The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  Gil stared at him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember you saying once that a man in command has to make two choices – lead from the front always or only sometimes. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, try never. Who am I, Redeemer?’

  They just stared at each other at first.

  ‘You are The Left Hand of God.’

  ‘And why am I here?’

  Gil did not reply.

  ‘Is there anything here,’ continued Cale, ‘you don’t understand?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Hooke walked over to them having spent several minutes examining a curiously coloured boulder.

  ‘I think there is brimstone in these rocks.’

  ‘Get on your horse. We’re leaving.’

  Thirty minutes later Cale with Hooke only next to him was looking down on his handiwork from the familiar rise. He was pleased with himself. Except for the dozen or so men he had sent out to place rocks and boulders to give the archers ranges at fifty-yard intervals, he could see no one – even though he knew where to look.

  It was two hours after first light the next morning that Hooke spotted a cloud of dust away to the north. Cale ordered a blunt arrow to be fired into the centre of the Drift to warn the Purgators that the Folk were coming. Within the hour Cale could see scouts coming in clumps of two, sometimes three, in a ragged line that extended over a front of a thousand yards or so on either side of a small group of ten heading for the Drift. As they approached the crossing and saw nothing, the land dipped inwards herding the inner groups together. Cale felt an intense thrill gripping him along the back of the neck, pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. By now a group of fifteen scouts had carelessly bunched together about a hundred and fifty yards from the nearest line of about seventy Redeemer archers. Then they stopped, clearly spooked by something.

  ‘Shit!’ said Cale. They had started to turn and split up when a silent arc of arrows rose into the air in a majestic curve and in less than two seconds rained in on the scouts taking all but one of them off their horses. The survivor raced off to the south followed by another flight of thirty or so arrows. Cale gasped with irritation. The arrows were a waste for just one man even if they could take a single target moving away at the rate the terrified scout was going. Clearly Gil had the same idea. His shout to hold fire drifted lazily up towards the rise. Gil had the sense to realize that there would be no more surprises and no more tightly packed groups of fifteen to make an easy target.

  Thirty minutes later a thick mortar arrow shot up almost vertically into the air from the shoulder just a hundred feet or so below the tabletop mountain. It landed about ten yards from the trenches manned by the Redeemer cassocks stuffed with prairie grass. By the third shot the mortars had got their range and a barrage of arrows and their twelve equally murderous bolts scoured the trenches for another hour. The idea of the fake defenders had been that of the sniper on the tabletop mountain, for which he’d been rewarded by the insulting promotion. It had been successful, and out of all proportion. Not only had they wasted an enormous number of mortar arrows but it was clear the Folk still hadn’t caught on and were clearly convinced, though for good reason, that the Redeemers were following the same dismal chain of tactics they had shown at Duffer’s Drift and elsewhere on the veldt. A large body of them were crawling up the south side of the hill in order to take the high ground and fire down at the men in the riverbank who had killed so many of the Folk in the first volley. While this was happening, Cale spotted two groups of perhaps a hundred men each galloping away to the east and west. Cale’s guess was that they were heading for the river some distance away on either side. Once they’d got down the bank, they’d make their way along the river from either side and try and get close in to attack the archers during the night. He was reluctant to give away his own presence but finally ordered one of the Redeemers to sneak down to the west side of the U and fire a blunt arrow with a warning message but not to do so until just before the light failed so the arrow would not be seen so easily and their presence hinted at.

  During the remainder of the day there were a number of light skirmishes from the attacking Folk as the guerrillas moved forward trying to provoke a response in order to best map out the shape and numbers of the defenders. But the Redeemers were not inexperienced, even if unfamiliar with this kind of informal warfare – and Gil from the occasional if undecipherable shouts clearly had them under control. Besides, Cale had ordered passages to be cut between the small ravine-like raggednesses of the far riverbank so that the defenders could move with relative ease across most of the U. In this way the defenders gave the impression that their numbers were greater than they were. With luck, if the Folk thought the river was so firm-handed they might be discouraged from attacking that night along the river bed.

