The Beating of His Wings

‘For God’s sake, Thomas, enough,’ said IdrisPukke. Cale looked directly at him like a fox smelling a slight sniff of something in the wind: Important? Not at all. Then the interruption was entirely dismissed as if it had never happened. He turned to concentrate on Bosco again. He dropped the stained block of wood and then, with great care, took hold of the penitents’ rope around Bosco’s neck and started to sway him gently from side to side, supporting his neck so he would do no harm, the way a mother holds the head of a baby she’s about to bathe.

‘Thomas!’ called out IdrisPukke.

But it was no use: he was somewhere very far beyond the reaches of pity. Cale pulled Bosco up to his face and slapped him with one hand to bring him round. Slowly, Bosco woke up. As he recognized Cale he started to smile lovingly at the boy.

‘I want …’

But what Bosco wanted was cut short in a second as Cale, hyena-souled, whipped the rope upwards and then down with a snap so furious it broke the old man’s neck with a loud crack.

There was a sound from the men around, an intake of breath. Cale pulled Bosco’s face back to his own until they were almost touching, fixing his death in his mind so that he would not forget – then, very carefully, he laid the dead man on the ground and walked away. The witnesses were shaking, every one of them, even Fanshawe. They had all seen hard deaths before, and anger, but nothing like this, not from someone who was still, really, a boy.

41

The fire that had nearly suffocated Vague Henri the day before had still not been put out completely and after a few hours it regained its hold, though only in the ghetto where the girls had been held. Still it was enough to give off an orange glow that lit the undersides of the grey clouds that had settled low over the Sanctuary and enabled IdrisPukke to find Cale, about half a mile from the gate, about four hours after he’d killed Bosco.

‘I’m very sorry about Vague Henri,’ said IdrisPukke.

There was no reply at first.

‘How did you know I’d be here?’

‘I didn’t. I sent people out but I thought that somewhere here would be a possibility.’

Cale was sitting on a rock about a hundred yards from the isolated compound where Arbell Materazzi was being kept. ‘Were you thinking of going in?’

‘I was mulling it over, yes.’

‘Would you mind if I asked you not to?’

Again there was no reply for a time.

‘I was thinking of burying Vague Henri at the Voynich oasis,’ he said eventually.

‘I don’t know it.’

‘Not far from here. A lake. Nice trees, birds singing and stuff. He’d like that.’

‘He would, yes.’

‘I want the girls to go. They’ll cry, I suppose. He’d like that as well. Stupid really. What difference does it make?’

‘I’ve been to a fair number of funerals. They make a difference sometimes.’

‘Not to him.’

‘No, not to him.’

A few minutes’ more silence. Then Cale laughed.

‘Did I ever tell you about Vague Henri and the upside down prayer book?’

‘I don’t believe you did.’ In fact he’d told IdrisPukke the story when they were at Treetops.

‘Don’t know where he got the idea but he tore the cover off the missal we were supposed to read for an hour a day and glued it on upside down. He’d take it out whenever he came across a pig who didn’t know him and start reading. It drove them crazy when they saw it – pretending to read the Holy Missal … blasphemy! They’d come racing over and rip it out of his hands and clip him on the ear. But he didn’t mind. Then he’d show them the cover had been stuck on upside down and tell them he was waiting for a new one. Even piggy Redeemers had to do a grovel at that. Some of them even said they were sorry. He made a fortune betting the acolytes he could get a Redeemer to ask for forgiveness.’

Another silence.

‘I hate her.’

‘Yes.’

‘I never hated her before. I pretended I did, but I didn’t. I was ashamed that she stopped loving me and sold me up but I didn’t stop loving her, not for a moment.’ Another silence. ‘Do you know about mortification?’

‘No.’

‘Bosco said it meant that you could die of shame – you know, shame for your sins. I felt mortification by loving her. So weak – weak and ashamed.’ For the first time he looked over at IdrisPukke. ‘Do you know why Henri died?’

