‘They are men who have transgressed but are atoning by especial bravery for their errors. More I have sworn on the foot of St Barnabus not to say.’
Had Van Owen been used to being cheeked by acolytes he might more easily have realized he was being mocked. It was an error too far, thought Cale, and even as he said it he despised his own stupidity. God knows what might have happened if Van Owen had been familiar with the drollery of cocky young boys. Van Owen was not sure what he thought about the unlikeable boy in front of him (other than that he did not like him). Boy saints were not unknown although he himself had never met one. Usually they were saints because they had died proving their holiness and were therefore not able to become a nuisance. There had not been a boy warrior particularly recognized as chosen by God for three hundred years -St Johan – and he had conveniently died of smallpox a few years after he had defeated the Cenci at St Albans. A chosen boy who had lovely visions of the Redeemer’s mother and a way with incomprehensible prophecies that might be usefully interpreted by wiser heads was one thing – a tergiversating sheep in wolf’s clothing was something else again, particulary one who was in Bosco’s pocket. The problem for Van Owen was that he was more than a self-serving, ambitious sly-boots (which he most definitely was); he was also a pious believer in the Hanged Redeemer. What if the odious twerp in front of him was not just some swashbuckling Mohawk with a talent for butchery but was blessed by God? Making a mistake in this matter was about more than politics; it might involve his immortal soul.
The unusually extreme weather that had brought the snow changed as quickly as it arrived. The knife-cold winds from the north were replaced by the usual warmer winds from the east that brought with them a thaw which melted the snow in less than three days. The earth of the Machair was light and peaty and the vugs and follicles of the catchiform rocks on which it lies drained the meltwater as easily as if it were an unplugged bath in one of the palazzos in Memphis.
Busy now with his preparations, Van Owen had no time to think about Cale and as soon as Cale could he dragged Vague Henri with him in search of extra food for the Purgators.
‘Let them starve,’ said Vague Henri. ‘Let them freeze. I hope they catch the hog cholera so their spines bend over sideways and their rotting left ear falls into their right-hand pocket.’
‘Pull yourself together, Vague Henri. Sooner or later your life and, more to the point, my life are going to depend on them.’
It was on one of these useless tasks, the unnecessary guard duty to a wagon train bringing fuel from the Sluff coalfields some ten miles to the south of the Golan, that a singular event took place. Forced on their return to take a byway back to the Golan because of a small avalanche that had closed the main road, they found themselves skirting the dreary smelting sheds that relied on the coalfields for the heat in the manufacture of iron and the much rarer steel, so expensive and difficult to make that it was rarely used by the Redeemers. As they came over a low hill both saw the great pile beneath at almost the same moment. They reined their horses and stared down at the great stack beneath them, silent, shocked, horrified. Thrown together in a huge heap, wind-whipped and only partly covered in snow was the armour of the Materazzi from the great disaster at Silbury Hill. From a distance it looked like a vast pile of shells from some human-shaped creature of the sea, empty and discarded like the crab and lobster shells scooped out and abandoned beside the seafood stalls of Memphis Bay. Within five minutes they were at the gates of the storage dump where two old men were standing at a brazier keeping themselves warm while they watched half a dozen men loading a wagon with bits and pieces from the great mound of armour in front of them.
‘What’s going on?’
The oldest man looked at him wondering whether the boy Redeemer was worth being insolent to. He took a middle line.
‘These are the barbicans from that victory over the Mazzi. Where are they now in all their pride?’ Then he added piously, ‘Come to dust.’
‘Where are they taking them?’
‘To be melted down. Over there. In the great smelter. Nowt workin’ now though. Not ’nuff coal, d’ysee, with this weather the way it is.’
The men at the wagon were working quickly, not out of zeal but to try and keep warm. One of them was singing as he worked, a blasphemous mixture of one of the Redeemers’ most revered hymns and a pub song about Barnacle Bill.
