by Paul Hoffman
‘What?’ he said.
‘Tell me what you saw when you were up there. With the mountains and the sea and the sky. Tell me honestly.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I saw a river delta easy for a landing from the sea but impossible to defend. Up from that I saw a river plain – you could bring an army up easy … but then it narrows and a land slip cuts it in two, about eight feet deep. You could defend for days against four times the men. But there’s a small bypass to the left cut into the hill. If they took that it would be over. But there’s also a path to the back of the valley. If you timed it right you could pull your men back in packs of a hundred or so and get them out even though it’s constricted. They could cover the remainder from the hills when they needed to abandon the line. But any attempt to follow with numbers and you’d be jammed tight like a cork in a bottle.’ He laughed. ‘Sorry, not what you want to hear.’
‘I’m not trying to reform you.’
‘Don’t mind if you do. I’m sick of myself. Sick of being like this.’ He smiled again. ‘Redeem me all you want.’ A pause. ‘Can you make me better?’
‘I can try.’
‘Does that mean no?’
‘It means I can try.’
Another silence, or as much as the pulsing thrum of the tree cicadas would permit.
‘What about you?’ he said, after a minute or two.
‘When you saw the sun over the mountain today did you see a round disc of fire somewhat like a gold dollar?’ Sister Wray asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I saw an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”’
Yet another silence.
‘Quite a bit different then,’ Cale said eventually.
‘Yes,’ said Sister Wray.
‘There is no God,’ said Cale. He did not intend this as an insult. He did not intend to say it at all. It burst out of him. He felt Poll moving up his arm and whispering very quietly in his ear, so that Sister Wray would not overhear, ‘Blasphemous cunt!’
At that moment something extraordinary happened, a coincidence so outrageous that it could only be encountered in either an improbable fiction or life itself: four resounding clangs sounded from the bell tower and a powerful voice from above shouted: ‘Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you.’ But Cale misunderstood – although Cadbury’s shout was intended as a warning he interpreted it as a threat from the heavens, to punish him for his sacrilegious outburst.
At once he looked around into the dark and realized that the cloister was a natural trap – a box with only one entrance, four times longer than it was wide with a covered walkway creating deep shadows on all four sides. The bell rang out again, followed by the shout, ‘Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you.’
Sister Wray began to rise. He grasped her arm and at the same time pushed against the ground, so that the wooden high-backed bench on which they were sitting toppled backwards.
As they moved through the shadows of the cloisters, getting into position, the bells and the warning astonished the Trevors. Having separated to move either side of the covered walkway, both decided to let fly with their small overstrungs – but by toppling backwards on the bench Cale was a fraction faster and the bolts moithered overhead with a venomous zip. On his feet, Cale grabbed Sister Wray with his other hand and dragged her backwards into the darkness of the covered walkway. He dumped her forcefully next to a statue of St Frideswide and whispered, ‘Stay here – don’t move.’
There was only one course possible for his killers. One of them would stay near the only exit to his left, while the other would already be moving up the other walkway to close in on him from the right. Cale was in a pinch. If he tried to make the diagonal run across the open centre of the cloisters they’d have plenty of time to put a bolt in him front and back. He couldn’t stay where he was.
‘Give me your habit and your veil. Quick.’
She did not waste time being shocked, but she was afraid and fumbled at the line of buttons. ‘Quickly!’ He reached for the front of her habit and ripped it apart. She gasped but did not flap and helped him haul it down to her feet. Then, without asking, he lifted off her veil. Too much afraid to stop and stare at what he saw, Cale stepped into the habit and dragged on the veil, ripping away the small, perforated patch that covered her eyes. ‘Don’t you move,’ he said again and, black habit pulled up to his knees, launched himself into the middle part of the cloister. But he didn’t try for the long diagonal run to the exit but sprinted straight across by the shortest way towards the opposite side. Lighter than the deeply shadowed walkway, it was still only dimly lit by the clouded moon and the poor light and black habit made his movements indistinct and odd. Thrown by the strange appearance of the nun, and wary of a decoy being used to force them to give their position away, the Two Trevors hesitated and let the figure go as it flapped into the unseeable shadows of the walkway.
