Bosco had been working the Office for the Propagation of the Faith like donkeys, spreading the word of Cale’s victories in the veldt to every corner of the Redeemerate and stressing his many qualities: his bravery, cunning, holiness, kindness, compassion for the poor; unofficial rumours of miracles were started, stories of Redeemer soldiers of dreadful piety meeting him and then having visions of St Redeemer Jerome, blood pouring from his severed hands, and of St Redeemer Finlay, who had been wrapped in a blanket steeped in pitch and then set fire to like a match.
Unaware of this consider Cale’s astonishment as, by way of a slower and more populous route ordered by Bosco, he made his journey back to the Sanctuary from the veldt. He found that even in the back of beyond there were people by the road bowing and calling to him for a blessing, some of whom had walked for days on the rumour of his passing by. In the towns and villages subject to the cruelty and destruction of punitive raids by the Folk, men and women wept with thankfulness and burst into hymnal songs of sacrifice and martyrdom.
‘Faith of our fathers, living still. In spite of dungeon, fire and sword!’
The hairs on his neck spiked unpleasantly to hear that particular hymn again.
Even in places far removed from the raids of the Folk, statues of the saints were paraded, holy gibbets that had not seen the light outside a church for a dozen generations were raised in the noonday sun. To Gil’s scandal and alarm the blind and scrofulous were dragged forward to touch the hem of Cale’s cassock or even the hair of his horse so that he might intercede with heaven for their sake.
By the time they were on the winding road up to the Sanctuary, Gil hardly knew what to think. Even the apparently affectless Cale looked as if something peculiar was going on in his brain, more than just his loathing of the sight of the Sanctuary walls.
Halfway up the massive rock on which the Sanctuary was built, their column was joined by the Officer of Mortification. It was his task, one he performed with enormous satisfaction, to remind a victorious returning Redeemer that all human achievement was utterly futile. All the way up the second half of the mountain and through the great gates and into the Courtyard of Repentance, the Officer of Mortification whispered in Cale’s ear: ‘Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return. Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return ...’ At the twentieth time of saying Cale turned his head towards him and whispered back: ‘Shut your gob.’
The Officer was so astonished at this he did indeed stay silent all the way until they were in the courtyard where the great phalanx of the six orders of the Knights of St Redeemer Barnabus waited for Cale’s return and the Officer felt safe enough to continue, this time shouting aloud for the benefit of the faithful.
‘Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ And then ‘STOP!’
Cale did so. ‘Turn to me.’ Again he did as he was asked. In his left hand the Officer of Mortification held a whitish linen bag. He reached inside and took a pinch of the contents, the mixed ashes of the twenty-four martyrs of the great burning at Aachen and raising them to Cale’s forehead drew the simplified shape of a gallows like an upside-down L.
‘Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell
The last four things on which we dwell
Mortification, death and sin
These are the clothes that we lie in.’
Cale looked around the great square for once ablaze with the High and Holyday colours of the Redeemers in the multilayered ordered blocks of the Sodalities to which each one of them belonged. There were the Bon Secours in vestments red and gold, Lazarites in white with their gurning Servitors, Knights of the Curia ululating the charm and beauty of the One True Faith, the Necrotic Asphyxiates with hempen ropes around their necks, rubbed raw. There were the Scarlatti in crimson bowler hats, the Quinzième in green and black braces, faces covered by a hood that towered to a point, hands rolling in perpetuity the fifteen beads of sorrow one by one. Opposite on their knees were Batteni with the cincture of abstinence around their waist, knotted with the seven nodes of denial of the flesh and wearing dried pigeon peas inside their socks. There were Fromondi with knittles singing a hallelujah from the throat, the Peccavi lamenting the loss of the many and the finding of the few. Then Bosco began to walk along their ranks with a reedy aspergill in hand, shaking over them the waters of affliction and the oils of grief. At every tenth Redeemer he stopped and offered them salt to represent the bitter taste of sin and they accepted the rebuke with tears. Then he placed a five-fold scapular around their necks, yoke of the Redeemer, burden of the Lord, while behind him a thurifer swung his thurible incensing the faithful in their penitential gorgeousness.
And then the singing began in earnest, the bass notes of the Alimenteri so deep the hearing of them seemed to begin somewhere in the stomach, shaking the bowels like some great underwater tow. Then softly the lighter tones of the cantabile that merged and clashed and merged again as if they were different songs. Then the high notes of the juveniles, pure as ice, freezing the hairs along Cale’s spine, the sound rising to heaven with a pitch so terrible it made him want to scream. Then it slowly began to end, first the high pitch of the young boys, then the middle tones and then the gradual diminishing of the bass rolling away like a storm passing out to sea.
It was beautiful beyond imagining. And yet he hated it.
When he had first come to the Sanctuary he had been uncomprehendingly impressed by the extraordinary sights and sounds of a major holyday – a vast but vague pageant of noise and colour to such a small boy. As he grew older the holydays began to clarify into the hideous boredom of the ceremonies and the power of the music. Those with a talent practised for hours every day out of hearing – Cale himself had been tested for the quality of his voice and dismissed with the observation that he sounded like a cat having its throat cut with a rusty saw. Unkind but not untrue. So four times a year he heard the choir and the orchestra perform and grew to love it and hate it in equal measure. How could the dead souls of the Redeemers produce anything to move him so?
Then the procession into the great basilica and the Mass for the Dead, not for the legions of those killed in the cause of the faith but for the souls of those unsaved who had died before hearing the word of the Hanged Redeemer. In sorrow and mourning all the statues of martyrs, the sister of the Hanged Redeemer and all the thousand holy gibbets in the Sanctuary, large and small, had been covered in purple silk and would remain so for another forty days until at the exact same second the pins that held them closed were pulled away and the purple cloth would shimmer to reveal the beautiful smiles, the tortured limbs, the wounds and weeping sores of holy suffering.
If the beauty of the Agnus Dei in the courtyard had shaken him, Cale had two hours of utter dreariness in the basilica to calm himself. Without the great music to endow them with its command the reds and blacks and golds of high hats and curiously shaped vestments, the burning incense and the waving hands in elaborate blessings were reassuringly dull and ridiculous, soothing to his fury at the insulting loveliness of the sound of the three great choirs of the Sanctuary. The stupidity and ugliness of the Prayer of Self-Loathing was especially dreary balm to his resentment:
‘Less than the dust beneath my feet
Less than the weed that grows beside my door