5
Kleist was singing wildly, happily off-key.
‘The buzzing of the trees and the cigarette bees
The soda water fountains
Where the bluebell rings
And the lemonade sings
On the big rock candy mountain
In the big rock candy mountain
The priests all quack like ducks
There’s a five-cent whore at every door
At dinner there is always more
And never was heard a discouraging word
In the big rock candy mountain.’
He reached down, casual like, to check the knife sheathed in a pocket of the horse’s saddle and went on bawling not with much respect for tunefulness.
‘There’s a lake of stew and whisky too
You can paddle all around it in a big canoe
In the big rock -‘
Then he was off, pulling the knife with him and running for a patch of blackberry briars. He leapt into the middle, his speed and weight carrying him, thorns scraping his skin red as he went. But the tangle of shoots was thicker than he’d realized and the older suckers in the middle were tough and thick-barbed and his headlong flight was painfully brought to a halt.
Powerful hands grabbed him by the heels and dragged him backwards out of the briars. They had to tug hard and it gave Kleist a couple of seconds to decide. He dropped the knife in the briars and then he was free and being dragged into the open.
Other hands grabbed his wrists as he kicked and wriggled. Once he was held fast he knew there was no point and stopped struggling.
One man stood in front of him, his precise features hidden by the sun in Kleist’s eyes.
‘We’re going to search you, so don’t move. Any weapons?’
‘No.’
Two hands, swiftly and cleanly, skilfully frisked him.
‘Good. If you had lied to us it would have been the last thing you ever did. Get him up.’
Kleist was pulled roughly into a sitting position and all five men, knives and short swords pulled, let him go in disciplined order. These people knew what they were doing.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Thomas Cale.’
‘What are you up to out here on your own?’
‘I was heading for Post Moresby.’ A hefty blow landed on the side of his head.
‘Say “Lord Dunbar” when you speak to Lord Dunbar.’
‘All right. How was I supposed to know?’
Another blow to teach him not to be lippy.
‘What would you do there?’ said Lord Dunbar.
Kleist looked at him – he was scruffy, dirty and badly dressed in an ugly-looking tartan. He didn’t look like any lord Kleist had ever seen.
‘I want to get on a boat and get as far away from here as I can.’
‘Why?’
‘The Redeemers killed my family in the massacre on Mount Nugent. When they took Memphis I knew it was time to go away where I’d never see one of them ever again.’ This was half true as far as it went.
‘Where did you get the horse?’
‘It’s mine.’
Another blow to the head.
‘I found it. I think it was a stray from the battle at Silbury Hill.’
‘I heard about that.’
‘Perhaps the Redeemers would pay cash for him,’ said Handsome Johnny.
‘Perhaps they’ll string you up when you try,’ said Kleist, getting another clip on the ear.
‘Lord Dunbar!’
‘Lord Dunbar, all right.’
‘Handsome Johnny,’ said Dunbar. ‘Search his horse.’ Dunbar squatted down beside him.
‘What are these Redeemers after?’
‘I don’t know. All I know is they’re a bunch of murdering bastards, Lord Dunbar, and the best thing to do is get away from them.’
‘The Materazzi haven’t been able to catch us in twenty years,’ said Lord Dunbar. ‘It doesn’t much matter to us who’s trying to hunt us down.’
Handsome Johnny came back and laid an armful of Kleist’s possessions on the ground. There was a good haul. Kleist had made sure that however basic the purpose of anything he took from Memphis, it was all of the highest quality: the swords of Portuguese steel, inlaid with ivory at the handle, a blanket of cashmere wool, and so on, then the money – eighty dollars in a silk purse. This cheered the five men considerably. For all Dunbar’s boasting the pickings were pretty scant if their clothes and ragged state were anything to go by.
‘All right,’ said Kleist. ‘You’ve got everything I own. It’s a pretty good drag. Just let me go.’
Another blow.
‘Lord Dunbar.’
‘We should shallow the cheeky little sod.’
Kleist didn’t like the sound of that.
‘Let me take him back there,’ said Handsome Johnny. ‘I’ll save any trouble.’
Lord Dunbar glared at him.
‘I know what beastliness you want to do before that, Handsome Johnny,’ he shouted. He looked back at Kleist. ‘Get up.’ Kleist got to his feet. ‘Give us your jacket.’ Kleist took off his short coat, one he’d stolen off a hook in Vipond’s attendance room, soft leather and simply but beautifully cut.
‘You’ve been lying to me and I like that in a man,’ said Dunbar, admiring the jacket and mourning the fact that it was too small. ‘But you’re right about fair dos.’ He pointed to a roughish path. ‘That’ll take you in the general direction out of the woods. After that you’re on your own. Now bugger off!’
Kleist didn’t need to be told twice. He passed by Handsome Johnny, who watched him go with resentful lasciviousness and vanished into the woods with nothing but half the clothes he’d been wearing five minutes before.
*
‘You can’t replace three hundred men carefully chosen for their great qualities and bound to you with hoops of steel with those degenerates in the House of Special Purpose.’
