‘But your experience is a good deal broader in the last eight months. In fact I’d say it was uniquely so. Clearly God ordained your escape and all the extraordinary things that have happened to you precisely so you could answer the question. You’ve walked hand in hand with the great and the good of this world, been loved in all the ways possible by the most beautiful, done mighty services and been mightily betrayed for your trouble.’
All of this had the great advantage from Bosco’s point of view of being more or less precisely what the young man himself believed to be the case: truth and self-pity formed a harmonious whole.
‘I’d say,’ continued Bosco, ‘that you’d seen as much as anyone that man is a wolf to man.’
‘Hypocrites,’ replied Cale, ‘I’ve come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are.’
‘That’s at my expense, I suppose,’ said Bosco, apparently not insulted. ‘If so, I’m afraid you must explain why.’
‘How do you look at me with a straight face and clack on about treachery?’
‘You’ve still lost me. Suppose I’d left you in the hands of the kind of people prepared to sell you for sixpence. Since the day you could walk you’d have been behind a plough staring at a horse’s arse for fifteen hours a day – stupid, ignorant, probably dead by now – a kind of nothing.’
‘God has been merciful. Besides, I thought I was special.’
‘There are a great many people who are born special. As the Hanged Redeemer said, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.”’
Cale laughed. ‘A flower? I am, it’s true, sweeter and more flowery than people give me credit for.’
‘Then let me put it more clearly: you were born to wade through slaughter to the throne of God. Many are called, few are chosen. But I chose you and made you fit to be the agent of the promised end.’
‘Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’
‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.’ He smiled an oddly fetching expression of self-awareness and mockery.
‘And?’
‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension how like a cow. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? To me the quintessence of dust.’ Bosco had seemed to lose himself but then looked intensely at Cale.
‘You disagree?’
Cale did not reply.
‘Leave your hatred of me to one side for a moment and consider your experience of the world. Do you disagree in your heart of hearts?’
There was another long pause.
‘Tell me more.’
‘This is not the first time the Lord has wiped away mankind for its failures. It is not generally known that there was a kind of Man before Adam. God destroyed him in a great flood in which he drowned the whole world and started again.’
‘Everything?’
‘Everything. Even to the last blade of grass.’
‘Sounds easy enough. Why not do the same again?’
‘Too many people, not enough water. Too much grass.’
‘Does the Pope believe any of this?’
‘Not exactly,’ replied Bosco, ‘but whatever he looses on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’
‘I don’t get ... Oh, I see.’ Cale thought about what he thought he saw. ‘You’re going to kill the Pope and take his place.’
‘If I didn’t know better I’d say you were more devil than angel. Do you really think you can kill a Pope anointed by God and not immediately damn yourself ?’
‘I suppose not.’
They sat in silence, Bosco wanting Cale to ask for an explanation. Knowing this, despite his curiosity, Cale declined to give him the satisfaction.
‘The Pope is not himself,’ said Bosco.
‘Who is he?’ replied an astonished Cale. It was not an expression he’d heard before.
‘No, I mean he’s not well. He is an old man and he is suffering from a disease of the mind – a weakening, one that’s slowly getting worse. He forgets.’
‘I forget.’
‘He forgets who he is.’
‘If he’s that bad he’ll die soon.’
‘He is that bad but people afflicted in this way often live for a long time – very long.’ He looked at Cale again enjoying the feeling of, once again, being master to his pupil.
‘What must I do?’ asked Bosco. It was not a question but a prompt that Cale should demonstrate his good judgement.
‘You must be there when he dies and become Pope.’
Bosco laughed. ‘A little easier said than done.’
‘You can laugh,’ said Cale, ‘but am I wrong?’
‘No – let’s look simply at complex things. That is, indeed, the end but what’s the beginning? Even for the very clever it can be like breaking bones to stand back from something that’s been in front of you all your life.’
‘How powerful are you?’ Cale asked after a long time.
‘Excellent,’ laughed Bosco. ‘When you murdered Redeemer Picarbo you were kind enough to promote me from, let’s say, tenth in line to the papacy to perhaps ninth.’
‘You wouldn’t have punished me?’
‘Hard to say. Your actions at the time were inconvenient. My plans for you – for all of this – were years in the future. Tenth in line to the papacy is not in line to the papacy at all. Your vanishing and my coming for you advanced everything in a most peculiar and unexpected way. Memphis is fallen. I have much of the credit and what is not mine is yours. I am now fourth in line to the papacy. Alas’ – he smiled – ‘fourth in line is, in reality, little better than tenth or twentieth.’
‘Who are first and second?’
‘To the point!’ mocked Bosco. ‘Gant and Parsi.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘Why would you? I was mistaken in thinking these things were premature when it comes to you.’
‘So now you’re going to tell me?’
‘Now I am going to ask you to work it out.’
‘Why not just tell me?’
‘Because you will see it more clearly if you do so. And also because it will give me greater pleasure.’
Told by the devil who has tormented you all your life that he will let you guess his secrets, what intelligent boy, however deep his hatred, might not be curious?
‘There was a book in the library with its own lock – the census. I managed to open others but not that.’
‘You did manage to break it trying, though.’
‘How big is the Redeemer empire?’
‘It’s not an empire, it is a commonwealth. The commonwealth has achieved enosis with forty-three countries and, according to the last census, has the chance to redeem one hundred million people.’
‘How big is the world?’
‘I have no real idea. Concerning the Indies and China we know little enough. But concerning the four quarters, not including Memphis, we are, perhaps, four times the size and many times wealthier than is generally held to be the case.’
‘Why not including Memphis?’
‘Memphis drew its clout from its military power. We conquered Memphis and destroyed the Materazzi but we did not conquer its empire: that merely collapsed. Each country in that empire has declared itself free and started squabbling with its neighbours about the same things it squabbled about before the Materazzi arrived. Taking Memphis has turned out to be a mixed blessing, and given time it may turn out not to be a blessing at all.’
‘If the Redeemer empire is so much bigger an empire than everyone thinks ...’
‘Commonwealth,’ interrupted Bosco.
‘... than everyone thinks, why are you stuck in the fight with the Antagonists?’
‘Good. Exactly so.’ Bosco was clearly pleased with this question. ‘The commonwealth of the Redeemers is not only large but bloated – full of contradictions. Some parts of the commonwealth are slack in their beliefs and so full of blasphemies they’re hardly better than Antagonists. Many extract from us more in subsidies than they pay in taxes. Others are fanatical in their beliefs but always arguing with each other after this or that doctrinal point. There are numerous schisms threatening to become full-grown heresies like Antagonism.’