4


It is well enough known that the heart is encased in a tube and that sufficient distress causes it to fall down the tube, generally called the bunghole, or spiracle, which ends in the pit of the stomach. At the bottom of the bunghole, or spiracle, is a trap-door – made of gristle – called the springum. In the past, when bitter disappointment struck a man or woman and was too much to bear the springum would burst open and the heart would fall through it and give those who had suffered too much pain a merciful and quick release by stopping the heart instantly. Now there is so much pain in the world that hardly anyone could bear it and live. And so ever-protecting nature has caused the springum to fuse to the spiracle so that it can no longer open and now suffering, however terrible, must simply be endured. This was just as well for Cale as the first sight of the Sanctuary rose out of the early-morning mist as grim as a punishment. All the way along the last part of the journey a childish hope had emerged from somewhere in his soul that when he saw the Sanctuary first it might have been utterly destroyed by fire or brimstone. It was not. It sat squat on the horizon, unalterable in its concrete watchfulness, and waiting for his return, as solid in its presence as if it had grown into the flat-topped mountain on which it was built that itself looked like an enormous back tooth implanted in the desert. It was not made to delight, to intimidate, to glorify, or boast. It looked like its function: constructed to keep some people out no matter what and to keep others in no matter what. And yet you could not easily describe it: it was blank walls, it was prisons, it was places of grim worship, it was brownness. It was a particular idea of what it meant to be human made out of concrete.

All the way up the narrow road that corkscrewed up the side of the vast tabletop hill Cale’s heart battered against the gristly door of his springum as it clutched at oblivion – but oblivion would not come. The great gates opened and then the great gates shut. And that was that. All the daring, the courage, the intelligence, the luck, the death, the love, the beauty and the joy, the slaughter and treachery had brought him back to the exact point where he had started not even a year before. It was the canonical hour of None and so everyone was in the dozen churches praying – the acolytes for forgiveness of their sins, the Redeemers for the forgiveness of the acolytes’ sins.

Had he been less miserable, Cale might have noticed that he was helped down from his horse not even by a common Redeemer but by the Prelate of the Horse himself and with extraordinary deference. Bosco, making do for the dismount with an Ostler of the vulgar kind, walked forward and gestured him towards a door that Cale had barely noticed in all his years at the Sanctuary, because it was forbidden for an acolyte to go anywhere near it. It was opened for him by the Prelate of Horses and he led the way not as his superior but, as it were, as a guide. They walked on in the brown gloom that was the common feature of the Sanctuary everywhere, but even in the depths of misery Cale began to be aware of the oddness of having lived in a place all his life and then in a moment being shown there were vast areas of that place he had no idea existed. Brown it still was, but different. There were doors! There were doors everywhere. They stopped at one. It was opened and he was gestured inside, but this time no one went ahead of him and only Bosco followed. The chamber was large and furnished with brown furniture and lots of it. And it was disturbingly familiar. It was the same layout as the room in which he had killed Redeemer Picarbo. It even had a bedroom. This was a place only for the powerful.

‘It will be necessary for you to stay here for two days, perhaps three. There are preparations, I am sure you understand. Your food will be brought to you and anything you need, just knock on the door and your ...’ He wasn’t quite sure of the correct word. ‘... your guardian will arrange for it to be brought to you.’ Bosco nodded, almost a bow, and left closing the door behind him. Cale stared after him, astonished not just by the notion that he had a guardian, but more by the idea that he could ask for what he wanted. What could possibly be in the Sanctuary that anyone would want? As it turned out, Cale’s justified assumption that there was indeed nothing turned out to be entirely wrong.

