The Left Hand of God

by Paul Hoffman

  “Do you know anything about the killings?” asked Cale.

  “Me?” said IdrisPukke. “I was going to ask you the same thing.” He took another bite of the soda bread. “Were you going to help Vipond?”

  There was a pause as Vague Henri and Cale looked at each other.

  “We were thinking about it,” said Cale.

  “Very wise. Always think carefully before doing anyone a favor. Good advice. In your friend’s case,” he added, nodding at Kleist, “I wish I’d taken it.”

  “You’d have gone without your dinner if you had.”

  IdrisPukke laughed softly. “Not much of an exchange—two pieces of bread for three lives. I’d say you still owed me.”

  “There’s nothing we can do for you,” said Vague Henri.

  “Perhaps not. But in future I may have to call it in. I hope you’re honorable men.”

  Cale laughed.

  “Are you an honorable man?”

  “You’d be laughing on the other side of your face if I wasn’t.”

  Vague Henri thought it best to change the subject.

  “What do you think they’ll do to us?”

  IdrisPukke shrugged. “They’ll take you to Memphis. If Vipond lives, you should be all right.” He smiled. “As long as you stick to your story.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” asked Vague Henri.

  “Depends. They might put you on trial or they might just throw you in the bypass.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Somewhere you get forgotten about.”

  “We didn’t do anything,” said Cale.

  “So I gather.” He laughed again. “But don’t tell them that.”

  “Who do you think killed them?”

  IdrisPukke considered.

  “There are lots of hooligans in the outer Scablands, but not many would think of touching an armed embassy from the Materazzi.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My God, don’t they teach you anything at that place?”

  All three looked at him, stony of expression.

  “Right. Well, the Materazzi rule Memphis and everywhere up to the Scablands and down as far as the Great Bight—which I can see you’ve never heard of either.”

  “What’s Memphis like?”

  “Wonderful. The greatest show on earth. There’s nothing you can’t get in Memphis, nothing that can’t be bought or sold, no crime that hasn’t been committed, no food they haven’t eaten, no practice . . . ” He paused. “. . . unpracticed. You’re in for a treat as long as they don’t kill you or forget you—and of course as long as you have money.”

  “We don’t,” said Cale.

  “Then you must get it. If you have no money in Memphis, there’s no point to you. And if there’s no point to you in Memphis, someone will soon find one for you.”

  “What do you—”

  “Enough questions. I’m sore and tired. We’ll talk in the morning.” He winked. “If I’m still here.” And with that IdrisPukke turned over and within five minutes was snoring.

  They assumed he was joking as he so often and so puzzlingly seemed to be, but next morning when they woke up IdrisPukke had gone.

  Captain Bramley was furious and gave all three boys a good kicking, and though it did make them feel considerably worse, it didn’t seem to make him feel better. Riba had rushed over and begged him to stop.

  “Why would they help him to escape and stay behind themselves?” she pointed out desperately. “It isn’t fair!”

  The boys, being old hands at unfairness, stoically kept their mouths shut and tried to keep their more tender portions away from the point of Captain Bramley’s boot. Fortunately for them he was a railer and a flailer rather than one of the skillful sadists they were used to. Unfairness was as familiar to them as water, not least because a beating was often preceded by a reference to the Hanged Redeemer’s direst warning that anyone who hurt a child would be better off being cast into the sea with a millstone around his neck. When the boys first arrived they were frequently told stories and parables about the kindness of the Holy Redeemer and his particular regard for the young, whose care and happiness were always being recommended to those around him. At first the fact that they were often beaten for no good reason prior to these homilies of love and kindness, and often afterward too, was the cause of bewildered resentment. Over the years, however, the contradictions ceased to exist and the words of comfort and joy went in one ear and out the other. They were just words, bereft of meaning to all concerned.

  Having worked out his initial burst of rage on the boys, Bramley turned to his sergeant and corporal, who stood by with weary patience for their turn.

