Imagine a great U formed by a river bend. The land inside the U is twenty feet lower than the land outside it, except towards the back, which is dominated by a low hill. Past this hill runs the all-important road that crosses the river and straight out the other side, cutting the U into two equal halves. A few hundred yards down this road is a large tabletop hill. The twenty-foot difference between the north and south bank meant that for eighty miles in either direction no wagon could make its way up the near vertical sides except for on this one road at the Drift. The entire field of defence was barely two thousand yards wide. Cale’s problem was as easy to set out as it was difficult to solve. There were perhaps fifty of these choke points on the veldt and not enough troops to hold them by conventional means. To cut down the movement of the Folk and their ability to resupply from the sea, nearly all the points had to be held nearly all the time. At the moment they were taking them at will, holding them while supplies passed through and then vanishing whenever the Redeemers showed up, and taking various other similar forts up and down the front line.
Cale spent nearly eight hours walking the U.
‘What do you think?’ said Gil, anxious to hear the answer of the great prodigy.
‘Tricky,’ was all he got in addition to a request to talk to survivors of the last attack. There were only two, this not being a taking prisoners kind of war. Nevertheless, Cale spent all evening talking to them.
‘How many are here now?’ he asked Gil.
‘Two thousand.’
‘How many can you keep here?’
‘Not more than two hundred. There aren’t the troops or supplies for them if there were.’
‘Send away eighteen hundred.’
Gil was too intelligent to ask why. There had to be few enough defenders or there would be no attack.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Cale, ‘except leave.’
Cale was simply being annoying but he kept Gil swinging on his rope, following in the rear of the eighteen hundred as they retreated and doing nothing about the defence of the Drift. Having travelled some five miles with the withdrawal, Cale turned his horse to one side and the fuming Gil was forced, along with the two guards, to come with him. Soon Cale turned back towards the camp and a small rise some eight hundred yards to the rear of the Drift. It was probably not high enough nor close enough to attract Folk scouts when there were better, nearer lookouts they would visit first. Cale dismounted and gestured to the others to do the same. Then he started for the top of the rise and ended up crawling the last few yards. Gil, relief softening his fury, came up behind him.
‘Do you want something?’ asked Cale, hostile.
‘I’m just doing as Redeemer Bosco would tell me, sir.’
This was true enough so there wasn’t much point arguing, although this didn’t stop him thinking about it. He took what looked like a leather bottle without a top from his knapsack and two glass circles and fitting them in either end of the topless leather bottle he pulled two straps around the middle and tightened them so they were held fast. It was the telescope with which Bosco had shown him the imperfect moon and the identical twin of the one he had stolen from Redeemer Picarbo and which had been filched in turn by one or other of the soldiers who’d captured him in the Scablands. It seemed like half a lifetime ago.
The more awkward and taciturn Cale was with Gil, the more the Redeemer’s earlier bad temper at being treated as if he were of no importance seemed gradually to change. His initial confusion about Cale’s change of status from expendable acolyte to manifestation of the wrath of God was a leap even for the most obedient of Redeemers. But the greater the contempt or indifference with which Cale treated him, the more Gil found himself able to let his decade-long familiarity change into awe and trust. He had a natural desire to worship and for all his intelligence it was as if the black intensity and seemingly total indifference that had come to dominate Cale in the last eight months was exerting its magic over a man very much sensitive to magic. Cale sensed the change, the respect, admiration and the fear that was more than physical – something he knew Gil barely felt. What surprised him more was that he could feel the growing adoration working on him like the air he and Vague Henri used to blow into the soft animal skins that held the holy water in the sacristy so that they could bounce them up and down on the floor in blasphemous delight. To walk past a group of men and feel them diminish themselves at the sight of you – this was something.
Through the rest of the day Cale barely spoke between spying out the landscape and drawing maps of the field of battle in the dust, then scrapping, re-drawing and scrapping again. Throughout he tried to keep the intensely curious Gil from seeing or understanding what he could see of the diagrams he was drawing of trenches, heights, lines of sight and so on. This was not so much from any need he felt to keep things secret as a desire to annoy Gil. But, though frustrated, Gil only seemed the more impressed. In time, Cale began to enjoy the feeling of gawping admiration so much that he started making up marks and signs just to amuse himself by making his diagram insanely and meaninglessly complex in a way that clearly left Gil drowning in wonder.
Just before dark Cale backed down the hill and Gil followed. He started to arrange the rota for guard duty and was dividing by four when he realized something. Instead, and without facing a murmur of protest, he divided the night watch into three. His insolence, and he could feel it, increased their awe of him still further. Deeply satisfied with his deviousness he went back to the top of the rise and made himself as comfortable as possible before falling asleep and dreaming of Arbell Swan-Neck. Impossibly beautiful, she managed to keep eluding him as he tried to follow her in the corridors of the Palazzo as if he were a nuisance she must politely – but not too politely – deal with and not a once-adored lover. In his dreams of her often he was robbed of his anger and violence, stripped down to a humiliated supplicant who could not accept that he was now graciously despised while he preposterously hoped that if he could only get her to stay still and talk to him she would certainly be able to explain that her apparent betrayal had all been a terrible mistake. And it would be all right. He would be happy again. But always she turned away as if his presence was utterly unwelcome. He woke up just before dawn, miserable and burning with shame and anger at his weakness.
He ate and drank silently and then, Gil by his side, waited to watch the Drift emerge slowly in the light of dawn. The trenches now filled with archers in the centre of the U were built at angles so that bolts and arrows could not be aimed down a straight line. The problem, now clearer than ever, was that the red earth thrown up by the digging was a stark contrast with the yellow grass of the veldt, marking the ground as plain as a target painted with circles. From this distance the fifty or so archer men-at-arms hidden in the bend of the river with its cracks and crevices seemed well hidden, not easy to spot even with his bioscope. An hour later with the sun well up, Gil pulled at his arm and pointed to a dust cloud coming from the north by the side of the tabletop mountain in front of the Drift. The dust cloud gradually revealed a large body of Folk, mounted soldiers pulling four wagons behind them and heading for the Drift. At first it seemed as if they were going to ride straight on through its middle, a manoeuvre of such suicidal stupidity that only the events at Silbury Hill made him suspect for a moment that the commando approaching might actually do so.