8


The Manifesto of Redeemer Picarbo

It is clear and it requires no great arguments that our forefathers were in error. This is no easy thing to say concerning famous men deserving praise. But to err is human and God has given us reason to struggle to make the best of our nature. Woman was given to us in the first to be a friend but she was no companion to us as was required. No – not even from the beginning. Would a friend and companion tempt a man to his own destruction, to listen to Satan, to eat the one thing – the one thing, for God’s sake, the one and only thing forbidden to man and woman? Such generosity, so small a burden, to bear in exchange for happiness and joy. All of it was lost because women are never satisfied but are always in the ears of men and wanting whatever they cannot have. It is no wonder that even the misguided Janes who will refuse to represent the world in images have a sign for the devil that has its origins in a picture of a woman’s tongue, and for temptation as a man’s ear. Women then from the first corrupted the friendship God had ordained between men and women. The friendship that grows from reason has seen that reason inflamed by women’s desire. Desire has made that friendship go mad. Men and women should live as man and wife in harmony and companionship and yet again and again we see men spurred always on by women into loving their own wives immoderately. A proper love takes reason as its guide and will not allow itself to be swept away in impetuous desire. And so the reasonable and sane is corrupted by women who want, greatest of all depravities, to be loved as if they were adulterers. All men commit adultery with their own wives and cannot help but do so because women will not be loved reasonably and in proportion. Love for women is their whole existence and they cannot in their nature bear what is moderate or rational. The soul of men alone, history has proved, struggles to free itself of desire as it rises to the divine. No woman will allow this escape by men. It is she and not God who must be the centre of everything. By my investigations and experiments I have discovered women inflame the reason not only by their parts and their fondling but by a secret liquid that flows from their gallbladders.

As we have many times done with sheep and pigs, breeding this one for better meat, the other for finer wool, I have by diverse means schooled such women as I have confined here in all that is voluptuous and concerned only with physical sensation regarding the pleasure of beauty, of the delicacy of the skin and the hair and all the ways in which the organs of immediate sensation can be puffed up and exaggerated. They have been taught since very young all the business of delighting men so that (even more than ordinary women) they think of nothing else but giving pleasure to men so that men in turn find pleasure and solace only in their company and not in the pursuit of God. By these means I have greatly stimulated their wombs to exude this uterine milk to such an intensity and strength that it, strangled and thickened by its own excess, has glutinated to become as solid as amber or pitch (which in being the stuff of hell is most apt). By my arts and inspired by God and the Hanged Redeemer, I have found out and removed these resins and revealed that they have the power, reduced to a powder and mixed with holy chrism, to supply any man with the original goodness of the friendship of women that they so quickly and destructively took from men and from themselves. With this prepared mixture, which I have called Redeemer’s Oil, not only men may resist women as it eases away their lust, but even Redeemers who have been lost to madness and dreadful fits may be restored to happiness and good fellowship and be reclaimed from the destruction of penis fury and the sorrow at the loss of women that afflicts so many.


The door opened and Bosco returned.

‘Finished?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Show me.’

Cale pointed to the last sentence he had read, old habits dying hard. It was done before he could stop himself.

‘Well,’ said Bosco, awkward himself at this reminder of their past. ‘You can read the rest later. Your opinion?’

‘Too much penis fury.’

Bosco smiled.

‘Indeed so. He was as much possessed by women in his way as any fornicator. If you think what you’ve read is mad, the rest of it goes on to lay out his plans for a special farm in which his creatures would be raised to produce this resin in sufficient amounts to calm the world. But if it hadn’t been for this you would never have left the Sanctuary and the Materazzi empire would still be the greatest power in the four quarters. Odd, isn’t it, how things work out?’

‘What will you do with the girls?’

‘I don’t know. They can stay where there are.’

‘A trap for someone.’

‘Exactly. Would you care to meet them?’

It was fair to say that Cale was astonished.

‘A trap for me?’

‘There are many traps laid for you but none of my making. I am your good servant.’

‘Yes. I mean, yes I do want to see them.’

‘I’ll arrange it when you return from the veldt. Picarbo may have been a lunatic but his handiwork is most interesting.’

A week later Cale was standing on the low hill at Duffer’s Drift, surrounded by the Purgators – suspicious, hopeful, wary, resentful – and Guido Hooke. Cale had thought there might be a fight to retake the Drift, particularly if the Folk holding it had realized that there were only two hundred and thirty Redeemers come to do so. As it turned out, by the time they arrived the Folk had simply vanished into the prairie.

‘Look around you,’ shouted Cale. ‘If you are stupid you’ll die here. If you’re clever you’ll die here. If you use all the great skills you’ve learned, you’ll die here. Let me tell you this: unless you become like little children, you will die here.’

‘Speak up!’ shouted a Redeemer at the back. Cale looked at Gil and with two guards he moved behind the Redeemer who’d spoken out and gestured him forward. He stepped to the front with a hard-man swagger and stood in front of Cale, staring at him with eyes the colour of the leavings in a mug of beer.

‘What did you say?’ asked Cale.

‘I said speak -‘

Cale stepped into the man crashing his forehead into his face. The Redeemer went down instantly, clutching his broken nose. Cale stepped back onto the flat boulder he had been speaking from.

‘If you have bad hearing – you will die here.’

