‘When it’s all over, we could buy a nice house,’ said Vague Henri. ‘What about that Treetops place you’re always going on about?’
Cale thought about this pleasant notion. ‘Hard to defend. Treetops. It’s a bit too close to a lot of people with ungenerous thoughts. We need to go over the sea.’
‘What about the Hanse? I bet with all that money they’ve got nice houses. One with a lake or a river.’
‘Best to go where we’re not known. I hear good things about Caracas.’
‘We could bring the girls with us.’ The girls in the Sanctuary were a difficult subject between them.
‘They might already be dead.’
‘But they might not.’
‘All right. I agree: a nice house with lots of girls in Caracas then.’
‘Do they have cakes in Caracas?’
‘Caracas is famous for its cakes.’
There was no more time to work on the future because IdrisPukke arrived unexpectedly with bad news from Spanish Leeds.
‘They’re planning to impeach you,’ he said.
‘I suppose,’ said Cale, ‘impeach isn’t a good thing – not medals and a parade an’ that?’
‘No. More like put you on trial in secret in the Star Chamber followed by a private meeting with Topping Bob.’
‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ asked Vague Henri.
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does to me,’ said Cale.
‘Set fire to the bridge after Bex.’
‘They can’t prove I did it.’
‘They don’t need to. Besides you did set fire to it. Also perjury is a capital case.’
‘They told me to lie.’
‘But you still did it. The summary execution of Swiss citizens.’
He did not say anything in reply to this accusation because it was also true.
‘The illegal raising of taxes.’
‘They agreed to that.’
‘You have it in writing?’
‘No. What else?’
‘Isn’t that enough? Just setting fire to the bridge would have the entire population of Switzerland fighting to get their hands on the rope.’
‘What choice did I have?’
‘Don’t ask me, ask them. An impeachment before the Star Chamber doesn’t at all require that the accusations are true in order for a guilty verdict – but it doesn’t help that you actually did all these things.’
‘You could march on Spanish Leeds yourself.’ This from Vague Henri.
‘Not without taking the Sanctuary first.’
Cale turned to IdrisPukke. ‘Why aren’t they waiting to get me until after it falls?’
‘They’re worried it will take too long – or that if it doesn’t the New Model Army will do exactly what Vague Henri says.’
‘But the New Model Army is still Swiss – and the King rules by the will of God. The same God they believe in.’
‘They’re peasants, not Swiss citizens – and they’re not peasants any more. Wars change people.’
‘It’s asking a lot,’ said Cale.
‘Try asking it.’
‘Not till we’ve taken the Sanctuary. Then we’ll see.’
‘And your invitation to Leeds?’
‘I’m pretty sure you can find the right words. Besides, it may not be as long as the whingers think – taking down the Sanctuary. Hooke will be here tomorrow with a new engine.’
‘And if it works, what then?’
‘I’ll worry about that when it happens.’
‘To be honest, I don’t think you can afford to do that. You need to start making plans now.’
‘We were thinking,’ said Vague Henri, ‘of going to Caracas.’
‘I’m afraid this isn’t the time for stupid jokes. I’d say the chances of you being allowed to retire to a peaceful retreat are approximately none.’
‘No rest for the wicked?’
‘Something like that. You have many talents, Thomas, and making enemies is one of them.’
‘Nobody likes us,’ said Vague Henri. ‘We don’t care.’
IdrisPukke looked at him. ‘You’re being more than usually trying, Henri. I wonder if perhaps you might like to stop.’ He turned his attention back to Cale. ‘You’ve shown yourself to be a great tactician, but the time for tactics is coming to an end. Where are you going? That’s the question for you now.’
But Cale was only a boy when all was said and done and he had no idea where he was going and never had known.
The next day Hooke arrived with three of his new howitzers: big fat barrels of steel, in principle the same as his all-conquering hand-shooters but so strongly built that they could fire a ball of iron the size of a small melon. It took several hours to set up the howitzers in their ugly wooden cradles and work out their elevations for the first assault on the walls of the Sanctuary, which were uniquely strong because the stones had been mortared together with a mixture made from rice flour, which set like the hob of hell.
