пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

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Пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

For Richard Gollner

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specific world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even into a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.

J. B. Watson, Psychologies of 1925

I fought like an angel.

Prologue

Imagine. A young assassin, no more than a boy really, is lying carefully hidden in the long green and black bulrushes that grow in great profusion along the rivers of the Vallombrosa. He has been waiting for a long time but he is a patient creature in his way and the thing he waits for is perhaps more precious to him than life. Beside him are a bow of yew and arrows tipped with black country steel capable of penetrating even the costliest armour if you’re close enough. Not that there will be any need for that today because the young man is not waiting for some rascal deserving of his murder but only a water bird. The light thickens and the swan makes wing through the rooky wood, the cawing crows complaining bitterly at the unfairness of her beauty as she lands upon the water like the stroke of a painter’s hand upon a canvas, direct and beautifully itself. She swims with all the elegance for which her kind is famous, though you will never have seen movement quite so graceful in such still and smoky air on such steeple grey water.

Then the arrow, sharp as hate, shears through the same air she blesses and misses her by several feet. And she’s off, web strength along with her grace convey her whiteness back into the air and away to safety. The young man is standing now and watching the swan escape.

‘I’ll get you next time you treacherous slut!’ he shouts and throws down the bow, which alone of all the instruments of death (knife, sword, elbow, teeth) he has never been able to master and yet is the only one that can give him hope of restitution for his broken heart. But not even then. For though this is a dream, not even in his dreams can he hit a barn door from twenty yards. He wakes and broods for half an hour. Real life is careful of the sensitivities of desperadoes but even the greatest scourge, and Thomas Cale is certainly one of those, can be mocked with impunity in his nightmares. Then he goes back to sleep to dream again of the autumnal leaves that strewed the brooks in Vallombrosa, and the great white wings beating into swirls the early-morning mist.

‘The Lay of Thomas Cale, Angel of Death’ is the second worst poem ever to emerge from the Office for the Propagation of the Faith of the Hanged Redeemer. This institution subsequently became so famous for its skill in spinning the grossly untrue on behalf of the Redeemers that the phrase ‘to tell a monk’ passed into general usage.

Book the Forty Seventh: The Argument

Wake up! For sunrise in the spoon of night

Reveals the Left Hand

of the Lord of Might.

His name is Cale, his arm is strong

As the Angel of Death he does no wrong.

Searching for traitors who’ll murder the Pope

Cale left the Sanctuary by means of a rope.

To protect the Pope he pretended to flee

The quiet and care of the Sanctuary

And Bosco his mentor he claimed to reject

And all for the sake of the Pope to protect.

In Memphis the city of Sodom and Vice

He rescued a princess, a maiden of ice.

With wiles and with lust his soul’s ruin she sought

And when he said, ‘No!’ his assassins she bought.

Now long had her father conspired ’gainst the Pope

And attacked the Redeemers to further this hope

But in the great battle at Silbury Hill

With Princeps and Bosco, Cale gave them their fill.

The Empire of Memphis they wasted that day

Then Bosco and Cale they returned to the fray

The Antagonist heretics them for to slay.

For Pope and Redeemer let all of us pray!

It is a generally accepted wisdom that true events pass into history and are transformed according to the prejudices of the person recording them. History then turns slowly into legend, in which all facts are blurred despite the interest of the tellers, who will by now be many, various and contradictory. Finally, perhaps after thousands of years, all intentions, good or bad, all lies and all exactness merge into a myth of universal possibility in which anything might be true, anything false. It no longer matters, one way or the other. But the truth is that a great many things depart from the facts almost as soon as they happen and are converted into the great smog of myth almost before the sun has gone down on the events themselves. The doggerel above, for example, was written within two months of the incidents it so badly attempts to immortalize. Let us go then through this drivel verse by verse.

Thomas Cale had been brought to the grim Sanctuary of the Hanged Redeemer at the age of three or four (no one knew or cared which). As soon as he arrived the little boy was singled out by one of the priests of this most forbidding of religions, the Redeemer Bosco, mentioned three times in the poem not least because he was the man who caused it to be written. It should not be thought that this was inspired by anything so simple as human vanity or ambition.

The Redeemers were not only infamous for their harsh view of the sinful nature of mankind but even more for their willingness to enforce that view through military conquest led by their own priests, most of whom were brought up to fight rather than preach. The most intelligent and the most pious (a line more easily blurred among the Redeemers than elsewhere) were responsible for ensuring correct beliefs and the administration of the faith in all its many conquered and converted states. The rest were reserved for the armed wing of the One True Faith, the Militant, and were raised and frequently died (the lucky ones, went the joke) in numerous religious barracks, of which the largest was the Sanctuary. It was in the Sanctuary that Cale was chosen by Bosco as his personal acolyte – a form of favouritism only an inhumanly tough child could ever hope to survive. By the time he was fourteen (or fifteen) Cale was as cold and calculating a creature as you could ever have wished not to meet in a dark alley or anywhere else – and apparently animated by only two things: his utter loathing of Bosco and his indifference to everyone else. But Cale’s general bad luck was about to change for the worse as he opened the wrong door at the wrong time and discovered the Lord of Discipline, Redeemer Picarbo, dissecting a young girl, still alive if only just, and about to do the same to another. Choosing self-preservation over compassion and horror, Cale shut the door quietly and left. However, in a moment of madness which he claimed forever to regret, the look in the eyes of the young woman about to be so cruelly disembowelled caused him to return and in the ensuing struggle kill a man perhaps tenth in line to the Pope himself. What you already have gathered of the Redeemers will make clear the fate Cale could expect: one that, you can be sure, involved a great deal of screaming.

If escape from the Sanctuary had been easy Cale would have already been long gone. While, as the twaddle of ‘The Lay of Thomas Cale’ claims, it did involve a rope there was no plot to murder the Pope – another invention of Bosco’s to cover up the flight of an acolyte he had particular reason to want back, a reason that had nothing to do with whatever bizarre and revolting business Picarbo had been up to. What the poem does not mention is that Cale was accompanied by three others: the girl he’d saved; Vague Henri, the only boy in the Sanctuary he remotely tolerated; and Kleist, who like everyone else regarded him with suspicion and dislike.

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Пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire’

There are many acts of righteous larceny throughout these three books, from Paradise Lost to a shampoo ad from the sixties, from Francis Bacon to a Millwall Football Club chant. Two of Bosco’s speeches in The Last Four Things, on the essential worthlessness of mankind and the lonely greatness of the hangman, are based on essays from the Catholic philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

There are a number of scenes indebted to the long-forgotten Mary Herbert, particularly Death To The French and The Unhappy Prince. Arthur Schopenhauer and La Rochefoucauld take their usual bow in the observations of IdrisPukke and Vipond. Much of the tactics and the idea behind the episode at Duffer’s Drift come from E. D. Swinton’s imaginative training manual of the Boer War, The Defence of Duffer’s Drift (out of print but available on the web). Lines and half-lines from the King James Bible are everywhere, the beautiful and the ugly. The practical usefulness to me of the Iliad and its descriptions of violence is straightforward. The web in general and YouTube in particular made it possible to use the shouts and cries of men in the middle of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also enabled me to find footage of Saddam Hussein’s denunciations of his soon-to-be-dead rivals during the Ba’ath Party Assembly in 1979, here used during Bosco’s similar strategy at the Congress in Chartres.

The idea for the Klephts came from John Keegan’s brief but incisive discussion of these impressively unheroic Greek bandits on page ten of A History of Warfare. The details of the operation on Vague Henri follow closely the account by surgeon John Bradmore of his successful attempt to remove an arrow from the face of the fifteen-year-old Prince Henry (later Henry V) in 1403. Anyone who doubts the potential physical strength or tactical ability of adolescents should read an account of Henry’s youthful military campaigns and note that he took this hideous wound in the face early on in the Battle of Shrewsbury, fought ‘hand-to-hand’ for the rest of the day and then led a cavalry charge in the evening which had a major effect on the outcome.

The harrowing description of the starvation of the Folk that Cale forces Arbell to read aloud comes from A View of the Present State of Ireland by Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene. Spenser is not just responsible for the terrible brilliance of the description of famine, a brilliance that might be expected from someone generally considered to be one of the greatest of all English poets, but also for the view that a policy of genocide through starvation was the only solution to the problem of Ireland. Anyone who believes that it is not possible to write hideous ideas beautifully might like to read the full text. The assumption that someone as noxious as Hitler, a deeply talentless painter, could never by definition be a great artist has to confront this little-known work.

Cale’s idea for a concentration camp to isolate his opponents from the support of the native population was first carried out during the Boer War with the same, admittedly unintended, consequences.

Also thanks to Nick Lowndes of Penguin and Mark Handsley for their work on the preparation of the text. As always, Alexandra Hoffman and my agent, Anthony Goff. Anna Swan read the manuscript with the sharpest of eyes. I remain deeply grateful to Kate Burton (née Brotherhood) for placing this book in so many languages.

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Читать онлайн «The Last Four Things»

Автор Пол Хофман

The Last Four Things

For Richard Gollner

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well‑formed, and my own specific world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant‑chief and, yes, even into a beggar‑man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.

