The Left Hand Of God (28 page)

“You’re very confident of your powers, Cale,” said Vipond. “Given you’ve spent the last ten minutes telling us how invulnerable the Redeemers are.”

Cale looked at him.

“I said their assassins were invulnerable to you.” He smiled. “I didn’t say they were invulnerable to me. I’m better than any soldier the Redeemers have ever produced. I’m not boasting; it’s just a fact. If you don’t believe me, sir,” he said, looking at the Marshal, “then ask your daughter and IdrisPukke. And if they’re not enough, then ask Conn Materazzi.”

“Hold your tongue, you young pup,” said Vipond, anger replacing his curiosity. “You never speak to Marshal Materazzi in such a manner.”

“I’ve had worse things said to me,” said the Marshal. “If you can keep my daughter safe, then I will make you rich and you can talk to me in private however you damn well please. But what you say had better be true.” He stood up. “By tomorrow afternoon I want a written plan for her protection in front of me. Yes?”

Cale nodded.

“For now every soldier in the city is on duty. Now, if you wouldn’t mind leaving us. You too, IdrisPukke.”

The two of them stood up, nodded and left.

“That was quite a performance,” said IdrisPukke as he shut the door. “Was any of it true?”

Cale laughed but did not reply.

Had he given IdrisPukke an answer, it would have been that very little of his dire warning was rooted in anything but his desire to force Arbell Swan-Neck to pay attention to him. He was furious at her ingratitude and more than ever in love with her. But she deserved to be punished for treating him in the way she did, and what could be better than to be able to decide when he wanted to see her and have endless opportunities to make her life a misery by his presence? Of course, the fact that his presence was so distasteful to her was a blow to the heart, but he was no less able to live with such painful contradictions than anyone else.

Anxiety for his daughter made the Marshal fear the worst, and he was an easy prey for Cale’s ominous predictions. Vipond was no more convinced than IdrisPukke. On the other hand, he could see no harm in what Cale proposed. And the notion that the Redeemers might try to kill her was clearly not implausible. At any rate, it would allow the Marshal to think that something was being done while Vipond worked day and night to get to the root of the Redeemers’ intentions. He was sure that war of some kind was inevitable and was resigned to preparing for it, however surreptitiously. But for Vipond, to fight any war without knowing what precisely your enemy wanted was a disaster in the making. And so he was content for Cale to get up to whatever it was he was getting up to—though it was not difficult to see what it was. Cale clearly knew nothing of the motive behind the kidnapping, but having him as bodyguard to Arbell Materazzi would keep her safe. Vipond was, in his own less paternal way, as grateful to Cale for his rescue as her father: the political implications of having the most adored member of the royal family in the hands of such a murderous and brutal regime as that of the Redeemers did not bear thinking about. The news coming from the Eastern Front about the Redeemers’ bitter stalemate with the Antagonists was terrible, so terrible indeed that it was hard to believe—except that the pitifully small number of those who had escaped over the borders into Materazzi territory all gave an alarmingly consistent story, one that gave the horrible ring of truth to the accounts Vipond’s agents had been recording and sending him. If war was coming against the Redeemers, it promised to be like no other.

T
ell me what you know about the Redeemer war against the Antagonists.”

Vipond was looking grimly at Cale across his vast desk. IdrisPukke was sitting over by the window as if he were more interested in what was going on in the garden below.

“They are the Anti-Redeemers,” said Cale. “They hate the Redeemer and all his believers and want to destroy him and make his goodness perish from the earth.”

“That’s what you believe?” said Vipond, surprised at Cale’s sudden movement from normal speech to a monotone rote.

“It was what we were taught to recite twice a day at Mass. I don’t believe anything the Redeemers say.”

“But what do you know about the Antagonists—about their beliefs?”

Cale looked puzzled and thought for a few moments.

“Nothing. We were never told that the Antagonists believed anything. All they cared about was destroying the One True Faith.”

“You didn’t ask?”

Cale laughed. “You didn’t ask questions about the One True Faith.”