  There was a thin new moon that evening with the old moon in her arms, giving poor light and often obscured by clouds. It was nervy stuff waiting in the dark like that. The black night, instead of being something surrounding you, seemed to fill the inside of your head, all sense of being inside or out slowly being lost unless a cloud passed away from the thin moon and illuminated a distant tree or the side of the table mountain. Then the black space your senses told you was only inches away now revealed itself as miles in the distance and not even where it should be. A dead white tree on the prairies – just caught in the light of the moon – seemed to Cale to be stranded above him in mid-air when in fact he knew it to be on the flat almost a mile away. With even the most basic senses being all higgledy-piggledy it was a bad experience to be waiting in the coal-black night for someone with murder in their heart to come and get you. In the dark and even for those with good nerves the veldt at night became an implacable enemy waiting, mocking, for you to make the first move. A wild dog or night deer trotting along became twice its size and its speed like three ordinary living things. The sound of a hedgehog snuffling about became as loud as a lion grumbling before a leap. What if the creeping crawling thing making that scraping sound just outside your trench had a deadly bite or sting? The night was an unpleasant alchemist for ordinary things – it made a bush into the man who was waiting to kill you if you even breathed too loud. Still, it would be worse if you were doing the getting. Imagine trying to move in this. And, of course, with no way of checking, time vanished. Two hours passed which might have been four or five minutes. Odd thoughts began tormenting you. What if tonight the sun went down and didn’t come up. Something you would never have bothered thinking about, on a night like this seemed possible. ‘Never shall sun that morrow see’, a phrase he had heard Lord Vipond quoting from somewhere, kept coming back to him. ‘Never shall sun that morrow see.’

  Then at once there was a flare of light from what looked like a point way up in the clouds. Then another. It was Gil lighting up the river bed with fire arrows – one after the other, beautifully cupped by the shape of the river. After the seventh or eighth Cale heard screams and shouts. The arrows had caught the Folk trapped on either side by the steep riverbank. You could not see the volleys of unlit arrows rasping in on the attacking Folk, but there was little cover for them and no chance of rushing the Purgators because Cale had placed a deep line of staked thorn trees across the river and several more lines of sharpened stakes.

  It didn’t, or didn’t seem to, last for long even though there was one pause before a second attack. This was much briefer than the first. Then nothing until the first lightening of a beautiful rose-red dawn.

  The sun came up after this gentle start like a clap of thunder and by seven o’clock it was already too hot. Down in the riverbank, the far side he could see at any rate, the dead and dying numbered thirty-three. Perhaps half as many again were obscured by the near bank. The men were trying to crawl back down the river bed but not quickly. One was so badly injured he was crawling, equally slowly, towards the Purgators he wanted to escape from.

  One of the retreating wounded was beginning to make pro
gress and an arrow from the Purgators lashed out fast as a heron and struck the wounded man.

  ‘About time they showed some mercy,’ said Guido Hooke, gravely. ‘No one should have to die so slowly in sun like this.’ Cale laughed. ‘Did I say something to amuse you, Mr Cale?’

  ‘If they put the poor bastard out of his misery, it was by accident. They’ll be wounding him again to try and encourage his friends to do something heroic.’

  ‘Scum.’ Hooke looked at Cale, trying to read him. ‘You think me weak?’

  Cale considered this carefully for a moment.

  ‘No. I think it’s surprising.’

  ‘That someone should have some feeling for a suffering human being?’

  ‘That you would expect anything else from the Redeemers.’

  ‘You can still disapprove of something you expect.’

  ‘Why bother? Will it make any difference?’

  ‘You must have been brought up very careless.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Why so cynical?’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Cynicism is -‘

  ‘I don’t care what it means either.’

  Miffed at this rebuke, Hooke didn’t reply. After a few minutes it was Cale who spoke.

