The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  Artemisia won the support of the militia, and rid herself of the officers who out of natural self-interest opposed her, by dividing the soldiers in two and offering to fight three war games. Then she bet the officers three thousand dollars she would win all three. If they lost they were to resign. She had three thousand left in her dowry (Daniel had given it back to her on their wedding day) and she used a thousand of it to bribe the militia now under her command and who, until she paid them so much money, were not very happy about it either. She had two and a half thousand men, mostly farmers and their hired workers and an assortment of brewers, bakers and metal workers. She had three months.

  At first the men worked hard because they were paid to – but only on results. Each week the men were paid more but only if they ran the length of this field faster, or carried a heavy weight for longer. But she also divided them up into groups with different fierce-sounding names and dressed them in waistcoats of different colours – though wisely not the baby blue or cerulean of her childhood dolls. Anyone who failed to improve was stripped of their waistcoat publicly and thrown out. But if they subsequently passed the test they’d failed, and bettered it, they’d be reinstated. She made mistakes – but money and an apology seemed to cure everything. When the three months were up, the games began. They were rough enough, though with padded sticks instead of swords and spears, and there were many injuries. She won all three easily because of her talent but also because her opponents were made up of intelligent officers who were complacent and complacent officers who were stupid. She retained some of the former and began a further series of rough games to correct her mistakes – which she knew were many. She ordered books by great authorities on the art of war from everywhere possible – and found most of them maddeningly vague when it came to what she wanted to know: the details of how something was actually done. One bombastic authority after another would tell of, say, the night march by General A that had daringly outflanked and surprised General B – but the details of how you moved a thousand men over rocky, lousy paths without lights and without the men breaking their legs or falling over the edge of a cliff – the things you actually needed to know – were nearly always absent. What was left were just stories for children and daydreamers.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ Cale said, laughing, ‘how you got to be so good. I’ve been taught to do nothing else my whole life.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m more talented and clever than you.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met anyone more talented than me.’

  She burst out laughing.

  ‘I don’t know what’s so funny,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘You are. I’m not surprised nobody likes you.’

  ‘Some people like me. But not many, it’s true,’ he admitted. ‘So how did you do it?’

  ‘I played.’

  ‘All children do that. Even we used to play.’

  ‘I played a different way from everyone else.’

  ‘Now who’s boasting?’

  ‘I’m not boasting. It’s true.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘I watched other children playing even when I was very small – all they ever did was make things come out the way they wanted them to. But things never do – I knew that even when I was five. So I took an old pack of my mother’s cards and I used to write things on them – your best general falls off his horse and breaks his neck, a spy steals your plan of attack, thunder makes your enemies’ horses stampede, you suddenly go blind.’

  Cale laughed again. ‘I take it back. You are cleverer than me.’

  ‘It’s not a question of being clever. Nothing’s lost on me, that’s all. Just like everyone, I see what I want to see – only I know that’s what I’m like, so sometimes I can make myself see things as they are. Only sometimes, though. That would be really clever – seeing things as they are all the time.’

  But she was wrong about that, as time would tell.

  And so what happened was everything you would expect. He told her about the Sanctuary and his life there (not everything, of course, some things are better left unsaid) and she was close to tears hearing him talk about the things he experienced there, which was, of course, very satisfactory to Cale. They talked and walked and kissed – something that to her surprise he was puzzling good at. To the great scandal of her servants, she brought him to the small house she had rented not far from Boundary Park and – a little guiltily, though not too much – spent several hours making a shameless beast of herself with her young lover’s body. She was aware at some level that he was very much more familiar with how to touch her than his age and history would have suggested. Her suspicions were moved to the place where all uncomfortable suspicions go – to the back of her mind. There they joined all her other anxieties and shames, including the one which she was most guilty about, that she was deeply excited by Cale’s certainty that there would be no agreement that kept the Redeemers on the other side of the Mississippi in exchange for money and more concessions of territory. They were coming and nothing would stop them except force. The realization that she wanted a war appalled her because she knew perfectly well that it would bring terrible pain and suffering everywhere, especially to the people she had built her private army to protect. Although they turned out to be a tough collection, the farmers and carpenters who had made up her militia were interested in cows and barley not war. The thing which she was most talented at, most excited by, most passionate about was an exercise in blood and suffering, though it wasn’t this that drew her to fighting but the delight she felt in trying to control the uncontrollable. There are some men and at least one woman for whom life is meaningless unless the greatest prize of all, life itself, is at stake. What was the point of chess, she used to complain to her husband when he was alive? He used to spend hours playing and claimed that it was a game so full of traps and subtleties it mirrored the deepest and most complex levels of the human mind.

  ‘Bollocks!’ she had said to him. She had heard this expression just that Sunday on the training ground and was not completely aware of the strength of its vulgarity. Bollocks was not a word that a Margravine ought to use to a Margrave and certainly not about chess. Eye-widening, startled at her outburst, he pretended only polite uncertainty.

