Bosco reached across the table and fetched Cale an enormous blow to the face. This time it was Cale’s turn to be stunned by shock into inaction.
‘You must forgive him,’ said Bosco calmly to Van Owen. ‘I have indulged him in the interests of his talents for the glory of our Redeemer and he has grown big-headed and insolent. If you will excuse us you will have every assistance and I will punish him. I am deeply sorry.’
Such humility from his enemy was almost as surprising as the rudeness of Cale, and Van Owen found himself nodding idiotically and then outside in the corridor as Bosco showed him to the door and closed it behind him.
The Redeemer General turned barely breathing to look at Cale. It was not a pleasant sight. The boy had gone white with fury, an expression Bosco had never seen before not just on Cale but on anyone.
‘There is a knife in the drawer just on the left,’ said Bosco. ‘But before you kill me, which I know you can do, just hear me out.’
Cale did not reply or even change his expression but neither did he move.
‘You were about to say something that could have changed the world. Never,’ he said, softly but shaking slightly, ‘never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.’
Cale still did not move – but slowly a sort of colour, a kind of inhuman reddish tinge began to return to his face.
‘I’m going to sit down,’ said Bosco. ‘Over here. Then when I’ve finished you can decide whether or not to kill me.’ For the first time since he had turned back from the door he looked away from Cale and sat down on a wooden bench against the wall. Cale’s eyes lost the yellowy wild-dog look as something human began to seep back into them.
Bosco let out a deep breath and began talking again.
It was twenty-four hours before Cale turned up in the convent to tell Vague Henri what had happened.
‘I came this close,’ said Cale, holding his thumb and forefinger almost together, ‘to killing him.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘My guardian angel, my guardian angel stopped me.’
Vague Henri laughed.
‘Did he give you a name? Because I’d like to thank him, that guardian angel of yours. He saved my neck.’
‘Don’t be too pleased because there’s bad news too.’
‘What?’
‘Bosco made a bargain with Van Owen to take me and the Purgators with him.’
‘Why?’
‘As observers. He told him that me and the Purgators however successful in the veldt had a lot to learn from a soldier like Van Owen. That and a bribe.’
‘A bribe?’ Vague Henri was wide-eyed at this. Perhaps there’s a point beyond which the human heart contains so much loathing it cannot be added to. That was certainly what it seemed like to Vague Henri when he thought about the Redeemers. But he was shocked almost by the idea of one of them accepting a bribe.
‘Bosco offered him,’ said Cale, ‘the preserved foot of St Barnabus. Van Owen has a personal devotion to St Barnabus. You know that stuff that the cats in Memphis go off their tracks for – he was just like that.’ Cale could not bring himself to tell Vague Henri that he also had to apologize to Van Owen. It was necessary but heart-scalding.
You must eat it up, Bosco had said. You will shortly watch him fail and that will make up for it.
Are you sure he’ll fail?
No.
‘What’s the bad news?’ said Vague Henri.
‘You’re going to come with me.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Because I asked for you.’
‘What the bloody hell did you do that for?’
‘Because I need you with me.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘You should think better of yourself.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the way I think about myself.’
‘I need someone to listen to my ideas. Who else can I talk to?’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘I’ll bet you don’t. I’ll bet you’d rather stay here getting your end away with a shoal of beezles who think the sun shines out of your backside – but you can’t. Time to wake up.’
‘All right!’ shouted Vague Henri. ‘All right! All right! All right!’ He breathed out like a bad-tempered horse and swore. ‘When?’
‘Tomorrow as he purposes.’
‘Why is Bosco letting me go?’
‘Because he thinks we won’t, either of us, leave the girls in the lurch.’
‘And will we?’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
Vague Henri did not reply directly.
‘At least it explains why he let us enjoy the sins of the flesh.’
‘It explains why he let you enjoy them. He let me in there because you can’t corrupt the Wrath of God.’
‘And is that what you are?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You keep asking me that.’
‘Because I want to know. I value your opinion – I told you.’ There was a pause. ‘Talking of which, what do you think about taking my acolyte, Model, into the convent before we go?’
‘Why?’
‘It would be a kindness. Who knows what will happen to us? He might never get a chance to see a woman.’
Vague Henri looked at him, furious now.
‘They’re not animals in the Memphis Zoo. They don’t belong to you so you can lend them out to your pals.’
‘All right, keep you hair on. I don’t remember you objecting when it was your turn.’
‘They’re not turns.’
‘Have it your own way. Good God! It was just an idea.’
Vague Henri did not reply.
The next day, two hours into the journey to the Golan Heights, Vague Henri was cold, miserable and deeply, deeply missing the lovely girls he’d left behind, nearly all of them in tears except for his favourite Vincenza who kissed him on both cheeks and then lightly on the lips. He shivered, and not from the cold, as he remembered what she had whispered in his ears between these soft kisses. She, wisest of the girls by far, was signalling him out as hers.
‘Come back to me and I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.’
He missed them horribly and who can blame him. If there was a heaven how could it be better than life in the convent? Other, of course, than not being surrounded by hell. And that was the problem of problems – he was, he knew, willing to go through hell to get back to them but he was not able to. There was only one person with the skill required, the menace and the violence and the rage.
It was another six days before they made it to the Golan. The Golan is a great ridge about forty miles long and the same distance from the Pope’s formal palace in the holy city of Chartres whose right flank it protected. The right side of the Golan led to the eastern Macmurdos, mountains impassable to any army before they descended two hundred miles later into a pass, Buford’s Gap, disputed by both the Laconics and the neutral Swiss. This was the one weakness in the natural defences of the Redeemers on the east of the Golan. If the Laconics did agree to join the Antagonists this gap was the place through which they would attack. To the left of the Golan, Chartres and the vast Redeemer territories behind it were protected by the Fronts – a line of trenches sometimes ten deep and stretching the five hundred miles to the next natural defence: the Weddell Sea. Time out of mind the Antagonists had been pinned behind these great defences, natural and manmade. Only the fortune in silver discovered at Argentum would be enough to persuade the Laconics to put an entire army in the field because it was their policy never to hire out more than three hundred soldiers at once to protect their greatest resource from disaster. They also had to be bribed to risk war with the Swiss over ownership of Buford’s Gap, otherwise a place of no great strategic importance to either side.
It was no summer progress for the Laconics to the Golan. Normally a place of mild winters which made a campaign at such an unusual time worth contemplating if the money was right, a cold coming they had of it, just the worst winter in living memory. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days bitter, the nights unbearable, Bosco reassured Van Owen his delay at the Sanctuary would not matter because however bad the weather was on Shotover Scarp it would be worse for the Laconics trying to make their way across the Machair. On the rare occasions when it snowed there the winds moving over its wide and open spaces allowed the formation of huge drifts. The Laconics could take more adversity than any man but they could not fly so they were stuck where they were with their black soup and miserable Helots who died of the cold by the dozen.