Meanwhile, Bosco had a great many pressing problems to deal with. In the eyes of Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist, Bosco appeared to be a figure of absolute authority among the Redeemers. This was far from the case. It might have been true concerning acolytes and even many senior Redeemers. His writ might now run in the Sanctuary but, however important it was, the centre of power for the faith lay with Pope Bento XVI in the holy city of Chartres. For twenty years a formidable bastion of power and orthodoxy, he had spent those two decades rolling back the changes of the previous hundred years in search of a renewed purity for the One True Faith. However, for some time he had been prey to that great affliction of age, Mens Vermis, first as a great tendency to forget, then to wander, then to wander and not return except for brief flashes of a few hours where his old grasp seemed to return in its entirety. From where, who knows? In the three years during which the Vermis had ruined his mind many cabals and juntos, cliques and coteries, had emerged preparing for the moment when death might release him from his duties. The two most important of these were the Redeemers Triumphant, run by Redeemer Cardinal Gant – responsible for religious orthodoxy – and the Office of the Holy See controlled by Redeemer Cardinal Parsi. Whoever controlled the Holy See and the Redeemers Triumphant controlled access to the Holy Father, and as the Holy Father was so ill, between them they controlled a very great deal. As for Gant and Parsi there was the difference between a gnat and a flea as to which of them hated Bosco most. Bosco’s view of either went a long way beyond hatred. This longstanding animosity was a matter of design by Pope Bento, who believed as much in the principle of divide and rule as he did in God. When the time was right he would have chosen a successor but such matters seemed beyond him now even though the choice was only between Parsi and Gant. It would not have been Bosco. Bosco was suspected of thinking and sometimes of new thinking. Aware of these reservations, Bosco had made other plans.

A reaper and sower even more gifted than Chancellor Vipond of Memphis, Bosco had reacted quickly to the catastrophe of Cale’s killing of Picarbo and his subsequent escape. But it is a great help when you know that God is on your side also to have brains, along with a belief that God helps those that help themselves. Bosco had put it about to those who needed to know that it was Antagonist spies who had murdered Picarbo and that Cale had been forced to accompany them to uncover a plan to murder the Pope. Where Antagonists were concerned no accusation was too outrageous. ‘A big lie,’ he was fond of saying to Redeemer Gil, the nearest Bosco had to a confidant, ‘is more easily believed than a small one and a simple one more readily than anything too complicated.’ He had therefore commissioned Redeemer Eugen Hadamowski, his propaganda Burgrave, to write a book, the Protocols of the Moderators of Antagonism, outlining the details of such a plot. They had then, after careful searching, found the body of a Redeemer who shared all the most exaggerated features generally held to be typical of an Antagonist: he had green teeth (a lucky symptom of the disease from which he had died), thick lips, a large nose and black curly hair. They had thrown his body into the sea just off the Isle of Martyrs, where they knew the current would carry it, and let the general willingness to believe in such conspiracies do the rest. The Protocols did not, however, confine themselves just to the details of the ghastly plot itself, but also expressed fear that an unusually brave and holy Redeemer spy was out and about and that through great risk and holy cunning had infiltrated the Antagonist plotters to try to save the Pope. More cunningly it claimed that an Antagonist fifth column had converted an undisclosed number of Redeemers to their heresy and that many of these apostates had worked their way to important posts in both Gant’s Redeemers Triumphant and Parsi’s Office of the Holy See, where they fed vital secrets to their masters and awaited the opportunity offered by any moments of weakness in the faithful. The Protocols also reluctantly conceded that despite all their efforts little head way had been made against the religious purity of Bosco’s Redeemers in the Sanctuary.

