‘Move it,’ said Cale.
Fanshawe picked up a two-wheeled cart by the shafts at the front. It was much bigger than the original it was based on, and he was astonished at how light it was. Nevin was a peacock puffed with pride. ‘It’ll shift four times as quick as the supply wagons them junkie Redeemers use, tum right enough and heft near half as much. Don’t over-pack it and you only need one horse ’stead of six bullocks. Push comes to shove you don’t even need a beast – y’could budge it with four men and half a cargo and still resupply near as quick as the Redeemers. I’m salivatin’ right enough. Haven’t I made it to be all things to all men.’ It was a statement not a question.
Cale was almost as delighted with Nevin as Nevin was delighted with himself.
‘Mr Nevin worked with me on the war wagon as well. It was his idea to cut down the size so they can move maybe twice as fast as the Redeemer supply carts. The only way they can move with enough speed to follow and attack us is by sending mounted infantry after us but without supply wagons. Even if they catch up, Artemisia’s outriders will tell us hours before they arrive. We circle up, dig a six-foot trench around the outside, and what will they do? If they attack we’ll cut them to pieces, worse than we did today. If they wait, the outriders will have ridden for more troops to relieve us. Remember, there’ll be two hundred of these forts on the move every day of every week. Even if they can isolate one and destroy it we’ll take ten times as many of them with us.’
‘As easy as that?’
‘No,’ replied Cale. ‘But they’ll lose two men for every one of ours.’
‘Even if you’re right, and I concede you might be, the Redeemers are ready to die in numbers – are your hillbillies?’
Cale smiled again.
‘We’ll find out, I suppose.’
‘Do you really think you can win a battle with your wagons?’
‘Don’t know that either, but I don’t intend to try. It’s like IdrisPukke says: the trouble with decisive battles is that they decide things. I’m not going to crush the Redeemers, I’m going to bleed them.’
26
According to the great Ludwig, the human body is the best picture of the human soul and so, like the body, the human spirit has its cancers and growths and infected organs. Just as the purpose of the liver is to act as a sump for the poisons of the body, the soul has its organs for containing and isolating the toxic discharge of human suffering.
It is an axiom of the hopeful that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you strong: but the truth is that such deadly suffering can be held in isolation in this poison reservoir only for a time: like the liver it can deal with only so much poison before it begins to rot.
Survivors of the Sanctuary had already taken more than their due share of grief. Add to this the loss of his wife and child, and the horror of the events in Kitty’s basement, and Kleist was on the brink of drowning in his past. The day after the mock battle on Silver Field he was delivering a pair of boots he had been working on for the campaign ahead (leather work had been one of Kleist’s designated skills at the Sanctuary) and was heading for the bootmakers in New York Road. Bosco had drummed into Cale that decent boots were third only to food and weapons for an army. Kleist was heading through the market, crowded because the weekly horse fair was on, when he brushed past Daisy carrying their son.
He walked on for a few yards and then stopped. He had barely taken in the face of the young woman – he’d not been looking at her directly and they’d passed in a fraction of a second – but something shivered in him, even though she was older and thinner than his dead wife, much more drawn. He knew it could not be her – her dust was blowing about on a prairie three hundred miles away – and he did not want to look again and drag his misery out of the depths, but he could not stop himself. He turned to stare at her as she moved away through the crowd, baby on hip. But she was quickly hidden in the crush of buyers and sellers. He stood still as a stump and told himself to go after her, but then he told himself there was no point. A shiver of desolation passed through him, his grief now uncontainable, spreading slowly, a slow and malignant leak. He stood for a moment longer but he had things to do and he turned for the bootmaker’s. But from that moment in the marketplace Kleist was on borrowed time.
‘So what do you think?’
For the last ten minutes Cale had been watching Robert Hooke examining a four-foot-long tube of pig iron.
‘Have you tried to use it?’ asked Hooke.
‘Me? No. I saw one like it at Bex. The first time it fired it went through three Redeemers at one go – the second time it blew up and killed half a dozen Swiss. But if you could make it work it’d be a hell of a thing.’
Hooke eyed the ugly-looking contraption. ‘I’m astonished it worked at all.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘I’d need a lot of money.’
‘Of course you will. But I’m not stupid. I know you were working on a tube for your collider. I’m not paying for you to research into the nature of things.’
‘You think all knowledge must be practical.’
‘I don’t think anything about knowledge one way or the other – what I think about is not being on top of a bonfire, one you’ll be joining me on if we don’t find a way to stop Bosco. Understand?’
‘Oh, indeed I do, Mr Cale.’
‘So, is it possible?’
‘It’s not impossible.’
‘Then give me a bill and get on with it.’ Cale walked off towards the door.
‘By the way,’ called out Hooke.
‘Yes?’
‘Is it true you cut off a man’s head because he told you to bring him a glass of water?’
Even for someone as sound as a roach Cale’s workload would have been murderous and he was very far from sound. Necessity forced him to delegate. There were candidates enough: IdrisPukke and a reluctant Cadbury (‘I have criminal enterprises to run’) could be trusted, Kleist even, silent and grim as he was, seemed to want work to occupy his mind. Vague Henri was everywhere doing everything. But it was still not enough. He went with IdrisPukke to ask Vipond for his help.
‘I’m sorry about Conn.’
‘I am,’ replied Vipond, ‘quite clear that you have nothing to be sorry for. There was no choice.’
‘I didn’t laugh at him.’
‘I know. But I’m afraid it doesn’t matter. You must bring in Bose Ikard.’
‘How?’
‘Yes … not easy. He’s an able man in his way but he has the besetting fault of power: it’s become an end in itself. And he’s addicted to conspiracy. Leave him alone for five minutes and he’d start plotting against himself.’
‘I need control of the regular army,’ said Cale. ‘I thought I could build my own separate force. But it won’t work on its own. I need troops who can fight outside the forts.’
‘I understand you promised him otherwise.’
‘Well, I was wrong. The hillbillies are fine as long as they’re protected behind the walls and out of reach. But away from the wagons they’re as dangerous as a bald porcupine.’
Vipond said nothing for a moment.
‘Desperate situations require desperate remedies,’ he said at last. ‘Try telling the truth.’
‘Meaning?’
‘What it suggests. Be frank with him. He knows how desperate things are or you wouldn’t be where you are now. Point out to him that you’ll succeed together or you’ll die together. Or you could try blackmail if that person Cadbury has anything on him.’
‘Not enough,’ said IdrisPukke.
‘Then honesty it is.’
‘And if honesty doesn’t work?’
‘Assassination.’
‘I thought you said it never worked.’