“If you knew the Antagonists hated the Redeemers so much, why didn’t you try and escape into the East?”

“We’d have had to travel fifteen hundred miles through Redeemer land and then try to cross seven hundred miles of trenches on the Eastern Front. And even if we had been stupid enough to try, we were always told that the Antagonists would martyr a Redeemer on sight. They were always telling us about Saint Redeemer George who was boiled alive in cows’ urine or Saint Redeemer Paulus who was pulled inside out by having a hook forced down his throat and then tying it to a team of horses. They never stopped talking about dungeons, fire and sword, or singing about them. Like I said, it never really occurred to me that the Antagonists actually believed in anything except killing Redeemers and destroying the One True Faith.”

“Did all your fellow acolytes think that way?”

“Some thought like me—a lot didn’t. To them it was all they’d ever known, so they never questioned it. That’s what the world was to them. They thought they’d be saved if they believed, and that if they didn’t believe, then they’d burn in hell for all eternity.”

Vipond started to become impatient.

“The war against the Antagonists has been going on since two hundred years before you were born. What you’ve consistently told me is that, along with being part of the One True Faith, all you were ever prepared for—and you in particular—was to fight, and yet you know nothing about victories or defeat or tactics or how this and that battle was won or lost? I find that hard to credit.”

Vipond’s skepticism was completely justified. Cale had gone over every battle and skirmish between the Redeemers and the Antagonists with Redeemer Bosco standing over him and hitting him with his belt every time he made an error in his analysis of what had gone well or badly. Cale had eaten and drunk the battles in the East four hours a day for ten years. But it was true, on the other hand, that he knew nothing about what the Antagonists believed. His decision to lie about what he knew about the war was based as much on instinct as calculation: if war between the Materazzi and the Redeemers was coming, then with it was coming terrible misery and death. He was not going to be a part of any such thing, and if he owned up to what he knew, then Vipond would pay any price to drag him into it.

“All they told us about were glorious victories and treacherous defeats. They were just stories—no details. You didn’t ask questions. Me,” he went on lyingly, “I was just trained to kill people. That’s all—close combat and the three-second kill. That’s all I know.”

“What, in God’s name,” asked IdrisPukke from the window, “is the three-second kill?”

“What it says,” replied Cale. “A real fight to the death is decided in three seconds, and that’s what you aim for. Anything else—all that arty stuff you train the Mond in—that’s just bollocks. The longer a fight goes on, the more chance comes into it. You trip, your weaker opponent gets in a lucky blow or he sees you have a weakness and he happens to have a strength. So—you kill in three seconds or take the consequences. The Redeemers at the Cortina pass died like dogs because I didn’t give them a chance to die any other way.”

Cale was being deliberately shocking. Since he was a small boy, he had been as proficient a liar as he was now a killer. And for the same reason: it was necessary to be so in order to live. He had deflected their interest in the one side of his past he did not want to reveal, by an admission of the truth elsewhere. And the more shocking, of course, even for such experienced hands as Vipond and IdrisPukke, the better. If the Materazzi believed that he was just a young and pitiless killer and no more, then encouraging them was in Cale’s interest. It was true enough, which made him persuasive, but it was not the whole truth by a long chalk.

Vipond asked him a few more questions, but whether he believed Cale entirely or not, it seemed clear that the boy was giving nothing more away and so he went on to his plans for guarding the safety of Arbell Swan-Neck.

It was clear from his written arrangements for keeping her safe and his answers to Vipond’s questions that Cale was as skilled in preventing death as he was in enabling it. Finally satisfied with Cale’s answers, in this at least, Vipond took a thick file from his desk and opened it.

“Before you go, I want to ask you about something. I have had a number of reports from Antagonist refugees and double agents, and captured documents about a Redeemer policy they refer to as the Dispersal. Have you heard of this?”

Cale shrugged. “No.” This time Vipond was convinced by the puzzled look on his face.

“These reports,” continued Vipond, “are about something called Acts of Faith. Is this a term familiar to you?”

