30
It was the night of the banquet and IdrisPukke and his half-brother, Vipond, were in particularly good form. The former had teased the women concerning their beauty and bantered with the men about their failure to live up to the women, and Vipond, a more restrained humorist when he felt like it, created storms of laughter with a dryly amusing story about the vanity of the Bishop of Colchester and a misadventure involving an Aylesbury duck that concluded with the observation that ‘Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.’
Not to be outdone, IdrisPukke smoothly passed into one of his aphoristic moods and was giving those around him the benefit of his many years’ experience of mankind’s idiocy, absurdity and wickedness, including, it must be said, his own.
‘Never argue with anyone about anything. No, not even Vipond, though he’s possibly the wisest man who ever lived.’ Vipond, just across the table and enjoying his half-brother’s performance and the double flattery involved in the mockery, laughed along with the others and the banging of approval of half a dozen now tipsy Materazzi.
‘When it comes to self-delusion my brother is completely right. You could talk to Vipond for a thousand years and barely touch on the number of absurd things he believes.’
Then Vipond’s face fell and for a brief moment IdrisPukke wondered if he had gone too far. But it was something he had seen not heard that alarmed the Chancellor. IdrisPukke followed the apprehensive look to the top of the room. Though the chatter and laughter of the rest of the vast room carried on, the table around the half-brothers went very quiet.
At the top of the stairway leading down into the hall stood Cale, dressed neck to foot in a black suit not unlike an unusually elegant cassock then very much the style among the rich young men of Spanish Leeds and which he’d had specially made by his seamstress and paid for again with Kitty the Hare’s money.
He looked like a nail and didn’t care who knew it. But, unsurprisingly, the greatest shock among the few dozen there who knew him by sight was that felt by Arbell Materazzi, sitting next to her husband and eight months pregnant. If a woman can be white as a ghost and blooming at the same time then so she was, the blue veins of her eyelids like the thready filaments in Sophia marble.
IdrisPukke, heart sliding out of humour, watched as Cale walked slowly down the aisle like the wicked witch in a fairy tale, his eyes in their black circles to match his clothes fixed on the beautiful pregnant girl in front of him. He should have realized thought IdrisPukke, he really should. The chair next to him, meant for Cale’s non-arrival, was eased back by a servant as Cale, full of himself at the satisfying catastrophe his presence was causing, came up, gave a gentle nod to Vipond and then fixed his murderous scowl on Arbell Swan-Neck. There was no word sufficiently strong to describe the look on Conn’s face but no one had much difficulty imagining what was going on inside his soul. The question of whether or not he knew often crossed IdrisPukke’s mind afterwards. It was hard to believe that if he did know the evening would end well. Bose Ikard must have hoped for trouble given what he must have known about Conn and Thomas Cale. But he had stumbled on something much worse than a glorified squabble between precocious boys.
There are many words for the different kinds of silence that exist between people who hate. IdrisPukke considered that if he was ever in prison again with a year or two weighing on his hands he might be able to arrive at a suitable list. But whatever kind of silence it was, it was ended by a guest of Vipond’s, Señor Eddie Gray, an ambassador of sorts for the Norwegians trying to get a handle like many others on what, if anything, the Materazzi would do next and how it might affect them. Provocative and supercilious by nature, Gray looked Cale up and down ostentatiously.
‘You’re the right colour for an Angel of Death, Mr Cale. But a little short.’
There was the unheard sound of souls drawing breath. There was hardly a pause from Cale as he took his eyes for the first time from Arbell and looked at Gray.
‘It’s as you say. But if I was to cut off your head and put it under my feet I’d become taller.’
The cordon of silence of those who realized something was up had now extended either side of the Materazzi, including and not by accident Bose Ikard. Alerted by the contempt in Gray’s tone and the odd appearance of the young man in black they had caught both Gray’s dismissal and the devastating reply and burst into laughter.
Filled with a noxious mixture of hatred, adoration, love and considerable smugness at the sharpness of his own wit, Cale allowed the chair to be eased under him and turned his gaze at once ludicrous and terrifying to the hapless Swan-Neck. No bullock in a perfumier’s maddened by wasps could have let loose such an ungovernable mix as the clouds of desires, resentments, betrayals and disappointed lusts that mingled and fumed within that stupendous hall. It was no wonder that the baby in its mother’s womb began to kick and squirm like a piglet in a sack. It was a monument to Arbell Materazzi’s good breeding that she didn’t drop her firstborn on the spot.
