The Last Four Things

21

It was another four days before the Laconics began to move, as Cale had hoped, around the back of the Golan and directly to take Chartres. Whatever the losses they had taken of their profoundly precious soldiers during the victory on the Machair these deaths had to be balanced against their need for Antagonist silver. Their only alternative to the money gained from hiring out military power was the wealth provided by the vast number of Helot serfs who lived in Laconia and the enslaved countries that surrounded it on nearly all sides. They could terrorize the Helots and purge their leaders but doing so only decreased the Laconics’ income – a dead slave was a dead slave – and ensured that the Helots repeatedly threatened to rebel because the Laconics killed them in large numbers whether they did so or not. Every cull of a few thousand Helots made them smug in the short term but more suspicious in the long. Unafraid of death they were nevertheless terrified of annihilation. This was what drove the Laconics back to the battlefield and the attack on Chartres.

Cale’s immediate concern was that the Laconics might have worked out that the Redeemers were going to try and stop them with the wall of the Golan on one side and, admittedly, only a slight rise on the other. The rise did little more than inhibit their level of sight of a much bigger field of battle, but for all its apparent unimportance it was almost as good as a great stone wall in that it would serve to funnel them into a much narrower space than anything before or after it. Once Cale could engage them not even the Laconics would be able to rearrange themselves mid-battle.

Unfortunately for Cale the newly elected Laconic King, Jeremy Stuart-Clarke, had indeed seen the problem but his choices were limited: he could move on Chartres via the Golan and risk the dangers of a bottleneck or he could stay where he was and wait, using up the valuable supplies he had only just received and bringing his men not only to a physical halt but also a mental one. However well disciplined no soldier was ever a patient man. Soldiers went off the boil and having prepared themselves for a final push after a drearily long wait, stopping dead again was not something King Stuart-Clarke would do without good reason. He did not have one. Moving further south to attack Chartres from the flatter rear would take at least a week and give the Redeemers even more time to prepare – and they had been given enough of that. He knew the Antagonists were about to put extra pressure on them by attacking the trenches that extended west from the Golan – a manoeuvre he could not delay now and which would be completely pointless if he did not press on directly.

He weighed one set of risks against another and given he had already slaughtered one Redeemer army he thought it sensible to continue. Besides, the entire camp had been afflicted with an unpleasant stomach ailment which, while not as bad by a long way as dysentery, had left almost everyone with terrible runs and unpleasant stomach pains. All risks balanced it made by far the most sense to take the shortest route to Chartres.

It was with a mixture of delight and sudden fear that Cale watched the Laconics, after a pause of nearly three hours, move into his only advantageous defensive battlefield for a hundred miles in any direction. But now it occurred to him that in his two previous experiences of a major battle he had been watching from a place of safety, a dismissive onlooker full of opinions as to what was being wrongly done. Now standing facing this most terrible of armies he was forced to recognize the difference between knowing something and feeling it. Now he felt the difference. For some reason it was a different fear from the one that had left him motionless with terror in the fight with Solomon Solomon in the Red Opera. This time it was his knees that seemed to suffer from terror. They were actually shaking. In the Red Opera it had been a terrible palsy in his chest.

He had ordered a tower built to the rear of his last line of men so that he could see the battle unfold but now he was worried that he would not be able to climb the thin ladder of the lightweight structure. He looked at his knees as if to rebuke them. Stop shaking. Stop. And on came the Laconics in their lazy squares. For a moment everything seemed hopeless, his soldiers weak, his ideas for defence and attack laughable in the face of the great device for killing moving slowly towards them. Then it was one foot on the ladder and another, slowly, a pause, another step. He wanted to be somewhere else, for there to be a rescuer for him, to take him away and keep him safe. Then another step and another. And then like a baby seabird reaching the shore after an over-ambitious swim in a rough sea he eased over onto the platform of the tower and was helped to his feet by the two guards already up there with their oversized shields to shelter him from arrows, bolts and spears. Staring out at the Laconics he calmed himself that it would be all right as long as nothing went wrong with the exploding Villainous Saltpetre.

Which it duly did. It started to rain. Villainous Saltpetre, as Hooke was later to explain, did not like water – or rather it liked water too much. It absorbed the slightest damp the way the desert sand loved rain. Within two minutes of the clouds opening the Villainous Saltpetre was as flammable as a marsh. Knowing this weakness, Hooke had been extremely careful to avoid demonstrating his invention whenever it was wet, not out of a desire to hide its vulnerability but simply because it would not work. His only experience of warfare had been on the veldt during a time of year when it never rained. In hindsight it seemed obvious that he should have mentioned it but it had simply never occurred to him, at least not until it started raining: the life of the experimenter was quite naturally a life that involved creating the best possible circumstances for his experiment.

