‘A bad girl,’ said Vincenza. ‘What a wicked thing to do.’
‘I used to like her,’ said a now sad Vague Henri. ‘Kleist never did.’
‘I think your friend Kleist was right not to like her.’
‘I don’t think Kleist liked anybody.’
Unknown of course to Vague Henri this, if it ever had been true, was certainly no longer the case. Kleist was now happily, not to say ecstatically, married, not that among the Klephts this was particularly complicated. It was a simple, even cursory, affair without the weeks of pointless feasting and ruinous expense, as Daisy’s father complacently pointed out, of the even humblest Musselman wedding. ‘What a performance! What on earth for?’
In fact the Klephts were always anxious to pick up news of Musselman weddings in the hope that those they couldn’t rob on their way to the ceremony they could rob on the way back. And it was during a particularly epic one of these even more fabulous than usual marriage celebrations that Kleist first went to work on behalf of his new relatives.
Realizing that large numbers of men would be away in one place for the duration, the Klephts launched a raid on Musselman territory and given the considerable nature of the opportunity they put more men into the raiding party than it was their usual habit to risk. Though carefully calculated, it turned out to be unwise. The Musselmen had spread the rumours of the great marriage solely as bait for the Klephts and having drawn them in had sprung the trap and surrounded them in the Bakah Valley, also with considerable skill and great cunning. Suveri had led a breakout from the valley at night and tried to lead the bulk of those who had survived the first day back to the mountains. It was a long way and a difficult one and he would certainly have died along with his seventy men if it had not been for Kleist. For the next three days the two hundred and fifty Musselmen, who had tried to follow with every intention of massacring them, were picked off by a sixteen- or possibly fifteen-year-old boy they never even saw. By the end of the third day Kleist had killed so many of them he had become sick of the slaughter and, much to his new father-in-law’s annoyance, just shot their horses from under them. But when the screams of the animals also became too much to bear he just fired warning shots. With such terrible losses and all their attempts to find their tormentor a failure, the Musselmen reluctantly turned back, taking their dead with them and leaving the victory to Kleist, who returned to the mountains both pleased with his work and also somewhat low at how easy it was to kill other human beings in such large numbers. If he did not stay down for long, neither, in a small but marked way, was he ever quite the same again. He knew it was a terrible thing to kill a man because he felt most strongly that he did not want to be killed himself. He had worked hard to stay alive even in the Sanctuary, a place where he now understood that life was not really worth living. So he knew he ought to feel worse than he did - even though he felt bad for a few days after killing so many. But something nagged at him, perhaps the conscience the Redeemers were always blathering on about but never showed any signs of possessing themselves. But it was not strong enough to be remorse or guilt, just strong enough to tell him that the Redeemers had made their mark on him, not the one they intended but one that would never go away. He did wonder from time to time what he would have been like if he had never gone into the Sanctuary. Utterly different that was for sure. But what had been done couldn’t be undone so there wasn’t much point worrying about it. And, by and large, he didn’t.
15
There is a children’s rhyme about the Laconics to which the guttersnipes of Memphis used to skip and sing.
The Ephors of Laconia
Like skeletons but bonier
Their soup is black and so’s their wit
They throw their babies in a pit
ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!
They kill their slaves and just for fun
They go and kill another one
They carry coffins on their heads
And sleep in them instead of beds
FIVE! SIX! SEVEN! EIGHT!
They whip their children with a stick
They beat them black and blue with it
And if they wince or make a sound
They treat them to another round
NINE! TEN! ELEVEN! TWELVE!
There is a forbidden final verse not to be sung in the presence of adults or snitches.
Their children aren’t for fighting just
They use them for their wicked lust
It’s dreadful what they do to them
They stick it up their B! U! M!
While most of this verse is whispered, the final three letters are to be shouted as loud as possible.
