The Last Four Things

16

‘I want to talk to the Maid of Blackbird Leys.’ This was a demand from Cale that expected a refusal and it was a reminder to Bosco that the destructive soul of his God made flesh was also an adolescent. There was satisfaction to be had from refusing to conform to Cale’s expectations.

‘Of course.’

There was a gratifying silence in response.

‘Now.’

‘As you wish.’ Bosco reached over to a pile of a dozen parchments already imprinted with his seal and began writing.

‘I want to see her on my own.’

‘I have no desire to see the Maid of Blackbird Leys again I can assure you.’ More satisfaction.

Bosco made it clear that it would take at least an hour and a half to be cleared through the four levels of security that protected the ten occupants of the inner cells of the House of Special Purpose. He had to wait for fifty minutes at the last level because a messenger had to be sent back to Bosco to return with a letter of confirmation to confirm the letter Cale had brought with him. Forty of those fifty minutes were taken up by Bosco’s third pleasure of the evening as he let the messenger hang about outside his office.

Eventually the messenger returned and the keyholder let Cale first through one great door and then through to the Maid’s cell.

She had been lying down but sat up straight as the cell door opened, afraid as she had every right to be at such an unusual event.

‘Go away,’ Cale said. The keyholder tried to argue. ‘I won’t tell you a second time.’

‘I’ll have to lock you in.’

‘When I call you back.’ Cale paused to make his meaning clear. ‘Don’t.’

The keyholder knew exactly what this apparently mysterious warning meant because keeping Cale waiting when he called to be let out was exactly what he was intending to do.

In a terrible suppressed temper the keyholder locked the door and Cale put the candle he was holding on the table, no chair, that was the only other item of furniture in the cell. The girl, scrawny from dreadful food and too little of it, stared at him with huge brown eyes. They seemed bigger than they probably were because her hair had been shaved off – party because of lice, partly because of malice.

‘I’ve just come to talk to you. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Not from me.’

‘From someone else?’

‘You’re in the House of Special Purpose in the Sanctuary – of course from someone else.’

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Thomas Cale.’

‘I’ve never heard of you.’

‘I can see that you have.’

‘Unless you’re the Thomas Cale sent by God to kill all his enemies.’ Cale did not say anything. ‘God,’ she said, a rebuke, ‘is a mother to his children.’

‘I never had a mother,’ replied Cale. ‘Is that a good thing?’

‘Homo hominis lupus. Is that what you are, Thomas, a wolf to man?’

‘It would be fair to say,’ he replied thoughtfully, ‘that I’ve done my share of wolfy things. But just because rumours have reached you about me even in here doesn’t mean they’re true. You should hear what they say about you.’

‘What do you want?’ she said.

This was a good question because he was not sure. Certainly he was curious about how a woman had managed to anger the Redeemers in so many different ways. But the truth was he had asked Bosco for this visit more to annoy him than to satisfy his own curiosity. He had expected him to say no.

From his pockets – he could now have as many pockets as he liked – he began producing food: a pastie, half a small loaf of bread divided in two for convenience, a large slice of cheese, an apple and some gurr cake, and a bottle of milk. Her eyes, which already seemed to fill her tiny face, grew even wider.

‘I hope it’s not too rich.’

‘Rich?’

‘For your stomach.’

‘I’m not some bog trotter who never had a pie before or lived on rutabagas all my life. I’m a Reeve’s daughter. I can read. I know Latin.’

‘Is that what it was? Isn’t that the sin of pride?’

‘Being able to read?’

‘I meant looking down on the poor – it’s not their fault they never had a pie or some gurr cakes. I never had them much myself until recent times. That’s why I’m taking offence.’

By now he was smiling and she took her rebuke well.

‘May I?’ she said looking with a great covetous yearning at the food.

‘Please.’ She began eating but her intention not to stuff herself was lost in the sheer wonder of the pastie.

‘The food is sickening enough outside this place – it must be beyond belief in this shithole.’

‘Mnugh bwaarh gnuff,’ she agreed and kept on eating. He watched with alarm as the cheese – at least a pound in weight – started to follow the pastie. With some difficulty he took what was left of the cheese out of her fingers and put it on the table. ‘You’ll be sick. Give it a chance to go down.’ He held her by the shoulders and pushed her down onto the bed, giving her a moment or two to recover the equanimity of a Reeve’s daughter – whatever a Reeve was. It was as if the very soul of the food, the milk, the cheese, the anticipation of the honey in the pastry, was breathing new life into her. He waited for almost a minute and it was as if she was a near-dead thing restored to life – she seemed to have grown, her eyes no longer straining against her skull. They began to fill with tears.

‘You’re not the angel of death, you’re the angel of life.’

He did not know what to say to this and so said nothing.

‘How can I help you?’ she asked for all the world like the Reeve’s daughter in her father’s parlour brought out to impress the visitors with her piety and learning.

‘I knew all about the placards you wrote and put on the church doors. That you got other people to do the same. I want to know why.’

She might have looked like a dead thing but she was not a fool.

‘Will they use this against me in court?’

‘You’ve had all the hearings you’re ever going to have.’ He felt sorry for the brutality of what he’d said but it was out before he could stop himself. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, barely audible. ‘Do you know when they’ll kill me?’

This unnerved him. He felt shifty and responsible.

‘No. I don’t know. I don’t think it’ll be soon. From what I know they’ll take you to Chartres first.’

‘Then I’ll see the sky again?’

This unnerved him even more.

‘Yes. For sure. It’s a hundred miles.’

There was a long silence.

‘You want to know why?’ she said at last.

‘Yes.’ Though now he didn’t want to know anything more about her at all.

‘About two years ago I sneaked into the sacristy at the church when the priest was away. I’m a very Nosy Parker – everyone says so.’

He nodded in the gloom but he did not know what a Nosy Parker was. ‘In the reservatory which he was supposed to keep locked I found a strong box he was supposed to lock as well. Inside were the Hanged Redeemer’s four books of good news. These were the words of the Hanged Redeemer as he spoke them himself to his disciples. Have you read the good news?’

‘No’

‘Have you talked to anyone who has?’

He laughed at such a barmy idea. ‘Of course not. What was a parish priest doing with the four books of the Redeemer? Only the Cardinals are supposed to read them and then only once in case they defile them with human understanding. There aren’t more than fifty of them and I can’t see them sharing with a priest from the parish of Bumhole-in-the-Dale. No offence.’

She did seem, if not offended, then certainly startled.

‘It was a copy. I’m sure it was the parish priest’s handwriting – he wasn’t a proper scribe but his script was careful.’

‘So it was done from memory.’ It was clear what he thought of this and it wasn’t much.

‘Don’t you care what it said?’ she asked, clearly astonished.

‘No.’

She would not be put off.

‘It said that we should love our neighbour as we love ourselves, do to others as we would be done by, that if someone strikes us on the left cheek we should turn the right one.’

‘Arse or face?’

‘It’s true!’

‘How do you know?’

‘It was written in the book itself.’

‘In some nutter Redeemer’s handwriting. They burn a dozen a year in the courtyard two hundred yards from here – madmen who’ve had the word of God revealed to them in a vision. The only difference is that your mopus had the sense at least to try and keep his gibberish locked away.’

‘It was the truth. I know it.’

‘That’s what they all say – what else?’

‘Peace and good will to all men,’ she said.

Cale laughed as if this were the most delightfully funny thing he had ever heard. ‘Pull the other one,’ he said, ‘it’s got bells on. “Obey and suffer ... Give in and take your kicking”, that’s more the Redeemer style.’

She looked at him eyes as wide, thought Cale, as that weird creature in the zoo at Memphis, the one with the index finger half the size of its body.

‘Those who hurt children are to be punished. It will be better for them if they had a millstone tied around their neck and be cast into the sea.’

Oddly enough he did not seem to find this so amusing and said nothing for some time. She sat on the edge of the bed looking frail and scrawny and he thought about what was going to happen to her and he felt bad about laughing at the things that had brought her here to this dreadful place.

‘I’ll do what I can to get some food to you.’ It was all the comfort he could imagine. She looked at him and it made him feel horribly old and bad, very bad.

‘Can you help me to get away?’

‘No. I wish I could but I can’t.’

Once outside the House of Special Purpose it was to find that winter had arrived at last and in the great square of the Sanctuary the new-fallen snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even. The choughs coughed in the leafless trees as Cale crunched past and the nail-toothed hunting dogs barked at the cold as if it were a burglar or escapee. Nothing could give the drably monumental buildings of the Sanctuary charm, but covered in snow and lit by the only fitfully clouded moon it had that night a frigid beauty to it – as long as you didn’t have to live there.

Later he asked Bosco if he could send the Maid food.

‘I can’t allow that.’

‘You won’t.’

‘No. I can’t. You’ve never heard that phrase: “A lion at home, a spaniel in the world?”’

‘No.’

‘Well, now you have.’

‘What’s a spaniel?’

‘A dog notorious for its willingness to please. I can explain your presence in her cell – but only once. When it became known – and it would in a matter of days – that I had allowed her to eat more than necessary to keep her alive for the executioner I would be instantly revealed as a heretic. As I would be. Her sins against the Redeemer faith cannot be weighed.’

‘I gave her a promise.’

‘Then more fool you.’

‘And her sins cannot be weighed because she read the copy of the sayings of the Hanged Redeemer and talked about them?’

‘Yes.’

‘You burned the book she found I suppose.’

‘It seemed best.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’ His taunting of Cale almost involved a kind of gaiety.

‘This book of sayings of the Hanged Redeemer. What was it?’

A thoughtful, still teasing grimace from Bosco.

‘It was a book of sayings of the Hanged Redeemer.’

A silence.

‘You’re mocking me.’

‘Yes. But it was still a copy of the sayings of the Hanged Redeemer.’

‘A good copy.’

