‘Be careful,’ he said, at last. But she couldn’t speak as he took his hand away and she then tried to snatch it back. And then she found her voice – wrenched out of her with a fearful sob. ‘I’ll never hold it again.’
‘You will. I know how to stay alive. Believe me.’
And then she was moving away looking back at him all the time, although it hurt her neck and back as if they were in a splint. She did not take her eyes off him once until she had turned out of the village and was lost to sight.
Daisy’s father walked over to him.
‘Let’s hope you’re right.’ He almost said it aloud but what he was really hoping was that he was wrong.
*
Redeemer Rhodri Galgan was ten back from the front of two lines that trailed more than five hundred Redeemers down the pass at Simmon’s Yat. It was a steep climb and he was carrying nearly half his own weight in materiel. To keep his mind off his exertions he was praying to St Anthony.
‘Dearest Saint,’ he whispered under his breath, ‘for whom the fish rose out of the water to hear him preach, to whom a mule knelt down as you passed him by with a reliquary of the true gibbet and who restored the leg of a young man who cut it off in remorse for having kicked his mother, have mercy on a poor sinner: forgive my audacity, my lust and my cupidity, my pride and my gluttony, anger and fultony, envy and sloth, forgive me for both.’ Looking up for a moment from his supplications he noticed a small black object in the sky about sixty yards away. The very first tingling of fear had begun on the nape of his neck when the object moving faster than a falling stone struck him in the chest. All around him a dozen others fell but the dreadful pain and burning in his ears distracted him in the very few seconds he had left to live.
The Redeemers had barely grasped what had happened before fifty or so Klephts led by Kleist were already running away back up the Yat hoping to vanish before the Redeemers pulled themselves together and caught up with them. They would only be surprised once and Kleist waited just a little longer than the Klephts to see what the damage was. Perhaps a dozen, he thought, but not enough or anything like it. The trouble was that the passes were easy to ambush but were also wide enough to provide plenty of cover among the great boulders that had fallen down the sheer sides.
As he expected, the Redeemers shed most of the weight of their rucksacks and left them to be guarded by fifty men and moved on, but now in groups of ten moving up and on in spurts overtaking each other, taking cover and then being overtaken in turn. The first attack had slowed them but it was not enough.
‘You must take more risks,’ he said to the Klephts, ‘or they’ll catch the column.’
If he was surprised by their response it was because he had not entirely grasped their way of thinking. However much Kleist hated the notions of martyrdom and self-sacrifice he had been brought up to regard as the very essence of what it meant to be a worthy human being, they had nevertheless left their mark on his way of seeing war. The fact was that the Klephts would not die for an idea of freedom or honour (a notion they found not so much ridiculous as incomprehensible – what good were freedom or honour if you were dead?). On the other hand, they were still cautiously ready to do so for the lives of their families. The word for hero in the ancient language of the Klephts was synonymous with the word for buffoon – but they were not dead to the idea of reluctant courage of a kind only to be demonstrated when absolutely necessary, a kind of bravery known as brass. There are few men, after all, who do not draw a line somewhere with regard to the importance of their own lives, and now convinced that Kleist was not taking them for fools – the Klephts being obsessed with not having the wool pulled over their eyes – they began to knuckle under.
Kleist was impressed by the change in them but he found it hard to see how much practical difference it would make. They were now determined but not being men of great martial skill against Redeemers who had nothing else, this determination was of limited value. So the Klephts heaved rocks at the Redeemers from the tops of the high passes, they slowed them down with their inferior skills at archery and they occasionally put themselves in a position where they were forced to stand toe to toe and slug it out. They always lost, and badly. So much so that Kleist found himself telling them to stop being so rash – a speech it can certainly be said that was never given to a Klepht before.
But even the most honour-fixated society, the most prone to martyrdom and high-minded principle, has its share of traitors. The Redeemers had the legendary apostate Harwood, the Materazzi had Oliver Plunkett. Even the Laconics, obedience as much as part of them as their spines, had Burdett-Harris. For the Klephts at this time of their greatest hazard it was Burgrave Selo. Of all the Klephts he had the most to lose, being the wealthiest of them by far. He was a wheeler and a dealer, moneylender, a time-serving slippery coquette, a charmer, a black-leg and a trimmer. He could go into a twelve-inch gap behind you and come out in front. In short, Burgrave Selo, an ancient title to which he, of course, had no right at all, thought he could outmanoeuvre everyone. And it is to be said in his defence that he always had outmanoeuvred everyone and so why shouldn’t he have regarded Kleist as a child and an alarmist who did not know how to tergiversate and come to an agreement that suited everyone – especially Burgrave Selo. He did not, reasonably enough, believe in Kleist, but he did with good reason believe in himself. So, genuine in so far as genuineness was a quality he possessed at all, Selo believed that what was good for him would in the end, once you took the long view, be good for the Klephts. He took, it should also be fairly said, many hours to square his conscience but after what was for him a great and terrible struggle he did what he thought was best all round. He approached the Redeemers almost personally – at considerable risk – by sending his most trusted brother to shout out at them in the dark that he wanted to talk. The Redeemer captain in charge, a man trained by one of Cale’s Purgators, was suspicious but cautious of missing a chance and promised Selo’s brother safe passage (broken promises made to worshippers of false gods were said to make the Hanged Redeemer smile with pleasure. Not that the Klephts really had a god in the sense that a Redeemer would have understood). A meaningless deal was struck in which the captain guaranteed the lives of Selo’s family and his possessions and position and executions were to be confined to a dozen or so Klepht leaders. All in all Selo considered it was an ill wind that blew no one any good and he had come out on top, removed his enemies and rivals, and preserved the lives of the Klephts despite their own stupidity so they would all, or most of them, live to fight another day.
Once the Klepht attack started Selo had arranged personally – it wouldn’t do to trust anyone else – to lead half the Redeemer force away from the main pass of the Yat and via a dangerous but quick route over the mountains and out the other side where they could catch the women and children and turn them back from what Selo regarded, with justification, as an insanely dangerous journey.
Only a year before, what happened next could not have taken place. The Redeemer captain, one Santos Hall, would never have divided his forces had he not learnt different from Cale’s Purgators. Until Cale, keeping your men together was a rule never, and usually wisely so, challenged. But though flexibility came hard to the Redeemers, Hall’s experience in the veldt had taught him a fair amount concerning irregular forces – and the Klephts were, apparently, a good deal less formidable than the Folk, particularly if the poverty of their lookouts and the treachery of their leaders were anything to go by. Given that his mission was fundamentally a punitive one, allowing most of his targets to escape was unacceptable. Selo might be leading his men into a trap or on a frolic of his own to take them in the wrong direction but Santos Hall calculated that Selo was entirely sincere in his duplicity and the attacking Klephts were clearly trying to slow them for a reason. Sending their women away even under such risky circumstances was exactly what they should be doing given what was in store for them.