Imagine then the jumbled brew of mixed and bruised emotions that arrived at the siege camp in front of the Sanctuary a few days later, the traumatized joy of Kleist and Daisy and the seething fear and anger of Arbell Materazzi.
Cale had already prepared a fenced-off compound for Arbell, well-guarded and away from the nosy in the walled tent city that had grown up near the walls of the Sanctuary. He’d considered carefully whether to wallow in the pettiness of ensuring the compound was as uncomfortable as possible or to show Arbell that he was somebody to be reckoned with through his ability to provide luxury even in a shithole like the scrubland in front of the Sanctuary. Fortunately for Arbell, he chose the latter. He was also regretting in a half-baked way his decision to bring her here at all – it’s not given to many people to do whatever they want and he was discovering another facet of such immense clout: absolute power tends to confuse absolutely.
Arbell and her two maids were met by her new guards several miles from the camp and removed to her comfortable prison so that no one would see her. Kleist barely noticed; he could barely contain himself as he took his wife and child to see Cale and Vague Henri.
As soon as he came into their command post, where they were failing to come up with a solution to the impregnability of the Sanctuary, they could see a miraculous change in his manner, not just because he was happy where he’d been for so long miserable, but that he had about him an intensity that made him seem almost mad. With him came the wide-eyed Daisy, holding her baby on her hip. In garbled bursts of rapturous speech the story flowed out of him, disjointed and hard to follow. But the basics were clear enough: this was the wife and child come back from the dead. For the three of them one thing united them – astonishment that life could ever be so madly kind. They were beside themselves; surprised, no, shocked by joy. They hugged Daisy, hugged the baby, then hugged Daisy again and demanded a repeat of the whole story, full of questions about where she’d been and who with. And though she was mortified when Kleist told them why she’d been on the run from Leeds, they were delighted, particularly Vague Henri, whose loathing of the ruling class of the city had only increased with his absence. They ordered food and drink and gave her an official pardon for all crimes in the past, and, as they were so happy, in the future as well. And then Daisy noticed that Kleist had gone completely white. As she reached for him he fell off his chair, hit his head – an appalling blow on the leg of the table – and threw up. The quacks were called and he was taken up carefully by the guards and put in Cale’s luxurious wagon.
‘He’s just overwrought,’ said the doctor. ‘Not surprising, really – I’d have a stroke if it had happened to me. He just needs some peace and quiet with his wife and child. He’ll be all right.’
‘I’ll leave my steward with you,’ said Cale to Daisy. ‘Anything at all you want, just tell him. We’ll come back later.’
‘Make it tomorrow,’ interrupted the doctor.
‘… we’ll come back tomorrow. Anything at all.’
They went back to the command centre and had several drinks and a smoke.
‘He has a baby. Amazing,’ said Vague Henri.
‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’
‘Yeah. It all got a bit too much, that’s all.’
But he was not all right. Certainly he recovered in a manner of speaking, but he was shook, as the Irish say. And over the next few days he remained shook, always a slight trembling and the stance of someone who’d just taken a blow, an overwhelmed look, a dazed look. During a brief visit the next day the two of them, puzzled because it didn’t seem to make sense that he might be worse, began to realize that they might be wrong: their experience of suffering in their lives (brutality, death, violence) might have been unusually intense but it was not necessarily broad. On the way to talk to the doctor, the other unfortunate subject surrounding Kleist’s return involved them in a bitter discussion: Vague Henri, until Kleist mentioned it in passing, had no idea that he’d come to the Sanctuary dragging Arbell Materazzi with him.
‘You’re a bloody idiot.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now?’
Cale didn’t say anything.
‘This could stir up a lot of those snakes you’re always going on about.’
‘I don’t think so. Nobody loves us – but nobody loves her either. The Materazzi are nothing – just a nuisance.’
They walked on in silence for a while.
‘What does IdrisPukke say about it?’
‘IdrisPukke doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to know.’
‘And you’re sure of this because …?’
‘He told me.’
‘So what are you going to do with her?’
‘Let her poach delicately in her own juices.’
In fact, he discovered that keeping Arbell interned nearby but not having to see her gave him a certain ease. He had control of a kind he’d lost: he knew exactly where she was. That was something else about power he’d noticed, something good this time: it was like drinking – it made the world glow. At dinner with Vague Henri that night he was unusually silent. After half an hour without speaking he looked at Vague Henri and asked casually, ‘Do you think I’m mad?’
‘Yes,’ said Vague Henri. But it was an odd question oddly asked and he was spooked.
With every day that the Axis stood outside the Sanctuary gawping at the walls Cale’s power was slipping away. Increasingly, the only option was to disperse the army, leaving a rump to keep the Redeemers from getting out. But then all the Redeemers had to do was wait for the forces in the west to counter-attack and lift the siege the following year, or even the next. Then it could be resupplied and used as a base to move against the Axis. The Hanse were already complaining about the cost of their mostly Hessian mercenaries, the Laconics couldn’t be trusted and now new religious squabbles had broken out on all sides. Cale knew that the Redeemers had the resources to regroup and that Bosco would be putting all his energy into buying the means to copy Hooke’s handguns. If he succeeded, Cale’s greatest advantage would be lost. To make things worse, the poisonous but incomprehensible religious differences that had caused the ten churches of Switzerland to split from one another were re-emerging now that the threat from the Redeemers was fading. Preventing these religious schisms from infecting the unity of the New Model Army was an increasing headache. Cale needed to kill the war quickly and that meant taking the Sanctuary. But the Sanctuary didn’t want to be taken.
He was sure there must be a way because there was always a way. Under Bosco’s brutal discipline he’d been forced to stand for hours in front of maps and a flat board littered with bits of wood to signify troops and towns and rivers and impossible odds and made to work a way out of intractable problems. If he didn’t, he took a beating. If he took too long he took a beating. Sometimes he even took a beating when he got it right. ‘To teach you the most important lesson of all,’ said Bosco. When he asked what it was, Bosco beat him again. ‘Perhaps if I hit you a couple of times?’ offered Vague Henri. Cale decided instead that they should walk around the problem. These days his safety meant having people around him all the time, something he hated, so taking a hefty guard with them they went for a ride around the walls of the Sanctuary, making sure to stay well back. He’d stop and look, stop and look. There was a solution. There was always a solution. He found it in the Little Brother.
‘Now you point it out,’ said Vague Henri, ‘it’s obvious.’ And it was. It was so obvious that it was clear the Sanctuary must fall. Nothing could stop it. In two months they’d be inside the walls.
The next day he gathered the considerable number of interested parties, their mutual hostility growing ever more irksome, and took them through his plan. First, not with any great skill, he drew the outline of the flat-topped mountain on which the Sanctuary was built. His drawing didn’t have to be up to much for the assembly to recognize what it was: its shape haunted their dreams.