He told them to turn around and outlined the various ways the Drift had been defended – pointing to this trench system here, another there, how this hill had been reinforced, that field of fire covered to prevent an attack.

‘The one thing they have in common,’ he said, when he’d finished laying out the battlefield, ‘is that everyone who planned them and everyone who carried out those plans is now dead. You will be placed in cohorts of fifteen. You will elect a cohort leader and a deputy and a sergeant. You will unlearn together or you’ll die. You have one day to walk this place and each cohort will come up with a plan to keep you alive for the three days it will take for reinforcements to arrive. I don’t need to threaten you that, if you fail, I’ll have you returned to the Sanctuary for your immediate Act of Faith because the Folk will take care of you on that score. Back here an hour before sunset.’

Cale had hoped that by his pointing out why the previous defences had failed, by showing them the lie of the land, not in maps but rock by trench, by keeping everything particular and down to earth, the Purgators would realize that their salvation lay in one place. But it became clear to Cale, as the cohorts produced one doomed-to-fail plan after another, that while fear could do almost anything, you could not frighten anyone into thinking for themselves.

The next day Cale assembled the Purgators down by the river crossing. He took out an egg and laid it on the flat top of a large rock.

‘If any one of you can balance this egg on its narrow end you get the safest job in the battalion – taking messages to the rear. As soon as the Folk come into sight you’ll be on your way.’

For the next few minutes there were about twenty efforts before the Purgators were certain it could not be done, even if they were also sure Cale had some trick up his sleeve. Which, of course, he did. When they’d given up he stepped to the rock, picked up the egg and tapped it gently against the rock, breaking it slightly and leaving it stood on one end.

‘You didn’t say we could break it.’

‘I didn’t say anything. You decided the rules, not me.’ He pointed at the ford. ‘The crossing here is in a bad place from a defender’s view. I want you to work out how to move it.’

‘It can’t be done.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘How can it be?’

‘You’re right. It can’t. So why do all of your plans to defend it put you in trenches so close you could fight them off with your bare hands? If you had a bow that could fire ten miles, that’s how far away you could be. If you can walk the battlefield but even if you can’t – think like a child. Imagine yourself into every real place in every real way. Put yourself in the mind of your enemy and then walk the battlefield in fact or in your head. Make your mind a model of the real world – with a horse and then in a trench. Put everything to the test of what’s real. You don’t have time to learn from your mistakes.’

He took them to the trenches where most of the Redeemers had died in the last attack.

‘Where’s the front?’

By now the Purgators were beginning to catch on.

‘There’s no point in hiding. Make your mistakes now when there’s only me to answer to.’

One of the men pointed to the Drift forward of the trench.

‘Wrong. There is no front here. The direction of attack is to the side, the rear and facing you. Here it’s front all around. What ground should you take?’

‘The high ground.’

This came out of the Purgators as naturally as the response to a priest in morning mass. At the familiarity there was a buzz, almost like amusement at the memory of something in common, of no longer being outcast.

‘Wrong again. The ground you take is the best ground. Usually, but not here, it’s the high ground. I’m telling you that if you do what’s usually right, you’ll usually end up dead.’ He pointed at the U-shaped bend in the river.

On either side of the bank it was as ragged as if it had been cut into repeatedly by a giant axe.

‘Use the land around you. Those cuts in the bank can be deepened and prepared, but look at it – most of the work has been done for you. This is the best cover for twenty miles.’

‘Hold on, sir,’ said one of the Purgators. ‘You said we needn’t be next to the ford as no one can steal it. This plan puts us right on top of it.’

‘If it wasn’t for the fact that I used up the last fresh egg I’d have given it to you. I changed my mind because I didn’t want to think about giving up the high ground. Just like the rest of you.’ He pointed out into the scrub beyond the U of the river. ‘The ford could be defended from there well enough – but on balance the ravines on the bank are better. At least you better hope so. Besides, remember there is no front or rear in this place. I’m going to put some of you on the high ground. If the Folk try to get in between us, they’ll be trapped from both sides.’ He looked around the group. ‘Are any of you Sodality Marksmen?’ Mostly Redeemer archers were used in massed ranks and great accuracy was not required but where it was needed the specially trained Sodality Marksmen were used. There were six. He told them to collect food and water for three days and while they were doing this set most of the Purgators to digging into the ravines on either side of the bank to improve on what nature had offered them. Thirty of the others were set to digging trenches.

‘Make sure you cut a space big enough inside the bottom of the trench to hide from arrows coming at you from directly above.’ He gave Gil some further instructions and then set off, running to the tabletop mountain in front of the U with the six marksmen.

As the Redeemers dug they talked. Friends of the priest Cale had dropped for pretending he couldn’t hear were muttering.

‘A few months ago and anyone of us could have disembowelled the little shitehawk for even thinking of touching one of us.’

‘He better not try it on me or ...’

‘Or what?’ said another. ‘The days when we could do anything to anyone have gone. He’s annointed by God, you can hear it in his voice and what he says.’

‘And the way he said it.’

‘He’s an acolyte gone cocky. I’ve seen it before – one of them claims he’s seen a vision of the Holy Mother and suddenly they’re all over him until he’s found out for the little liar he is.’

