‘Well?’ said Vipond when IdrisPukke wandered back to the recently vacated Jewish ghetto, the Chief Rabbi having decided that the Redeemers being in the ascendant it was time to put as great a distance between them and his congregation as was humanly possibly – which was to say so far that any further and they would be on their way back.
IdrisPukke gave his half-brother a summary.
‘Will he see me?’
‘No.’
‘To be fair, neither would I in his position.’
‘You men of the world,’ mocked IdrisPukke. ‘So shocking.’
‘Will he see you again perhaps?’
‘It depends. You know his type – always want you to know they’ve got a finger up your arse.’
‘So to speak.’
‘He’s uncertain what to do next, for all his vanity. But he wants you off his municipality as soon as he can. Depending on that old bastard Zog’s kindness isn’t much of a guarantee.’
‘No.’ There was a long silence.
‘What do you think Cale will do?’
‘What can he do but wait? Ikard has put most of his troops to the margins. Cale and Vague Henri are facing six hundred miles of Antagonist trenches and a two-hundred-mile line of twitchy Swiss border troops. He’ll be staying put, I’d say.’
There was a knock on the door which was instantly opened from outside. The guard, all reverence and solicitude, showed Arbell Materazzi into the room. She might well be the last ruler of the Materazzi, a rump now so diminished as to be barely thought of as being ruled, but at least she looked like the almost queen she was. Older, more beautiful, suffering having given her a kind of grey power to her looks. Everything had changed in only a few months, her world destroyed, her father dead, now first among the remaining Materazzi, married to her cousin, Conn, and heavily pregnant.
21
It was another four days before the Laconics began to move, as Cale had hoped, around the back of the Golan and directly to take Chartres. Whatever the losses they had taken of their profoundly precious soldiers during the victory on the Machair these deaths had to be balanced against their need for Antagonist silver. Their only alternative to the money gained from hiring out military power was the wealth provided by the vast number of Helot serfs who lived in Laconia and the enslaved countries that surrounded it on nearly all sides. They could terrorize the Helots and purge their leaders but doing so only decreased the Laconics’ income – a dead slave was a dead slave – and ensured that the Helots repeatedly threatened to rebel because the Laconics killed them in large numbers whether they did so or not. Every cull of a few thousand Helots made them smug in the short term but more suspicious in the long. Unafraid of death they were nevertheless terrified of annihilation. This was what drove the Laconics back to the battlefield and the attack on Chartres.
Cale’s immediate concern was that the Laconics might have worked out that the Redeemers were going to try and stop them with the wall of the Golan on one side and, admittedly, only a slight rise on the other. The rise did little more than inhibit their level of sight of a much bigger field of battle, but for all its apparent unimportance it was almost as good as a great stone wall in that it would serve to funnel them into a much narrower space than anything before or after it. Once Cale could engage them not even the Laconics would be able to rearrange themselves mid-battle.
Unfortunately for Cale the newly elected Laconic King, Jeremy Stuart-Clarke, had indeed seen the problem but his choices were limited: he could move on Chartres via the Golan and risk the dangers of a bottleneck or he could stay where he was and wait, using up the valuable supplies he had only just received and bringing his men not only to a physical halt but also a mental one. However well disciplined no soldier was ever a patient man. Soldiers went off the boil and having prepared themselves for a final push after a drearily long wait, stopping dead again was not something King Stuart-Clarke would do without good reason. He did not have one. Moving further south to attack Chartres from the flatter rear would take at least a week and give the Redeemers even more time to prepare – and they had been given enough of that. He knew the Antagonists were about to put extra pressure on them by attacking the trenches that extended west from the Golan – a manoeuvre he could not delay now and which would be completely pointless if he did not press on directly.
He weighed one set of risks against another and given he had already slaughtered one Redeemer army he thought it sensible to continue. Besides, the entire camp had been afflicted with an unpleasant stomach ailment which, while not as bad by a long way as dysentery, had left almost everyone with terrible runs and unpleasant stomach pains. All risks balanced it made by far the most sense to take the shortest route to Chartres.
It was with a mixture of delight and sudden fear that Cale watched the Laconics, after a pause of nearly three hours, move into his only advantageous defensive battlefield for a hundred miles in any direction. But now it occurred to him that in his two previous experiences of a major battle he had been watching from a place of safety, a dismissive onlooker full of opinions as to what was being wrongly done. Now standing facing this most terrible of armies he was forced to recognize the difference between knowing something and feeling it. Now he felt the difference. For some reason it was a different fear from the one that had left him motionless with terror in the fight with Solomon Solomon in the Red Opera. This time it was his knees that seemed to suffer from terror. They were actually shaking. In the Red Opera it had been a terrible palsy in his chest.
He had ordered a tower built to the rear of his last line of men so that he could see the battle unfold but now he was worried that he would not be able to climb the thin ladder of the lightweight structure. He looked at his knees as if to rebuke them. Stop shaking. Stop. And on came the Laconics in their lazy squares. For a moment everything seemed hopeless, his soldiers weak, his ideas for defence and attack laughable in the face of the great device for killing moving slowly towards them. Then it was one foot on the ladder and another, slowly, a pause, another step. He wanted to be somewhere else, for there to be a rescuer for him, to take him away and keep him safe. Then another step and another. And then like a baby seabird reaching the shore after an over-ambitious swim in a rough sea he eased over onto the platform of the tower and was helped to his feet by the two guards already up there with their oversized shields to shelter him from arrows, bolts and spears. Staring out at the Laconics he calmed himself that it would be all right as long as nothing went wrong with the exploding Villainous Saltpetre.
Which it duly did. It started to rain. Villainous Saltpetre, as Hooke was later to explain, did not like water – or rather it liked water too much. It absorbed the slightest damp the way the desert sand loved rain. Within two minutes of the clouds opening the Villainous Saltpetre was as flammable as a marsh. Knowing this weakness, Hooke had been extremely careful to avoid demonstrating his invention whenever it was wet, not out of a desire to hide its vulnerability but simply because it would not work. His only experience of warfare had been on the veldt during a time of year when it never rained. In hindsight it seemed obvious that he should have mentioned it but it had simply never occurred to him, at least not until it started raining: the life of the experimenter was quite naturally a life that involved creating the best possible circumstances for his experiment.
Unaware of his damp nemesis, Cale watched the Laconic advance from his tower protected by the two Purgators and waited in high tension to give the signal to set fire to the oil-soaked fuses. It was an ecstatic and agonizing wait, then his signal came and the trumpets blew, harsh as crows. At the first note the front line of the Redeemers stepped back behind the yew stakes driven into the ground and then teams of two waiting hammered in more stakes into the gap so that while it was not a fence, as such, it was impossible for a man to slip between the gap, not least because all the stakes had sharpened meat hooks screwed into the stake itself at ten-inch intervals. Cale had had two teams of two practise their speed for twelve hours a day during the last two weeks and before the lit fuses reached the casks another layer of staggered hooked stakes had been hammered into the ground.