‘When I cut her throat I’ll do the same for you.’
‘No, you won’t.’ He smiled. ‘All right, you probably won’t. Me being naked and all that is a disadvantage, true. But I’m not a helpless girl. I know what I’m doing.’ He was bluffing. He might have felt well enough for once to experience four of the seven pleasures with Ruby but without the Phedra and Morphine anything more arduous was well beyond him.
‘I’m the one with the knife.’
‘All right, so you kill me. They’re still going to slice your tonk off and cook it in front of you.’
With all the talk, and what talk it was, the purist had time for the horrible events and the horrible predicament they’d put him in to take effect. He was visibly shaking.
‘What’s the deal?’ he said, voice catching.
‘The deal is you let the tart go and I’ll kill you.’
Ruby had been impressively calm until then and, to be fair, her eyes bulged only a little.
‘Are you taking the piss? I’ll cut her throat.’
‘So you keep saying. You know as well as I do you were over and done with the moment you killed that girl. You can’t take that back. You either let me deal with you now and it will be quick and painless or you wait a few days and become a legend for suffering. Fifty years from now people will still be saying, “I was there.”’
Now the purist began to cry. Then he stopped and terror became anger and he tightened his grip on Ruby. Then he began weeping again.
‘It’ll be quick,’ said Cale. ‘I’ll be the best friend you ever had.’
There was more weeping and more panic but then he loosened his hold on Ruby and she eased herself away. The purist, now crying uncontrollably, stood with his arms down by his side. Cale went over to him and slowly took the knife from his hands.
‘Kneel down,’ he said softly.
‘Please,’ said the purist, though it was not clear why. ‘Please.’ Cale was remembering that Kitty the Hare had said that too before he died.
Cale put his hand on the man’s shoulder and eased him downward.
‘Say a prayer.’
‘I don’t know any.’
‘Repeat after me: Into my hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’
‘Into my hands, O Lor …’
A sudden stab from Cale under his left ear. The purist fell forward and lay absolutely still. Then he began to jerk. Then stop. Then jerk, then stop.
‘For God’s sake, finish him,’ called out Ruby.
‘He’s dead,’ said Cale. ‘His body’s just getting used to it.’
An hour later, just before Cale left the House of Comforts, and while they were finishing a drink alone, Ruby said to him, ‘I felt there was something dreadful about you earlier on. Then I thought you were lovely. Now I don’t know what to think.’
She was tired, of course, and though she’d seen more than a few bad things this was the worst night of her life. Still, it wasn’t what Cale wanted to hear and he left without saying anything more.
PART FIVE
The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.
John Bright
34
There have been six battles fought at Blothim Gor. No one remembers any of these fights except in the name: ‘Blot’ is ancient Pittan for blood, as is ‘him’ in the language of the Galts, who wiped them out and stole their land. ‘Gor’ means the same in old Swiss. Blood, blood, blood – a fitting place for the first use of Robert Hooke’s hand-shooters. The war on the Mississippi plains had lasted six months by the time he got the balance of metals, powder and ease of use. Until then the fighting could have gone either way. The butcher’s bill was hideous, the Redeemers’ willingness to die in their thousands was beginning to edge out the advantage of the war wagons and the fraying soldiers inside them, born to cut wood, milk cows and dig potatoes. What kept them fighting was the sight, and rumours of the sight, of Thomas Cale. In the dying light of dusk he would appear on buttes and on cragged ridges and rocky wolds, still, except when the wind blew his cloak behind him like a wing, watching over them: pathfinder, dreadful guardian steward with his legs akimbo or kneeling, watching with his sword across his knees, shadowy predator, dark custodian. And then the stories began to make their way through bastion after bastion of a mysterious pale young man, no more than a boy, who would turn up wherever the fight was almost lost and battle side by side with the wounded and the lost, his presence calming their fear and radiating it back into the hearts of their almost triumphant enemy. And when it was over, and impossibly they had won, he would bind the wounds of the living and pray, tears in his eyes, for the dead. But when they looked for him again he would be gone. Scouts returned with stories of being trapped by the Redeemers when all hope was lost and they had surrendered themselves to a dreadful fate when an ashen young man emerged from nowhere, hooded and thin, and fought beside them against impossible odds only to prevail. Yet when the fight was over he was gone, sometimes to be seen watching from a nearby hill.
Ballads were written and spread within the week to every wagon on the Mississippi plains. Many had been written by IdrisPukke himself, after these stories had filtered back to Spanish Leeds. He hired dozens of travelling singers to go around the wagons singing his folk songs. But they also picked up the ones written by the men of the New Model Army themselves, clumsier, more sentimental than those written by IdrisPukke but mostly more powerful, so much so that when the returning singers played them to him he could feel the thrill along his neck and arms, finding himself moved and shaken even though he knew they were just propagation.
‘What is truth?’ said Cale, when IdrisPukke told him, shamefaced, about how the songs made him feel.
Cale, for whatever reason, perhaps shame or a cooler head even than IdrisPukke’s, claimed that while the circus, as he referred to the twenty puppet Cales, had its effect in keeping the New Model Army from disintegrating through the spring and summer campaign, their resilience owed as much, or more, to his ability to keep the wagons supplied with decent food and weapons and new men with good boots and warm clothes – all delivered through the lightweight carts that Nevin had made for him and which could move so fast even over bad terrain that the Redeemers were rarely able to interdict them. No one, he said to IdrisPukke, wants to sing a heroic song about a decent pair of boots and lightweight supply wagons.
Even so, it was a damned close-run thing. It was Hooke’s killing machines that brought the Redeemers to their knees on the Mississippi plains. Until then, they were using new tactics against the wagons, Greek fire and a lighter battering ram under a hood of bamboo to protect them from the blows and arrows of the bastions. They also had an advantage because of their belief that death was merely the door to a better life and, of course, that the life they left behind was a desert. But Hooke’s guns offered not only more slaughter than even the Redeemers could deal with but also horrible injuries, each blast wounding as many as six men at a time with ragged cuts that could not be stitched or easily cleaned so that the wounds became septic and refused to heal. And Hooke’s was not the only inventive mind concerned with dealing out pain and injury: it had occurred to the peasants that if they mixed a little dog-shit with the contents of the handguns they could ensure that the hideous wounds inflicted by them would fester most painfully.
Within three months the New Model Army was back over the Mississippi and with a bridgehead at Halicarnassus they were able to defend, despite the murderous counter-attacks of the Redeemers, for the same reason it had been the last place to fall.
Up until Bex the war against the Redeemers brought only defeat; after Hooke’s handguns it was only victory. But there was not an easy triumph in any battle, from the clash at Finnsburgh between barely enough men to fill a public house (and where the only member of the Swiss royal family died during an unlucky visit to bring a tonic to the troops) to the five hundred thousand who drew up to face one another in the battle for Chartres.