There was, however, a sign of poor breeding and it, quite deliberately, came from Cale: as the servants began double-spooning meat and beans and petit pois onto his plate, Cale thanked each one of them knowing full well, because IdrisPukke had told him repeatedly, that it was not done at all to acknowledge the appearance of food upon the plate but to carry on talking to the left or right as if the larks’ tongues or peacock cutlets had appeared magically by their own suicidal will. ‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he said, with each expression of utterly false gratitude intended as a blow to the heart of the beauty sitting opposite him and a kick to the shins of her glaring husband.
We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy. But even though Conn had dismissed certain suspicions exiled to the very back of his mind and even though he must dislike the man who’d saved him from a hideous death at Silbury Hill – yet he could in the oubliettes of his unlikeable soul still remember the horrors of the purple death crushing him and which he still relived in terrible dreams: he could not, however hard he tried, shake off a clinging gratitude.
The trouble with Cale was that he had opened his opera of revenge brilliantly but now was lost for a song. Señor Eddie Gray’s mockery had been like throwing buns to a bear. He knew how to deal with aggression, verbal or physical. Arbell simply looked down at her soup bowl as if she hoped the contents would part like the Reed Sea and swallow her whole. Conn just glared at him. For all her misery she looked utterly and heartbreakingly beautiful. Her lips usually somewhat pale brown were a deep red and the white teeth just showing beneath them made him lyrical in his hatred and he thought of roses with snow between the scarlet petals. He had spent so much time thinking about her over the last hideous months that now she stood only a few feet away, it seemed incomprehensible for all the hatred that she would not laugh with delight, as she used to when he closed the door of her rooms behind him, and squeeze him tightly in her arms and smother his face with kisses as if she could never get enough of the touch and taste of him. How was it possible that she had tired of him? How was it possible that she could prefer the creature sitting next to her, have let him ... ? But that thought was too near madness and he was already too close. It had not even for a moment – you must excuse his utter ignorance in these things – occurred to him that he might be the father of the leaping bastard folded in its mother’s womb. Nor had it occurred to him that in the eyes of any objective person the obviousness of Arbell Materazzi preferring a tall and beautiful youth of her own kind and breeding, the great hope for the future of all the Materazzi, over a dark-haired, shortish, harsh-souled murderer with a grudge against the world was a matter anyone would have even thought of questioning. It was true that she owed her life to him, and in an extraordinary way the life of her younger brother, but gratitude is an awkward emotion at the best of times, even or especially towards those you once adored. It is particularly difficult for beautiful princesses because they are, in a manner of speaking, born to be given things and even a normal capacity for gratitude would weigh more heavily on them than human nature is generally able to bear.
‘Are you well?’ said Cale at last. At no time in all the history of the world has such a question been asked as if it were a threat.
She briefly looked up, her natural boldness getting the better of her confusion.
‘Very well.’
‘I am glad to hear it. For myself times have been hard since we last met.’
‘We’ve all suffered.’
‘Speaking personally I’ve caused more suffering than I’ve endured.’
‘Isn’t that always your way?’
‘You have a short memory – and worse since you were so many times in my debt.’
‘Mind your manners,’ said Conn, who would have stood and thrown his chair back with a dramatic flourish were it not for the fact that Vipond had gripped his thigh and squeezed with a strength surprising in a man of his age and profession.
‘How’s your leg?’ replied Cale. He was, after all, in many ways still young.
‘For God’s sake,’ whispered IdrisPukke. By now the wave of attentive silence had spread down one half of the hall. But having come with the intention of tormenting Arbell at length Cale realized that the control that would have made this at least plausible had deserted him – a reservoir of loss and anger had opened up far deeper than he had realized he felt – and he had certainly known that it was deep. ‘You’re not wanted here,’ said Conn, ‘why don’t you stop embarrassing yourself and leave.’ Either of these would have done. Like some hypocaust bellows – fed by a frenetic bedlamite – Cale was fired up beyond control. He stood up and was reaching for his belt when a weak hand curled around his wrist.
