‘I expected loss heavier than this – and from the start – getting worse as the Redeemers worked out how to deal with us. These deaths. They can be replaced. I’ve planned for this.’
A tired and irritated Cale was in a furtive meeting set up before the official one with the Committee of Ten Churches was due to begin – it was thought necessary to get their story straight to minimize any religious contributions.
‘But Thomas, darling,’ said Fanshawe, ‘what did you expect? Killing and being killed is a profession. These people are peasants, salt of the earth, of course – no doubt – but fashioned by a lifetime shovelling shit and gleaning turnips – whatever they are … it’s no preparation when it comes to the big red one. You can’t expect it.’
‘We need,’ said Cale, ‘to plan on losing one wagon train in three. I always expected losses like that.’
‘You can expect what you like. It can’t be done,’ said Fanshawe. ‘It’s not in their souls to die in those numbers – any more than it’s in yours to reap cabbages and have carnal knowledge of your more fetching sheep.’
When Fanshawe was gone he left behind a miserable inner circle.
‘Is he right, do you think?’ said IdrisPukke to Vague Henri.
‘Underneath the piss-take? Pretty much. In the fight at Finnsburgh the Redeemers almost broke through. I was shitting myself if you want to know. Now they know what’s coming if the Redeemers win a brawl. Nobody gets used to that.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘No’
There was a depressed silence.
‘I have a suggestion.’ It was Vipond.
‘Thank God someone has,’ said Vague Henri.
‘I’d wait,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘until you heard it before you get your hopes up.’
‘In spite of my brother’s sneers,’ continued Vipond, ‘I think we saw something remarkable today. The conventional view of people like myself is that a leader must be either loved or feared to be effective in a time of crisis – and given that love is a tricky thing and fear is not so tricky – then fear it is.’
‘You want me to make them more terrified of me than they are of the Redeemers?’
‘In other circumstances I don’t see that you’d have any choice.’
‘I can do that.’
‘I’m sure you can. But there may be another way, less damaging to your soul.’
‘My lugholes,’ said Cale, ‘are open as wide as a church door.’
‘Good. You saw your effect today on the very kind of man Fanshawe said was about to break?’
‘Yes, I saw it.’
‘Whatever seized them, it wasn’t love or fear.’
‘What then?’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what it is but you could feel it between your thumb and forefinger – I don’t know … belief, perhaps. It doesn’t matter of what kind, in their eyes wherever you are the gates of hell are on their side.’
‘Thanks.’
‘That’s why the noses of the Holy Joes were out of joint. They knew what power was moving through their flock. But seeing is believing, Cale – you need to be out and about, among them every day and everywhere. They need the Exterminating Angel where they can see him. Watching over them, working through them.’
Cale looked at him.
‘You might just as well ask me to fly. As far as what was going on today, I felt it all right, but what it was about you can read in the stars. They saw a bad angel watching over them, I agree – but it was all I could do not to fall off my horse or throw up all over them.’ He smiled, one of the not so pleasant ones. ‘I couldn’t do it if my life and the life of everyone around me depended on it.’
At this point – and in a way that in other circumstances might be regarded as theatrical – Cale threw up on the floor.
In fact, he felt a little better once the vomiting had stopped but the meeting was at an end and so, dish-rag weak, Cale left the Cecilienhoft where it had been held and headed for a night’s sleep at the No-Worries Palace. As everyone knew where he was, a vast crowd had collected outside and at the sight of him great shouts went up.
Despite Bosco’s rare enthusiasm for information, and his desire to improve its quality amongst those who served his cause, it was not easy for Redeemers to pass themselves off as anything other than what they were. They had paid but unreliable informers and also fellow travellers, unofficial converts to the One True Faith whose desire to become Redeemers was as intense as their reasons were vague. They tended to be the despised, the failed, the hurt, the slightly mad, the deeply resentful – and often for good reason. But their limitations were plain enough: they were not disciplined or very competent, however zealous they might be. Had they been capable and rooted, it’s unlikely they would have been such fertile ground for insurrection. But it was one of the more level-headed and skilled of these converts who’d made his way to the Cecilienhoft where everyone knew Cale was planning the destruction of the Pope. There were guards there certainly, but no one had expected or planned for the crush of the soldiers of the New Model Army desperate to see him, along with the people of the city packed together with the mass of refugees evacuated from the Mississippi plain. Indeed, the confusion almost saved Cale from his attack – there was no planned route and so no way of being somewhere he could be expected to pass by. So crushed was he by the crowd that the assassin too was flotsam and jetsam, compelled to follow the flow and swirl of the river of people as it moved forward and back. Sometimes Cale moved away from him, sometimes back towards him. At one point, as the crowd grasped for a touch of his clothes or called for a blessing, an old woman who must have been stronger than she looked forced a small jar into his hand: ‘The ashes of St Deidre of the Sorrows – bless them, please!’ In the general racket he couldn’t properly hear what she was saying; he thought the ashes were a gift and didn’t want to be unkind. Given the state of him she would probably have had the strength to grab it back but the crowd decided and swept her away as she cried out for her dreadful loss.
With Vague Henri and IdrisPukke a good ten yards behind, the exhausted Cale was spilled into a break in the crowd made by the few guards who had been able to stay with him but where his murderer could finally get to him, too. The would-be assassin was no skilled killer and it’s hard to hide the look of someone with slaughter on his mind. It was within a second or less that Cale saw him coming at him and it was his eyes that gave him away. Kitten-weak and weary as he was, millions of nerves came to his aid like angels and, as the man brought the knife down to his chest, Cale took the lid off the jar of Deidre’s ashes and threw it in his face. As anyone will know who has looked closely at the ashes of the dead they are not like ashes much at all, more gravel than anything fine enough to easily blind a man. But Cale was lucky that these relics were fakes and consisted of the clinker from the forger’s fire. The effect was instant: in terrible pain the murderer cried out and dropped the knife to try to clear the spiky cinders from his eyes. The few guards around were quick enough to grab the assassin and they’d already stabbed him three times in the heat of their panic before they realized Cale was shouting at them to stop. Any chance of getting something useful out of the man was gone. Cale stood and watched as Vague Henri and IsdrisPukke joined him. Perhaps it was the mixture of sudden fright and exhaustion, but he thought he had never seen blood so red or ashes so white. The murderer muttered something before his eyes rolled into the back of his head.
‘What did he say?’ asked Cale.
The guard who’d been closest to the dead man looked at Cale, shocked and confused by what had happened.
‘I’m not … I’m not sure, sir. It sounded like “Do you have it?”’
‘You look gruesome,’ said Vague Henri. ‘The Angel of Death warmed up.’