The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  ‘I’ll make it for you now,’ he said, all irritation vanishing with her smile. The water was already boiling and in twenty minutes she was wolfing down the beans and rice they’d taken from Lord Dunbar.

  ‘What were you doing out here on your own?’

  ‘Just going for a wander.’

  ‘Out here?’

  ‘There’s not much point in wandering somewhere you’ve been before.’

  ‘You’re too young.’

  ‘I’m older than you.’

  ‘I can look after myself.’

  ‘So can I.’ They looked at each other awkwardly. ‘Usually. I was careless and got caught. It was my fault.’

  This made him indignant.

  ‘How could it be your fault what they did?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But if you try and steal a horse from bastards and ruffians you know what to expect. Besides,’ she said, ‘they didn’t kill you and I’m grateful for that.’

  At this he hardly knew what to say. She smiled. ‘So maybe I won’t stab them in the back.’

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘The Quantocks.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘They’re about three days from here. I want to go home now. Come with me.’

  ‘All right.’

  He replied without a pause. He regretted it instantly, but only because it was such an alien thing for him to do. He felt as if he had become inhabited by another person and one who might do or say something very stupid.

  ‘Do you have a family?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and then regretted it. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No need to say sorry. Your family shouldn’t let you go wandering off.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘You’re the one who wants to go off on a killing bender.’

  ‘I wanted to avenge your honour,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘The Klephts, that’s my clan. They don’t really believe in things like that. We’re very curious but not very honourable.’

  ‘You’re making a fool of me.’

  ‘No, I’m not – really not. Respect and integrity and honesty – we don’t believe in all that. All the tribes around us do, they’re always getting into fights about their honour this and honour that. They kill themselves over honour and they kill their wives and daughters over it too. If I was a Deccan they’d strangle me if they’d found out I’d been raped.’ She stuck two fingers in the air. ‘That’s what I think of honour.’ She could see this had shocked Kleist, though startled would have been more like it. She laughed. ‘And they’re as stupid and lacking in curiosity as a cow. “Curiosity killed the cat” – that’s their favourite saying. My uncle Adam canoed down the Rhine for five days because he heard there was a whore in Firenze with unusually shaped genitals. I myself am famous because I taught a chicken to walk backwards.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  She laughed, delighted. ‘Because the Klephts have a saying as well: “You can’t teach a chicken to walk backwards.”’

  8

  The Manifesto of Redeemer Picarbo

  It is clear and it requires no great arguments that our forefathers were in error. This is no easy thing to say concerning famous men deserving praise. But to err is human and God has given us reason to struggle to make the best of our nature. Woman was given to us in the first to be a friend but she was no companion to us as was required. No – not even from the beginning. Would a friend and companion tempt a man to his own destruction, to listen to Satan, to eat the one thing – the one thing, for God’s sake, the one and only thing forbidden to man and woman? Such generosity, so small a burden, to bear in exchange for happiness and joy. All of it was lost because women are never satisfied but are always in the ears of men and wanting whatever they cannot have. It is no wonder that even the misguided Janes who will refuse to represent the world in images have a sign for the devil that has its origins in a picture of a woman’s tongue, and for temptation as a man’s ear. Women then from the first corrupted the friendship God had ordained between men and women. The friendship that grows from reason has seen that reason inflamed by women’s desire. Desire has made that friendship go mad. Men and women should live as man and wife in harmony and companionship and yet again and again we see men spurred always on by women into loving their own wives immoderately. A proper love takes reason as its guide and will not allow itself to be swept away in impetuous desire. And so the reasonable and sane is corrupted by women who want, greatest of all depravities, to be loved as if they were adulterers. All men commit adultery with their own wives and cannot help but do so because women will not be loved reasonably and in proportion. Love for women is their whole existence and they cannot in their nature bear what is moderate or rational. The soul of men alone, history has proved, struggles to free itself of desire as it rises to the divine. No woman will allow this escape by men. It is she and not God who must be the centre of everything. By my investigations and experiments I have discovered women inflame the reason not only by their parts and their fondling but by a secret liquid that flows from their gallbladders.

  As we have many times done with sheep and pigs, breeding this one for better meat, the other for finer wool, I have by diverse means schooled such women as I have confined here in all that is voluptuous and concerned only with physical sensation regarding the pleasure of beauty, of the delicacy of the skin and the hair and all the ways in which the organs of immediate sensation can be puffed up and exaggerated. They have been taught since very young all the business of delighting men so that (even more than ordinary women) they think of nothing else but giving pleasure to men so that men in turn find pleasure and solace only in their company and not in the pursuit of God. By these means I have greatly stimulated their wombs to exude this uterine milk to such an intensity and strength that it, strangled and thickened by its own excess, has glutinated to become as solid as amber or pitch (which in being the stuff of hell is most apt). By my arts and inspired by God and the Hanged Redeemer, I have found out and removed these resins and revealed that they have the power, reduced to a powder and mixed with holy chrism, to supply any man with the original goodness of the friendship of women that they so quickly and destructively took from men and from themselves. With this prepared mixture, which I have called Redeemer’s Oil, not only men may resist women as it eases away their lust, but even Redeemers who have been lost to madness and dreadful fits may be restored to happiness and good fellowship and be reclaimed from the destruction of penis fury and the sorrow at the loss of women that afflicts so many.