Bosco’s belief that the Protocols could be as crude as a four-year-old’s painting of the Hanged Redeemer as long as the faithful were convinced by their origins turned out to be more true than he could have reasonably hoped. The body’s apparently one-in-a-million chance arrival from the sea was proof that there was no conspiracy. So natural did it seem that the question of its fakery never arose. The Office of the Holy See and the Redeemers Triumphant were reduced to arguing that while the threat was clearly real, the Antagonists were mistaken about the heretics in their ranks. Nevertheless there were mighty purges. Torture as such was forbidden to be used on Redeemers but the Office of Interrogators had no need of racks and branding. A few nights without sleep, followed by ducking in water, soon had entirely innocent men – innocent of heresy at any rate – confessing to collusion and apostasy and trafficking with devils all followed by the naming of names. Bosco watched with considerable satisfaction as a great number of his enemies were burnt at the stake by a great many of his other enemies. The authority he gained as a result of his own rule at the Sanctuary being accused by the Protocols of being a model of resistance to Antagonism gave him a renewed influence sufficient to launch the attack on the Materazzi with its utterly unexpected and magnificent consequences. He was now very much in the ascendant over Parsi and Gant and he had proved to his followers, beyond any shadow of a scruple or doubt, that God had blessed his daring and dangerous plan and that Cale was indeed God’s instrument. Work, and very serious work, remained to be done. Neither Gant nor Parsi were to be underestimated and realizing the threat from Bosco they had joined together to oppose him. The Antagonist purge had eventually been brought to an end by their concerted efforts and they were on the move against Bosco and at any price.

That night Bosco lay on his bed, brooding over the many plans he had set in motion to destroy his rivals and bring about the end of the world. Exhilaration and worry kept him awake. What, after all, could shock the soul so intensely as the decision to bring everything to an end – the terrible vertigo of commitment to the ultimate solution of evil itself ? His wariness was more ordinary but not less important. Bosco was not foolish enough to countenance grand ideas without knowing he needed the wit and competence to carry them out and, of course, the luck. Then there was the wariness and exhilaration he felt about Cale. Everything he had ever hoped for from this boy had come true and more than that. And yet he was puzzled that God had given everything his vision had promised and pressed down into the barrel yet there were still traces of something inadequate about him: pointless anger and resentment not turned into a proper righteousness. He comforted himself before he fell asleep that he had not intended Cale to be made manifest to the world for another ten years at least. If it hadn’t been for that lunatic Picarbo and his ghastly experiments, things would have been very different. Soon after a short fulmination he stopped indulging his bad temper and comforted himself with one of his oldest dictums, ‘a plan is a baby in a cradle – it bears little resemblance to the man’.

Early the next morning he waited in the Square of Martyrs’ Blood, expectant and impatient, for one of his most carefully laid plans to reach its maturity. The great gates creaked open and three hundred Redeemers marched into the Sanctuary. It would be hard to describe them as the cream of the military wing of the priesthood because cream would give entirely the wrong sense of something smooth and richly soft. They were as forbidding a collection as perhaps had ever stood together in one place – only great care and patience over nearly ten years had won them to Bosco’s cause, it being no easy thing to bend the inflexible and reason with the fanatical. Hardest of all had been to preserve the flickers of daring and imaginative violence that brought them to his attention in the first place. These were Redeemers who had shown a talent for unlikely innovation, along with their more conventional talent for cruelty, brutality and the willingness to obey. They would be Cale’s most direct servants. Cale would train them, each of them in turn train one hundred others and each of them again one hundred more. Now that he had Cale and the men in front of him he had the origins of the end of everything.

Bosco might still lack his rivals’ power base in Chartres but he had a great variety of followers of different kinds, many unknown to one another. Some were fanatical in their devotion, true believers in his plan to change the world for ever, most had no idea of his final intentions but regarded him as more zealous in matters of faith than Parsi and Gant. Others were more lukewarm still: he was someone powerful who might yet become more powerful. Probably he would be eclipsed by the Pope’s death, peace be upon him, but you never knew. Through this ugly rainbow of alliances he had spread the word about Cale by revealing the heroism of his part in saving the Pope from the malice not only of the Antagonists but from the expansionism of the now ruined Materazzi. Unofficial pamphlets were written telling disapprovingly but salaciously of the temptations and dangers Cale had faced. Their portrait of Memphis was crude but by no means untrue: the availability of flesh, its cunning politicians, and beautiful but corrupting women’s wiles. But while some Redeemers might have enjoyed the horrors that they read about most of them were not hypocrites: they were genuinely revolted by what they read. It may surprise you that men such as these could feel love, but be unsurprised. They did. Cale had saved the Pope they loved.

