The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  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 oc
casionally 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.

  6

  ‘You’re my hero.’

  Kleist and the girl were sitting in front of a partly dead and hollowed-out oak that held a fire in such a way that it looked like a hearth.

  ‘I’m not your hero.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ taunted the girl. ‘You saved me.’

  ‘I didn’t save you. You just happened to be in the bushes when I took back my stuff. I didn’t even know you were there.’

  ‘Your heart knew,’ teased the girl.

  ‘Think what you like,’ said Kleist. ‘Tomorrow you go where you were going and I’ll go somewhere else as far away from you as possible.’

  ‘My people believe,’ said the girl, chattering as happily as a starling, ‘that when you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them for ever.’ This claim was as outrageous a lie as she had ever told and contrary to everything the Klephts believed when it came to matters of obligation.

  ‘Where’s the sense in that?’ said an exasperated Kleist. ‘It should be the other way around.’

  ‘All right. Now I’m responsible for you.’

  ‘Firstly,’ said Kleist, ‘I don’t give a toss what your people believe and secondly I don’t want you to be responsible for me – I want you to go away.’

  The girl laughed.

  ‘You don’t mean that. Tell me your name.’

  ‘I don’t have a name. I’m nameless.’

  ‘Everybody has a name.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Shall I tell you my name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I knew you were going to say that.’

  ‘Then why did you ask?’

  ‘Because I looove,’ she said, lengthening the sound of the word, ‘to hear the sound of your voice.’ And she laughed again. It took perhaps two hours for Kleist to be completely done for.

  Two days later Cale and Gil watched as the Folk accepted, clearly after some argument and with a lot more caution, the surrender of the six surviving Redeemers. They were tied up and loaded in a wagon and ten minutes later had vanished beyond the tabletop mountain.

  ‘How many more times?’ said a morose Gil.

  Cale did not answer but walked down off the rise, mounted his horse and started back to the not entirely reliably named Fort Bastion. Five days after their arrival there, the four of them were back in the Sanctuary and facing a bad-tempered Bosco.

  ‘I told you to stay in the veldt until you’d sorted the problem out.’

  ‘I have sorted it out.’

  Cale had the pleasure of surprising Bosco into silence, not something in all their long association he had been able to do before.

  ‘Explain.’

  Cale did so. When he’d finished Bosco looked dubious, not because Cale had been unconvincing but because his claims looked too good to be true. Bosco was being offered a way out of what was becoming a terrible trap with its origins in the ludicrous events that had caused the execution of his two hundred and ninety-nine carefully chosen vanguard. When someone offered you a way out of the teeth of your greatest problem that was not the time, in Bosco’s experience, to worry about the price, or even whether it was a delusion made plausible by desire. People believe what they want to believe. It was perhaps, thought Bosco, the most beautifully true of all the great truisms. He had little choice but to accept, even if it did coincide exactly with what he most needed.

  ‘While you were away I had the Purgators put on parade and had one of their members executed in front of them. It was an arduous death. And I mean arduous to watch. When you tell them what you want from them they will have had a very recent reminder of what will happen if they fail to come up to the mark.’

  ‘Not all the Purgators are suitable. There are about thirty who’re too mad or stupid to be of any use. But I’m not an executioner. I want them sent to the Bastille at Marshalsea.’

  ‘What makes you so sure they’d be better off?’

  ‘That’s as might be. I told you I’m not an executioner.’

  ‘Very well. But you have no right to discredit the mystery of Petar Brzica.’

  He should have known better, but cocky because he had managed to get one over on Bosco concerning the veldt he could not stop himself.

  ‘Mystery? That butcher.’

  ‘How many times do you have to be told about letting others know what you’re thinking,’ said Bosco, wearily. ‘However, listen. God has spoken. And it must follow that what he has spoken is the truth. The One True Faith is not intolerant because it is some pompous schoolmaster terrified of contradiction, it is intolerant because the Truth is intolerant by virtue of the fact that it is true. It is not intolerant to refuse to allow a teacher to state that two and two is five or three. Such a person would be stopped in all societies at all times. How much less should we be prepared to tolerate a lie that prevents a man from being saved for all eternity. So it is clear as two and two make four that there can be no tolerance for all our sakes of anything that deviates from God’s truth. The Pope is the source of all faith on earth and he must form a great partnership with the hangman to enforce the only love that truly exists: the narrowest, hardest and most inflexible dogma.’

  ‘Brzica serves nothing but a desire for blood.’

  ‘No
t so. Not fair. Like any other Redeemer he could have chosen to prepare acolytes for the defence of the faith. He could have learnt to sermonize on the love God bears all of mankind, poor as mankind is, poor as all his works are: his vision corrupt, his tastes disgusting, his body a vile traitor, everything about him humdrum and banal. Instead Brzica has chosen the most arduous vocation of them all: the torture and killing of his own kind. No one will eat with him, no one will pass the time of day or pray next to him. In the midst of this desolation of fear and loathing he must consign himself not to the ordinary pleasures of the human voice but the groans of the dying only. He arrives in the courtyard of the Act of Faith in front of an assembly of his fellows who see him only with dread. A heretic or blasphemer is tossed to him – he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a wooden bar and lifts his arms. There is a horrible silence save only for the sound of bones cracking and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He stretches him out on the ground and drags a sharpened hook through his body from chest to pubic bone and pulls his entrails out before the screaming eyes, the mouth open like a furnace.’

  ‘And you wonder why no one wants to sit next to him?’

  ‘I don’t wonder at all. And yet for all that hatred he is all greatness, all power. Remove the executioner from the world and in an instant order yields to chaos; kindness and fellowship and good works are defenceless before the wicked opportunism of the malicious and the cruel, the apostate and blasphemer who would rob each man of an eternal life of bliss. Tell me he is not a hero and a saint.’

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  ‘I want Hooke.’

  ‘I explained that will not be possible.’