  The door opened and Bosco returned.

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Cale pointed to the last sentence he had read, old habits dying hard. It was done before he could stop himself.

  ‘Well,’ said Bosco, awkward himself at this reminder of their past. ‘You can read the rest later. Your opinion?’

  ‘Too much penis fury.’

  Bosco smiled.

  ‘Indeed so. He was as much possessed by women in his way as any fornicator. If you think what you’ve read is mad, the rest of it goes on to lay out his plans for a special farm in which his creatures would be raised to produce this resin in sufficient amounts to calm the world. But if it hadn’t been for this you would never have left the Sanctuary and the Materazzi empire would still be the greatest power in the four quarters. Odd, isn’t it, how things work out?’

  ‘What will you do with the girls?’

  ‘I don’t know. They can stay where there are.’

  ‘A trap for someone.’

  ‘Exactly. Would you care to meet them?’

  It was fair to say that Cale was astonished.

  ‘A trap for me?’

  ‘There are many traps laid for you but none of my making. I am your good servant.’

  ‘Yes. I mean, yes I do want to see them.’

  ‘I’ll arr
ange it when you return from the veldt. Picarbo may have been a lunatic but his handiwork is most interesting.’

  A week later Cale was standing on the low hill at Duffer’s Drift, surrounded by the Purgators – suspicious, hopeful, wary, resentful – and Guido Hooke. Cale had thought there might be a fight to retake the Drift, particularly if the Folk holding it had realized that there were only two hundred and thirty Redeemers come to do so. As it turned out, by the time they arrived the Folk had simply vanished into the prairie.

  ‘Look around you,’ shouted Cale. ‘If you are stupid you’ll die here. If you’re clever you’ll die here. If you use all the great skills you’ve learned, you’ll die here. Let me tell you this: unless you become like little children, you will die here.’

  ‘Speak up!’ shouted a Redeemer at the back. Cale looked at Gil and with two guards he moved behind the Redeemer who’d spoken out and gestured him forward. He stepped to the front with a hard-man swagger and stood in front of Cale, staring at him with eyes the colour of the leavings in a mug of beer.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Cale.

  ‘I said speak -‘

  Cale stepped into the man crashing his forehead into his face. The Redeemer went down instantly, clutching his broken nose. Cale stepped back onto the flat boulder he had been speaking from.

  ‘If you have bad hearing – you will die here.’

  He told them to turn around and outlined the various ways the Drift had been defended – pointing to this trench system here, another there, how this hill had been reinforced, that field of fire covered to prevent an attack.

  ‘The one thing they have in common,’ he said, when he’d finished laying out the battlefield, ‘is that everyone who planned them and everyone who carried out those plans is now dead. You will be placed in cohorts of fifteen. You will elect a cohort leader and a deputy and a sergeant. You will unlearn together or you’ll die. You have one day to walk this place and each cohort will come up with a plan to keep you alive for the three days it will take for reinforcements to arrive. I don’t need to threaten you that, if you fail, I’ll have you returned to the Sanctuary for your immediate Act of Faith because the Folk will take care of you on that score. Back here an hour before sunset.’

  Cale had hoped that by his pointing out why the previous defences had failed, by showing them the lie of the land, not in maps but rock by trench, by keeping everything particular and down to earth, the Purgators would realize that their salvation lay in one place. But it became clear to Cale, as the cohorts produced one doomed-to-fail plan after another, that while fear could do almost anything, you could not frighten anyone into thinking for themselves.

  The next day Cale assembled the Purgators down by the river crossing. He took out an egg and laid it on the flat top of a large rock.

  ‘If any one of you can balance this egg on its narrow end you get the safest job in the battalion – taking messages to the rear. As soon as the Folk come into sight you’ll be on your way.’

  For the next few minutes there were about twenty efforts before the Purgators were certain it could not be done, even if they were also sure Cale had some trick up his sleeve. Which, of course, he did. When they’d given up he stepped to the rock, picked up the egg and tapped it gently against the rock, breaking it slightly and leaving it stood on one end.

  ‘You didn’t say we could break it.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything. You decided the rules, not me.’ He pointed at the ford. ‘The crossing here is in a bad place from a defender’s view. I want you to work out how to move it.’

  ‘It can’t be done.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘How can it be?’

  ‘You’re right. It can’t. So why do all of your plans to defend it put you in trenches so close you could fight them off with your bare hands? If you had a bow that could fire ten miles, that’s how far away you could be. If you can walk the battlefield but even if you can’t – think like a child. Imagine yourself into every real place in every real way. Put yourself in the mind of your enemy and then walk the battlefield in fact or in your head. Make your mind a model of the real world – with a horse and then in a trench. Put everything to the test of what’s real. You don’t have time to learn from your mistakes.’

