In his room Cale was looking pointlessly out of the window, his mind hundreds of miles away. Behind him there was the clatter of an acolyte laying out his second meal of the day. If nothing else, eating, now that his food came from the nuns as it did for the other Redeemers, was one pleasure he still felt. Of a sort. The acolyte dropped one of the covers on the floor and it bounced noisily and rolled over near his feet. The nearness of the acolyte’s scrabble to pick it up made him look at the boy’s face for the first time. The boy, though he was at least Cale’s age, picked up the cover and looked back, but uncertainly.
‘I don’t know you,’ said Cale.
‘They brought me here ten days ago from Stuttgart.’ Cale had read about Stuttgart only a few days before in an almanac Bosco had given him that set out in the driest detail every armed and walled Redeemer citadel with a population above five thousand. It was five hundred pages long and there were ten volumes. According to Bosco, the Redeemer commonwealth was fragile. What was clear from even what he had read in the alamanac was that it was vast, bigger by far than he had ever imagined.
‘Why?’ asked Cale.
‘Don’t know.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Model.’
Cale went over to the table and sat down. There were scrambled eggs, toast, chicken legs, sausages, mushrooms and porridge. He started to help himself.
‘You’re Cale, aren’t you?’
Cale ignored him. ‘They say you saved the Pope himself from nasty Antagonists.’
Cale looked back at him for a moment then went back to eating. Model stared at him. He was hungry because acolytes were always hungry, just as for most of the year they were cold. But it did not occur to him that the food on the table, some of which he did not even recognize, might be shared with him. It was like a beautiful woman to an ugly man – he could appreciate the beauty but could not expect at all to participate in it. But, distracted as he was, Cale could not eat this well in front of another acolyte.
‘Sit down.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Yes, you could. Sit.’
Model sat and Cale put a dish of fried potatoes in front of him. But there was, of course, a problem. Cale picked up the dish of fried potatoes and emptied all but one on his own plate. Flushed with desire and longing, Model’s face fell.
‘Look,’ said Cale. ‘You eat too much of this stuff and you’ll be yawning your guts up in five minutes. Believe me. What did you eat in Stuttgart?’
‘Porridge and bunge.’
‘Bunge?’
‘Sort of fat and nuts and stuff.’
‘We call it dead men’s feet.’
‘Oh,’ said Model.
Cale removed the skin from a small piece of chicken and scraped away the delicious jelly that clung juicily to the underside. Then a smaller helping of just the white of an egg and a larger dollop of porridge but just a little bit, not too much.
‘See how that goes down.’
Well was the answer, ecstatically wonderfully in a heavenly way it went down well. Not even in the depths of his anger and fury could Cale fail to take pleasure in the delight of Model as he ate the fried potato, the white of the egg, the porridge slipping down his parched and hungry throat as if it had come from the gardens of paradise, where it was said that there were lemonade springs and the rocks were made of candy.
When Model finished he sat back and stared again at Cale.
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. Now go and lie down for five minutes and turn your face to the wall so you aren’t looking at me while I finish. You might feel a bit strange.’
Model did as he was told and Cale finished his breakfast without giving him another thought. As he finished there was a knock at the door.
‘Go away,’ he said, signalling the alarmed Model to get up. There was another knock. He waited. ‘Come in.’ It was Bosco.
Ten minutes later the two of them stood alone in the Aftorium looking silently at the two hundred and ninety-nine dead bodies, all that remained of Bosco’s ten years of planning for the means to bring the world to an end.
‘I wanted to show you this because there should be no secrets between us. I don’t want you to learn from my mistake because I did not make a mistake. I wish that I had, because then I could learn from it. But this error, shall we call it, is simply what it is. An event. There was a plan, a carefully arrived at and exactingly thought-out plan. What you need to learn here is that there is nothing to learn. That there are foolish men and that there are inexperienced men and that there are misunderstandings. This is the nature of things. You understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘I will consider an alternative.’
But for all his acceptance of the terrible carnage done to his years of irreplaceable planning (Bergeron had been replaced but to his astonished thankfulness not disembowelled or even punished) Bosco was white with shock.
‘Consider them for an hour. Then leave.’
‘I don’t need an hour,’ said Cale.
‘I think ...’
‘I don’t need an hour.’
Bosco moved his head, just a slight move. He turned to leave and Cale followed up the winding steps known as the Stairway to Heaven going up and, for reasons lost in time, Yummity’s Steps going down. They moved slowly up past the Rotunda, Bosco’s knees not being what they once were, and up into the Bourse, the hall that led off into the various departments of the House of Special Purpose.
Towards the back of the Bourse a man, a Redeemer, stripped of his robes, was being led towards an open courtyard. He was wailing quietly, a drizzly sobbing like a tired and unhappy child. Cale watched as the three attending Redeemers ushered him forward. Cale watched them as if he might be a buzzard or one of the more thoughtful Falconidae.
‘Stop them.’
‘Pity is nothing of ...’
‘Stop them and tell them to take him back to his cell.’
Bosco walked over to the execution party as they stalled, trying to push the prisoner through the doorway and out into the bright sunshine of the courtyard.
‘Hold on a moment.’
Ten minutes later Cale, followed by a wary Bosco, was walking silently through the cells where the Purgators, those whose sins of blasphemy, heresy, offences against the Holy Ghost and a long list of others, were kept while they waited for their fate to be decided, usually a very simple and uniform fate. Cale walked up and down carefully looking over the waiting prisoners – the terrified, the despairing, the bewildered, the fanatical and the clearly mad.
‘How many?’
‘Two hundred and fifty six,’ said the jailer.
‘What’s in there?’ said Cale, nodding towards a locked door. The jailer looked at Bosco and then back at Cale. Was this the promised Grimperson? He didn’t look like much.
‘Behind that door we keep those condemned to an Act of Faith.’
Cale looked at the jailer.
‘Unlock the door and go away.’
‘Do as you’re told,’ said Bosco.
He did so, face red with resentment. Cale pushed the door and it swung open easily. There were ten cells, five on each side of the corridor. Eight were Redeemers whose crimes required a public execution to encourage and support the morale of the witnessing faithful. Of the other two, one was a man, clearly not a priest because he had a beard and was dressed in civvies. The other was a woman.
‘The Maid of Blackbird Leys,’ said Bosco, when they returned to his rooms. ‘She has been prophesying blasphemies concerning the Hanged Redeemer.’
‘What sort of blasphemies?’
‘How can I repeat them?’ said Bosco. ‘They’re blasphemies.’
‘How was she charged then, at her trial?’
‘The case was heard in camera. Only a single judge was present when she repeated her claims and condemned herself.’
‘But the judge knows.’
‘Unfortunately, may peace be upon him, the judge died of a stroke immediately afterwards, clearly brought on by the Maid’s heresy.’