It was then that Vague Henri arrived, the donkey scout still three hundred yards behind. He looked at the dead men around him.
‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said to the surviving Purgators, eight of them. Cale stared at him knowing exactly what he meant and that it was not a compliment.
‘Strip a pair of them of armour and weapons and quickly.’ Within a couple of minutes they were gone, taking their dead with them.
Despite Cale having come even closer to death than at Silbury, things turned out all right in the end. He learnt a lesson, although as he later said to Vague Henri, ‘I still don’t know what it was,’ and he lived. But the day hadn’t finished with him by any means.
Although the sedge and heathers of the battlefield of Eight Martyrs were robust enough, a fair stretch of them had been churned up and the mud underneath exposed and dragged over. Despite the freezing weather of only a week before, the warm winds from the sea that had melted the snow had grown even warmer. That afternoon it was unseasonably hot, and it brought new life where there was only hideous death. Midge eggs lay buried under the warmth of the sedge and several inches into the mud. Exposed by the battle, heated by the sun, they hatched in their millions and in only an hour they formed a whirling single column the size of the battlefield and rising to over a thousand yards above.
The nearly three thousand Redeemers who survived the carnage and escaped in a ragged mass towards the foot of the Golan looked back and saw something in the air that few of them had seen before – a cloud in the sky moving and shifting like no mist or fog but like something alive. Which, after all, was what it was – now like a weasel on its hinds, now like a camel, now to those who’d seen one very like a whale. But to most, exhausted, shamed, afraid and terrorized it looked like the Hanged Redeemer shaking his head in rage at the dreadful loss and blasphemy of the Laconic victory. And then finally the wind and the causeless flight of the insects changed and the grief-stricken visage of the saviour became for a moment the stern and watchful face of an implacable boy. Or so it later seemed certainly to many – even, after a few days, to a growing number who had not been there at all.
Within hours the survivors were beginning to stream back into the Golan and rumour began to spread like butter on miraculous bread: news of the promised end, that Jews had been swarming to Chartres to convert, that the four dwarf horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden through the streets of Ware, on Gravelly Hill a red dragon appeared standing over a woman clothed in the sun, and at Whitstable a beast from the land forced the people in the town to worship a beast from the sea. In New Brighton an angel appeared carrying the Wrath of God in a bowl. Once these reports became common knowledge, out of the horror of this hideous defeat came a strange exuberance. The story swept the Golan that an acolyte, a boy, had defeated a hundred soldiers of the enemy with the jaw bone of an ass and had rescued Redeemer Van Owen from the Antagonist traitors who had betrayed his army to their enemies.
While this last rumour was not entirely untrue, neither was it entirely accidental. Bosco’s fellow travellers in the Golan, along with those who knew and who believed, found that their garbled version of the numbers and events on Pillock Hill had fallen on desperately willing ears. Events at last conspired with them. The Laconics, instead of advancing either to try and take the Heights or even go around and take the entrenched Redeemer line from the rear, to the astonishment of all stayed exactly where they were. Within hours every Redeemer on the Golan knew beyond certainty that the Laconics had halted because the vision of the Hanged Redeemer and his manifested Wrath had stilled them with the fear of God.
It was neither midges nor God that caused the Laconics to pull back into the camp they had already occupied for a week before the fight but a terrible nagging and habitual fear. It has been wisely said that if you put all your eggs in one basket you’ll end up spending all your time watching the basket. It’s an even more worrying prospect if the eggs in that one basket are unusually rare. This was the heart of the problem for the Laconics. Their capacity to work together like dancers in the chaos and horror of the battlefield was created out of a lifetime of brutal care and violent solicitude. Each one of them cost a fortune in time and money and the treasure needed to buy that time was earned by slaves. These slaves were not brought from the four quarters of the earth, their families and all their other ties destroyed in the process, but by the bondage of entire peoples living with them cheek by jowl – the slaves many, the Laconics few. There was barely a Laconic warrior who was afraid of death but not one who wasn’t fearful of the men and women that he owned. At the Battle of Eight Martyrs the Laconics killed fourteen Redeemers for every one of them that died. And yet they were traumatized by this loss. The effort that had gone into the grave with those eleven hundred men was such that they could never entirely be replaced even within a generation, the Laconics being so few and their training so long and hard.