‘OOOOH Death and Judgement and Heaven and Hell
Are the last four things on which we dwell
I’d rather dwell on Marie the whore
And what she does with a cucumbore!’
The others, frozen, carried on clearly not listening, pulling apart the armour section by section, cutting the leather straps where they’d not rotted then, throwing the lighter bits and pieces onto the wagon – gauntlets clanged, casques and back plates clattered, armlets and cubiteries pinged and set up a clank and a racket as they rattled over each other as they filled the wagon up. One of the men noticed Cale and Vague Henri. ‘Shut up, Cob!’ The singer stopped instantly, his good humour replaced magically by alert hostility.
Cale stood and watched Vague Henri walk over to the pile.
‘It’s a dollar if you want to look, pal,’ said one of the men.
‘Shut your gob,’ said Vague Henri pleasantly.
‘You’se not allowed here.’
‘And now it’ll be two dollars,’ said the singer.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I’ll give you what you deserve.’
Cale walked over to the men and gave them a dollar wordless. What had put such a bend in Vague Henri?
‘We agreed on two.’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
He turned his back on the men who seemed to agree that indeed pushing their luck was not a good idea. Cale watched as Vague Henri walked among the strewn armour along the bottom of the great pile and bent down to pick up a half-crushed helmet. It had an enamel badge above the nosepiece just slightly bigger than a man’s thumb – a red and black chequerboard and three blue stars.
‘This is Carmella Materazzi’s coat of arms.’ He nodded over to another helmet exactly the same – but even under the grime one that was clearly pretty new. ‘And that must be his son’s. I’d heard they were both killed but no one knew for sure. Kleist stole the kid’s wallet then got ten dollars when he gave it back and said he’d found it in the Sally Gardens.’ He placed the first helmet carefully on the ground and walked right to the edge of the pile and placed a foot high up as if he were going to climb. With a great heave he pulled out another helmet, this one with a filthily bedraggled plume, raggedy, all colour drained by exposure to the hard winter. ‘I thought I recognized it. This,’ he said, holding the helmet out to Cale, ‘belonged to that shit-bag Lascelles. He clipped me on the ear once for getting in his way.’
‘Well, that’ll teach him,’
Vague Henri laughed. ‘You’re right. Henri’s curse on everyone who does me a bad turn. Let’s hope he suffered.’ He opened and shut the visor the way he had seen the puppeteers in the Memphis market do. ‘Where are your jibes now, mate?’
He looked around the great heap. When all was said and done, Memphis had been a great joy for him. ‘Seems a pity,’ he said, at last, ‘not to make some use of this. God there’s a fortune here.’
The men carefully pretending not to listen could not contain themselves at this.
‘How much, mister?’
‘Ten thousand dollars? Fifteen?’
‘You lie.’
Both Cale and Vague Henri laughed aloud at this.
‘Sorry, mister. But that’s not possible.’
‘Suit yourself. But look at the state of it. Besides there’s hardly anyone left alive could wear this stuff. It takes years to learn to move in their integuments. Much good it did them anyway. Armour always comes with a price,’ replied Cale.
‘Still,’ said Vague Henri, ‘it’s mad to let it all be melted down.’
‘Why? It’ll be d
ark in three hours. We better go.’
As they walked away one of the men called out after them.
‘Where would we take it, mister? Just tell us and we’ll remember you in our prayers.’
In the great storeroom of Vittles of the Blessed Honoratus on the back slopes of the Golan, Cale ordered two sides of beef with a requisition stolen from Van Owen’s battle quarters and with his quartermaster’s forged signature.
‘What if he works out it was you?’
‘With any luck he’ll be dead before he does.’
‘What if he wins – or even if he lives?’
‘I don’t think he can do it – stop them, I mean.’
‘That’s what we thought at Silbury Hill.’