  ‘A friend of mine used to say it was a waste of time blaming people for their nature.’

  ‘I was right.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About being brought up careless.’

  Cale refused to take offence and just smiled. ‘I wish IdrisPukke had brought me up. I’d be more to your taste, Mr Hooke, than I am now.’

  At that there was another arrow flash and another wounded man struck.

  ‘It’s not foolish to wish for a life better than this.’

  But Cale had had enough and did not reply. Then he noticed a dozen or so Folk crawling towards the hill at the back of the U and beginning to move up the slope, then another ten and another. The centenar in the firing trench at the top was being more patient in letting them come close to his position than made sense.

  ‘Come on,’ he said under his breath. Then a volley of arrows and what looked like half a dozen hits. But now more of the Folk were crawling and, stooped low, even running over a hump on the hill and it became clear that it was only when moving over this hump that the attackers had to suffer the arrows from the trenches. When he had decided on the defence of the hill the slope below had seemed devoid of any cover for the entire climb and so making it almost impossible to mount a successful attack. Now it was clear that he had missed something. Once they got two thirds up the hill the Folk attackers were able to move into a shallow dip that protected them from arrows and allowed them to gather on the slope high enough to make a rushed attack. It was impossible that he had missed something so obvious.

  Endless were the times it had been driven into him about the moment of holy revelation, the vision on the road or on top of a mountain that made the scales fall from the eyes. There was nothing divine about what struck Cale on top of the rise over Duffer’s Drift but it was a vision of the truth all the same. He could not afford to fail here.

  His most desperate desire since he could remember thinking at all about anything was to be left alone. But now as he watched the Folk creeping towards the top of the hill he could see the failure of his greatest hope. If they took the hill they would be able to take the Drift. They would kill the Purgators and with them Cale’s ability to deliver to Bosco the power to keep him safe. But at the price of never being left alone. He could run away now but there were only Redeemers behind and Antagonists in front. He was five hundred miles away from what? Nothing like safety. To be alone anywhere in this world was to be isolated and vulnerable. Any peace and any quiet came at the pleasure of someone else. There was no corner, no crack, however small, where he could creep away from the world and please himself. The roof had to be earned, the food bought. He had to fight and keep fighting and if he stopped fighting he would drown. Wake up. March or die. March or die.

  In Memphis he had made enemies as easily as breathing because he was stupid and made mistakes. The only people he knew and understood were Redeemers. Here he had some chance because he was one of them and he had a place. Everywhere else he was a child with a talent for being angry. He was as bound to the Purgators about to be annihilated in the Drift as much as if he loved and believed in every one of them. There was no choice and never had been. All this, realized in a fraction of the time it took to tell, flooded over him in a great deluge as if he had been standing below a great collapsing dam. And even as everything, heart and soul, cried out against it, he was on his feet and racing down the rise to the twenty Purgators waiting by their horses, ignorant of the disaster unfolding just out of sight.

  Desperate to attack but needing to explain his plan, Cale started drawing the Drift in the dust and giving instructions as he did so.

  ‘Understand?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Then you,’ he said, ‘repeat it back to me.’ The Purgators hesitated but returned a fair account of what Cale had told them. Cale repeated it again and mounted them.

  ‘Succeed and you’ll be as good as saints to Redeemer Bosco.’ Longing to be cast out himself it had taken the dreadful vision on the rise to see that belonging was more to these men than life itself. He thought he had offered them escape from hideous death but it was more than that. If he had been an angel sent to pardon them and set them free in the world they would have been lost, wanderers without place or meaning. Their freedom would have been the freedom of a ghost.

  As they rode in good order to the top of the rise watched by the bemused Hooke, Cale could feel the power of brotherhood and loyalty sweeping through them even in the teeth of their own death. Then they swept over the rise and were slowly raising their speed in line with Cale, faster towards the hill as the Folk were preparing their final rush towards the top, thoughts bent on the struggle ahead and no one thinking of the rear until the Purgators were only fifty yards behind and racing towards them. Now seen, the Purgators screamed for Saint this and Martyr that and then the slaughter began.