The vast expansion of acolyte numbers over the last few years as Bosco built up his control of the military future of the Redeemers meant that, vast as the Sanctuary was, there was little in the way of accommodation for the three hundred of his new elite. Redeemers in general might not expect much in the way of life’s pleasures but a room of their own when not on active service, however small, was a matter of great significance in lives generally full of privation. The many cells in the House of Special Purpose had been built when space was less of a luxury and Bosco had decided to clear out those who had been languishing there for any length of time. Over the last few weeks large numbers of executions had been carried out to create the space needed for the new arrivals. As with all enclosed institutions those inside the Sanctuary were terrible gossips and as such relentlessly nosy. There was bound to be talk about the arrival of these imposing-looking officers but, in hindsight, Bosco felt he ought to have spent time on a convincing explanation for their presence. At the time he relied on the considerable intelligence of the highly experienced Chief Jailer to carry out his orders to treat the men well and put them in the north wing of the prison now cleared of inmates by means of the recent spate of murders. Bosco arranged for the excellent feeding of the three hundred men and explained that the wing would be locked to keep out the curious. They knew they were a chosen elect and that secrecy was vital to their own survival, so there were no objections.

Then Bosco spent several hours explaining his intentions to a mostly silent Cale.

‘Whose authority are they under?’

‘Yours.’

‘And whose authority am I under?’

‘You are under no authority – certainly not mine, if that’s what you meant. You are God’s resentment made flesh. You only imagine that you are a man and that the will of another man can ever matter to you. Deviate from your nature and you will destroy yourself. That’s why Arbell Swan-Neck betrayed you and her father also betrayed you – even when you had saved the life of his daughter and recalled his only son to life just as much as if you had brought him back from the dead. People are not for you – you are not for people. Do what you’re here for and you’ll return to your father in heaven. If you try to be something you can never be then you are due more pain and misery than any creature that ever lived.’

‘Give me Memphis.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘Oh,’ said Bosco, smiling. ‘So that you can tear it down brick by brick and sow salt into its foundations.’

‘Something like that.’

‘By all means. That’s what you’re for after all. But I do not have the authority and therefore you don’t have it either. We must have an army. Sleeping in the House of Special Purpose is the means to get one. Even then I will need to be Pontiff before you can get up to mischief on that scale. As you have now discovered, nothing you can do for a man or woman will make them love you. Except for me, Thomas, I love you.’

And with that he stood up and left.

That night a nervous Redeemer Bergeron, Deputy Chief Jailer, arrived with a list of the names of the three hundred Bosco had asked for to check against his records and to guard against infiltrators. The new list confirmed there were, in fact, only two hundred and ninety-nine. The missing Redeemer would have to be accounted for in case he’d had second thoughts or been arrested. It turned out some time later that he had died of smallpox on his way to join the others. The jailer was nervous because he was new to dealing with the fearsome Bosco. His boss, the Chief Jailer, had been imprisoned himself only the day before on charges of Impious Malateste, an offence serious enough to have him arrested but not to inform Bosco about. The Chief Jailer had chosen his deputy now in charge precisely because his limited intelligence would lessen any threat to his own position. The deputy returned an hour after Bosco had read the list of names. Bosco did not look up when he entered, merely pushed the list in his direction. He nervously picked it up without looking and got out of Bosco’s intimidating presence as quickly as possible.

Outside, the jailer’s heart was beating like a girl’s who had just had her first kiss. He tried to calm himself and taking the list to a taper burning weakly on the wall examined it carefully. When he finished his eyes were bulging with fear and uncertainty. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. He was too afraid to ask for clarification from Bosco and too proud to consult his predecessor. He was right to think that he would have looked foolish and inept in the eyes of both. His promotion, after all, was yet to be confirmed. ‘Whatever you are,’ he had once overheard, ‘be decisive.’ This not very good advice, misunderstood in any case, had been lurking at the back of Redeemer Jailer Bergeron’s mind for many years awaiting the opportunity to betray him. At last its opportunity had come. How many of us are any different? How many of our worst or finest hours are rooted in some minor piece of nonsense that was stuck in our souls like a weed into a rocky cliff and flourished there against the odds? It forces its roots into a crack, the crack is widened, a sudden storm, the water invades the crack, the water freezes in the winter night and opens up the split. A stranger passes, his horse stumbles on the loosened rock and horse and rider are ejected into the dreadful chasm of the scarp. So Bergeron hurried to the cell of Petar Brzica and knocked with absolute conviction on his door.