There was a mumble of agreement all around. Acolytes claiming to have seen visions of this or that saint prophesying one thing or another and causing general excitement until they were, unless particularly skilled, caught out and made an example of were not uncommon.

‘Well,’ said another, ‘you better hope you’re wrong because he’s all that stands between us and a blunt knife. I want to believe in him and I do. You can hear it in his voice. Everything he said makes sense once he explained – the fact that he’s just a boy makes it true. Only God could have put knowledge like that into a child’s head.’

‘Shut your gob and get on with your digging,’ said Gil as he passed by. To him they were Purgators but the mixture of awe and doubt about Cale was clattering about in his brain just the same.

Within two hours Cale was back, this time alone and putting in place the notions he had conceived while looking down on the site from the top of the mountain. One of the marksmen, a veteran of the Eastern Front, had come up with an idea of his own he’d seen at Swineburg during the Advent offensive. He was promoted on the spot by a delighted Cale to the position of Bum-Bailey – a deadly insult in Memphis, but important-sounding to the other Redeemers. On his way down the mountain he felt that what had seemed like a good joke at the time was in fact childish and, worse, might come back to haunt him. What was done was done but he stayed away from that kind of thing in the future.

When he got back to the Drift he ordered up the twenty best riders and then told them to take off their cassocks. Having collected a bale’s worth of prairie grass from the scrub he had the cassocks filled with the grass and then impaled the scarecrowish results on twenty staves driven into the bottom of the old trench in which so many Redeemers had died in the previous attack. Once you were thirty yards away or more you couldn’t tell the difference. It was unlikely that the Folk would catch on that Redeemers had no reason to fight with their cowls over their heads.

‘What do you want the riders for?’ asked a suspicious Redeemer Gil. Cale considered avoiding a straight answer but there was no reason to.

‘I need protecting when I watch you from up on the hill back there,’ he said, nodding to the rise half a mile away from which they’d watched the previous two massacres.

‘What about leading your men?’

‘I’m not here to save people, isn’t that right? That’s what you believe, isn’t it?’

Gil stared at him.

‘Yes.’

‘I remember you saying once that a man in command has to make two choices – lead from the front always or only sometimes. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, try never. Who am I, Redeemer?’

They just stared at each other at first.

‘You are The Left Hand of God.’

‘And why am I here?’

Gil did not reply.

‘Is there anything here,’ continued Cale, ‘you don’t understand?’

‘No, sir.’

Hooke walked over to them having spent several minutes examining a curiously coloured boulder.

‘I think there is brimstone in these rocks.’

‘Get on your horse. We’re leaving.’

Thirty minutes later Cale with Hooke only next to him was looking down on his handiwork from the familiar rise. He was pleased with himself. Except for the dozen or so men he had sent out to place rocks and boulders to give the archers ranges at fifty-yard intervals, he could see no one – even though he knew where to look.

It was two hours after first light the next morning that Hooke spotted a cloud of dust away to the north. Cale ordered a blunt arrow to be fired into the centre of the Drift to warn the Purgators that the Folk were coming. Within the hour Cale could see scouts coming in clumps of two, sometimes three, in a ragged line that extended over a front of a thousand yards or so on either side of a small group of ten heading for the Drift. As they approached the crossing and saw nothing, the land dipped inwards herding the inner groups together. Cale felt an intense thrill gripping him along the back of the neck, pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. By now a group of fifteen scouts had carelessly bunched together about a hundred and fifty yards from the nearest line of about seventy Redeemer archers. Then they stopped, clearly spooked by something.

‘Shit!’ said Cale. They had started to turn and split up when a silent arc of arrows rose into the air in a majestic curve and in less than two seconds rained in on the scouts taking all but one of them off their horses. The survivor raced off to the south followed by another flight of thirty or so arrows. Cale gasped with irritation. The arrows were a waste for just one man even if they could take a single target moving away at the rate the terrified scout was going. Clearly Gil had the same idea. His shout to hold fire drifted lazily up towards the rise. Gil had the sense to realize that there would be no more surprises and no more tightly packed groups of fifteen to make an easy target.

Thirty minutes later a thick mortar arrow shot up almost vertically into the air from the shoulder just a hundred feet or so below the tabletop mountain. It landed about ten yards from the trenches manned by the Redeemer cassocks stuffed with prairie grass. By the third shot the mortars had got their range and a barrage of arrows and their twelve equally murderous bolts scoured the trenches for another hour. The idea of the fake defenders had been that of the sniper on the tabletop mountain, for which he’d been rewarded by the insulting promotion. It had been successful, and out of all proportion. Not only had they wasted an enormous number of mortar arrows but it was clear the Folk still hadn’t caught on and were clearly convinced, though for good reason, that the Redeemers were following the same dismal chain of tactics they had shown at Duffer’s Drift and elsewhere on the veldt. A large body of them were crawling up the south side of the hill in order to take the high ground and fire down at the men in the riverbank who had killed so many of the Folk in the first volley. While this was happening, Cale spotted two groups of perhaps a hundred men each galloping away to the east and west. Cale’s guess was that they were heading for the river some distance away on either side. Once they’d got down the bank, they’d make their way along the river from either side and try and get close in to attack the archers during the night. He was reluctant to give away his own presence but finally ordered one of the Redeemers to sneak down to the west side of the U and fire a blunt arrow with a warning message but not to do so until just before the light failed so the arrow would not be seen so easily and their presence hinted at.

