The Left Hand Of God (38 page)

“You know, Vipond,” said the Marshal, miserably, “as much as I admire the subtleties of the way you deal with these matters, I have to say that, when all’s said and done, there are few problems in this world that can’t be solved by a large bribe or by shoving your enemy over a steep cliff on a dark night.”

“Meaning, my lord?”

“That boy, Cale. I’m not defending Solomon Solomon—you know I tried to stop it—but if the truth be known, I didn’t think the boy had a chance against him.”

“And if you had realized?”

“There’s no point in putting on that high-and-mighty tone; don’t tell me you always do the right thing rather than the wise thing. The point is we need Solomon Solomon; he could have smoothed things over and whipped these bastards into line. It’s simple—we need Solomon Solomon and we don’t need Cale.”

“Cale saved your daughter, my lord, and very nearly lost his own life in the process.”

“You see, there you go—of all people, you should know I can’t take things personally. I know what he did and I’m grateful. But only as a father. As a ruler, I’m pointing out that the state needs Solomon Solomon a lot more that it needs Cale. That’s just the obvious truth and there’s no point in you denying it.”

“So what do you regret, my lord? Not having him thrown over a cliff before the fight?”

“You think you can embarrass me into backing down? First of all, I would have given him a large bag of gold and told him to bugger off and never come back. Which, incidentally, is exactly what I intend to do when this war is over.”

“And what if he’d said no?”

“I’d have been pretty damn suspicious. Why is he hanging around here, anyway?”

“Because you gave him a good job in the middle of the most protected square mile in the entire world.”

“So it’s my fault? Well, if it is, I’m going to put it right. That boy is a menace. He’s a jinx like that fellow in the belly of the whale.”

“Jesus of Nazareth?”

“Yes, him. Once this business with the Redeemers is sorted, Cale is gone and that’s all there is to it.”

What also had the Marshal in such a foul temper was the prospect of having to sit with his son for an entire evening—the humiliation was almost more than he could endure.

As it turned out, the banquet went well. The nobles present seemed ready and even willing to set aside old resentments and squabbles and present a united front in the face of the threat from the Redeemers to Memphis in general and Arbell Swan-Neck in particular. Throughout the dinner she was so sweet and yet gently amusing and so astonishingly beautiful that she made the Redeemers’ grotesque portrait of her seem an increasingly powerful reason to put aside petty differences and face the threat that these religious fanatics posed to all of them.

Throughout the banquet she tried desperately not to look at Cale. So intensely did she love and desire him that she felt sure it would be obvious even to the most thick-skinned. Cale, for his part, was in a sulk because he interpreted this as her avoiding him. She was ashamed of him, he could see, embarrassed to be around him in public. The Marshal’s fears, on the other hand, that he would be mortified by Simon seemed to be groundless. True enough, the boy sat there inevitably saying nothing—but his habitual expression of alarm and terrified bewilderment had vanished. Indeed, his expression seemed entirely normal: now a look of interest, now one of amusement. The Marshal felt increasingly irritable as he had been unable to shake a tickly cough, probably caused by having to yap so much to his endless petitioners.

Another thing annoying the Marshal was the young man beside Simon. He did not recognize him and he said nothing all evening, but throughout dinner he endlessly twitched his right hand in a maddening series of small pointings, tiny jabs, endless circles and so on. In the end it started to get on the Marshal’s nerves so much that he was about to order his manservant, Pepys, to tell the young man either to stop or get out, when the young man with Simon stood up and waited for silence—an action so astonishing in such company that the buzz of laughter and conversation almost slowed to a halt.