J. B. Watson, Psychologies of 1925

I fought like an angel.

Book the Forty Seventh: The Argument

Wake up! For sunrise in the spoon of night

Reveals the Left Hand

of the Lord of Might.

His name is Cale, his arm is strong

As the Angel of Death he does no wrong.

Searching for traitors who’ll murder the Pope

Cale left the Sanctuary by means of a rope.

To protect the Pope he pretended to flee

The quiet and care of the Sanctuary

And Bosco his mentor he claimed to reject

And all for the sake of the Pope to protect.

In Memphis the city of Sodom and Vice

He rescued a princess, a maiden of ice.

With wiles and with lust his soul’s ruin she sought

And when he said, ‘No!’ his assassins she bought.

Now long had her father conspired against the Pope

And attacked the Redeemers to further this hope

But in the great battle at Silbury Hill

With Princeps and Bosco, Cale gave them their fill.

The Empire of Memphis they wasted that day

Then Bosco and Cale they returned to the fray

The Antagonist heretics them for to slay.

For Pope and Redeemer let all of us pray!

The Redeemers were not only infamous for their harsh view of the sinful nature of mankind but even more for their willingness to enforce that view through military conquest led by their own priests, most of whom were brought up to fight rather than preach. The most intelligent and the most pious (a line more easily blurred among the Redeemers than elsewhere) were responsible for ensuring correct beliefs and the administration of the faith in all its many conquered and converted states. The rest were reserved for the armed wing of the One True Faith, the Militant, and were raised and frequently died (the lucky ones, went the joke) in numerous religious barracks, of which the largest was the Sanctuary. It was in the Sanctuary that Cale was chosen by Bosco as his personal acolyte — a form of favouritism only an inhumanly tough child could ever hope to survive. By the time he was fourteen (or fifteen) Cale was as cold and calculating a creature as you could ever have wished not to meet in a dark alley or anywhere else — and apparently animated by only two things: his utter loathing of Bosco and his indifference to everyone else. But Cale’s general bad luck was about to change for the worse as he opened the wrong door at the wrong time and discovered the Lord of Discipline, Redeemer Picarbo, dissecting a young girl, still alive if only just, and about to do the same to another. Choosing self‑preservation over compassion and horror, Cale shut the door quietly and left. However, in a moment of madness which he claimed forever to regret, the look in the eyes of the young woman about to be so cruelly disembowelled caused him to return and in the ensuing struggle kill a man perhaps tenth in line to the Pope himself. What you already have gathered of the Redeemers will make clear the fate Cale could expect: one that, you can be sure, involved a great deal of screaming.

If escape from the Sanctuary had been easy Cale would have already been long gone. While, as the twaddle of ‘The Lay of Thomas Cale’ claims, it did involve a rope there was no plot to murder the Pope — another invention of Bosco’s to cover up the flight of an acolyte he had particular reason to want back, a reason that had nothing to do with whatever bizarre and revolting business Picarbo had been up to. What the poem does not mention is that Cale was accompanied by three others: the girl he’d saved; Vague Henri, the only boy in the Sanctuary he remotely tolerated; and Kleist, who like everyone else regarded him with suspicion and dislike.

While Cale’s intelligence, schooled by long training, meant that he evaded the Redeemers trying to recapture them, his habitual bad luck led to all four walking into a patrol of Materazzi cavalry out of the great city of Memphis, a place richer and more varied than any Paris or Babylon or Sodom, another one of the few references in the ‘Lay’ that has any echo of the truth about it. In Memphis the four came to the attention of its great Chancellor, Vipond, and his unreliable half‑brother, IdrisPukke, who for reasons unclear to anyone, even to himself, took a shine to Cale and showed him something he had never experienced before, a little kindness.

But it would take a good deal more than a touch of decency to get round the back of Cale, whose suspicion and hostility quickly began to earn him the loathing of almost everyone he encountered, from the Materazzi clan’s golden boy, Conn, to the exquisite Arbell Materazzi. Usually known as Swan‑Neck (no coincidence that the murderous dream which begins our story has a swan as its object of hate), she was the daughter of the man who ruled a Materazzi empire so vast that it was one upon which the sun never set. Bosco, however, placed very great store by Cale’s hostility and he had no intention of letting Cale misuse it where it was only likely to get him killed. It is of no surprise that for all her dislike of him, a person like Cale could not fail to fall in love with a distant beauty such as Arbell Materazzi. She continued to regard him as a thug even, or especially, after he saved her life during a pitilessly lethal act of violence (dismissed later by his enemies as no more than a form of pretentious swashbuckling). Kleist’s complaint about Cale that wherever he went a funeral shortly followed came to be more widely understood, particularly by IdrisPukke, who had been witness to the murderously cold rescue of Arbell. However, the alien and the strange can be a strong brew for the young, hence the reference in the ‘Lay’ to the attempted seduction of Cale by the lovely Arbell. Except that there was no seduction, if seduction implies persuasion of the reluctant, and there was never any point at which the word ‘No!’, or anything like it, ever crossed his lips. She certainly never paid to have him assassinated — nor, as Kleist later joked when he eventually read the poem, would she have needed to, given there were so many people willing to do it for nothing.

Equally unreliable is the claim that Arbell’s father had ever nursed the slightest intention of attacking the Redeemers. His entirely fictional aggression had been invented by Bosco with the sole intention of providing an excuse to his superiors to wage a war that was in fact designed for one purpose: to return Cale to the Sanctuary. The law of unintended consequences being what it is, Bosco’s desperately disease‑wasted army under the generalship of Redeemer Princeps found itself trapped by a Materazzi army ten times its size at Silbury Hill. The ensuing battle was watched by a horrified Cale (who for reasons too complicated to explain here had provided the plan of attack for both armies) as a mixture of bad luck, confusion, mud, folly and a lack of crowd control that caused one of the most lethal reversals of fortune in the history of warfare.

To his astonishment Bosco found himself the conqueror of Memphis and possessed of every prize the world could offer, except the one he wanted: Thomas Cale. But Bosco had long had a finger in Memphis’s nastiest pie, one owned by the appalling wheeler‑dealer, businessman and pimp, Kitty the Hare. Kitty knew that Cale had lost his abnormally inexperienced heart to the beautiful Arbell just as he also discovered in due course that her intense passion for this most peculiar boy was already beginning to burn itself out — strange fruit, as Kitty joked, for such a hothouse flower. All the better for Bosco, whose men had taken her prisoner. As soon as he arrived in Memphis, Bosco applied his talent for human nature — one far too advanced for a beautiful young princess, however intelligent — by convincingly threatening to lay waste to the city if she did not give up her lover, while also reassuring her, entirely sincerely as it happened, that he had no intention of harming him. So she betrayed Cale, if betrayal it was, but with what kind of conscience it would be hard to say. So it was that Cale gave himself up, at the additional price of the release of Vague Henri and Kleist, only to learn that he had been delivered up to the man he hated above all things by the woman he loved above all things. This then brings us to the last of the lying verses of the ‘Lay of Thomas Cale’, with our hero heading into the wilderness with two great hatreds blistering his heart: one for the woman he once loved and the other, more familiar, for the man who had just told him one more thing about himself that had his brain spinning in his head. Bosco told him to stop feeling sorry for himself because he was not a person at all, not someone who could be either loved or betrayed but, as the ‘Lay’ had assured us all along, no more than the Angel of Death. And it was now time to go seriously about his God’s business.

From now on everything that follows is the truth.

There are taller mountains than Tiger Mountain, many far more dangerous to climb, those whose sheer heights and dreadful crevices make the soul shiver with their hostility to any living thing. But there are none more impressive, none more likely to raise the spirits, to inspire wonder at its solitary splendour. Its great cone shape grows up from the Thametic plain that surrounds most of it and flatly stretches into the distance so that from fifty miles away its majestic symmetry seems like the work of man. But no man ever lived, not the most egotistical, no Akhenaten or Ozymandias, who could build a giant peak like this. Closer, its inhuman vastness is revealed, a hundred thousand times as big as the great pyramid of Lincoln. It’s not hard to see why it has been held by many different kinds of faith to be the one place on earth from which God will speak directly to mankind. It was at the top of Tiger Mountain that Moses received the tablets of stone on which the six hundred and thirteen commandments were written. It was here in exchange for victory over the Ammonites that Jephthah the Gileadite, with considerable reluctance it must be said, cut the throat of his only daughter upon an altar after he had promised to sacrifice to the Lord the first living thing that greeted him on his return home. Willingly she went and to the very last the miserable Jephthah hoped for a compassionate reprieve — a voice, an angelic messenger, the stern but merciful proof that it was just a test of faith. But Jephthah returned from Tiger Mountain on his own. It was here, on the Great Jut below the snow line, that the Devil himself, at the instigation of the Lord, showed the Hanged Redeemer all the world that lay below and offered to give it to him.

On the other hand the Montagnards, a tribe without much of a place for religion in their lives, and who had controlled Tiger Mountain for eighty‑odd years, referred to it as the Great Testicle. The reason why was starting to occupy Cale as, along with the Lord Militant Bosco and thirty guards, he made his way up the lower reaches of the mountain.