During the remainder of the day there were a number of light skirmishes from the attacking Folk as the guerrillas moved forward trying to provoke a response in order to best map out the shape and numbers of the defenders. But the Redeemers were not inexperienced, even if unfamiliar with this kind of informal warfare – and Gil from the occasional if undecipherable shouts clearly had them under control. Besides, Cale had ordered passages to be cut between the small ravine-like raggednesses of the far riverbank so that the defenders could move with relative ease across most of the U. In this way the defenders gave the impression that their numbers were greater than they were. With luck, if the Folk thought the river was so firm-handed they might be discouraged from attacking that night along the river bed.

There was a thin new moon that evening with the old moon in her arms, giving poor light and often obscured by clouds. It was nervy stuff waiting in the dark like that. The black night, instead of being something surrounding you, seemed to fill the inside of your head, all sense of being inside or out slowly being lost unless a cloud passed away from the thin moon and illuminated a distant tree or the side of the table mountain. Then the black space your senses told you was only inches away now revealed itself as miles in the distance and not even where it should be. A dead white tree on the prairies – just caught in the light of the moon – seemed to Cale to be stranded above him in mid-air when in fact he knew it to be on the flat almost a mile away. With even the most basic senses being all higgledy-piggledy it was a bad experience to be waiting in the coal-black night for someone with murder in their heart to come and get you. In the dark and even for those with good nerves the veldt at night became an implacable enemy waiting, mocking, for you to make the first move. A wild dog or night deer trotting along became twice its size and its speed like three ordinary living things. The sound of a hedgehog snuffling about became as loud as a lion grumbling before a leap. What if the creeping crawling thing making that scraping sound just outside your trench had a deadly bite or sting? The night was an unpleasant alchemist for ordinary things – it made a bush into the man who was waiting to kill you if you even breathed too loud. Still, it would be worse if you were doing the getting. Imagine trying to move in this. And, of course, with no way of checking, time vanished. Two hours passed which might have been four or five minutes. Odd thoughts began tormenting you. What if tonight the sun went down and didn’t come up. Something you would never have bothered thinking about, on a night like this seemed possible. ‘Never shall sun that morrow see’, a phrase he had heard Lord Vipond quoting from somewhere, kept coming back to him. ‘Never shall sun that morrow see.’

Then at once there was a flare of light from what looked like a point way up in the clouds. Then another. It was Gil lighting up the river bed with fire arrows – one after the other, beautifully cupped by the shape of the river. After the seventh or eighth Cale heard screams and shouts. The arrows had caught the Folk trapped on either side by the steep riverbank. You could not see the volleys of unlit arrows rasping in on the attacking Folk, but there was little cover for them and no chance of rushing the Purgators because Cale had placed a deep line of staked thorn trees across the river and several more lines of sharpened stakes.

It didn’t, or didn’t seem to, last for long even though there was one pause before a second attack. This was much briefer than the first. Then nothing until the first lightening of a beautiful rose-red dawn.

The sun came up after this gentle start like a clap of thunder and by seven o’clock it was already too hot. Down in the riverbank, the far side he could see at any rate, the dead and dying numbered thirty-three. Perhaps half as many again were obscured by the near bank. The men were trying to crawl back down the river bed but not quickly. One was so badly injured he was crawling, equally slowly, towards the Purgators he wanted to escape from.

One of the retreating wounded was beginning to make progress and an arrow from the Purgators lashed out fast as a heron and struck the wounded man.

‘About time they showed some mercy,’ said Guido Hooke, gravely. ‘No one should have to die so slowly in sun like this.’ Cale laughed. ‘Did I say something to amuse you, Mr Cale?’

‘If they put the poor bastard out of his misery, it was by accident. They’ll be wounding him again to try and encourage his friends to do something heroic.’

‘Scum.’ Hooke looked at Cale, trying to read him. ‘You think me weak?’

Cale considered this carefully for a moment.

‘No. I think it’s surprising.’

‘That someone should have some feeling for a suffering human being?’

‘That you would expect anything else from the Redeemers.’

‘You can still disapprove of something you expect.’

‘Why bother? Will it make any difference?’

‘You must have been brought up very careless.’

‘I was.’

‘Why so cynical?’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘Cynicism is -‘

‘I don’t care what it means either.’

Miffed at this rebuke, Hooke didn’t reply. After a few minutes it was Cale who spoke.

‘A friend of mine used to say it was a waste of time blaming people for their nature.’

‘I was right.’

‘About what?’

‘About being brought up careless.’

Cale refused to take offence and just smiled. ‘I wish IdrisPukke had brought me up. I’d be more to your taste, Mr Hooke, than I am now.’

At that there was another arrow flash and another wounded man struck.

‘It’s not foolish to wish for a life better than this.’

But Cale had had enough and did not reply. Then he noticed a dozen or so Folk crawling towards the hill at the back of the U and beginning to move up the slope, then another ten and another. The centenar in the firing trench at the top was being more patient in letting them come close to his position than made sense.