‘Good enough – a few errors but he was an intelligent man with an excellent memory.’

‘Was?’

‘Now you’re being deliberately slow.’

‘So why was it so sinful what she did?’

Bosco laughed. ‘As you said yourself: the word of God is easily soiled by human understanding. That’s terribly good, by the way. Would you object if I used it in a sermon?’

‘You were listening?’

‘Did you ever suspect otherwise?’

Cale did not reply for a moment. ‘I don’t know what it means, not really. It’s just something I heard a friend of mine say in Memphis. He was joking.’

Bosco was a little disappointed. He had felt rather proud of Cale when he’d heard him say it. It had been, after all, just right. Perhaps the fact that he could not keep his promise to the girl had taken the wind out of his great vanity for a minute. And why not explain, after all?

‘Even for those Redeemers who do not realize that God has decided to begin again, what we would agree on is that when it comes to men and to women there is no end to their garboils and quarrels over everything. There is no statement direct from the mouth of God, no matter how plain and easy to understand, that will not have them cutting each other’s throats over what it truly means. As for me: to publish the word of God to mankind is casting pearls before swine. Either way, what the Maid of Blackbird Leys has done is unforgivable.’

But later that night the snow brought more than an unaccustomed allure to the Sanctuary – it had also driven Redeemer General Guy Van Owen to take refuge there. He had been waiting outside the great gates for ten minutes and was in a foul mood because the guards had refused to let him in. Van Owen had intended to return to his command on the Golan Heights that protected the Eastern Front, a journey that normally meant avoiding the Sanctuary and Bosco by twenty miles. But the snow had made the way impassable and unprepared in his rush to return in such extreme weather he was obliged to take shelter where he could or die. He also hated Bosco because thirty years earlier he thought he had seen him smile dismissively during a sermon he had given on Holy Emulsion. In fact Bosco had merely been bored and was thinking of the hot chocolate that would follow Van Owen’s sermon – a rare treat special to that particular holyday because the saint in question had been boiled alive in sugar.

Finally Bosco turned up in one of the towers that guarded the great gate.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’

‘You know damn well who I am,’ shouted back Van Owen.

‘I only know who you told the Colour Chaplain you were. If you think that’s enough to get you and a hundred men inside the Sanctuary uninspected and in the middle of the night ...’ He did not finish his sentence.

Van Owen swore and shouted at his lighterman to raise his lantern up so that he could remove his hood and show himself.

‘Satisfied?’

‘Get the lighterman to go along the ranks. I want to see the men with you.’

‘Buggeration!’ He turned to the lighterman. ‘Do as he says.’ It took another ten minutes for Bosco to be satisfied. It was certainly the case that he would have done this even had Van Owen been an ally but he had to admit that the delay gave him a mean-spirited pleasure. Eventually Bosco was persuaded and disappeared from Van Owen’s view. He was made to wait, increasingly furious and uncertain, for another two minutes and then the gates slowly swung open – but only partly so that the men and horses were obliged to come in slowly one by one.

Van Owen came in first, looking for a row with Bosco.

‘Where is he?’ he shouted at the Colour Chaplain.

‘The Lord Redeemer has gone to bed, Redeemer. He’ll send for you after mass tomorrow morning. I’ll show you to your room. Your men are to sleep in the main hall which will be locked.’

Fuming, Van Owen was led across the pristine snow unwatched by his men, who were only interested in stabling the horses and getting out of the cold. But one person was observing him carefully from a high window. When he had made his bad-tempered way into the main building Cale lit a beeswax candle, went to the library, unlocked the door with a key he had stolen from Bosco and searched carefully in the stacks for the file on Van Owen and a much thinner testament, ‘Tactics of the Laconic Mercenary’. Then he sat down at Bosco’s desk in Bosco’s padded chair and began to read.

‘I must be back in Golan as soon as possible.’

‘What’s your hurry, Redeemer?’

‘Tell your acolyte to leave if you would.’

‘My acolyte?’ Bosco looked bemused. ‘Oh, this is not my acolyte. This is Thomas Cale.’

Van Owen looked at Cale, his expression a mix of the reluctantly impressed and the dismissive. Cale stared back, blank as you like.

‘If you wish him to stay,’ said Van Owen, ‘by all means.’

‘I do.’

‘Now as time is so short ...’ Van Owen paused but only so that he could deliver his news momentously. ‘There are eight thousand Laconic mercenaries in the pay of the Antagonists marching through the Machair towards the Golan Heights.’

‘And you’re to take command of their defence.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

‘No,’ said Van Owen, clearly delighted at least to have something over Bosco. ‘That is not my intention. The Golan is to be the base for a forward defence of the Heights. I am determined not to allow these creatures to inspire the fear and alarm they are accustomed to. A Redeemer army has nothing to fear of any soldier, particularly not these frightful sodomites. I have eight thousand of my own men waiting on the Golan and by tomorrow they will be joined by another ten thousand.’

‘You have nothing to fear but you intend to outnumber them more than two to one?’

Van Owen smiled, feeling that he had surprised Bosco with his daring.

‘You are not the only one, Bosco, who believes in new tactics. But I intend to be bold without taking unnecessary risks.’

‘Yes,’ said Bosco, as if conceding something. ‘It is bold.’

There was a satisfied but silent acknowledgement from Van Owen. Cale spoke for the first time.

‘It’s mad attacking them on the Machair.’

‘You know it well do you, little boy?’

‘I know that it’s mostly flat – and flat is flat wherever you are. It couldn’t be better ground for the Laconics to fight on. Attack them there and they’ll think all their birthdays have come at once.’ The phrase about birthdays was one he’d heard often in Memphis and liked the way it sounded. As he realized when he said it aloud in Bosco’s rooms it had less of a ring to it when used to someone who didn’t have a birthday. You will remember that a Redeemer had the right to kill an acolyte who did something sufficiently unexpected. Who knows what might have happened if Van Owen had been less astonished at being talked to in such a way or had brought a weapon with him.

Bosco reached across the table and fetched Cale an enormous blow to the face. This time it was Cale’s turn to be stunned by shock into inaction.

‘You must forgive him,’ said Bosco calmly to Van Owen. ‘I have indulged him in the interests of his talents for the glory of our Redeemer and he has grown big-headed and insolent. If you will excuse us you will have every assistance and I will punish him. I am deeply sorry.’

Such humility from his enemy was almost as surprising as the rudeness of Cale, and Van Owen found himself nodding idiotically and then outside in the corridor as Bosco showed him to the door and closed it behind him.

The Redeemer General turned barely breathing to look at Cale. It was not a pleasant sight. The boy had gone white with fury, an expression Bosco had never seen before not just on Cale but on anyone.

‘There is a knife in the drawer just on the left,’ said Bosco. ‘But before you kill me, which I know you can do, just hear me out.’

Cale did not reply or even change his expression but neither did he move.

‘You were about to say something that could have changed the world. Never,’ he said, softly but shaking slightly, ‘never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.’

Cale still did not move – but slowly a sort of colour, a kind of inhuman reddish tinge began to return to his face.

‘I’m going to sit down,’ said Bosco. ‘Over here. Then when I’ve finished you can decide whether or not to kill me.’ For the first time since he had turned back from the door he looked away from Cale and sat down on a wooden bench against the wall. Cale’s eyes lost the yellowy wild-dog look as something human began to seep back into them.

Bosco let out a deep breath and began talking again.

It was twenty-four hours before Cale turned up in the convent to tell Vague Henri what had happened.

‘I came this close,’ said Cale, holding his thumb and forefinger almost together, ‘to killing him.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘My guardian angel, my guardian angel stopped me.’

Vague Henri laughed.

‘Did he give you a name? Because I’d like to thank him, that guardian angel of yours. He saved my neck.’

‘Don’t be too pleased because there’s bad news too.’

‘What?’

‘Bosco made a bargain with Van Owen to take me and the Purgators with him.’

‘Why?’

‘As observers. He told him that me and the Purgators however successful in the veldt had a lot to learn from a soldier like Van Owen. That and a bribe.’

‘A bribe?’ Vague Henri was wide-eyed at this. Perhaps there’s a point beyond which the human heart contains so much loathing it cannot be added to. That was certainly what it seemed like to Vague Henri when he thought about the Redeemers. But he was shocked almost by the idea of one of them accepting a bribe.

‘Bosco offered him,’ said Cale, ‘the preserved foot of St Barnabus. Van Owen has a personal devotion to St Barnabus. You know that stuff that the cats in Memphis go off their tracks for – he was just like that.’ Cale could not bring himself to tell Vague Henri that he also had to apologize to Van Owen. It was necessary but heart-scalding.

You must eat it up, Bosco had said. You will shortly watch him fail and that will make up for it.

Are you sure he’ll fail?

No.

‘What’s the bad news?’ said Vague Henri.

‘You’re going to come with me.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Because I asked for you.’

‘What the bloody hell did you do that for?’

‘Because I need you with me.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘You should think better of yourself.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the way I think about myself.’

‘I need someone to listen to my ideas. Who else can I talk to?’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘I’ll bet you don’t. I’ll bet you’d rather stay here getting your end away with a shoal of beezles who think the sun shines out of your backside – but you can’t. Time to wake up.’

‘All right!’ shouted Vague Henri. ‘All right! All right! All right!’ He breathed out like a bad-tempered horse and swore. ‘When?’

‘Tomorrow as he purposes.’

‘Why is Bosco letting me go?’

‘Because he thinks we won’t, either of us, leave the girls in the lurch.’

‘And will we?’

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

Vague Henri did not reply directly.

‘At least it explains why he let us enjoy the sins of the flesh.’

‘It explains why he let you enjoy them. He let me in there because you can’t corrupt the Wrath of God.’

‘And is that what you are?’

‘What do you think?’

‘You keep asking me that.’