‘Hello, Tom,’ said Vague Henri gently. ‘I’ve brought someone to see you.’ Like cool water his voice poured over the expectant silence of the lookers-on. Cale stared for a moment at the white skin and the still striking mark along his face and then the two standing next to him: Simon Materazzi and the always reluctant Koolhaus.
‘Simon Materazzi says hello, Cale,’ said Koolhaus. Then the deaf and dumb young man folded him in his arms and would not let him go until they were out of the hall and having a smoke in the damp cold air of Spanish Leeds.
It was two hours later before IdrisPukke tracked them down by the simple expedient of waiting in Cale’s room until he returned.
‘Take Henri and Simon back to bed before they fall down,’ he told Koolhaus, who very gladly did as he was told. Cale sat down on his bed not looking at IdrisPukke.
‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself. Your reputation is no longer that of being God’s wrath, more his village idiot.’
This stung enough at least to get Cale to look at him, although he still said nothing, miserable as a limp drum.
‘Do you think you can bully the world?’
‘I’ve done all right so far.’
‘So far I suppose you have. But that isn’t all that far considering you’re so very young and there’s such a lot of the world to go.’
Neither of them said anything for a full minute.
‘I want her to suffer. She deserves it.’ He spoke so softly and with such sadness IdrisPukke hardly knew what to say.
‘I know how hard it is to give up a great love.’
‘I saved her life.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did I do something wrong?’
‘No.’
‘Why then?’
‘Nobody knows the answer to that. You can’t say to someone love this woman or love that man.’
‘But she used to.’
‘What lovers say to one another is written in the wind and the water. Some poet or other said that but it’s true all the same.’
‘She gave me away to Bosco. It’s not right to let that go.’
IdrisPukke might, in the interests of balance and fairness, have pointed out that Arbell had been in something of a difficult position at the time. But it had been years since he was foolish enough to have said so.
‘Unfortunately we live in interesting times. You can have a great say in them, perhaps the greatest – so, young as you are and however much this is a pain to you, in matters of love and politics and war small things in life must give way to greater.’
Cale looked at him.
‘Not if the small come first.’
Another long silence. Not even IdrisPukke could think of a reply. He changed the subject.
‘I don’t know what the Redeemers and their Pope are going to do about you. I wouldn’t bank on it being nothing. You make enemies the way other people breathe. To speak angrily the way you do, to show your hatred by what you say or by the way you look, is an unnecessary proceeding: dangerous, foolish, ridiculous and vulgar – though I suppose vulgarity is the least of your problems. You must either learn more discretion or start running now.’
Cale said nothing while IdrisPukke sat on the bed feeling sorry for the strange boy next to him. After a few minutes IdrisPukke began to worry that in his silence Cale was drifting too far.
‘Did you look up at the night sky while you were out?’
Cale laughed, softly and oddly, thought IdrisPukke – but it was better than the silence before.
‘No,’ said Cale. ‘Do the stars still shine?’
‘You have been the Master of Ceremonies,’ said Vipond to IdrisPukke later that night, ‘to a great many disasters but this must be one of your finest.’
‘Not at all. I’ve been involved in many worse things than a squabble between two lovers.’
‘You know it’s a good deal worse than that. Bose Ikard wants us expelled and you can be very sure a report about a brawl between the Materazzi heirs and your friend Nogbad the Bad will be on its way to the King of Switzerland as we speak, and a carefully embroidered one at that.’
‘King Zog may be an old woman but he’s not going to throw us out over a squabble like this – however much Ikard stirs it up.’
‘He will if he tells him that there is some question over the paternity of Arbell’s child.’
‘What do you think?’
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘There’s no arguing with that. The point is that the rumours are leaking under every doorway in Spanish Leeds. King Zog takes a very dim view of promiscuous behaviour and particularly between an aristocrat and some yob who carries the coal into her bedroom.’
‘He’s a great deal more than that.’
‘Not to King Zog of Switzerland. God never created a greater snob. His only reading is to spend hours sighing with pleasure and delight over his ancestry in the Almanach de Gotha.’
‘In case you hadn’t noticed, brother’- IdrisPukke never called him this unless he was particularly annoyed with him – ‘the Materazzi have descended into a kind of nothing. Without Cale to stop them the Redeemers are ready to roll up the Antagonists, the Laconics, Switzerland and everyone else like an old carpet. And they’ll piss on King Zog as they go by.’
