Once they arrived on the Golan, Cale and Vague Henri were run ragged by Van Owen, who put them to every unpleasant or pointless detail he could find for them, not difficult when moving around in the freezing winds was a torture even in performance of the simplest task. Van Owen kept the Purgators in the worst and coldest quarters and supplied them as poorly as he was able.
‘Who are those people?’ he asked Cale of the aloof Purgators. ‘I don’t like the look of them. There’s something not right here.’
Despite the fact that he knew that Bosco was right and that giving anything away to someone who wished you ill was the mark of childishness, he simply could not stop himself.
‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, Redeemer, no straight thing was ever made.’ It was perhaps the most famous saying of St Barnabus, he of the preserved foot. And the especial devotion of Van Owen.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’
‘No, Redeemer.’
‘So I ask you again. Who are these people?’
Another famous saying of St Barnabus was: a truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent. Cale knew this because he had looked up a Life of the saint in the library the night before they had left the Sanctuary. He was impressed by the saying about the truth because he thought St Barnabus had well said something he had learnt himself about telling lies when he was still only a small boy.
‘They are men who have transgressed but are atoning by especial bravery for their errors. More I have sworn on the foot of St Barnabus not to say.’
Had Van Owen been used to being cheeked by acolytes he might more easily have realized he was being mocked. It was an error too far, thought Cale, and even as he said it he despised his own stupidity. God knows what might have happened if Van Owen had been familiar with the drollery of cocky young boys. Van Owen was not sure what he thought about the unlikeable boy in front of him (other than that he did not like him). Boy saints were not unknown although he himself had never met one. Usually they were saints because they had died proving their holiness and were therefore not able to become a nuisance. There had not been a boy warrior particularly recognized as chosen by God for three hundred years -St Johan – and he had conveniently died of smallpox a few years after he had defeated the Cenci at St Albans. A chosen boy who had lovely visions of the Redeemer’s mother and a way with incomprehensible prophecies that might be usefully interpreted by wiser heads was one thing – a tergiversating sheep in wolf’s clothing was something else again, particulary one who was in Bosco’s pocket. The problem for Van Owen was that he was more than a self-serving, ambitious sly-boots (which he most definitely was); he was also a pious believer in the Hanged Redeemer. What if the odious twerp in front of him was not just some swashbuckling Mohawk with a talent for butchery but was blessed by God? Making a mistake in this matter was about more than politics; it might involve his immortal soul.
The unusually extreme weather that had brought the snow changed as quickly as it arrived. The knife-cold winds from the north were replaced by the usual warmer winds from the east that brought with them a thaw which melted the snow in less than three days. The earth of the Machair was light and peaty and the vugs and follicles of the catchiform rocks on which it lies drained the meltwater as easily as if it were an unplugged bath in one of the palazzos in Memphis.
Busy now with his preparations, Van Owen had no time to think about Cale and as soon as Cale could he dragged Vague Henri with him in search of extra food for the Purgators.
‘Let them starve,’ said Vague Henri. ‘Let them freeze. I hope they catch the hog cholera so their spines bend over sideways and their rotting left ear falls into their right-hand pocket.’
‘Pull yourself together, Vague Henri. Sooner or later your life and, more to the point, my life are going to depend on them.’
It was on one of these useless tasks, the unnecessary guard duty to a wagon train bringing fuel from the Sluff coalfields some ten miles to the south of the Golan, that a singular event took place. Forced on their return to take a byway back to the Golan because of a small avalanche that had closed the main road, they found themselves skirting the dreary smelting sheds that relied on the coalfields for the heat in the manufacture of iron and the much rarer steel, so expensive and difficult to make that it was rarely used by the Redeemers. As they came over a low hill both saw the great pile beneath at almost the same moment. They reined their horses and stared down at the great stack beneath them, silent, shocked, horrified. Thrown together in a huge heap, wind-whipped and only partly covered in snow was the armour of the Materazzi from the great disaster at Silbury Hill. From a distance it looked like a vast pile of shells from some human-shaped creature of the sea, empty and discarded like the crab and lobster shells scooped out and abandoned beside the seafood stalls of Memphis Bay. Within five minutes they were at the gates of the storage dump where two old men were standing at a brazier keeping themselves warm while they watched half a dozen men loading a wagon with bits and pieces from the great mound of armour in front of them.
‘What’s going on?’
The oldest man looked at him wondering whether the boy Redeemer was worth being insolent to. He took a middle line.
‘These are the barbicans from that victory over the Mazzi. Where are they now in all their pride?’ Then he added piously, ‘Come to dust.’
‘Where are they taking them?’
‘To be melted down. Over there. In the great smelter. Nowt workin’ now though. Not ’nuff coal, d’ysee, with this weather the way it is.’
The men at the wagon were working quickly, not out of zeal but to try and keep warm. One of them was singing as he worked, a blasphemous mixture of one of the Redeemers’ most revered hymns and a pub song about Barnacle Bill.
‘OOOOH Death and Judgement and Heaven and Hell
Are the last four things on which we dwell
I’d rather dwell on Marie the whore
And what she does with a cucumbore!’
The others, frozen, carried on clearly not listening, pulling apart the armour section by section, cutting the leather straps where they’d not rotted then, throwing the lighter bits and pieces onto the wagon – gauntlets clanged, casques and back plates clattered, armlets and cubiteries pinged and set up a clank and a racket as they rattled over each other as they filled the wagon up. One of the men noticed Cale and Vague Henri. ‘Shut up, Cob!’ The singer stopped instantly, his good humour replaced magically by alert hostility.
Cale stood and watched Vague Henri walk over to the pile.
‘It’s a dollar if you want to look, pal,’ said one of the men.
‘Shut your gob,’ said Vague Henri pleasantly.
‘You’se not allowed here.’
‘And now it’ll be two dollars,’ said the singer.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I’ll give you what you deserve.’
Cale walked over to the men and gave them a dollar wordless. What had put such a bend in Vague Henri?
‘We agreed on two.’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
He turned his back on the men who seemed to agree that indeed pushing their luck was not a good idea. Cale watched as Vague Henri walked among the strewn armour along the bottom of the great pile and bent down to pick up a half-crushed helmet. It had an enamel badge above the nosepiece just slightly bigger than a man’s thumb – a red and black chequerboard and three blue stars.