  “You!” he shouted at the sergeant. “You big fat sack of shit. And you!” he said, looking at the corporal, a much smaller man. “You scrawny little sack of shit. Get ten of your best men and find that bastard IdrisPukke. And if you come back without him, and alive, you bring your dinner, both of you, because when I’ve finished with you you’re going to bloody need it.”

  And with this he stamped off toward his tent.

  “Keep interrogating the prisoners,” he yelled over his shoulder.

  The sergeant let out a deep breath of disdain and patient irritation. “You heard what the man said, Corporal.”

  The corporal approached the three boys, now backed against the wheel of the wagon, knees drawn up to protect themselves.

  “Do you know anything about the escape of the prisoner?”

  “No!” yelled back a furious but frightened Kleist.

  “The prisoner says no,” reported the corporal calmly.

  “Ask him if he’s sure, Corporal.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” said Kleist. “Why, in God’s name, would he tell us where he was going?”

  “He has a point, Sergeant.”

  “Yes,” said the sergeant wearily. “Yes, he does.” There was a pause.

  “Mount up Seven Platoon and wake up Scout Calhoun. We’ll be on our way in ten minutes.”

  With that the soldiers around them dispersed and the boys and Riba were left alone as if nothing had happened. She knelt down beside them and looked at them with heartbreaking pity—an emotion, it has to be said, that they barely appreciated. Firstly, they were more concerned with their own bruises, and secondly, they were not capable of understanding that she could actually feel for their pain. Except for Vague Henri, perhaps, who when they had been together for the week in the Scablands had stripped to the waist to wash when they’d come across one of its few streams. He had caught her surreptitiously looking at his back and the numerous scars and gouges and weals that covered it. Even though he had never encountered feminine sympathy before, he was, in a confused way, it’s true, alive to its strange power.

  Then the camp itself started to move. The prisoners were fed on porridge and they were off. Before she was taken away, Riba whispered excitedly that in two days they would be in Memphis. The three of them were unable to share her enthusiasm, given the uncertainty of the welcome that awaited them.

  “The old guy,” said Kleist to Riba, “the one we were about to rescue. Is he dead?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Try to do something useful and find out,” said Kleist.

  Her eyes opened wide at this rebuke and started to mist.

  “Leave her alone,” said Vague Henri.

  “Why?” said Kleist. “They’re going to hang us if he dies—so I don’t see how she can be riding to Memphis on her fat arse and not finding out what we need to know.”

  The mistiness was instantly replaced by indignation.

  “Why do you keep saying that I’m fat? I’m supposed to be like this.”

  “No more arguments,” said Cale irritably. “Kleist—leave her alone. You—find out what’s happened to the old man.”

  Riba looked at Cale, shocked and angry, but said nothing.

  “March or die! March or die!” The corporals cried out, the threa
t no longer significant, because this was called every time they struck camp and moved on. The cart to which the boys were tied lurched and moved on, and they left Riba behind, staring at them furiously. Later that day, however, she walked by them, nose still clearly out of joint, and said as if it were a matter of no possible consequence:

  “He’s still alive.”

  The Scablands came to an end quite suddenly within a hundred meters. They moved from grit, ash, stones and scruffy hillocks to a green and fertile plain already spotted with farms, houses and the huts of workers. People emerged from behind hedges and clumping barrows to take a look at them. Not for long, though—the sight of the soldiers, baggage and prisoners was enough to make them curious, but after a gawp of twenty seconds or so everyone but the children went back to what he was doing.

  For the rest of the day and all the next the number of houses and people grew denser. First villages, then towns, then the suburbs of Memphis itself. But it was still two hours more before they saw its great citadel.

  They had stopped because of traffic jams, and one of the corporals, seeing them stare, amazed, at the city, moved his horse forward.

  “Those walls are the greatest in the world—fifty foot thick at the weakest and twice five miles around.” The boys looked at him.

