As we have many times done with sheep and pigs, breeding this one for better meat, the other for finer wool, I have by diverse means schooled such women as I have confined here in all that is voluptuous and concerned only with physical sensation regarding the pleasure of beauty, of the delicacy of the skin and the hair and all the ways in which the organs of immediate sensation can be puffed up and exaggerated. They have been taught since very young all the business of delighting men so that (even more than ordinary women) they think of nothing else but giving pleasure to men so that men in turn find pleasure and solace only in their company and not in the pursuit of God. By these means I have greatly stimulated their wombs to exude this uterine milk to such an intensity and strength that it, strangled and thickened by its own excess, has glutinated to become as solid as amber or pitch (which in being the stuff of hell is most apt). By my arts and inspired by God and the Hanged Redeemer, I have found out and removed these resins and revealed that they have the power, reduced to a powder and mixed with holy chrism, to supply any man with the original goodness of the friendship of women that they so quickly and destructively took from men and from themselves. With this prepared mixture, which I have called Redeemer’s Oil, not only men may resist women as it eases away their lust, but even Redeemers who have been lost to madness and dreadful fits may be restored to happiness and good fellowship and be reclaimed from the destruction of penis fury and the sorrow at the loss of women that afflicts so many.
The door opened and Bosco returned.
‘Finished?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Show me.’
Cale pointed to the last sentence he had read, old habits dying hard. It was done before he could stop himself.
‘Well,’ said Bosco, awkward himself at this reminder of their past. ‘You can read the rest later. Your opinion?’
‘Too much penis fury.’
Bosco smiled.
‘Indeed so. He was as much possessed by women in his way as any fornicator. If you think what you’ve read is mad, the rest of it goes on to lay out his plans for a special farm in which his creatures would be raised to produce this resin in sufficient amounts to calm the world. But if it hadn’t been for this you would never have left the Sanctuary and the Materazzi empire would still be the greatest power in the four quarters. Odd, isn’t it, how things work out?’
‘What will you do with the girls?’
‘I don’t know. They can stay where there are.’
‘A trap for someone.’
‘Exactly. Would you care to meet them?’
It was fair to say that Cale was astonished.
‘A trap for me?’
‘There are many traps laid for you but none of my making. I am your good servant.’
‘Yes. I mean, yes I do want to see them.’
‘I’ll arrange it when you return from the veldt. Picarbo may have been a lunatic but his handiwork is most interesting.’
A week later Cale was standing on the low hill at Duffer’s Drift, surrounded by the Purgators – suspicious, hopeful, wary, resentful – and Guido Hooke. Cale had thought there might be a fight to retake the Drift, particularly if the Folk holding it had realized that there were only two hundred and thirty Redeemers come to do so. As it turned out, by the time they arrived the Folk had simply vanished into the prairie.
‘Look around you,’ shouted Cale. ‘If you are stupid you’ll die here. If you’re clever you’ll die here. If you use all the great skills you’ve learned, you’ll die here. Let me tell you this: unless you become like little children, you will die here.’
‘Speak up!’ shouted a Redeemer at the back. Cale looked at Gil and with two guards he moved behind the Redeemer who’d spoken out and gestured him forward. He stepped to the front with a hard-man swagger and stood in front of Cale, staring at him with eyes the colour of the leavings in a mug of beer.
‘What did you say?’ asked Cale.
‘I said speak -‘
Cale stepped into the man crashing his forehead into his face. The Redeemer went down instantly, clutching his broken nose. Cale stepped back onto the flat boulder he had been speaking from.
‘If you have bad hearing – you will die here.’
He told them to turn around and outlined the various ways the Drift had been defended – pointing to this trench system here, another there, how this hill had been reinforced, that field of fire covered to prevent an attack.
‘The one thing they have in common,’ he said, when he’d finished laying out the battlefield, ‘is that everyone who planned them and everyone who carried out those plans is now dead. You will be placed in cohorts of fifteen. You will elect a cohort leader and a deputy and a sergeant. You will unlearn together or you’ll die. You have one day to walk this place and each cohort will come up with a plan to keep you alive for the three days it will take for reinforcements to arrive. I don’t need to threaten you that, if you fail, I’ll have you returned to the Sanctuary for your immediate Act of Faith because the Folk will take care of you on that score. Back here an hour before sunset.’
Cale had hoped that by his pointing out why the previous defences had failed, by showing them the lie of the land, not in maps but rock by trench, by keeping everything particular and down to earth, the Purgators would realize that their salvation lay in one place. But it became clear to Cale, as the cohorts produced one doomed-to-fail plan after another, that while fear could do almost anything, you could not frighten anyone into thinking for themselves.
The next day Cale assembled the Purgators down by the river crossing. He took out an egg and laid it on the flat top of a large rock.
‘If any one of you can balance this egg on its narrow end you get the safest job in the battalion – taking messages to the rear. As soon as the Folk come into sight you’ll be on your way.’
For the next few minutes there were about twenty efforts before the Purgators were certain it could not be done, even if they were also sure Cale had some trick up his sleeve. Which, of course, he did. When they’d given up he stepped to the rock, picked up the egg and tapped it gently against the rock, breaking it slightly and leaving it stood on one end.
‘You didn’t say we could break it.’
‘I didn’t say anything. You decided the rules, not me.’ He pointed at the ford. ‘The crossing here is in a bad place from a defender’s view. I want you to work out how to move it.’
‘It can’t be done.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘How can it be?’
‘You’re right. It can’t. So why do all of your plans to defend it put you in trenches so close you could fight them off with your bare hands? If you had a bow that could fire ten miles, that’s how far away you could be. If you can walk the battlefield but even if you can’t – think like a child. Imagine yourself into every real place in every real way. Put yourself in the mind of your enemy and then walk the battlefield in fact or in your head. Make your mind a model of the real world – with a horse and then in a trench. Put everything to the test of what’s real. You don’t have time to learn from your mistakes.’