To describe Cale’s mood as foul would be to do that mood an injustice. There is no word in any language ever spoken to describe the hurly‑burly in his heart, his loathing at the idea of his return to the Sanctuary and the bitterness of his anger at his betrayal by Arbell Materazzi, known to everyone as Swan‑Neck, and about whose beauty and gracefulness as a result nothing more need be said — nothing about the suppleness of her long legs, the breath‑catching span of her narrow waist, the curve of her breasts (they were not proud, her breasts, they were overweeningly arrogant). She was a swan in human form. In his mind Cale was endlessly imagining the wringing of this swan’s neck and then miraculously reviving her and murdering her all over again — this time a violent snap, the next a slow strangling and then after that perhaps a cutting out and burning of her heart, followed by a good raking for it among the ashes to make doubly sure.

For two weeks since they had left Memphis he had not spoken once, not even to ask why they had changed direction in the middle of the Scablands and started travelling away from the Sanctuary. On balance Bosco thought it better to let his former acolyte stew. But he had underestimated Cale’s talent for mute anger and finally decided to break their silence.

‘We’re going to Tiger Mountain,’ volunteered Redeemer Bosco, softly and even with kindness. ‘There’s something I need to show you. ’

It might be thought that someone whose heart was moithering with so much hatred for one person might not have enough intensity of feeling left over to loathe another in the same way. In part this was true, but Cale’s heart, when it came to hatred, was made of stern and capacious stuff: his aversion to Bosco had merely been shifted further from the centre of the fire, in the clinker at the side as it were, to keep warm, for bringing back to the broil later. Nevertheless, despite his current preoccupation with hating, Cale could not help but be puzzled by the great change in Bosco’s attitude towards him. Since he was a very small boy Bosco had driven him like a ship in a storm — relentless, merciless, pitiless, cruel, never slacking, never giving him a place to rest. Day after day, year after year he had scoured him black and blue, teaching and punishing, punishing and teaching until there seemed no difference between the two. Now there was only restraint, a great softness, almost something like tenderness. What was it? There was no answer to be had, even when he had the energy to spare from mind‑murdering Arbell Materazzi (beating her to death with a stick, martyring her on a wheel, drowning her to applause in a high mountain lake). But despite the hammers beating out their cacophony in his soul something in Cale was paying attention to the terrain through which they were moving, resulting in a moment of understanding, though not of amusement exactly — he was in too dark a place for that. Now he could see why it was called the Great Testicle. Close in, the smoothness of its lines from thirty miles away had vanished to become a landscape deeply grooved with ridges, always moving down in the direction of the water that carved them but also sideways and across, curling around and even back on themselves where the rock was hardest. This close the experience was like the tiniest of fleas trying to get across the bollocks of the greatest of giants.

Moving through this hard‑to‑solve maze would have been immensely difficult, despite the fact that it was not particularly steep, had it not been for the help offered by the narrow causeway built by the Montagnards that wound over the ridges and the numerous filled‑in ravines and defiles. This had been done not as an intentional sacrilege but in order to gain access to the salt deposits that marbled their way through the middle slopes of the mountain. Across the eighty years during which they held sway over the Redeemers’ most sacred place the Montagnards had created a huge network of tunnels. Intended sacrilege or not, when the Redeemers had re‑emerged as a power after being weakened by their lengthy religious civil wars they repaid this blasphemy by wiping out the Montagnards to the last man, woman and child.

Once past the Great Testicle the slope steepened, again not greatly. High though it was, Tiger Mountain was not especially difficult to climb. In this more even landscape there were many small holes, the decayed entrances to the deposits of salt between thirty and a hundred feet below the surface. Despite his foul temper and silence Cale could not help but be distracted by the intriguing features of this sacred landscape. But while it lacked great crevices and dangerous crags, the going inevitably became tougher and soon they were forced to dismount and lead the horses up harsher and more awkward paths. Finally they did come to a narrow pass, with steep and rocky walls to either side.

Bosco ordered his men to make camp, though it was still early afternoon, and then turned to Cale and spoke to him directly for the second time.

‘They’ll stay here. We have to go on. There’s something I need to show you. We should also get something straight. The only way back down this part of the mountain is through this pass. If you attempt to come back down on your own you know what will happen. ’

With this gently spoken warning he set off up through the pass and Cale followed. They climbed for thirty minutes, Cale always staying about ten yards behind his former master until they reached a shelf about twenty feet deep. To one side there was a simply constructed but beautifully made stone altar.

‘That was where Jephthah kept his oath to the Lord and sacrificed his only daughter. ’ His tone of voice was odd, not reverential at all.

‘And I suppose,’ replied Cale, ‘that stain on the side there is supposed to be her blood. She must have been filled with strong stuff — you can still see it a thousand years after it was spilled halfway up a mountain. ’

‘With God all things are possible. ’ They looked at each other for some time. ‘No one knows where he killed her. This altar was built for the benefit of the faithful, some of whom are permitted to come here on Bad Friday — a painter comes the day after their visit and paints it again so that there’s time for it to weather in for the following year. ’

‘What is truth?’ he said and did not wait for an answer.

After two hours they were only some five hundred yards from the snow line and into the last climb before they could talk to God himself. But it was just here that Bosco turned aside and began to walk around the mountain parallel with the snow. Here the thin air made the going harder for all that they were no longer climbing. Cale’s head began to ache. As he followed Bosco around a small bluff he lost sight of him for a moment and when he made contact again almost knocked him over. Bosco had stopped and was looking with great intensity at a flat rock cantilevered out from the mountain like the abandoned first section of a bridge.

‘This is the Great Jut where Satan tempted the Hanged Redeemer by offering him power over all the world. ’ He turned to look at Cale. ‘I want you to come out there with me,’ he said, pointing at the end of the Jut.

Bosco smiled. ‘I’m putting my life as much in your hands as you are in mine. ’

‘Not really,’ replied Cale, ‘given there are thirty guards below us with spiteful thoughts on their mind. ’

‘Fair enough. But do you think I’ve gone to all this trouble to try and throw you off a mountain?’

‘I don’t care to think anything about you. ’

In the past Bosco would have beaten Cale severely for speaking to him like this. And Cale would have let him. It was then that Cale realized something, though he could not have said what it was exactly, about just how great was the change that had come over both of them in only a few months.

‘I can’t make you and I won’t try. ’

‘But you’ll have me killed. ’

‘To be honest — no. But however great your hatred for me — something that gives me great pain — you must realize by now that you and I are bound together by unbreakable chains — I believe that’s the expression you used to Arbell Materazzi when we left Memphis. ’

Perhaps Bosco realized how very close he was to having his neck broken. If he did, he didn’t show it. But there was anxiety there, the anxiety, incomprehensible to Cale, of someone who deeply wants to be believed, to be understood, and fears that they will not. ‘Besides,’ added Bosco, ‘I have something to tell you about your parents. ’ With that he walked down the rough granite of the Great Jut. Cale watched him for a moment, shocked, as he was meant to be, by what Bosco had said. It is not easy to imagine the feelings of someone like Cale for whom the notion of mother and father was as notional as the sea to the landlocked. What would such a person feel in the moment they were told the ocean was just over the next hill? Cale walked out onto the Jut, a good deal more warily than Bosco — he was not afraid of heights but he did not love them. Besides, walking on the Jut proper it seemed a good deal more fragile than standing in front of it. As he came up behind Bosco his former master stepped aside as carelessly as if he were in the middle of the training field of the Sanctuary and gestured Cale up beside him, a few inches away from the dreadful spaceless fall below.

Cale looked out over the world feeling as if he was being held in the middle of the sky itself; heart pumping, eyes astonished, he could see around for miles with the vast blue sky above and the yellow earth beneath bending to meet it in an arc of shimmering purple haze. It seemed as if it was the entire world he was looking at and not just a crescent of fifty miles or so. Bosco said nothing for several minutes as Cale was battered by the vastness. Finally Cale turned to face him.

‘Firstly — your parents. I heard the rumours…’ He paused for a moment. ‘… the rumours from Memphis not long after your slaughter of Solomon Solomon. ’

‘He got what he deserved, which is more than can be said for the men you had me kill. ’ Of all the many unpleasant memories the two of them shared this was the worst. Convinced that Cale’s murderous gifts were divinely inspired it had barely occurred to Bosco that being obliged to fight half a dozen experienced, if disgraced, soldiers to the death might have been deeply traumatic for a boy of twelve or thirteen, however skilled or callous.

‘My heart was in my mouth for every second I thought you were in danger. ’ This was not quite the lie it seemed. At first he had been ecstatic at the murderous proof of the boy’s talent for killing. It was of an excellence that only religious inspiration could explain. But after the sixth death Bosco realized that God might resent his desire for proof and punish his presumption by allowing Cale to be hurt. It was realizing his presumption that suddenly made Bosco afraid for Cale and caused him to put an end to the slaughter.

It was more astonishment than restraint that prevented Cale from throwing him off the Jut there and then. The man who had beaten him for every reason that malice could devise, and half as many times again for none at all, was professing concern for him all along in tones that would have penetrated the hardest heart. But Cale’s heart was a good deal harder than that. If he let Bosco live it was only because his curiosity was even greater than his hatred. And besides, there were thirty evil bastards still waiting for him below.