‘Conn Materazzi is a prospect, given time.’
‘Cale plotted our destruction and that of the Laconics. Not bad for a coal-carrying yob. If you think Conn Materazzi has that in him you must be the old fool that there’s no fool like.’
‘We only have his word for the defeat of the Laconics.’
‘We were there at Silbury to witness what Cale’s plans did to us.’
‘All excuses aside, that was as much luck as judgement.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘You can’t control him.’
‘No.’
‘He can’t control himself.’
‘He wouldn’t be the first. He’s young, he’ll get over it.’
‘You’re wrong about that. I heard him threaten her when he left Memphis and again tonight. He’ll never be free of her. People talk about children as if they’re in some way different from adults. But there isn’t any difference, not really. Just souls crazy for love. The lover and the killer are in him like linsey-woolsey – never to be singled out.’
‘Then get Arbell out of Spanish Leeds and Conn with her. Out of sight, out of mind. Then we use Cale to come up with a plan to deal with the Redeemers.’
‘Why should he help us?’
‘He hates Arbell because he loved her and saved her and still she gave him up to them.’
‘We all did that.’
‘Speak for yourself. And he didn’t worship the ground you walked on. It’s in his interests to strike a deal with us because there isn’t anywhere else he can go. With Cale directing a Swiss army there’s at least a chance for us and a chance for him. He’ll see that. Arbell or no Arbell, he’s always had survival on his mind.’
‘Isn’t he just a danger to everyone?’
‘Then we must help him focus his attention where he can do most damage.’
‘It’s not much of a plan.’
‘It is when you don’t have a better one.’
‘Did you know he’s been talking to Kitty the Hare?’
‘Yes.’
‘You liar!’ As if they were young boys again no offence was intended or taken.
‘Do you tell anyone else all your comings and goings?’ said IdrisPukke.
‘I’m renowned for my candid nature.’
‘Exactly so. If he’s going to save the rest of us from the Redeemers I hope to God he has his thumbs on as many scales as there are sea shells on the shore.’
‘Another threat to Arbell from the Redeemers would be useful – good excuse to encourage Arbell’s absence.’
‘Would Conn go with her?’
‘Too much to hope for. Besides, Zog won’t have a guttersnipe leading an army he’s paying for, whatever you think.’
‘Then he’s a fool.’
‘No one has ever argued otherwise.’
‘Can you control Conn?’
‘Yes,’ replied Vipond.
‘Enough to let himself become a front for someone who might be the father of his first child?’
‘Not an approach I was thinking of trying. Besides, we have an advantage.’
‘Which is?’
‘He doesn’t want to believe it. We must encourage that natural desire as much as possible.’
But their plan had an unforeseen flaw – though this was not in itself something that would have surprised either of them.
Part of Bose Ikard’s way of making the Materazzi feel unwelcome was to ensure the inadequacy of their accommodation. When it came to Arbell this involved a message delivered by putting her in rooms designed two hundred years earlier as living space for the then King’s new bride, the Infanta Pilar. The Infanta never grew above two and a half cubits (a cubit being the distance between the elbow and the fingers of an outstretched hand). Adored for her good nature, wit and generosity to the poor, she inspired numerous buildings in the resultant craze for all things Spanish that had given what was then mere Leeds its unusual additional name. Once a byword for all that was dismal (‘You look like Leeds’ was an ancient joke at the expense of the unhappy – and the expense of Leeds), the desire to please the tiny Infanta led to an explosion of exotic public and private houses in the Spanish style. The Infanta’s personal apartments were built by her doting husband to her scale rather than that of the giants who surrounded her. The result for Arbell was that while her apartments were certainly fit for a queen they were fit for a very small queen forty-two inches high. To the Infanta the ceiling was lofty, to Arbell there were many parts of her rooms where she had to bow her beautiful neck just ever-so-slightly.
It was the night after the dreadful banquet and Conn and Arbell were sitting down in her apartments. Given they were both tall this gave the proportions of the room a comic aspect as if they were sat in a place somewhere between a ship’s cabin and a large doll’s house.
Arbell was looking down at her breasts and stomach. ‘I feel,’ she said ruefully to Conn, ‘as if I’d swallowed the heads of three bald men. Big-headed bald men. God, how much longer?’