‘Come on,’ he said under his breath. Then a volley of arrows and what looked like half a dozen hits. But now more of the Folk were crawling and, stooped low, even running over a hump on the hill and it became clear that it was only when moving over this hump that the attackers had to suffer the arrows from the trenches. When he had decided on the defence of the hill the slope below had seemed devoid of any cover for the entire climb and so making it almost impossible to mount a successful attack. Now it was clear that he had missed something. Once they got two thirds up the hill the Folk attackers were able to move into a shallow dip that protected them from arrows and allowed them to gather on the slope high enough to make a rushed attack. It was impossible that he had missed something so obvious.

Endless were the times it had been driven into him about the moment of holy revelation, the vision on the road or on top of a mountain that made the scales fall from the eyes. There was nothing divine about what struck Cale on top of the rise over Duffer’s Drift but it was a vision of the truth all the same. He could not afford to fail here.

His most desperate desire since he could remember thinking at all about anything was to be left alone. But now as he watched the Folk creeping towards the top of the hill he could see the failure of his greatest hope. If they took the hill they would be able to take the Drift. They would kill the Purgators and with them Cale’s ability to deliver to Bosco the power to keep him safe. But at the price of never being left alone. He could run away now but there were only Redeemers behind and Antagonists in front. He was five hundred miles away from what? Nothing like safety. To be alone anywhere in this world was to be isolated and vulnerable. Any peace and any quiet came at the pleasure of someone else. There was no corner, no crack, however small, where he could creep away from the world and please himself. The roof had to be earned, the food bought. He had to fight and keep fighting and if he stopped fighting he would drown. Wake up. March or die. March or die.

In Memphis he had made enemies as easily as breathing because he was stupid and made mistakes. The only people he knew and understood were Redeemers. Here he had some chance because he was one of them and he had a place. Everywhere else he was a child with a talent for being angry. He was as bound to the Purgators about to be annihilated in the Drift as much as if he loved and believed in every one of them. There was no choice and never had been. All this, realized in a fraction of the time it took to tell, flooded over him in a great deluge as if he had been standing below a great collapsing dam. And even as everything, heart and soul, cried out against it, he was on his feet and racing down the rise to the twenty Purgators waiting by their horses, ignorant of the disaster unfolding just out of sight.

Desperate to attack but needing to explain his plan, Cale started drawing the Drift in the dust and giving instructions as he did so.

‘Understand?’

They nodded.

‘Then you,’ he said, ‘repeat it back to me.’ The Purgators hesitated but returned a fair account of what Cale had told them. Cale repeated it again and mounted them.

‘Succeed and you’ll be as good as saints to Redeemer Bosco.’ Longing to be cast out himself it had taken the dreadful vision on the rise to see that belonging was more to these men than life itself. He thought he had offered them escape from hideous death but it was more than that. If he had been an angel sent to pardon them and set them free in the world they would have been lost, wanderers without place or meaning. Their freedom would have been the freedom of a ghost.

As they rode in good order to the top of the rise watched by the bemused Hooke, Cale could feel the power of brotherhood and loyalty sweeping through them even in the teeth of their own death. Then they swept over the rise and were slowly raising their speed in line with Cale, faster towards the hill as the Folk were preparing their final rush towards the top, thoughts bent on the struggle ahead and no one thinking of the rear until the Purgators were only fifty yards behind and racing towards them. Now seen, the Purgators screamed for Saint this and Martyr that and then the slaughter began.

The horse charge of the Purgators flowed into the dip and pulled to a halt – they were trained as mounted infantry not cavalry – dismounting in a hurried scramble and charging the Folk from the side. Trees hit by a flash flood, the first ranks went down in the rush of the furious Redeemers bursting with dammed-up rage from their months of terrified imprisonment. A dozen were ahead of Cale, reckless and full of malice, bloody enthusiasts for death. Cale found himself at first following the men in front as if hiding behind a moving wall. But already in their frenzy they began to lose their shape as the Folk, at first surprised, began to absorb the shock and push them back. On the right they surged against the now ragged Redeemers and split their wall. A gap opened to the counterattack and Cale was again exercising his flair for brutality. First came Ben Van Brida – a thick-bearded eighteen-year-old, grunting heavily as he swung twice at the boy in front of him. That was his lot as Cale’s knife struck him in the throat just under the chin, the point emerging at the nape of his neck. But Cale had struck too hard – entering the spinal cord the blade stuck in the bone and Van Brida’s fall jerked the knife out of his hand. Cale ducked at the first blow of the next attacker and the next – neither willing to take their turn they both attacked at once. Cale stepped closer and grabbed the man to his left by the waist and catching him off balance steered him into the second attacker, preventing him from getting in another blow. He stamped down on the instep of his enemy, Frans Arnoldi of Nakuru was his name, who screamed in agony at his broken foot. As he fell Cale hurled him at the other man who staggered backwards only to be stabbed by an arriving Purgator, struck through the liver and an instant death. Lucky for him – few die quick that die in battle. No time for thanks as Cale finished the broken-footed Arnoldi – he flung out both his hands and cried out ‘No!’ Much good it did him, Cale’s blow severing his spinal cord that runs from haunch to neck. Then the next man rushed to Cale and his inevitable death. Juanie De Beer, who fought to the last at Bullbaiter’s Lane and earned the name De Beer the Bitterender, took a blow from Cale just above the genitals. He fell for all his courage, writhing in the sand in agony. Cale screamed at the Purgators behind him to close the gap. The Folk held back for a moment. Startled by the gross belligerence of the boy in front of them they’d stopped to gawp like peasants open-mouthed as some great bishop passed. He seemed to need no one, so dreadful and so natural the spleen he brought to bear on everyone who challenged him. Startled by his shouts the Purgators rushed to surround him as the attacks began again. Cale stepped back, leery now, once again aware of the danger he was in from the short spears in ones and twos incurving their way into the body of monks behind him, no sound like it even among the shouts and screams, no bolt or arrow makes the horse-slap muffled thud of a javelin stopped in a moment by flesh and blood. He stepped forward to avoid the spears, using the Purgators ahead of him as a protective wall. But now the dip in the slope that had protected the Folk was not enough to shield them from the archers on the top of the hill. They had to stand to fight off the surge from the side but that left them exposed. Penned in and squeezed by Cale’s wall of men the thirty-yard gap to the top that had promised them victory now made them easy prey for the archers.