Unaware of his damp nemesis, Cale watched the Laconic advance from his tower protected by the two Purgators and waited in high tension to give the signal to set fire to the oil-soaked fuses. It was an ecstatic and agonizing wait, then his signal came and the trumpets blew, harsh as crows. At the first note the front line of the Redeemers stepped back behind the yew stakes driven into the ground and then teams of two waiting hammered in more stakes into the gap so that while it was not a fence, as such, it was impossible for a man to slip between the gap, not least because all the stakes had sharpened meat hooks screwed into the stake itself at ten-inch intervals. Cale had had two teams of two practise their speed for twelve hours a day during the last two weeks and before the lit fuses reached the casks another layer of staggered hooked stakes had been hammered into the ground.

Meanwhile, halfway up the Golan, Cale’s plan of battle was disintegrating even further. Even though the rain was already easing off, the strength of the brief downpour was such that not only had it deliquesced the Villainous Saltpetre but it had wet the ropes of the mortars and reduced the power with which they could eject the unusually heavy bolts. Hooke had quickly covered them up but in order to reach the right wing of the advancing Laconics the mortars were operating at the extreme edge of their range. Now the ropes were slightly wet that range was reduced by a quarter, a distance that rendered them useless.

A desperate Hooke had a flag to signal that he was unable to fire and it was duly noted by an alarmed Cale on his rickety tower. He could also see lots of other makeshift flags waving from the Golan. They had not arranged a sign about the Villainous Saltpetre because there had been no good reason to do so. Now the Laconics were approaching the casks, as were the excellently timed burning ends of the fuses.

Another signal from Cale and another ear-cracking blast from the horns beneath him. This time the entire Redeemer front line ducked down and faced away from the caskets, each one curled up into a protective ball. The Laconics kept advancing, breaking into a run just as they had at Eight Martyrs. The fuses burnt as calculated, the Laconics arrived as hoped for and nothing happened. Many stepped on the lightly earth-covered container but though they could feel the ground change beneath them they were in no position to stop. Then one of the boxes exploded, the last but one on the Laconic right. It had been designed to explode forwards but wood is unreliable stuff and the force of the blast shot out to front and back, killing almost as many Redeemers behind as it did their advancing enemies.

What this single explosion managed to do was bring the Laconic line to an astonished halt. None of them had ever seen such violence, the earth itself blown into the sky and the ear-blasting sound worse than thunder. The ranks shuddered and stopped and staggered back as if a single startled creature. Carnage delivered by the human hand is one thing, horrible in its close and personal gash and mangle of flesh and bone. Think, though, what it was like to witness for the first time the calamity of such a flash of power and smoke. For a moment after the roar of armies striving to come to grips, there was a great and sudden silence as if the hand swipe of some bilious god had lashed the ground between them. Used to delivering the hideous blow or cut, none of them had seen a man ruptured, pulverized and torn in less time than it took to blink.

Slack-jawed and stupefied at the failure of the casks, panic and fear ran riot in Cale. But he was not the only one – King Stuart-Clarke had been thrown from his horse as it reared from its terror at the explosion as had half a dozen of the messengers with him. Frightened horses were bolting everywhere and the attack, the worst of nightmares, had completely stalled and all the vital momentum along a line of a thousand yards was lost. All the commanders had been unseated like the king or were trying to control their mounts. Cale, horrified by the failure of the casks, had a few moments to collect his shattered wits.

He was short of archers but had held them back in any case to pick off the Laconics after they had been hit by all twenty casks, guessing that some were bound to fail. Now he was down the tower and onto his waiting horse and shouting at the four hundred archers in front of him to let loose their first volley and sending a messenger to the four hundred hiding on the rise to wait until the Laconics tried to come around his right. Then as the Laconics began to sort themselves to renew the attack he waved Gil to take the reserves as planned to reinforce his already much stronger left. The reserves, mostly the surviving Black Cordelias, began a slow run towards their left-hand flank and Cale stopped and realized that in the pause between altering his plans and the re-start of the fight he had no idea what to do. Wait and see, wait and see. But the horror of inaction, the panic induced by the sense that he should stay where he was or go back to the tower and wait, was simply too great to stop. He raced up and down the rear for perhaps twenty seconds – an age on an age – like some lost and desperate child before he came to grips with himself and stopped. Now, as he used to do during his terrible panics during the long and bitter nights as a child, he bit deep into his hand below the thumb and felt the rush of pain begin to calm him down. He stopped, breathing deeply, a few seconds, and then turned the horse back to the tower and in a few moments was in control of himself, watching the battle collect itself and the Laconics begin the attack again.