‘Yes?’

‘The people on this list in the north wing are to be executed.’

Brzica was not especially surprised given that so many prisoners from the north wing of the House had been put to death recently. He examined the list, calculating roughly what sort of task it was. ‘I thought,’ he said, more to make conversation than anything, ‘the executions were finished for now.’

‘Obviously not,’ came the bad-tempered reply. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and see the Lord Redeemer Bosco and ask him yourself what he thinks he’s up to.’

‘Not my job,’ replied Brzica. ‘Ours is not to reason why. When?’

‘Now.’

‘Now?’

‘I’ve just come from Redeemer Bosco’s presence.’

This was compelling.

‘What’s the rush?’

‘That’s nothing to concern you. All you need to worry about is how quickly you can start and finish.’

‘How many exactly?’

‘Two hundred and ninety-nine.’

Brzica considered, his lips moving in silent calculation.

‘I can start in two hours.’

‘How soon can you start if you get your finger out?’

Again Brzica considered.

‘Two hours.’

Bergeron sighed.

‘Then how long?’

‘Once the rotunda gets going we can do one every two minutes. With breaks – eleven hours.’

‘And without breaks?’

‘Eleven hours.’

‘Very well,’ said Bergeron, in a tone that suggested he had concluded his negotiation successfully. ‘The rotunda in two hours.’

Brzica was in fact working in the rotunda in less than an hour with his four assistants or topping coves. He had taken a look at his victims carefully. They were a tough-looking bunch. If they caught a sniff of what was happening there would be trouble. At the moment it was clear they were unaware – though not blissfully so. Not even men as ginty-looking as this could be so carefree in the face of death and the everlasting torment that waited. One thing bothered him a great deal. ‘Why,’ he said to the Redeemer on guard, ‘aren’t they locked in their cells? Why’s there no one but you to watch them?’

His reply was convincing. ‘No idea.’

If the guard was uncommunicative it was not just because he genuinely knew nothing, but also because no one wanted to talk to Brzica. Even the most thuggish Redeemers looked down on, indeed despised, him in the way executioners have always been despised. Nobody liked him but he didn’t care, or at least that was what he told himself. In fact he was sensitive about the way he was regarded. He liked being feared. He liked being seen as deadly and mysterious. He was aggrieved, however, by the disdain. It was uncalled for. It was unjust. He held himself aloof but his feelings were hurt by this lack of respect.

He suffered in silence, not out of choice but because no one wanted to talk to him. Not even his assistants, two of whom had recently, and much to his irritation, tried to get themselves reassigned to ministering to lepers in Mogadishu. They would get theirs in due course for this disloyalty, but tonight required unity and harmonious skill.

Problems still remained and he decided to walk along the ambulacrum to clear his head. Should they be bound first? No. The advantage of tied hands and hobbled legs needed to be offset against the clear worry this would give that something unpleasant was up. These were not the kind of men to go quietly and given the fact that for some reason they had been left with the doors to their cells open, a riot could easily result. It was better, he decided as he loped up the ambo, to keep them innocent and do it all so quickly they wouldn’t catch on until they were halfway to the next life. It required more deftness and a surer touch but then these he had in abundance.

‘Good night, Redeemer.’ It was Bosco walking past, mulling over Cale.

‘Good ...’

But Bosco was already gone.