“I am Jonathan Koolhaus,” announced Koolhaus, “language tutor to Lord Simon Materazzi. Lord Simon wishes to say something.” At this, the room went quiet, more out of astonishment than deference. Simon then stood up and began moving his right hand in exactly the same peculiar style as Koolhaus had been doing all evening. Koolhaus translated:

“Lord Simon Materazzi says, ‘I have been sitting opposite Provost Kevin Losells for the entire evening and during that time Provost Losells has on three occasions referred to me as a gibbering half-wit.’ ” Simon smiled, a broad and good-humored smile. ” ‘Well, Provost Losells, when it comes to being a gibbering half-wit, as the children say in the playground: it takes one to know one.’ ”

The burst of laughter that followed this was fueled as much by the sight of Losells’s bulging eyes and red face as it was by the joke. Simon’s right hand flicked busily back and forth.

“Lord Simon Materazzi says, ‘Kevin claims it is a great dishonor to him to be seated opposite me.’ ” Simon bowed mockingly to Kevin and Koolhaus did likewise. Simon’s right hand moved again. ” ‘I say to you, Provost Losells, that the dishonor is all mine.’ ”

With that, Simon sat down, smiling benevolently, and Koolhaus with him.

For a moment the table stared on in astonishment, though there was some laughing and clapping. And then, as if by some strange unspoken agreement, the guests all decided they would ignore what they had just seen and pretend it hadn’t happened. With that, the buzz of laughter and conversation reignited and everything went on, at least on the surface, just as before.

In due course the evening came to an end, the guests were ushered out into the night, and the Marshal, accompanied by Vipond, almost ran to his private chambers, where he had ordered his son and daughter to wait for him. He was barely through the door before he demanded, “What’s going on? What sort of a heartless trick is this?” He looked at his daughter.

“I don’t know anything about this. It’s as much a mystery to me as to you.”

During all this, an astonished Koolhaus was thrashing his fingers about to Simon as discreetly as possible.

“There, you—what are you doing?”

“It’s ah . . . It’s a finger-language, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s very simple, sir. Each gesture of my finger stands for a word or an action.” Koolhaus was so nervous and spoke so quickly that it was barely possible to understand him.

“Slow down!” shouted the Marshal. Koolhaus, trembling, repeated what he’d said. The Marshal stared, disbelieving, as his son signaled to Koolhaus.

“Lord Simon says . . . uh . . . you are not to be angry with me.”

“Then explain what this is.”

“It’s simple, sir. As I said, each sign stands for a word or an emotion.” Koolhaus touched himself on the chest with his thumb.

“I.”

Then he made a fist and rubbed it in a circular motion on his chest.

“Apologize.”

He raised his thumb out of the fist, pointed it forward and made a hammering motion.

“For making.”

He pointed to the Marshal.

“You.”

He snapped his wrist and fist back and forth.

“Angry.”

Then he repeated the gesture so quickly that it was barely possible to distinguish anything.

“I am sorry for making you angry.”

The Marshal looked at his son as if looking would reveal the truth. Disbelief and hope were both of them clear on his face. Then he took a deep breath and looked at Koolhaus.

“How can I know for sure if it’s my son speaking and not you?”

Koolhaus began to regain something of his usual balance.

“You never can, my lord. Just as no man can ever be sure that he alone is a thinking and feeling creature and everyone else a machine that only pretends to feel and think.”

“Oh my God,” said the Marshal. “A child of the Brainery if ever I heard one.”

“Indeed I am, sir. But for all that, what I say is true. You know that others feel and think as you do because over time your good judgment tells you the difference between the real and the not real. Just so you’ll see if you talk to your son through me that, while he is untrained and woefully ignorant, he has as keen a mind as you or I.”

It was hard not to be impressed by Koolhaus’s insulting sincerity.

“Very well,” said the Marshal. “Let Simon tell me how all this was arranged from the start to this evening. And don’t add anything or make him seem wiser than he is.”

So for the next fifteen minutes Simon had his first ever conversation with his father and the father with his son. From time to time the Marshal would ask questions, but mostly he listened. And by the time Simon had finished, tears were pouring down the Marshal’s face and that of his astonished sister.

