‘Good,’ said Vague Henri.
‘I mean what’s it taste like?’
Vague Henri looked up, thoughtfully, trying to be exact in his comparison. ‘A bit like dog.’
Eating it, it was food after all, IdrisPukke was reminded of pork cooked in axle-grease, if axle-grease tasted anything like it smelt. When, with a full and queasy stomach, he fell asleep, he dreamt all night, as it seemed to him, of teapots pulsating in the night sky. When he woke up with the sky beginning to barely lighten, it was to the sound of Vague Henri cursing in a foul temper.
‘What’s the matter?’
Vague Henri picked up a rock and hurled it at the ground in a great fury.
‘It’s that shit-bag Kleist. He’s run away, the treacherous bastard.’
‘You’re sure he hasn’t just gone to relieve himself or to be on his own?’
‘Do I look like an idiot?’ replied Vague Henri. ‘He’s taken all his stuff.’ He continued pouring execrations on Kleist’s head for a good five minutes until picking up the same rock and throwing it down with a last burst of temper, he sat down and boiled in silence.
After leaving him in silence for a few minutes, IdrisPukke asked him why he was so angry. Vague Henri looked back at him, indignant as well as bewildered.
‘He left us in the lurch.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s ...’ He was unable to put an exact finger on why. ‘... obvious.’
‘Well, perhaps. But why shouldn’t he leave us in the lurch?’
‘Because he was supposed to be my friend – and friends don’t leave their friends in the lurch.’
‘But Cale isn’t his friend. I heard him say so any number of times. I don’t remember Cale having a good word for him either.’
‘Cale saved his life.’
‘He saved Cale’s life at Silbury Hill – and more than once.’
Vague Henri gasped in irritation.
‘What about me? He was supposed to be my friend.’
‘Did you ask him if he wanted to come with us?’
‘He didn’t say anything when we started.’
‘Well, he’s said something now.’
‘Why couldn’t he say it to my face?’
‘I suppose he was ashamed.’
‘There you are then.’
‘There you are nothing. Granted that judged by the highest standards of saintliness he should have explained his reasoning to you personally and in full. You claim to be his friend – has Kleist ever implied any aspirations to saintliness?’
Vague Henri looked away as if he might find someone ready to support his case. He said nothing for some time and then laughed – a sound partly humorous, partly disappointed.
‘No.’
Unable to resist moralizing, IdrisPukke continued complacently. ‘It’s pointless to blame someone for being themselves and looking to their own interests. Whose interests would they look to? Yours? Kleist knows what’s waiting for him if he’s caught again. Why should he risk such a hideous death for someone he doesn’t even like?’
‘What about me?’
‘Why should he risk such a hideous death for someone he does like? You must think awfully well of yourself.’
This time Vague Henri laughed without the disappointment. ‘So why have you come then? The Redeemers won’t be any kinder to you than to me.’
‘Simple,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I have allowed affection to get the better of my good judgement.’ He could not resist the opportunity to expand on another one of his pet notions. ‘That’s why it’s much better not to have friends if you have the strength of character to do without them. In the end friends always turn into a nuisance of one kind or another. But if you must have them let them alone and accept that you must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be.’
They struck camp in silence and had carried on the same way for a good while when Vague Henri asked his companion a surprising question.
‘IdrisPukke, do you believe in God?’
There was no pause to consider his answer. ‘There’s little enough goodness or love in me, or the world in general, to go about wasting it on imaginary beings.’
4
It is well enough known that the heart is encased in a tube and that sufficient distress causes it to fall down the tube, generally called the bunghole, or spiracle, which ends in the pit of the stomach. At the bottom of the bunghole, or spiracle, is a trap-door – made of gristle – called the springum. In the past, when bitter disappointment struck a man or woman and was too much to bear the springum would burst open and the heart would fall through it and give those who had suffered too much pain a merciful and quick release by stopping the heart instantly. Now there is so much pain in the world that hardly anyone could bear it and live. And so ever-protecting nature has caused the springum to fuse to the spiracle so that it can no longer open and now suffering, however terrible, must simply be endured. This was just as well for Cale as the first sight of the Sanctuary rose out of the early-morning mist as grim as a punishment. All the way along the last part of the journey a childish hope had emerged from somewhere in his soul that when he saw the Sanctuary first it might have been utterly destroyed by fire or brimstone. It was not. It sat squat on the horizon, unalterable in its concrete watchfulness, and waiting for his return, as solid in its presence as if it had grown into the flat-topped mountain on which it was built that itself looked like an enormous back tooth implanted in the desert. It was not made to delight, to intimidate, to glorify, or boast. It looked like its function: constructed to keep some people out no matter what and to keep others in no matter what. And yet you could not easily describe it: it was blank walls, it was prisons, it was places of grim worship, it was brownness. It was a particular idea of what it meant to be human made out of concrete.
All the way up the narrow road that corkscrewed up the side of the vast tabletop hill Cale’s heart battered against the gristly door of his springum as it clutched at oblivion – but oblivion would not come. The great gates opened and then the great gates shut. And that was that. All the daring, the courage, the intelligence, the luck, the death, the love, the beauty and the joy, the slaughter and treachery had brought him back to the exact point where he had started not even a year before. It was the canonical hour of None and so everyone was in the dozen churches praying – the acolytes for forgiveness of their sins, the Redeemers for the forgiveness of the acolytes’ sins.
Had he been less miserable, Cale might have noticed that he was helped down from his horse not even by a common Redeemer but by the Prelate of the Horse himself and with extraordinary deference. Bosco, making do for the dismount with an Ostler of the vulgar kind, walked forward and gestured him towards a door that Cale had barely noticed in all his years at the Sanctuary, because it was forbidden for an acolyte to go anywhere near it. It was opened for him by the Prelate of Horses and he led the way not as his superior but, as it were, as a guide. They walked on in the brown gloom that was the common feature of the Sanctuary everywhere, but even in the depths of misery Cale began to be aware of the oddness of having lived in a place all his life and then in a moment being shown there were vast areas of that place he had no idea existed. Brown it still was, but different. There were doors! There were doors everywhere. They stopped at one. It was opened and he was gestured inside, but this time no one went ahead of him and only Bosco followed. The chamber was large and furnished with brown furniture and lots of it. And it was disturbingly familiar. It was the same layout as the room in which he had killed Redeemer Picarbo. It even had a bedroom. This was a place only for the powerful.
‘It will be necessary for you to stay here for two days, perhaps three. There are preparations, I am sure you understand. Your food will be brought to you and anything you need, just knock on the door and your ...’ He wasn’t quite sure of the correct word. ‘... your guardian will arrange for it to be brought to you.’ Bosco nodded, almost a bow, and left closing the door behind him. Cale stared after him, astonished not just by the notion that he had a guardian, but more by the idea that he could ask for what he wanted. What could possibly be in the Sanctuary that anyone would want? As it turned out, Cale’s justified assumption that there was indeed nothing turned out to be entirely wrong.