He began putting his fists to his head, grinding his temples with his knuckles as if to drill a hole to let something out.
‘Don’t go down there,’ IdrisPukke said.
‘Think I might.’ Cale stood up. ‘Bosco was right, you either kill the past or it kills you.’
‘Don’t go. You’re in a state of mind where something grim might happen.’
‘You’re right, it’s true – unspeakable things are on my mind.’
‘What would Vague Henri say?’ He was getting desperate trying this one.
‘Vague Henri’s dead. No votes for him.’
‘I don’t know how bad or good she is. I barely know the girl. What I do know is that she’s a blight on you. You can only make things worse if you go anywhere near her. The two of you share a madness that will cut you both in two. Get her away from you.’
Another short silence.
‘When I murdered Kitty the Hare there was something I didn’t tell you about. It was the look in his eyes – I suppose he was terrified as well but it wasn’t his fear that stuck in my mind, it was the shock. This can’t be happening to me, he was thinking while I beat the life out of him, not me. Day after day Kitty was guilty of every kind of cruelty and violence yet when that violence came to him in his own home he was dumbfounded. Couldn’t get that look of amazement out of my mind.’ He turned again to IdrisPukke. ‘Know why?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve just realized myself. I want to see that look again, really I do. I want to see it in the eyes of that shit-bag Zog, and Bose Ikard, and Robert Fanshawe and his Ephors and everyone like them everywhere in the world. I want to see that shock in their eyes: Me? Not me. This can’t be happening. The world is full of people who need to die like that.’
‘So, the Left Hand of God after all.’
Cale laughed.
‘Who said anything about God?’
‘What about all the people you’re going to have to kill to get to them?’
‘I’ll give everyone the chance to budge out of the way.’
‘And if they don’t agree to budge?’
‘Then they’ll get what’s coming to them.’
‘And so will the thousands upon thousands who won’t be able to get out of the way even if they wanted to. Bosco thought you could rule the world – but he was mad. What’s your excuse?’
‘What choice do I have?’
‘We always have a choice.’
‘You know, I’ve never heard you say anything stupid before. Are you really telling me I can stop? Not even if I wanted to. No one’s going to let me be, no one’s going to let me take myself off somewhere and eat cake with girls in peace and quiet. I tried that. I wouldn’t last six months if I walked away now.’ He looked at IdrisPukke. ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’
‘Your joy is all in laying waste to things – blight and desolation is what makes your soul glad.’
‘What?’ For some reason Cale was furious.
‘Wasn’t that what that puppet said to you?’
‘Oh, that thing. Yes.’
‘I don’t agree, for what it’s worth.’
‘Thanks – I’m touched.’
‘But if you go down there and kill Arbell Materazzi, that’s the first step. You can’t come back from something like that.’
‘You know what I learnt from killing Bosco? There’s nothing like an itch that you can finally scratch. Enough talk now. We’ll talk again tomorrow.’
‘You can’t kill someone just because they don’t love you any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘Suppose everyone behaved like that?’
‘Then people would be a lot more careful.’
‘Will you come with me?’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Sleep on it?’
‘No.’
What was IdrisPukke to do? Nothing.
He made his way back to the main compound, tripping on stones and matted webs of arse-wipe as he went.
All that night priests were falling through the air. Flocks, doles, bevies, parliaments and trains of the lately hanged were being hauled in their hundreds to the West Wall of the Sanctuary and heaved over the side to freefall the three hundred feet onto Ginky’s Field, where for six hundred years the bodies of the Redeemers had been set aside. What did they fall like? Like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Some three hours into this grim rite – known as the First Defenestration of the Hanged because the gap in the wall through which the bodies were pitched resembled a window – Windsor finally escaped from the recesses of the Sanctuary and made his sick and exhausted way to Fanshawe. ‘It’s too late now, darling,’ he said. ‘You’d better get some sleep and you can try again tomorrow.’
But there wasn’t to be another chance for Windsor. By the time the sun came up Thomas Cale was miles away, sitting in the back of a wagon on its way to the materials depot at Snow Hill.
IdrisPukke had men out searching for months but there wasn’t a trace of the boy. He didn’t give up, of course: he paid a good deal of money to intelligencers who knew how to keep their mouths shut to report on rumours about even the most tenuous sightings of Thomas Cale. There were plenty of those. It was not difficult to discount the story that he’d been seen in the prow of a great ship setting out across the Wooden Sea, accompanied by eight maidens in white silk, bound for the Isle of Avalon from where he would return after a long sleep to save the world when it was next threatened with destruction. Then it was reported he was making his living as a juggler in Berlin, or selling hats in the markets in Syracuse. Alarmingly plausible was the news, more than a year later, that he’d been killed trying to interrupt the marriage in Lebanon of Arbell Materazzi to the Aga Khan, Duke of Malfi, a man so extravagant he was known as the Emperor of Ice Cream because his fortune was melting away. But IdrisPukke quickly confirmed from a guest who’d been at the ceremony that the celebrations had passed off impeccably. Later still there was the rumour that he had drowned, along with Wat Tyler, in the Great Fiasco on the Isle of Dogs; then that he had been crucified next to Buffellow Bill during the religious wars at Troy.
But though the sightings were as numerous as they were unreliable a pattern of sorts emerged from a few reports, very small in number, that he hoped were true. There were a number of claims he had been seen down in Emmaeus in one-horse towns buying nails, saws and olive oil. The ordinariness of this reassured IdrisPukke: it was warm there, even in winter, and the countryside was covered by mile upon mile of forests of elm and ash, as well as hundreds of small lakes where it would be very hard to find someone who didn’t want to be found. He liked to think of Cale keeping occupied hammering and sawing things and eating well – though he could discover nothing very solid to these reports even after he’d sent reliable people down there to make inquiries. But he hoped he was somewhere around there at any rate and keeping safe.
APPENDIX i
Statement on behalf of the Unified Nations Archaeological Survey (UNAS)
As the legal judgment by Moderator Breffni Waltz so elegantly details the origins of the discovery of the Rubbish Tips of Paradise and the ‘creation’ of the so-called Left Hand of God trilogy, I will not rehearse them here. Neither do I intend to detail the legal challenges to the entirely improper claims of ownership by either Dr Fahrenheit or the Habiru people, rights which clearly belong to the entire world and not to an individual or a tribal group who have shown scant respect for this most precious of archaeological sites.
No one is denying the contribution of Dr Fahrenheit in discovering the tips and had he immediately called in the Unified Nations Archaeological Survey, as he should have done, this would be a very different story: he would now be admired as one of archaeology’s greatest sons instead of being reviled as its greatest villain. Early on Fahrenheit came up with the working hypothesis that the origin of the pages in the Field of Books was not a library or anything equally carefully structured but a rubbish tip consisting largely of discarded papers, somewhat similar to those uncovered in the early years of the last century at Oxyrinchus (though those remains are no more than eighteen hundred years old – proof that even a great city can vanish very quickly from the memory of history). It turns out that he was right. What he was not able to do was discover the location of the rubbish tip itself. However, while he was looking for what one might term the mother lode, he kept discovering individual scraps of paper and it was from these, matched by his quick grasp of the Habiru language, that he was able to find the very few words these two civilizations had in common and so unravel the meaning of many of these documents, some of which may be up to fifty thousand years old, or even older. What he had in his possession were many higgledy-piggledy scraps of paper – bits of old letters, accounts, legal documents – but only one book. It was never found in its complete form but the papers continued to turn up in large quantities and in approximately the same place – there were so many fragments that once he had mastered the language of these texts he was able to recreate almost in their entirety the series of what turned out to be three books.