The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  Then came the second shock: knowing they were facing men who, like themselves, did nothing but fight and learn to fight the Laconics had stolen another trick from their many wars. Out came their new swords taken from the Strouds, nearly forty inches long and steeply curving at the end. It allowed them to cut down easily over the shields of Redeemers and do so with a dreadful force onto the helmet of the men in front of them. Helmets designed to take only a blow or cut were split apart by the force of something like a hammer and a spike. The terrible injuries inflicted with each crushing stroke trembled the lines of the Black Cordelias. Then the final twist of the bezel as the dreadful practised grace of the Laconics came into play. To the Laconic right, packed with the strongest men in any case, the middle line of Laconics at the rear – once they knew the line in the centre would not give – shifted their weight and made it stronger still. While the Redeemer centre and the Redeemer right moved slowly back as the Black Cordelias fell to the curved blades and were replaced by weaker or even less well-armoured men, there was a crushing collapse on their left as the curved swords, the strongest Laconics, and the swift and sudden reinforcement became too much. ‘IS THAT IT? WHAT? WAIT! STAND THERE! STAND THERE!’ The confusion and the collapse and the shouts – most on either side had no idea if they were about to win or die.

  Amid the rumbling noise, the screams, the orders, the trumpets blaring instructions and the dead and dying, the Laconic right broke their opponents – those that could do so ran, those that could not were killed and only their bodies slippery with blood and excrement and soil made awkward the turning advance of the Laconics. The mercenaries overbalanced on the bodies underneath their feet, the flabby leadenness of the dead, the clutching hands of the dying and the still noisily wounded, some of them still fighting able to stab at the stumbling mercenaries being pushed from behind and suddenly disordered and vulnerable. Many more Laconics died in that decisive but messy turn than in all their previous ten years of fighting. But once it was done, the battle but not the killing was through. Van Owen watched on from his hill in hopeless horror, unable to do anything but send his thin reserves to die in delaying what could not be stopped. Now as the Redeemers in the centre and the right fought on, the Laconics attacked them from the side and simply but bloodily rolled them up like a carpet at a picnic’s end. Those that did not run died.

  For the second battle in a row, Vague Henri and Cale ended up watching a massacre. The Purgators around them had been yelling their encouragement, and became so loud Vague Henri swore at them to keep it down. He was about to point out to them that they were cheering on men who would have applauded at their executions, who regarded them as the living dead, men without souls. It was Cale who realized what he was going to say because he was thinking the same but put a hand on Vague Henri’s arm to shut him up. This time, unlike the fiasco at Silbury Hill, Cale had the sense not to become involved and long before the terrible end he had withdrawn. But unlike the Redeemers that day, he had a stroke of luck.

  Of Cale and Vague Henri and their squad of Purgators, some were in tears, others calling out the prayers for the dead and the dying.

  ‘Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell,’ called out Purgator Giltrap, once the Prayer Sponsor of Meynouth before he was convicted of three of the nine offences against reason. To which, mindful of Vague Henri’s rebuke, the others replied softly: ‘The last four things on which we dwell.’

  Chins on their chests, the two boys leading at the front were able to hide their unbecoming smirks.

  As they returned towards the Golan, Cale protected the column by moving in a roundabout way along the Machair Fingers, called so because, long, low and thin, their stubby ends were held to point to the way around the heights. The Laconics were no better cavalrymen than they were archers but they had reserves, not used that day, of fast mounted soldiers and before they left the bluff, Cale had seen them in the distance slowly making their way around the far side of Van Owen’s outlook. Cale moved back to the Golan slowly, wary in case he stumbled over the Laconic mounted troops. Along the fingers to either side and just below the crest of these hills he had scouts on donkeys, sure-footed on the uneven sides, keeping an eye out for anything that might threaten them. One of them, just before the fingers’ stubby end signalled Cale to join him at the top. When he made his way up on foot along with Vague Henri, the scout pointed to a troop of Redeemers about twenty strong leaving and heading towards the Golan.