‘No.’

‘Because of her.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘See, I came back here because of her. I brought her here to show her. I mean I didn’t plan it or anything, not in my head. But I can see it now. Now he’s dead.’

‘See what?’

‘I wanted her to see the Sanctuary – so she’d understand why I was so odd and then she’d love me again. And then I wanted to show her that I could destroy it – that she didn’t have to give me away to Bosco because I could have beaten them. I would have done. I have done. I wanted her to see what a dreadful thing she did for no good reason. But all I did was bring Vague Henri back so that he could die in this shithole. Here of all places. To die here.’

He began putting his fists to his head, grinding his temples with his knuckles as if to drill a hole to let something out.

‘Don’t go down there,’ IdrisPukke said.

‘Think I might.’ Cale stood up. ‘Bosco was right, you either kill the past or it kills you.’

‘Don’t go. You’re in a state of mind where something grim might happen.’

‘You’re right, it’s true – unspeakable things are on my mind.’

‘What would Vague Henri say?’ He was getting desperate trying this one.

‘Vague Henri’s dead. No votes for him.’

‘I don’t know how bad or good she is. I barely know the girl. What I do know is that she’s a blight on you. You can only make things worse if you go anywhere near her. The two of you share a madness that will cut you both in two. Get her away from you.’

Another short silence.

‘When I murdered Kitty the Hare there was something I didn’t tell you about. It was the look in his eyes – I suppose he was terrified as well but it wasn’t his fear that stuck in my mind, it was the shock. This can’t be happening to me, he was thinking while I beat the life out of him, not me. Day after day Kitty was guilty of every kind of cruelty and violence yet when that violence came to him in his own home he was dumbfounded. Couldn’t get that look of amazement out of my mind.’ He turned again to IdrisPukke. ‘Know why?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve just realized myself. I want to see that look again, really I do. I want to see it in the eyes of that shit-bag Zog, and Bose Ikard, and Robert Fanshawe and his Ephors and everyone like them everywhere in the world. I want to see that shock in their eyes: Me? Not me. This can’t be happening. The world is full of people who need to die like that.’

‘So, the Left Hand of God after all.’

Cale laughed.

‘Who said anything about God?’

‘What about all the people you’re going to have to kill to get to them?’

‘I’ll give everyone the chance to budge out of the way.’

‘And if they don’t agree to budge?’

‘Then they’ll get what’s coming to them.’

‘And so will the thousands upon thousands who won’t be able to get out of the way even if they wanted to. Bosco thought you could rule the world – but he was mad. What’s your excuse?’

‘What choice do I have?’

‘We always have a choice.’

‘You know, I’ve never heard you say anything stupid before. Are you really telling me I can stop? Not even if I wanted to. No one’s going to let me be, no one’s going to let me take myself off somewhere and eat cake with girls in peace and quiet. I tried that. I wouldn’t last six months if I walked away now.’ He looked at IdrisPukke. ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’

‘Your joy is all in laying waste to things – blight and desolation is what makes your soul glad.’

‘What?’ For some reason Cale was furious.

‘Wasn’t that what that puppet said to you?’

‘Oh, that thing. Yes.’

‘I don’t agree, for what it’s worth.’

‘Thanks – I’m touched.’

‘But if you go down there and kill Arbell Materazzi, that’s the first step. You can’t come back from something like that.’

‘You know what I learnt from killing Bosco? There’s nothing like an itch that you can finally scratch. Enough talk now. We’ll talk again tomorrow.’

‘You can’t kill someone just because they don’t love you any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘Suppose everyone behaved like that?’

‘Then people would be a lot more careful.’

‘Will you come with me?’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Sleep on it?’

‘No.’

What was IdrisPukke to do? Nothing.

He made his way back to the main compound, tripping on stones and matted webs of arse-wipe as he went.