  The horse charge of the Purgators flowed into the dip and pulled to a halt – they were trained as mounted infantry not cavalry – dismounting in a hurried scramble and charging the Folk from the side. Trees hit by a flash flood, the first ranks went down in the rush of the furious Redeemers bursting with dammed-up rage from their months of terrified imprisonment. A dozen were ahead of Cale, reckless and full of malice, bloody enthusiasts for death. Cale found himself at first following the men in front as if hiding behind a moving wall. But already in their frenzy they began to lose their shape as the Folk, at first surprised, began to absorb the shock and push them back. On the right they surged against the now ragged Redeemers and split their wall. A gap opened to the counterattack and Cale was again exercising his flair for brutality. First came Ben Van Brida – a thick-bearded eighteen-year-old, grunting heavily as he swung twice at the boy in front of him. That was his lot as Cale’s knife struck him in the throat just under the chin, the point emerging at the nape of his neck. But Cale had struck too hard – entering the spinal cord the blade stuck in the bone and Van Brida’s fall jerked the knife out of his hand. Cale ducked at the first blow of the next attacker and the next – neither willing to take their turn they both attacked at once. Cale stepped closer and grabbed the man to his left by the waist and catching him off balance steered him into the second attacker, preventing him from getting in another blow. He stamped down on the instep of his enemy, Frans Arnoldi of Nakuru was his name, who screamed in agony at his broken foot. As he fell Cale hurled him at the other man who staggered backwards only to be stabbed by an arriving Purgator, struck through the liver and an instant death. Lucky for him – few die quick that die in battle. No time for thanks as Cale finished the broken-footed Arnoldi – he flung out both his hands and cried out ‘No!’ Much good it did him, Cale’s blow severing his spinal cord that runs from
haunch to neck. Then the next man rushed to Cale and his inevitable death. Juanie De Beer, who fought to the last at Bullbaiter’s Lane and earned the name De Beer the Bitterender, took a blow from Cale just above the genitals. He fell for all his courage, writhing in the sand in agony. Cale screamed at the Purgators behind him to close the gap. The Folk held back for a moment. Startled by the gross belligerence of the boy in front of them they’d stopped to gawp like peasants open-mouthed as some great bishop passed. He seemed to need no one, so dreadful and so natural the spleen he brought to bear on everyone who challenged him. Startled by his shouts the Purgators rushed to surround him as the attacks began again. Cale stepped back, leery now, once again aware of the danger he was in from the short spears in ones and twos incurving their way into the body of monks behind him, no sound like it even among the shouts and screams, no bolt or arrow makes the horse-slap muffled thud of a javelin stopped in a moment by flesh and blood. He stepped forward to avoid the spears, using the Purgators ahead of him as a protective wall. But now the dip in the slope that had protected the Folk was not enough to shield them from the archers on the top of the hill. They had to stand to fight off the surge from the side but that left them exposed. Penned in and squeezed by Cale’s wall of men the thirty-yard gap to the top that had promised them victory now made them easy prey for the archers.

  It was Predikant Viljoen, sermonizer of Enkeldoorn, who realized that their only chance was to break through the Redeemer wall and become so mixed in the fight that the archers on the hill would be forced to stop. Hell was Viljoen’s great passion – his sermons would raise the hackles of his congregation like the quills upon a fretful porcupine. Now he was handing out hell himself in spades. The Predikant was half as big again as any of the other Folk and had a face like an ample plate, fringed with a beard. Like all the Folk he carried a small shovel, used on the veldt for everything from digging holes to slaughtering animals. It was light, the shaft of bamboo, the blade a square of steel sharpened on three sides with only the top left blunt. The grindstoned edges of the shovel that he swung sliced shoulder, hip and knee.