  ‘Your exquisite reasons, my dear?’

  ‘I don’t have any exquisite reasons. It’s just that chess has rules and life doesn’t have rules. You can’t burn your opponent’s bishop, you can’t stab him either, or pour a bucket of water over the board or play when you haven’t eaten for three days. However clever you have to be to play it, it’s just a stupid game. To fight a battle,’ she said, ‘needs a mind a hundred times better than any stupid game.’ She was so rude because she felt guilty about wanting to go to war.

  Her husband had thought about this for a moment. ‘Let us hope, my dear, that at some time in the future you get your chance to butcher as many of our friends and neighbours as will satisfy your ambition.’

  She didn’t talk to him for three days – but unusually he was not the one to give in.

  It was a secret relief that, when the time came to play with real death and destruction, she had absolutely no choice but to do the one thing that in all the world she most wanted to. The extreme nature of the Redeemers cleared her conscience.

  At the war conference in Spanish Leeds (Cale was as dismissive of it as he was desperate to be there), there emerged a sudden demand for decisive action from the King himself. It was intolerable, he said, that so much had been lost to the Redeemers and he would not endure it and neither would his people, and he sincerely believed his allies would take the same view.

  He did not sincerely believe anything of the kind. It is a truth, declared Vipond later, that the sincerity of anything said aloud should be divided by the number of people listening to it. Like nearly all kings, in another world Zog would have been an inadequate cattle farmer, a better than average grower of turnips or a mediocre butcher. The same would be
true for many of the great and the good who surrounded him. This is why the best picture of the world is as a lunatic asylum. ‘If you only knew,’ IdrisPukke was fond of saying to Cale, ‘with how much stupidity the world is run.’

  The last we heard of the great storm above the forests of Brazil it had passed the height of its unimaginable power by merely a fraction. Now, months later, it has dispersed that power across five thousand miles in all directions to the north and south and east and west. Descending from the warm skies above the Aleatoire Bridge over the River Imprevu, a great tributary of the Mississippi, it approached a large buddleia, as purple as the hat of an Antagonist bishop, covered in butterflies feeding on its nectar. As it touched the bush the last breath of wind of the great Brazilian storm finally died – but not before it ever so slightly lifted the wings of one of the butterflies, causing it to take to the air. The movement of the long-tailed blue just caught the eye of a passing swallow who dipped and, in a fraction of a second, took it in its beak, startling the mass of other butterflies who took to the air in hundreds like a bursting cloud and frightened a passing horse pulling a wagon badly loaded with rocks for the repair of a wall. The horse reared, turning the cart on its side and pitching the rocks into the River Imprevu below.

  Some agricultural language followed this accident, and a kick for the unfortunate horse, but only some rocks were lost and not worth the effort of getting them out. So the wheel was put back on the wagon, the horse given another kick, and that was that.

  In the river below, the not especially large pile of stones caused the current to flow more quickly round its sides and pointed the faster stream directly at the roots of one of the oldest and largest oak trees on the banks of the great tributary.

  At the same moment, Zog was proposing that an army of the best Swiss troops and those of its allies should be sent through the Schallenberg Pass to engage the Redeemer army on the plains of the Mittelland. ‘We can do nothing less. In putting this plan forward I rededicate myself to the service of this great country and this great alliance.’ The speaker thanked the King and tearfully stated, ‘You have become for us all, your Majesty, a kaleidoscope king of our kaleidoscope alliance.’ There was loud applause.

  The speaker then threw the King’s plan open for discussion to the Axis members gathered – which is to say that he threw the King’s plan open to them for their agreement, a consent that had already been guaranteed by persuasion and threats from Bose Ikard, despite the fact that he was profoundly opposed to doing anything of the kind. Given that he had not persuaded the King against a fight he realized that he must make up for disagreeing with him by now being deeply enthusiastic in its favour. He had neglected, however, to talk to Artemisia, because he didn’t consider her important enough. She listened for twenty minutes to various speeches in response, all supporting the King and all pretty much the same. She tried catching the eye of the speaker of the meeting but he refused to recognize her. In the end she simply stood up, as one of the prearranged speeches of support ended, and started talking.

  ‘With all respect to His Majesty, while I understand his impatience to engage the Redeemers, what you suggest is too hazardous. The only force that stopped the Redeemers from walking into this room has not been any army but the existence of the Mississippi. But for a mile of water we would not be talking together now.’

  This simple and straightforward truth was the cause of huge and vocal resentment: ‘Army’; ‘Noble traditions’; ‘Heroism’; ‘Brave lads’; ‘Our heroes’; ‘Courage’; ‘Second to none’.

  ‘I’m not questioning the courage of anyone,’ she shouted above the racket of objections. ‘But the Redeemers are stuck where they are in the north until early next year. They must build an uncountable number of boats and train enough shoremen to get them across the river. I can tell you because I know that it’s the work of years to know how to navigate the currents of the Mississippi. Now’s the time to reconstruct what’s left of the armies that made it across.’ A reminder here, a little too subtle, that so many were still alive because of her. ‘We must send the best of the troops we have north to retrain the troops that were rescued and use the greatest ally we have – the size and currents of the Mississippi.’