There was no running attack this time; the Laconics simply advanced and expected to close. This was what happened with their strongest forces facing Cale’s now massively reinforced left. But he did not have the men to offer such a depth of soldiers to resist the Laconics’ strongest wing and also have a line six or eight deep in the middle and the right. Hence the yew stakes and the hooks. This would slow the Laconics down and protect this so much weaker line. Then once the Laconics were through he had trained the Redeemers here to fall back slowly as they fought and refuse to make a stand. Then four hundred archers on the rise would hit the Laconics from the rear where they would either have to turn to defend their unarmoured backs and take the pressure off the attack or be picked off by ten volleys every minute by the best archers in all the four quarters.

There were no such measures to his left. The Laconic right wing was twenty deep of their strongest and most experienced but now the Redeemers opposing them were nearly fifty deep. As long as the helmets protected them from the crushing blows of the Laconic swords, and the dreadful push and shove of so many men did not lead to a collapsing crush, then he hoped to reverse the push of the Laconic right and drive them back and around to their left do what they had done to the Black Cordelias twenty days before.

Whether all this would have worked by itself was argued over for months and years. It was touch and go said Cale as he talked about his victory late into the night with Vague Henri.

‘You were utterly useless,’ he said to him, pleasantly, ‘stuck up there with that half-wit Hooke – but without the dead dogs in the stream I don’t think we’d have done it.’

The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life. Six hours after it had begun so violently it was finished. King Stuart-Clarke was dead along with eight thousand of his men, the survivors fighting a retreat over four weeks, legendary for its courage and resilience. Not that their survival made much difference to the Laconics when all was said and done. Thomas Cale changed their history for ever on that day and all because of three things he thought at the time were less important than his great mortars and the mass destruction of the boxes of saltpetre: the reinforced helmets of the dead Materazzi, intelligent tactics, and a bad dose of the squits induced by the decaying animals in the stream that fed the Laconic camp had sapped, by just a little, just enough, the terrible strength that was required to fight in heavy armour for a day. And, credit where credit was due, the insane courage and self-sacrificing skill of the Redeemers. Throughout the day he was back and forth with his ten Purgators who were aching to die for him. He was on top of the tower one minute, scrambling down and heading to a section along the front threatening to decay and shouting at those who could not see where they were needed to rush here or withdraw from there. Along to his right he rode repeatedly, Purgators terrified on his behalf and shielding him as if their eternal life itself depended on it as he tried to get the line first to hold the Laconics along the razor wall of the spikes of yew and when they were through to pull back in steady order so that they were kept penned in where the archers on the rise could hurt them most. Then it was back to the great scrum on the left where the battle would be won or lost, urging on the deadly push and shove, picking up men who fell, shouting for others where the lines of force had eased to move around the other side and add their weight. Now the fear had gone and he was so busy in the fight he had no time to worry that he was in his element, that for once he was neither angry or sad but exhilarated beyond all reckoning and only now and again a still small voice calling to him to show some sense. All day throughout the fight he was like some fly or wasp at a window buzzing back and forth as if he were trying to find a weakness in the glass. Lead from the front: always, sometimes, never. It was the last he always promised to himself but today it was impossible. Sometimes he had to lay into the Laconics as they cut a hole into the Redeemer line, sealing it up, lashing his enemy like the calmest madman in the asylum, cutting and blocking like the machine he had been brought up to be, his Purgators and the men he most hated in the world running into die next to him as if they had no other destiny but this. And then the Purgators would form a ring around him and he’d withdraw and back onto his horse and up his spindly tower like God in his heaven surveying the chaos of his own creation. Then the glass impossibly bowed to the wasp and bulged and broke. The right flank of the Laconics warped and twisted and then not so much broke as burst. In such a beast as this it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of bravery or even strength, and once it was down it was finished as a battle. But not as an individual slaughter – now the creature was breaking into its parts, disassembled into each man, alone and weak and easy to kill where he could not re-form himself into a smaller beast to run away.

With the battle won, the slaughter against the Laconics was as dreadful as they had inflicted against the Redeemers only a few weeks before. What is to be said? The terror, the horror, the downward stab, the blood upon the ground. He could not have stopped them even if he had wanted to. He left it to the centenars to stop it as they could. By the time they did there were only five hundred prisoners and the few thousand who managed to get away completely. Cale himself had two pressing tasks. One was to inform the waiting Bosco of the victory, the other was to shrivel the hairs on Guido Hooke’s arse by means of a bollocking so desperate in its vituperativeness that it became almost as much a legend as the battle itself.