All that night priests were falling through the air. Flocks, doles, bevies, parliaments and trains of the lately hanged were being hauled in their hundreds to the West Wall of the Sanctuary and heaved over the side to freefall the three hundred feet onto Ginky’s Field, where for six hundred years the bodies of the Redeemers had been set aside. What did they fall like? Like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Some three hours into this grim rite – known as the First Defenestration of the Hanged because the gap in the wall through which the bodies were pitched resembled a window – Windsor finally escaped from the recesses of the Sanctuary and made his sick and exhausted way to Fanshawe. ‘It’s too late now, darling,’ he said. ‘You’d better get some sleep and you can try again tomorrow.’

But there wasn’t to be another chance for Windsor. By the time the sun came up Thomas Cale was miles away, sitting in the back of a wagon on its way to the materials depot at Snow Hill.

IdrisPukke had men out searching for months but there wasn’t a trace of the boy. He didn’t give up, of course: he paid a good deal of money to intelligencers who knew how to keep their mouths shut to report on rumours about even the most tenuous sightings of Thomas Cale. There were plenty of those. It was not difficult to discount the story that he’d been seen in the prow of a great ship setting out across the Wooden Sea, accompanied by eight maidens in white silk, bound for the Isle of Avalon from where he would return after a long sleep to save the world when it was next threatened with destruction. Then it was reported he was making his living as a juggler in Berlin, or selling hats in the markets in Syracuse. Alarmingly plausible was the news, more than a year later, that he’d been killed trying to interrupt the marriage in Lebanon of Arbell Materazzi to the Aga Khan, Duke of Malfi, a man so extravagant he was known as the Emperor of Ice Cream because his fortune was melting away. But IdrisPukke quickly confirmed from a guest who’d been at the ceremony that the celebrations had passed off impeccably. Later still there was the rumour that he had drowned, along with Wat Tyler, in the Great Fiasco on the Isle of Dogs; then that he had been crucified next to Buffellow Bill during the religious wars at Troy.

But though the sightings were as numerous as they were unreliable a pattern of sorts emerged from a few reports, very small in number, that he hoped were true. There were a number of claims he had been seen down in Emmaeus in one-horse towns buying nails, saws and olive oil. The ordinariness of this reassured IdrisPukke: it was warm there, even in winter, and the countryside was covered by mile upon mile of forests of elm and ash, as well as hundreds of small lakes where it would be very hard to find someone who didn’t want to be found. He liked to think of Cale keeping occupied hammering and sawing things and eating well – though he could discover nothing very solid to these reports even after he’d sent reliable people down there to make inquiries. But he hoped he was somewhere around there at any rate and keeping safe.

APPENDIX i

Statement on behalf of the Unified Nations Archaeological Survey (UNAS)

As the legal judgment by Moderator Breffni Waltz so elegantly details the origins of the discovery of the Rubbish Tips of Paradise and the ‘creation’ of the so-called Left Hand of God trilogy, I will not rehearse them here. Neither do I intend to detail the legal challenges to the entirely improper claims of ownership by either Dr Fahrenheit or the Habiru people, rights which clearly belong to the entire world and not to an individual or a tribal group who have shown scant respect for this most precious of archaeological sites.

No one is denying the contribution of Dr Fahrenheit in discovering the tips and had he immediately called in the Unified Nations Archaeological Survey, as he should have done, this would be a very different story: he would now be admired as one of archaeology’s greatest sons instead of being reviled as its greatest villain. Early on Fahrenheit came up with the working hypothesis that the origin of the pages in the Field of Books was not a library or anything equally carefully structured but a rubbish tip consisting largely of discarded papers, somewhat similar to those uncovered in the early years of the last century at Oxyrinchus (though those remains are no more than eighteen hundred years old – proof that even a great city can vanish very quickly from the memory of history). It turns out that he was right. What he was not able to do was discover the location of the rubbish tip itself. However, while he was looking for what one might term the mother lode, he kept discovering individual scraps of paper and it was from these, matched by his quick grasp of the Habiru language, that he was able to find the very few words these two civilizations had in common and so unravel the meaning of many of these documents, some of which may be up to fifty thousand years old, or even older. What he had in his possession were many higgledy-piggledy scraps of paper – bits of old letters, accounts, legal documents – but only one book. It was never found in its complete form but the papers continued to turn up in large quantities and in approximately the same place – there were so many fragments that once he had mastered the language of these texts he was able to recreate almost in their entirety the series of what turned out to be three books.