‘How else are we going to replace them? Do we have ten years?’
Bosco was not so green that he was unaware this was the first time Cale had spoken of them both in this way, and that he was being charmed. Still, that he was making an effort to be deceptive was encouraging.
‘No, we don’t.’
‘Are there any records?’
‘Oh, each Redeemer has a tally codex. Everything about him is recorded there.’
‘Do you have one?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’d like to read it.’
‘This idea won’t work.’
‘It might not work. They’re standing on the edge of death followed by eternal hell where devils every day will disembowel them with a spade or swallow them alive and shit them out for all eternity. Save them from a fate like that – those are the hoops of steel that’ll bind them to me.’
‘These are deviants. The very boilings of moth and rust.’
‘If they don’t come up to snuff, I’ll return them for execution. These are trained men abandoned by everyone. At least give me their tallies.’ Cale smiled, the first time in a long time. ‘I don’t even believe you disagree.’
‘Very well. We’ll both read the tallies. Then we’ll see.’
‘Tell me about Guido Hooke.’
There was a knock at the door which opened immediately followed by a Redeemer who nodded obsequiously to Bosco and dumped a large file in a box, marked ‘INTRO’. He nodded again and left.
‘Hooke,’ said Bosco, ‘is a nuisance to me and of no real concern to you.’
‘I want to know about him.’
‘Why?’
‘A hunch. Besides, I thought I was to know everything.’
‘Everything? You see that file Notil just bought in. That’s just a day’s paperwork – a slack day. Stick to what you’re good at.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Very well. Hooke is a know-all who thinks he can understand the world by the book of arithmetic. He is a great inventor of engines. He is brilliant in the way of the best of such people but he has struck his gonk once too often into things that he had much better not have done. I’ve left him alone because I admire his mind, and for ten years. But his declarations about the moon contradicted the Pope, I warned him to leave and suggested the Hanse might be willing to employ him. While I was in Memphis he went to Fray Bentos to take ship but was caught by Gant’s men in a hoteli waiting to embark.’
‘Why didn’t they take him to Stuttgart?’
‘Because in Stuttgart he wouldn’t be my responsibility. Now I must either make an Act of Faith of him or be seen to defy the ruling of the Pope.’
‘But you said the Pope was wrong.’
‘You are being deliberately slow.’
‘What kind of engines?’
‘Blasphemous engines.’
‘Why?’
‘A machine for flying – if God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings. A wagon cased in iron – if God had meant us to have armour we would have been born with scales. And for all I know, or care, a machine for extracting sunlight from cucumbers. Most of the drawings he’s made are fantasies. His idea for a hopiocopter that flies is twaddle. It doesn’t look as if it could move along the ground, let alone fly through the air. But I have made use of his water gate in the east canal.’
‘If God had intended there to be water gates wouldn’t he have made water flow upwards?’ Bosco would not rise to the bait.
‘If you want to know about him read his tally. He’s a dead man, whether you do or don’t.’
Kleist had been forced to hang around until the next day before Lord Dunbar and his men left and he could collect the knife he’d dropped in the bramble bush. He thought carefully about what to do next. He was not interested in revenge, not being the indulgent type – it was dangerous and Kleist did not believe in risk. On the other hand he was in the middle of some bumhole wilderness with no horse, no chattels, no money and few clothes. All in all he decided he had to follow them but he wondered repeatedly over the next three days if he hadn’t made a mistake. He was cold and hungry. He was used to that, but though the surroundings were green enough he came across no standing water. Weakness from lack of water could take you quickly and once he lost touch with Dunbar he was finished. He had one break: he found some bamboo – spindly but good enough. Probably. He cut himself a section five feet long and a dozen thin poles and hurried to catch up. Following for the rest of the day he found a small puddle of green and brown water and decided to risk it. He’d tasted worse but not often. Dunbar and his men stopped an hour before darkness and Kleist had to work quickly in the fading light. The bamboo was still green, which made it easy to cut it into thin lashings to twist and use for a bow string. Then he split the bamboo down the middle into three staves, each one shorter than the last. By the time it was dark he’d bound one stave on the other with the lashings like the leaf spring of a cart. He slept little and badly when he did. The next day he began work as soon as it was light, following as they moved off, and finished the bow as they stopped for a couple of hours at midday. He would have liked to recurve the ends for more power but there wasn’t time – it was a complicated process. The sun came out and tormented him with thirst but while it desiccated him it did the same to the bow, drying it fully and binding everything archer-tight. There was flint enough lying around and it took only ten minutes to make an arrowhead.
A maggoty crow provided the feathers for the fletch, but crow feathers were hard to work and he’d wasted most of the best getting the technique right. Binding them accurately with the bamboo and twine was a bastard. Still, while Redeemer Master Arrowsmith Hart would have given him a good hiding for the results, they weren’t too bad all considered. Good enough as long as he could get in close to cause some serious evil. He was exhausted, thirsty, hungry and in a foul temper. A few quick practice shots out of sight eased his weariness with a mixture of satisfaction at his skill and a douse of malice. But he’d let them get too far away and thinking he’d lost them almost walked into the camp they’d hidden in a thickish cloud of trees. In the light that remained he only had the time to crawl around half of the campsite and see what was what. By then he had placed four of them but not the fifth. Sunset meant that the hoped-for attack would have to be delayed. He would have preferred to wait out the night where he was so as not to risk a re-approaching in the morning. But the failure to spot the fifth man meant he thought it better to withdraw a few hundred yards. Tricky either way and a bloody nuisance.