What Cale did not realize was that his victory had replaced one mortal danger to him with another, this time one over which he would have no control. Bosco’s reluctance to take decisive action in Chartres was not born out of indecision but the complexities of the problems that he faced. He must not only destroy his enemies, and do so quickly above all, but also destroy a great many of his friends. He knew perfectly well that many of his allies were allies of disaffection. They were not passionate supporters of Bosco’s dream of a completely cleansed world for the simple reason that they did not know what it was he believed and would have been appalled if they had. He had put together an ugly rainbow coalition of theological disaffections, many of them utterly incompatible, personal grudges, religious grudges and self-seving malcontents clear that change was in the air but wary of being caught on the wrong side. Most dangerous of all were those as committed as Bosco to a vision of a pure new world, who considered themselves just as vital to the scouring that must precede it. Chief among these dangerous partners was Redeemer Paul Moseby, long the keeper of the money that supported this collection of visionaries and fellow travellers. Distributor of favours and influence, he was owed much by many and expected to be paid. A year before, Moseby had gained even greater power in Chartres by arresting with great speed a cadre of Antagonist plotters who had burnt down the Basilica of Mercy and Compassion in the very heart of the old city, second in importance and holiness only to the vast Dome of Learning. Moseby, having grown impatient of a real conspiracy, had set the fire himself, or arranged for it, and arrested four previously designated brothers with a history of mind disease helped along in their incoherence by the careful administration of soporific drugs. They had been swiftly executed and as a reward Moseby had been put in charge of administering an ‘enabling’ Act, so called because it enabled him to imprison anyone for up to forty days without bringing charges. He rarely required the allotted time to find something to justify any arrest he made. Some were released both because it looked fair-minded to do so but also because their card had been duly marked and a lesson learned as to what would happen if they did not co-operate in future.

But Moseby started to enjoy the increase in power he now began to experience in its almost purest form. He arrested and threatened Redeemers that Bosco did not want arrested or threatened. He started to argue with Bosco about his own ideas concerning the renewed Redeemer faith. More, he disagreed in meetings, and not in private, where he could show his importance compared to Bosco and that he was not a retainer to be taken by the new faithful for an obedient servant. Worse, it had come to Bosco’s attention that he had questioned Cale’s divine origins. It had, in fact, been only a joke to the effect that while he might indeed be the anger of the Lord made flesh he did not look like it. A casual sneer had the same effect on Bosco as it so often does in life of causing as much, or more, damage than a carefully reasoned argument. From that point it might be said that the fate of Moseby, and that of his familiars, was decided. It was by no means sealed, however. Bosco was about to take on two powerful factions at the same time, neither of whom he could be sure of destroying separately let alone together in a few hours. He had one great advantage: the complete unexpectedness and shocking originality of what he was about to try and do.

Few battles are truly decisive. Even the one fought at Golan Heights which seemed to define that term depended for any lasting significance on the events that took place in Chartres immediately following the victory over the Laconics. Bosco had first convened a Congress of the Sodalities of Perpetual Adoration with the intention, avowedly, of praying for the deliverance of Redeemers from the Laconics. If Cale lost they could pray away for all the good it would do them. If he won what would happen was very much the opposite of prayer.

Once Bosco had heard of the defeat of the Laconics he had his own battle to fight. The members of the congress, which included most of Bosco’s supporters, reliable or otherwise, were sealed into the meeting house by his religious sentinel, Redeemer Francis Haldera. A senior member of the Sodalities, he had been of considerable use during Bosco’s years of trying to build support in Chartres from his distant power base in the Sanctuary. He was an endlessy biddable fixer and easer of things, smooth as butter to those who needed flattery, ruthless to those for whom blackmail was the most useful approach. The time was coming, one way or another, when these qualities would no longer be required and his essential lack of belief or courage was to be made a central part of Bosco’s delicately balanced plan. Haldera had been taken aside and isolated in a private room before the beginning of prayers and reassured with certain lies. Once news of Cale’s victory had been received he was confronted with evidence that he had pugnated four acolytes and burglarized another, which was true, and conspired with the Antagonist heresy along with numerous others, which was not. It was made clear to him he would be slowly grilled alive for the crimes he had committed, real and false, but that if he confessed and co-operated he would merely be exiled. It was unsurprising, therefore, that he agreed to denounce both himself and anyone else he was told to. He was given a document to read out and twenty minutes to rehearse it, while the unsuspecting Sodalities prayed on for a victory that had already been won.

At the same time as Bosco was revenging himself against his friends, a group he could easily gather together in one place, he had also to commence eliminating his enemies, dispersed as they were over the entire city, and to achieve all of this at approximately the same time. It was vital to keep news of Cale’s victory out of the city for as long as possible. News of such an epic deliverance would lead to great celebratory chaos and any chance of destroying his opponents depended on most of them being where they were supposed to be.