But what did that tell him, or us, about their status among the people for whom they were intended? Were they to be found in such numbers because the Left Hand of God trilogy (as he called it – none of the title pages have so far been discovered) was considered one of the great artistic treasures of this lost civilization? In short, was the author the equivalent of our own giants – a Bramley or Ginsmeyer – or was he an Allin Harwood or Jinna Lorenzo, widely read and as widely derided? Or was he a deluded self-publisher whose books went straight from the printing press into his attic and from there directly to the rubbish tip en masse without selling a copy to anyone other than a luckless friend or relative?

As such, completely shorn of any context, either historical or aesthetic, these books set us an interesting challenge. For now we must make something of them, good or bad, only through a simple and direct reading unmediated by accumulated layers of cultural status. If we fail to be moved and stimulated, are we rejecting a work once considered by its readers to be of sublime quality? And if we are stirred, are we being stimulated by a book so worthless its contemporaries thought it only fit to be thrown away? Other central questions remain, of the sort we can usually take for granted in order to tell us what to think about what we are about to read. Is it some kind of historical fiction? Is it a contemporary work describing recent events? Is it entirely imaginary? Did the Redeemers exist in fact, or are they merely the product of an unhealthy imagination, or is their presentation merely propaganda written by someone belonging to an opposing cult? Are the characters based on real individuals and as such would have been known to their audience or are they entirely inventions of the writer? Are the many differences in style to be explained by the erratic nature of the writing or are these references to known works that the reader would have recognized, or are they just thefts? Was it written by more than one person? Or none of the above? Only one of these questions, concerning the Materazzi and the Redeemers, has already been partly answered (see below 1#). We must accept we may never know how to read these texts accurately.

Mr Fahrenheit attempted to solve these problems by the simple expedient of ignoring them. He published the first two books in the series as if they were contemporary examples of the genre usually described as ‘fantasy’ – though lacking as they do any dwarfs, fairies, monsters or elves it’s not easy to understand why. Be that as it may, the books published under the family name of Fahrenheit’s mother were reasonably successful in commercial terms, if found odd by many and distinctly disliked by others. The translation, though racy and free, cannot be said to be inaccurate.

The Unified Nations have now legally taken control of the site called by the Habiru the Field of Books but popularly known as the Rubbish Tips of Paradise after a newspaper headline more concerned with a memorable phrase than any degree of accuracy (the rubbish tips are east of the fabled Eden by some two hundred miles). The ‘ownership’ of the text of the Left Hand of God trilogy is subject to legal appeal between UNAS and Fahrenheit and the Habiru. Following Mr Fahrenheit’s committal under the Mental Health Act to a care facility in Cambria, an agreement has been reached to publish the third volume, The Beating of His Wings, in a translation by Fahrenheit where the profits are paid directly to the Habiru. In due course, and in the light of the extensive research on the documents being uncovered by UNAS, a proper academic translation will be published to include footnotes and a detailed analysis of the historical context as well as a professional commentary.

We can hardly fail to hope that, as more material is uncovered in the Rubbish Tips of Paradise (as we are now more or less obliged to call them), we will discover many great masterpieces of our hidden past. Who can say what shocks and delights are to come?