Nine hours later and with a splitting headache he was back and watching. Still only four men but the one missing yesterday was back and Lord Dunbar was gone. Frustration and excitement and fear made the hammering in Kleist’s brain seem like it would break his skull but he daren’t do a thing until all five were together. And then, around eight, Dunbar crawled out of what looked like a large bush at the edge of the camp. In a few seconds he was urinating at the edge of the camp and shouting orders for them to strike it. Arrow into bow, string pulled, the huge power of his right arm and shoulder and back tensed and a deep breath and then loose. A scream from Dunbar as the arrow took him in the left hip. Three-second pause – the other four stared. ‘What?’ called one.
Another arrow hit Handsome Johnny in the mouth and he fell back waving his arms. A third raced off, slipping and sliding in terror to the cover of the trees. An arrow, pulled badly, hit him in the foot and he hopped the last few yards, shouting in pain, and vanished into the trees. Another unscathed raced out of the camp in the other direction. The fifth man in the almost centre of the camp did not move. Kleist took aim, the bow creaking with the bend and let loose into the middle of his chest. A dreadful gasp of anguish. He bowed another arrow and drew it back, carefully and quickly making his way into the camp, moving the point back and forth over the points of threat. Handsome Johnny wasn’t going to be any trouble. The man kneeling with his head bowed was still groaning but there was now a strange whistling sound alternating with each indrawn breath. No one could fake that noise. He wasn’t going to be any trouble either. He just wished the sound would stop. Dunbar, lying on his side, was a dreadful white colour, lips bloodless.
‘I should,’ said Dunbar, softly, ‘have killed you when I had the chance.’
‘You should have left me alone when you had the chance.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Any weapons?’
‘Why should I tell you?’
‘Fair enough.’ Nervous, Kleist kept watching the trees. This was too risky.
‘This could take hours. Finish me.’
‘So I should, but it’s easier said than done.’
‘Why? You did for those two without much problem.’
‘Yeah, but I was angry then.’
‘When all’s said, I let you go. Finish it.’
‘Your men will be back. Let them do it.’
‘Not for hours. Maybe not at all.’
‘Well I don’t want to, see.’
‘You’d best be ...’
There was a loud ‘THWACK!’ as Kleist loosed the bow almost point blank into Dunbar’s chest. His eyes widened and he breathed out for what seemed like minutes but was only a few seconds. Fortunately for both of them that was that.
Behind him the man on his knees still groaned and whistled. Kleist dropped to his knees and heaved. But there was nothing in his stomach to come out. It was not easy to keep on retching and keep an eye on the trees. He dropped the bow – he needed his hands free to search his new possessions and claim his old. He stood up slowly and screamed.
Standing five yards away was a girl. She looked at him wide-eyed and then threw herself into his arms and burst into tears.
‘Thank you! Thank you!’ she sobbed, hugging him as if he were a lost parent, her hands clutching him with desperate relief and gratitude. She kissed him full on the lips, then pushed herself into his chest, her hands squeezing his upper back as if she would never let him go. ‘You were so brave, so brave.’ She stepped back to examine him, eyes brimming with admiration.
It would not have taken a talented student of human nature to have read Kleist’s not only astonished look but also the deep shiftiness of his expression as she looked adoringly at him. He watched the understanding that he had not arrived to rescue her move over her face like a fast sunrise. The admiration washed out and her eyes began to become wet with tears. It was not often that Kleist felt mean-spirited.
She stepped back rather more than the emotion of her discovery warranted and produced the knife she had lifted from Kleist’s belt while she was so gratefully hugging him.
The look of astonishment and anger on Kleist’s face was so comic in its effect, the girl burst into laughter.
His face went red with anger, which only made her laugh harder. Then he stepped forward, knocked the knife out of her hand and punched her in the face. She went down like a sack of coal and fetched her head a nasty blow. He picked up the knife, keeping his eyes on her, then gave a quick scan of the trees. Things were getting out of control. Her expression now was one of shock and pain at her bloody nose. She sat up.
‘Laughing on the other side of your face now.’
She said nothing as he backed away and started examining the bundles around the camp for his own stuff and anything else portable. The man on his knees was still moaning and his punctured lung still whistling.
The girl started crying again. Kleist carried on searching. In what must have been Lord Dunbar’s pack he found his money. Otherwise the pickings were scant. Their lives as robbers can’t have been up to much. And they only had three horses, including the one they stole from Kleist. The girl’s crying became louder and more uncontrollable. Along with the groan and whistle of the kneeling man it was getting on Kleist’s nerves. But more than that.
