‘Something’s missing’ said Cale. ‘Any offers?’
‘The Sanctuary.’
‘Yes. But not that. Something else.’
Silence. Cale went back to the drawing and added an outcrop of rock about fifty feet higher than the table-top mountain and with a slope on its far side, but with a gap of about eighty yards between the outcrop and the mountain proper. ‘This ridge is called the Little Brother. This gap between it and the walls of the Sanctuary – we’re going to fill it in.’ He drew a line between the two, ending at the very top of the Sanctuary wall.
Do rooms gasp? This one did. As Vague Henri had said, once it was pointed out it was obvious.
‘The gap’s enormous. It’ll take years,’ said someone.
‘It’ll take a month,’ said Cale. ‘I’ve had Mr Hooke do the calculations.’
‘That would be the Mr Hooke who killed eight of my men with his exploding pile of crap?’
‘Without Hooke,’ said Cale, ‘most of the people in this room would be rotting quietly in the Mississippi mud. So shut your gob.’ He then went into detail about Hooke’s calculation – the volume of barrows of earth and the number of men they had to deliver them.
‘Their archers’ll pick us off by the hundred.’
‘We’ll build defensive roofs for them to work under.’
‘They’ll be heaving rocks over the walls too – they’ll have to be bloody strong roofs.’
‘If you’re telling me soldiers will die, yes, they will. But we can work from the top of the Little Brother as well if we need to. In the end it’s just filling a hole. When it’s done, they’re finished.’
Later Ormsby-Gore and Fanshawe discussed the day’s events.
‘My men are soldiers, not bloody navvies.’
‘Don’t be such a bore, darling,’ said Fanshawe. ‘I feel as if all my birthdays have come together. He really is a clever old thing. Pity he’s got to go.’
The trouble with nay-saying doom-mongers is that they’re bound to be right eventually. No matter what great enterprise you set out on, things will always go wrong. So it was with the attempt to fill in the gap between the Little Brother and the Sanctuary. The predicted rain of arrows could be protected against with covered walkways but these could be easily smashed with rocks that were much heavier than expected because the Redeemers, once they saw what was intended, had come up with a sling device, based on the trebuchet, that could heave rocks weighing several tons two hundred feet from the walls. Nothing the Axis could build would sustain that kind of weight falling from such a height. No one, of course, was foolish enough to say ‘I told you so’ to Cale’s face but if words were fog it would have been difficult to find your way around the camp.
The problem was solved in a few days and merely involved more effort. Barrels of rocks and stones were hauled to the top of the Little Brother and heaved over the edge. It was a sweaty, arm-bending, sinew-stretching curse but it worked. By the time Hooke devised a rail on which wagons could be pulled up the hill using counterweights it didn’t even speed them up much. Day by day, day by day, the gap was filled. Even if it was slow, every member of the fractious Axis could see progress and also the inevitable result of where that progress was leading. The promise of success brought harmony of a sort. The Swiss became more patient and put their plans for impeachment and a quick evacuation back until after the Sanctuary had fallen. Even the Laconics started pretending to treat their allies as equals: Fanshawe wanted the Sanctuary taken and with it the opportunity to paste Cale with no questions asked.
Every night Cale would walk over to the compound where he was keeping Arbell. At times the temptation to go in was almost unbearable but his dreams about her kept him out. They took place in any number of different places he didn’t recognize (Why? he thought. Why not places that I know?) but it was always him hanging about, skulking like the lunatic draper in the mad ward at the Priory, who’d been left standing at the altar by the woman he adored and who spent the days weeping and asking everyone if they’d seen her. But the one constant in Cale’s dreams was the look on her face when, heart full of dreadful hope, he walked up to her. The look she gave him was bad enough in his dreams without seeing it in reality. So he watched the warm light inside the tent and the shadows lengthening and contracting as she moved about – though he knew it might just be the maids seeing to the boy or combing her hair. He tried to stop himself going to watch, of course, and sometimes succeeded but pathetically rarely.
He had become very used indeed to the comfort and solitude of his comfortable wagon, now occupied by Kleist and his family, and to replace it had put several dozen expert carpenters and former upholsterers turned soldiers, who would have been better employed on the siege, to create something even more sumptuous.
Kleist was a cause for worry. He was at once happy beyond words at the return to life of his wife and child and also shattered by the cruelties that preceded it. The sway of the one could not affect the weight of the other.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
The doctor shrugged, as if to indicate that it was obvious. ‘He was brought up in this awful place.’
‘So were the two of us,’ said Vague Henri.
‘Give it time,’ said the doctor. There was a difficult silence. ‘I’m sorry, I misspoke. I didn’t mean … um … to be unduly alarmist.’ But he very nearly did mean it, he just didn’t mean to express himself so bluntly. ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’ was his philosophy; if you bent a sapling out of shape while it was young it was obvious it would grow up even more deformed. Pleased as he was with his woody metaphors he was wise enough to prune this one back. ‘What I was … driving at was that obviously people are affected by their past but it’s just as important to recognize that even the same physical diseases affect different people differently – so how much more so with mental diseases.’ The two boys just stared at him. ‘I mean, even the strongest people mentally can only take so many shocks – Mr Kleist had the shock of being brought up in this place, then the delightful shock, but still a shock, of falling in love and marrying and becoming a father. Then the shock of discovering them murdered and burnt to ashes. Then the torture you told me about and being taken to the edge of death itself in the most painful and revolting way.’
‘But now he has them back,’ said Vague Henri, desperate for Kleist to be well.
‘But it was just another shock – do you see?’
‘No, I don’t see,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I was brought up here as well. I was in the cells with him at Kitty the Hare’s place. All right, I didn’t lose a wife and child but …’ But what? He couldn’t think of an objection – look at what had happened, even to Cale.
The doctor was going to suggest that Vague Henri tried in future to live a more tranquil life, just in case; but he had the sense to keep it to himself this time.
‘What should we do about Kleist?’ asked Cale.
‘He needs calm. Get him away from here for one thing and to somewhere free from any strain or disharmony.’
Cale smiled. ‘If I knew somewhere like that, I’d go myself.’
‘That would probably be a good idea,’ said the doctor, unable to help himself.
‘That shit-bag Bose Ikard and his pals are out to get us,’ said Cale to Kleist and Daisy. ‘It’s time that some of us weren’t here.’
Neither of them, wary, said anything.
‘People are always out to get you, aren’t they?’ said Daisy.
‘Oh, indeed they are, Mrs Kleist. But the Swiss are sitting on all our money. We want Kleist to take as much as he can carry and put it beyond reach – set up somewhere we can retire to when the balloon goes up.’ The balloon, or balon, was a red flag used by the Redeemers to signal that an attack was imminent.