As a terrified and bewildered Haldera ascended one of the two great stone-staired lecterns at the congress eyed by a watchful Bosco already waiting thirty yards away in the other, the first assassinations were about to take place at the Bequinage. Redeemer Low and two of his confreres who merely had the misfortune to be in his company were approached as they prayed for victory by four of Gil’s assassins and were stabbed some six or seven times. Others could not be approached so easily. The Gonfalonier of the Hasselt, as he emerged into the street from a thirty-minute silence, was struck by a bolt from a nearby window the force of which was said to be so great that it passed through his body and wounded a monk standing guard behind him. This unlikely story was, in fact, true because the weapon of preference of Gil’s assassins was the over-strung Fell crossbow, so called because it was almost always fatal to its victims. It had one disadvantage, as its name suggests, that so powerfully tensioned was it that on occasions when the trigger was released the whole device disintegrated as explosively as if it had been filled, successfully, with Villainous Saltpetre. This was how Redeemer Breda, head of the Papal Bodyguard, the Beghards, survived. More attuned to the experience of assassination than most of the other intended victims, he realized the significance of the hideous ‘Twang!’ that resulted from the crossbow’s disintegration as it was fired by his would-be murderer and instantly made off down the nearest exit. There his luck and good judgement deserted him. The nearest escape route was called the Impasse Jean Roux and his ignorance of the local dialect cost him his life. As soon as he realized it was a dead end, he quickly made his way back to the main road but found the way barred by his assassin, bleeding heavily from a deep wound to the forehead caused by the exploding crossbow. He was so mortified by his failure that he was prepared to sacrifice his life to finish his task. The sacrifice was duly made as Breda’s guards, slow to react, finally came to attempt his rescue, but not before his killer had hacked off Breda’s hand and stabbed him through the lung.

Other assassinations by crossbow bolt were more successful: Pirenne died in the Rue de Châteaudun, along with Hardy and Nash; Padre Pete in the Auditorium; Redeemer ‘Loving’ Oliver – so called because of his unusual tenderness – in his manse on the Rue de Reverdy from a particularly fine shot. It was fired from well behind a window fifty yards away, through another window into the manse and then caught him in the chest as he passed the opening for the very first time that day. But there is a limit to the number of high-quality murderers just as there are wood carvers or plumbers. Gil was forced to rely, so extreme were the demands on his secret Sodalities’ homicidal skills, on the only quite good, then the merely competent, and then the erratic. These he had decided should do their work close up with weapons requiring less refined expertise. There were a satisfying number of successes by knife, half-sword and small pick but also inevitable failures, though fewer than he expected. Twice the wrong Redeemer was stabbed, or guards proved more alert than expected, or the assassin himself more incompetent. But for his two main targets, Gant and Parsi, Gil had, of course, reserved his very best men, which is to say Jonathon Brigade and himself. Which of them did the better job depends on your preference for ingenuity and quick thinking or enormous skill in the handling of weapons and leaving nothing to chance.

The problem with murdering Gant and Parsi was not that they treated the world with suspicion (Bosco’s murderous plan was unthinkable, after all) but that their grandiosity and self-importance completely isolated them from any casual contact. They went from the Holy Palace to basilica to shrine and back to palace again only in carriages entered into and exited from out of sight of the ordinary people and common Redeemers as a conscious way of elevating their status. That they were unapproachable by virtue of vanity and not fear was neither here nor there when you were trying to kill them.

Brigade had worked out his plan – but like a true artist who had produced a good work but not a great one, he knew it was inferior. He loved simplicity, sparseness, few moving parts – mostly because there was less to go wrong but also because it suited his taste for plainness. Bosco’s one sympathizer in the Holy Peculiar, Gant’s palace, ensured that he had been able to find a corridor used by Gant to enter his chapel to pray at noon during the canonical hour of sext. The entrance to the corridor had a door only five feet high, the irksome invention of a humbler predecessor, deliberately designed to force all who entered to bow meekly before they entered the chapel. Once Gant was through Brigade planned to shut the door, bar it, kill Gant and escape. It seemed simple but was not. Gant did not always attend sext here – prone to late-morning headaches he would sometimes, if infrequently, retire to his darkened rooms to recover. It took no great worrier to reckon that on a day of such great tension he might easily succumb to the migraine. There was also the difficulty of escape – the chapel was right in the middle of the gargantuan complex that made up the Holy Peculiar. The final weakness was that Brigade would have to trust the calmness and reliability of a traitor to get him in and out. So uneasy had he become that he decided on a hardly less dangerous strategy of walking the palace and looking for another opportunity. Changing plans at the last minute was something he had never countenanced before but he could not shake off the sense of unease. His original plan was plausible but he smelt disaster. After ten years as a holy assassin Brigade had learnt to dismiss instinct. Now after twenty-five he had learnt to value it once more. Perhaps, he thought, he was just getting old.

Meanwhile at the gathering of the Congress of the Sodalities those collected there were if not uneasy then certainly mystified at the size of the assembly. Bosco had worked hard over the years to build this group but just as hard to keep its size, and many of its members, secret. There were many present who were by no means natural allies or who believed themselves to be part of a quite different conspiracy or none at all. These differences had to be reconciled – but not by agreement. Both mild-mannered reformists who would have been horrified by Bosco’s larger plan and disagreeable zealots who had other ambitions for salvation would alike have to be dealt with and dealt with this afternoon.