‘Tell me about the rumours. ’

‘After you killed him it was bruited about that the Redeemers had taken you while you were a baby from a family related directly to the Doge of Memphis — that you are a Materazzi and not an inconsiderable one. ’ Can silence be stunned? You would believe it can had you been standing there on the Great Jut.

‘Is it true?’ Cale’s voice was only a whisper despite himself. There was a brief pause.

‘Absolutely not. Your parents were illiterate peasants of no importance in any way. ’

‘No. They sold you to us, and happily, for sixpence. ’

Even Bosco was surprised by the bark of laughter that followed this.

‘I thought you might have been disappointed — about the Materazzi I mean — but it pleases you to have been bought for sixpence?’

‘Never you mind what pleases me. Why are we here?’

Bosco looked back over the great plain below.

‘When God decided to make mankind he took a rib from his first great creation, the Angel Satan. And from Satan’s rib he formed the first man out of the dust of the ground. Displeased that God had taken his rib while he was sleeping without consulting him, Satan rebelled against the Lord God and was thrown from heaven. But God took pity on mankind because he had been wrong to make him out of the rib of such a treacherous servant. And because it was God’s error he sent many prophets to save mankind from his own nature, hoping to bring out all those good things from which he had been formed. Finally, and desperately, he sent his own son to save them. ’ Bosco turned slightly, his expression one of utter amazement, his eyes filling with tears. ‘But they hanged him. ’

Again he said nothing for two or three minutes. ‘The Lord God brooded over this terrible wound for a thousand years, so loving a God is he. In all that time he turned over in his mind all that was good about men, all that was kind. But always he could hear and see the unbearable repartee between what was Godly and the poisonous error built into him by this loving, but terrible, mistake. ’

Again there was a short silence as he stared out over the dizzying landscape below. When he spoke again his voice was even softer and more reasonable.

‘The heart of a man is a small thing but it desires great matters. It is not big enough for a dog’s dinner but the whole world is not big enough for it. Man spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound; from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child. ’

Bosco turned back to Cale, his eyes shining with all the love and hope of a doting parent desperate to be understood by the person they love most in the world.

‘And who will exterminate him who exterminates all others? You. It is you who are charged with the slaughter of man. Of the whole earth, you will make a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed, without end, without measure, without pause, until the annihilation of all things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death. ’

Bosco smiled at Cale, tolerant, genuinely understanding.

‘Why would you do such a terrible thing? Because it is in your nature to do so. You are not a man, you are God’s anger made flesh. There is enough of mankind in you to wish to be other than what you are. You want to love, you want to show kindness, you want to be merciful. But in your heart you know you are none of these things. That is why people hate you and why the more you try to love them the more they fear you. This is why the girl betrayed you and why you will always be betrayed as long as you live. You are a wolf pretending to himself that he is a lamb.

‘Where else do you think you get your genius for mayhem and death? You kill with as much ease as others breathe. You turn up in the greatest city in the world and despite all your good intentions it took you six months to leave it in ruins. You do not bring disaster, you are disaster. You are the Grimperson, the Angel of Death, and you’d better like it or lump it. But if you don’t like it you’d better get used to wandering where everyone will despise you and everyone will try and kill you for no reason they’ll ever know. Come with me and when your work is finished and everything that lives now is dead, you will come here and be taken up into heaven. It is the only way you’ll ever have peace of mind. This is a promise. ’

Within three hours the two of them had walked down to the Redeemers waiting for them and that night a respectful Bosco talked to a silent Cale late into the night.

‘Do you know why God made you?’ It was a quote instantly recognizable from the Catechism of the Hanged Redeemer. Cale’s reply, cautious, was nevertheless by rote.

‘He made us to know and love him. ’

‘Do you think God made him well?’

‘Not in my experience,’ said Cale, ‘but I might just have been unlucky. ’

‘But your experience is a good deal broader in the last eight months. In fact I’d say it was uniquely so. Clearly God ordained your escape and all the extraordinary things that have happened to you precisely so you could answer the question. You’ve walked hand in hand with the great and the good of this world, been loved in all the ways possible by the most beautiful, done mighty services and been mightily betrayed for your trouble. ’

All of this had the great advantage from Bosco’s point of view of being more or less precisely what the young man himself believed to be the case: truth and self‑pity formed a harmonious whole.

‘I’d say,’ continued Bosco, ‘that you’d seen as much as anyone that man is a wolf to man. ’

‘Hypocrites,’ replied Cale, ‘I’ve come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are. ’

‘That’s at my expense, I suppose,’ said Bosco, apparently not insulted. ‘If so, I’m afraid you must explain why. ’

‘How do you look at me with a straight face and clack on about treachery?’

‘You’ve still lost me. Suppose I’d left you in the hands of the kind of people prepared to sell you for sixpence. Since the day you could walk you’d have been behind a plough staring at a horse’s arse for fifteen hours a day — stupid, ignorant, probably dead by now — a kind of nothing. ’

‘God has been merciful. Besides, I thought I was special. ’

‘There are a great many people who are born special. As the Hanged Redeemer said, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air. ”’

Cale laughed. ‘A flower? I am, it’s true, sweeter and more flowery than people give me credit for. ’

‘Then let me put it more clearly: you were born to wade through slaughter to the throne of God. Many are called, few are chosen. But I chose you and made you fit to be the agent of the promised end. ’

‘Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’

‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity. ’ He smiled an oddly fetching expression of self‑awareness and mockery.

‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension how like a cow. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? To me the quintessence of dust. ’ Bosco had seemed to lose himself but then looked intensely at Cale.

Cale did not reply.

‘Leave your hatred of me to one side for a moment and consider your experience of the world. Do you disagree in your heart of hearts?’

There was another long pause.

‘This is not the first time the Lord has wiped away mankind for its failures. It is not generally known that there was a kind of Man before Adam. God destroyed him in a great flood in which he drowned the whole world and started again. ’

‘Everything. Even to the last blade of grass. ’

‘Sounds easy enough. Why not do the same again?’

‘Too many people, not enough water. Too much grass. ’

‘Does the Pope believe any of this?’

‘Not exactly,’ replied Bosco, ‘but whatever he looses on earth shall be loosed in heaven. ’

‘I don’t get… Oh, I see. ’ Cale thought about what he thought he saw. ‘You’re going to kill the Pope and take his place. ’

‘If I didn’t know better I’d say you were more devil than angel. Do you really think you can kill a Pope anointed by God and not immediately damn yourself?’

They sat in silence, Bosco wanting Cale to ask for an explanation. Knowing this, despite his curiosity, Cale declined to give him the satisfaction.

‘The Pope is not himself,’ said Bosco.

‘Who is he?’ replied an astonished Cale. It was not an expression he’d heard before.

‘No, I mean he’s not well. He is an old man and he is suffering from a disease of the mind — a weakening, one that’s slowly getting worse. He forgets. ’

‘He forgets who he is. ’

‘If he’s that bad he’ll die soon. ’

‘He is that bad but people afflicted in this way often live for a long time — very long. ’ He looked at Cale again enjoying the feeling of, once again, being master to his pupil.

‘What must I do?’ asked Bosco. It was not a question but a prompt that Cale should demonstrate his good judgement.

‘You must be there when he dies and become Pope. ’

Bosco laughed. ‘A little easier said than done. ’

‘You can laugh,’ said Cale, ‘but am I wrong?’

‘No — let’s look simply at complex things. That is, indeed, the end but what’s the beginning? Even for the very clever it can be like breaking bones to stand back from something that’s been in front of you all your life. ’

‘How powerful are you?’ Cale asked after a long time.

‘Excellent,’ laughed Bosco. ‘When you murdered Redeemer Picarbo you were kind enough to promote me from, let’s say, tenth in line to the papacy to perhaps ninth. ’

‘You wouldn’t have punished me?’

‘Hard to say. Your actions at the time were inconvenient. My plans for you — for all of this — were years in the future. Tenth in line to the papacy is not in line to the papacy at all. Your vanishing and my coming for you advanced everything in a most peculiar and unexpected way. Memphis is fallen. I have much of the credit and what is not mine is yours. I am now fourth in line to the papacy. Alas’ — he smiled — ‘fourth in line is, in reality, little better than tenth or twentieth. ’

‘Who are first and second?’

‘To the point!’ mocked Bosco. ‘Gant and Parsi. ’

‘Never heard of them. ’

‘Why would you? I was mistaken in thinking these things were premature when it comes to you. ’

‘So now you’re going to tell me?’

‘Now I am going to ask you to work it out. ’

‘Why not just tell me?’

‘Because you will see it more clearly if you do so. And also because it will give me greater pleasure. ’

Told by the devil who has tormented you all your life that he will let you guess his secrets, what intelligent boy, however deep his hatred, might not be curious?

‘There was a book in the library with its own lock — the census. I managed to open others but not that. ’

‘You did manage to break it trying, though. ’

‘How big is the Redeemer empire?’

‘It’s not an empire, it is a commonwealth. The commonwealth has achieved enosis with forty‑three countries and, according to the last census, has the chance to redeem one hundred million people. ’

‘How big is the world?’

