The Beating of his Wings (Left Hand of God Trilogy 3)

by Paul Hoffman

  For ten minutes at a time Conn punched the life out of everyone who came at him: brutality was never so graceful, splintering of bones never so deft, the bursting and crushing of flesh never so debonair; his reach the greater, his heart the stronger, muscle and sinew bound together in his ugly skill and beautiful violence.

  A few hundred yards away, keeping shtum in the trees, Cale watched Conn fighting like an angel and envied him his strength. But he admired him too. He was quite something out there in the blood and chaos.

  ‘We have to go,’ whispered Artemisia, as loud as a whisper can go. She was standing at the foot of the tree with two of her hefty-looking soldiers. She had declined to climb up with Cale.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Worried about your nails?’

  ‘The Swiss Pickers are coming to root out the archers. They won’t know who we are – it’s too dangerous. We’ve to go.’

  He was down almost before she’d finished, breathing heavily and sweating not at all healthily. They moved off but not quickly; too much in the way of razor briars. Careful of the dog’s teeth thorns they pushed through into a clearing. Ten yards away, so did others. Four Redeemers, the marksmen the Pickers were looking for. No one did anything. No one moved. For years Bosco had set Cale tests in which he was faced with the completely unexpected with only a few seconds to solve the problem before the blow to the back of his head that followed if he failed. To make things worse, the punishment was not always immediate; sometimes the blow fell a few hours or a day or a week later. This was to teach him to assess things before he acted, no matter how immediate the danger. Four Redeemers against four of them. Artemisia would be no use – the two guards with her would be handy but not a match. And neither was he. Turn their backs and run? Not through the briars. Take the Redeemers on? Not a chance. Never expect rescue, Bosco used to say, because rescue never comes. But it came to Cale then, and by means of the greatest curse of his life. The four Redeemers knelt down; one of them – the leader apparently – burst into tears.

  ‘We were told,’ he said, beating his breast three times in terrible remorse, ‘that the Left Hand of God would be watching over us. But I did not believe. Forgive me.’

  Fortunately Artemisia and her bodyguards did not need to be told to stay still. The four Redeemers looked at Cale fearfully and lovingly. He raised his hand and drew a circle in the air. It was the sign of the noose, a gesture only permitted to the Pope. And now, it seemed, also to the incarnation of the Wrath of God. It was as if he had opened a door into the next world and through it passed eternal grace into the hearts of the four men. Cale said nothing but waved them away with a kindly smile. Open-mouthed, struck by the love of God, the four Redeemers left.

  When they’d gone he turned to Artemisia. ‘Perhaps, in future,’ he said, ‘you won’t answer back so often.’

  ‘They think you’re a God?’ said an astonished Artemisia.

  ‘That’d be blasphemy. They think I’m one of God’s feelings made flesh.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Disappointment. And anger, in case you were wondering.’

  ‘That’s two feelings.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to answer back.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re anything made flesh. I think you’re just a horrible little boy.’

  ‘A horrible little boy who just saved your life.’

  ‘What’s he angry about, your God?’

  ‘He’s not my God. He’s angry and disappointed because he sent mankind his only son and they hanged him.’

  ‘You can see his point, I suppose.’

  On the battlefield the next crisis was approaching, but this time for the Redeemers. Between Conn’s blistering violence driving the Swiss and their allies forward as he moved up and down the line and Fauconberg, some fifty yards behind, disposing and allocating, assigning and putting things right, the Redeemer line began to buckle and also to twist ever more quickly against the clock so that now the front moved slantwise across the field. But though they came close they did not break. Not yet, at any rate, but without the ten thousand Redeemers who had failed to turn up, it was only a question of time. What had become of the missing Redeemers? They were still lost. Not by much, a couple of miles, but the battlefield was only the size of four of the larger fields the locals used for wheat. And the hideous wind that had worked so wonderfully to favour the Redeemers earlier now worked against them. The screams of orders and agony, of anger and effort, made for a hefty din. Only a couple of miles away, the arriving Redeemers would normally have followed the sound and that was what they did. But the wind had thrown the noise to the east and following the sound took them away from and not towards the fight. Now the line of battle had been turned so that the Redeemers were being pushed back towards the woods, where the thickly planted trees and the razor briars formed a barrier through which only the first few hundred men would be able to escape. For the rest it might as well have been a wall of brick.

