The letter was not the one from Bosco but a fake that Cale had bodged together with Vague Henri. The truth of Bosco’s betrayal might have been just as corrosive to his reputation among the Purgators but the real letter implicated Cale as much. The Purgators were silent now, many had gone white. Cale detailed the names of the newly dead in Chartres – all true enough, it should be said, and watched eyes on every face as the Purgators to a man stood still as stumps asking themselves whether to believe the unbelievable.
‘I brought you here, a two-day ride, so that you can make a choice, and not be chained to the wheel with me as I make mine never to accept this disgrace. Each one of you must choose: return or leave with me. I promise now that he who has no stomach for this flight, let him depart. His parole and passport freeing him I’ll sign myself. Ten dollars in his purse that man will have, for in this dreadful division of our faith I would not want it on my mind to die in that man’s company who in his conscience would not die with us. Read this letter,’ he said, waving it towards them. ‘If it does not turn your blood to stone and make your choice. I saved you once and every one of you has paid me back a dozen times. The man who comes with me will be my brother – the man who leaves shall in his leaving still for ever be my friend. I’ll stand aside and let you read but make it quick – our flight is noted and the dogs are up.’ With that he jumped down, handed the letter to the nearest Purgator, and walked over to Vague Henri and sat down.
‘What will you do,’ asked Vague Henri, ‘if some of them decide to leave?’
‘Why not all?’
‘And make it through the rancorous priests, the dogs, all for a chance to knock on the door of the slaughterhouse of Chartres?’
‘They have the letter.’
‘And it’s almost true.’
They watched as the Purgators talked and read and talked and read.
‘Good speech,’ said Vague Henri.
‘Thank you.’
‘Not yours.’
‘I read it in a book in Bosco’s library.’
‘Do you remember the name?’
‘Not of the maker, no. I remember the book,’ he paused. ‘Tip of my tongue.’
‘Not very grateful ...’
‘Death to the French,’ Cale interrupted with satisfaction. ‘That’s what it was called.’
In the end Vague Henri turned out to be wrong. About twenty of the Purgators, to the great hostility of the remainder, decided to return. Cale stopped a row that could have turned ugly and took some pleasure in keeping his promises of parole and money. His reputation for integrity among the Purgators was one he valued. Besides, being seen to be honest in these matters would ensure that everyone who came with him would do so willingly. And indeed, seeing him prove his honesty, three more Purgators chose to leave. In five minutes they had collected their gear and were gone. Another five minutes and Cale, still with slightly more than a hundred and sixty men, was heading in the opposite direction having ensured that Vague Henri had let slip to one of the ringleaders of the departed the direction in which they were heading.
‘I’m amazed,’ said Hooke, as he left riding between Vague Henri and Cale, ‘that even a Purgator could let himself be fooled by such a palpable device.’
‘Keep your mouth shut,’ said Vague Henri.
‘What about me?’ said Hooke.
‘What about you?’ replied Vague Henri.
‘You may keep your ten dollars but I want a passport and a parole the same as you offered them.’
‘You?’ said Cale. ‘I own you from snout to whistle. You’re going nowhere.’
‘If I’m so grossly incapable I wonder it wouldn’t be a relief to see the back of me.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Cale, softly smiling and all the more menacing for it. ‘You can learn to see the world more like I do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that the next time I use one of your devices in a brew – you’re going to be two steps in front of me when it all kicks off.’
After two more days heading in the direction he’d asked Vague Henri to spill to the returning Purgators, Cale realized that those who remained would have been getting suspicious as to why they kept following the Laconics but not engaging them.
‘I am calling off this chase. With our band of brothers shaved by more than twenty, we are outnumbered three to one. The Antagonist border is close and with it Laconic reinforcements might be anywhere and lying in wait for us. We will head to Spanish Leeds.’
‘They are allies to the Antagonists,’ called out a Purgator.
‘Only in good weather. The Swiss are neutral in their nature – even when they offer help it never comes. Even so you must remove your cassocks before we cross – it’s no easy feat in any case – impossible if you’re dressed like this.’
‘You ask a great deal, Captain, to deny our faith.’
‘Keeping your mouth shut isn’t a denial of anything – just common sense.’
‘I thought we were brothers, Captain.’
‘And so we are. Just as I’m the eldest. Take your money and your pass and go. My promise is entente even now.’
‘I want to stay, Captain.’
‘No.’
‘I want to stay. I talk too much.’
‘I don’t. Leave.’
The rest of the Purgators, Cale could see, were shocked at the insolence shown to Cale and pleased by his arbitrary exercise of power. They were not used to the first and comforted by the second.
Realizing the entire mood of the Purgators was against him the man left quickly.
‘Should I follow him?’ said Vague Henri.
‘Follow him?’ replied Cale pretending not to understand.
‘You know what I mean.’
Cale shook his head.
‘You’ve grown very bloodthirsty in your old age.’