Standing at one of the great lecterns at the Congress Haldera looked across at Bosco like a little boy who has angered his mother terribly. Although he was not shaking he seemed to be so, his face so white and shocked. And like a mother, a terrible and unforgiving one who no longer loved and protected the child across from her, Bosco impatiently signalled Haldera to get on with it. The dreadful unease spread at once through the assembly the way laughter does through an audience gathered to be entertained by a conjurer and his amusing dog. Haldera confessed to his terrible sins on behalf of the Antagonist heresy, the words emerging as pale as the man himself, and that he had, to his heartbreaking shame, conspired with others. (‘Don’t mention the numbers,’ Bosco had instructed. ‘I want everyone on their toes – I want them to feel the wind from the wings of the Angel of Death as he passes over them. Or not.’)

One by one, with many fearful glances at Bosco, who looked now deeply saddened, betrayed and even tearful, Haldera went through the stumbling list of names of those whose breaths in life could now be counted: Vert, Stone, Debau, Harwood, Jones, Porter, Masson, Finistaire. As each was called the blood drained from his face. Most stood without protest and made their way out of their seats as if mild obedience might placate the dreadful judgement. The lucky watchers next to them shrank back from their touch as they brushed past as if their fate might be catching. In the aisles stern religious police led them to the back and outside. Then before they were gone another name was called. And so it went on – the shocked compliance, the occasional confusion. ‘No, not him. We know Frederick Taverner well and he is not a traitor.’ ‘My apologies, Redeemers. Please sit down.’ The condemned and then instantly reprieved Taverner taking a shock from which he would never completely recover. The rest of the audience aghast at the error and what it might mean for them.

In a large room some fifty yards away the fingered were held, then taken to a smaller room and stripped to the waist. Brzica had been brought from the Sanctuary to supervise the large number of executions required. But there were too many for one man to carry out and he had been assigned numerous helpers. Touchy as always about any slight concerning the rareness of his art he complained that they could not possibly possess sufficient skill.

‘They are a discredit to my mystery,’ he said to Gil with the egoism of any prodigy.

Less vain of his talents, Jonathon Brigade was as excited by the inspiration of his new plan as any author wracked by a failure in his art who finds the sudden revelation or the clue that sets it right and leads him out of the confusing maze of the not quite good enough. The son of a master builder, Brigade could not help noticing with disapproval scaffolding three storeys high loaded with bricks for work the builders had been told to stop so that they could go and pray for victory. Having spent hours loading the bricks upon the scaffold the labourers had been faced with a problem: spend another hour or more lowering them back to store them on the ground and miss the call to prayer or take a minor risk and leave them where they were. And they were right to judge the bricks were safe, the scaffold would hold – why would they take into account the possibility that up-to-no-good Jonathon Brigade would happen by? How could they have guessed that such a malign presence would know how to weaken the reverts holding the scaffolding together and at which point to tie a rope to them so that when Gant and five of his holy brethren passed, as they must in order to enter the chapel, a hefty pull would cause more than a ton of bricks to collapse on top of them? It was simple and it was not far from an external wall where additions to the kitchen would make it easy for Brigade to escape. Perfect, except for the return of the builders, whose foreman had seen them leaving and demanded they return and move the stone blocks from the scaffolding back to the ground. Brigade, a man whose temperament was such that he always tried to make the best of things, chose to take this as a sign that he was being advised from the heavens to find another way and duly went in search of it.

Gil on the other hand had planned the murder of Parsi to take account of chance. It was increasingly in Parsi’s nature not to be seen at all. What had once been an unease concerning open spaces had grown in recent years to become almost fear of them. Even his audiences in the Pontiff’s Palace took place by means of a tunnel underground. He did emerge into the light for twenty minutes every day walking around his covered cloisters exposed to the open on only one side to read the versicles of the Didache from his breviary (‘Scour me of desire, O Lord, batter my soul’, and so on). Information about his comings and goings was scant. But he had followed up a casual reference to one of Parsi’s daily rituals by going to the top of Carfax tower and, after a long wait, observing it for himself. The timing of his daily prayer circuit was always the same, the pace he took was pretty much exact as he went round and round. Only part of the holy garden was cloistered; unluckily for Gil the only part that could be overlooked from his hidden eyrie in Carfax tower looked onto the side that was covered by a deep roof and left Parsi in dark shadow and hence unseeable from the tower except for the lower quarter of his cassock-covered extremities. It was impossible to get in a killing shot from the tower, in other words. But Parsi walked at an almost constant speed, a monotonously rhythmic rolling gait, and Gil knew that out of his sight in the tower but at the other end of the garden he was in the open for perhaps as long as twenty seconds. He was not in his eagle’s nest to take a shot himself but to measure the walk and calculate when Parsi was in the open but out of his sight, then signal to a group of forty archers in a courtyard three hundred yards away to fire their arrows over the wall of their own yard, arch over two streets then down into the end of the cloisters where Parsi was in the open praying to be punished for his sins – concerning which Gil, with enormous contrivance, was hoping to oblige him.