The tears of a woman are an alcahest to the soul of man, Redeemer Fraser had once said to him. A tearful bitch can dissolve all a man’s good judgement in its liquid gerrymandering.
At the time this warning had seemed of dubious relevance, given that he had no memory of ever having seen a woman. His experience in Memphis, though it had very much expanded his experience of women in some ways, was not helpful when it came to tears, the whores of Kitty Town not being given much to weeping.
‘Shut up,’ he said.
She reduced the sound to a grizzling and the occasional heavy sob.
‘What the hell were you doing with these desperadoes?’
She could not answer at first, trying to bring herself under control with wet gasps of emotion.
‘They kidnapped me,’ she said, which was not true or not entirely true, ‘and they all raped me.’ His time in Memphis had made Kleist familiar with the term. He had heard a number of puzzling amusing stories about rape and had caused even more laughter by asking for an explanation. He was shocked by the answer and did not approve. She was clearly a liar but she looked as distraught as even Kleist would have expected. But then a few minutes ago she’d been laughing at him.
‘If you’re telling the truth, I’m sorry.’
‘Let me have one of the horses.’
‘That would mean you could keep up with me. I don’t think so.’
‘You’ll have the best horse – the others are just kick-bags.’
This was true enough.
‘I could sell them in the next town. Why should I give one to you when you’re a thief? Or worse.’
‘They’re both branded. They’ll hang you for a horse thief if you try to sell them.’
‘Well, you look as if you’d know,’ he said, tying his newly filled bag onto his horse saddle.
‘Please. Two of them are still out there.’
‘One of them isn’t going to be following anyone for quite some time.’
‘But the other one could.’
‘All right. Just shut up. But you go in that direction,’ he said, pointing to the west. ‘If I see you again, I’ll cut your bloody head off.’ With that he mounted his horse and set off, leaving the girl sitting on the forest floor, next to the kneeling man, still wheezing and whistling. If his actions in leaving the young woman in the clearing were ignoble, they were in the light of the appalling consequences of his only other experience of rescuing young women in distress at least understandable.
‘Do you think he’s right?’ asked Gil.
‘What do you think?’ said Bosco.
‘I think he’s wrong,’ replied Gil, ‘I think the Purgators are where they deserve to be. Their fate is their character. If God has not been able to change their hearts not even someone who is the anger of God made flesh can change them, blessing be upon him.’
‘We must hope, Redeemer, that you are wrong. Cale is full of surprises.’
‘Now I know why I never loved him.’
They both laughed.
‘Should I continue?’ said Gil. ‘With the plan to invest Bose Ikard?’ Bose Ikard was the Burgrave of Switzerland, notionally second only to the notorious King Zog of that country, but a very close second. With the Materazzi empire having collapsed Bose Ikard was now the most powerful of all the rainmakers in the four quarters. He had made, in Bosco and Gil’s eyes, the mistake of allowing a remnant of the Materazzi to take refuge in Spanish Leeds, something they rightly regarded as hostile to their interests. What they did not realize was that Bose Ikard took the same view and only a screaming fit by King Zog had forced his hand to allow the Materazzi to take refuge in Spanish Leeds. The Redeemer Diplomatic Service was not adept at either diplomacy or the gathering of intelligence and Bosco had limited access to its findings, which in any case did not include the fact that Bose Ikard had done everything possible to encourage the Materazzi to go away. Beyond simply allowing them to stay he offered no help and no money, a lack of assistance he hoped would effectively starve them into moving on somewhere else where they would no longer be his problem. Understandably he did not want their presence to give the Redeemers an opportunity to cause trouble. However, Bosco knew nothing of this reluctance and could only infer Ikard’s attitudes from his apparently hospitable treatment of the Materazzi. He’d thought it might be a good idea to have him killed to mark Zog’s card and to discourage anyone else who might be thinking of harbouring the Materrazi or anyone else the Redeemers had taken a dislike to.
‘No. We must delay his death until ... for several months at any rate – until we have some idea whether Cale can turn the Purgators.’
‘It’s risky to delay.’
‘It’s risky not to. We are midstream in a spate. It’s dangerous to go forwards, it’s dangerous to go back. Meanwhile I mean to spread Cale’s name and reputation. I want you to take him to Duffer’s Drift.’
‘Because?’
‘Because he will solve the problem.’
‘You seem very sure.’
‘Take him and see. Clearly you have less faith in the power of God’s exasperation than you ought.’
‘Mea culpa, Redeemer.’
Bosco sniffed, now out of sorts at Gil’s lack of zeal.
‘What about Hooke?’
‘Reluctant as I am to have my hand forced by Gant we must avoid provocation until Cale succeeds or fails. If Hooke is to die we must make a show of it, and we must swallow the humiliation like it or not by broadcasting it wide. Invite persons of note.’
There was a knock on the door and Cale was shown in. He was told he was to be sent south with Gil to deal with the Folk. He didn’t argue or even ask any questions.
‘I want him. Hooke, I mean,’ said Cale.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve read his tally and seen his drawings. Some may be what you say but his machine for storming walls looks right – maybe even the giant crossbow. There are good ideas everywhere. You said his water gate was a fine piece of work.’