  ‘Is it Van Owen?’ said Vague Henri, as Cale looked through his spyglass.

  ‘Must be.’ He handed the glasses to Vague Henri. ‘Look over there.’

  Vague Henri searched in the direction Cale was pointing. About thirty mounted Laconics were chasing down Van Owen’s guard, who were, so it looked from their easy pace, unaware they were about to be attacked.

  ‘Don’t fancy Van Owen’s chances,’ said Vague Henri. ‘What I saw of his guards were old men, preachers and a couple of orthodoxers.’

  Cale took the glasses back and watched as the Laconic horsemen closed. Even so hammers were working in his brain. Even without glasses, Vague Henri could see clearly enough. In five minutes the Laconics had closed to about two hundred and fifty yards before Van Owen’s rear guards saw them. Vague Henri watched as they moved at once from a slow gallop to a full one and all but five or six guards around what must have been Van Owen fell back to put a line of horsemen between him and the advancing Laconics. But if the Laconics were no cavalrymen they were still the better horsemen and with the better horses. It was clear the Redeemers would soon be caught and showing some sense at least the guards made for a small hill, little more than a glorified pimple on the landscape. Dismounting, Van Owen’s guards took up a circular position around their general and waited. Cale handed Vague Henri the glasses. Now he could see the Laconics dismount no more than thirty yards from Van Owen and move in quick formation up the slight rise. And then the fight began.

  Cale started to move back down the finger. Vague Henri grabbed his arm.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Me? I’m going to save Van Owen. You stay here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘All right. Come with me.’

  ‘I’m not going to help that shit-bag. Why are you?’

  ‘Watch and wonder, Sonny Jim.’

  ‘You’re a nutter.’

  ‘We’ll see.’ And with that he was off down the hill like some mountain goat.

  Vague Henri waited on top of the finger along with the donkey scout and watched as Cale and his Purgators moved out into the plain and to the fight on what they came later to call Pillock Hill half a mile ahead.

  As Cale and the Purgators quickly advanced, Vague Henri realized that Cale had not been as peculiarly impulsive as he’d at first seemed. As long as he was quick he’d catch the Laconics from the rear. Squeezed between the lines of Redeemers their inevitable victory would become almost certain defeat. Besides, he wouldn’t risk an attack directly. Vague Henri was always arguing that crossbowmen could more easily replace archers because bowmen took years to train. The crossbow delivered the same and sometimes better results in only a few months. So it went as Cale dismounted his Purgators seventy yards away from the top of Pillock Hill and stood behind his men, some way back in fact, and started instructing them to shoot the Laconics down with their crossbows. Later that day one of the Purgators told Vague Henri one of them questioned the order because of the danger to Van Owen’s guard. Cale had punched him so hard that, as the Purgator described it, ‘his nose burst like a Bicester plum’.

