‘I was right.’
‘About what?’
‘About being brought up careless.’
Cale refused to take offence and just smiled. ‘I wish IdrisPukke had brought me up. I’d be more to your taste, Mr Hooke, than I am now.’
At that there was another arrow flash and another wounded man struck.
‘It’s not foolish to wish for a life better than this.’
But Cale had had enough and did not reply. Then he noticed a dozen or so Folk crawling towards the hill at the back of the U and beginning to move up the slope, then another ten and another. The centenar in the firing trench at the top was being more patient in letting them come close to his position than made sense.
‘Come on,’ he said under his breath. Then a volley of arrows and what looked like half a dozen hits. But now more of the Folk were crawling and, stooped low, even running over a hump on the hill and it became clear that it was only when moving over this hump that the attackers had to suffer the arrows from the trenches. When he had decided on the defence of the hill the slope below had seemed devoid of any cover for the entire climb and so making it almost impossible to mount a successful attack. Now it was clear that he had missed something. Once they got two thirds up the hill the Folk attackers were able to move into a shallow dip that protected them from arrows and allowed them to gather on the slope high enough to make a rushed attack. It was impossible that he had missed something so obvious.
Endless were the times it had been driven into him about the moment of holy revelation, the vision on the road or on top of a mountain that made the scales fall from the eyes. There was nothing divine about what struck Cale on top of the rise over Duffer’s Drift but it was a vision of the truth all the same. He could not afford to fail here.
His most desperate desire since he could remember thinking at all about anything was to be left alone. But now as he watched the Folk creeping towards the top of the hill he could see the failure of his greatest hope. If they took the hill they would be able to take the Drift. They would kill the Purgators and with them Cale’s ability to deliver to Bosco the power to keep him safe. But at the price of never being left alone. He could run away now but there were only Redeemers behind and Antagonists in front. He was five hundred miles away from what? Nothing like safety. To be alone anywhere in this world was to be isolated and vulnerable. Any peace and any quiet came at the pleasure of someone else. There was no corner, no crack, however small, where he could creep away from the world and please himself. The roof had to be earned, the food bought. He had to fight and keep fighting and if he stopped fighting he would drown. Wake up. March or die. March or die.
In Memphis he had made enemies as easily as breathing because he was stupid and made mistakes. The only people he knew and understood were Redeemers. Here he had some chance because he was one of them and he had a place. Everywhere else he was a child with a talent for being angry. He was as bound to the Purgators about to be annihilated in the Drift as much as if he loved and believed in every one of them. There was no choice and never had been. All this, realized in a fraction of the time it took to tell, flooded over him in a great deluge as if he had been standing below a great collapsing dam. And even as everything, heart and soul, cried out against it, he was on his feet and racing down the rise to the twenty Purgators waiting by their horses, ignorant of the disaster unfolding just out of sight.
Desperate to attack but needing to explain his plan, Cale started drawing the Drift in the dust and giving instructions as he did so.
‘Understand?’
They nodded.
‘Then you,’ he said, ‘repeat it back to me.’ The Purgators hesitated but returned a fair account of what Cale had told them. Cale repeated it again and mounted them.
‘Succeed and you’ll be as good as saints to Redeemer Bosco.’ Longing to be cast out himself it had taken the dreadful vision on the rise to see that belonging was more to these men than life itself. He thought he had offered them escape from hideous death but it was more than that. If he had been an angel sent to pardon them and set them free in the world they would have been lost, wanderers without place or meaning. Their freedom would have been the freedom of a ghost.
As they rode in good order to the top of the rise watched by the bemused Hooke, Cale could feel the power of brotherhood and loyalty sweeping through them even in the teeth of their own death. Then they swept over the rise and were slowly raising their speed in line with Cale, faster towards the hill as the Folk were preparing their final rush towards the top, thoughts bent on the struggle ahead and no one thinking of the rear until the Purgators were only fifty yards behind and racing towards them. Now seen, the Purgators screamed for Saint this and Martyr that and then the slaughter began.
The horse charge of the Purgators flowed into the dip and pulled to a halt – they were trained as mounted infantry not cavalry – dismounting in a hurried scramble and charging the Folk from the side. Trees hit by a flash flood, the first ranks went down in the rush of the furious Redeemers bursting with dammed-up rage from their months of terrified imprisonment. A dozen were ahead of Cale, reckless and full of malice, bloody enthusiasts for death. Cale found himself at first following the men in front as if hiding behind a moving wall. But already in their frenzy they began to lose their shape as the Folk, at first surprised, began to absorb the shock and push them back. On the right they surged against the now ragged Redeemers and split their wall. A gap opened to the counterattack and Cale was again exercising his flair for brutality. First came Ben Van Brida – a thick-bearded eighteen-year-old, grunting heavily as he swung twice at the boy in front of him. That was his lot as Cale’s knife struck him in the throat just under the chin, the point emerging at the nape of his neck. But Cale had struck too hard – entering the spinal cord the blade stuck in the bone and Van Brida’s fall jerked the knife out of his hand. Cale ducked at the first blow of the next attacker and the next – neither willing to take their turn they both attacked at once. Cale stepped closer and grabbed the man to his left by the waist and catching him off balance steered him into the second attacker, preventing him from getting in another blow. He stamped down on the instep of his enemy, Frans Arnoldi of Nakuru was his name, who screamed in agony at his broken foot. As he fell Cale hurled him at the other man who staggered backwards only to be stabbed by an arriving Purgator, struck through the liver and an instant death. Lucky for him – few die quick that die in battle. No time for thanks as Cale finished the broken-footed Arnoldi – he flung out both his hands and cried out ‘No!’ Much good it did him, Cale’s blow severing his spinal cord that runs from haunch to neck. Then the next man rushed to Cale and his inevitable death. Juanie De Beer, who fought to the last at Bullbaiter’s Lane and earned the name De Beer the Bitterender, took a blow from Cale just above the genitals. He fell for all his courage, writhing in the sand in agony. Cale screamed at the Purgators behind him to close the gap. The Folk held back for a moment. Startled by the gross belligerence of the boy in front of them they’d stopped to gawp like peasants open-mouthed as some great bishop passed. He seemed to need no one, so dreadful and so natural the spleen he brought to bear on everyone who challenged him. Startled by his shouts the Purgators rushed to surround him as the attacks began again. Cale stepped back, leery now, once again aware of the danger he was in from the short spears in ones and twos incurving their way into the body of monks behind him, no sound like it even among the shouts and screams, no bolt or arrow makes the horse-slap muffled thud of a javelin stopped in a moment by flesh and blood. He stepped forward to avoid the spears, using the Purgators ahead of him as a protective wall. But now the dip in the slope that had protected the Folk was not enough to shield them from the archers on the top of the hill. They had to stand to fight off the surge from the side but that left them exposed. Penned in and squeezed by Cale’s wall of men the thirty-yard gap to the top that had promised them victory now made them easy prey for the archers.