‘He has offended the Pope.’
‘You intend to kill the Pope.’
‘Not so. But if I did I wouldn’t offend him first.’
‘Hooke’s engines could help you not to worry about offending him.’
Bosco sighed and walked over to the window. ‘There are many irons in the fire and unlimited kettles boiling over them. I have to balance conflicting needs.’
‘My needs come first.’
‘You are the resentment of God – not God Almighty himself. There’s a considerable difference, as you’ll learn if you push your luck too far.’ He laughed at Cale’s expression. ‘My dear, this is not a threat. If you fail, I fail with you.’
‘I used to think you were so powerful no one could stand against you.’
‘Well, you were wrong. We stand on the edge of a gnat’s wing, you and I. Let me say this. If you succeed at Duffer’s Drift then I can use the power this will give both of us to delay Hooke’s execution. I don’t have the power to stop it and that’s that. Set him to work while you’re away. Succeed at Duffer’s Drift with your Purgators and who knows? It’s in your hands.’
*
It took Cale, along with Redeemer Gil and two others, six days to reach the Drift. They had made more than seventy miles each day, changing ponies at horse stations placed at twenty-mile intervals until the last eighty miles, where Antagonist outriders were causing too much trouble for anything permanent. When they arrived, Cale was exhausted, his shoulder was killing him and his finger hurt like hell itself, as bad almost as the day Solomon Solomon had cut it away in the Red Opera.
‘Get some sleep, sir,’ said Gil as Cale was shown to a tent made from blue sacking. Cale never slept easily but two minutes served when he hit the hideously uncomfortable cot laid for him. Gil woke him with a cup of foul-tasting liquid eight hours later. It occurred to Cale as he drank that he must now be as soft as lard compared to only a few months earlier. Then he would have thought this muck was bearable.
‘This,’ he said to Gil, who was watching him thoughtfully, ‘is bloody horrible.’
Gil looked genuinely disconcerted. ‘I’m sorry.’ He took the mug and tasted it to see what was wrong. ‘It tastes all right to me.’ They looked at each other – a pointless exchange. ‘Go and have a look around the camp. Get the measure. There’ll be something here to eat when we come back.’
‘Can’t wait.’
The veldt of the Transvaal is a wide-open prairie four hundred miles to the south-west of the Sanctuary. The people there, who call themselves the Folk, farm and hunt across its great spaces and are recent converts to Antagonism. For that reason and because they are an odd bunch by any standards, their beliefs are rigid and intense. They have two ranks: the ordinary Folkhusbands and a leader, the Folk Maister, now nearly always a Predikant, or pastor, who never has authority over more than a thousand souls. Not having been of the Redeemer faith before their conversion and having had little to do with it, their loathing and hatred of their monkish assailants were intense to the point of insanity. It was said, an exaggeration of course, that the Folk were born onto a saddle and with a bow in their hands. The trench warfare of the Eastern Front was useless as a model for fighting such people in such terrain. The Folk did not fight in armies but in commandos of between a hundred and four hundred men – but often less and sometimes more. If they were attacked they just retreated into the endless veldt. A trench system against such methods was like trying to kill a fly with an axe.
It had become the Redeemers’ forgotten war. Most of their troops were bogged down in the great attrition of the Eastern Front. But even if there had been more in the way of Redeemer soldiers there was no obvious way of using superiority of numbers against such a fluid and skilled group fighting on ground they knew and loved. In addition, the Redeemers used cavalry rarely and were not very good when they did. In a straight fight it was true a force of Redeemers would annihilate even a vastly superior number of the Folk. But they never gave them a straight fight.
Because the war on the veldt was regarded by the Pope and his close advisors as of minor importance, Bosco and Princeps had been allowed greater freedom to decide on new tactics, something always considered with suspicion on the Eastern front. Even before Bosco and Princeps had been drawn to attack the Materazzi by Bosco’s desperate need to recapture Cale, they had changed the conduct of the war against the Folk in dramatic fashion. A string of thirty forward forts had been established. They were not forts in any normal sense with solid walls and defined defensive barriers, but, so it was intended, fluid defensive positions to guard all the most important strategic points in the veldt. Behind them would be eight much larger conventional forts from which each of the forward positions could be reinforced when they inevitably came under attack. It was the most original plan in Redeemer military history. Unfortunately the problem with all great plans is that they must be put into practice. Lacking the presence of Princeps, now moved to the more pressing assault on the Materazzi, the execution of the new tactics by his clueless replacement created a terrible crisis. Instead of large numbers of Redeemers standing in trenches defending territory the Folk had no intention of attacking, they had now ventured out into territory where none of their hideous military virtues were of any help and all of their weaknesses could be punishingly exploited. The result was a change from a war that was going nowhere to one that was coming close to collapsing into defeat. The advance forts were relentlessy attacked and taken over by the Folk with heavy casualties for the Redeemers and few for their assailants. When they attempted to retake the forts the Redeemers again took heavy losses. But the Folk always knew when to make their retreat quickly so that their casualties were light. A few weeks later, having attacked the forts furthest away towards the Drakensberg they would be back and the whole bloody process would start again. Bloody, that is, almost solely for the Redeemers. Duffer’s Drift had won its lamentable name because it was the most important of the advanced forts and had been lost to the Folk so often.