There was a witness, as it turned out, to what happened next, saved from execution by Gil because he was curious about the precise details of what happened to Parsi.

Gil gasped himself as the archers loosened their sharps, the terrible and beautiful curve flocking towards the unseen mumbling prelate on the ground, the graceful whoosh as they passed towards their mark and then the mixing of the thwack and ping and thud as they struck wall and earth and man. Gil, as it turned out, got the numbers right but only just. Parsi was hit by three arrows but only from the extreme edge of the cloud; one in the foot, another in the groin, a third in the belly. The shocked cry and the scream of agony reached Gil in his tower just as he made to leave. But such pain can come from any wound. He was not satisfied for sure until he saved the witness, a novice who had been sitting down in the cloisters while his master said his prayers, more than four hours later.

Four hundred yards away an irritable Moseby, unused to being kept in the dark and ready to give Bosco a bad-tempered reminder of who he was dealing with, waited in the nearest room that Bosco had to an oubliette. It was small with a window high up so that no one could see out, and as far away from the arrests and slaughter as was possible. Moseby politely asked a servant for a drink (he regarded it as a sign of inadequacy to be rude to servants) and Brzica came in with a jug to see it done, moving behind him and tinkering with a mug and cup and pouring the requested water. Then someone with a resemblance to Bosco entered and Moseby looked up. ‘I must -‘ but what he must was lost in eternity as Brzica took him by the hair and cut his throat.

Meanwhile Jonathon Brigade was beginning to feel that he must stop looking for some ideal site for his murder and yet he was sure that if he only looked on a little further there it would be. All the time a voice, not his conscience to be sure, nagged at him to revert to his first plan however unsatisfactory and risky it was. Something is better than nothing. This is going to get you killed. Stop. But he could not – always he felt that just a little further on would be the answer. And then a door opened in front of him and he was face to face with Redeemer Gant and behind him half a dozen priests. They stared at each other as Gant tried to place him and failed. Brigade’s mind went blank for a second but every cell of his body was that of the instinctive murderer. He stepped forward gently so that Gant was forced to stay in the doorway blocking the priests behind. Then an idea – a truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

‘My Lord Redeemer,’ said Brigade, ‘an assassin has been sent to kill you. Come with me.’ He took him gently by the arm and smiled at the priests. ‘Please wait here until Redeemer Gant sends for you. Protect this doorway with your life.’ He then shut the door and gripping Gant by the arm pulled him swiftly down the stairs, building up speed as they reached a spacious landing on which he grasped Gant by the shoulders and, pushing the protesting Redeemer at ever greater speed, launched him out of a large window which splintered into a thousand pieces as the great prelate fell screaming to his death on the cobbles fifty feet below. A brief look and Brigade was on his way to find his escape, haring down the stairs and shouting: ‘Fire! Fire!’

This was the famous First Defenestration of the Holy Peculiar. The second is another story.

What a day!

Momentous, spiteful, terrible, tragic, cruel – no word or list could capture its horrors and its brutal drama of lives lost and empires won. There were, perhaps, fewer than fifteen hundred Redeemers that required executing but it had to be done quickly and this was awkward even for a man as experienced as Brzica and as reluctantly determined as Gil. High-quality executioners are as rare as high-quality cooks or armourers or stonemasons – and mass executions were, in fact, extremely rare. After all, except to demoralize one’s opponents, as in the massacre at Mount Nugent that sent such a clear message to the Materazzi or the peculiar circumstances of the death of Bosco’s so carefully chosen Redeemers in the House of Special Purpose what was the need? The real point of an execution was either to dispose of an individual permanently in private or to do so extravagantly in public to make an example of them. If the former then you could take your time; if the latter, it was necessary to produce something spectacular and highly individual. Killing fifteen hundred men not weakened by hunger and months of darkness and cold was a difficult matter. He did not have the assistants for this number of killings because normally he didn’t need them. So this was a damned difficult job for Brzica and Gil.

‘You ever cut the throat of a pig?’ said the former to the latter.

‘No.’

‘When I was a boy on my father’s farm,’ Brzica pointed out gloomily to Gil, ‘he used to reckon it took two years to train someone to slaughter a pig. It’s a lot harder to kill a man.’

‘I’ve brought you experienced men. They know why this is necessary.’

Brzica grunted with the impatience of a man who was used to having his great talents diminished.

‘It ain’t nothing like ... nothing like killing a man in battle or running away from battle – it has its own rhymes and reasons, its own knacks and techniques. Few’re cut out to kill in cold blood constantly – and specially not kill their own kind. But I don’t suppose you believe me.’