“Executions for crimes against religion witnessed by the faithful.”

“It’s claimed that up to a thousand captured Antagonists at a time are being taken to the centers of Redeemer towns and are being burned alive. Those who recant their Antagonist heresy are shown mercy and strangled before being burned.” He paused, looking at Cale carefully. “Do you think these Acts of Faith are possible?”

“Possible. Yes.”

“There are other claims supported by captured documents that these executions are only the beginning. These documents refer to the Dispersal of all Antagonists. Some of my people say this is a plan once victory is achieved to move the entire Antagonist population onto the island of Malagasy. But some Antagonist refugees claim that the Dispersal is a plan, once they are removed to the island, to kill the entire Antagonist population in order to wipe out their heresy for good. I find this difficult to believe—but you have more experience than any of us as to the nature of the Redeemers. What do you think of such a thing? Is it possible?”

Cale said nothing for some time, clearly torn between his loathing of the Redeemers and the enormity of what he was being asked. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I never heard of anything like that.”

“Look, Vipond,” said IdrisPukke, “the Redeemers are clearly a brutal collection, but I can remember twenty years ago during the Mont uprising there were all sorts of rumors about how, in each town they captured, they’d collect all the babies, throw them up in the air in front of their mothers and impale them on their swords. Everyone believed it—but it was all bloody lies. None of it ever happened. In my experience, for every atrocity there are ten atrocity stories.”

Vipond nodded. It had not been a productive meeting, and he felt both frustrated and ill at ease about the stories from the East. But something more trivial was also nagging him. He looked suspiciously at Cale.

“You’ve been smoking. I can smell it on your breath.”

“What’s it to you?”

“It’s whatever I choose to make it, you insolent young pup.” He looked over at IdrisPukke, who was still looking out of the window and smiling. Vipond turned back to Cale. “I would have thought you had more sense than to imitate IdrisPukke in anything. You should look to him as an example of how things should not be done. As for smoking—it is a childish affectation: a habit loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, causes the breath to stink and makes any man who takes it for long enough effeminate. Now get out, both of you.”

F
our hours later Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist were settling themselves into their comfortable rooms in Arbell Materazzi’s quarter of the palazzo.

“What if they find out we don’t know anything about being bodyguards?” said Kleist as they sat down to eat.

“Well, I’m not going to tell them,” said Cale. “Are you? Anyway, how difficult can it be? Tomorrow we go through the place and make it secure. How many times have you practiced doing that? Then we stop anyone new from coming in and one of us stays with her wherever she goes. If she leaves here, which we discourage, she can’t go outside the keep, and two of us plus a dozen guards go with her. That’s all there is to it.”

“Why didn’t we just take a reward for saving her and get out?”

Kleist’s question was a good one because it was exactly what Cale knew they should be doing, and if it wasn’t for the way he felt about Arbell Swan-Neck, it was exactly what he would have done.

“We’re just as safe here as we would be anywhere else” was all he said. “We’ll get the reward we were promised and the money for taking care of business here. This job is money for old rope, and the truth is we’ve got an entire army guarding us from the Redeemers. If you’ve got somewhere better to go, be my guest.”

And that was that. That night Arbell Swan-Neck slept with Vague Henri and Kleist outside her door. “We’d better be careful until we can make a plan of the place tomorrow,” said Cale, planning all the while how he was going to make his entrance the next day as her all-powerful protector. He would show her his disdain for everything about her, and she would be cowed and afraid, and he would be delighted with himself as well as devastated.

It was nine o’clock the next morning when Arbell Swan-Neck emerged from her private apartment, having been told by the maids who’d brought her breakfast that there were two guards outside accompanied by two scruffy-looking herberts who they’d only seen before clearing out the stables.

Wearing her coldest face, she was put out to discover that, besides the two guards standing formally to attention on either side of the door, she was faced not by Cale but by two boys she’d never seen before either.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“Good morning, lady,” said Vague Henri affably.