The Rotunda had been designed by Brzica’s predecessor – a Fancy Dan, in Brzica’s opinion – and had been constructed, in his professional opinion, more elaborately than was necessary. Keep it simple was his motto. He had replaced the Rotunda’s three-room system for mass executions – one about to be killed, one in the next room being prepared and the third the victim in waiting – and replaced it with something that relied more on the cooperation of the victim under the impression that something else was happening. The victim was told he was to have a brief introduction to the Prior of the Sanctuary. When he entered through the thick and soundproof door he would see the Prior kneeling to pray with his back to him and facing a Holy icon of the Hanged Redeemer. He and his two guards would kneel side by side, the latter a little closer perhaps than one would expect. The Prior would then stand up and turn around, the victim would look up, Brzica in his leather apron would grab his hair, the two guards hold his arms and then Brzica would draw the knife embedded in his glove across his throat. Already dying and in shock he would be dropped onto the false floor in front of him, this would be lowered by the guards, the dead or dying man would be pushed down the chute to be pulled away by the Redeemers in the room below, who would wash the false floor quickly and carefully and then the floor would be pushed and raised back into place. A quick check for signs of the struggle and then the guards would be up and leaving the room by a door further along the corridor. Outside the next victim would be patiently waiting with his two guards. He would see dimly in the shadows what he thought was his predecessor leaving through the exit door. Then the whole procedure would begin again.

This went on throughout the night with only a single interruption. One of the victims, more alert than all the rest, sensed something was not quite right. As a tired hand grasped his hair and another his left hand he instinctively jerked free. Slipping and sliding and screaming as all four of his murderers grappled and tried to pin him down, screaming and fighting till they bundled him into the shaft, stamped on his hand, beat him about the head and finally pushed him through to be finished off by the Redeemers in the chambers below. Not even the thickest door could prevent the sound of such a dreadful struggle reaching the ears of the man waiting in the corridor outside. Brzica went out himself and stabbed the frightened Redeemer where he stood before he could raise a fuss. Other than that, everything passed as it should.

The next morning at eleven, Redeemer Jailer Bergeron inspected the pile of lightly washed bodies laid out in the Rotunda Aftorium, waiting to be removed to Ginky’s Field under the cover of night. It was a sobering but impressive sight. Half an hour later he was standing in front of a slightly impatient Bosco, who was trying to work out the boring but complicated documents involving an argument over the delivery of a large consignment of spoiled cheese.

‘What is it?’ said Bosco, not looking up.

‘The executions have been carried out as you ordered, Redeemer.’

Bosco looked up having lost, to his irritation, his train of thought over the claim and counter-claim concerning responsibility for the rotten cheese.

‘What?’

A terrible dread flushed through Bergeron as if he had been hit by a winter spate.

‘The execution of the prisoners in the House of Special Purpose.’

Bergeron’s voice was whisper thin. He took out the order sheet with the names and pointed to the last page. ‘There’s the cross you put at the end to confirm it.’

Bosco took the paper from him without fuss. A horrible quiet settled over him. He looked at it for a moment. His precious gauleiters gone, every one.

‘The cross at the bottom,’ he said softly, ‘was to show that I’d read it.’

‘Ah.’

‘Ah, indeed.’

‘I ...’

‘Please don’t say anything. You’ve brought me a disaster this morning. Take me to see them.’

In his room Cale was looking pointlessly out of the window, his mind hundreds of miles away. Behind him there was the clatter of an acolyte laying out his second meal of the day. If nothing else, eating, now that his food came from the nuns as it did for the other Redeemers, was one pleasure he still felt. Of a sort. The acolyte dropped one of the covers on the floor and it bounced noisily and rolled over near his feet. The nearness of the acolyte’s scrabble to pick it up made him look at the boy’s face for the first time. The boy, though he was at least Cale’s age, picked up the cover and looked back, but uncertainly.

‘I don’t know you,’ said Cale.