‘I have no real idea. Concerning the Indies and China we know little enough. But concerning the four quarters, not including Memphis, we are, perhaps, four times the size and many times wealthier than is generally held to be the case. ’

‘Why not including Memphis?’

‘Memphis drew its clout from its military power. We conquered Memphis and destroyed the Materazzi but we did not conquer its empire: that merely collapsed. Each country in that empire has declared itself free and started squabbling with its neighbours about the same things it squabbled about before the Materazzi arrived. Taking Memphis has turned out to be a mixed blessing, and given time it may turn out not to be a blessing at all. ’

‘If the Redeemer empire is so much bigger an empire than everyone thinks…’

‘Commonwealth,’ interrupted Bosco.

‘… than everyone thinks, why are you stuck in the fight with the Antagonists?’

‘Good. Exactly so. ’ Bosco was clearly pleased with this question. ‘The commonwealth of the Redeemers is not only large but bloated — full of contradictions. Some parts of the commonwealth are slack in their beliefs and so full of blasphemies they’re hardly better than Antagonists. Many extract from us more in subsidies than they pay in taxes. Others are fanatical in their beliefs but always arguing with each other after this or that doctrinal point. There are numerous schisms threatening to become full‑grown heresies like Antagonism. ’

‘If things are so bad why haven’t the Antagonists defeated you?’

‘Again, well done. They face the same problems. It is not lack of religion that’s destroying mankind, it is mankind that is destroying religion. Such a creature is incompetent to aspire to the likeness of God. God tried but failed. He will try again. ’

‘I thought God was perfect,’ said Cale.

‘Then why has he made such a mess of mankind?’

‘Because he is perfectly generous. God is not some criminal who cheats in his own card game. He wishes to engage with us freely, out of choice. Not even God can make a circle square. God is lonely — he wants mankind to choose obedience, not be frightened into it. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘I understand what you’re saying, yes. ’

‘Neither I nor the God we both serve need you to agree. You are not a man and you are not a god, you are anger and disappointment made flesh. What you do is what you are. What you think is irrelevant. ’

‘I have been told in my visions that you will be taken up and set aside in the Island of Avalon, a place flowing with milk and honey. You will stay there clothed in white samite until a time, if it comes, when God needs you again. ’

After this Cale did not say anything for some time.

‘Tell me about Chartres. ’

‘The Sanctuary is the military heart of the faith but that’s why it’s positioned here in the back of beyond — to curtail its shout. Although I have great power, any commander of the Sanctuary who approaches within forty miles of Chartres would be excommunicated by fiat of the Pope. I am permitted there only by his express permission — rarely forthcoming — and never with more than a dozen priests. Even then I haven’t met with him alone since Gant and Parsi sealed him off from the world like a pea in a pod. ’

‘I don’t know what that is. ’ A pause. ‘Why don’t they kill you?’

‘Straight there as usual. They count me as a rival but one effectively neutralized because all my power is in the army and not in Chartres. Your running away, Cale, advanced matters too quickly. ’

‘Or you,’ said Cale, ‘have allowed them to drift. ’

‘Not so. Almost since the day you arrived here I have been recruiting three hundred military officers who have accepted that mankind cannot be cured and that you are its solution. They will be here soon. You will train these already considerable men and they will train three hundred more and so on. Within two years you will have prepared four thousand officers and I will be ready to move against Gant and Parsi. If I am successful we will be invited into Chartres to save the Pope. ’

‘And how will you do that?’

‘That’s not something you need to worry about. ’

‘Silk. Heavy white silk. ’

It was not that Cale believed Bosco about Avalon, though Bosco was clearly sincere in his certainty of the existence of the place, but he was dubious at the picture of the pleasures that awaited him there.

‘The last time I saw anyone wearing heavy white silk it was some archbishop giving a high mass in praise of God. Four hours was bad enough. In case you hadn’t noticed I’m not the praising type. ’

‘Why would you be? In Avalon you will be cared for by seventy‑two creatures who are not exactly angels. ’

‘They are feminine spirits. Lesser than the rebel angels they made common cause with because they were resentful, as always, about their place in heaven. But seventy‑two of them realized before God’s final victory that they would lose even what they already had, and so, weeping tears, they persuaded God to show them mercy — against the advice of the Holy Mother, who saw them for the conniving slags they were. But a forgiving God sent them to Avalon in recognition of that repentance and as punishment for having wavered in their faith. They are waiting for you and to serve you in any way you desire. ’

‘Like the nuns in the convent. ’

‘That will be a matter for you — and so I assume not at all like the nuns in the convent. ’

‘And how do you know this?’

‘It was revealed to me in the desert. ’

According to the Janes the heart of a child can take forty‑nine blows before it’s damaged for ever and what’s done can never be undone. Consider, then, the heart of Thomas Cale, sold for sixpence, fed on beatings, steeled to murder and then betrayed by the only living creature to show him love (a particularly hard one, that). Self‑pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul. Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation. Imagine what poison was poured into Cale’s breast that afternoon and night on Tiger Mountain. Consider the damage done and the power offered to make it right. It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger — how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul.

When Vague Henri, IdrisPukke and Kleist had decided on their careful pursuit of Bosco and his prize they had expected him to head straight for the safety of the Sanctuary, so the long detour taken by Bosco made them wary and suspicious. IdrisPukke only realized where they were going a few hours before Tiger Mountain appeared on the horizon. He was surprised that the news seemed to amaze the two boys.

‘This is the Holiest site in the Good Book,’ said Vague Henri.

‘I didn’t think you believed in all that any more,’ replied IdrisPukke.

‘Who said we do?’ For the last few days Kleist had been even touchier than usual.

‘It’s not that,’ said Vague Henri, ‘but we’ve heard about this place all our lives. God spoke to Prester John on that mountain. Jephthah sacrificed his only daughter to the Lord there. ’

The two patiently explained the story, so often repeated to them it no longer seemed a real event with real people — a none‑too‑sharp knife and a twelve‑year‑old girl willingly bent over a curved rock.

‘Good grief,’ said IdrisPukke when they’d finished.

‘And it was where Satan tempted the Hanged Redeemer with power over the whole world. I got a hefty thrashing for pointing out that Satan must’ve been a bit of a dunce. ’

‘What’s the point of tempting someone with something they don’t want?’

The unexpectedness of Bosco’s diversion meant that they had little water and no food for two days. But Kleist had shot a fox and they were waiting with sore stomachs for it to cook.

‘Do you think it’s ready?’

‘Better wait,’ said Kleist. ‘You don’t want to be eating undercooked fox. ’

IdrisPukke didn’t want to be eating fox, undercooked or otherwise. When it was ready Kleist cut it (carving a fox into three equal parts was no mean feat), complete equality of shares being ensured by the law of the acolytes that whoever divided what they were about to eat had to take the smallest portion, an insight into human nature that had it been extended to a great many grander matters would have transformed the history of the world. IdrisPukke was still looking down at the fair third of the crisply done animal on his plate while the other two were on the point of finishing, though a good half‑hour of bone and marrow sucking would follow.

‘What’s it like?’ said IdrisPukke.

‘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.

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. ’

‘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.

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?’

‘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.

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. ’

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.

Meanwhile, Bosco had a great many pressing problems to deal with. In the eyes of Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist, Bosco appeared to be a figure of absolute authority among the Redeemers. This was far from the case. It might have been true concerning acolytes and even many senior Redeemers. His writ might now run in the Sanctuary but, however important it was, the centre of power for the faith lay with Pope Bento XVI in the holy city of Chartres. For twenty years a formidable bastion of power and orthodoxy, he had spent those two decades rolling back the changes of the previous hundred years in search of a renewed purity for the One True Faith. However, for some time he had been prey to that great affliction of age, Mens Vermis, first as a great tendency to forget, then to wander, then to wander and not return except for brief flashes of a few hours where his old grasp seemed to return in its entirety. From where, who knows? In the three years during which the Vermis had ruined his mind many cabals and juntos, cliques and coteries, had emerged preparing for the moment when death might release him from his duties. The two most important of these were the Redeemers Triumphant, run by Redeemer Cardinal Gant — responsible for religious orthodoxy — and the Office of the Holy See controlled by Redeemer Cardinal Parsi. Whoever controlled the Holy See and the Redeemers Triumphant controlled access to the Holy Father, and as the Holy Father was so ill, between them they controlled a very great deal. As for Gant and Parsi there was the difference between a gnat and a flea as to which of them hated Bosco most. Bosco’s view of either went a long way beyond hatred. This longstanding animosity was a matter of design by Pope Bento, who believed as much in the principle of divide and rule as he did in God. When the time was right he would have chosen a successor but such matters seemed beyond him now even though the choice was only between Parsi and Gant. It would not have been Bosco. Bosco was suspected of thinking and sometimes of new thinking. Aware of these reservations, Bosco had made other plans.