Cale had given the Two Trevors a problem: what was simple had become complicated. They were, of course, not long in working out what had probably happened. But only probably. It was probably Cale wrapped in the nun’s habit. But only probably. Perhaps she was young and fit. Perhaps Cale had threatened to cut off her head if she didn’t make the dash. Perhaps the nun had decided to sacrifice herself for Cale and got away with it. Lugavoy had the exit covered and it was clear that he must stay there; it was Kovtun at the top of the cloister who had to decide whether Cale was still to his left or now to his right dressed head to toe in black. And he had to be quick. The warning from the tower meant that they were being looked for. The problem about being quick was that it meant they might easily make a mistake. But to act more slowly meant dealing with the guards of the more dangerous lunatics farther inside the Priory. He was now in a trap himself – to one side a presumably harmless nun, to the other a homicidal maniac. He was unnerved even more by a strange convulsive sound like an animal bellowing in the dark.
He was not to know, of course, that his position was considerably less serious than he thought. He wasn’t to know that the sound was nothing more than Cale chucking up his guts at the terrible demands he had made of his miserably collapsing constitution. But Kovtun had to move and his skill and instinct made him choose correctly. He went back the way he’d come, closing in on the distressed and exhausted boy. Cale was unarmed, not that it would have made much difference if he’d been holding the Danzig Shank itself, and he knew that he must make his move to the exit or die where he was. He was soaked in sweat, his lips full of pins and needles. He moved towards the exit slowly – any faster and he would have fallen down. Fortunately for him, the still spooked Kovtun was following pretty gingerly himself. Neither Cale nor the Two Trevors had time on their side but all three knew that too little patience could get them killed. Cale was on all fours, feeling his way towards the right-hand corner of the cloister, heading for the exit and whoever was waiting there and trying not to breathe too hard or give himself away by throwing up again. Behind him, Kovtun was slowly beating up the walkway. Cale realized the greatest obstacle to his having any chance of getting out was the moonlight coming through the large entry into the cloisters. Anyone trying to make it through would be lit up like St Catherine on a wheel. He shuffled forwards to the edge of the light and braced himself to run, hoping to catch whoever was guarding the exit by surprise. Behind him he heard the sound of Kovtun scuffing his foot lightly on an uneven slab. He ran for it – one second, one and a half, two seconds – and then felt a huge crack to the side of his head as Trevor Lugavoy, who’d been waiting just the other side of the line of moonlight, stepped in and struck him with the heavy end of his overstrung. It would have taken a lot less to knock Cale down in his dreadful state and he fell like a sack of hammers, collapsing with his back to a statue of St Hemma of Gurk.
11
Drawing his long knife, Lugavoy reached down and pulled the veil from Cale’s head to make sure he was going to kill th
e right person.
‘Thomas Cale?’ he asked.
‘Never heard of him,’ whispered Cale. Lugavoy, who was left-handed, drew back the long knife and stabbed at Cale who cried out, but then there was a loud THWACK! like an old woman beating a carpet of its dust. Trevor Lugavoy saw but did not understand that the lower half of his forearm, with the hand that had been holding the long knife, was now lying on the cloister floor. He raised his amputated arm and stared at the stump, utterly bemused.
Then the shock hit him and he sat down heavily on his backside. A blurred figure moved in front of him and struck Trevor Kovtun, who had moved directly behind Cale, in the chest. It is no easy thing to kill a man instantly with a sword but Kovtun was close to death within seconds of slumping to the ground. Lugavoy had moved onto his knees and had taken hold of his severed forearm, as if in the preliminary stages of putting it back on. Then he looked up and saw a creature whose very eyes and nose and mouth seemed to have been smeared across its face in colours of blue and red. Whether he saw anything more terrible after that cannot be known – no one returns from that place, scheduled or unscheduled.