  Enormous howls of protest went up at this and the speaker had to work himself up into a fury to bring the meeting to order.

  ‘We thank the Margravine of Halicarnassus for her forthright views but she understandably may not know that it is not done in this place to speak slightingly of the brave heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of others.’

  ‘Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear!’ And that was that.

  ‘If you will forgive me for being blunt, Margravine,’ said Ikard, half an hour later in his office, ‘but you have behaved like a complete twerp.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the term. Not a compliment, I s’pose.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Whatever the merits of your views – and I know there are others of reputation who agree with you – you made any chance of influencing matters impossible with your ridiculous defiance.’

  She made a brief sound with her tongue against her front teeth.

  ‘Do I take it that signals disagreement?’ said Ikard.

  ‘You didn’t bother asking my opinion before, what possible reason could I have to believe you’d have listened if I’d kept my mouth shut?’

  ‘The King,’ lied the Chancellor, ‘has until now spoken of you with respect and admiration. Now you hang in his favour like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.’

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘I must be like Cassandra, doomed always to tell the truth but never to be believed.’

  ‘You flatter yourself, Margravine. I have always understood the story about Cassandra to demonstrate not that she was so wise but that she was so foolish: there’s no point in telling people the truth when there’s no chance of them hearing. You must wait until they’re ready. That’s the moral of the story. Take it from someone who knows. The course you suggested, whatever its merits militarily, is in every way socially and politically impossible. The army will not stand for such abuse, the aristocracy will not endure it, and the people whose sons and husbands died in their thousands will neither stand for it nor endure it. You may know something about war but you know nothing about politics. Something must be done.’

  Then she was dismissed. It was ten minutes before she thought of a strong reply – although the young man she told about her dressing-down didn’t have to know that.

  ‘So what did you say?’ asked Cale.

  ‘I said, “Unfortunately for you, Chancellor, the facts don’t give a damn about politics.”’

  He laughed. ‘A good shout, that.’ She was a little ashamed but not too much.

  For Cale and Artemisia, waiting for the pig to pass through the python was in some ways a frustrating experience and in other ways delightful. Great events that they wanted to influence were taking place without them but they had endless hours for each other, and though there was more talking than the giving of pleasure, there was not very much more. If the Axis failed (and what was to stop them?) he could soon be on top of a bonfire big enough to be seen all the way to the moon. On the other hand, neither Vague Henri nor Kleist were well enough to make it out over the mountains. Besides, he was used to waiting for the unspeakably grim, used to it all his life; but the pleasure of being with the woman asleep next to him was a rare thing and he knew it. Now was the time for girls and cake.

  There was one way in which he was involved in the new plan to attack the Redeemers. He was sworn to secrecy by Vipond, who risked a great deal by showing him a copy of the plans drawn up by Conn Materazzi for the advance through the Schallenberg and the attack on the Redeemers. It was a trust Cale immediately betrayed by discussing what he’d been shown in great detail with Artemisia.

  Cale’s feelings on going through the plan were oddly mixed. It was not at all bad. In Conn’s position he would not have done much different. It tu
rned out he wasn’t just an over-privileged, chinless wonder after all. Apparently he had expressed sympathy with Artemisia’s dismissal of the King’s idea (irritatingly showing even more good sense) but Cale realized Conn had no choice but to attack if he wanted to stay as Commander in Chief, and he’d made a pretty good fist of coming up with a decent plan. But it was still too risky.

  ‘The trouble with decisive battles,’ said IdrisPukke, not for the first time, ‘is that they decide things.’

  ‘If you get the chance,’ said Cale, ‘you might want to suggest he cuts out a couple of thousand extra men to stay in the Schallenberg, just in case it all goes a bit porcupine. If he loses that’s all there’ll be between the Redeemers and us and a lot of running about and screaming.’

  Later, on his way back to Artemisia, he stopped to see Arbell’s brother, Simon. It was a visit he’d been avoiding, not for lack of affection – he’d rescued the boy from the isolation and contempt of being unable to hear or speak – but because he both feared and – horribly, hatefully – desperately desired to see his sister.

  He spent several hours talking to Simon through his reluctant and disagreeable aide, Koolhaus. Koolhaus had been a low-ranking civil servant in rank-obsessed Memphis, not because he lacked ability, but because his father was a merdapis, an untouchable who carried away the excrement and urine from the palaces of the Materazzi. Koolhaus was two parts of resentment to three parts of intelligence. It was Koolhaus who, in a matter of days, had devised an expressive language out of the short list of signs given to him by Cale, which was based on the simple signing system the Redeemers used to direct an attack when silence was required. Cale and Vague Henri had developed it a little in order to make offensive remarks about the monks around them during the brain-destroyingly boring three hour high masses at the Sanctuary