‘He’s just a Redeemer – the loyalty the pig farmer owes to the pig – right?’
Cale smiled. ‘You’ve been talking to Hooke. He’s a bad influence that man, as well as useless. As to the other, leave him alone. He’s too far from Chartres to do us any harm – even if he gets there. Which I doubt. I want you to take five men and let Fanshawe get a good look at you.’ He drew a few lines in the dust. ‘Then double back and we’ll wait for you here.’
23
You may have heard the devil referred to as Old Merk, a name taken from Nicholas Merk, the most infamous of those infamous diplomats for hire, the Talleyrand. Nevertheless for all the disgracefully cynical advice he handed out we must all admit an obligation to Merk: he tells us not how men ought to be but how they are.
‘A ruler determined to go on a foreign adventure should always take the path of conquest by plunder rather than conquest by possession. It is all very well for a great man to look at the maps on his wall and consider for how many hours the sun shines on his territories, but the problem with conquered peoples is that if you do not steal their possessions and leave at once you must run their country for them, repair their waterways so that they do not die of thirst, fill the potholes in the roads, stuff their granaries so that they do not perish of hunger. You must decide on their squabbles, which will usually be many and lethal, and pay your soldiers or theirs when the agreements you have so patiently negotiated break down, which they always do.
‘You may consider a conquered land to be like an inherited great house – wonderful to contemplate at first and worthy of blessing your good fortune but in reality nothing but trouble and a drain on your time, patience, blood and treasure. Steal!’
It was such a squabble of the endless kind Merk predicts that brought five hundred bad-tempered Redeemers marching into the foothills of the Quantocks to deal with an increase in the number of raids by mountain bandits on the local Musselman communities. It was cold and it was wet and there was little enough to eat because so much had been stolen from the Musselmen. The Redeemers could not see why they should be enduring these deprivations, not to say risking their lives, com
ing to the aid of people who were not even heretics. They worshipped false Gods, not even the right God wrongly like the Antagonists. It was not a habit of the new Redeemer Governor of Memphis to explain his actions to his men and nor did he, but the reasons were simple enough: Memphis must eat and the Musselmen provided the city with a significant proportion of its food. The actions of these mountain crooks were a fairly serious nuisance and an advertisement that Redeemer rules could be flouted and flamboyantly so. The expedition was not intended to restore order but to demonstrate to anyone watching what could be expected if Redeemer authority was challenged in any way. The Redeemers arrived as punishers not policemen.
While the notion of having nothing to do was certainly an agreeable one among the Klephts there was a deep antipathy to being obliged to have nothing to do and fulfilling that obligation in a prescribed place. Guard duty was therefore regarded with special loathing and while everyone under the age of forty was supposed to take their turn it was a custom, as Mary, Countess of Pembroke, used to say, ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’. Those who had the means paid others to take their place, generally those too lazy, useless and stupid to earn a living any other way. Now with so many of the daring and intelligent earning so much from the increased number of raids on Musselman territory there was more money around for more people to bribe the least competent of their fellows to stand on a hillside during winter in the extreme cold with nothing happening and nothing much likely to happen.
There were strict guidelines about the use of fires by the guards – only at night, small, in the recesses of light-smothering rocks and with the driest wood. It was not easy in the cold and rain to conform to these sensible but uncomfortable rules. There was also the sheer unlikeliness of an attack by the Musselmen in winter and at night. Blundering around on the steeps in the dark and in the ice or rain, possibly both, was as good a way to get yourself killed as any. Lying there in the cold or wet the temptation to take a tiny risk, probably not even that, and build up the fire a bit and use the damper wood because keeping anything dry up there was a mare, you could see how things would slip. And so the consequences of Kleist’s arrival worked themselves out: his talent gave the Klephts the opportunity for more raids and therefore more wealth and therefore more bribes, while all the time increasing the need for a watchfulness that actually grew less and less instead of more intense. And had it not been for Cale’s unintended heroism in saving Riba and all the disasters that grew from it, the guards calculating the balance of risk between catching pneumonia or getting their throats cut by Musselmen in the middle of the night would have been entirely reasonable. But they had not reckoned on the Redeemers. And why would they? But for all that, it was Redeemers who were crawling over the icy surfaces of Mounts How and Usborne and killing Klephts by the light of their forgivably overstoked fires.
But luck runs out even for the wicked and after the third set of Klepht guards had been piped they were spotted by an insomniac watchman who despite the larger fires had been too cold to sleep. He died in the fight but in the moil that followed one of the Klephts escaped and made his way home, warning the other outposts as he came. Now wary enough to stay alive, soon messengers with more detailed information arrived.
It did not take long as the story unfolded for Kleist to realize who he was dealing with.
‘Perhaps,’ said Suveri, ‘they’re Materazzi. They came about twenty years ago and burnt out half a dozen villages.’
‘There aren’t any Materazzi any more.’
‘Not official maybe. But there must be any number of trained men needing to earn a bob.’