Bosco’s belief that the Protocols could be as crude as a four‑year‑old’s painting of the Hanged Redeemer as long as the faithful were convinced by their origins turned out to be more true than he could have reasonably hoped. The body’s apparently one‑in‑a‑million chance arrival from the sea was proof that there was no conspiracy. So natural did it seem that the question of its fakery never arose. The Office of the Holy See and the Redeemers Triumphant were reduced to arguing that while the threat was clearly real, the Antagonists were mistaken about the heretics in their ranks. Nevertheless there were mighty purges. Torture as such was forbidden to be used on Redeemers but the Office of Interrogators had no need of racks and branding. A few nights without sleep, followed by ducking in water, soon had entirely innocent men — innocent of heresy at any rate — confessing to collusion and apostasy and trafficking with devils all followed by the naming of names. Bosco watched with considerable satisfaction as a great number of his enemies were burnt at the stake by a great many of his other enemies. The authority he gained as a result of his own rule at the Sanctuary being accused by the Protocols of being a model of resistance to Antagonism gave him a renewed influence sufficient to launch the attack on the Materazzi with its utterly unexpected and magnificent consequences. He was now very much in the ascendant over Parsi and Gant and he had proved to his followers, beyond any shadow of a scruple or doubt, that God had blessed his daring and dangerous plan and that Cale was indeed God’s instrument. Work, and very serious work, remained to be done. Neither Gant nor Parsi were to be underestimated and realizing the threat from Bosco they had joined together to oppose him. The Antagonist purge had eventually been brought to an end by their concerted efforts and they were on the move against Bosco and at any price.

That night Bosco lay on his bed, brooding over the many plans he had set in motion to destroy his rivals and bring about the end of the world. Exhilaration and worry kept him awake. What, after all, could shock the soul so intensely as the decision to bring everything to an end — the terrible vertigo of commitment to the ultimate solution of evil itself? His wariness was more ordinary but not less important. Bosco was not foolish enough to countenance grand ideas without knowing he needed the wit and competence to carry them out and, of course, the luck. Then there was the wariness and exhilaration he felt about Cale. Everything he had ever hoped for from this boy had come true and more than that. And yet he was puzzled that God had given everything his vision had promised and pressed down into the barrel yet there were still traces of something inadequate about him: pointless anger and resentment not turned into a proper righteousness. He comforted himself before he fell asleep that he had not intended Cale to be made manifest to the world for another ten years at least. If it hadn’t been for that lunatic Picarbo and his ghastly experiments, things would have been very different. Soon after a short fulmination he stopped indulging his bad temper and comforted himself with one of his oldest dictums, ‘a plan is a baby in a cradle — it bears little resemblance to the man’.

Early the next morning he waited in the Square of Martyrs’ Blood, expectant and impatient, for one of his most carefully laid plans to reach its maturity. The great gates creaked open and three hundred Redeemers marched into the Sanctuary. It would be hard to describe them as the cream of the military wing of the priesthood because cream would give entirely the wrong sense of something smooth and richly soft. They were as forbidding a collection as perhaps had ever stood together in one place — only great care and patience over nearly ten years had won them to Bosco’s cause, it being no easy thing to bend the inflexible and reason with the fanatical. Hardest of all had been to preserve the flickers of daring and imaginative violence that brought them to his attention in the first place. These were Redeemers who had shown a talent for unlikely innovation, along with their more conventional talent for cruelty, brutality and the willingness to obey. They would be Cale’s most direct servants. Cale would train them, each of them in turn train one hundred others and each of them again one hundred more. Now that he had Cale and the men in front of him he had the origins of the end of everything.

Bosco might still lack his rivals’ power base in Chartres but he had a great variety of followers of different kinds, many unknown to one another. Some were fanatical in their devotion, true believers in his plan to change the world for ever, most had no idea of his final intentions but regarded him as more zealous in matters of faith than Parsi and Gant. Others were more lukewarm still: he was someone powerful who might yet become more powerful. Probably he would be eclipsed by the Pope’s death, peace be upon him, but you never knew. Through this ugly rainbow of alliances he had spread the word about Cale by revealing the heroism of his part in saving the Pope from the malice not only of the Antagonists but from the expansionism of the now ruined Materazzi. Unofficial pamphlets were written telling disapprovingly but salaciously of the temptations and dangers Cale had faced. Their portrait of Memphis was crude but by no means untrue: the availability of flesh, its cunning politicians, and beautiful but corrupting women’s wiles. But while some Redeemers might have enjoyed the horrors that they read about most of them were not hypocrites: they were genuinely revolted by what they read. It may surprise you that men such as these could feel love, but be unsurprised. They did. Cale had saved the Pope they loved.

The vast expansion of acolyte numbers over the last few years as Bosco built up his control of the military future of the Redeemers meant that, vast as the Sanctuary was, there was little in the way of accommodation for the three hundred of his new elite. Redeemers in general might not expect much in the way of life’s pleasures but a room of their own when not on active service, however small, was a matter of great significance in lives generally full of privation. The many cells in the House of Special Purpose had been built when space was less of a luxury and Bosco had decided to clear out those who had been languishing there for any length of time. Over the last few weeks large numbers of executions had been carried out to create the space needed for the new arrivals. As with all enclosed institutions those inside the Sanctuary were terrible gossips and as such relentlessly nosy. There was bound to be talk about the arrival of these imposing‑looking officers but, in hindsight, Bosco felt he ought to have spent time on a convincing explanation for their presence. At the time he relied on the considerable intelligence of the highly experienced Chief Jailer to carry out his orders to treat the men well and put them in the north wing of the prison now cleared of inmates by means of the recent spate of murders. Bosco arranged for the excellent feeding of the three hundred men and explained that the wing would be locked to keep out the curious. They knew they were a chosen elect and that secrecy was vital to their own survival, so there were no objections.

Then Bosco spent several hours explaining his intentions to a mostly silent Cale.

‘Whose authority are they under?’

‘And whose authority am I under?’

‘You are under no authority — certainly not mine, if that’s what you meant. You are God’s resentment made flesh. You only imagine that you are a man and that the will of another man can ever matter to you. Deviate from your nature and you will destroy yourself. That’s why Arbell Swan‑Neck betrayed you and her father also betrayed you — even when you had saved the life of his daughter and recalled his only son to life just as much as if you had brought him back from the dead. People are not for you — you are not for people. Do what you’re here for and you’ll return to your father in heaven. If you try to be something you can never be then you are due more pain and misery than any creature that ever lived. ’

‘Oh,’ said Bosco, smiling. ‘So that you can tear it down brick by brick and sow salt into its foundations. ’

‘Something like that. ’

‘By all means. That’s what you’re for after all. But I do not have the authority and therefore you don’t have it either. We must have an army. Sleeping in the House of Special Purpose is the means to get one. Even then I will need to be Pontiff before you can get up to mischief on that scale. As you have now discovered, nothing you can do for a man or woman will make them love you. Except for me, Thomas, I love you. ’

And with that he stood up and left.

That night a nervous Redeemer Bergeron, Deputy Chief Jailer, arrived with a list of the names of the three hundred Bosco had asked for to check against his records and to guard against infiltrators. The new list confirmed there were, in fact, only two hundred and ninety‑nine. The missing Redeemer would have to be accounted for in case he’d had second thoughts or been arrested. It turned out some time later that he had died of smallpox on his way to join the others. The jailer was nervous because he was new to dealing with the fearsome Bosco. His boss, the Chief Jailer, had been imprisoned himself only the day before on charges of Impious Malateste, an offence serious enough to have him arrested but not to inform Bosco about. The Chief Jailer had chosen his deputy now in charge precisely because his limited intelligence would lessen any threat to his own position. The deputy returned an hour after Bosco had read the list of names. Bosco did not look up when he entered, merely pushed the list in his direction. He nervously picked it up without looking and got out of Bosco’s intimidating presence as quickly as possible.

Outside, the jailer’s heart was beating like a girl’s who had just had her first kiss. He tried to calm himself and taking the list to a taper burning weakly on the wall examined it carefully. When he finished his eyes were bulging with fear and uncertainty. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. He was too afraid to ask for clarification from Bosco and too proud to consult his predecessor. He was right to think that he would have looked foolish and inept in the eyes of both. His promotion, after all, was yet to be confirmed. ‘Whatever you are,’ he had once overheard, ‘be decisive. ’ This not very good advice, misunderstood in any case, had been lurking at the back of Redeemer Jailer Bergeron’s mind for many years awaiting the opportunity to betray him. At last its opportunity had come. How many of us are any different? How many of our worst or finest hours are rooted in some minor piece of nonsense that was stuck in our souls like a weed into a rocky cliff and flourished there against the odds? It forces its roots into a crack, the crack is widened, a sudden storm, the water invades the crack, the water freezes in the winter night and opens up the split. A stranger passes, his horse stumbles on the loosened rock and horse and rider are ejected into the dreadful chasm of the scarp. So Bergeron hurried to the cell of Petar Brzica and knocked with absolute conviction on his door.

‘The people on this list in the north wing are to be executed. ’

Brzica was not especially surprised given that so many prisoners from the north wing of the House had been put to death recently. He examined the list, calculating roughly what sort of task it was. ‘I thought,’ he said, more to make conversation than anything, ‘the executions were finished for now. ’

‘Obviously not,’ came the bad‑tempered reply. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and see the Lord Redeemer Bosco and ask him yourself what he thinks he’s up to. ’

‘Not my job,’ replied Brzica. ‘Ours is not to reason why. When?’