‘They brought me here ten days ago from Stuttgart.’ Cale had read about Stuttgart only a few days before in an almanac Bosco had given him that set out in the driest detail every armed and walled Redeemer citadel with a population above five thousand. It was five hundred pages long and there were ten volumes. According to Bosco, the Redeemer commonwealth was fragile. What was clear from even what he had read in the alamanac was that it was vast, bigger by far than he had ever imagined.

‘Why?’ asked Cale.

‘Don’t know.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Model.’

Cale went over to the table and sat down. There were scrambled eggs, toast, chicken legs, sausages, mushrooms and porridge. He started to help himself.

‘You’re Cale, aren’t you?’

Cale ignored him. ‘They say you saved the Pope himself from nasty Antagonists.’

Cale looked back at him for a moment then went back to eating. Model stared at him. He was hungry because acolytes were always hungry, just as for most of the year they were cold. But it did not occur to him that the food on the table, some of which he did not even recognize, might be shared with him. It was like a beautiful woman to an ugly man – he could appreciate the beauty but could not expect at all to participate in it. But, distracted as he was, Cale could not eat this well in front of another acolyte.

‘Sit down.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Yes, you could. Sit.’

Model sat and Cale put a dish of fried potatoes in front of him. But there was, of course, a problem. Cale picked up the dish of fried potatoes and emptied all but one on his own plate. Flushed with desire and longing, Model’s face fell.

‘Look,’ said Cale. ‘You eat too much of this stuff and you’ll be yawning your guts up in five minutes. Believe me. What did you eat in Stuttgart?’

‘Porridge and bunge.’

‘Bunge?’

‘Sort of fat and nuts and stuff.’

‘We call it dead men’s feet.’

‘Oh,’ said Model.

Cale removed the skin from a small piece of chicken and scraped away the delicious jelly that clung juicily to the underside. Then a smaller helping of just the white of an egg and a larger dollop of porridge but just a little bit, not too much.

‘See how that goes down.’

Well was the answer, ecstatically wonderfully in a heavenly way it went down well. Not even in the depths of his anger and fury could Cale fail to take pleasure in the delight of Model as he ate the fried potato, the white of the egg, the porridge slipping down his parched and hungry throat as if it had come from the gardens of paradise, where it was said that there were lemonade springs and the rocks were made of candy.

When Model finished he sat back and stared again at Cale.

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome. Now go and lie down for five minutes and turn your face to the wall so you aren’t looking at me while I finish. You might feel a bit strange.’

Model did as he was told and Cale finished his breakfast without giving him another thought. As he finished there was a knock at the door.

‘Go away,’ he said, signalling the alarmed Model to get up. There was another knock. He waited. ‘Come in.’ It was Bosco.

Ten minutes later the two of them stood alone in the Aftorium looking silently at the two hundred and ninety-nine dead bodies, all that remained of Bosco’s ten years of planning for the means to bring the world to an end.

‘I wanted to show you this because there should be no secrets between us. I don’t want you to learn from my mistake because I did not make a mistake. I wish that I had, because then I could learn from it. But this error, shall we call it, is simply what it is. An event. There was a plan, a carefully arrived at and exactingly thought-out plan. What you need to learn here is that there is nothing to learn. That there are foolish men and that there are inexperienced men and that there are misunderstandings. This is the nature of things. You understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘I will consider an alternative.’

But for all his acceptance of the terrible carnage done to his years of irreplaceable planning (Bergeron had been replaced but to his astonished thankfulness not disembowelled or even punished) Bosco was white with shock.

‘Consider them for an hour. Then leave.’

‘I don’t need an hour,’ said Cale.

‘I think ...’

‘I don’t need an hour.’

Bosco moved his head, just a slight move. He turned to leave and Cale followed up the winding steps known as the Stairway to Heaven going up and, for reasons lost in time, Yummity’s Steps going down. They moved slowly up past the Rotunda, Bosco’s knees not being what they once were, and up into the Bourse, the hall that led off into the various departments of the House of Special Purpose.

