‘They are allies to the Antagonists,’ called out a Purgator.
‘Only in good weather. The Swiss are neutral in their nature – even when they offer help it never comes. Even so you must remove your cassocks before we cross – it’s no easy feat in any case – impossible if you’re dressed like this.’
‘You ask a great deal, Captain, to deny our faith.’
‘Keeping your mouth shut isn’t a denial of anything – just common sense.’
‘I thought we were brothers, Captain.’
‘And so we are. Just as I’m the eldest. Take your money and your pass and go. My promise is entente even now.’
‘I want to stay, Captain.’
‘No.’
‘I want to stay. I talk too much.’
‘I don’t. Leave.’
The rest of the Purgators, Cale could see, were shocked at the insolence shown to Cale and pleased by his arbitrary exercise of power. They were not used to the first and comforted by the second.
Realizing the entire mood of the Purgators was against him the man left quickly.
‘Should I follow him?’ said Vague Henri.
‘Follow him?’ replied Cale pretending not to understand.
‘You know what I mean.’
Cale shook his head.
‘You’ve grown very bloodthirsty in your old age.’
‘He’s just a Redeemer – the loyalty the pig farmer owes to the pig – right?’
Cale smiled. ‘You’ve been talking to Hooke. He’s a bad influence that man, as well as useless. As to the other, leave him alone. He’s too far from Chartres to do us any harm – even if he gets there. Which I doubt. I want you to take five men and let Fanshawe get a good look at you.’ He drew a few lines in the dust. ‘Then double back and we’ll wait for you here.’
23
You may have heard the devil referred to as Old Merk, a name taken from Nicholas Merk, the most infamous of those infamous diplomats for hire, the Talleyrand. Nevertheless for all the disgracefully cynical advice he handed out we must all admit an obligation to Merk: he tells us not how men ought to be but how they are.
‘A ruler determined to go on a foreign adventure should always take the path of conquest by plunder rather than conquest by possession. It is all very well for a great man to look at the maps on his wall and consider for how many hours the sun shines on his territories, but the problem with conquered peoples is that if you do not steal their possessions and leave at once you must run their country for them, repair their waterways so that they do not die of thirst, fill the potholes in the roads, stuff their granaries so that they do not perish of hunger. You must decide on their squabbles, which will usually be many and lethal, and pay your soldiers or theirs when the agreements you have so patiently negotiated break down, which they always do.
‘You may consider a conquered land to be like an inherited great house – wonderful to contemplate at first and worthy of blessing your good fortune but in reality nothing but trouble and a drain on your time, patience, blood and treasure. Steal!’
It was such a squabble of the endless kind Merk predicts that brought five hundred bad-tempered Redeemers marching into the foothills of the Quantocks to deal with an increase in the number of raids by mountain bandits on the local Musselman communities. It was cold and it was wet and there was little enough to eat because so much had been stolen from the Musselmen. The Redeemers could not see why they should be enduring these deprivations, not to say risking their lives, coming to the aid of people who were not even heretics. They worshipped false Gods, not even the right God wrongly like the Antagonists. It was not a habit of the new Redeemer Governor of Memphis to explain his actions to his men and nor did he, but the reasons were simple enough: Memphis must eat and the Musselmen provided the city with a significant proportion of its food. The actions of these mountain crooks were a fairly serious nuisance and an advertisement that Redeemer rules could be flouted and flamboyantly so. The expedition was not intended to restore order but to demonstrate to anyone watching what could be expected if Redeemer authority was challenged in any way. The Redeemers arrived as punishers not policemen.
While the notion of having nothing to do was certainly an agreeable one among the Klephts there was a deep antipathy to being obliged to have nothing to do and fulfilling that obligation in a prescribed place. Guard duty was therefore regarded with special loathing and while everyone under the age of forty was supposed to take their turn it was a custom, as Mary, Countess of Pembroke, used to say, ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’. Those who had the means paid others to take their place, generally those too lazy, useless and stupid to earn a living any other way. Now with so many of the daring and intelligent earning so much from the increased number of raids on Musselman territory there was more money around for more people to bribe the least competent of their fellows to stand on a hillside during winter in the extreme cold with nothing happening and nothing much likely to happen.
There were strict guidelines about the use of fires by the guards – only at night, small, in the recesses of light-smothering rocks and with the driest wood. It was not easy in the cold and rain to conform to these sensible but uncomfortable rules. There was also the sheer unlikeliness of an attack by the Musselmen in winter and at night. Blundering around on the steeps in the dark and in the ice or rain, possibly both, was as good a way to get yourself killed as any. Lying there in the cold or wet the temptation to take a tiny risk, probably not even that, and build up the fire a bit and use the damper wood because keeping anything dry up there was a mare, you could see how things would slip. And so the consequences of Kleist’s arrival worked themselves out: his talent gave the Klephts the opportunity for more raids and therefore more wealth and therefore more bribes, while all the time increasing the need for a watchfulness that actually grew less and less instead of more intense. And had it not been for Cale’s unintended heroism in saving Riba and all the disasters that grew from it, the guards calculating the balance of risk between catching pneumonia or getting their throats cut by Musselmen in the middle of the night would have been entirely reasonable. But they had not reckoned on the Redeemers. And why would they? But for all that, it was Redeemers who were crawling over the icy surfaces of Mounts How and Usborne and killing Klephts by the light of their forgivably overstoked fires.
But luck runs out even for the wicked and after the third set of Klepht guards had been piped they were spotted by an insomniac watchman who despite the larger fires had been too cold to sleep. He died in the fight but in the moil that followed one of the Klephts escaped and made his way home, warning the other outposts as he came. Now wary enough to stay alive, soon messengers with more detailed information arrived.
It did not take long as the story unfolded for Kleist to realize who he was dealing with.
‘Perhaps,’ said Suveri, ‘they’re Materazzi. They came about twenty years ago and burnt out half a dozen villages.’
‘There aren’t any Materazzi any more.’
‘Not official maybe. But there must be any number of trained men needing to earn a bob.’
‘They’re not Materazzi for hire or anything else,’ said Kleist.
He explained and for some time there was silence.
‘When the Materazzi came we just upped sticks and hid in the mountains. We wait them out, they burn the villages – a pity – but they can’t stay here for ever.’
There was considerable protest at this: their recent increase in wealth had started not just the richest to build themselves new houses more fit for their improved circumstances. Many were half finished and there was much resentment at the idea of abandoning them to be destroyed. This squabble continued for some time.