It was Predikant Viljoen, sermonizer of Enkeldoorn, who realized that their only chance was to break through the Redeemer wall and become so mixed in the fight that the archers on the hill would be forced to stop. Hell was Viljoen’s great passion – his sermons would raise the hackles of his congregation like the quills upon a fretful porcupine. Now he was handing out hell himself in spades. The Predikant was half as big again as any of the other Folk and had a face like an ample plate, fringed with a beard. Like all the Folk he carried a small shovel, used on the veldt for everything from digging holes to slaughtering animals. It was light, the shaft of bamboo, the blade a square of steel sharpened on three sides with only the top left blunt. The grindstoned edges of the shovel that he swung sliced shoulder, hip and knee.

It was with the spade the Predikant burst through the wall of Purgators, shouting for his flock to follow, lashing with skill and holy madness from side to side. He took the top off the head of one Redeemer as if it were a Memphis lady’s breakfast egg. A mercifully instant death, it appalled the Redeemers to either side, courage gone as their comrade fell. The next man took the shovel straight in the face from a ferocious jab – his teeth and jaw split, his tongue severed. The next blow took off an arm, the next a foot. Now the gap he needed was opened and he lashed around him like not a bull or bear but like a pastor ordered by God to clear the seventh circle of hell. Cale had backed away to the left. He could see when God and nature had conspired in holy violence and were with a man in such a way that he was like a hurricane.

Roaring with rage and pride the Predikant lashed on – the Folk were pushing in behind him now, hearts the stronger, their courage increasing. The shovel bit like a dog, hands split, haunches cut open. Ribs were sliced and the lights and liver fell into the dust – not even animals could die so cruelly. And still he came on, Folk spreading behind him and still Cale kept back behind the frightened Purgators. Then was the moment when all things were open. Here where the road split, where two fates were calling, where Victory beckoned and Defeat nodded him over. Then the Predikant’s mistake: calling on God he caught Cale’s eye and vanity killed him – Cale’s vanity and his own as their eyes met briefly and the Predikant dismissed him as only a boy. Turning as a short spear whipped past him and into the heel of a fleeing Purgator. Cale pulled it out of the poor man’s foot as if it were a present. As the Predikant ripped open the stomach of a Purgator who had stayed to fight instead of run, Cale grasped the javelin and raised it over his shoulder, took two steps and threw. Nothing you’ve seen was ever so graceful, power and balance combined to perfection. No bite from a snake was struck with such instinct. The spear took the pastor just above the groin. Splitting his bladder and smashing his pelvis it emerged from his buttock. Crying with anguish he fell to the ground, the blood and the urine pouring into the sand, like wine and like water, the steam of it rising. Cale remembered it always. Now he was shouting and urging them forwards and two of the Folk who’d seen that their pastor had died at the hands of the boy who was roaring came for him, instantly pumped up with vengeance. But only one made it – the other was taken by Purgators, their courage returning. The second man struck – the blow would have cut Cale in half had it landed. But colder and colder Cale watched his opponent like a man who was playing at fighting with children – the blows were just clumsy, ungainly and awkward. But the arrows came close now – one nearly took him and broke his attention and the moment of focus fled for a moment. The clang and clatter, the yelping and shouting brought him to earth and the gracefulness left him. The man saw him waver and gaining in confidence moved to kick at him. The blow swept past Cale, who kicked at his standing foot, grabbed at his waist and then pulled him downwards onto the sand. How long was the second as Cale took his time and bending him backwards reached for his knife. They struggled so, quietly grunting and gasping, Cale shifting his weight to get better purchase. Then he collected his strength and wrenching his arm free he struck. The Folkhusband’s body was shaking as Cale got to his feet and looked to gather the danger. The Folk had lost heart with the death of their Predikant. The arrows from the hill began again as they fell back. The Purgators pushed ever forward. The lives of the Folk could be counted in minutes. As to the details of the slaughter that followed not even Predikant Viljoen had described the pains of hell in such a lively manner. Already the flies were laying their eggs in the mouths of the dead and the dying.

So on a poxy hill, in a scuffle between fewer than two hundred men in a place that didn’t have a name until it became a byword for Redeemer failure, an entire world was changed in the time it takes to boil an egg.

