‘I’m obliged,’ said Fanshawe. Without an order Mawson, the blank expression of a much-experienced killer now absent, picked up his sedge blanket and leapt up behind Fanshawe as easily and gracefully as if he had pulled out a chair to sit down to his dinner. He looked much younger now.
‘Till we meet again, boys,’ said Fanshawe. With that he turned his horse and, pausing only to let Mawson pick up his knife, they were soon five hundred yards away and behind the rise he had emerged from only ten minutes before.
‘I don’t think,’ said Vague Henri, ‘I’m cut out for this stuff.’
‘You were absolutely gorgeous,’ said Cale. With that he went off to get his horse and they beat it back to the Golan as quickly as possible.
Fanshawe and Mawson, however, were not much further away than when the boys had seen them disappear behind the rise. They had found a small gulley and having spread the grass and sedge blanket beneath them were indulging themselves energetically in Laconic beastliness.
*
It was the night before the Battle of Eight Martyrs, so called because over the last six hundred years this number of Redeemers had given their lives for the faith in or around what was to be the battlefield. It was by no means a matter of luck that there should be a place of conflict already consecrated by the blood of martyrs. So hated were the Redeemers by their many adversaries that over hundreds of years there remained few places where one or more of them had not been hanged, decapitated, broken, dismembered, strangled, garrotted or crucified. There was an embarrassment of riches for the Redeemers when it came to naming battlefields after martyred saints. Indeed there was barely a village fist-fight that could not have been named after one.
Cale had not been asked to attend the final instructions for battle but neither had he been excluded. Lurking behind Van Owen’s battle shack with Vague Henri and waiting for a group to form at the door so he could slip inside unnoticed, Cale whispered to Vague Henri, ‘What have I got to do?’
‘Keep your big mouth shut.’
‘Right.’
Then five or six Redeemer subalts arrived and Cale followed them in, close behind, and moved to the darkest and most densely packed corner of the large room, which in any case was only well-lit where the large plan of the battle hung from the wall.
To Cale’s great disappointment Van Owen outlined nothing spectacularly stupid in the way of tactics. Neither was there anything interesting beyond the use of much heavier armour for the front rank of the Redeemers who would take the initial brunt of contact with the Laconics. Cale had to admit that given the little that Van Owen knew about Laconic field tactics – he did not, of course, have access to the testaments in Bosco’s library – it was hard to criticize any of his decisions. His only slight satisfaction was to sneer at the small size of Van Owen’s reserves. Given the two-to-one advantage, he thought Van Owen should have kept back a much bigger share of his army to give him the option to deal with anything unexpected.
‘On the other hand,’ said Vague Henri, after Cale had slipped out unobserved in the general rush to leave and prepare for the next day, ‘suppose he weakens his first attack by not using his better numbers. Keeping too big a reserve is like dividing your forces. I’m not sure I’d do much different in his place.’
‘Nobody asked you.’
‘You did as it happens.’
‘Well, now I’m sorry and I’ll pray to God for forgiveness.’
‘Do you? Still pray, I mean.’
Cale did not reply.
‘Well?’
‘Yes, I still pray.’ There was a pause. ‘I pray for deliverance from evil and having to look at your ugly face all day long.’
‘Me? I’m gorgeous. You said so yourself.’
When they got back to the Purgators’ hut there was a message from one of Van Owen’s adjutants: Cale and his men were to observe the battle if they wished but were instructed to stay away from either the command centre or the battlefield. On no account were they to intervene in any way whatsoever.
This was excellent news. Cale’s one fear was that Van Owen would include him in something dangerous out of spite. It was clear that in the event of victory or defeat he did not want to risk Cale making a further name for himself. Cale wrote back repeating the order and went cheerfully to sleep.
He gave most of the Purgators a lie-in the next day, something by which they were always delighted, but left at dawn with Vague Henri and ten men. At the opening of the gates the small band moved through the army as it stirred itself for the day’s action. They made their way around in front of the Field of Eight Martyrs mostly ignored by men with too much else on their mind and rode away to the north and to a small bluff with a good sight of the battlefield they had marked out before the encounter with Fanshawe. Cale had his men check their surrounds for Laconic outposts put in place since they were last there and confirmed for himself two routes of escape in case things went wrong. Then they climbed the bluff and waited in silence for the day to begin. Already the Laconics were loosely gathered at their end of the plain, though not in any disciplined formation but like a crowd at an unusually large county fair watching as the Redeemers deployed.
First of all came the Black Cordelias, seven thousand strong, armour covered in purple and the black from which they got their name. Even from a couple of miles away on the bluff the wind brought snatches of a hymn. The boys, laughing, began mockingly to sing along.
‘Remember man as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, so you must be
Prepare for death and follow me
Today me, tomorrow you
I am dust and you are too
Hideous the truth of Death
Dreadful is the final breath.’
The two boys grew nearly hysterical with joy – observing their enemies, whatever the outcome, going to their deaths and they watching safe and sound. Vague Henri remembered a song the quads in Arbell Swan-Neck’s palazzo used to sing. It took a moment to get the tune back and he had forgotten the first few lines.
‘Oh! Death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling
Oh! Grave thy victoreee?
The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for meee!’
The wind must have changed slightly as the hymns faded in and out of hearing but impressively dominating their formation was the giant censer the size of a cathedral bell the Black Cordelias always took into battle as it swung back and forth, incense blooming upwards in a great pillar of smoke.
Still the Laconics drifted about in front of their camp like a crowd watching a vaguely interesting pageant. Now the fourth army of the Golan, known as the Hierophants, with its five Sodalities, ten thousand in alclass="underline" the slaves of the Immaculate Heart, the Poor Simons of Perpetual Adoration, the Norbetines, the forbidding Oblates of Abasement and then, grimmest of all, the Brotherhood of Mercy. For the next hour the Redeemer army deployed: cloth of gold, ensigns of red, banners of purple, the petioles of the confessors, the pink fronds of the medical friars not allowed to touch the dying until they called out the unctions in extremis. All of it now to the sound of bagpipes loud enough to defy the everchanging wind and which Van Owen, watching from the promontory sticking out of the Golan, would signal once the battle started and the hymns stopped to act as his voice, each Sodality having its own particular sound and its own instructions to advance, turn or retreat.
Now when the Redeemers were half drawn up in line to attack, the Laconic soldiers began to move but still with the same lack of intensity with which they previously seemed to watch. But within less than three minutes they formed into a loose series of ragged squares as if from nowhere. But then it was as if they had lost interest again, the groups remained clear enough but still without the precise and martial discipline of formal rank and file. Now they watched again as the Redeemer second army finished its own formation – a continuing line of Black Cordelias to the front and the others formed behind six deep, the most lightly armoured and most mobile to the rear. In a tight group half a mile back stood a thousand reserves. Then with a trumpet blast the six pipers cut short their skirling music, the sound drifting in the wind like the last breath of a great and wounded animal.