‘I’ve just come from Redeemer Bosco’s presence. ’

This was compelling.

‘That’s nothing to concern you. All you need to worry about is how quickly you can start and finish. ’

‘Two hundred and ninety‑nine. ’

Brzica considered, his lips moving in silent calculation.

‘I can start in two hours. ’

‘How soon can you start if you get your finger out?’

Again Brzica considered.

‘Once the rotunda gets going we can do one every two minutes. With breaks — eleven hours. ’

‘And without breaks?’

‘Very well,’ said Bergeron, in a tone that suggested he had concluded his negotiation successfully. ‘The rotunda in two hours. ’

Brzica was in fact working in the rotunda in less than an hour with his four assistants or topping coves. He had taken a look at his victims carefully. They were a tough‑looking bunch. If they caught a sniff of what was happening there would be trouble. At the moment it was clear they were unaware — though not blissfully so. Not even men as ginty‑looking as this could be so carefree in the face of death and the everlasting torment that waited. One thing bothered him a great deal. ‘Why,’ he said to the Redeemer on guard, ‘aren’t they locked in their cells? Why’s there no one but you to watch them?’

His reply was convincing. ‘No idea. ’

If the guard was uncommunicative it was not just because he genuinely knew nothing, but also because no one wanted to talk to Brzica. Even the most thuggish Redeemers looked down on, indeed despised, him in the way executioners have always been despised. Nobody liked him but he didn’t care, or at least that was what he told himself. In fact he was sensitive about the way he was regarded. He liked being feared. He liked being seen as deadly and mysterious. He was aggrieved, however, by the disdain. It was uncalled for. It was unjust. He held himself aloof but his feelings were hurt by this lack of respect.

He suffered in silence, not out of choice but because no one wanted to talk to him. Not even his assistants, two of whom had recently, and much to his irritation, tried to get themselves reassigned to ministering to lepers in Mogadishu. They would get theirs in due course for this disloyalty, but tonight required unity and harmonious skill.

Problems still remained and he decided to walk along the ambulacrum to clear his head. Should they be bound first? No. The advantage of tied hands and hobbled legs needed to be offset against the clear worry this would give that something unpleasant was up. These were not the kind of men to go quietly and given the fact that for some reason they had been left with the doors to their cells open, a riot could easily result. It was better, he decided as he loped up the ambo, to keep them innocent and do it all so quickly they wouldn’t catch on until they were halfway to the next life. It required more deftness and a surer touch but then these he had in abundance.

‘Good night, Redeemer. ’ It was Bosco walking past, mulling over Cale.

But Bosco was already gone.

The Rotunda had been designed by Brzica’s predecessor — a Fancy Dan, in Brzica’s opinion — and had been constructed, in his professional opinion, more elaborately than was necessary. Keep it simple was his motto. He had replaced the Rotunda’s three‑room system for mass executions — one about to be killed, one in the next room being prepared and the third the victim in waiting — and replaced it with something that relied more on the cooperation of the victim under the impression that something else was happening. The victim was told he was to have a brief introduction to the Prior of the Sanctuary. When he entered through the thick and soundproof door he would see the Prior kneeling to pray with his back to him and facing a Holy icon of the Hanged Redeemer. He and his two guards would kneel side by side, the latter a little closer perhaps than one would expect. The Prior would then stand up and turn around, the victim would look up, Brzica in his leather apron would grab his hair, the two guards hold his arms and then Brzica would draw the knife embedded in his glove across his throat. Already dying and in shock he would be dropped onto the false floor in front of him, this would be lowered by the guards, the dead or dying man would be pushed down the chute to be pulled away by the Redeemers in the room below, who would wash the false floor quickly and carefully and then the floor would be pushed and raised back into place. A quick check for signs of the struggle and then the guards would be up and leaving the room by a door further along the corridor. Outside the next victim would be patiently waiting with his two guards. He would see dimly in the shadows what he thought was his predecessor leaving through the exit door. Then the whole procedure would begin again.

This went on throughout the night with only a single interruption. One of the victims, more alert than all the rest, sensed something was not quite right. As a tired hand grasped his hair and another his left hand he instinctively jerked free. Slipping and sliding and screaming as all four of his murderers grappled and tried to pin him down, screaming and fighting till they bundled him into the shaft, stamped on his hand, beat him about the head and finally pushed him through to be finished off by the Redeemers in the chambers below. Not even the thickest door could prevent the sound of such a dreadful struggle reaching the ears of the man waiting in the corridor outside. Brzica went out himself and stabbed the frightened Redeemer where he stood before he could raise a fuss. Other than that, everything passed as it should.

The next morning at eleven, Redeemer Jailer Bergeron inspected the pile of lightly washed bodies laid out in the Rotunda Aftorium, waiting to be removed to Ginky’s Field under the cover of night. It was a sobering but impressive sight. Half an hour later he was standing in front of a slightly impatient Bosco, who was trying to work out the boring but complicated documents involving an argument over the delivery of a large consignment of spoiled cheese.

‘What is it?’ said Bosco, not looking up.

‘The executions have been carried out as you ordered, Redeemer. ’

Bosco looked up having lost, to his irritation, his train of thought over the claim and counter‑claim concerning responsibility for the rotten cheese.

A terrible dread flushed through Bergeron as if he had been hit by a winter spate.

‘The execution of the prisoners in the House of Special Purpose. ’

Bergeron’s voice was whisper thin. He took out the order sheet with the names and pointed to the last page. ‘There’s the cross you put at the end to confirm it. ’

Bosco took the paper from him without fuss. A horrible quiet settled over him. He looked at it for a moment. His precious gauleiters gone, every one.

‘The cross at the bottom,’ he said softly, ‘was to show that I’d read it. ’

‘Please don’t say anything. You’ve brought me a disaster this morning. Take me to see them. ’

In his room Cale was looking pointlessly out of the window, his mind hundreds of miles away. Behind him there was the clatter of an acolyte laying out his second meal of the day. If nothing else, eating, now that his food came from the nuns as it did for the other Redeemers, was one pleasure he still felt. Of a sort. The acolyte dropped one of the covers on the floor and it bounced noisily and rolled over near his feet. The nearness of the acolyte’s scrabble to pick it up made him look at the boy’s face for the first time. The boy, though he was at least Cale’s age, picked up the cover and looked back, but uncertainly.

‘I don’t know you,’ said Cale.

‘They brought me here ten days ago from Stuttgart. ’ Cale had read about Stuttgart only a few days before in an almanac Bosco had given him that set out in the driest detail every armed and walled Redeemer citadel with a population above five thousand. It was five hundred pages long and there were ten volumes. According to Bosco, the Redeemer commonwealth was fragile. What was clear from even what he had read in the alamanac was that it was vast, bigger by far than he had ever imagined.

Cale went over to the table and sat down. There were scrambled eggs, toast, chicken legs, sausages, mushrooms and porridge. He started to help himself.

‘You’re Cale, aren’t you?’

Cale ignored him. ‘They say you saved the Pope himself from nasty Antagonists. ’

Cale looked back at him for a moment then went back to eating. Model stared at him. He was hungry because acolytes were always hungry, just as for most of the year they were cold. But it did not occur to him that the food on the table, some of which he did not even recognize, might be shared with him. It was like a beautiful woman to an ugly man — he could appreciate the beauty but could not expect at all to participate in it. But, distracted as he was, Cale could not eat this well in front of another acolyte.

Model sat and Cale put a dish of fried potatoes in front of him. But there was, of course, a problem. Cale picked up the dish of fried potatoes and emptied all but one on his own plate. Flushed with desire and longing, Model’s face fell.

‘Look,’ said Cale. ‘You eat too much of this stuff and you’ll be yawning your guts up in five minutes. Believe me. What did you eat in Stuttgart?’

‘Porridge and bunge. ’

‘Sort of fat and nuts and stuff. ’

‘We call it dead men’s feet. ’

Cale removed the skin from a small piece of chicken and scraped away the delicious jelly that clung juicily to the underside. Then a smaller helping of just the white of an egg and a larger dollop of porridge but just a little bit, not too much.

‘See how that goes down. ’

Well was the answer, ecstatically wonderfully in a heavenly way it went down well. Not even in the depths of his anger and fury could Cale fail to take pleasure in the delight of Model as he ate the fried potato, the white of the egg, the porridge slipping down his parched and hungry throat as if it had come from the gardens of paradise, where it was said that there were lemonade springs and the rocks were made of candy.

When Model finished he sat back and stared again at Cale.

‘You’re welcome. Now go and lie down for five minutes and turn your face to the wall so you aren’t looking at me while I finish. You might feel a bit strange. ’

Model did as he was told and Cale finished his breakfast without giving him another thought. As he finished there was a knock at the door.

‘Go away,’ he said, signalling the alarmed Model to get up. There was another knock. He waited. ‘Come in. ’ It was Bosco.

Ten minutes later the two of them stood alone in the Aftorium looking silently at the two hundred and ninety‑nine dead bodies, all that remained of Bosco’s ten years of planning for the means to bring the world to an end.