‘Because I want to know. I value your opinion – I told you.’ There was a pause. ‘Talking of which, what do you think about taking my acolyte, Model, into the convent before we go?’

‘Why?’

‘It would be a kindness. Who knows what will happen to us? He might never get a chance to see a woman.’

Vague Henri looked at him, furious now.

‘They’re not animals in the Memphis Zoo. They don’t belong to you so you can lend them out to your pals.’

‘All right, keep you hair on. I don’t remember you objecting when it was your turn.’

‘They’re not turns.’

‘Have it your own way. Good God! It was just an idea.’

Vague Henri did not reply.

The next day, two hours into the journey to the Golan Heights, Vague Henri was cold, miserable and deeply, deeply missing the lovely girls he’d left behind, nearly all of them in tears except for his favourite Vincenza who kissed him on both cheeks and then lightly on the lips. He shivered, and not from the cold, as he remembered what she had whispered in his ears between these soft kisses. She, wisest of the girls by far, was signalling him out as hers.

‘Come back to me and I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.’

He missed them horribly and who can blame him. If there was a heaven how could it be better than life in the convent? Other, of course, than not being surrounded by hell. And that was the problem of problems – he was, he knew, willing to go through hell to get back to them but he was not able to. There was only one person with the skill required, the menace and the violence and the rage.

It was another six days before they made it to the Golan. The Golan is a great ridge about forty miles long and the same distance from the Pope’s formal palace in the holy city of Chartres whose right flank it protected. The right side of the Golan led to the eastern Macmurdos, mountains impassable to any army before they descended two hundred miles later into a pass, Buford’s Gap, disputed by both the Laconics and the neutral Swiss. This was the one weakness in the natural defences of the Redeemers on the east of the Golan. If the Laconics did agree to join the Antagonists this gap was the place through which they would attack. To the left of the Golan, Chartres and the vast Redeemer territories behind it were protected by the Fronts – a line of trenches sometimes ten deep and stretching the five hundred miles to the next natural defence: the Weddell Sea. Time out of mind the Antagonists had been pinned behind these great defences, natural and manmade. Only the fortune in silver discovered at Argentum would be enough to persuade the Laconics to put an entire army in the field because it was their policy never to hire out more than three hundred soldiers at once to protect their greatest resource from disaster. They also had to be bribed to risk war with the Swiss over ownership of Buford’s Gap, otherwise a place of no great strategic importance to either side.

It was no summer progress for the Laconics to the Golan. Normally a place of mild winters which made a campaign at such an unusual time worth contemplating if the money was right, a cold coming they had of it, just the worst winter in living memory. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days bitter, the nights unbearable, Bosco reassured Van Owen his delay at the Sanctuary would not matter because however bad the weather was on Shotover Scarp it would be worse for the Laconics trying to make their way across the Machair. On the rare occasions when it snowed there the winds moving over its wide and open spaces allowed the formation of huge drifts. The Laconics could take more adversity than any man but they could not fly so they were stuck where they were with their black soup and miserable Helots who died of the cold by the dozen.

Once they arrived on the Golan, Cale and Vague Henri were run ragged by Van Owen, who put them to every unpleasant or pointless detail he could find for them, not difficult when moving around in the freezing winds was a torture even in performance of the simplest task. Van Owen kept the Purgators in the worst and coldest quarters and supplied them as poorly as he was able.

‘Who are those people?’ he asked Cale of the aloof Purgators. ‘I don’t like the look of them. There’s something not right here.’

Despite the fact that he knew that Bosco was right and that giving anything away to someone who wished you ill was the mark of childishness, he simply could not stop himself.

‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, Redeemer, no straight thing was ever made.’ It was perhaps the most famous saying of St Barnabus, he of the preserved foot. And the especial devotion of Van Owen.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘No, Redeemer.’

‘So I ask you again. Who are these people?’

Another famous saying of St Barnabus was: a truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent. Cale knew this because he had looked up a Life of the saint in the library the night before they had left the Sanctuary. He was impressed by the saying about the truth because he thought St Barnabus had well said something he had learnt himself about telling lies when he was still only a small boy.

‘They are men who have transgressed but are atoning by especial bravery for their errors. More I have sworn on the foot of St Barnabus not to say.’

Had Van Owen been used to being cheeked by acolytes he might more easily have realized he was being mocked. It was an error too far, thought Cale, and even as he said it he despised his own stupidity. God knows what might have happened if Van Owen had been familiar with the drollery of cocky young boys. Van Owen was not sure what he thought about the unlikeable boy in front of him (other than that he did not like him). Boy saints were not unknown although he himself had never met one. Usually they were saints because they had died proving their holiness and were therefore not able to become a nuisance. There had not been a boy warrior particularly recognized as chosen by God for three hundred years -St Johan – and he had conveniently died of smallpox a few years after he had defeated the Cenci at St Albans. A chosen boy who had lovely visions of the Redeemer’s mother and a way with incomprehensible prophecies that might be usefully interpreted by wiser heads was one thing – a tergiversating sheep in wolf’s clothing was something else again, particulary one who was in Bosco’s pocket. The problem for Van Owen was that he was more than a self-serving, ambitious sly-boots (which he most definitely was); he was also a pious believer in the Hanged Redeemer. What if the odious twerp in front of him was not just some swashbuckling Mohawk with a talent for butchery but was blessed by God? Making a mistake in this matter was about more than politics; it might involve his immortal soul.

The unusually extreme weather that had brought the snow changed as quickly as it arrived. The knife-cold winds from the north were replaced by the usual warmer winds from the east that brought with them a thaw which melted the snow in less than three days. The earth of the Machair was light and peaty and the vugs and follicles of the catchiform rocks on which it lies drained the meltwater as easily as if it were an unplugged bath in one of the palazzos in Memphis.

Busy now with his preparations, Van Owen had no time to think about Cale and as soon as Cale could he dragged Vague Henri with him in search of extra food for the Purgators.

‘Let them starve,’ said Vague Henri. ‘Let them freeze. I hope they catch the hog cholera so their spines bend over sideways and their rotting left ear falls into their right-hand pocket.’

‘Pull yourself together, Vague Henri. Sooner or later your life and, more to the point, my life are going to depend on them.’

It was on one of these useless tasks, the unnecessary guard duty to a wagon train bringing fuel from the Sluff coalfields some ten miles to the south of the Golan, that a singular event took place. Forced on their return to take a byway back to the Golan because of a small avalanche that had closed the main road, they found themselves skirting the dreary smelting sheds that relied on the coalfields for the heat in the manufacture of iron and the much rarer steel, so expensive and difficult to make that it was rarely used by the Redeemers. As they came over a low hill both saw the great pile beneath at almost the same moment. They reined their horses and stared down at the great stack beneath them, silent, shocked, horrified. Thrown together in a huge heap, wind-whipped and only partly covered in snow was the armour of the Materazzi from the great disaster at Silbury Hill. From a distance it looked like a vast pile of shells from some human-shaped creature of the sea, empty and discarded like the crab and lobster shells scooped out and abandoned beside the seafood stalls of Memphis Bay. Within five minutes they were at the gates of the storage dump where two old men were standing at a brazier keeping themselves warm while they watched half a dozen men loading a wagon with bits and pieces from the great mound of armour in front of them.

‘What’s going on?’

The oldest man looked at him wondering whether the boy Redeemer was worth being insolent to. He took a middle line.

‘These are the barbicans from that victory over the Mazzi. Where are they now in all their pride?’ Then he added piously, ‘Come to dust.’

‘Where are they taking them?’

‘To be melted down. Over there. In the great smelter. Nowt workin’ now though. Not ’nuff coal, d’ysee, with this weather the way it is.’

The men at the wagon were working quickly, not out of zeal but to try and keep warm. One of them was singing as he worked, a blasphemous mixture of one of the Redeemers’ most revered hymns and a pub song about Barnacle Bill.

‘OOOOH Death and Judgement and Heaven and Hell

Are the last four things on which we dwell

I’d rather dwell on Marie the whore

And what she does with a cucumbore!’

The others, frozen, carried on clearly not listening, pulling apart the armour section by section, cutting the leather straps where they’d not rotted then, throwing the lighter bits and pieces onto the wagon – gauntlets clanged, casques and back plates clattered, armlets and cubiteries pinged and set up a clank and a racket as they rattled over each other as they filled the wagon up. One of the men noticed Cale and Vague Henri. ‘Shut up, Cob!’ The singer stopped instantly, his good humour replaced magically by alert hostility.

Cale stood and watched Vague Henri walk over to the pile.

‘It’s a dollar if you want to look, pal,’ said one of the men.

‘Shut your gob,’ said Vague Henri pleasantly.

‘You’se not allowed here.’

‘And now it’ll be two dollars,’ said the singer.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I’ll give you what you deserve.’

Cale walked over to the men and gave them a dollar wordless. What had put such a bend in Vague Henri?

‘We agreed on two.’

‘Don’t push your luck.’

He turned his back on the men who seemed to agree that indeed pushing their luck was not a good idea. Cale watched as Vague Henri walked among the strewn armour along the bottom of the great pile and bent down to pick up a half-crushed helmet. It had an enamel badge above the nosepiece just slightly bigger than a man’s thumb – a red and black chequerboard and three blue stars.

‘This is Carmella Materazzi’s coat of arms.’ He nodded over to another helmet exactly the same – but even under the grime one that was clearly pretty new. ‘And that must be his son’s. I’d heard they were both killed but no one knew for sure. Kleist stole the kid’s wallet then got ten dollars when he gave it back and said he’d found it in the Sally Gardens.’ He placed the first helmet carefully on the ground and walked right to the edge of the pile and placed a foot high up as if he were going to climb. With a great heave he pulled out another helmet, this one with a filthily bedraggled plume, raggedy, all colour drained by exposure to the hard winter. ‘I thought I recognized it. This,’ he said, holding the helmet out to Cale, ‘belonged to that shit-bag Lascelles. He clipped me on the ear once for getting in his way.’

