but I could not perceive, hear but not understand. Then in his mercy for my stupidity he cut away the skin from my eyes. When you came here as a boy I saw at once what you were but I thought that you needed me to teach you how to wipe away his great mistake. Every night I wept at the pain and suffering I must inflict on you so that you would have the strength of soul and body to do such unspeakable work. All of the things I did to make you strong only built hatred where there should have been love. The death of the world was an act of holy tenderness to mankind and not a punishment – it was to be done as a gift so that he could begin again. I thought you were the incarnation of God’s wrath but you were his love made flesh, not his anger. In my incompetence I maddened you and made you hateful when all I should have done was treat you with the kindness that you were to show the world by helping all its souls into the next life to start again. My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.’

Bosco knelt down in front of Cale.

‘Forgive me, Thomas. God was telling me through all your victories against us that the damage done to your soul had to be undone by the man who caused that damage. I thought that I and my fellow priests would be the last to join God for the great renewal of souls, but now it’s necessary for us to be first, so that you can go about God’s work with a spirit at peace. Only by our poor sacrifice can your soul-hatred be wiped away.’

Bosco, tears of gratitude pouring from his eyes, held out both of his arms and began to pray.

‘Purge me with hyssop, Lord, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Deliver me from my guilt so that the spirit and the heart of Thomas Cale, which I have broken, may rejoice.’

As Bosco prayed, Cale began to look around as if for a key he had absentmindedly misplaced. Everyone else stared at him, horribly thrilled at what was happening. Fanshawe spoke softly to IdrisPukke as Cale walked over to the far end of the table on which Vague Henri’s body was lying and started pulling at a small piece of two by four that had been nailed to the refectory wall and the table to keep it from moving.

‘Think of the information we can get from Bosco,’ said Fanshawe. ‘We need him alive.’

‘I agree. Be my guest.’ Fanshawe did not move.

Cale’s attempt to pull away the block of wood, no more than nine inches long, was unsuccessful, the nails still being in too deep. Then he gave the block an almighty wrench and it came free. As he walked back to Bosco the old man was still praying.

‘With this sacrifice of your priests wipe away all tears from his eyes so that there shall be no more sorrow, nor shall there be any more pain.’

Slowly Cale began to circle behind him – a weighing up of something clearly going on in his mind.

‘Just as the Hanged Redeemer offered his broken neck for our salvation, with the sacrificial chokings of Your Redeemers wipe clean the needless insults to his soul, so that he will be free at last to do his terrible kindness to the world. Free at la – ’

Cale took two steps forward and brought the block of wood down on the top of the old man’s head. But it was not an especially hard blow and it was not an especially heavy piece of wood. Bosco’s head jerked forward slightly, not much, and a thin line of blood dripped down his face. He opened his mouth as if to continue but not a sound emerged. He tried to speak again but immediately there was another blow and again his head jerked forward but again the blow was much less heavy than it could have been. The men watching were not at all strangers to the hideous but already some of them were looking away. Then another blow. Another trickle of blood.

Bosco was waving his head about and his hands had fallen halfway to his sides. He gasped.

‘Into … thy … ha – ’

Another blow stopped his mouth but still he was too strong to fall or the blows deliberately not heavy enough. Then another crack of wood against skull and another. This time he almost fell on his face but something drew him nearly upright again. Another blow and this time a cry from Bosco as half a dozen lines of blood flowed down his shaved skull and covered his face.

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