Doctor Professeur Ajax Plowman

42nd of Brumaire AD 143. 812

1# Since it details an event mentioned frequently in the trilogy, I refer those interested to the first proper academic paper by UNAS based on translated documents from the Rubbish Tips of Paradise: ‘The Praxis of Aggression: Historical Verification for the Battle of Silbury Hill and the Decline of the Materazzi Hegemony’, History Today, vol 277, pp. 62–120.

APPENDIX ii

Some of the following statement by Paul Fahrenheit has been redacted under the laws of criminal libel and several statutes of Unified Nations Hate Crime legislation.

Concerning the self-serving propaganda of the Unified Nations Archaeological Survey (UNARSE), the obscurantist mediocrities who make up the cultural commentariat and academia, the who is now Chair of the Arts Council, and the hacks of the mass media, all of you can in a .

Furthermore,

What could be drearier once you have learned the basics of thinking and reading than to carry on living in an intellectual nursery with someone telling you what toys to choose and why. ‘This is a nice toy, little boy or little girl, but not that one – it does not meet with our view of toyness.’ And what could be more foolish than to see the world through the eyes of most of the commentariat: the teacher, the academic, the cultural commentator, the critic, the massed ranks of opinion-formers who clog up our world like in a midden. But death above all to the Dooey Decimal System which places the world in order down to the eighteenth point. The best picture of the human mind is never the library, with its convenient and deadly order, but the rubbish tip: life in its fundamental nature is haphazard, random, full of the rotten and the beautiful, the wrongly discarded, full of the profound truth of chaos. It cannot be packaged neatly for your discovery. You must be an outdragger, a tinker in life’s journey looking for the surprising, the unexpected, the object that comes to hand to be made use of in a different way from the one intended. As for to all of them.

The traveller who goes exploring with an official guide, even a counter-cultural one, and a carefully worked out itinerary is no explorer, merely a high-minded tourist. The next time you enter a library do so with a blindfold! The Rubbish Tips of Paradise are more interesting than paradise itself.

As Vague Henri would say: Death to the barn owl!

Paul Fahrenheit.

The Priory

Cambria

18th of Germinal AD 143.799

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my agent, Anthony Goff, and my editor at Penguin, Alex Clarke; Alexandra, Victoria and Thomas Hoffman, and Lorraine Hedger who types up my handwritten manuscripts with miraculous accuracy. Thanks also to the Penguin Rights department: Kate Burton, Sarah Hunt-Cooke, Rachel Mills and Chantal Noel. Also Nick Lowndes and my copy editor, Debbie Hatfield.

The description of King Zog and his habits is based on The Court and Character of King James 1, probably by Sir Anthony Weldon.

Bose Ikard’s speech claiming he has reached agreement with the Redeemers is substantially that of Neville Chamberlain’s speech in 1938 on returning from a meeting with Adolf Hitler, claiming that he had secured ‘peace for our time’.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer makes his usual extensive contribution to the observations of IdrisPukke. Sister Wray’s comments on the sun are from William Blake. The popular tune sung by Riba in the carriage has a line based on the title of W. H. Auden’s ‘O Tell Me The Truth About Love’. The line, ‘Love has no ending’ comes from Auden’s ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’. The words ‘under’ and ‘umbrella’ are borrowed from Rihanna Fenty. The trial of Conn Materazzi is partly based on the transcript of ‘The Trial of Sir Walter Raleigh’ in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials. Cale’s comments about being seen to watch over his men echo the letter by Sullivan Ballou to his wife shortly before his death, and first quoted in The Left Hand of God. In some foreign editions this acknowledgement was inadvertently omitted. The exchange between Dorothy Rothschild and Cale that ends Chapter 31 is from a line by the underrated American President Calvin Coolidge. There are many half quotes or ones so buried and rewritten that I can no longer recognize or trace them. If the reader suspects other sources from Homer to Homer Simpson they can, of course, resort to Google cut and paste – the greatest sneak in the history of knowledge.

