‘Show some -‘
But what he was supposed to show was unspoken as Kleist stood up and knifed him in the chest in one movement, picked up his flag and was over the wall of rocks the Redeemers had raised to cover their rear, never expecting it would be used. It would make an excellent wall of defence for the Klephts. Kleist loosened the large red cloth of silk and stuck it into a crevice where anyone who made it through would see it easily. Then he hared off up the mountain, fast and agile as a goat and never looked back.
A day later he was off the mountain. Another day after that he stood in front of the ten gallows of the Redeemers and the piles of ash and dry bones underneath them. He stood for a while then sat down with his head in his hands and cried. He was still there a day later when, in threes and fours, the twenty-one Klephts who had survived the fight in the mountains walked up and sat down next to him. Had he known the Klephts better he would have realized that it had never occurred to any of them that he would stay.
They could not bury the women and children because the Redeemers were surely following. They left, promising to return, and went on as best they could.
28
Unusually for medicine men, who generally suspected each other of stealing their cures, Hooke and Bradmore got on like brothers, no doubt because the lines between their skills were so plain. It was clear that the wound must be correctly enlarged to make Hooke’s idea possible. He intended to build a set of hollow tongs in reverse and the width of the arrow. This would then be inserted into the wound and inside the hollow metal head of the arrow. Then by means of a screw the tip of the device already divided in two would slowly be forced apart inside the arrow shaft which it would grip tightly. The arrowhead could then be pulled out the way it had gone in. While Hooke went off to the foundry to make this subtle and tiny device, Bradmore set about enlarging the wound so that it could be introduced. First he made a set of probes from elder wood also the thickness of an arrow shaft, dried them and covered them in linen soaked in rose honey to prevent infection. The shortest probe first, he inserted them into Vague Henri’s wound and then progressively introduced longer probes until he was satisfied he had made a clear run to the bottom of the wound. This took three days and by the end of this hideously painful process, Hooke, through great trial and error, arrived with a device that he was satisfied would do the job. Coming to Vague Henri’s face he presented the mechanism at the same angle the arrowhead had first entered and, placing the tip of the mechanism in the centre of the wound, slowly pushed it the six inches inside necessary for the tip of the tongs to fit inside the socket of the arrowhead. They were obliged to move it about backwards and forwards a good deal. Then Hooke turned the screw at the top of the device hoping it would open at the far tip, grip the head and stay firm enough for them to extract it.
They again began moving the device back and forth tugging firmly and, little by little, finally pulled the offending arrow out of Vague Henri’s face. Of the agony the poor boy endured it need only be said that the opium has not been grown that could dull the pain of that exercise.
His suffering was not over anyway. The danger of such a wound was the terrible risk of infection, something concerning which Bradmore was a great genius. Once the arrowhead was out – and big enough it was once it was lying on a plate – Bradmore took a squirtillo and filled it with white wine and flushed it into the wound. Then he placed in new probes made of wads of flax soaked in finely sieved bread, turpentine and honey. He left this for a day and then replaced the flax wads with shorter wads and so on for another twenty days. Afterwards he covered the wound in a dark ointment called Unguetum Fuscum and concerning which he was very secretive. After this treatment had stopped hell no longer held quite the terror it used to have for Vague Henri.
Bradmore had been appalled by the amount of opium Cale had been feeding Vague Henri and demanded he hand it over before he killed him, not least by causing him to explode – a terrible constipation having afflicted him as a result. He spent as much time as he could sitting with his friend, who was often in too much pain to reply or hallucinating even on the much more limited supply of opium Bradmore was prepared to give him. He instructed Cale to go into the market, almost as famous as that formerly of Memphis, and buy various types of food that he had never heard of and nearly all of which was extremely expensive.
‘You’ve bunged him up, you sort him out.’
The trouble was that no one had any money – the question of Bradmore’s fee having been carefully avoided. Bradmore had assumed that the Materazzi had escaped with at least some of their renowned wealth. This was not the case, as Cale well knew, and what they did have was not going to be spent on ruinous medical fees for some boy. They had troubles enough of their own. Vipond agreed to create the impression to Bradmore that money was no object when it came to the treatment of Vague Henri but paying was going to be Cale’s problem. Cale’s one option was to sell a small ruby he had stolen from the diadem of a statue of the Redeemer’s Mother in the anteroom at Chartres. At least he hoped it was a ruby, or at least valuable.
It was not his only financial problem. He had the Purgators as well as Vague Henri’s future to pay for. Part of him wished they just vanish but he knew this wasn’t going to happen. Not only were they devoted to him but he knew that having control of a hundred and sixty experienced fighting men would give him a good deal of heft in what was to come. But they had to be paid for and kept out of sight. If any of the Materazzi found out who they were there would be trouble.
So the day after Bradmore’s removal of the arrow, Cale went off on his own to buy food to treat Vague Henri’s terrible constipation but also to see if he could get something for his ruby. While he was making his way among the numerous stalls and the incomprehensible cries of the sellers (‘Bompos! Bompos! Bompos! Tufradoluh! Chiliwillis luvilanascarleta! Mushrumps cheap enough, luvli, to cook for someone yu don even like!’), he noticed three shops together opposite a stall of carrots and parsnips and cauliflowers artfully composed in the shape of a face. In each shop was a woman at a table stitching clothes. He watched the first two for a couple of minutes but lingered at the last of the three, partly because the woman was much younger than the others but also because she was working at such an astonishing rate. He watched for several more minutes now, fascinated not so much by her speed as the almost magical skill with which she was stitching a collar to a jacket. He liked watching skilled people work. She looked up a couple of times at Cale – there was no glass in the window – and finally spoke.
‘Want a suit?’
‘No.’
‘Then bugger off.’
It was not his way these days to let anyone these days have the last word, even a girl in a shop, but he felt tired and ill. Coming down with something, he thought, best get on. He left and she did not look up from her work. After a ten-minute walk that would usually have taken five he made it to Wallbow Gardens. Unlike the usual commercial squares of Spanish Leeds there were half a dozen extravagantly liveried guards wandering about to warn off criminals from the twenty or so gold and jewellery shops that made up the square and which had now replaced Memphis as the centre of trade in the four quarters for dealings in precious metals.
The first jeweller told him it was only semi-precious and worth about fifty dollars. This pleased Cale because it was clear the jeweller was lying and this must mean it was worth considerably more. When he told him he wanted it back the jeweller offered more but Cale thought it best to move on. The next claimed it was glass. The one after that again claimed it was only semi-precious and offered him a hundred and fifty dollars.