  Whatever the danger to the eminent guard of honour on Pillock Hill, the effect on the Laconics was devastating. Within a minute half a dozen of the red-cloaked mercenaries had fallen. They had no choice but to break off and attack Cale and his Purgators. But with the guard of honour behind they seemed to be swapping one inevitable kind of defeat for another. They charged down the hill, a fearsome enough sight even from Vague Henri’s distance, and were into the Purga
tors with only a further three casualties. What followed was a terrible fight and hideously close run. It should not have been but Van Owen’s guard of honour, instead of following down Pillock Hill and giving the Laconics the impossible task of fighting front and rear, simply stood and watched their rescuers fall into a desperate struggle for their lives. Despite their smaller numbers, now two to one, the Laconics were armoured – though not as heavily as unmounted troops – unlike the Purgators, and were heading downhill on terrain ideal for their way of fighting. The Purgators no longer held an advantage as it became clear that instead of chasing after the Laconics, as good sense dictated, the guard of honour had decided just to wait and watch. Cale cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled: ‘Help us!’ But the guards just stared at their rescuers, impassive as cows. Cale stood about ten yards behind the Purgators cursing, fit to be roped, as he realized that they had not misunderstood what was needed from them but were deliberately holding back. ‘Why?’ thought Cale. ‘Helping us makes sense.’ But not if you are a general who believes in martyrdom and sacrifice and that it’s vital, above everything, that you survive for the greater good. Already Van Owen and his guard were on their way down the other side of the hill, leaving to head back to the Golan. If he had been Vague Henri or Kleist then Cale could have stayed out of trouble with his marksmanship, picking off the Laconics from a safer distance. But he was not. His only choice was to fight himself. He screamed high with fury at his own stupidity and then raced to the raggedy left hand of the battle and took the first Laconic soldier from behind with a thrust underneath the back of his helmet and through his neck. Coming from the left he always had the advantage – sideways on he leant to the right – being off balance normally being a bad idea, raised his left leg not more than two feet and kicked out at the next man’s vulnerable knee-joint. The man’s scream of agony as the joint snapped was cut short by a kick to the side of his head as he fell. Cale grabbed the two desperately pressed Purgators he had saved and began trying to roll the Laconics up from the side, pulling each Purgator he could rescue around him to form an outflanking wall. At the other end of the line things were going badly for the unarmoured Purgators, who in any case could not match the strength or skill of their better-disciplined opponents. But Cale, furious at Van Owen’s treachery, was a whirlwind of animosity and bile. Without intending to he inspired his men, his courage as they thought, even his love for them, showing in his monstrous and ugly skill. Something in the focus of his talent for killing seemed to oppress even the Laconics for whom violent death was, in all essentials, the point of being alive. His every action so lacking in grace or elegance, in everything except a brutal conviction in each stab or blow that you and you only would fail, that anything you brought to this fight was futile, seemed to cause even the Laconics to lose heart as they were enfolded from the left. They did not show it, merciless as they were to themselves as well as to others, but in the minutes before their deaths they had time to understand that they were sure to lose. Seven became three, three became one, and then it was over. Then the usual monstrosity: the wounded crying out, the numb, the delighted, the cruel finishing of the Laconics still alive. One of the Laconics was only lightly wounded in the leg and the two Purgators were both leery of any danger – a hidden dagger perhaps – and enjoying taunting him as he shuffled backwards away from their jabs. ‘Antagonist bag of shit!’ Not accurate but the worst thing they could think of. ‘Atheist malefactor!’ This was nearer the truth of the Laconics, if misapplied, but it was an odd fact that most Redeemers had no idea that the Antagonists were a splinter of their own religion and believed most of the things that they did. The edge of one of the swords caught the Laconic soldier on the hand cutting deep into the palm and his cry of pain caught Cale’s attention. He raged over towards the two Purgators and pushed them irritably out of the way. The eyes of Laconic soldier, already terrified, widened as he saw Cale standing over him – he crouched with his arms outspread waiting, the blow arriving in an instant, down through the collarbone and sheering into his heart. A horrible cough which lasted seconds and then unconsciousness and death. A kinder end than for many over the next few hours who were left to die in agony from their wounds or who were slowly finished off by the cruel or the clumsy. All that horror was still to come for thousands on the battlefield. It is always better sometimes, had said IdrisPukke to Vague Henri once when they were eating fish and chips on a sandy beach on the Gulf of Memphis, to reserve the right to look away.

  It was then that Vague Henri arrived, the donkey scout still three hundred yards behind. He looked at the dead men around him.

  ‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said to the surviving Purgators, eight of them. Cale stared at him knowing exactly what he meant and that it was not a compliment.

  ‘Strip a pair of them of armour and weapons and quickly.’ Within a couple of minutes they were gone, taking their dead with them.

  Despite Cale having come even closer to death than at Silbury, things turned out all right in the end. He learnt a lesson, although as he later said to Vague Henri, ‘I still don’t know what it was,’ and he lived. But the day hadn’t finished with him by any means.