‘Well, that’ll teach him,’

Vague Henri laughed. ‘You’re right. Henri’s curse on everyone who does me a bad turn. Let’s hope he suffered.’ He opened and shut the visor the way he had seen the puppeteers in the Memphis market do. ‘Where are your jibes now, mate?’

He looked around the great heap. When all was said and done, Memphis had been a great joy for him. ‘Seems a pity,’ he said, at last, ‘not to make some use of this. God there’s a fortune here.’

The men carefully pretending not to listen could not contain themselves at this.

‘How much, mister?’

‘Ten thousand dollars? Fifteen?’

‘You lie.’

Both Cale and Vague Henri laughed aloud at this.

‘Sorry, mister. But that’s not possible.’

‘Suit yourself. But look at the state of it. Besides there’s hardly anyone left alive could wear this stuff. It takes years to learn to move in their integuments. Much good it did them anyway. Armour always comes with a price,’ replied Cale.

‘Still,’ said Vague Henri, ‘it’s mad to let it all be melted down.’

‘Why? It’ll be dark in three hours. We better go.’

As they walked away one of the men called out after them.

‘Where would we take it, mister? Just tell us and we’ll remember you in our prayers.’

In the great storeroom of Vittles of the Blessed Honoratus on the back slopes of the Golan, Cale ordered two sides of beef with a requisition stolen from Van Owen’s battle quarters and with his quartermaster’s forged signature.

‘What if he works out it was you?’

‘With any luck he’ll be dead before he does.’

‘What if he wins – or even if he lives?’

‘I don’t think he can do it – stop them, I mean.’

‘That’s what we thought at Silbury Hill.’

As you can imagine, it is no easy thing to bring two carcasses into a camp and not call attention to yourselves – but there was so much of the hive about the place and they had waited till near dark and gone around the long way that the food, along with the rutabagas for all, was delivered safely and received by the Purgators with awestruck gratitude. It was roasting and boiling in a minute. Cale had also taken a leaf out of Bosco’s book and put a cutting he had made from the wooden foundations of Van Owen’s battle quarters into a small brass box he had found on a body in the veldt and liked the look of. He claimed to the fuelbrother that it was a sliver of the true gallows on which the Hanged Redeemer had been sacrificed. In exchange he got fourteen sacks of coal and a fletch of wood. Cale and Vague Henri watched the blissful Purgators eat and warm themselves in front of the fires as if they were spoiled children.

‘Does your heart good,’ said Cale, smiling. But the trouble was that Vague Henri couldn’t help himself, despite everything in his heart screaming the opposite. The trouble was it did do his heart good to see men whose brothers in faith had bullied and harassed him all his life. Now as they took such deep pleasure in being warm and well fed, warmth and food that he had provided and for which they were so pathetically grateful, he started to feel some connection with them as if a line were being drawn between them binding them together. He did not want this. ‘How can I feel sorry for them?’ he whispered to Cale miserably as the great but badly made hut in which they sat hummed with light and pleasure and deep content that only warm feet and a full stomach can provide. Cale looked at him.

‘Careful with your tears – you might drown.’

The next morning both of them were ready to leave before dawn. As the sky began to lighten they were on their mounts and away from the Golan camp, now beginning to stretch like a great dog as the final day of preparations got cracking.

Used to seeing the two going in and out and with Cale much admired by reputation for his victories on the veldt, the guards nodded them through and out onto the heights leading down to the flat Machair. The sound of bells calling the Redeemers to mass began, the pi-dogs barking as the two of them picked their way downwards. In half an hour they were moving quickly but watchfully over the easy riding plain. Here and there were stubborn areas of snow but smaller and fewer as they moved away from the heights.

‘Still,’ said Vague Henri, as they stopped for a few minutes to rest the horses, ‘I don’t care how hard the Laconics are. Even if it’s warm enough now, six nights out in the open in cold like that – bound to put a crimp in your swagger.’

‘I suppose,’ replied Cale. With the horses rested they remounted and walked them on slowly. If they came across Laconic cavalry doing some scouting themselves they wanted the animals to be rested. What Cale wanted to get a sense of was the terrain, how the melt had affected the ground, if there were choke points to defend or attack. Muddy ground, only to be expected, would be a disadvantage and perhaps a big one for the Laconics who, whatever their other skills, always tried to close on their enemies and use their ability to fight in powerful blocks ten deep and overpower their opponents with their strength, ferocity and unique ability to move these blocks around as if they were dancers in a troupe rather than soldiers.

‘They do a lot of dancing, so it says in the testaments.’

‘When they’re not taking it up the chuff.’

‘You never know, according to the testaments they have these sorts of ceremonies – I mean in public – where they do all that Gomorrah business in a ritual like on holydays.’

‘You liar!’

‘I’m not saying it’s true, I’m just telling you what it said.’

‘Better not get caught then.’

‘Better not. Anyway, you’ll be all right.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You’re too ugly.’

‘That’s not what the girls at the Sanctuary say.’

‘What’s that, then?’

‘They say I’m gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.’

Laughing they rode on in silence for nearly ten minutes.

‘Do you see him?’

‘Yes. He’s not exactly taking much trouble to stay hid.’

For several minutes a horseman had been tracking them from a couple of hundred yards away having emerged from behind a rise, a shallow one, but high enough to have hidden him if he’d wanted not to be seen.

There was a loud click! as Vague Henri started to ratchet back the light crossbow that had been hanging from his saddle in such a way that the rider could not see that he was arming himself.

‘Let’s turn back.’

Cale nodded and they began easing the horses around. The rider stopped for a moment and then began to follow.

‘If he gets any closer to you, reload time – send one past him.’

‘Why don’t I just put one in him?’

‘What for? Just warn him off.’

Vague Henri raised the bow, steadied and fired a warning. The horse kicked as the bolt shot past, closer than Vague Henri had intended. But, after all, he was on a horse himself and out of practice. The two boys stopped and watched.

‘I say,’ shouted the Laconic scout. ‘Would you mind if I had a word?’

Cale stopped and turned his horse as Vague Henri finished reloading.

‘You set?’ he said.

‘What are you doing? This isn’t the time for a little chat.’

‘I don’t agree. We might not get another chance.’

‘Come forward!’ shouted Cale. ‘And keep your hands where we can see them. My friend here didn’t miss the last time and he won’t miss this time either.’

‘My word of honour,’ shouted the rider, laughing.

‘Do Sodomites have any honour?’ asked Vague Henri.

‘Why are you asking me?’

‘Come forward. Slowly,’ shouted Cale. ‘Try anything and you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.’

The rider moved forwards as he was told until he was about ten yards away.

‘That’ll do.’

The rider stopped. ‘Lovely morning,’ he said. ‘Makes you glad to be alive.’

‘Which you won’t be,’ said Vague Henri, ‘if you’ve got any little friends planning to join us. I can put one in you and we can be back to our patrol before you hit the ground.’

‘There’s no need for all that, my dear,’ said the young man, clean-shaven and with elaborately beaded hair.

‘What do you want?’ said Cale.

‘I thought we might talk.’

‘About?’

‘You’re Redeemers, aren’t you?’

‘Might be. What’s it to you?’

‘Forgive me for saying so but aren’t you a bit young to be out and about when there’s going to be so much blood and screaming.’

‘I thought Laconics were supposed to be brief of speech,’ said Cale.

‘They are, that’s true, usually. But it would be a sad world, wouldn’t it, if we were all the same?’

‘Are you Krypteia?’

The man’s eyelashes flicked and he moved his head to one side. He smiled.

‘Might be. You’re very well informed, if I may say so.’

Cale took a quick look behind and to either side to check what might be about and knowing that Vague Henri had his mark fixed on the man’s chest.

‘Does your friend with the crossbow have a steady nerve?’

‘I can’t say that he does, to be honest,’ replied Cale. ‘So I’d stay still if I were you. I asked you already – what do you want?’

‘I just thought we might have a chat.’

‘Is that what they’re calling it now?’ asked Vague Henri.

‘I’m not sure I understand you,’ replied the young man although he clearly knew mockery when he heard it.

‘I wouldn’t distract him, if I were you,’ said Cale, ‘not while he’s got that thing pointed at your chest.’ The young man looked at Cale, amused and not at all nervous.

‘Your name, young man?’

‘You first.’

‘Robert Fanshawe.’ He dropped his head, all the while keeping his eyes on Vague Henri. ‘Yours to the lowest pit of hell.’

‘Dominic Savio,’ said Cale his return nod unnoticeable to all but an eagle blessed with particularly sharp sight. ‘And that’s where you’re going if you do anything my friend here doesn’t like. I’m always going on at him about his jumpiness, by the way.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Dominic Savio.’

‘The pleasure’s all yours.’

But then something odd, a flicker of something in Fanshawe’s eyes. Cale’s horse, restless for some reason, had begun drifting to one side. He took one more step.

‘Steady!’ But Cale was no great horseman and the horse moved anyway. The hoof seemed to sink impossibly into the heather mix of sedge and wild grass and then the ground itself rose up as if it were some creature looking for its prey. Screaming with terror and off balance the horse reared up throwing Cale with a hefty thud back onto the ground, winding him so badly he just lay on his back groaning. Then a blur of movement as a man rolled out from under the sedge and grabbed the stunned Cale, turned him over on top of himself as a shield and had a knife at his throat.

‘Easy! Easy!’ shouted Fanshawe at Vague Henri, who, startled as much by the event as the speed of it, had not fired. This was as well: had he done so it would have certainly killed Fanshawe but also Cale.

‘Easy! Easy!’ said Fanshawe again. ‘We can all live through this. Let me explain.’

Vague Henri, shaking, said, ‘Go on.’