‘You look very beautiful.’
‘I made you say that.’
Conn smiled.
‘It’s true you did make me say it. But it’s true anyway.’
‘You lie so sweetly it’s almost a pleasure to be deceived by you.’
‘Have it your own way,’ he said, taking her hand.
‘Promise me you’ll stay away from Thomas Cale,’ she said.
‘I wondered how long before you brought him up.’
‘Now you know. Promise me.’
‘You forget that he saved my life. It’s not so easy to kill someone you owe so much to. He saved yours as well and that makes it harder still. So I promise – even if he was so rude to you.’
‘I’ll live. But I want to ask you something much harder.’
‘What?’
‘He is not so gracious. I want you to promise to walk away if he comes looking for you.’
‘And my pride?’
‘It’s nothing. It’ll pass. Pride is nothing.’
‘You say that because you’re a woman.’
‘And so I don’t have any pride?’
‘What makes you proud is different – so what’s possible or impossible is different.’
‘Will you take pride in giving Cale what he wants? He’s not stupid enough to provoke you when you’re in full armour. He knows that you’d have the advantage.’ Some flattery, probably true, was needed here. She had pushed him too far already.
‘And what am I supposed to do if he dares me?’
‘My God you sound like a schoolboy!’
‘If you choose not to understand.’ He was annoyed at being spoken to like this but allowances must be made for women and especially women in the late stages of pregnancy. ‘If I walk away from him then my reputation, the thing that I am, walks away from me at the same time. You tell me that you will continue to respect me – but will you?’
‘Of course I will.’
‘That’s what you say now. But I won’t have the respect of anyone else.’
She sighed and said nothing for a while.
‘I know what you are – you are courageous and skilful and daring.’ More necessary flattery – and also true. ‘But he’s not,’ she looked hard for the right word and failed, ‘he’s not normal. He doesn’t bring catastrophe, he is a catastrophe. His friend, Kleist – the one who never liked him – he said he had funerals in his brain. Well, it’s true.’
‘How is anyone to live without respect? What’s the point?’
She sighed again and moved her stiff neck from side to side and groaned. Look at yourself, she thought, as fat as gluttony. ‘When will it ever end?’ she said aloud and looked at her husband sideways. ‘You owe him your life.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then how can you honourably kill him? Let it be more widely known that he behaved bravely – more, praise his courage so that people will admire you more than they admire him. Make it clear that you are inevitably in his debt and everyone will praise you for walking away if he provokes you. What courage! What true honour that Conn Materazzi could so easily fight and yet risks that honour in order to be honourable. It’s true after all, you said so yourself.’
‘Won’t that mean he gains a reputation ...’ He had to think about this: was it an honourable objection to make in the circumstances? ‘... a name for courage?’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ replied Arbell. ‘He’ll soon spoil the good opinion anyone has of him. He thinks it’s beneath him to be admired by people he despises – and he despises everyone.’
‘You’re very clever.’
‘Yes I am.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Now go away and let me sleep.’
He stood up and cracked his head on the ceiling.
‘Ow!’
She winced along with him but could see he was not hurt. She made to get up to kiss it better – no mean feat. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said.
She needed no encouragement. ‘I will if you don’t mind.’ He bent down and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Then with exaggerated comic carefulness he made his way to the door and was gone. She eased herself further back onto the sofa, twisting from side to side to stretch her aching back and decided to wait for another ten minutes before making the effort to go to bed. She closed her eyes, enjoying the peace and quiet.
And then from the shadows at the back of the room a low voice said softly:
‘I do haunt you still.’
Some say the world will end in ice. If so, it was something of that terminal cold that froze the hairs on the neck of the young mother-to-be. She moved quick as you like for all the aching back and enormous bulge and turned in horror as Cale emerged into the candlelight. ‘In case you were wondering,’ he said putting his finger precisely on the fear uppermost in her mind, ‘I heard everything you said. Not very nice.’
‘I’ll scream.’
‘I wouldn’t. Things would be grim for anyone who came through the door when you did.’
‘You expect me to die without a word?’
‘God no. I wouldn’t expect you to comb your own hair without complaining.’ This was not fair. She was by no means a trivial person. ‘Whine all you like, your majesty, but do it quietly.’
‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘I’m thinking of killing you.’
‘I know you believe I’ve offended you but how has my baby offended?’
‘That’s why I’m thinking about it.’
‘It’s yours.’
‘You would say that.’
‘It’s true.’
‘It’s true that I saved your life twice and you said you loved me more deeply than ...’ He smiled, not pleasantly. ‘... you know I can’t remember but I seem to recall it was a thing of great depth. Perhaps you can help me.’
‘It is true,’ she said, almost impossible to hear.
‘The rumour in the vegetable market is that you’re a slut – and betting is even as to who the father is: either the Memphis village idiot or the prole who carried the coals into your bedroom.’
‘You know that isn’t true.’
‘I don’t know. You sold me to men who for all you knew were going to take me to a place of execution, hang me and then cut me down alive, gut me ... while I watched ... fry those guts ... while I watched ... cut off my cock and balls ... while I watched. Well, you see. It looks bad.’
‘They promised me they wouldn’t hurt you.’
‘And what made you think a promise meant more to them than it meant to you. You were tired of me, and wanted to see the back of me, and didn’t care how.’
‘That’s not true.’ She was crying now but barely audibly.
‘It may not be the whole truth but it’s true enough. Anyway I’m sick of listening to you.’
‘They didn’t do any of those things to you. He promised to make you a great man. Aren’t you? Didn’t he keep his promise?’
This was too much. In a few strides he was over to her as she backed away to the wall holding her hands out in terror to protect her child. He reached behind her head and grabbed her golden pony tail and dragged her over to the sofa pushing her to her knees.
‘I’ll show you how he kept his promise, you lying bitch.’ He kept tight hold of her hair with one hand and pulled the lamp on the table next to the sofa so that it cast a better light. Then with his free hand he reached into a back pocket and took out the letter given to him by Bosco and over which he had squabbled with Vague Henri. He unfolded it on the sofa rug, violently pushing her head down so that her face was almost touching it.
‘Read!’ he said.
‘You’re hurting me.’
He twisted her hair sharply. She called out.
‘Scream quietly,’ he whispered. ‘Someone might be unlucky enough to hear. Now read who it’s from.’ Another encouraging tug.
‘From Redeemer General Archer, Commander Forces of the Veldt, to Redeemer General Bosco.’
‘You can skip the first five lines.’
Arbell continued with some difficulty – his grip was fierce and she was too close to the script.
‘Before he left Thomas Cale ordered us to sweep up every village on the Veldt within fifty miles of our camps and bring in all the women and children, their animals to be used to feed the three thousand souls we managed to intern. Some sort of rinderpest killed most of their cattle and reduced very much the milk of those that survived. Often lacking sufficient rations ourselves there were none to spare. Given their weakness many have succumbed to starvation, measles and the squits, in all about two and a half thousand. I was not informed until very late and when I inspected the camp I saw such wretchedness any heart would have rued the sight ...’
‘Don’t worry about the next bit,’ said Cale pointing further down the letter, ‘start again there.’
‘Out of every corner of the place they came creeping on their hands and knees because their legs could not bear them; they looked like the very anatomy of death and spoke whispers like ghosts crying out of their graves. It was told to me that they were happy to eat moss where they could and then finally in desperation to scrape the carcasses out of their graves also. I know you to be a person of clemency but though I describe pitiable things, and ones easier to read about than to witness, there is no hope that these Antagonists will amend and it is a dire necessity that they be cut off. This judgement of the heavens that makes us tremble touches us not with pity.’
‘That’s enough,’ he said letting her hair go and bouncing her head off the soft bolster of the sofa – not the cruellest violence he had offered the world it must be said.
Slowly she pulled herself up and eased into a sitting position.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last. ‘What has this got to do with me? Or even you? This dreadful thing wasn’t what you intended, was it?’
‘Haven’t you heard? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. My intention is to be left alone with a decent bed and some decent food to go with it. But what I do is just what you said. Catastrophe follows me everywhere. I sat in the shadows back there listening to your chinless wonder whining about his reputation -‘
‘He’s not chinless!’
‘Be quiet. My reputation is that I’m a bloody child who cares no more for the lives of people than he cares for the life of a dog. My reputation is that I consume everything I touch. You put me there back with them. The blood of everyone I’ve wasted since then is on your hands as well as mine.’
