‘Did I say that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Extraordinary.’
To Cale’s surprise his subsequent meeting with Bose Ikard was not just successful but pleasurable. Lies had to be elaborate and there was always something you hadn’t thought of to catch you out. It was a strain, lying. Telling the truth, on the other hand, was easy. It was so true. He liked telling the truth so much he decided that one day he’d like to tell it again. And so it turned out as Vipond had hoped: a lack of choice would drive Bose Ikard towards simplicity.
‘I can tell you that the High Command won’t be convinced. They don’t want anything to do with you.’
‘Then they’ll have to be replaced.’
‘They’ve only just been appointed.’
‘Is this true of all of them or just some of them?’ asked IdrisPukke.
‘If you could remove the triad that might be enough. If.’
‘Are you averse to special means?’
‘Special?’
‘You know: desperate times require desperate remedies.’
Within ten days, two resignations and a suicide had accounted for the triad by way of Kitty the Hare’s red books. As a matter of courtesy and a show of good faith, one of the books was handed over to Bose Ikard, one that contained some unorthodox financial dealings involving Bose Ikard himself. IdrisPukke had, of course, made a copy.
For different reason the Laconics and the Redeemers were societies built on the notion that war was an inevitable constant of human existence. The Axis armies were just armies. Cale was helped in his reforms, however, by the increasing awareness that it was not defeat that was at stake in the war but annihilation. This awareness was made all the greater by reprints of sermons given in the Great Cathedral of Chartres by Pope Bosco himself. In them, Bosco, quoting in precise detail from the Good Book, called on his followers to carry out God’s explicit command that ‘you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. In Makkedah utterly destroy it and all the souls therein. In Libnah destroy it and all the souls therein; and in Luchish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir, they utterly destroyed all them that breathed and they did not spare any, putting to death men, women and children and infants, cattle and sheep and camels and donkeys.’
There were suggestions, entirely true as it happened, that these blood-curdling sermons were fakes. But though it was true that they had been made up by Cale and Vague Henri and printed in secret, most people became reluctantly persuaded they were real and for two reasons. From the few refugees who had recently made it across the Mississippi from the territory now occupied by the Redeemers, there were numerous reports of the mass evacuation of entire cities, moving to the north and then the west. But there was also the disturbing truth that all the religions of the Four Quarters shared a belief in the same Good Book, and though most chose to ignore the many occasions on which God had demanded the divine massacring of entire countries, down to the last dog, it was no longer possible to do so in quite the same way. The inconvenient truth was that the promise of an apocalypse, whether local (Man Hattan, Sodom) or universal (the end time of Geddon), was woven into the very fabric of their oddly shared beliefs.
For the next six weeks it was duck soup all round as Cale’s new government department, the Office Against the Redeemers (the OAR) found itself pushing at open doors everywhere. Partly this was due to fear of the Redeemers and partly fear of Thomas Cale: the story about him cutting off a man’s head for ordering him to bring a drink of water was now accepted truth. ‘You have a talent for being legendary,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I wonder if that can be entirely a good thing.’ His access to Kitty the Hare’s red books also encouraged co-operation. After the replacement of the triad, everyone, for the moment, now relied for their position on Thomas, with the result that a new enthusiasm about his plans for everything began to permeate the halls of power. Much was done and much quicker than the OAR could have expected. But all this good news couldn’t last, nor did it. But the blow, when it came, was unexpected in its expectedness.
Two months into their preparations they had planned the first delivery of supplies of food, uniforms, weapons and the wagons so central to their campaign. The boots, mostly designed by Cale and Kleist, had been contracted in detail according to a strict model – the Redeemer way. The same with the food. The same with the weapons – from the high quality but simple flails to the newly created crossbows designed for speed of loading and close fighting rather than power. Standing in the food depot, where the first lot of rations had been delivered, Cale watched as box after box was broken open to reveal tack biscuits infected with maggots and weevils. Those that weren’t were either tainted by rancid fat or adulterated with God-knew-what to make them not just inedible (soldiers could endure the merely inedible if they had to) but worthless in providing energy to fighting men. In the previous four hours he had been through the same routine with all the other supplies: the boots were already falling apart, the crossbows couldn’t fire a bolt powerful enough to break the skin of a child suffering from rickets. The wagons seemed to be built to their specifications but a thirty-minute ride with half a dozen of them showed they’d barely last a week of serious use.
‘I want those responsible,’ said Cale, as cold as anyone had ever seen him.
But this turned out to be a good deal trickier than it seemed. Corruption in the matter of military supplies was rooted not just in the suppliers but in the people the suppliers corrupted in order to get the contracts. It was so grown into the business of procurement that those involved did not think of it as fraud. Worse than the fact that it was an ingrained habit was that control of procurement was exclusively in the gift of members of the Royal Family. It should not be thought that they actually did anything for the money except endure the strain of opening up their pockets, but the amount they expected for doing nothing was so great that there simply wasn’t enough money left to provide decent weapons and food and make any kind of profit.
Warfare seemed almost easy next to this. If the OAR could not resupply quickly enough, and with the right quality of equipment for the likelihood of an early spring crossing by the Redeemers, they were finished. Yet the people responsible for creating this disaster were beyond Cale’s reach.
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Bose Ikard who, to be fair, saw the problem clearly enough.
‘It has to stop. It has to be taken out of their hands. It’s mad. Don’t they realize the Redeemers will destroy them as well?’
‘They’re royal. Their lives are themselves a form of insanity. They are princes of the blood – a real power – an anointed power created by God flows through their veins. They’re not the same as you or me.’
‘And I thought the Redeemers were mad.’
‘Welcome to the rest of the world,’ said Ikard. ‘If I intervened I’d be in a cell within an hour. What good would that do you? There must be a solution.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It’s up to you. You’re in charge now.’
‘Do I have your support?’
‘No. But whatever you do, make it dazzle.’
Gil had known for some time that Cale had managed to cover himself with, mostly, stolen glory from the great Redeemer victory at Bex, but everything he could learn was vague and generalized, not much better than the gossip people knew on the streets. He also had a third-hand account of Conn’s trial and a first-hand account of his execution, along with the widely believed rumour that Cale had laughed and smoked as Conn’s head bounced along the Quai des Moulins. If only, he thought, the claims made in Spanish Leeds about Redeemer spies were true – the only people he had in his pay were criminals, the only fellow travellers were outsiders and inadequates. But Gil was beginning to realize that it was no longer a case of separating fact from fiction when it came to Cale – it became important not to dismiss, however ludicrous, the stories of him being seven foot tall or blinding an assassin by holding his hand up in the air (though the story about him cutting off someone’s head because they’d told him to get them a glass of water struck him as all too plausible). Something about Cale caused people to clothe him in their hopes and fears – the fact that they were afraid of him and yet had ridiculous expectations of his ability to save them were bound up together. And it wasn’t just the stupid and desperate – look at Bosco. He was the cleverest man he knew and yet nothing could shake his belief in Cale. But that didn’t stop Gil from trying.