He finally stood up and embraced his son. “I’m sorry, boy, so sorry.” Then he told one of his guards to fetch Cale. Koolhaus heard this command with decidedly mixed feelings. The explanation given by Simon had, in Koolhaus’s opinion, been unfairly biased in favor of Cale’s idea of teaching Simon a simple sign language and had insufficiently taken into account that Koolhaus had turned it from a crude and simple-minded series of gestures into a real and living language. Now it looked as if that yob Cale was going to steal all his thunder. Cale had, of course, been almost as taken aback by what had happened as the rest at the banquet, having had no idea of the advances Koolhaus and Simon had made, mainly because the former had sworn the latter to secrecy with the intention of pulling off a brilliant surprise and taking the credit.

Cale was expecting a bollocking and was somewhat confused at being hailed as a savior both by Arbell and the Marshal, guilty about his ungrateful but not necessarily misguided decision to get rid of Cale.

But Arbell too was feeling guilty. In the days after the terrible events at the Red Opera, she had spent lascivious nights with Cale, passionately devouring every inch of him, but days listening to her visitors discussing the horrors of Solomon Solomon’s death. As she had expressed only distaste for her mysterious bodyguard in the past, no one felt awkward about describing what had happened in all its unpleasant details. Some of this could be dismissed as gossip and bias in favor of one of their own, but when even the honest and good-natured Margaret Aubrey said, “I can’t think why I stayed. I felt so sorry for him at first. He seemed so small out there. But, Arbell, I never saw a colder or more brutal thing in all my life. He talked to him before he killed him. I could see him smiling. You wouldn’t treat swine like that, my father said.”

After hearing this, the feelings of the young princess were in a great moither. Certainly she was aggrieved at the insult to her lover, but had she not also seen that strange murderous blankness for herself ? Who could blame her if a quietly suppressed shudder did not make its way into the deepest recesses of her heart, there to be locked away? But all these dreadful thoughts were banished by the discovery that Cale had as good as brought her brother back from the dead. She took his hand and kissed it with both passion and wonder—and thanked him for what he had done. Not even the fact that he offered the credit to Koolhaus made much difference. Koolhaus felt betrayed, conveniently forgetting that it had been Cale who had spotted the hidden intelligence of Simon Materazzi and who had seen the way to unlock it. Cale’s attempt to include him in the general mood of congratulation and indebtedness was just his way, Koolhaus began to think, of backing into the light and nudging him out of it. So on a day Cale finally won around two of his doubters, he balanced this by making another enemy.

T
hat night Arbell Materazzi held Cale in her arms, having banished all reservations about him. How brave he was and how ungrateful she had been to harbor any doubts—and now he had worked this miraculous change upon her brother. How generous toward others it made him seem and how clever and full of insight. She was almost burning with adoration as she made love to him that night, worshipping him with every inch of her lithe and exquisite body. What graceful magic this worked on Thomas Cale’s abraded soul, what joy and astonishment it brought him. Later, as he lay wrapped in her elegant arms and endless legs, he began to feel as if the deepest layers of his icy soul were being touched by the sun.

“No harm can come to you. Promise me,” she said after nearly an hour of silence.

“Your father and his generals have no intention of letting me anywhere near the fight. I have no intention of going anyway. It’s nothing to do with me. My job is to look after you. That’s all that interests me.”

“But what if something happened to me?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“Not even you can be sure of that.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes as if searching for something. “You know that picture on the wall in the next room?”

“Your great-grandfather?”

“Yes—with his second wife, Stella. The reason I put it up there was because of a letter I came across when I was a girl, rooting around in some old family bits and pieces I found in a trunk. I don’t think anyone had looked inside for nearly a hundred years.” She stood up and walked over to a drawer on the far side of the room, naked as a jaybird and enough to stop the heart of any man.
How is it,
he thought,
such a creature loves me.
She rooted around for a moment and then returned with an envelope. She took out two pages of dense writing and looked at them sadly. “This is the last letter he wrote to Stella before he died at the siege of Jerusalem. I want you to hear the last paragraph because I want you to understand something.” She sat down at the foot of the bed and began reading:

My very dear Stella,

The indications are very strong that we shall attack again in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.