I could stand this no longer. Whatever Keig might have in mind to do in the future, this was the man I had been hunted with and had fought beside who was being attacked in this lie-permeated fashion.
I positively flung myself round on him.
‘Tell them,’ I whispered fiercely. ‘Tell them. These people just don’t know. They’ve had their heads in the sand for years. Tell them that all this is just a pack of half-truths and worse.’
But Keig sat looking straight ahead. He might have been lost in some ancient dream ever since we had entered the Rota chamber.
Down at the President’s chair Cormode was speaking now with a slow calmness that held his listeners like so many hypnotized rabbits.
‘Fellow Delegates, it is my solemn duty to ask you to vote for the immediate arrest of Thomas Keig and for the setting up of a court to bring him to a just and proper trial.’
And it was plain from the straining attention he was getting all round the chamber that the moment he cared to call for a formal vote—as stickler for procedure that he was he would undoubtedly do—he would get it overwhelmingly. Only one thing could stop him: Keig getting up and putting the record straight then and there. Leaving a reply till a trial could take place would be leaving it too long: from such a procedure it was certain Keig would emerge discredited, whatever the verdict. Cormode would have too much time to elaborate his smears.
But if Keig were to speak now … I had seen him so many times turning some demoralized rabble back into a group of fighting men to have any doubts of his ability on this score. He had come a long, long way from that first halting blurted speech Cormode had heard him make in the Swedenborgian hall back in Dublin. He could bring to anything he had to say today the weight of all the accumulated authority of the past six years. He would jerk this waxen assembly into knowing the truth in less than ten minutes.
He must be made to answer, to fight back as he had fought back against Mylchraine from the moment his land on the Kernel had been taken from him.
I turned to him again, though at the moment I did so I think I realized at the back of my mind precisely what his eventual answer was going to be.
‘Keig,’ I said, putting into the stifled syllable all the force I was capable of. ‘Get up and speak. Now. That hidebound fool down there thinks that because he’s in his precious democratic assembly you can’t get at him. Break their rules. Tell them the truth. They’ll turn and laugh him out of existence.’
But at that moment they were by no means laughing. They were sitting tied to Cormode as by so many lines running to his hands.
‘Fellow Delegates,’ he resumed, cold as ice still, ‘will you raise your hands to signify you wish the arrest to take place?’
I swung round to Keig once more, my thoughts pounding in a jetting current of determination to force him to stand up and save himself.
He was not there.
The little gilt chair not two feet away from mine was empty, and that old polished-handled glinting-bladed axe lay propped up against it like an object out of another world. Of Keig, as I had half-known would be so, there was not the least sign.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © H.R.F. Keating
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ISBN: 9781448203260
eISBN: 9781448202935
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The Strong Man Page 39