‘They’re not Materazzi for hire or anything else,’ said Kleist.
He explained and for some time there was silence.
‘When the Materazzi came we just upped sticks and hid in the mountains. We wait them out, they burn the villages – a pity – but they can’t stay here for ever.’
There was considerable protest at this: their recent increase in wealth had started not just the richest to build themselves new houses more fit for their improved circumstances. Many were half finished and there was much resentment at the idea of abandoning them to be destroyed. This squabble continued for some time.
‘For God’s sake!’ said Kleist when he couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘They haven’t come here to make a point – not to you anyway because there won’t be one of you left alive to learn any lesson they’re bringing with them. They’re not going to burn a few houses to teach you not to be so greedy. They’re going to wipe you off the face of the earth. They’ll kill the old men, the young, the girls, the children. They’ll pass over nothing that lives. And they’ll do all this in front of you so that it’s the last thing you see before they put you under with saws and harrows of iron and the axe and the rope. Then they’ll pass all of you through the brick kiln. Then they’ll pour the ashes into the rivers and the streams so that they run black and all that will be remembered of you is cinders, all that will remain of you is a byword for ruin.’
There was, as you will have guessed, a dreadful silence, broken by Dick Tarleton, well known for his refusal to take anyone or anything seriously.
‘That bad,’ he said.
‘Wait here for two days, fool, and you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.’
‘Are you suggesting we fight?’
‘You’ll lose.’
‘What then?’
‘Leave.’
‘And go where?’
‘Where’s the nearest border?’
‘Upper Silesia.’
‘Then go to Upper Silesia.’
‘Hundreds of the old and young over the mountains in winter. It’s a fantasy.’
‘Well, you better find a way because, if you stay, within a week there’ll be one kind of Klepht – dead ones.’
And indeed what Kleist was saying was unthinkable and full of terrible possibilities. For hours they argued as Kleist delivered one story of Redeemer cruelty after another.
‘You’re exaggerating to get your way.’
Exhausted and afraid and frustrated Kleist lost his temper and punched this sceptic to the ground and had to be dragged away, though not before he had managed a kick to his ribs so hard he broke two of them. This outburst seemed to help convince the shocked onlookers that Kleist was, even if wrong, completely sincere. When he calmed down he could see the mood had changed.
It was time for some boasting. The problem with the Klephts, however, was that they not only tolerated exaggeration concerning one’s former achievements, it was positively admired. To have created a reputation for something without having earned it was an accomplishment often more highly regarded than an actual accomplishment itself. This was no place for diffidence or modesty.
‘You know me,’ Kleist began. ‘The new houses you are so willing to die to protect are being built because of me. My skill has made you rich – nothing else. There isn’t one of you who could beat me in a fair fight or an unfair one. If I didn’t choose to kill you from half a mile away I could do it face to face – not that there’d be much of it left after I’d bitten your nose off and thumbed out one of your eyes.’ He might have enjoyed these flourishes if the lives of his wife and unborn child were not at stake.
‘And where do you think I got these talents from? Under a stone? I got them from the men who are less than a day from here. And remember that I’m just a footboy, a novice in killing and cruelty compared to the Redeemers coming here – they have no more pity than a millstone, iron is straw to them, arrows are stubble. You must take the women and children now and the bulk of the men will come with me. We will try and draw them away from the march as best we can. This is my last word. If you don’t agree I’m gone and my wife with me.’
‘Your wife, Kleist, is about to drop.’
‘So you know I mean what I say. She has more chance, both of them, giving birth in a ditch by the road than staying here.’
This was not quite good enough f
or the assembled Klephts, but they had to have Daisy called out to confirm what Kleist had said – young as she was, Daisy was regarded with a certain respect. Bluster was one thing, and to be admired, but taking a wife nearly nine months gone out into the wilderness during winter was a dire thing to do if it were true and all too horribly convincing.
Daisy turned up and, now enormous, waddled into the meeting house with an aching back and an aching arse. She was not much in the mood for persuasion and gave the sum of things to them straight.
‘I thought we admired a man who knew when and how to be afraid. We’ve always had the brains and thought ourselves better than anyone else because we delighted in the usefulness of a savvy coward. I know you suspect my husband of courage but you should trust him all the more if he’s ready to take me now, like this, rather than face the Redeemers. Show some sense – live and don’t die.’ And with that she left and went back to her home to lie down and be terrified.
There was another hour of wrangling and some of course refused to put themselves at such a risk – and it was a dreadful one – on the say-so of a boy, however useful. But it would be fair to say of the Klephts that once they had decided to run away they did not do so by halves – and running away was something they knew how to do. Desperate as he was to be gone, Kleist realized that nothing could happen in the way of a start until the next day, when the Redeemers might be no more than twelve hours away. They must be deployed and quickly if there was to be any chance of the train making it out of the mountains and to the borders.
‘I will have Megan Macksey with me as midwife,’ said Daisy, trying to be reassuring in a way she did not feel.
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