Towards the back of the Bourse a man, a Redeemer, stripped of his robes, was being led towards an open courtyard. He was wailing quietly, a drizzly sobbing like a tired and unhappy child. Cale watched as the three attending Redeemers ushered him forward. Cale watched them as if he might be a buzzard or one of the more thoughtful Falconidae.

‘Stop them.’

‘Pity is nothing of ...’

‘Stop them and tell them to take him back to his cell.’

Bosco walked over to the execution party as they stalled, trying to push the prisoner through the doorway and out into the bright sunshine of the courtyard.

‘Hold on a moment.’

Ten minutes later Cale, followed by a wary Bosco, was walking silently through the cells where the Purgators, those whose sins of blasphemy, heresy, offences against the Holy Ghost and a long list of others, were kept while they waited for their fate to be decided, usually a very simple and uniform fate. Cale walked up and down carefully looking over the waiting prisoners – the terrified, the despairing, the bewildered, the fanatical and the clearly mad.

‘How many?’

‘Two hundred and fifty six,’ said the jailer.

‘What’s in there?’ said Cale, nodding towards a locked door. The jailer looked at Bosco and then back at Cale. Was this the promised Grimperson? He didn’t look like much.

‘Behind that door we keep those condemned to an Act of Faith.’

Cale looked at the jailer.

‘Unlock the door and go away.’

‘Do as you’re told,’ said Bosco.

He did so, face red with resentment. Cale pushed the door and it swung open easily. There were ten cells, five on each side of the corridor. Eight were Redeemers whose crimes required a public execution to encourage and support the morale of the witnessing faithful. Of the other two, one was a man, clearly not a priest because he had a beard and was dressed in civvies. The other was a woman.

‘The Maid of Blackbird Leys,’ said Bosco, when they returned to his rooms. ‘She has been prophesying blasphemies concerning the Hanged Redeemer.’

‘What sort of blasphemies?’

‘How can I repeat them?’ said Bosco. ‘They’re blasphemies.’

‘How was she charged then, at her trial?’

‘The case was heard in camera. Only a single judge was present when she repeated her claims and condemned herself.’

‘But the judge knows.’

‘Unfortunately, may peace be upon him, the judge died of a stroke immediately afterwards, clearly brought on by the Maid’s heresy.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘Luck had nothing to do with it. He has gone to a better place – or at least a place from which no traveller returns, nor anything the traveller might have learned before his departure. It’s all in the paperwork.’

‘And I can read it?’

‘You are not a person to be tainted, you are the anger of God made flesh. It doesn’t matter what you read, what you hear, you are the sea-green incorruptible.’

Cale thought about this for a few moments.

‘And the beardy man?’

‘Guido Hooke.’

‘Yes?’

‘He is a natural philosopher who claims that the moon is not perfectly round.’

‘But it is round,’ said Cale. ‘All you need to do is look at it. If you’re going to kill people for being stupid you’re going to need a lot more executioners.’

Bosco smiled.

‘Guido Hooke is very far from stupid, although he is eccentric. And he is right about the moon.’

There was a snort of dismissal from Cale.

‘Anyone can see on any unclouded night that the moon is round.’

‘That is an illusion created by the moon’s distance from the earth. Consider Tiger Mountain – from a distance its slopes seem smooth as butter, close to it’s as wrinkled as an old man’s sack.’

‘How do you know? About the moon, I mean.’

‘I’ll show you tonight if you wish.’

‘If Hooke is right, why is he going to die for telling the truth?’

‘It’s a matter of authority. The Pope has ruled that the moon is precisely round – an expression of the perfect creation of God. Guido Hooke has contradicted him.’

‘But you say he’s right.’

‘What does that matter? He’s contradicted the rock on which the One True Faith is built: the right to the last word. If he is allowed to do so, consider where it will end: the death of authority. Without authority there is no church, without the church no salvation.’ He smiled. ‘Hooke speaks for the lower truth, the Pope for a higher one.’

‘But you don’t believe in salvation.’

‘Which is why I must become Pope so that what is true and what I believe become the same thing. Why are you so interested in the Purgators?’


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