  “That’d be ten miles, then,” said Kleist.

  The corporal’s face fell and he spurred the horse onward.

  11

  The last two miles up to the great gates of the Citadel of Memphis consisted entirely of markets of one kind or another. The noise and the smells and the colors left the boys wide-eyed and almost overwhelmed with delight. Any traveler would have considered it an experience to take with him until the Day of the Dead—but for three boys whose staple food was something called dead men’s feet, varied by an occasional rat, this was heaven itself, only a heaven rich and strange beyond imagining. Each drawn-in breath came with the smell of cumin and rosemary and along with it the sweat of a herder selling goats, a housewife dashed with oil of tangerine, a whiff of urine and the smell of roses. There were calls and cries from every direction: the squawk of cooking parrots, the miaow of the gourmet’s favorite—the Memphis boiling cat—the cooing of sacrificial doves, the bark of dogs raised in the hills around the city for roasting on holidays; pigs squealed, cows groaned, and a huge shout went up as a pike about to be gutted flapped its way loose from a fishmonger and flailed its way to freedom in a sewer. A cry of tragic loss from the monger, derisive laughter from the crowd.

  On they moved through the traders’ incomprehensible cries, “Widdee, Widdee, Wee!” called out a man who seemed to be selling bright pink cow tails from a casket, shaved of skin and the color of candy floss. “Etchy-Gudda-Munda,” shouted another, displaying his vegetables with a hand swept out with all the smugness of a magician who had just made them appear from thin air. “Buyee myah vegetables ah! Rhyup tommies. Deliciosa pinnapules. Buy ah my herbage, my gorgheous botany.”

  Some stalls were on sites filling half an acre—and on one corner an old man, half-naked, held out a ragged cloth, trying to sell the two speckled eggs it contained and hopping from foot to foot.

  Gawping around to his left, Vague Henri saw a train of boys of around nine years, linked by chain round their necks, being led toward a gate watched over by huge men in leather jackets, who nodded them through. The boys seemed unconcerned, but what truly alarmed Vague Henri was that the lips of the boys were painted red and their eyelids powdered in a delicate blue.

  Vague Henri called over to one of the soldiers next to him. He nodded at the boys and the building through the gate, gaudily painted and even more crowded than the market.

  “What’s going on there?”

  The solider looked at the boys and his face paled over with disgust.

  “That’s Kitty Town. Never go there.” He paused and looked sadly at Vague Henri. “Not if you have a choice.”

  “Why is it called Kitty Town?”

  “Because it’s run by Kitty the Hare. And so you don’t ask any more questions, he ain’t no woman and he ain’t no hare. Stay away.”

  As they entered past the guards into the city of Memphis proper, the change was instant: from the crush and noise and smell of the market into the deep cool of the tunnel. Within thirty yards of near darkness under the walls they were out in the light again. And then again it was another world. Unlike the Sanctuary, where brownness and uniformity made everywhere look like everywhere else, in the citadel there was endless variety: a palace with spiky copper minarets blooming with green stood next to a manor house of yellow and purple brick. There were tailor-perfect boulevards with trees whose trunks were painted white with chalk, and leading off them warped and ancient lanes so narrow even a cat would think twice before entering. Hardly anyone looked at the boys: it was as if they were not so much ignored as unseen. Except by the younger children, who ogled them from behind the delicate iron railings of the garden squares, all curls and golden hair.

  Then there was a burst of activity from one of the roads above them, and twenty household cavalry in red and gold uniforms clattered into the square escorting a decorated carriage. They headed urgently toward the caravan and pulled up around the covered wagon in which Lord Vipond lay unconscious. The carriage opened its two wide doors and three important-looking men rushed toward the wagon and disappeared inside. The boys all stood for five minutes and waited in the cool breeze and the shadows of the trees that lined the square.

  A small girl, perhaps five years old, walked unseen by her gossiping mother up to the rail nearest the three acolytes.

