Most of the rest of the time he slept, ate most of the food allotted to Gil and the two guards, and made notes and imagined over and over the attack that had happened on Duffer’s Drift and the ones that might happen. And also he thought about Swan-Neck and the next meeting, where she would throw herself into his arms, weeping with loss while the dying Bosco with his last gasp would admit her betrayal had been an evil trick. Then he would be ashamed of his absurd delusion and imagine slowly wringing that beautiful neck without pity or remorse as she choked and gargled under his merciless hand-grip. After these often lengthy daydreams he would feel ashamed and a little bit mad. But this did not stop him from revisiting them on many occasions to commit, as the Holy Redeemer Clementine called it, the sin of pursuing evil thoughts. Cale found himself pursuing evil thoughts on an ever more demented and epic scale than even Clementine could possibly have imagined. ‘It is as well for the world,’ IdrisPukke had said once to Cale, ‘that the very wicked are generally as pusillanimous about turning their thoughts into deeds as anyone else.’
When Cale had looked down from the Great Jut on Tiger Mountain, he had felt an uneasy joy and delightful unpleasantness and now on the rise above Duffer’s Drift he felt the same uneasiness and unpleasantness and the same delight and joy. There’s nothing like an itch, after all, you can finally scratch.
The centenars under a millenar had agreed that while deepening the trenches was of no use, the strength of the soil would allow them to dig a shelf at the bottom of the trench so that each man could escape from the rain of projectiles coming from the ballistas. To cover the main trench at the centre of the U more trenches were built outside it to the left and right. The plan to cut and burn every bush outside the U for four hundred yards was prevented by Cale because he would only let two hundred men do the work and not the eighteen hundred that were available. ‘You won’t have more than two hundred men in future so what’s the point in having them now?’
Besides, there were hiding places enough with large rocks and the concrete-hard termite hills that were scattered across the landscape like pointy but badly made beehives. On the hill inside the U, the trench was moved to cover the blind spot that had been missed in the previous attack.
6
‘You’re my hero.’
Kleist and the girl were sitting in front of a partly dead and hollowed-out oak that held a fire in such a way that it looked like a hearth.
‘I’m not your hero.’
‘Yes, you are,’ taunted the girl. ‘You saved me.’
‘I didn’t save you. You just happened to be in the bushes when I took back my stuff. I didn’t even know you were there.’
‘Your heart knew,’ teased the girl.
‘Think what you like,’ said Kleist. ‘Tomorrow you go where you were going and I’ll go somewhere else as far away from you as possible.’
‘My people believe,’ said the girl, chattering as happily as a starling, ‘that when you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them for ever.’ This claim was as outrageous a lie as she had ever told and contrary to everything the Klephts believed when it came to matters of obligation.
‘Where’s the sense in that?’ said an exasperated Kleist. ‘It should be the other way around.’
‘All right. Now I’m responsible for you.’
‘Firstly,’ said Kleist, ‘I don’t give a toss what your people believe and secondly I don’t want you to be responsible for me – I want you to go away.’
The girl laughed.
‘You don’t mean that. Tell me your name.’
‘I don’t have a name. I’m nameless.’
‘Everybody has a name.’
‘Not me.’
‘Shall I tell you my name?’
‘No.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘Then why did you ask?’
‘Because I looove,’ she said, lengthening the sound of the word, ‘to hear the sound of your voice.’ And she laughed again. It took perhaps two hours for Kleist to be completely done for.
Two days later Cale and Gil watched as the Folk accepted, clearly after some argument and with a lot more caution, the surrender of the six surviving Redeemers. They were tied up and loaded in a wagon and ten minutes later had vanished beyond the tabletop mountain.
‘How many more times?’ said a morose Gil.
Cale did not answer but walked down off the rise, mounted his horse and started back to the not entirely reliably named Fort Bastion. Five days after their arrival there, the four of them were back in the Sanctuary and facing a bad-tempered Bosco.
‘I told you to stay in the veldt until you’d sorted the problem out.’
‘I have sorted it out.’
Cale had the pleasure of surprising Bosco into silence, not something in all their long association he had been able to do before.
‘Explain.’
Cale did so. When he’d finished Bosco looked dubious, not because Cale had been unconvincing but because his claims looked too good to be true. Bosco was being offered a way out of what was becoming a terrible trap with its origins in the ludicrous events that had caused the execution of his two hundred and ninety-nine carefully chosen vanguard. When someone offered you a way out of the teeth of your greatest problem that was not the time, in Bosco’s experience, to worry about the price, or even whether it was a delusion made plausible by desire. People believe what they want to believe. It was perhaps, thought Bosco, the most beautifully true of all the great truisms. He had little choice but to accept, even if it did coincide exactly with what he most needed.
‘While you were away I had the Purgators put on parade and had one of their members executed in front of them. It was an arduous death. And I mean arduous to watch. When you tell them what you want from them they will have had a very recent reminder of what will happen if they fail to come up to the mark.’
‘Not all the Purgators are suitable. There are about thirty who’re too mad or stupid to be of any use. But I’m not an executioner. I want them sent to the Bastille at Marshalsea.’
‘What makes you so sure they’d be better off?’
‘That’s as might be. I told you I’m not an executioner.’
‘Very well. But you have no right to discredit the mystery of Petar Brzica.’
He should have known better, but cocky because he had managed to get one over on Bosco concerning the veldt he could not stop himself.
‘Mystery? That butcher.’
‘How many times do you have to be told about letting others know what you’re thinking,’ said Bosco, wearily. ‘However, listen. God has spoken. And it must follow that what he has spoken is the truth. The One True Faith is not intolerant because it is some pompous schoolmaster terrified of contradiction, it is intolerant because the Truth is intolerant by virtue of the fact that it is true. It is not intolerant to refuse to allow a teacher to state that two and two is five or three. Such a person would be stopped in all societies at all times. How much less should we be prepared to tolerate a lie that prevents a man from being saved for all eternity. So it is clear as two and two make four that there can be no tolerance for all our sakes of anything that deviates from God’s truth. The Pope is the source of all faith on earth and he must form a great partnership with the hangman to enforce the only love that truly exists: the narrowest, hardest and most inflexible dogma.’
‘Brzica serves nothing but a desire for blood.’
‘Not so. Not fair. Like any other Redeemer he could have chosen to prepare acolytes for the defence of the faith. He could have learnt to sermonize on the love God bears all of mankind, poor as mankind is, poor as all his works are: his vision corrupt, his tastes disgusting, his body a vile traitor, everything about him humdrum and banal. Instead Brzica has chosen the most arduous vocation of them alclass="underline" the torture and killing of his own kind. No one will eat with him, no one will pass the time of day or pray next to him. In the midst of this desolation of fear and loathing he must consign himself not to the ordinary pleasures of the human voice but the groans of the dying only. He arrives in the courtyard of the Act of Faith in front of an assembly of his fellows who see him only with dread. A heretic or blasphemer is tossed to him – he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a wooden bar and lifts his arms. There is a horrible silence save only for the sound of bones cracking and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He stretches him out on the ground and drags a sharpened hook through his body from chest to pubic bone and pulls his entrails out before the screaming eyes, the mouth open like a furnace.’