‘I’d just left my man here under that,’ he looked over at the six-by-four sheet of cloth covered in sedge and grass stitched to the surface, ‘when I saw you heading straight for him. Thought I’d track you to make sure you went by – but you got too close. By then I’d realized you weren’t old enough to be soldiers. Thought I’d lead you away. Wrong again, eh?’ He smiled, hoping to calm Vague Henri down. He looked, thought Fanshawe, a dangerous combination: jumpy but knew what he was doing.

‘We can all walk away from this,’ repeated Fanshawe. ‘Just lower the crossbow and my friend here will let Dominic go.’

‘You first,’ said Cale. ‘I told you.’

‘I’ll cut this little boy’s throat and then come for you!’ said the man holding Cale.

‘Let’s all calm down. Now I’m going to ask my chum here to bring Dominic to his feet and then we can go from there. All right?’

Vague Henri nodded.

‘Going to count to three. One, two, three.’

With that the man holding Cale pulled him upwards till they were both standing – the knife at his throat never giving a smidgeon or a jot.

‘Jolly good,’ said Fanshawe. ‘We’re all getting along famously.’

‘Now what?’ said Vague Henri.

‘Tricky, I admit. What if we ...’ With that Cale raised his right foot, scraped it down the shin of the man holding him while driving his elbow into his ribs and grabbing the man’s wrist and twisting with all his strength. The man’s shout was smothered by the air leaving his lungs. Whippet quick, Cale squirmed away, cracked his elbow again to the forearm of the man and had the knife from his fingers. To Cale’s astonishment the man could still move. He blocked the blow Cale struck with the knife and lashing out with his fist caught Cale on the side of his head. With a cry of pain, Cale stepped back to give himself room for another blow. As he lashed at his chest the man dodged once, twice and then kicked out at Cale’s left shin, knocking one foot off the ground so that he fell to one knee. Another hefty blow from the man, which had it landed would have smashed every tooth in Cale’s head, but he dodged back, his knuckles taking him at the lowest point of his chin and glancing away. Cale was on both feet now as his opponent overbalanced at the missed strike and scrambled away. They stood, Cale with the knife and the advantage, staring at each other and waiting for a chance to strike.

‘Stop! We can stop here! Tell him!’ shouted Fanshawe to Vague Henri. ‘We can all go free. Nobody needs to die here.’

‘It’s all one to me,’ said the man, glaring at Cale.

‘Not me, it isn’t,’ shouted Fanshawe. ‘Do as you’re bloody well told and back away. Do it or by God I’ll come over and help him.’

Trained to obedience even more than to slaughter, slowly the man eased back step by step as wary as you like.

‘Congratulations. Every one of us. Get up behind me, Mawson.’ He looked over at Vague Henri. ‘May I, dear boy?’

‘I’m not your dear boy.’

Fanshawe reached for the reins and eased his horse over to Mawson, who was still looking at Cale as if he were wondering whether to eat his heart first or his liver.

‘Get on behind me, Mawson.’

‘My knife,’ said Mawson. Fanshawe sighed and looked at Cale with a weary what-can-you-do-with-them look.

Cale stood back then raised the knife and threw it with considerable force some forty yards in the direction he wanted them to take.

‘I’m obliged,’ said Fanshawe. Without an order Mawson, the blank expression of a much-experienced killer now absent, picked up his sedge blanket and leapt up behind Fanshawe as easily and gracefully as if he had pulled out a chair to sit down to his dinner. He looked much younger now.

‘Till we meet again, boys,’ said Fanshawe. With that he turned his horse and, pausing only to let Mawson pick up his knife, they were soon five hundred yards away and behind the rise he had emerged from only ten minutes before.

‘I don’t think,’ said Vague Henri, ‘I’m cut out for this stuff.’

‘You were absolutely gorgeous,’ said Cale. With that he went off to get his horse and they beat it back to the Golan as quickly as possible.

Fanshawe and Mawson, however, were not much further away than when the boys had seen them disappear behind the rise. They had found a small gulley and having spread the grass and sedge blanket beneath them were indulging themselves energetically in Laconic beastliness.

*

It was the night before the Battle of Eight Martyrs, so called because over the last six hundred years this number of Redeemers had given their lives for the faith in or around what was to be the battlefield. It was by no means a matter of luck that there should be a place of conflict already consecrated by the blood of martyrs. So hated were the Redeemers by their many adversaries that over hundreds of years there remained few places where one or more of them had not been hanged, decapitated, broken, dismembered, strangled, garrotted or crucified. There was an embarrassment of riches for the Redeemers when it came to naming battlefields after martyred saints. Indeed there was barely a village fist-fight that could not have been named after one.

Cale had not been asked to attend the final instructions for battle but neither had he been excluded. Lurking behind Van Owen’s battle shack with Vague Henri and waiting for a group to form at the door so he could slip inside unnoticed, Cale whispered to Vague Henri, ‘What have I got to do?’

‘Keep your big mouth shut.’

‘Right.’

Then five or six Redeemer subalts arrived and Cale followed them in, close behind, and moved to the darkest and most densely packed corner of the large room, which in any case was only well-lit where the large plan of the battle hung from the wall.

To Cale’s great disappointment Van Owen outlined nothing spectacularly stupid in the way of tactics. Neither was there anything interesting beyond the use of much heavier armour for the front rank of the Redeemers who would take the initial brunt of contact with the Laconics. Cale had to admit that given the little that Van Owen knew about Laconic field tactics – he did not, of course, have access to the testaments in Bosco’s library – it was hard to criticize any of his decisions. His only slight satisfaction was to sneer at the small size of Van Owen’s reserves. Given the two-to-one advantage, he thought Van Owen should have kept back a much bigger share of his army to give him the option to deal with anything unexpected.

‘On the other hand,’ said Vague Henri, after Cale had slipped out unobserved in the general rush to leave and prepare for the next day, ‘suppose he weakens his first attack by not using his better numbers. Keeping too big a reserve is like dividing your forces. I’m not sure I’d do much different in his place.’

‘Nobody asked you.’

‘You did as it happens.’

‘Well, now I’m sorry and I’ll pray to God for forgiveness.’

‘Do you? Still pray, I mean.’

Cale did not reply.

‘Well?’

‘Yes, I still pray.’ There was a pause. ‘I pray for deliverance from evil and having to look at your ugly face all day long.’

‘Me? I’m gorgeous. You said so yourself.’

When they got back to the Purgators’ hut there was a message from one of Van Owen’s adjutants: Cale and his men were to observe the battle if they wished but were instructed to stay away from either the command centre or the battlefield. On no account were they to intervene in any way whatsoever.

This was excellent news. Cale’s one fear was that Van Owen would include him in something dangerous out of spite. It was clear that in the event of victory or defeat he did not want to risk Cale making a further name for himself. Cale wrote back repeating the order and went cheerfully to sleep.

He gave most of the Purgators a lie-in the next day, something by which they were always delighted, but left at dawn with Vague Henri and ten men. At the opening of the gates the small band moved through the army as it stirred itself for the day’s action. They made their way around in front of the Field of Eight Martyrs mostly ignored by men with too much else on their mind and rode away to the north and to a small bluff with a good sight of the battlefield they had marked out before the encounter with Fanshawe. Cale had his men check their surrounds for Laconic outposts put in place since they were last there and confirmed for himself two routes of escape in case things went wrong. Then they climbed the bluff and waited in silence for the day to begin. Already the Laconics were loosely gathered at their end of the plain, though not in any disciplined formation but like a crowd at an unusually large county fair watching as the Redeemers deployed.

First of all came the Black Cordelias, seven thousand strong, armour covered in purple and the black from which they got their name. Even from a couple of miles away on the bluff the wind brought snatches of a hymn. The boys, laughing, began mockingly to sing along.

‘Remember man as you pass by

As you are now, so once was I

As I am now, so you must be

Prepare for death and follow me

Today me, tomorrow you

I am dust and you are too

Hideous the truth of Death

Dreadful is the final breath.’

The two boys grew nearly hysterical with joy – observing their enemies, whatever the outcome, going to their deaths and they watching safe and sound. Vague Henri remembered a song the quads in Arbell Swan-Neck’s palazzo used to sing. It took a moment to get the tune back and he had forgotten the first few lines.

‘Oh! Death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling

Oh! Grave thy victoreee?

The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling

For you but not for meee!’

The wind must have changed slightly as the hymns faded in and out of hearing but impressively dominating their formation was the giant censer the size of a cathedral bell the Black Cordelias always took into battle as it swung back and forth, incense blooming upwards in a great pillar of smoke.

Still the Laconics drifted about in front of their camp like a crowd watching a vaguely interesting pageant. Now the fourth army of the Golan, known as the Hierophants, with its five Sodalities, ten thousand in all: the slaves of the Immaculate Heart, the Poor Simons of Perpetual Adoration, the Norbetines, the forbidding Oblates of Abasement and then, grimmest of all, the Brotherhood of Mercy. For the next hour the Redeemer army deployed: cloth of gold, ensigns of red, banners of purple, the petioles of the confessors, the pink fronds of the medical friars not allowed to touch the dying until they called out the unctions in extremis. All of it now to the sound of bagpipes loud enough to defy the everchanging wind and which Van Owen, watching from the promontory sticking out of the Golan, would signal once the battle started and the hymns stopped to act as his voice, each Sodality having its own particular sound and its own instructions to advance, turn or retreat.

Now when the Redeemers were half drawn up in line to attack, the Laconic soldiers began to move but still with the same lack of intensity with which they previously seemed to watch. But within less than three minutes they formed into a loose series of ragged squares as if from nowhere. But then it was as if they had lost interest again, the groups remained clear enough but still without the precise and martial discipline of formal rank and file. Now they watched again as the Redeemer second army finished its own formation – a continuing line of Black Cordelias to the front and the others formed behind six deep, the most lightly armoured and most mobile to the rear. In a tight group half a mile back stood a thousand reserves. Then with a trumpet blast the six pipers cut short their skirling music, the sound drifting in the wind like the last breath of a great and wounded animal.

