‘Such as?’
‘A cadaver. Nothing untoward – it was brought from the executioner. I considered dissecting the dead to be a grey area – religiously speaking.’
‘They didn’t?’
‘It turns out that in religious terms the notion of grey areas is something of a grey area.’
‘So what’s your point?’
‘If I can have your protection in the business of developing the Chinese powder and money too, our hands can wash each other.’
‘How?’
‘If I can fire two balls of a pure substance at one another I can also fire a ball of iron at a man. Think of what such an engine would do. A man carrying such a device, even if he could only use it once, must wound or kill an enemy – or more than one. Think of the terror. He could discard it and fight on like any normal soldier but having killed or wounded the equivalent number of his opponents in the first moments of battle.’
‘You’re nowhere near making such a thing.’
‘I could be. Give me the space and the means.’
‘And how would I know whether you were giving me the run-around?’
‘I know my obligation,’ Hooke replied, offended. ‘But you can see that to achieve my life’s work I must be able to fire a solid object from a metal tube. The search for knowledge and the discovery of a great weapon are virtually one and the same. War is the father of everything. Besides, if you become a great general my life is protected. Correct?’
‘As long as you don’t take me for an idiot. You might take advantage of my ignorance of these things once but I’ll catch you out if you try and play on me – then you’ll be bobbing up and down like an onion in a vinegar jar. Understand?’
‘Your threats are not necessary.’
‘I think they are. Did you watch me fighting on the hill today?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I didn’t have any strong feelings about these men one way or the other. What are the Folk to me? Yet they’re dead, all the same, gone as if they’d never existed. I’ll think about it. Now, I’m tired.’
9
By now Kleist had spent nearly a month living with the Klephts in the Quantocks. It had taken some time to persuade him that he would be safe there. Although he’d never heard of the Klephts or the Quantocks he had come across the bad-tempered and touchy tribesmen, the Musselmen, who inhabited the Quantocks’ lower foothills. He had seen them once in Memphis and had been told to stay away from them and particularly the few women they brought down to repair the carpets of the very rich and draw up designs for new ones. ‘Go near one of their women and they’ll kill you whatever the cost to them. And savages that they are they’ll kill the women, too, just in case.’
Alarmingly, Daisy had agreed that this was true and even more generous than it should be.
‘Musselmen are fanatics, loopy, wicked and bad. They hate their women and treat them like dogs but their religion curses them because, for all their fear that they are liars and sluts, their God has ordained that the wives and daughters contain all the men’s honour in a bowl inside their livers and that once it’s defiled then the only way they can get it back is to kill the woman and start again. Can you believe it? Even if the woman has been raped they strangle the poor bitch. Disgusting.’
‘The Klephts aren’t like that?’ asked a worried Kleist.
‘God, no.’
‘Why?’
‘’Cos we’re not mad for one thing and because we came to the Quantocks and kicked them out a thousand years ago.’
‘So you’re like the Materazzi – not much in the way of being religious?’
‘Oh no – we’re very religious.’
This was a blow.
‘How?’ he asked, heart sinking.
Her description of her faith, despite her protestations as to its importance, didn’t really seem to amount to much that he could pin down. It seemed to restrain them very little so far as he could make out. It was strong on the distinctions between eating clean and unclean animals of a kind it seemed to Kleist no one would want to eat anyway. It was strictly forbidden to eat bats, for example, or anything that crawled or wriggled. Eating spiders meant you were unclean for a fortnight and should Kleist be tempted, which he was not, to go back to his former butchery skills the consequences would involve an exile of six months. Their notion of God seemed very distant. The Klephts talked of him as if he were a rich uncle who was benign enough but had lost day-to-day interest in their side of the family. For himself he could not shake his guilt at having deserted Vague Henri and, to a much lesser extent, IdrisPukke. All reason told him that he had every right not to risk his life so hideously for other people who had not even asked him if he agreed to go along. On the other hand he realized that if he really felt so clearly about the rightness of his position he wouldn’t have left them like a thief in the night. About Cale he did not feel guilty at all.