Imagine a great U formed by a river bend. The land inside the U is twenty feet lower than the land outside it, except towards the back, which is dominated by a low hill. Past this hill runs the all-important road that crosses the river and straight out the other side, cutting the U into two equal halves. A few hundred yards down this road is a large tabletop hill. The twenty-foot difference between the north and south bank meant that for eighty miles in either direction no wagon could make its way up the near vertical sides except for on this one road at the Drift. The entire field of defence was barely two thousand yards wide. Cale’s problem was as easy to set out as it was difficult to solve. There were perhaps fifty of these choke points on the veldt and not enough troops to hold them by conventional means. To cut down the movement of the Folk and their ability to resupply from the sea, nearly all the points had to be held nearly all the time. At the moment they were taking them at will, holding them while supplies passed through and then vanishing whenever the Redeemers showed up, and taking various other similar forts up and down the front line.
Cale spent nearly eight hours walking the U.
‘What do you think?’ said Gil, anxious to hear the answer of the great prodigy.
‘Tricky,’ was all he got in addition to a request to talk to survivors of the last attack. There were only two, this not being a taking prisoners kind of war. Nevertheless, Cale spent all evening talking to them.
‘How many are here now?’ he asked Gil.
‘Two thousand.’
‘How many can you keep here?’
‘Not more than two hundred. There aren’t the troops or supplies for them if there were.’
‘Send away eighteen hundred.’
Gil was too intelligent to ask why. There had to be few enough defenders or there would be no attack.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Cale, ‘except leave.’
Cale was simply being annoying but he kept Gil swinging on his rope, following in the rear of the eighteen hundred as they retreated and doing nothing about the defence of the Drift. Having travelled some five miles with the withdrawal, Cale turned his horse to one side and the fuming Gil was forced, along with the two guards, to come with him. Soon Cale turned back towards the camp and a small rise some eight hundred yards to the rear of the Drift. It was probably not high enough nor close enough to attract Folk scouts when there were better, nearer lookouts they would visit first. Cale dismounted and gestured to the others to do the same. Then he started for the top of the rise and ended up crawling the last few yards. Gil, relief softening his fury, came up behind him.
‘Do you want something?’ asked Cale, hostile.
‘I’m just doing as Redeemer Bosco would tell me, sir.’
This was true enough so there wasn’t much point arguing, although this didn’t stop him thinking about it. He took what looked like a leather bottle without a top from his knapsack and two glass circles and fitting them in either end of the topless leather bottle he pulled two straps around the middle and tightened them so they were held fast. It was the telescope with which Bosco had shown him the imperfect moon and the identical twin of the one he had stolen from Redeemer Picarbo and which had been filched in turn by one or other of the soldiers who’d captured him in the Scablands. It seemed like half a lifetime ago.
The more awkward and taciturn Cale was with Gil, the more the Redeemer’s earlier bad temper at being treated as if he were of no importance seemed gradually to change. His initial confusion about Cale’s change of status from expendable acolyte to manifestation of the wrath of God was a leap even for the most obedient of Redeemers. But the greater the contempt or indifference with which Cale treated him, the more Gil found himself able to let his decade-long familiarity change into awe and trust. He had a natural desire to worship and for all his intelligence it was as if the black intensity and seemingly total indifference that had come to dominate Cale in the last eight months was exerting its magic over a man very much sensitive to magic. Cale sensed the change, the respect, admiration and the fear that was more than physical – something he knew Gil barely felt. What surprised him more was that he could feel the growing adoration working on him like the air he and Vague Henri used to blow into the soft animal skins that held the holy water in the sacristy so that they could bounce them up and down on the floor in blasphemous delight. To walk past a group of men and feel them diminish themselves at the sight of you – this was something.
Through the rest of the day Cale barely spoke between spying out the landscape and drawing maps of the field of battle in the dust, then scrapping, re-drawing and scrapping again. Throughout he tried to keep the intensely curious Gil from seeing or understanding what he could see of the diagrams he was drawing of trenches, heights, lines of sight and so on. This was not so much from any need he felt to keep things secret as a desire to annoy Gil. But, though frustrated, Gil only seemed the more impressed. In time, Cale began to enjoy the feeling of gawping admiration so much that he started making up marks and signs just to amuse himself by making his diagram insanely and meaninglessly complex in a way that clearly left Gil drowning in wonder.