For a minute there was nearly silence, only the odd shout of a sergeant or the snort of a horse from the five hundred cavalry behind the right flank of the Redeemers.

In front of the Laconics there was movement as eight men with two flags each ran out and to each side in front of their still loosely grouped army.

Once they had dispersed they raised the flags and began to signal. Like a lazy horse midstream convulsed by the touch of a shocking eel, the army of Laconics flexed to life – six flabby squares hardened to edges sharp as a builder’s float. A flash again of flags and then they began to march towards the Redeemers, nearly a mile below; perfect in step and rhyme like any dance troupe or crew of mimes.

Then again the flags. The six squares stopped as one. A beat and then the flags again. A shout, one voice, eight thousand men. Then a great clash of sword on shields, the inward face then quickly turned to their enemies. A vast great flash of colour, yellow and red. Each line headed in turn to left and right so each square became a line spreading across the field, moving from thirty deep to ten. Another wave of the flags and with another shout, another turning in and out of the shields, the six lines moved together into a wall a thousand yards across and six men deep. From Van Owen’s watch on the Golan Heights the trumpets bellowed and a cry went up from every priest.

‘DEATH! JUDGEMENT! HEAVEN! HELL!

THE LAST FOUR THINGS ON WHICH WE DWELL!’

Even from the safety of their bluff and wrapped in the neutral malice that Cale and Vague Henri bore both sides an unpleasant thrill of fear ran from the nape of their necks and down their spines. Vague Henri defied the power of this hideous prayer by singing softly to Cale under his breath:

‘I’d rather dwell on Marie the whore

And what she does with a cucumbore!’

The great army of the Redeemers lurched forward like a bull freeing itself at last from a riverbank of mud. Then astonishment from Cale and Vague Henri. The Laconic mercenaries began to run towards their enemy as if desperate and overjoyed to die. This was no jog or trot but a burst of speed that must be fatal to the order and power of their massy wall that relied on thousands acting together as a single will.

As the two great armies spread towards each other like a stain the small animals of the Machair were squeezed into the space between. First and only to escape are the pheasants, stupid almost to the last, they flap and cackle into the air just as the Laconic line is about to trample them. The hares now run for the cover they will never find darting backwards and forwards between the Laconic rush and the dead still patience of the Redeemers. The fox that was hunting them also makes a run for it, first one way then the other, terrified, and then is swallowed up, engulfed like the animals outside the ark in Noah’s flood.

This sudden Laconic rush threw the centenars of the Redeemer archers on the left and right. Already the sudden burst of speed down the slight incline to the Redeemer line had caught them out. Seconds of delay made their confusion worse – the steady advance was all they had ever seen. By the time the centenars had heard the order for the release from a furious Van Owen, the chance for two flights of arrows had been lost. Then they recovered, shot, and the two boys watched as the dreadful sharps poured through the air towards the charging men in red. But speed like this had brought the Laconics through the arc so that only those in the rear were hit and many arrows fell uselessly behind.

Now so close the Redeemer archers were forced to shoot flat onto the advancing Laconics and straight into the protection of their shields. Another shock: the mercenaries had themselves hired men to do their fighting for them. Poor archers themselves and having disdained for too long the effeminacy of fighting at a distance, they had brought four hundred hired archers from Little Italy lagging just behind the Laconics on the right, who had taken the brunt of the arrows that had missed the bulk of advancing Laconics. A hundred and fifty were already dead, the others stalled – but now as the Redeemer archers were let loose to fire at will the Italians were ignored and now given time to set themselves up, they poured their fire at the Redeemer archers in their turn.

Havoc. Not expecting archers and little used to taking what they were used to handing out, the Redeemer bowmen were thrown into confusion by a lashing of arrows that landed almost one for one into their massed ranks. The centenars and sergeants shouting above the screams of the wounded and the dying. ‘HEAD DOWN! HEAD DOWN! HEAD DOWN! HEAD DOWN!’ ‘Take care!’ cries out another. ‘Look out! OVER THERE! OVER THERE!’ One Redeemer takes an arrow in the chest but it’s the living man next to him who flinches like a horse that’s felt an unexpected lash. Men duck and bend away at nothing – others just stand and take an arrow in the stomach or the face as if they had been taken completely by surprise. The archers who had so devastated the Materazzi cavalry less than a year before were reduced to lookers-on as the Laconics, barely touched by their arrows, slammed as if with a stepping punch into the ranks of the Black Cordelias. The noise of bigger on smaller shields was more of an ugly clattering bang than a majestic crash. But only the Redeemers in all the world could have taken such armoured strength at such a speed and held. Some gave way along the line, Redeemer and Laconic rolling on top of each other in a clumsy pile, bad for the mercenaries who expected them either to hold or fall as one and getting through instead were slaughtered on the ground by waiting Norbetines. Then the pushing and the shoving began, the shouts and rhythmic calls from either side like the bellowing in a tug-of-war at a carnival. The men at the back throwing their weight behind the men in front who did the same to the men in front of them, shoulders to their upper backs, grunting and heaving the battle into shape all the way to the first line. From so far away on the hill the dark red of the Laconic capes and the many colours of the Redeemer Sodalities seemed like oil and water spilt on a tabletop. But here and there along the dividing line a tiny burst of colour mixed, stayed, and then the intruders were slaughtered or gave way and were absorbed back into their lines.

Then came the second shock: knowing they were facing men who, like themselves, did nothing but fight and learn to fight the Laconics had stolen another trick from their many wars. Out came their new swords taken from the Strouds, nearly forty inches long and steeply curving at the end. It allowed them to cut down easily over the shields of Redeemers and do so with a dreadful force onto the helmet of the men in front of them. Helmets designed to take only a blow or cut were split apart by the force of something like a hammer and a spike. The terrible injuries inflicted with each crushing stroke trembled the lines of the Black Cordelias. Then the final twist of the bezel as the dreadful practised grace of the Laconics came into play. To the Laconic right, packed with the strongest men in any case, the middle line of Laconics at the rear – once they knew the line in the centre would not give – shifted their weight and made it stronger still. While the Redeemer centre and the Redeemer right moved slowly back as the Black Cordelias fell to the curved blades and were replaced by weaker or even less well-armoured men, there was a crushing collapse on their left as the curved swords, the strongest Laconics, and the swift and sudden reinforcement became too much. ‘IS THAT IT? WHAT? WAIT! STAND THERE! STAND THERE!’ The confusion and the collapse and the shouts – most on either side had no idea if they were about to win or die.

Amid the rumbling noise, the screams, the orders, the trumpets blaring instructions and the dead and dying, the Laconic right broke their opponents – those that could do so ran, those that could not were killed and only their bodies slippery with blood and excrement and soil made awkward the turning advance of the Laconics. The mercenaries overbalanced on the bodies underneath their feet, the flabby leadenness of the dead, the clutching hands of the dying and the still noisily wounded, some of them still fighting able to stab at the stumbling mercenaries being pushed from behind and suddenly disordered and vulnerable. Many more Laconics died in that decisive but messy turn than in all their previous ten years of fighting. But once it was done, the battle but not the killing was through. Van Owen watched on from his hill in hopeless horror, unable to do anything but send his thin reserves to die in delaying what could not be stopped. Now as the Redeemers in the centre and the right fought on, the Laconics attacked them from the side and simply but bloodily rolled them up like a carpet at a picnic’s end. Those that did not run died.

For the second battle in a row, Vague Henri and Cale ended up watching a massacre. The Purgators around them had been yelling their encouragement, and became so loud Vague Henri swore at them to keep it down. He was about to point out to them that they were cheering on men who would have applauded at their executions, who regarded them as the living dead, men without souls. It was Cale who realized what he was going to say because he was thinking the same but put a hand on Vague Henri’s arm to shut him up. This time, unlike the fiasco at Silbury Hill, Cale had the sense not to become involved and long before the terrible end he had withdrawn. But unlike the Redeemers that day, he had a stroke of luck.

Of Cale and Vague Henri and their squad of Purgators, some were in tears, others calling out the prayers for the dead and the dying.

‘Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell,’ called out Purgator Giltrap, once the Prayer Sponsor of Meynouth before he was convicted of three of the nine offences against reason. To which, mindful of Vague Henri’s rebuke, the others replied softly: ‘The last four things on which we dwell.’

Chins on their chests, the two boys leading at the front were able to hide their unbecoming smirks.

As they returned towards the Golan, Cale protected the column by moving in a roundabout way along the Machair Fingers, called so because, long, low and thin, their stubby ends were held to point to the way around the heights. The Laconics were no better cavalrymen than they were archers but they had reserves, not used that day, of fast mounted soldiers and before they left the bluff, Cale had seen them in the distance slowly making their way around the far side of Van Owen’s outlook. Cale moved back to the Golan slowly, wary in case he stumbled over the Laconic mounted troops. Along the fingers to either side and just below the crest of these hills he had scouts on donkeys, sure-footed on the uneven sides, keeping an eye out for anything that might threaten them. One of them, just before the fingers’ stubby end signalled Cale to join him at the top. When he made his way up on foot along with Vague Henri, the scout pointed to a troop of Redeemers about twenty strong leaving and heading towards the Golan.

‘Is it Van Owen?’ said Vague Henri, as Cale looked through his spyglass.

‘Must be.’ He handed the glasses to Vague Henri. ‘Look over there.’

Vague Henri searched in the direction Cale was pointing. About thirty mounted Laconics were chasing down Van Owen’s guard, who were, so it looked from their easy pace, unaware they were about to be attacked.