‘What about you and me? You know?’
‘I’m not a cow,’ she said. ‘My father doesn’t own me. He is a civilized person who will thank you for helping me.’
So it proved. But despite his welcome Kleist was uneasy because he couldn’t bend his mind to understand the Klepht way of thinking about the world. It was not just that he understood the Redeemer mentality because he’d lived among them for so long; he felt he had a pretty good handle on the Materazzi even after only a few weeks. And Memphis was full of races and types from all over the world. But none of his meetings with remarkable races in Memphis had left him with a vague sense of missing something that he felt all the time in the Quantocks. The Quantocks were a conundrum in limestone, riddled with spatey gorges, rocky unclimbable juts and chasms. Everywhere secret recesses punctured the high cliffs providing a hideaway or a place to gather for an attack. From here the Klephts disrupted trade by sacking, snatching, grabbing, nabbing, dispossessing, confiscating and generally depriving passers-by of everything but the clothes they stood up in – and not always those either. Their energetic approach to larceny became so notorious that amongst the dwellers round about (which other than the aggravating Musselmen was the only label the Klephts could be bothered to attach to the rich and ancient cultures they robbed) anyone who stole was known as a klephtomaniac. From time to time the other hill tribes would decide the rapacity and general nuisance level of the Klephts was no longer to be tolerated and they would band together for a punitive expedition into the mazy and innaccessible middle of the Quantocks.
It was no more than three weeks after Daisy had brought him into the heart of the Quantocks that Kleist had his first taste of their, to him, unique way of waging war. He had no intention of volunteering his services, and had been furious with Daisy about her boasting concerning his epic brutality to Dunbar and his men. His principle since Memphis was to keep his mouth shut about everything he possessed in terms of goods and services that might be useful to others and he told her to do the same in future.
‘Why?’ she said, astonished.
‘Because I don’t want them trying to stick me in the Vanguard to see if I’ll play Barnaby the Berserker.’
‘You worry too much.’
‘That’s why I’m still alive.’
‘No one’s going to ask you to do anything. It’s got nothing to do with you.’
‘Just remember that.’
Four days later at the specific invitation of Daisy’s father he found himself sitting on top of a great limestone crop with (he had checked) plenty of rear avenues of escape, Daisy beside him, elated but not nervous. They were looking down into a valley about eight hundred feet across where the Klephts had built a rough wall. There were about five hundred Klephts in position, wandering up and down, talking, laughing and acting as if they didn’t have a care in the world. At the other end of the valley there was a Musselman force of about a thousand. They waited for half an hour and then advanced in close order, spears and silvered shields shining in the sun. At two hundred yards they stopped, at which point the Klephts started to pay them some serious attention, which took the form of shouting endless and colourful abuse about the Musselmen’s sexual practices with animals, the ugliness of their mothers, and the sluttishness of their wives and daughters. It was these last two that seemed to drive the Musselmen into an almost hysterical fury. Some, indeed, were so overcome with grief at this abuse to their honour that they burst into tears and knelt down and began throwing dirt over their heads. It settled into a routine. From one side of the defensive wall in the valley a dozen Klephts would call out a name: ‘FATIMA!’ and another dozen would shout back: ‘DOES IT BEHIND THE PIGSTY!’ And then again: ‘AIDA!’, to the chorus of: ‘LIKES THEM THREE AT A TIME!’ But the biggest reaction was provoked by what seemed to Kleist like the least offensive of them alclass="underline" ‘NASRULA!’ To which a lone voice of unusual clarity shouted back: ‘HAS A MOLE UPON HER INNER THIGH!’ This instantly struck a nerve with one of the Musselmen, who screamed in fury at the precise nature of the description of his hapless wife and instantly started to run suicidally towards the Klepht front line. Fortunately in his hysterical haste he tripped over a stone and before he could get back to his feet half a dozen of his friends and relatives grabbed him and dragged him noisily protesting back to their front line.