For Richard Gollner
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specific world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even into a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.
J. B. Watson, Psychologies of 1925
I fought like an angel.
Wilfred Owen
Prologue
Imagine. A young assassin, no more than a boy really, is lying carefully hidden in the long green and black bulrushes that grow in great profusion along the rivers of the Vallombrosa. He has been waiting for a long time but he is a patient creature in his way and the thing he waits for is perhaps more precious to him than life. Beside him are a bow of yew and arrows tipped with black country steel capable of penetrating even the costliest armour if you’re close enough. Not that there will be any need for that today because the young man is not waiting for some rascal deserving of his murder but only a water bird. The light thickens and the swan makes wing through the rooky wood, the cawing crows complaining bitterly at the unfairness of her beauty as she lands upon the water like the stroke of a painter’s hand upon a canvas, direct and beautifully itself. She swims with all the elegance for which her kind is famous, though you will never have seen movement quite so graceful in such still and smoky air on such steeple grey water.
Then the arrow, sharp as hate, shears through the same air she blesses and misses her by several feet. And she’s off, web strength along with her grace convey her whiteness back into the air and away to safety. The young man is standing now and watching the swan escape.
‘I’ll get you next time you treacherous slut!’ he shouts and throws down the bow, which alone of all the instruments of death (knife, sword, elbow, teeth) he has never been able to master and yet is the only one that can give him hope of restitution for his broken heart. But not even then. For though this is a dream, not even in his dreams can he hit a barn door from twenty yards. He wakes and broods for half an hour. Real life is careful of the sensitivities of desperadoes but even the greatest scourge, and Thomas Cale is certainly one of those, can be mocked with impunity in his nightmares. Then he goes back to sleep to dream again of the autumnal leaves that strewed the brooks in Vallombrosa, and the great white wings beating into swirls the early-morning mist.
1
‘The Lay of Thomas Cale, Angel of Death’ is the second worst poem ever to emerge from the Office for the Propagation of the Faith of the Hanged Redeemer. This institution subsequently became so famous for its skill in spinning the grossly untrue on behalf of the Redeemers that the phrase ‘to tell a monk’ passed into general usage.
Book the Forty Seventh: The Argument
Wake up! For sunrise in the spoon of night
Reveals the Left Hand
of the Lord of Might.
His name is Cale, his arm is strong
As the Angel of Death he does no wrong.
Searching for traitors who’ll murder the Pope
Cale left the Sanctuary by means of a rope.
To protect the Pope he pretended to flee
The quiet and care of the Sanctuary
And Bosco his mentor he claimed to reject
And all for the sake of the Pope to protect.
In Memphis the city of Sodom and Vice
He rescued a princess, a maiden of ice.
With wiles and with lust his soul’s ruin she sought
And when he said, ‘No!’ his assassins she bought.
Now long had her father conspired ’gainst the Pope
And attacked the Redeemers to further this hope
But in the great battle at Silbury Hill
With Princeps and Bosco, Cale gave them their fill.
The Empire of Memphis they wasted that day
Then Bosco and Cale they returned to the fray
The Antagonist heretics them for to slay.
For Pope and Redeemer let all of us pray!
It is a generally accepted wisdom that true events pass into history and are transformed according to the prejudices of the person recording them. History then turns slowly into legend, in which all facts are blurred despite the interest of the tellers, who will by now be many, various and contradictory. Finally, perhaps after thousands of years, all intentions, good or bad, all lies and all exactness merge into a myth of universal possibility in which anything might be true, anything false. It no longer matters, one way or the other. But the truth is that a great many things depart from the facts almost as soon as they happen and are converted into the great smog of myth almost before the sun has gone down on the events themselves. The doggerel above, for example, was written within two months of the incidents it so badly attempts to immortalize. Let us go then through this drivel verse by verse.
Thomas Cale had been brought to the grim Sanctuary of the Hanged Redeemer at the age of three or four (no one knew or cared which). As soon as he arrived the little boy was singled out by one of the priests of this most forbidding of religions, the Redeemer Bosco, mentioned three times in the poem not least because he was the man who caused it to be written. It should not be thought that this was inspired by anything so simple as human vanity or ambition.
The Redeemers were not only infamous for their harsh view of the sinful nature of mankind but even more for their willingness to enforce that view through military conquest led by their own priests, most of whom were brought up to fight rather than preach. The most intelligent and the most pious (a line more easily blurred among the Redeemers than elsewhere) were responsible for ensuring correct beliefs and the administration of the faith in all its many conquered and converted states. The rest were reserved for the armed wing of the One True Faith, the Militant, and were raised and frequently died (the lucky ones, went the joke) in numerous religious barracks, of which the largest was the Sanctuary. It was in the Sanctuary that Cale was chosen by Bosco as his personal acolyte – a form of favouritism only an inhumanly tough child could ever hope to survive. By the time he was fourteen (or fifteen) Cale was as cold and calculating a creature as you could ever have wished not to meet in a dark alley or anywhere else – and apparently animated by only two things: his utter loathing of Bosco and his indifference to everyone else. But Cale’s general bad luck was about to change for the worse as he opened the wrong door at the wrong time and discovered the Lord of Discipline, Redeemer Picarbo, dissecting a young girl, still alive if only just, and about to do the same to another. Choosing self-preservation over compassion and horror, Cale shut the door quietly and left. However, in a moment of madness which he claimed forever to regret, the look in the eyes of the young woman about to be so cruelly disembowelled caused him to return and in the ensuing struggle kill a man perhaps tenth in line to the Pope himself. What you already have gathered of the Redeemers will make clear the fate Cale could expect: one that, you can be sure, involved a great deal of screaming.
If escape from the Sanctuary had been easy Cale would have already been long gone. While, as the twaddle of ‘The Lay of Thomas Cale’ claims, it did involve a rope there was no plot to murder the Pope – another invention of Bosco’s to cover up the flight of an acolyte he had particular reason to want back, a reason that had nothing to do with whatever bizarre and revolting business Picarbo had been up to. What the poem does not mention is that Cale was accompanied by three others: the girl he’d saved; Vague Henri, the only boy in the Sanctuary he remotely tolerated; and Kleist, who like everyone else regarded him with suspicion and dislike.