‘Don’t fancy Van Owen’s chances,’ said Vague Henri. ‘What I saw of his guards were old men, preachers and a couple of orthodoxers.’

Cale took the glasses back and watched as the Laconic horsemen closed. Even so hammers were working in his brain. Even without glasses, Vague Henri could see clearly enough. In five minutes the Laconics had closed to about two hundred and fifty yards before Van Owen’s rear guards saw them. Vague Henri watched as they moved at once from a slow gallop to a full one and all but five or six guards around what must have been Van Owen fell back to put a line of horsemen between him and the advancing Laconics. But if the Laconics were no cavalrymen they were still the better horsemen and with the better horses. It was clear the Redeemers would soon be caught and showing some sense at least the guards made for a small hill, little more than a glorified pimple on the landscape. Dismounting, Van Owen’s guards took up a circular position around their general and waited. Cale handed Vague Henri the glasses. Now he could see the Laconics dismount no more than thirty yards from Van Owen and move in quick formation up the slight rise. And then the fight began.

Cale started to move back down the finger. Vague Henri grabbed his arm.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Me? I’m going to save Van Owen. You stay here.’

‘Why?’

‘All right. Come with me.’

‘I’m not going to help that shit-bag. Why are you?’

‘Watch and wonder, Sonny Jim.’

‘You’re a nutter.’

‘We’ll see.’ And with that he was off down the hill like some mountain goat.

Vague Henri waited on top of the finger along with the donkey scout and watched as Cale and his Purgators moved out into the plain and to the fight on what they came later to call Pillock Hill half a mile ahead.

As Cale and the Purgators quickly advanced, Vague Henri realized that Cale had not been as peculiarly impulsive as he’d at first seemed. As long as he was quick he’d catch the Laconics from the rear. Squeezed between the lines of Redeemers their inevitable victory would become almost certain defeat. Besides, he wouldn’t risk an attack directly. Vague Henri was always arguing that crossbowmen could more easily replace archers because bowmen took years to train. The crossbow delivered the same and sometimes better results in only a few months. So it went as Cale dismounted his Purgators seventy yards away from the top of Pillock Hill and stood behind his men, some way back in fact, and started instructing them to shoot the Laconics down with their crossbows. Later that day one of the Purgators told Vague Henri one of them questioned the order because of the danger to Van Owen’s guard. Cale had punched him so hard that, as the Purgator described it, ‘his nose burst like a Bicester plum’.

Whatever the danger to the eminent guard of honour on Pillock Hill, the effect on the Laconics was devastating. Within a minute half a dozen of the red-cloaked mercenaries had fallen. They had no choice but to break off and attack Cale and his Purgators. But with the guard of honour behind they seemed to be swapping one inevitable kind of defeat for another. They charged down the hill, a fearsome enough sight even from Vague Henri’s distance, and were into the Purgators with only a further three casualties. What followed was a terrible fight and hideously close run. It should not have been but Van Owen’s guard of honour, instead of following down Pillock Hill and giving the Laconics the impossible task of fighting front and rear, simply stood and watched their rescuers fall into a desperate struggle for their lives. Despite their smaller numbers, now two to one, the Laconics were armoured – though not as heavily as unmounted troops – unlike the Purgators, and were heading downhill on terrain ideal for their way of fighting. The Purgators no longer held an advantage as it became clear that instead of chasing after the Laconics, as good sense dictated, the guard of honour had decided just to wait and watch. Cale cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled: ‘Help us!’ But the guards just stared at their rescuers, impassive as cows. Cale stood about ten yards behind the Purgators cursing, fit to be roped, as he realized that they had not misunderstood what was needed from them but were deliberately holding back. ‘Why?’ thought Cale. ‘Helping us makes sense.’ But not if you are a general who believes in martyrdom and sacrifice and that it’s vital, above everything, that you survive for the greater good. Already Van Owen and his guard were on their way down the other side of the hill, leaving to head back to the Golan. If he had been Vague Henri or Kleist then Cale could have stayed out of trouble with his marksmanship, picking off the Laconics from a safer distance. But he was not. His only choice was to fight himself. He screamed high with fury at his own stupidity and then raced to the raggedy left hand of the battle and took the first Laconic soldier from behind with a thrust underneath the back of his helmet and through his neck. Coming from the left he always had the advantage – sideways on he leant to the right – being off balance normally being a bad idea, raised his left leg not more than two feet and kicked out at the next man’s vulnerable knee-joint. The man’s scream of agony as the joint snapped was cut short by a kick to the side of his head as he fell. Cale grabbed the two desperately pressed Purgators he had saved and began trying to roll the Laconics up from the side, pulling each Purgator he could rescue around him to form an outflanking wall. At the other end of the line things were going badly for the unarmoured Purgators, who in any case could not match the strength or skill of their better-disciplined opponents. But Cale, furious at Van Owen’s treachery, was a whirlwind of animosity and bile. Without intending to he inspired his men, his courage as they thought, even his love for them, showing in his monstrous and ugly skill. Something in the focus of his talent for killing seemed to oppress even the Laconics for whom violent death was, in all essentials, the point of being alive. His every action so lacking in grace or elegance, in everything except a brutal conviction in each stab or blow that you and you only would fail, that anything you brought to this fight was futile, seemed to cause even the Laconics to lose heart as they were enfolded from the left. They did not show it, merciless as they were to themselves as well as to others, but in the minutes before their deaths they had time to understand that they were sure to lose. Seven became three, three became one, and then it was over. Then the usual monstrosity: the wounded crying out, the numb, the delighted, the cruel finishing of the Laconics still alive. One of the Laconics was only lightly wounded in the leg and the two Purgators were both leery of any danger – a hidden dagger perhaps – and enjoying taunting him as he shuffled backwards away from their jabs. ‘Antagonist bag of shit!’ Not accurate but the worst thing they could think of. ‘Atheist malefactor!’ This was nearer the truth of the Laconics, if misapplied, but it was an odd fact that most Redeemers had no idea that the Antagonists were a splinter of their own religion and believed most of the things that they did. The edge of one of the swords caught the Laconic soldier on the hand cutting deep into the palm and his cry of pain caught Cale’s attention. He raged over towards the two Purgators and pushed them irritably out of the way. The eyes of Laconic soldier, already terrified, widened as he saw Cale standing over him – he crouched with his arms outspread waiting, the blow arriving in an instant, down through the collarbone and sheering into his heart. A horrible cough which lasted seconds and then unconsciousness and death. A kinder end than for many over the next few hours who were left to die in agony from their wounds or who were slowly finished off by the cruel or the clumsy. All that horror was still to come for thousands on the battlefield. It is always better sometimes, had said IdrisPukke to Vague Henri once when they were eating fish and chips on a sandy beach on the Gulf of Memphis, to reserve the right to look away.

It was then that Vague Henri arrived, the donkey scout still three hundred yards behind. He looked at the dead men around him.

‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said to the surviving Purgators, eight of them. Cale stared at him knowing exactly what he meant and that it was not a compliment.

‘Strip a pair of them of armour and weapons and quickly.’ Within a couple of minutes they were gone, taking their dead with them.

Despite Cale having come even closer to death than at Silbury, things turned out all right in the end. He learnt a lesson, although as he later said to Vague Henri, ‘I still don’t know what it was,’ and he lived. But the day hadn’t finished with him by any means.

Although the sedge and heathers of the battlefield of Eight Martyrs were robust enough, a fair stretch of them had been churned up and the mud underneath exposed and dragged over. Despite the freezing weather of only a week before, the warm winds from the sea that had melted the snow had grown even warmer. That afternoon it was unseasonably hot, and it brought new life where there was only hideous death. Midge eggs lay buried under the warmth of the sedge and several inches into the mud. Exposed by the battle, heated by the sun, they hatched in their millions and in only an hour they formed a whirling single column the size of the battlefield and rising to over a thousand yards above.

The nearly three thousand Redeemers who survived the carnage and escaped in a ragged mass towards the foot of the Golan looked back and saw something in the air that few of them had seen before – a cloud in the sky moving and shifting like no mist or fog but like something alive. Which, after all, was what it was – now like a weasel on its hinds, now like a camel, now to those who’d seen one very like a whale. But to most, exhausted, shamed, afraid and terrorized it looked like the Hanged Redeemer shaking his head in rage at the dreadful loss and blasphemy of the Laconic victory. And then finally the wind and the causeless flight of the insects changed and the grief-stricken visage of the saviour became for a moment the stern and watchful face of an implacable boy. Or so it later seemed certainly to many – even, after a few days, to a growing number who had not been there at all.

Within hours the survivors were beginning to stream back into the Golan and rumour began to spread like butter on miraculous bread: news of the promised end, that Jews had been swarming to Chartres to convert, that the four dwarf horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden through the streets of Ware, on Gravelly Hill a red dragon appeared standing over a woman clothed in the sun, and at Whitstable a beast from the land forced the people in the town to worship a beast from the sea. In New Brighton an angel appeared carrying the Wrath of God in a bowl. Once these reports became common knowledge, out of the horror of this hideous defeat came a strange exuberance. The story swept the Golan that an acolyte, a boy, had defeated a hundred soldiers of the enemy with the jaw bone of an ass and had rescued Redeemer Van Owen from the Antagonist traitors who had betrayed his army to their enemies.

While this last rumour was not entirely untrue, neither was it entirely accidental. Bosco’s fellow travellers in the Golan, along with those who knew and who believed, found that their garbled version of the numbers and events on Pillock Hill had fallen on desperately willing ears. Events at last conspired with them. The Laconics, instead of advancing either to try and take the Heights or even go around and take the entrenched Redeemer line from the rear, to the astonishment of all stayed exactly where they were. Within hours every Redeemer on the Golan knew beyond certainty that the Laconics had halted because the vision of the Hanged Redeemer and his manifested Wrath had stilled them with the fear of God.