  “Hey, you, boy.”

  Cale looked at her with all the considerable unfriendliness he could muster.

  “Yes, boy, you.”

  “What?” said Cale.

  “You have a face like a pig.”

  “Go away.”

  “Where have you come from, boy?”

  He looked at her again.

  “From hell, to take you away in the night and eat you.”

  She considered this for a moment.

  “You look like an ordinary boy to me. A dirty, ordinary boy.”

  “Looks can be deceiving,” said Cale. By this time Kleist was interested.

  “You’ll see,” he said to the little girl. “Three nights from now we’re going to break into your room, but very quiet-like so your mother can’t hear. And then we’ll put a gag in your mouth and then we’ll probably eat you there and then. And then all we’ll leave behind is some bones.”

  Her confidence in their ordinariness seemed to waver. But she was not a girl to be easily frightened.

  “My dada will stop you and kill you dead.”

  “No, he won’t, because we’ll eat him too. Probably first, so you’ll know what’s coming.”

  Cale laughed aloud at this and shook his head at Kleist’s pleasure in the exchange.

  “Stop encouraging her,” he said, smiling. “She looks like a snitch to me.”

  “I am not a snitch!” said the little girl indignantly.

  “You don’t even know what a snitch is,” said Kleist.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Quiet!” whispered Cale.

  The girl’s mother had finally missed her and was hurrying over to her.

  “Come away, Jemima.”

  “I was just talking to the dirty boys.”

  “Be quiet, bold girl! You mustn’t talk about these unfortunate creatures like that. I’m sorry,” she said to the boys. “Apologize now, Jemima.”

  “I won’t.”

  She started to drag her away. “Then there will be no pudding for you!”

  “What about us?” Kleist called. “What about pudding for us?”

  Now there was movement ahead, and six household soldiers were lifting down Chancellor Vipond while the three men looked on with worried faces. He was taken to the carriage and carefully lifted inside. Within a minute the carriage had left the square, and the caravan moved on slowly behind.
/>   Three hours later they were inside the last keep, had been taken down to the cells, stripped, searched and had three buckets of freezing water thrown at them, smelling of unpleasant chemicals unfamiliar to them. Then they’d been given back their clothes, dusted in itchy white powder and locked in a cell. They sat in silence for thirty minutes until Kleist gave a sigh and said, “Whose idea was this? Oh yes, Cale’s. I forgot.”

  “The difference between here and the Sanctuary,” replied Cale, as if barely interested enough to reply, “is that here we don’t know what’s going to happen. If we were back there we would, and it would involve a lot of screaming.” It was hard to argue with this, and within a few minutes they were all asleep.

  For three days Lord Vipond drifted closer and closer to death. Many were the balms and medicines given to him, the aromatic herbs burned day and night; tinctures of this and that were smoothed on his wounds. Each one of these treatments was either useless or positively harmful and only Vipond’s natural vigor and good health pulled him through, despite the best efforts of the finest physicians Memphis could provide. Just when his heirs had been told to prepare for the worst (or, from their point of view, the best), Vipond woke up and croakingly demanded that the windows be opened, the noxious herbs removed and his body washed in boiled water.

  In a few days, no longer deprived of cool fresh air and with his natural defenses able to do their work, he was sitting up and giving an account of the events that led to him being buried up to his neck in the sandy grit of the Scablands.

  “We were about four days from Memphis when we were hit by a sandstorm, though it was more gravel than sand. That was what scattered the caravan, and before we could regroup Gurriers attacked us. They killed everyone as they stood—but for some reason they decided to leave me as you found me.”

  The man he was speaking to was Captain Albin, head of the Materazzi’s secret service—a tall man with the blue eyes of a young girl. This striking feature was in great contrast to the rest of his appearance, which was precise (he looked as if he had just been ironed) and cool.

  “You’re sure,” asked Albin, “that it was just Gurriers?”