‘I admit I don’t follow, but then that’s the point, isn’t it? You want me to seem like a stupid girl.’
‘Not at all,’ replied IdrisPukke. ‘But think about it. If you attack in late spring this will be the first action of the New Model Army against the Redeemers. Yes?’
‘He’s right,’ said Cale, seeing a hope of stopping her.
‘The army at large doesn’t need to know anything unless we succeed,’ said Artemisia.
‘I was talking about politics,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘You can keep it from the army and the people if you’re careful, but can you keep it from Bose Ikard and the High Command?’
‘I’ll persuade them it’s a risk worth taking.’
‘But politicians don’t like risks, they like deals. Remember that they’re so afraid of the Redeemers that they’re ready to put a mad boy in charge.’
‘He’s talking about you,’ said Vague Henri to Cale, ‘just in case you didn’t realize’.
‘They’re on the razor’s edge, all of them. Then the first thing you offer them is an abject failure – they’ll be begging Bosco for negotiations while the ashes are still warm on this young woman’s bonfire. You can live without this victory – you might not be able to live with a defeat.’
‘It’s worth the risk,’ said Artemisia.
‘I’m not sure that it is,’ said IdrisPukke.
Cale had been given his chance and he was careful not to turn it down.
‘This is a new idea. We need to think about it.’
‘Think about it and say no, that’s what you mean,’ said Artemisia.
‘Not true. Talk to your river pilots. See what they have to say. Work out a plan. When you have we’ll talk about it again.’
When Artemisia had left, Cale turned on Kleist.
‘We haven’t had a peep out of you in months but suddenly we can’t shut you up!’
‘You should have told us she was just along to improve the view – all we’ve heard from you till now is what a war genius she is.’
This was true and he couldn’t think of the last word. He had it anyway. ‘Bollocks!’
A few hours later Cale suffered another attack of the conniptions – longer and more violent in its retchings than usual. The demon, or demons, that inhabited his chest seemed to live in their own world, woke and slept on their own time, regardless of anything Cale did or did not do. They were unaware of the daily life of the boy they inhabited, indifferent to whether things went well or badly, if he was loved or hated, was kind or pitiless. The herbs worked up to a point, as he found out when he tried to stop taking them and the chest devils dry-heaved into existence two or three times a day instead of three or four times a week, which was bad enough. As for the Phedra and Morphine, he’d not had any reason to take it again and he wasn’t looking for one. The horrible down after he’d used it had lasted two weeks and made him feel as if he’d had a sip from death in a bottle. He did try offering the herbs to Kleist but he irritably refused, saying there was nothing wrong with him and he didn’t need Old Mother Hubbard’s helper to keep him going.
Even at best Cale had to work in short bursts, resting all the time and sleeping twelve hours or more a day. However much of a disadvantage this was in some ways – he felt horrible nearly all the time – it did produce some useful effects. He could not stay in any meeting for more than a few minutes and there were plenty of them to squeeze the life out of any action that needed to be taken. Never a friendly presence to most, his attendance at any gathering was tense to the point where he seemed almost on the edge of furious violence. Because he had no choice, his already decisive character tore through complex and dangerous decisions as if he was ordering meat for the guards back in Arbell’s house in Memphis. Oddly, somewhere inside his damaged mind he was sometimes at his sharpest: there was a place there cut off from the outside world he’d been building since the first moment he’d arrived at the Sanctuary. Through all those years of long use this place of retreat was as tough as the skin on an elephant’s foot – and needed to be to keep out the madness that was destroying the rest of him.
Do this. Give him that. Take those. Put it there. Do it again. Release these. Hang them. None of this denied the debt he owed to his friends. He smiled when he said, ‘Bring me solutions, not problems. You solve it. Every time I have to answer a stupid question think of it as hammering a nail into my coffin.’
And for the moment it worked. Each one of them could rely on the fear and dread and hope that Cale’s reputation inspired. Even Vipond, a man of power if ever there was one, and who knew now even better what its nature was having lost so much of it, was amazed at what he could only describe as the magic others invested in Cale.
‘I’ve told you,’ said IdrisPukke, who relished any chance to condescend to his half-brother. ‘The spirit of the times is in him. He has great abilities but that’s not why, or not mostly why, he’s in the ascendant. Look at Alois Huttler – you could find a thousand dunces like him giving out their half-baked opinions in any public house in the country. But Alois had the spirit of the times in him. Until he didn’t.’
‘When people are faced with annihilation,’ observed IdrisPukke, ‘it’s not difficult to see why they want to believe the Left Hand of God is behind them.’
On this occasion he was sounding off about Cale in his presence. Vague Henri gurned at his friend.
‘Pity all they’ve got is you, then.’
‘Your sickness,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘is becoming a kind of blessing.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘Not for you personally, of course. But didn’t Bosco tell you that Thomas Cale is not a person?’
‘Yes, but he’s mad.’
‘But not stupid. Am I right?’
‘You might not be always right, but I agree you’re never wrong.’
Laughter at this. IdrisPukke shrugged.
‘Perhaps in his madness he recognized something we’re only beginning to see ourselves. People find it easy to shine their dreadful hopes on you – the left hand of death, indeed, but on their side. It may be that the less you’re seen to do – the less of a person who’s like them – the more powerful you are.’ He sighed with enormous satisfaction. ‘I’m impressed by myself.’ More laughter. ‘We can make use of this.’
Against the weariness of being sick was the pleasure of working on the tactics of the New Model Army. The training was going better than Cale had imagined. Protected by the wagons, and using weapons based on tools they were used to working with for hours every day of their lives, the confidence of the peasant soldiers soared. The most effective of these hillbilly weapons was the threshers’ flail – a pole of four or five feet long linked by a chain to another pole of eighteen inches or so. These men were used to using them for ten hours a day after harvest and the swinging heads generated such a powerful force they could badly injure a knight in full armour let alone the less protected Redeemer men at arms. But above everything they worked on finding out every weakness of the war wagons. Vague Henri had the Purgator archers shooting in massed ranks at the wagon forts to work out how to protect the occupants and came up with bamboo-covered walkways and small shelters into which anyone caught in the open during such an attack could run to protect themselves. It wouldn’t take the Redeemers long to try to use something like fire arrows to set the wagons alight so he had the Swiss soldiers – who would be mostly used for attacks outside the fort and so were not being used for much during attacks – train in teams to put out fires before they took hold, mostly using buckets filled with earth and using water only if they must. They objected to this with puzzling intensity. They were soldiers and gentlemen – it was demeaning digging dirt and so the peasants should do it. All their resentments at the bewildering changes they had been forced to endure came out in this single issue of putting out fires. Out of nothing, Vague Henri found he had a mutiny on his hands. Cale was always mocking him by saying what a nice boy he was. Up to a point this was true, but because they were used to Cale as contrast there was a general misunderstanding about Vague Henri and what he was capable of. He seemed very normal in a way that Cale was clearly not, but he had experienced the same corrosive brutality and deadliness of the Redeemer life. It was a part of him too. Realizing he was on the edge of something disastrous his first instinct was to deal with the problem the Redeemer way: kill a couple of the noisier protestors and leave them to rot where everyone could see their mistake. Whether he would have been ready to do this and sleep well afterwards was fortunately not put to the test. There was something of good nature but also something of calculation that made him look for another way first.