It was neither midges nor God that caused the Laconics to pull back into the camp they had already occupied for a week before the fight but a terrible nagging and habitual fear. It has been wisely said that if you put all your eggs in one basket you’ll end up spending all your time watching the basket. It’s an even more worrying prospect if the eggs in that one basket are unusually rare. This was the heart of the problem for the Laconics. Their capacity to work together like dancers in the chaos and horror of the battlefield was created out of a lifetime of brutal care and violent solicitude. Each one of them cost a fortune in time and money and the treasure needed to buy that time was earned by slaves. These slaves were not brought from the four quarters of the earth, their families and all their other ties destroyed in the process, but by the bondage of entire peoples living with them cheek by jowl – the slaves many, the Laconics few. There was barely a Laconic warrior who was afraid of death but not one who wasn’t fearful of the men and women that he owned. At the Battle of Eight Martyrs the Laconics killed fourteen Redeemers for every one of them that died. And yet they were traumatized by this loss. The effort that had gone into the grave with those eleven hundred men was such that they could never entirely be replaced even within a generation, the Laconics being so few and their training so long and hard.

In the light of such a successful catastrophe the Ephors of Laconia must have their say on what to do and this was why they stopped, when had they advanced around the Golan Heights and taken the Redeemer trenches from the rear this great war might have counted its end in months or even weeks.

The Ephors ordered their troops before the Golan to dig themselves in and then made an offer to their Helot slaves: if they would pick among themselves three thousand of their strongest, most courageous and their brightest men then all who fought with the Laconics in the Golan would be freed on their return, and given two hundred dollars and a strip of land. The Helots seized upon this unprecedented chance of freedom and prosperity and three thousand of their finest turned up at the appointed time and place unarmed and were immediately massacred by the Laconics where they stood. And so reassured that they had both terrorized the Helots that remained and killed the strongest who had the will to free themselves, the Ephors took the additional money offered by the Antagonists and decided to advance once more. But planning and delivering a massacre takes time, as did extorting more money from the Antagonists, and it was nearly three weeks before the Laconic army was on the move again and during that time Bosco had excelled himself.

Within less than two days he had news of the defeat and in another two he’d taken advantage of the paralysis that had descended on the Holy See and was in Chartres insisting he be allowed an audience with the Pope, all the while having sent go-betweens to his secret fraternity of believers, and his most persuasive envoys to fellow travellers who, though in a panic and a funk, also watched to see what in this calamity they might profitably do.

However desperate the need for salvation from the Laconics it did not follow that everyone was equally willing to believe in Cale. Bosco’s enemies were in something of a bind. On the one hand they were as appalled by the defeat to the Laconics as any Redeemer would be and equally horrified by its likely consequences. And just because they were treacherous, scheming and self-interested did not mean they lacked genuine religious zeal. What if he was indeed the Grimperson, long if vaguely promised in a roundabout and ambiguous fashion? Some doubted if the Grimperson was a prophecy at all but was a mistranslation of the original and badly damaged text and could have meant not a deadly destroyer of the Redeemers’ enemies who might, or might not, bring about the end of all things, but a kind of holy cake of seventy raisins and nuts that would be provided by the Lord to bring an end to hunger should famine ever last longer than a year. The debate as to whether the prophecy concerned a dark destroyer or a substantial cake was largely unimportant considering that the Redeemer faith unquestionably faced annihilation.

At first Bosco’s astonishing request that Cale be put in charge of the Eighth Army of the Wras was rejected out of hand. A more cautious and plausible decision was made by the Pope in a brief moment of clarity to order Redeemer General Princeps, conqueror of the Materazzi and already in Chartres, to take command. However, at Bosco’s instruction Princeps claimed to be at death’s door with a fish bone stuck in his throat. He wrote a letter, not for the first time, making it clear he had only followed Cale’s plan in his victory over the Materazzi and called for the Pontiff in all humility to confirm the young man at the head of the Eighth Army. To convince unbelievers in his illness, of whom they were many, Princeps asked for the prayer for the dying to be said for him by the Pope himself. This was a blasphemy he had been unwilling to undertake other than at Bosco’s insistence on the grounds that unrequested their enemies would be certain to smell a rat.

It would be hard to exaggerate the blow this struck to Gant and Parsi. They regarded Princeps as if not their last hope then certainly their best.

‘We must act at once or we will be lost. Give it to the boy,’ moaned Parsi.

‘I’ll be damned if I’ll expose the faith to such a reckless act. If he’s a messenger from God I’ll want a bloody sight better sign than a magical fog or the word of that bastard Bosco.’ But among the faithful, desperate for a saviour, there was too much fervour for either of them to do nothing.

‘Well then,’ said Gant at last, ‘let the dog see the rabbit.’

Within an hour a Pontifical messenger and eight armed guards arrived at Bosco’s quarters and demanded that Cale come at once to an audience. Bosco, alarmed at the suddenness of this, attempted to go with him but was ordered with some obvious fear on the part of the messenger to stay where he was. ‘I have received orders directly, Redeemer,’ he apologized. ‘You are not to come.’

And so unable to brief Cale on what to say and do, or not to say and do, he was obliged to watch him head off for what he knew would be some sort of trap.

Cale was brought to an antechamber and told to wait in the hope that he would have enough time to work himself up into a panic before the audience. At the far end of the room lit by candles and hazed with smoke from four incense burners was a statue of the first of all the Redeemer martyrs, St Joseph, being stoned to death. It was an event notable for one other incident: it was perhaps the last time someone tried to intervene out of compassion on a Redeemer’s side. As the men of the town had gathered to take part in St Joseph’s execution for dishonouring their own One True Faith, a wandering, though much respected, preacher tried to prevent the killing by calling out, ‘Anyone of you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.’ Unfortunately for the compassionate preacher and even more unfortunately for St Joseph, one man, unabashed, rushed over to him carrying a large rock over his head and cried out confidently, ‘I’m without sin!’ and brought the rock crashing down on the shin of the Redeemer breaking his leg with a hideous crack!

The statue was of the moment when the sinless executioner had raised another large rock above his head and was about to cast it down on the agonized St Joseph. Cale was used to seeing gesso-painted wooden statues of terrible martyrdoms – flatly painted in simple colours, crude or merely competent carvings produced by the thousand for the benefit of the faithful in every Redeemer church. The statues of Chartres, and there were many of them, were like nothing he had ever seen. They were more real than the real itself, the carving not just beautifully done but full of life. The carved hands of the executioner were not just beautifully carved but beautifully observed: they were the hands of a working man. There were small cuts healed and almost healed on nearly every finger. There was dirt under every fingernail but one. The expression on his face was more than just a snarl of malice; it also caught the delight in cruelty, the pleasure, and beneath the animated face a bass note of despair. The teeth made of the finest ivory had been carefully discoloured, two were chipped, one seemed to be dead. As for St Joseph he would have drawn pity from the hardest heart: his left leg had not just been broken by the first stone but smashed, the bone protruding from his shin, jagged, bloody, agonizing – the glistening marrow leaking from the break was made of glass. His mouth was open in a cry of pain – no holy resignation to his fate but fear and anguish expressed in every line and fold. His hand was raised to stop the second blow, the arm thin, an old man’s arm with liver spots, it seemed impossibly to shake with pain and fear. But Cale’s eye was drawn back to the man who stood over him, his face punchy with hate, his eyes so filled with furious anger that only another’s death could answer it.

Cale’s own heart was filled with loathing for the man who’d made this extraordinary thing and tried to make him feel compassion for a fanatic at the point of death. He was interrupted by a cough from the doorway at the far side of the room. He walked over to the Redeemer waiting for him with the usual mixture of the numb and the restless he nearly always felt before a fight.

And then he was in the room with the Pontiff of all the Redeemers. It was taking-away-of-the-breath splendid with its floor-to-roof stained windows and extraordinary statues of religious scenes as wonderful and hideous as the one in the anteroom.

Fifty yards away was the Pontiff on his throne, vestments of gold, the face of God on earth, powerful, austere, remote and wise, his hair grey beneath the gold cap he always wore. Watching Cale from either side of the throne were eighty Redeemers dressed in the holyday cassock varieties of the Sodalities and brought here today to terrify Bosco’s presumptuous acolyte. From behind the throne a choir began to sing, a great and terrible rolling basso profundo so deep it seemed to resonate in Cale’s guts, exactly what Gant had hoped. Looking all of his fifteen years he walked the fifty yards towards the barrier rope of blue before the throne. When he arrived, and it was a room big enough to arrive in, the Redeemer at his side touched his arm as if to prevent him leaping over the thickly corded barrier.

The great choir reached its nerve-shredding climax and there was a moment as the final note seemed to fill the air with something celestial, huge, capable of wiping away all sense of self and anything but the will for God. There was a long pause as the Pontiff, lion-headed, strong, God-appointed, looked at the boy in front of him exposing his soul to the wisdom of the rock of God.

‘In whose name do you came to trouble the anointed of the ...’

‘You’re not him,’ said Cale, matter of fact. There was a gasp and the majestic face of the man on the throne dwindled in stature as if the air had been let out of a Memphis child’s balloon.

‘What do you mean by ...’

‘You’re not him.’

‘Who is then?’ The voice of the man was now very far from that of holy majesty – it was querulous, miffed, clearly annoyed at having been rumbled with such ease.

Cale stared insolently into the eyes of the counterfeit Pontiff and without looking raised his right hand to point at a frail old man standing about midway in one of the lines of forty Redeemers leading to the throne. There was another ripple of astonishment, very satisfying indeed to Cale. Slowly, portentously, he turned to face in the direction of the man he was pointing at. He bowed his head, the Redeemer at his side gestured him forward and he walked up to the real Pontiff almost to touching point. The Holy Father looked at him and smiled absently, holding out his hand to be kissed.

‘Have you come far?’