Just before dark Cale backed down the hill and Gil followed. He started to arrange the rota for guard duty and was dividing by four when he realized something. Instead, and without facing a murmur of protest, he divided the night watch into three. His insolence, and he could feel it, increased their awe of him still further. Deeply satisfied with his deviousness he went back to the top of the rise and made himself as comfortable as possible before falling asleep and dreaming of Arbell Swan-Neck. Impossibly beautiful, she managed to keep eluding him as he tried to follow her in the corridors of the Palazzo as if he were a nuisance she must politely – but not too politely – deal with and not a once-adored lover. In his dreams of her often he was robbed of his anger and violence, stripped down to a humiliated supplicant who could not accept that he was now graciously despised while he preposterously hoped that if he could only get her to stay still and talk to him she would certainly be able to explain that her apparent betrayal had all been a terrible mistake. And it would be all right. He would be happy again. But always she turned away as if his presence was utterly unwelcome. He woke up just before dawn, miserable and burning with shame and anger at his weakness.
He ate and drank silently and then, Gil by his side, waited to watch the Drift emerge slowly in the light of dawn. The trenches now filled with archers in the centre of the U were built at angles so that bolts and arrows could not be aimed down a straight line. The problem, now clearer than ever, was that the red earth thrown up by the digging was a stark contrast with the yellow grass of the veldt, marking the ground as plain as a target painted with circles. From this distance the fifty or so archer men-at-arms hidden in the bend of the river with its cracks and crevices seemed well hidden, not easy to spot even with his bioscope. An hour later with the sun well up, Gil pulled at his arm and pointed to a dust cloud coming from the north by the side of the tabletop mountain in front of the Drift. The dust cloud gradually revealed a large body of Folk, mounted soldiers pulling four wagons behind them and heading for the Drift. At first it seemed as if they were going to ride straight on through its middle, a manoeuvre of such suicidal stupidity that only the events at Silbury Hill made him suspect for a moment that the commando approaching might actually do so.
They halted about four hundred yards away. There was a pause of about ten minutes and then the commando split into two – one part to the east along the river, the other to the west. A small number of men with the covered wagons moved back behind the table mountain and Cale was unable to track them though he was anxious to do so. There was something odd about the wagons – they were covered but a peculiar shape. The Redeemers in the Drift would have to wait for the attack. Nearly an hour passed then Gil again pulled his sleeve. ‘Look, sir, on the shoulder of that butte.’ He was pointing at a flattish section down from the top of the table mountain. Taking the line, Cale examined the wagons now several hundred feet above the Drift and saw the three of them being stripped, though fuzzily, the glasses being not so good at such a distance. What he could make out consisted of frames and ropes but these were not structures he recognized beyond their being some sort of catapult. He passed the glasses to Gil who said he thought they looked like ballistas, a contraption much used for a while by the Antagonists on the Eastern Front.
‘Never heard of it,’ said Cale.
‘It’s just a glorified crossbow, but much bigger. They used it for a while about nine months ago but it was only any use against hill defences and there aren’t many of them on the Eastern Front. I can’t see the point of them here.’
They didn’t have to wait long for the first surprise. After five minutes of manic activity the ballistas had been set up – but instead of pointing the ten-foot-long bows at the trenches in the Drift, the three were clearly fixed pointing almost straight up into the air. When they fired, the powerful bows lashed the enormous bolts upwards but at a slight angle. An unpleasant nerve-jangling scream went up.
‘They fix a wheezer around the shaft – makes them wail. Gets on your tits.’
The whining bolts shot upwards and then curved in a sharp arc and smacked heavily into the yellow stub grass around the trenches as if straight down from the clouds directly above. For the next twenty minutes the ballistas were fired repeatedly to get their range until almost two in three of the bolts were landing in the trenches. A few screams made it clear that some of the huge bolts had found a target – but though this was nastily unfamiliar, Cale couldn’t see it was going to be decisive.
There was another hiatus and then the iron ‘TWANG!’ of the ballistas starting up again with the oddness of the difference in sight and sound – the giant bolts were almost in mid-flight before the metallic noise of the release rippled over Cale and Gil on the distant rise. But this time there was something even odder about the sound – it was deeper – and the arc of the bolt as it hit the top of its natural curve and began to fall to earth. The shaft, even without using the ’scope, was clearly much thicker and Cale scrabbled with the bioscope to catch sight of the bolt as it moved. Just as he fastened on to it, the thick shaft started to fall apart in mid-air and a dozen much thinner bolts gently separated from the main shaft and slowly formed a loose group before hitting the trenches as a loose pack – there was a beat and then the screaming of half a dozen men. Then another thick bolt was released and another. From time to time one of them failed to unravel but mostly the nine bolts fired every minute landed on the Redeemers in the trenches as one hundred and eight bolts every sixty seconds. The hideous screaming of the dead and dying was continuous now. Gil’s face set with a stoic pallor. Through the glasses he could see the surviving Redeemers desperately digging to get themselves deeper but it was as much use as digging to get out of the rain. Realizing this, the survivors started scrambling out of the trenches and running away. They were allowed to go about fifty yards before a sea of bolts and arrows from either side of the great U took them like a boy taking a stick to weeds. Some twenty Redeemers surrendered. From all around the U, the soldiers of the Folk emerged from behind bushes and the great termite hills. There must have been a hundred and sixty men within a hundred yards. As a handful of the Folk came to take the surrender and Cale was wondering whether the Redeemers were going to get more mercy than they would have given, a half-dozen arrows whisked down from the hill at the rear of the U and three of the Folk advancing fell screaming. There were ten Redeemers in a position there refusing to give in. But Cale could see that there was a blind spot to the right of the hill that allowed a platoon of the Folk to advance up to within fifty yards of the recalcitrant Redeemers. They were able to pin down the Redeemers and the Folk were easily joined by reinforcements. Being so close and with much greater numbers they swamped the Redeemers on the hill with their first charge. Whatever chance of mercy the Redeemers from the great trench had before, they had lost it now. Within ten minutes every one of the defenders was dead and with no more casualties than they’d received during the botched surrender the Folk had yet again humiliated one of the greatest fighting forces on earth.