As you can imagine, it is no easy thing to bring two carcasses into a camp and not call attention to yourselves – but there was so much of the hive about the place and they had waited till near dark and gone around the long way that the food, along with the rutabagas for all, was delivered safely and received by the Purgators with awestruck gratitude. It was roasting and boiling in a minute. Cale had also taken a leaf out of Bosco’s book and put a cutting he had made from the wooden foundations of Van Owen’s battle quarters into a small brass box he had found on a body in the veldt and liked the look of. He claimed to the fuelbrother that it was a sliver of the true gallows on which the Hanged Redeemer had been sacrificed. In exchange he got fourteen sacks of coal and a fletch of wood. Cale and Vague Henri watched the blissful Purgators eat and warm themselves in front of the fires as if they were spoiled children.
‘Does your heart good,’ said Cale, smiling. But the trouble was that Vague Henri couldn’t help himself, despite everything in his heart screaming the opposite. The trouble was it did do his heart good to see men whose brothers in faith had bullied and harassed him all his life. Now as they took such deep pleasure in being warm and well fed, warmth and food that he had provided and for which they were so pathetically grateful, he started to feel some connection with them as if a line were being drawn between them binding them together. He did not want this. ‘How can I feel sorry for them?’ he whispered to Cale miserably as the great but badly made hut in which they sat hummed with light and pleasure and deep content that only warm feet and a full stomach can provide. Cale looked at him.
‘Careful with your tears – you might drown.’
The next morning both of them were ready to leave before dawn. As the sky began to lighten they were on their mounts and away from the Golan camp, now beginning to stretch like a great dog as the final day of preparations got cracking.
Used to seeing the two going in and out and with Cale much admired by reputation for his victories on the veldt, the guards nodded them through and out onto the heights leading down to the flat Machair. The sound of bells calling the Redeemers to mass began, the pi-dogs barking as the two of them picked their way downwards. In half an hour they were moving quickly but watchfully over the easy riding plain. Here and there were stubborn areas of snow but smaller and fewer as they moved away from the heights.
‘Still,’ said Vague Henri, as they stopped for a few minutes to rest the horses, ‘I don’t care how hard the Laconics are. Even if it’s warm enough now, six nights out in the open in cold like that – bound to put a crimp in your swagger.’
‘I suppose,’ replied Cale. With the horses rested they remounted and walked them on slowly. If they came across Laconic cavalry doing some scouting themselves they wanted the animals to be rested. What Cale wanted to get a sense of was the terrain, how the melt had affected the ground, if there were choke points to defend or attack. Muddy ground, only to be expected, would be a disadvantage and perhaps a big one for the Laconics who, whatever their other skills, always tried to close on their enemies and use their ability to fight in powerful blocks ten deep and overpower their opponents with their strength, ferocity and unique ability to move these blocks around as if they were dancers in a troupe rather than soldiers.
‘They do a lot of dancing, so it says in the testaments.’
‘When they’re not taking it up the chuff.’
‘You never know, according to the testaments they have these sorts of ceremonies – I mean in public – where they do all that Gomorrah business in a ritual like on holydays.’
‘You liar!’
‘I’m not saying it’s true, I’m just telling you what it said.’
‘Better not get caught then.’
‘Better not. Anyway, you’ll be all right.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You’re too ugly.’
‘That’s not what the girls at the Sanctuary say.’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘They say I’m gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.’
Laughing they rode on in silence for nearly ten minutes.
‘Do you see him?’
‘Yes. He’s not exactly taking much trouble to stay hid.’
For several minutes a horseman had been tracking them from a couple of hundred yards away having emerged from behind a rise, a shallow one, but high enough to have hidden him if he’d wanted not to be seen.
There was a loud click! as Vague Henri started to ratchet back the light crossbow that had been hanging from his saddle in such a way that the rider could not see that he was arming himself.
‘Let’s turn back.’
Cale nodded and they began easing the horses around. The rider stopped for a moment and then began to follow.