‘You’re more convincing than you give yourself credit for, Redeemer,’ replied Gil. ‘But I’m sure with your guidance we’ll manage.’

‘Are you now?’

Manage they did, grim though it was. First Gil reassured the prisoners, collected in half a dozen halls of up to three hundred – that they had nothing to fear unless they were guilty of involvement in that day’s Antagonist uprising of fifth columnists. It was regretfully necessary to question them all to find the few believed to be involved. But it was, as they would themselves understand, necessary for them to be questioned before the overwhelming majority could be released. They would also, he was sure, understand that they would need to be bound hand and foot but that it would be done with respect due to the great number of the innocent among them. He asked for their co-operation at a time of great crisis for the faith. To demonstrate his sincerity Gil allowed himself to have his hands tied loosely behind his back and – again loosely – from ankle to ankle. He then shuffled meekly out of the room. Reassured the arrested Redeemers allowed themselves to be bound and led out in groups of ten. The first groups were led into the nearest courtyard where Brzica and his four assistants forced them to their knees and cut their throats as a demonstration for Gil’s watching chosen men.

Initially Brzica’s baleful predictions proved accurate and only the fact that Gil had so skilfully prepared the victims and the fact of their being carefully bound prevented a fiasco as the inexperienced executioners found that cutting a throat fatally required more accuracy and precision than they were used to displaying on the battlefield. Brzica saved the day with a simple improvisation – he used a piece of charcoal to mark a line along the throats of the victims just before they were led out so that the increasingly nervous and jumpy executioners had something to follow. It remained an ugly business even for men very used to ugliness. But, as Brzica quoted, smug as well as grim, after it was over (and who would know better than him?): even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course.

By evening the plot, like some brutal harvest, was gathered in and for all the errors and stupidities Bosco’s great gamble was closing in his favour; even this calm madman was astonished that it was done. But there was a twist of sorts to come. With the city secure, many more successes than failures, a few escapes and some regrettable errors of identity, the news of Cale’s great victory was released to a fearful and mystified population wound up to breaking point by the dreadful events of the day. News of victory gave wings to the claims that Antagonists, deep sleepers in the city’s life, had risen up and been defeated at a terrible cost in famous men and Holy Fathers of the church. It all made sense and any other explanations would have been far less plausible: a coup? A revolution? Here in Chartres? There were, besides, few left willing to contradict it. In less than thirty-six hours the Redeemers had themselves been redeemed and in Bosco’s mind the world had turned towards its greatest and most final purge.

In the late evening Pope Bento had retired to sleep knowing as much of the real nature of the day’s events as the nuns in the doorless convents of the outskirts of the city. Bosco finally had the chance to pause and eat in the palace itself, joined by Gil. Both were exhausted, worn out in ways neither of them would have thought possible, and neither spoke much.

‘You’ve done a man’s job,’ said Bosco at last. ‘And God’s great work, too.’

‘And might do more,’ replied Gil, but very softly as if he hardly had the strength to speak.

‘And how’s that?’

Gil looked at him as if he had some enormity on his mind that might be better left unsaid.

‘I want to speak freely.’

‘You can always speak freely to me. Now more than ever.’

‘I want to speak of something that can’t be spoken about.’

‘It must be infandous indeed if you need to beat about the bush so much.’

‘Very well. I’ve done horrible things in your service. Today I’ve walked knee-deep in the blood of good men. I’ll sleep differently now for as long as I breathe.’

‘No one would deny that you have risked your soul in our business.’

‘Yes, that’s right. My soul. But having risked it to the door of hell itself I do not want to have taken such a dreadful chance and let it be for nothing.’

‘I’ve taken the same risk.’

‘Have you?’

‘Meaning?’

‘You are, if you dare, able to be the voice of God on earth. Whatever you loose on earth would be loosed in heaven. Yet his current proxy sleeps a dozen rooms from here, babbling into his pillow and dreaming of rainbows and warm milk.’

‘What of it? He is the Pontiff.’

‘This feeble-minded creature is in the palm of your hand. Let me close it for you.’

Who knows what thoughts hammered away in Bosco’s extraordinary mind, the delicate and the gross together mixed. He did not say anything for some time.

‘You should have just done it,’ he said to Gil at last, ‘and said nothing. I am sorry that you blabbed and gave away an act that being done unasked I should have found it afterwards well done. I must sleep.’

He left the room closing the door softly behind him. Gil helped himself to a large glass of sweet sherry.

‘And found myself no doubt,’ he said loudly to no one, ‘rewarded with a command in the forefront of the hottest battle like Uriah the Hittite.’ He took a deep swig of the hideous wine and sang softly.

‘Everyone knows it, even a dunce,

Opportunity knocks once.’

But, as we all know, there is never an end to garboils.