  Although the sedge and heathers of the battlefield of Eight Martyrs were robust enough, a fair stretch of them had been churned up and the mud underneath exposed and dragged over. Despite the freezing weather of only a week before, the warm winds from the sea that had melted the snow had grown even warmer. That afternoon it was unseasonably hot, and it brought new life where there was only hideous death. Midge eggs lay buried under the warmth of the sedge and several inches into the mud. Exposed by the battle, heated by the sun, they hatched in their millions and in only an hour they formed a whirling single column the size of the battlefield and rising to over a thousand yards above.

  The nearly three thousand Redeemers who survived the carnage and escaped in a ragged mass towards the foot of the Golan looked back and saw something in the air that few of them had seen before – a cloud in the sky moving and shifting like no mist or fog but like something alive. Which, after all, was what it was – now like a weasel on its hinds, now like a camel, now to those who’d seen one very like a whale. But to most, exhausted, shamed, afraid and terrorized it looked like the Hanged Redeemer shaking his head in rage at the dreadful loss and blasphemy of the Laconic victory. And then finally the wind and the causeless flight of the insects changed and the grief-stricken visage of the saviour became for a moment the stern and watchful face of an implacable boy. Or so it later seemed certainly to many – even, after a few days, to a growing number who had not been there at all.

  Within hours the survivors were beginning to stream back into the Golan and rumour began to spread like butter on miraculous bread: news of the promised end, that Jews had been swarming to Chartres to convert, that the four dwarf horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden through the streets of Ware, on Gravelly Hill a red dragon appeared standing over a woman clothed in the sun, and at Whitstable a beast from the land forced the people in the town to worship a beast from the sea. In New Brighton an angel appeared carrying the Wrath of God in a bowl. Once these reports became common knowledge, out of the horror of this hideous defeat came a strange exuberance. The story swept the Golan that an acolyte, a boy, had defeated a hundred soldiers of the enemy with the jaw bone of an ass and had rescued Redeemer Van Owen from the Antagonist traitors who had betrayed his army to their enemies.

  While this last rumour was not entirely untrue, neither was it entirely accidental. Bosco’s fellow travellers in the Golan, along with those who knew and who believed, found that their garbled version of the numbers and events on Pillock Hill had fallen on desperately willing ears. Events at last conspired with them. The Laconics, instead of advancing either to try and take the Heights or even go around and take the entrenched Redeemer line from the rear, to the astonishment of all stayed exactly where they were. Within hours every Redeemer on the Golan knew beyond certainty that the Laconics had halted bec
ause the vision of the Hanged Redeemer and his manifested Wrath had stilled them with the fear of God.

  It was neither midges nor God that caused the Laconics to pull back into the camp they had already occupied for a week before the fight but a terrible nagging and habitual fear. It has been wisely said that if you put all your eggs in one basket you’ll end up spending all your time watching the basket. It’s an even more worrying prospect if the eggs in that one basket are unusually rare. This was the heart of the problem for the Laconics. Their capacity to work together like dancers in the chaos and horror of the battlefield was created out of a lifetime of brutal care and violent solicitude. Each one of them cost a fortune in time and money and the treasure needed to buy that time was earned by slaves. These slaves were not brought from the four quarters of the earth, their families and all their other ties destroyed in the process, but by the bondage of entire peoples living with them cheek by jowl – the slaves many, the Laconics few. There was barely a Laconic warrior who was afraid of death but not one who wasn’t fearful of the men and women that he owned. At the Battle of Eight Martyrs the Laconics killed fourteen Redeemers for every one of them that died. And yet they were traumatized by this loss. The effort that had gone into the grave with those eleven hundred men was such that they could never entirely be replaced even within a generation, the Laconics being so few and their training so long and hard.

  In the light of such a successful catastrophe the Ephors of Laconia must have their say on what to do and this was why they stopped, when had they advanced around the Golan Heights and taken the Redeemer trenches from the rear this great war might have counted its end in months or even weeks.