‘If he gets any closer to you, reload time – send one past him.’
‘Why don’t I just put one in him?’
‘What for? Just warn him off.’
Vague Henri raised the bow, steadied and fired a warning. The horse kicked as the bolt shot past, closer than Vague Henri had intended. But, after all, he was on a horse himself and out of practice. The two boys stopped and watched.
‘I say,’ shouted the Laconic scout. ‘Would you mind if I had a word?’
Cale stopped and turned his horse as Vague Henri finished reloading.
‘You set?’ he said.
‘What are you doing? This isn’t the time for a little chat.’
‘I don’t agree. We might not get another chance.’
‘Come forward!’ shouted Cale. ‘And keep your hands where we can see them. My friend here didn’t miss the last time and he won’t miss this time either.’
‘My word of honour,’ shouted the rider, laughing.
‘Do Sodomites have any honour?’ asked Vague Henri.
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘Come forward. Slowly,’ shouted Cale. ‘Try anything and you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.’
The rider moved forwards as he was told until he was about ten yards away.
‘That’ll do.’
The rider stopped. ‘Lovely morning,’ he said. ‘Makes you glad to be alive.’
‘Which you won’t be,’ said Vague Henri, ‘if you’ve got any little friends planning to join us. I can put one in you and we can be back to our patrol before you hit the ground.’
‘There’s no need for all that, my dear,’ said the young man, clean-shaven and with elaborately beaded hair.
‘What do you want?’ said Cale.
‘I thought we might talk.’
‘About?’
‘You’re Redeemers, aren’t you?’
‘Might be. What’s it to you?’
‘Forgive me for saying so but aren’t you a bit young to be out and about when there’s going to be so much blood and screaming.’
‘I thought Laconics were supposed to be brief of speech,’ said Cale.
‘They are, that’s true, usually. But it would be a sad world, wouldn’t it, if we were all the same?’
‘Are you Krypteia?’
The man’s eyelashes flicked and he moved his head to one side. He smiled.
‘Might be. You’re very well informed, if I may say so.’
Cale took a quick look behind and to eit
her side to check what might be about and knowing that Vague Henri had his mark fixed on the man’s chest.
‘Does your friend with the crossbow have a steady nerve?’
‘I can’t say that he does, to be honest,’ replied Cale. ‘So I’d stay still if I were you. I asked you already – what do you want?’
‘I just thought we might have a chat.’
‘Is that what they’re calling it now?’ asked Vague Henri.
‘I’m not sure I understand you,’ replied the young man although he clearly knew mockery when he heard it.
‘I wouldn’t distract him, if I were you,’ said Cale, ‘not while he’s got that thing pointed at your chest.’ The young man looked at Cale, amused and not at all nervous.
‘Your name, young man?’
‘You first.’
‘Robert Fanshawe.’ He dropped his head, all the while keeping his eyes on Vague Henri. ‘Yours to the lowest pit of hell.’
‘Dominic Savio,’ said Cale his return nod unnoticeable to all but an eagle blessed with particularly sharp sight. ‘And that’s where you’re going if you do anything my friend here doesn’t like. I’m always going on at him about his jumpiness, by the way.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Dominic Savio.’
‘The pleasure’s all yours.’
But then something odd, a flicker of something in Fanshawe’s eyes. Cale’s horse, restless for some reason, had begun drifting to one side. He took one more step.
‘Steady!’ But Cale was no great horseman and the horse moved anyway. The hoof seemed to sink impossibly into the heather mix of sedge and wild grass and then the ground itself rose up as if it were some creature looking for its prey. Screaming with terror and off balance the horse reared up throwing Cale with a hefty thud back onto the ground, winding him so badly he just lay on his back groaning. Then a blur of movement as a man rolled out from under the sedge and grabbed the stunned Cale, turned him over on top of himself as a shield and had a knife at his throat.
The Last Four Things tlhogt-2 Page 19