‘Why don’t you just stop killing people instead of blaming everyone else?’
She said this more violently than was perhaps wise given the circumstances. But she did not lack courage.
‘And tell me how am I supposed to do that? The Redeemers won’t stop, not for anything. They intend to wrap this world in a blanket, pour on the pitch, and then set fire to it like a match. There’s no stopping.’ He stood back glaring like the Troll of Gissinghurst. To be fair, she glared back giving as good as she got. ‘Now I’m going to leave by the door – not how I got in, just in case you were wondering. I want you to think about that in the nights to come. You’re not going to call anyone because I’ll kill them if you do and even if I’m caught I’ll be sure to mention to your chinless wonder of a husband that you claimed I was the father of his child.’
‘He won’t believe you.’
‘He will a little bit.’
And with that he walked to the door and was gone.
He moved quickly down the almost empty corridors – where the only guards were the young and inexperienced and easy to avoid – and considered his evening’s work with a peculiar satisfaction. He had made her feel worse and that was what mattered. Whether he was also truly heartbroken at the unintended consequences of his orders concerning the women and children of the veldt was hard to tell. As the Englishman used to say: the truth depends on where you start the story.
By the next day Cale was thinking better of his late-night visit. He had, all said and done, threatened a pregnant woman with violence and made himself look like the monster Arbell had claimed him to be as he stood listening in the shadows. And as for the child, she was certainly lying to save her skin. He could hardly bear to think about what it meant if not. So he didn’t.
Depressed and ashamed he had gone for a walk and stumbled by accident on the great park that spread eccentrically shaped as a salamander just north of the centre of the city. It was a warm day for the time of year, bright sunshine, and the park was full of people, flirting young men and women, children playing and shouting, older couples walking up and down the great promenades with their budding lime trees doing the passagiata for which Spanish Leeds had been famous for two hundred years – the seeing and being seen. Feeling oddly woollen-headed and with one ear blocked as if water from a bath had become stuck, he walked in the sunshine until he came to one edge of Salamander Park – a huge wall carved into the granite that topped the city. It had been cut flat and into it, and thickly carved were the great figures of the Antagonist Reformation who had taken refuge in Spanish Leeds during the initial persecution and before they had moved on to found the Antagonist city at Salt Lake. Here were thirty-foot-high reliefs of men who had fought against the Redeemers to the point of hideous death and yet he had never heard of them: Butzer, Hus and Philip Melanchthon, Menno Simons, Zwingli, Hutt and the unhappy-looking Mosarghu Brothers. Who were these giants in front of him and what in the name of God did they believe? It was almost impossible to grasp that the rejection of the Redeemers had such heft to it. Then he moved on across the park feeling ever more distant and removed from the flow of ordinary human happiness taking in the sun and each other as they would do a week today and all spring and summer long. And now he had to get away, out of the great ornate cast-iron gates of the north end of the park and round the side heading for his room. But he was so tired now, utterly weary, exhausted in a way that was completely new to him. He walked ever slower down the street as if each step was ageing him by a year, but it was so much worse than ordinary fatigue. He felt he had been on the move for a thousand years and nowhere to sit down, no rest, no peace, nothing but fighting and fear of the next blow. His heart was so heavy in his chest he felt it dragging him to a halt. How was it possible to feel like this and live? By now he was at the West Gate and he stopped and rested his head, pouring sweat against the sandstone.
‘Are you all right, son?’ But he did not have the strength to reply. Afterwards he could not remember how he made it back to his room, not even unlocking the door, only his lying on the bed gasping like a fish drowning on dry land. And then it came for him – the earthquake in his guts, a shaking and an avalanche of collapse and burst. His inside world gave way of flesh and soul together, hideous pain of tears and eruption. He rushed towards the jakes and retched and retched and nothing came but so violent it was as if his soul was trying to leave his bowels and belly while he was still alive. And so it went on for hour after hour. And then he went back to bed and wept but not like any child or man and nothing to do with release, and then when he thought, whatever thinking was, that bellowing in tearless pain would never stop, that was when he began to laugh over and over and for hours on end. And laughing was how Vague Henri found him just before dawn, still laughing, weeping and retching.