Things for the Folk went from worse to even worse. Cale wasn’t the only one to make a blunder at the Drift. The Folk Maister watching from the west could not himself see the attack led by Cale but he could see the beginning of the charge down the hill ordered by the centenar in support of it when it was almost over. The most recent information he had been given was that his men were gathering to take the hill and that success was certain. The Redeemers he could see piling over the crest and out of sight were, as far as he was concerned, engaging in a desperate and suicidal attempt to recover a position already lost. Anxious to take advantage of what he reasonably regarded as a terrible mistake, the Folk Maister ordered his troops to cross the river from in front of the hill and attack the Drift from inside the U. Once the centenar recalled his troops and Cale established a new defence lower down, the attacking Folk found that they were playing to another Redeemer strength. Flights of bolts and arrows from the hill they thought they’d won now took them from the rear and from high above where they could easily be picked out. The few who took refuge in the trenches along with the fake Redeemers did not survive for long. Fighting in trenches was the third Redeemer strength. The Folk were shown as much mercy as they were accustomed to offering themselves. None.

With such heavy losses and shocked by the peculiar way in which the Redeemers had fought, the Folk withdrew and attempted to use the mortars on the shoulder of the tabletop mountain to cover their retreat. This was when the Redeemer snipers Cale had left on the tabletop itself finally came into play. From what was now complete safety, the archers picked off half the Folk artillerymen before they realized that they could neither defend themselves nor remove the mortars. Abandoning them they fled to join what remained of the escaping Folk.

Cale had made every judgement that day correctly, except for the one that would have made his brilliance and courage completely unnecessary. It was a lesson of sorts but of what kind he was unsure – never make a mistake, perhaps. He walked up to the top of the hill, where Gil was waiting for him. Cheers and God bless yous came everywhere from men he despised but had now been forced to risk his life to save and who depended utterly on him, as, he now realized, he did on them.

Gil bowed only slightly but in such a way Cale that could sense some even deeper change towards him.

‘You have won golden opinions. Men, even degenerate men, find it hard not to love someone who has saved them twice.’

‘Well, we were very nearly even.’ Cale got down into the trench and looked back down the hill. He’d chosen the site from horseback some seven feet off the ground and from where he had a clear sight down its entire length. But at ground level it was obvious that there was a bulge in the middle of the field of fire which meant that until you were twenty yards away there was easily enough cover to attack the trench, protected from bolt and arrow. He was amazed at his own stupidity. How was it possible, when he had been so right about everything else, to be so witless about this?

‘They deserve an apology,’ he said to Gil, and for all his loathing of the Purgators he meant it.

‘Keep your mouth shut!’ said Gil, firmly, and then, worried, added an apologetic ‘sir’.

‘They can see my mistake.’

‘They can see you set up the battlefield to keep them alive and you came to their rescue when things went bad. It’s been a long time since this lot were victorious in anything. They won. They’re yours. You made a mistake and you put it right. What else can a general do?’

‘I don’t remember you being so forgiving on the Martyr’s training field.’

‘Train hard, fight easy.’

‘So, all that was just for my benefit?’

‘You’re alive and you won so I’d say it was.’

‘I’ve sent out scouts to make sure the Folk don’t double back. You’ll need to talk to them.’

‘No. You talk.’

‘No, sir.’

And so it was that ten minutes later Cale stood on a rock in the centre of the U and tried to keep the hatred and resentment of them out of his voice. But they didn’t need much. He had risked his life for them and they were back from the dead.

By now, Hooke had walked down from the rise and had listened to the celebrations of the Redeemers and the reluctance of the boy they were begging to adore, all of their longings invested in what to them was the blank slate of Thomas Cale. Finished and in a bad temper Cale told Hooke to inspect the mortars now being brought in from the mountain and give him a report within an hour. Hooke bobbed his head, mocking.

‘I shouldn’t worry about having to be faithful to people you hate. There are many different kinds of loyalty, Mr Cale,’ he said. ‘There’s the loyalty, for example, that the pig farmer owes to the pig.’ And while Cale was silenced by that he turned off down the hill to inspect the waiting mortars.

An hour later Hooke was giving his report. He was holding a large bolt about three feet long in his hand. Around the barrel of the bolt twelve smaller darts had been lashed carefully side by side.

‘The lashings are made of ordinary twine, woven with rubber. You know what rubber is?’

‘No.’

‘I’m not surprised. Condamine tried to demonstrate it to the Pope at Avignon but the Archbishop tried to arrest him for witchcraft because it repelled water unnaturally.’

‘What’s that got to do with the lashings?’

‘Nothing. But rubber also stretches.’ He pulled a length of the twine and it expanded, not by much but enough to make it clear that he was right.

‘When it’s fired from the mortar, a line of cat gut attached to the bolt with wax loosens the rubber twine and it unravels, from what I could see, in about five seconds. The twelve darts simply fall away and follow the main bolt to the earth. There’s more to it, I’d say, but that’s the basic principle.’

‘Can you copy it?’

‘I don’t see a problem.’

‘Then do it.’

‘Except one.’

‘Yes?’

‘Not a question of engineering, a question of theology. The Pope does not care for rubber. There has been no infallible pontifical ban Urbe et Orbe concerning rubber as such but there is great suspicion concerning flexible substances as not being natural. The attempt to arrest Condamine means that in common ecclesiastical law the use of rubber may be prima facie evidence for the practice of witchcraft.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am sure that the position is unclear and I am sure that I wouldn’t want to take the risk. You, however, are better placed. Perhaps Bosco will make some sort of temporary ruling. Although I believe he and Cardinal Parsi are opposed.’