Having finished off Trevor Lugavoy, something that, to Deidre’s vexation, took three strokes rather than one, she turned back to the astonished boy sitting knackered before her and said, ‘Are you Thomas Cale?’
Dog-weary as he was, Cale was too suspicious by nature to answer quickly. What if she was just a rival assassin and wanted to kill him herself? He panted more heavily to signal he could not speak and held out his right hand, palm forward, in a gesture of compliance. It didn’t work.
‘Are you Thomas Cale?’ she demanded.
‘It’s all right, Deidre. It’s him.’ It was Cadbury, with four alarmingly large men from the dangerous lunatic section of the Priory. ‘Marvellous work, Deidre. Marvellous, marvellous, marvellous. Now be a good girl and put away the sword.’
Meek as a little girl made from sugar and spice, Deidre did as she was told.
‘If I may say so,’ said Cadbury, to Cale, ‘you don’t look at all well.’
‘I’d say,’ a pause to stop being sick, ‘that things,’ another pause, ‘could be a lot worse,’ replied Cale, putting out his hand.
Cadbury pulled him up and looked him over, smiling. ‘I appreciate your desire to make up for all your wickedness but are you really sure you’re cut out for Holy Orders?’
Cale took off Sister Wray’s habit and picked up the veil Lugavoy had dropped on the pavement.
‘Stay here,’ he said to Cadbury and walked off wearily into the shadows of the covered walkway.
‘It’s all right, it’s me,’ he called out into the dark. ‘You’re safe, I’ve got your …’ he wasn’t sure what to call them, ‘… clothes.’ He placed the habit and the veil on a small section of pavement illuminated by the moon and then stood back. ‘The face thing’s a bit torn. Sorry.’ Nothing happened for a moment and then a shockingly white arm moved into the light and pulled the habit and veil slowly into the dark. There was a short period of rustling.
‘Are you all right? Not hurt?’ said Sister Wray from the shadows.
‘Not hurt.’ A pause. ‘Are you all right?’ Cale asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘Somebody rescued me. Do you think it was God?’
‘After you told him to his face he didn’t exist?’
‘Perhaps he wants to save me – for better things.’
‘You must think pretty well of yourself.’
‘As it happens I don’t think it was God – the woman who saved me, she doesn’t look like she’s had much to do with angels. Perhaps the devil was behind me all the time.’
‘So,’ said Poll, from the dark. ‘So you’re still the chosen one and not just a nasty little boy with a gift for bloodshed.’
‘I was hoping,’ replied Cale, ‘that you might have taken one in the gob. You’d better come and meet our redeemers.’
But halfway down the cloisters he changed his mind. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t. There are people, I don’t know … it’s better not to come to their attention.’
He vanished into the dark but Sister Wray decided she’d had enough of doing as she was told by Cale. She eased forward until she was able to hide at the left-hand corner of the cloister. Cale was talking to a tall man, elegantly dressed in black, and next to them a woman with her back to Sister Wray who had clearly lost interest in what was going on around her and was looking away into the darkness at the back of the cloister. When Deidre Plunkett turned around, Sister Wray drew back into the shadows and began to take the view that Cale had been right. It was a face best avoided.
‘We can’t stay,’ said Cadbury. ‘There was some unpleasantness earlier in the town and it’s time we weren’t here. She needs a scrub and to get out of these clothes.’
‘What about the bodies?’
‘Considering they were about to kill you before we stepped in I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask you to sort them out. Don’t think you have to thank her, by the way.’
‘Oh, yes. Thanks,’ said Cale, calling out to Deidre, who merely stared at him for a moment and then looked away again. He would have offered to take his rescuers to his room but it was clear from the presence of the watchmen that they were going nowhere. Then the furious Director of the Priory arrived and was about to demand an explanation when she saw the two dead men and the dismembered arm followed by Deidre Plunkett’s face. The blood drained from her lips, as well it might, but she was made of heavy-duty cloth. ‘Come here,’ she said to them both, and backed away from the cloisters’ entrance.