  He took them to the trenches where most of the Redeemers had died in the last attack.

  ‘Where’s the front?’

  By now the Purgators were beginning to catch on.

  ‘There’s no point in hiding. Make your mistakes now when there’s only me to answer to.’

  One of the men pointed to the Drift forward of the trench.

  ‘Wrong. There is no front here. The direction of attack is to the side, the rear and facing you. Here it’s front all around. What ground should you take?’

  ‘The high ground.’

  This came out of the Purgators as naturally as the response to a priest in morning mass. At the familiarity there was a buzz, almost like amusement at the memory of something in common, of no longer being outcast.

  ‘Wrong again. The ground you take is the best ground. Usually, but not here, it’s the high ground. I’m telling you that if you do what’s usually right, you’ll usually end up dead.’ He pointed at the U-shaped bend in the river.

  On either side of the bank it was as ragged as if it had been cut into repeatedly by a giant axe.

  ‘Use the land around you. Those cuts in the bank can be deepened and prepared, but look at it – most of the work has been done for you. This is the best cover for twenty miles.’

  ‘Hold on, sir,’ said one of the Purgators. ‘You said we needn’t be next to the ford as no one can steal it. This plan puts us right on top of it.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that I used up the last fresh egg I’d have given it to you. I changed my mind because I didn’t want to think about giving up the high ground. Just like the rest of you.’ He pointed out into the scrub beyond the U of the river. ‘The ford could be defended from there well enough – but on balance the ravines on the bank are better. At least you better hope so. Besides, remember there is no front or rear in this place. I’m going to put some of you on the high ground. If the Folk try to get in between us, they’ll be trapped from both sides.’ He looked around the group. ‘Are any of you Sodality Marksmen?’ Mostly Redeemer archers were used in massed ranks and great accuracy was not required but where it was needed the specially trained Sodality Marksmen were used. There were six. He told them to collect food and water for three days and while they were doing this set most of the Purgators to digging into the ravines on either side of the bank to improve on what nature had offered them. Thirty of the others were set to digging trenches.

  ‘Make sure you cut a space big enough inside the bottom of the trench to hide from arrows coming at you from directly above.’ He gave Gil some further instructions and then set off, running to the tabletop mountain in front of the U with the six marksmen.

  As the Redeemers dug they talked. Friends of the priest Cale had dropped for pretending he couldn’t hear were muttering.

  ‘A few months ago and anyone of us could have disembowelled the little shitehawk for even thinking of touching one of us.’

  ‘He better not try it on me or ...’

  ‘Or what?’ said another. ‘The days when we could do anything to anyone have gone. He’s annointed by God, you can hear it in his voice and what he says.’

  ‘And the way he said it.’

  ‘He’s an acolyte gone cocky. I’ve seen it before – one of them claims he’s seen a vision of the Holy Mother and suddenly they’re all over him until he’s found out for the little liar he is.’

  There was a mumble of agreement all around. Acolytes claiming to have seen visions of this or that saint prophesying one thing or another and causing general excitement until they were, unless particularly skilled, caught out and made an example of were not uncommon.

  ‘Well,’ said another, ‘you better hope you’re wrong because he�
�s all that stands between us and a blunt knife. I want to believe in him and I do. You can hear it in his voice. Everything he said makes sense once he explained – the fact that he’s just a boy makes it true. Only God could have put knowledge like that into a child’s head.’

  ‘Shut your gob and get on with your digging,’ said Gil as he passed by. To him they were Purgators but the mixture of awe and doubt about Cale was clattering about in his brain just the same.

  Within two hours Cale was back, this time alone and putting in place the notions he had conceived while looking down on the site from the top of the mountain. One of the marksmen, a veteran of the Eastern Front, had come up with an idea of his own he’d seen at Swineburg during the Advent offensive. He was promoted on the spot by a delighted Cale to the position of Bum-Bailey – a deadly insult in Memphis, but important-sounding to the other Redeemers. On his way down the mountain he felt that what had seemed like a good joke at the time was in fact childish and, worse, might come back to haunt him. What was done was done but he stayed away from that kind of thing in the future.

  When he got back to the Drift he ordered up the twenty best riders and then told them to take off their cassocks. Having collected a bale’s worth of prairie grass from the scrub he had the cassocks filled with the grass and then impaled the scarecrowish results on twenty staves driven into the bottom of the old trench in which so many Redeemers had died in the previous attack. Once you were thirty yards away or more you couldn’t tell the difference. It was unlikely that the Folk would catch on that Redeemers had no reason to fight with their cowls over their heads.

  ‘What do you want the riders for?’ asked a suspicious Redeemer Gil. Cale considered avoiding a straight answer but there was no reason to.

  ‘I need protecting when I watch you from up on the hill back there,’ he said, nodding to the rise half a mile away from which they’d watched the previous two massacres.

  ‘What about leading your men?’

  ‘I’m not here to save people, isn’t that right? That’s what you believe, isn’t it?’