Three days later the Redeemers were back defending the Drift with the eighteen hundred men Cale had earlier sent to the nearest major fort. During the interim the Folk had overseen the passage of more than two hundred wagons of supplies and almost a thousand troops. At the approach of the Redeemers they had simply vanished into the veldt, confident that Duffer’s Drift or one of the other roads into the interior could be taken when needed with a similar lack of difficulty.
Cale gathered seventeen centenars around him and for an hour took them through the tactics of the late Redeemers, whose remains had been shovelled into a shallow pit about five hundred yards away. He then explained why they’d been so easily defeated. He asked for questions. There were a few. He asked for answers. There were a few of those too. None of them, it was clear to Cale, would have resulted in a different outcome, though a couple would certainly have held back the Folk for longer.
‘You’ve got two hours to agree a plan. Then two hundred of you’ll stay here and see if you can hold out for the three days it’ll take to reinforce.’
‘How will you choose, sir?’
‘Prayer,’ said Cale. On his way back to his tent Cale had time to consider the cheapness of his remark. Redeemers or not, two hundred men were going to die.
Which is exactly what they did. Cale listened to the new tactic for defence, decided to order a few changes because he wanted to see their manoeuvres in practical operation and then chose the men to carry it out by lot rather than any blasphemous play with devotion. He added one name himself, that of a centenar he had recognized during the initial conflab as a Redeemer who had once beaten him on the arse with a rope as thick as a man’s wrist for talking during a training session. Possibly the Redeemer might have lived had it not been for the fact that it had not even been Cale doing the talking but Dominic Savio, who had been whispering to Vague Henri that he might, indeed probably would, die that very night and be shat out by a devil for all eternity.
For a second time Cale withdrew along with Gil to the scrubby rise about half a mile away from Duffer’s Drift. Again the wait, two days this time, which Cale passed occasionally tormenting Gil in any trivial way he could think of – hinting at lascivious experiences in Kitty Town, which, being in the early stages of love, he had not visited along with Kleist and the guilty but fascinated Vague Henri. ‘You could get a beezle,’ said Cale to Redeemer Gil, ‘for a dollar or less. And,’ he added, ‘a bumscraper for two.’
He had made up the names of these perversions and therefore thought they did not exist. He was wrong about this. In Kitty Town even a depravity no one had ever thought of could be found if you had the money.
Most of the rest of the time he slept, ate most of the food allotted to Gil and the two guards, and made notes and imagined over and over the attack that had happened on Duffer’s Drift and the ones that might happen. And also he thought about Swan-Neck and the next meeting, where she would throw herself into his arms, weeping with loss while the dying Bosco with his last gasp would admit her betrayal had been an evil trick. Then he would be ashamed of his absurd delusion and imagine slowly wringing that beautiful neck without pity or remorse as she choked and gargled under his merciless hand-grip. After these often lengthy daydreams he would feel ashamed and a little bit mad. But this did not stop him from revisiting them on many occasions to commit, as the Holy Redeemer Clementine called it, the sin of pursuing evil thoughts. Cale found himself pursuing evil thoughts on an ever more demented and epic scale than even Clementine could possibly have imagined. ‘It is as well for the world,’ IdrisPukke had said once to Cale, ‘that the very wicked are generally as pusillanimous about turning their thoughts into deeds as anyone else.’
When Cale had looked down from the Great Jut on Tiger Mountain, he had felt an uneasy joy and delightful unpleasantness and now on the rise above Duffer’s Drift he felt the same uneasiness and unpleasantness and the same delight and joy. There’s nothing like an itch, after all, you can finally scratch.
The centenars under a millenar had agreed that while deepening the trenches was of no use, the strength of the soil would allow them to dig a shelf at the bottom of the trench so that each man could escape from the rain of projectiles coming from the ballistas. To cover the main trench at the centre of the U more trenches were built outside it to the left and right. The plan to cut and burn every bush outside the U for four hundred yards was prevented by Cale because he would only let two hundred men do the work and not the eighteen hundred that were available. ‘You won’t have more than two hundred men in future so what’s the point in having them now?’
Besides, there were hiding places enough with large rocks and the concrete-hard termite hills that were scattered across the landscape like pointy but badly made beehives. On the hill inside the U, the trench was moved to cover the blind spot that had been missed in the previous attack.