For several futile minutes Cale and Cadbury tried to explain what had happened until they were interrupted by Sister Wray. ‘I was a witness and participant. Those two men came to kill us both. Why I can’t say, but it was completely unprovoked and had the …’ she paused, ‘… young woman and this man not intervened it would be our bodies lying in the cloister.’
‘And what,’ said the Director, ‘am I supposed to do with the bodies that are here?’
‘I’ll deal with them,’ said Cale.
‘I’m sure you will,’ said the Director. ‘I’m sure that’s the kind of talent you have in abundance.’
‘Call the magistrate,’ said Sister Wray.
‘He’s in Heraklion,’ replied the Director. ‘He couldn’t get here until late afternoon tomorrow at best.’ She looked at Cadbury and Deidre. ‘We’ll have to keep you in custody until then.’
‘I don’t think that I, nor my young colleague,’ Cadbury nodded at Deidre, ‘would be at all happy about that.’ The news of the three deaths in the market had obviously not yet reached the Priory. Once it did they were cooked: there would be no explaining away those deaths as well as the Trevors. He started to consider their chances of cutting their way out of the Priory.
‘They can stay with me in my room,’ said Cale. ‘The windows are barred and you can put as many guards outside as you like. I think that’s fair.’
The Director had the sense to be unnerved by the prospect of actually arresting Cadbury and the weird young woman – if that was what it was. ‘I give you my word,’ said Cale, something that meant absolutely nothing but which, he noted, seemed to satisfy many people. But wanting the easiest outcome persuaded the Director. She turned to the most senior of the guards.
‘Show them to Mr Cale’s room. You and all of your men remain outside until I have you relieved.’ She turned to Sister Wray. ‘I’d like to talk to you in private.’
Five minutes later the three of them had been delivered to Cale’s room and the door locked. Before the key had turned Cadbury was checking the impressive looking bars on the window. He turned to Cale.
‘And we’re better off here because?’
‘Because I don’t care to have bars on the window if I can do anything about it.’ Cale took a shiv from the drawer in the single desk and started stabbing at the wall. It crumbled surprisingly easily, because it was made of gravel and dust stuck together with
soap, to reveal a metal stud, the anchor to bars that looped through the wall under the window itself. ‘I’ve been loosening them off for a while. You can be out in ten minutes.’
‘How far down is it?’
‘About three feet. They haven’t kept dangerous head-bangers in here for years. The bars look impressive but inside the wall it’s mostly rust.’
‘Not bad,’ said Cadbury. ‘Forgive me for doubting you but one of my greatest faults is lack of trust.’ He looked over at Deidre. ‘Got any soap?’
It took Cadbury nearly half an hour of sullenly endured scrubbing to rid Deidre’s face of the greasepaint while Cale dug away at the already weakened wall. What gradually emerged from the soap and water was a more familiar Deidre – pale, thin-lipped but still mad-eyed. They put her in one of Cale’s suits; it was baggy, with the trousers held up by a belt that they had to cut out an extra notch a good six inches further on.
During the ten minutes more it took to remove the bars, Cale mined Cadbury for information about the Two Trevors. ‘I can’t be sure it was the Redeemers who sent them but for years they operated out of Redeemer territory for a price: if you want a peaceful retirement under our protection do what we ask when we ask it.’
‘There are other people who don’t care for me,’ said Cale.
‘Not who could get to the Two Trevors or afford them if they could. It was the Redeemers.’
‘You can’t be certain.’
‘Certain. No.’
‘If they were so wonderful, how come a little girl killed them?’
‘She’s not a little girl and the Trevors got unlucky. One job too far.’
‘The thing about your friend …’