Cale lay down to read the brief Bosco had sent him full of the cocky disdain common to the excellent when it came to those who were rumoured to be better. This soon became simple fascination at the peculiar details of what he was reading.
Admirers of the Laconic spirit and way of life (or Laconiaphiloidiods in the ancient Attic tongue) would regard the doggerel above as nothing more than street-urchin slander. But with the exception of the lines about coffins – which seems to be an entirely childish invention – the accusations in the song have strong backing from those less smitten than the Laconiaphiloidiods with this most strange of all societies. The Laconics, whose country resembled a barracks more than a nation, regarded themselves ‘the most free of all the peoples of the earth’ because they were dominated by no one and produced nothing of any kind whatsoever. They were a state where there was only one skill with which they were solely preoccupied: warfare. Healthy boys born into the Laconic peoples belonged to the state and at the age of five were taken away from their families – if such a thing could be really said to exist – and trained to do one thing, ‘kill or die’, until they reached the age of sixty something; it must be said, they rarely did. If they were not born healthy they were, as the gutter song rightly claimed, thrown into a chasm know as the Deposits. If the Laconics had written poetry, which they didn’t, little of it would have been about the pleasures or pains of old age. They paid for this single-minded pursuit of violence in two ways. At any one time up to a third of their number, which never exceeded more than thirteen thousand, were engaged in mercenary activities for which they were famously well paid. The bulk of the Laconic state was financed by the existence of the Helots. The term ‘slave’ is insufficient to describe the subjugation and bondage of these miserable peoples, which is what they were. Unlike the slaves in the Materazzi Empire and elsewhere, the Helots were not a mix of races captured here and there and sold on from owner to owner. They were conquered nations, subordinated in their entirety and who now farmed what had once been their own land and made goods for trade that were owned entirely by the Laconic state. The Laconics brought their children up in barracks to fear nothing but one thing and that was their Helots. Vastly outnumbered by these state serfs who surrounded them in huge numbers, their continued subjugation of the slaves slowly became as one thing with their obsession with war. The Helots made the Laconics’ single aim in life possible but were also the greatest threat to that life. Suppression of the Helots who had once been the means to wage war endlessly had now become the reason why it was now indispensable they do so. The vicious dog with razor teeth became obsessed with biting its own tail.
The Laconics were ruled by five Ephors elected from the small number who survived past their sixtieth birthday. The song’s reference to their alleged boniness is not borne out by any known historical fact. It is often said by those who detested the Laconics, and there were many, that the famous Laconic humour was humour at the expense of others, especially the physically disabled, whom they despised. This was not always true if the famous story about the Ephor Aristades is true. Once every five years all Laconic males were permitted to vote for the execution of any Ephor who had generally displeased them by his foolishness or pride, or indeed for whatever reason, the sentence only to be carried out if the votes against exceeded one thousand. Knowing that the number of votes for his death was rapidly approaching that number, the Ephor Aristades was asked by an illiterate citizen from the sticks, who had never clapped eyes on him, to write the name, if he would be so kind, of ‘that bastard Aristades’ on a clay tablet used for voting. It was considered greatly to his credit as a wit that he cheerfully obliged. He is said to have survived by only two votes. There was little else to laugh about for a child born into the Laconian state. The joke in Memphis was that the children thrown into the Deposits were the lucky ones. Once assigned to a barracks the food was as bad as that given to Redeemer acolytes but there was much less of it. This meanness was intended to make them ingenious in having to steal in order to stay alive. If caught they were severely punished, not for immorality but for showing a lack of skill in the execution of their larceny. There is a story that a ten-year-old having stolen a pet fox belonging to the Ephor Chalon with the intention of eating it found himself called into a parade before he could wring its neck and hide it. It is claimed that rather than reveal its presence and demonstrate his failure amongst his fellows, he allowed the fox to eat his entrails and dropped down dead without uttering a sound. Those who found this tale completely implausible before they encountered the Laconics were never quite as sure once they had done so.