Cale sighed. ‘How do you know so much?’

‘How do you know so little?’

‘If you’re so well informed, Mr Hooke, how is it you needed me to get you out of prison?’

‘Touché, Mr Cale. Nevertheless there are more ways than one to skin a cat.’

‘Yes?’

‘I have been working on an engine close to my heart.’

‘I thought it was engines that got you put in the House of Special Purpose.’

‘Yes.’

‘So if you’re prepared to risk blasphemy, what’s the problem about witchcraft?’

‘Because I am ready to die for this engine but I am not ready to die for rubber string. If I’m going to risk death I want something in return.’

‘Something in return? Bosco told me the prescribed punishment for building blasphemous engines was to have all your skin removed while you were still alive and then dip you in a barrel of vinegar.’

‘The mere adding of years to life is not living.’

‘I’ll try to remember that. But you remember this: I own your very teeth, Mr Hooke.’

‘I am not ungrateful.’

‘Does that mean you’re grateful?’

‘It’s human nature to work in your own interests, no matter how indebted you are to others.’

‘So what does this engine do?’

‘As such it can do nothing. It is an engine I am making in the pursuit of natural philosophy. I wish to uncover the nature of things. But before you berate me, this natural speculation has at least one practical use that spins from pure enquiry. Will you listen?’

‘Do you have friends, Mr Hooke?’

‘None that are powerful enough.’

‘If I think you’re trying to take me for a fool I will discard you.’

‘Fair enough, Mr Cale.’

Cale smiled and gestured for him to sit down. He did so but also bent to draw a circle in the dust.

‘Imagine this circle only two hundred feet in diameter and consisting of a fully enclosed pipe made of hardened brass. It is my belief that all matter is comprised of a single particle, an atom as I have named it, from which all things – earth, air, fire and water – are composed and made different solely by the various ways that nature has combined these atoms. But it follows, if my idea is correct, that only great power can undo the work of nature. I must find a way to make the purest substance on earth and form two balls of that substance and drive them at each other from opposite ends of the circular pipe and with such energy that when they collide they will smash each other into the atoms that alone make up their fabric and the fabric of all things.’

‘How do you know atoms exist if you need this to prove it?’

‘Ah,’ said Hooke. ‘You are not merely a general of precocious gifts. You are a most intelligent boy.’

‘That friend I told you about, he told me that when it comes to flattery you should lay it on with a trowel. Perhaps you know him?’

‘Just because it’s flattery doesn’t mean it is untrue, Mr Cale.’

‘Go on.’

‘I have arrived at the existence of atoms by mathematical speculations.’ Cale looked at him. ‘I can see you are unimpressed. Nevertheless, I have faith and numbers in my favour. But even if I’m wrong it doesn’t matter. The problem I face and have yet to solve is how to bring the two balls of pure substance together with such force that they split the glue of nature. It was the search for a means to propel a heavy object at many times the speed of an arrow that brought me into the House of Special Purpose and so close to a squalid death from which, I freely admit, you alone saved me.’

‘Enough.’

‘I had spent nearly two years experimenting on a written formula for an explosive powder from China. I had only a smidgen of the powder, nearly all of which I was forced to use to satisfy myself that it would work. But the formula was crude – the ingredients and a few clues as to the way they might be combined poor stuff. I tried and failed many times but in the few months before I was arrested I had some success. A powder that made great flashes and smoke and light but with little in the way of force. But it frightened my assistants. They blabbed into some big ears. The Redeemers came back and found the powder and, well, one or two other things not easy to explain to men of that sort.’

‘Such as?’

‘A cadaver. Nothing untoward – it was brought from the executioner. I considered dissecting the dead to be a grey area – religiously speaking.’

‘They didn’t?’

‘It turns out that in religious terms the notion of grey areas is something of a grey area.’

‘So what’s your point?’

‘If I can have your protection in the business of developing the Chinese powder and money too, our hands can wash each other.’

‘How?’

‘If I can fire two balls of a pure substance at one another I can also fire a ball of iron at a man. Think of what such an engine would do. A man carrying such a device, even if he could only use it once, must wound or kill an enemy – or more than one. Think of the terror. He could discard it and fight on like any normal soldier but having killed or wounded the equivalent number of his opponents in the first moments of battle.’

‘You’re nowhere near making such a thing.’

‘I could be. Give me the space and the means.’

‘And how would I know whether you were giving me the run-around?’

‘I know my obligation,’ Hooke replied, offended. ‘But you can see that to achieve my life’s work I must be able to fire a solid object from a metal tube. The search for knowledge and the discovery of a great weapon are virtually one and the same. War is the father of everything. Besides, if you become a great general my life is protected. Correct?’

‘As long as you don’t take me for an idiot. You might take advantage of my ignorance of these things once but I’ll catch you out if you try and play on me – then you’ll be bobbing up and down like an onion in a vinegar jar. Understand?’

‘Your threats are not necessary.’

‘I think they are. Did you watch me fighting on the hill today?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I didn’t have any strong feelings about these men one way or the other. What are the Folk to me? Yet they’re dead, all the same, gone as if they’d never existed. I’ll think about it. Now, I’m tired.’


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