ARTEMISIA

The character of Artemisia in The Beating of His Wings is inspired by, but not based on, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, the admiral who fought for the Persians against the Greeks at Salamis in 480BC. Against prevailing opinion she strongly advised Xerxes not to attack the Greek fleet in the narrow straits where they would have too great an advantage. Fortunately for the subsequent development of the Greek Golden Age, the growth of democracy and, very possibly, Western civilization itself, Xerxes went along with the advice of the majority and as a result lost heavily. Although alternative history is a bit of a mug’s game, who knows if Artemisia had been listened to more carefully whether the Americans might have had to weed Saddam Hussein out of London or Paris rather than Baghdad. Perhaps there wouldn’t be an American democracy at all.

Contemporary feminist historians are deeply suspicious of the traditional account of her death, which claims she threw herself off a cliff because she had fallen in love with a younger man who did not return her affections. For them, perhaps rightly, it smacks of the sexism of the classical world. Such a tough-minded woman, they argue, would not have been so psychologically fragile. But perhaps not – the classical world also has similar tales of great soldiers confused by love – take Antony and Cleopatra. In our own time the militarily-much-admired former general David Petraeus, who stabilized the collapsing American occupation of Iraq in 2008, and had a reputation as a subtle and sophisticated thinker, was forced to resign his job as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency over his affair with his biographer. As Thomas Cale would have to accept, there’s nothing that unusual about having nerves of steel and a heart of glass.

JAN ZISKA

The origin of the tactics and practices of Cale’s New Model Army lies with the Hussite general Jan Ziska, military leader of what was, as Luther later acknowledged, the first Protestant Christian sect in early fifteenth-century Europe (based around the modern Czech Republic). Alexander the Great inherited an army whose skill and tactical superiority had been established by his father, but Ziska is very close to being unique in military history, in that he developed a way of fighting professional armoured soldiers in huge numbers using peasants armed with weapons based on agricultural implements and farm wagons. He also pioneered the development of lightweight gunpowder weapons. This problem-solving, tactically brilliant, completely original genius is barely known outside the Czech Republic. For further reading, try Warrior of God: Jan Zizka and the Hussite Revolution by Victor Vernay or The Hussite Wars, 1420–34 by Stephen Turnbull and Angus McBride.

BEX

The battle at Bex is sometimes but not always based on the Battle of Towton in 1461. Again oddly, despite probably having the highest death rate in English history (including the first day of the Somme) at around 28,000, Towton has faded from popular memory in favour of less important and less bloody conflicts. For further reading, try Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton AD 1461 Veronica Fiorato (author, editor), Anthea Boylston (editor), Christopher Knusel (editor) and Towton: The Battle of Palm Sunday Field by John Sadler.

Some readers have been critical of the way in which the names of ‘real’ places turn up jumbled together without rhyme or reason in the geography of the world of The Left Hand of God trilogy. I’d ask them to consider the following: Riga Sweden Egypt Belfast Greece Norfolk Manchester Hamburg Kent Warsaw Cambridge London Peterborough Syracuse Rome Amsterdam Potsdam Batavia Dunkirk Reading (not far from Lebanon) Dover (not far from Smyrna) Mansfield Stamford Norwich Hyde Park Troy Bangor (next to Nazareth not far from Bethlehem) Sunbury Palmyra Westminster Emmaeus Mt Carmel Delhi Berlin Peru. The list could go on. What do these disparate places have in common? They are all towns, villages and small cities within 250 miles of New York (formerly New Amsterdam).

Find out more about The Left Hand of God trilogy by visiting:

www.redopera.co.uk

THE BEGINNING

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Table of Contents

THE BEATING OF HIS WINGS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

The Beating of His Wings

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

APPENDIX i

Statement on behalf of the Unified Nations Archaeological Survey (UNAS)

APPENDIX ii

Acknowledgements

ARTEMISIA

JAN ZISKA

BEX

THE BEGINNING