General order took a good ten minutes to restore. Still laughing Kleist turned to Daisy.
‘You don’t think it could be a mistake – twisting their ropes like that.’
She shrugged but wouldn’t say any more. But now the attack began, the Musselmen advancing in good order, impressively disciplined as if they knew their business. To Kleist it looked like something bloody was coming. Still the insults poured on like the arrows at Silbury Hill. And then the final furious screaming charge. At this, the Klephts launched a not very impressive and completely inaccurate flight of arrows, turned and ran away. Daisy leapt up and down, clapping her hands in delight as the Klephts raced back into the endless winding defiles at the rear of the valley. The rough stone wall delayed the Musselmen by a minute, laden as it was with traps on the far side – sharp slivers of bamboo hidden in pits that could slice through a foot, poisonous snakes in the crevices of the walls and thousands of spiders poured over the walls just before the Klephts ran away. None of them were poisonous but spiders were unclean for the Musselmen even to touch let alone eat. By the time they had regrouped and started after the Klephts, most were well out of sight, except for the young blades who stayed back at the top of the defiles to shout even more insults. They didn’t hang about for long as some of the furious Musselmen chased after them but, met by a lashing of rocks from the limestone cliffs that fitted into the defiles like fingers, they soon realized a chase was both fruitless and likely to be lethal.
‘Come on,’ said Daisy, and pulled him back from the cliff and, via a circuitous route in case they were spotted by any Musselman scouts, took him back to the village. For the rest of the afternoon the Klephts from the great unbattle drifted in, delighted with themselves and boasting of their lack of feats of daring, the complete absence of any brave deeds, and their total success in not even standing to the first man let alone the last.
Several days of celebration followed in which many war stories, endlessly exaggerated in the telling, were told of the cunning with which the teller caused havoc to his particular enemy without sustaining any personal risk to himself or demonstrating the slightest bravery. Each one of them competed in fabricating outrageous claims concerning the ways in which, from the complete safety of an unbridgeable chasm or the top of an unclimbable cliff, they had tricked outrageously stupid Musselmen into revealing the names of their female loved ones so that a wife’s, sister’s or mother’s sexual purity could be defamed in ever more inventively grotesque ways. As Kleist listened in delight it became clear that to the Klephts the ultimate victory over an enemy was not to defeat him man-to-man in a heroic struggle of arms, but to cause, without risk to oneself, the absurd opponent to drop dead of a spontaneous heart attack or stroke, caused entirely by his gullibility regarding the honour of his women relatives and the ingenuity of the lies of his Klepht opponent. But however amused, Kleist was also somewhat shocked. The fact is that while the military philosophy of the Klephts appealed to him precisely because it was against everything he had been taught by the Redeemers in terms of pain, blood, self-sacrifice and duty, it also clashed for exactly the same reason: it was against everything he had been taught by the Redeemers.
Daisy’s village, Soho, was surrounded by a path shaded with specially planted olives where every evening Klephts would walk in pairs and talk about all and everything under the sun. Kleist was in much demand as a talking partner because of the Klephts’ immense curiosity about everything in general and about the Redeemers in particular, whose practices and beliefs they found completely incomprehensible and therefore utterly fascinating. They assumed that every tale of brutality, every ghastly story of heaven and hell, every detail of the faith that Kleist recounted was merely an outrageous and entertaining lie. There was nothing he could do to persuade them that there were people who really believed and acted as the Redeemers believed and acted. ‘VIRGIN BIRTH? HAR! HAR! HAR! WALKING ON WATER? HE! HE! HE! BACK FROM THE DEAD? HO! HO! HO! THE LAST FOUR THINGS? TEE! HEE! HEE!’ A few days after the fight against the Musselmen, this time it was Kleist busy asking questions of Daisy’s father – a good-humoured old villain who had taken an immense, if not to be relied on, liking to him.
‘Look, Suveri, I’ve got nothing against running away but we were taught it’s the quickest way to get yourself killed.’
‘I’m alive, aren’t I? How many funerals can you see being prepared?’
‘You wouldn’t get away with that stuff in many places. Anywhere a horse could go they’d ride you down. Infantry, too, if they were good enough.’
‘But we didn’t fight in many places, we fought here.’
‘But what if you had to?’
‘We don’t.’
‘You raid.’
‘And sometimes we get killed – but we take what we’ve stolen into these mountains – and if we have to stop to fight a pitched battle, well, we just dump whatever we’ve filched and leg it back here.’
‘What if they trap you before you get here?’
‘I suppose you fight and get out or you don’t and you die.’
‘You can’t win a war without standing and fighting – that’s just a fact.’
‘True enough, I suppose. But we don’t fight wars. We just steal and rob. It’s none of my business if the Redeemers want to die for God or the Materazzi for glory. It wouldn’t suit us, that kind of thing, but it takes all sorts to make a world.’ He laughed and gestured at the limestone landscape around them with its endless crags and chasms and canyons. ‘Deserts make fanatics, everyone knows that. But a place like this breeds a noble cowardice. We know how to let other people be.’
‘You steal from other people all the time.’
‘Other than that. Nobody’s perfect.’
Over the next three months Cale and Gil expanded the campaign against the Folk by splitting the Purgators into groups of ten, each in charge of two hundred ordinary Redeemers.