Confident of success, Hooke had arranged for all three to be set off by men in specially padded armour. The army who gathered to watch pressed in so closely that the firing had to be delayed while they were pushed back, a process so laborious that Cale decided to let them stay. A wiser head prevailed in Hooke and eventually the watching soldiers were far enough back to satisfy him that the firing could go ahead. The three men in their special armour lumbered with their torches towards the howitzers and lit the fuses. There was a short fizz of powder and then a massive and almost simultaneous explosion, which burst two of the howitzers into a dozen pieces, cutting down all three of the armoured men and shooting back into the crowd of soldiers and killing a further eight. The third gun fired as it was meant to and sent the massive cannon ball smashing into the wall of the Sanctuary, where it simply bounced off, leaving behind a small dent. There would be no quick end to the siege of the Sanctuary.
But if it were not to be quick or even reasonably so then it was hard to see how he could avoid it collapsing. With winter coming on Cale would have to disperse the army before it fell apart through lack of food, water and the momentum needed to keep such disparate groups – predictably the New Model Army and the Laconics already hated each other – in the field in such hostile conditions. Even Cale was surprised to realize how little safety his great successes of the last few months had brought. In many ways, he wasn’t much safer than, say, the day after Deidre had slaughtered the Two Trevors. He’d expected to reach a position of power that offered a respite, a defence, an asylum, but he could see that while he really did have power, great power, it wasn’t made of the solid stuff he’d thought it would be. He’d thought it would be like a wall, but it wasn’t: it was like something else he couldn’t put his finger on.
But however elusive the question of how powerful power really was, he clearly had a great deal of it and that was why he was able to do something very foolish. He’d become obsessed with knowledge and feared never having enough of it. It was to him like the soother he saw in the mouths of infants. He saw very early on that information was odd stuff: you could easily end up with too much, or most of it was wrong or, even worse, correct but in a half-baked or misleading way. Still, he fancied himself, with some reason, as a good sifter of the stuff and had learned never to trust one source, not even the source he valued most in the world: IdrisPukke. It was true he felt a certain shame about this but not enough to stop him. The most important of these alternatives was Koolhaus, who had grown ever more disdainful and obnoxious the more he was able to demonstrate his superior intellectual gifts to the world. It was never enough for Koolhaus to be right, someone else had to be wrong as well – and he wanted them to know it. This was a weakness, perhaps a crippling one, as was the fact that his emotional grasp of the world was rather crude. Nevertheless, as a source of information and an evaluator of it he was invaluable. There was also Kleist. Intelligencing was the kind of work he was good at and which kept him busy: it was enough to distract to a certain extent from the fact that he was dangerously close to the sharp knife or the expensive narcotic from which he would never wake up. Kleist was not ready yet but he thought about it often. He made it through many bitter nights comforting himself with the thought that he could bring things to an end. Then there was Simon Materazzi. Cale had given Simon the freedom to go wherever he wanted. Simon could tell him what was happening in the camps and the streets. It was Simon who was the first to let him know that the puppet Cales were working to raise spirits and the first to let him know when the endless defeats and the slaughter that followed had demoralized the troops to such an extent that they couldn’t go on working any more. But by then Hooke had perfected and made hundreds of the shooters that were to change everything and give the men the one thing that made manipulation of their trust unnecessary: success. It was from both Koolhaus and Kleist that Cale received the same information at almost the same time, and from IdrisPukke shortly after: Arbell Materazzi had been given permission to leave for the protection of the Hanse. It revolted and shocked him how much it hurt to read that she was leaving. Even he realized the stupidity of feeling as if she had betrayed him all over again. He never stopped, not really, thinking about her. He realized, and this proved it, that she never thought about him at all, unless as someone to be avoided. No amount of anger with himself at the grossness of his stupidity could stop his useless and childish heart from crying out above his fury: How could she? How could she?