‘I wanted to show you this because there should be no secrets between us. I don’t want you to learn from my mistake because I did not make a mistake. I wish that I had, because then I could learn from it. But this error, shall we call it, is simply what it is. An event. There was a plan, a carefully arrived at and exactingly thought‑out plan. What you need to learn here is that there is nothing to learn. That there are foolish men and that there are inexperienced men and that there are misunderstandings. This is the nature of things. You understand?’

‘I will consider an alternative. ’

But for all his acceptance of the terrible carnage done to his years of irreplaceable planning (Bergeron had been replaced but to his astonished thankfulness not disembowelled or even punished) Bosco was white with shock.

‘Consider them for an hour. Then leave. ’

‘I don’t need an hour,’ said Cale.

‘I don’t need an hour. ’

Bosco moved his head, just a slight move. He turned to leave and Cale followed up the winding steps known as the Stairway to Heaven going up and, for reasons lost in time, Yummity’s Steps going down. They moved slowly up past the Rotunda, Bosco’s knees not being what they once were, and up into the Bourse, the hall that led off into the various departments of the House of Special Purpose.

Towards the back of the Bourse a man, a Redeemer, stripped of his robes, was being led towards an open courtyard. He was wailing quietly, a drizzly sobbing like a tired and unhappy child. Cale watched as the three attending Redeemers ushered him forward. Cale watched them as if he might be a buzzard or one of the more thoughtful Falconidae.

‘Pity is nothing of…’

‘Stop them and tell them to take him back to his cell. ’

Bosco walked over to the execution party as they stalled, trying to push the prisoner through the doorway and out into the bright sunshine of the courtyard.

Ten minutes later Cale, followed by a wary Bosco, was walking silently through the cells where the Purgators, those whose sins of blasphemy, heresy, offences against the Holy Ghost and a long list of others, were kept while they waited for their fate to be decided, usually a very simple and uniform fate. Cale walked up and down carefully looking over the waiting prisoners — the terrified, the despairing, the bewildered, the fanatical and the clearly mad.

‘Two hundred and fifty six,’ said the jailer.

‘What’s in there?’ said Cale, nodding towards a locked door. The jailer looked at Bosco and then back at Cale. Was this the promised Grimperson? He didn’t look like much.

‘Behind that door we keep those condemned to an Act of Faith. ’

Cale looked at the jailer.

‘Unlock the door and go away. ’

‘Do as you’re told,’ said Bosco.

He did so, face red with resentment. Cale pushed the door and it swung open easily. There were ten cells, five on each side of the corridor. Eight were Redeemers whose crimes required a public execution to encourage and support the morale of the witnessing faithful. Of the other two, one was a man, clearly not a priest because he had a beard and was dressed in civvies. The other was a woman.

‘The Maid of Blackbird Leys,’ said Bosco, when they returned to his rooms. ‘She has been prophesying blasphemies concerning the Hanged Redeemer. ’

‘What sort of blasphemies?’

‘How can I repeat them?’ said Bosco. ‘They’re blasphemies. ’

‘How was she charged then, at her trial?’

‘But the judge knows. ’

‘Unfortunately, may peace be upon him, the judge died of a stroke immediately afterwards, clearly brought on by the Maid’s heresy. ’

‘Luck had nothing to do with it. He has gone to a better place — or at least a place from which no traveller returns, nor anything the traveller might have learned before his departure. It’s all in the paperwork. ’

‘You are not a person to be tainted, you are the anger of God made flesh. It doesn’t matter what you read, what you hear, you are the sea‑green incorruptible. ’

Cale thought about this for a few moments.

‘And the beardy man?’

‘He is a natural philosopher who claims that the moon is not perfectly round. ’

‘But it is round,’ said Cale. ‘All you need to do is look at it. If you’re going to kill people for being stupid you’re going to need a lot more executioners. ’

‘Guido Hooke is very far from stupid, although he is eccentric. And he is right about the moon. ’

There was a snort of dismissal from Cale.

‘Anyone can see on any unclouded night that the moon is round. ’

‘That is an illusion created by the moon’s distance from the earth. Consider Tiger Mountain — from a distance its slopes seem smooth as butter, close to it’s as wrinkled as an old man’s sack. ’

‘How do you know? About the moon, I mean. ’

‘I’ll show you tonight if you wish. ’

‘If Hooke is right, why is he going to die for telling the truth?’

‘It’s a matter of authority. The Pope has ruled that the moon is precisely round — an expression of the perfect creation of God. Guido Hooke has contradicted him. ’

‘But you say he’s right. ’

‘What does that matter? He’s contradicted the rock on which the One True Faith is built: the right to the last word. If he is allowed to do so, consider where it will end: the death of authority. Without authority there is no church, without the church no salvation. ’ He smiled. ‘Hooke speaks for the lower truth, the Pope for a higher one. ’

‘But you don’t believe in salvation. ’

‘Which is why I must become Pope so that what is true and what I believe become the same thing. Why are you so interested in the Purgators?’

Kleist was singing wildly, happily off‑key.

‘The buzzing of the trees and the cigarette bees

The soda water fountains

Where the bluebell rings

And the lemonade sings

On the big rock candy mountain

In the big rock candy mountain

The priests all quack like ducks

There’s a five‑cent whore at every door

At dinner there is always more

And never was heard a discouraging word

In the big rock candy mountain. ’

He reached down, casual like, to check the knife sheathed in a pocket of the horse’s saddle and went on bawling not with much respect for tunefulness.

‘There’s a lake of stew and whisky too

You can paddle all around it in a big canoe

Then he was off, pulling the knife with him and running for a patch of blackberry briars. He leapt into the middle, his speed and weight carrying him, thorns scraping his skin red as he went. But the tangle of shoots was thicker than he’d realized and the older suckers in the middle were tough and thick‑barbed and his headlong flight was painfully brought to a halt.

Powerful hands grabbed him by the heels and dragged him backwards out of the briars. They had to tug hard and it gave Kleist a couple of seconds to decide. He dropped the knife in the briars and then he was free and being dragged into the open.

Other hands grabbed his wrists as he kicked and wriggled. Once he was held fast he knew there was no point and stopped struggling.

One man stood in front of him, his precise features hidden by the sun in Kleist’s eyes.

‘We’re going to search you, so don’t move. Any weapons?’

Two hands, swiftly and cleanly, skilfully frisked him.

‘Good. If you had lied to us it would have been the last thing you ever did. Get him up. ’

Kleist was pulled roughly into a sitting position and all five men, knives and short swords pulled, let him go in disciplined order. These people knew what they were doing.

‘What are you up to out here on your own?’

‘I was heading for Post Moresby. ’ A hefty blow landed on the side of his head.

‘Say “Lord Dunbar” when you speak to Lord Dunbar. ’

‘All right. How was I supposed to know?’

Another blow to teach him not to be lippy.

‘What would you do there?’ said Lord Dunbar.

Kleist looked at him — he was scruffy, dirty and badly dressed in an ugly‑looking tartan. He didn’t look like any lord Kleist had ever seen.

‘I want to get on a boat and get as far away from here as I can. ’

‘The Redeemers killed my family in the massacre on Mount Nugent. When they took Memphis I knew it was time to go away where I’d never see one of them ever again. ’ This was half true as far as it went.

‘Where did you get the horse?’

Another blow to the head.

‘I found it. I think it was a stray from the battle at Silbury Hill. ’

‘I heard about that. ’

‘Perhaps the Redeemers would pay cash for him,’ said Handsome Johnny.

‘Perhaps they’ll string you up when you try,’ said Kleist, getting another clip on the ear.

‘Lord Dunbar, all right. ’

‘Handsome Johnny,’ said Dunbar. ‘Search his horse. ’ Dunbar squatted down beside him.

‘What are these Redeemers after?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is they’re a bunch of murdering bastards, Lord Dunbar, and the best thing to do is get away from them. ’

‘The Materazzi haven’t been able to catch us in twenty years,’ said Lord Dunbar. ‘It doesn’t much matter to us who’s trying to hunt us down. ’

Handsome Johnny came back and laid an armful of Kleist’s possessions on the ground. There was a good haul. Kleist had made sure that however basic the purpose of anything he took from Memphis, it was all of the highest quality: the swords of Portuguese steel, inlaid with ivory at the handle, a blanket of cashmere wool, and so on, then the money — eighty dollars in a silk purse. This cheered the five men considerably. For all Dunbar’s boasting the pickings were pretty scant if their clothes and ragged state were anything to go by.

‘All right,’ said Kleist. ‘You’ve got everything I own. It’s a pretty good drag. Just let me go. ’

‘We should shallow the cheeky little sod. ’

Kleist didn’t like the sound of that.

‘Let me take him back there,’ said Handsome Johnny. ‘I’ll save any trouble. ’

Lord Dunbar glared at him.

‘I know what beastliness you want to do before that, Handsome Johnny,’ he shouted. He looked back at Kleist. ‘Get up. ’ Kleist got to his feet. ‘Give us your jacket. ’ Kleist took off his short coat, one he’d stolen off a hook in Vipond’s attendance room, soft leather and simply but beautifully cut.

Источник

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пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

Пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

Пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

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Пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

Пол хоффман последние четыре вещи перевод

Читать онлайн «The Last Four Things»

Автор Пол Хофман

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