For two weeks since they had left Memphis he had not spoken once, not even to ask why they had changed direction in the middle of the Scablands and started travelling away from the Sanctuary. On balance Bosco thought it better to let his former acolyte stew. But he had underestimated Cale’s talent for mute anger and finally decided to break their silence.
‘We’re going to Tiger Mountain,’ volunteered Redeemer Bosco, softly and even with kindness. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’
It might be thought that someone whose heart was moithering with so much hatred for one person might not have enough intensity of feeling left over to loathe another in the same way. In part this was true, but Cale’s heart, when it came to hatred, was made of stern and capacious stuff: his aversion to Bosco had merely been shifted further from the centre of the fire, in the clinker at the side as it were, to keep warm, for bringing back to the broil later. Nevertheless, despite his current preoccupation with hating, Cale could not help but be puzzled by the great change in Bosco’s attitude towards him. Since he was a very small boy Bosco had driven him like a ship in a storm – relentless, merciless, pitiless, cruel, never slacking, never giving him a place to rest. Day after day, year after year he had scoured him black and blue, teaching and punishing, punishing and teaching until there seemed no difference between the two. Now there was only restraint, a great softness, almost something like tenderness. What was it? There was no answer to be had, even when he had the energy to spare from mind-murdering Arbell Materazzi (beating her to death with a stick, martyring her on a wheel, drowning her to applause in a high mountain lake). But despite the hammers beating out their cacophony in his soul something in Cale was paying attention to the terrain through which they were moving, resulting in a moment of understanding, though not of amusement exactly – he was in too dark a place for that. Now he could see why it was called the Great Testicle. Close in, the smoothness of its lines from thirty miles away had vanished to become a landscape deeply grooved with ridges, always moving down in the direction of the water that carved them but also sideways and across, curling around and even back on themselves where the rock was hardest. This close the experience was like the tiniest of fleas trying to get across the bollocks of the greatest of giants.
Moving through this hard-to-solve maze would have been immensely difficult, despite the fact that it was not particularly steep, had it not been for the help offered by the narrow causeway built by the Montagnards that wound over the ridges and the numerous filled-in ravines and defiles. This had been done not as an intentional sacrilege but in order to gain access to the salt deposits that marbled their way through the middle slopes of the mountain. Across the eighty years during which they held sway over the Redeemers’ most sacred place the Montagnards had created a huge network of tunnels. Intended sacrilege or not, when the Redeemers had re-emerged as a power after being weakened by their lengthy religious civil wars they repaid this blasphemy by wiping out the Montagnards to the last man, woman and child.
Once past the Great Testicle the slope steepened, again not greatly. High though it was, Tiger Mountain was not especially difficult to climb. In this more even landscape there were many small holes, the decayed entrances to the deposits of salt between thirty and a hundred feet below the surface. Despite his foul temper and silence Cale could not help but be distracted by the intriguing features of this sacred landscape. But while it lacked great crevices and dangerous crags, the going inevitably became tougher and soon they were forced to dismount and lead the horses up harsher and more awkward paths. Finally they did come to a narrow pass, with steep and rocky walls to either side.
Bosco ordered his men to make camp, though it was still early afternoon, and then turned to Cale and spoke to him directly for the second time.
‘They’ll stay here. We have to go on. There’s something I need to show you. We should also get something straight. The only way back down this part of the mountain is through this pass. If you attempt to come back down on your own you know what will happen.’
With this gently spoken warning he set off up through the pass and Cale followed. They climbed for thirty minutes, Cale always staying about ten yards behind his former master until they reached a shelf about twenty feet deep. To one side there was a simply constructed but beautifully made stone altar.
‘That was where Jephthah kept his oath to the Lord and sacrificed his only daughter.’ His tone of voice was odd, not reverential at all.
‘And I suppose,’ replied Cale, ‘that stain on the side there is supposed to be her blood. She must have been filled with strong stuff – you can still see it a thousand years after it was spilled halfway up a mountain.’
‘With God all things are possible.’ They looked at each other for some time. ‘No one knows where he killed her. This altar was built for the benefit of the faithful, some of whom are permitted to come here on Bad Friday – a painter comes the day after their visit and paints it again so that there’s time for it to weather in for the following year.’
‘So it’s not true.’
‘What is truth?’ he said and did not wait for an answer.
After two hours they were only some five hundred yards from the snow line and into the last climb before they could talk to God himself. But it was just here that Bosco turned aside and began to walk around the mountain parallel with the snow. Here the thin air made the going harder for all that they were no longer climbing. Cale’s head began to ache. As he followed Bosco around a small bluff he lost sight of him for a moment and when he made contact again almost knocked him over. Bosco had stopped and was looking with great intensity at a flat rock cantilevered out from the mountain like the abandoned first section of a bridge.
‘This is the Great Jut where Satan tempted the Hanged Redeemer by offering him power over all the world.’ He turned to look at Cale. ‘I want you to come out there with me,’ he said, pointing at the end of the Jut.
‘You first.’
Bosco smiled. ‘I’m putting my life as much in your hands as you are in mine.’
‘Not really,’ replied Cale, ‘given there are thirty guards below us with spiteful thoughts on their mind.’
‘Fair enough. But do you think I’ve gone to all this trouble to try and throw you off a mountain?’
‘I don’t care to think anything about you.’
In the past Bosco would have beaten Cale severely for speaking to him like this. And Cale would have let him. It was then that Cale realized something, though he could not have said what it was exactly, about just how great was the change that had come over both of them in only a few months.
‘If I say no?’
‘I can’t make you and I won’t try.’
‘But you’ll have me killed.’
‘To be honest – no. But however great your hatred for me – something that gives me great pain – you must realize by now that you and I are bound together by unbreakable chains – I believe that’s the expression you used to Arbell Materazzi when we left Memphis.’
Perhaps Bosco realized how very close he was to having his neck broken. If he did, he didn’t show it. But there was anxiety there, the anxiety, incomprehensible to Cale, of someone who deeply wants to be believed, to be understood, and fears that they will not. ‘Besides,’ added Bosco, ‘I have something to tell you about your parents.’ With that he walked down the rough granite of the Great Jut. Cale watched him for a moment, shocked, as he was meant to be, by what Bosco had said. It is not easy to imagine the feelings of someone like Cale for whom the notion of mother and father was as notional as the sea to the landlocked. What would such a person feel in the moment they were told the ocean was just over the next hill? Cale walked out onto the Jut, a good deal more warily than Bosco – he was not afraid of heights but he did not love them. Besides, walking on the Jut proper it seemed a good deal more fragile than standing in front of it. As he came up behind Bosco his former master stepped aside as carelessly as if he were in the middle of the training field of the Sanctuary and gestured Cale up beside him, a few inches away from the dreadful spaceless fall below.