  But battles breathe out as well as in. In its sixth hour something in the Swiss began to fade, something in the Redeemers to emerge. In the continuous circulation of fighting men, no one should fight for more than half an hour. But change destroys the rhythm of the side that’s fighting well, brings, perhaps, new impetus to the soldiers doing badly. Conn had fought too long; at Fauconberg’s insistence he needed a longer rest, a drink and something to eat. Conn removed his helmet and, so that he could drink, the metal gorge that protected his throat. Three of his friends around him, Cosmo Materazzi, Otis Manfredi and Valentine Sforza, did the same. The legend afterwards was that the Redeemer marksmen in the trees had waited for this chance for hours. But legends are often wrong, or only partly right. There was nothing aimed at Conn by cunning assassins, it was just bad luck, a gust of a few haphazard arrows, not even ten. But three of them took Cosmo in the face, one hit Otis in the neck and another struck Valentine in the back of the head. Friends of a lifetime were gone inside a minute.

  Where Conn had shone before, he now burned. Rage stoked his talent and focused it to break, blow, smash and maim so that everywhere he went the Redeemer line fell back and sent the message of strain like weakening magic along the line, which now lost its rhythm for a second time and began to fail again, shifting back towards the woods and murderous defeat.

  Then, desperate and panic-stricken, the ten thousand missing Redeemers, under the command of Holy Gaffer Jude Stylites, stumbled upon the fight that was almost lost and found themselves as if by means of the most cunning intelligence not just on the battlefield but at exactly the right place at exactly the right time to save the day. What Stylites had been sensibly trying to do was to approach the Redeemers who’d been fighting all day long from the rear, at a point where his men could be used as replacements for the exhausted men in the front line. Instead, their run of accidents and the anti-clockwise turn of the battle line brought them into the side of the Swiss line, forcing it to bend into an L-shape to prevent being taken from behind. Now the pressure was on the Swiss and slowly the Redeemers began to push back from the line of trees and the certainty of defeat.

  Then, late in the afternoon, after whatever it is that controls a battlefield moved first with one side and then the other, the Swiss line broke – a man slipped, perhaps, and took down his neighbour as he fell and he in turn hampered another. Perhaps a Redeemer, with one late surge of strength, pushed into this gap and others, seeing the space opening, followed – and so from one slip a battle was lost, a war, a country, the lives of millions. Or perhaps it was that the confused arrival of the Redeemers’ reserve was just too much for the tired Swiss and that from the moment they stumbled into the exact weak point of the Axis the matter was decided.

  Whatever the cause, in minutes the Axis line crumbled and the few who ran became the many – and seeing them run, the many became the mass. Like a great building whose foundations had slowly been demolished underground, the collapse was great and sudden. Face to face, armour to armour, side by si
de, it’s not easy to kill an enemy. Perhaps only three or four thousand died in the seven hours of battle that preceded the collapse. Now was when the slaughter began.

  20

  The Swiss and their allies had only two lines of escape: up the slope to the side from where they’d attacked or back and down a muddy slope into a meadow contained in the meander of a river not much more than ten foot wide, but moving fast for being swollen by mountain rain. This glorified stream might just as well have been the Mississippi. Men in armour jumped into its waters and were dragged under by the weight. The exhausted ordinary soldiers in padded jackets struggled across the stream getting in each other’s way. Slipping and falling, they found the water soaked into the hand-painted mix of cotton and metal discs, which then pulled them under too. Meanwhile, the Redeemers were following at their heels, slicing and cutting and killing. Men they’d fought all day and could not harm were now easier to kill than herds in a knacker’s yard. From the top of the forty-foot slope the Redeemer archers formed a line and now, invulnerable, loosed ten a minute into the thousands packed in a space no bigger than a paddock, trapped not just against the almost impossible-to-cross stream but against each other as more and more panicked and terrified running men added to the crushing press.

  Those who’d seen what was happening and looked for escape elsewhere did no better. Most ran further along the river, heading for the bridge at Glane, but were easily caught by the mounted infantry of the Redeemers. Seeing they weren’t going to make the crossing, many tried to swim for it. But here the swollen stream was even deeper and they drowned again in their thousands. Realizing there was no escape across the river, those who turned back were slaughtered on the banks. Perhaps a thousand made it to the bridge and safely across. They would have died once the Redeemers made it over the bridge but they were stopped. Someone with foresight set the bridge alight as soon as they saw the Redeemers coming. It was a cold decision because a thousand men were still trying to cross when it began to burn. Fire in front and Redeemers behind, the terrified men had no choice but to try, and fail, to swim across this deepest part of the river. It was claimed that some survived because the numbers of the drowned packed into the river were so great they were able to walk across the bodies to escape.

  Thousands more had run away along the uplands to the rear of the position where they had begun the day, discarding armour as they went. The mounted Redeemers followed them – they were as vulnerable as little boys. Now the sky had cleared and the brightest of moons began to rise and take away what help the dark could bring. When the sun came up at six the dead lay everywhere, for ten miles from the battle and for six miles wide. More than a hundred of the great and the good were captured but not for ransom or as useful hostages. Santos Hall established first who they were and what degree of power they held and then executed them. For the second time in little more than a year the Redeemers had destroyed a ruling class inside a single day – and also finished most of what they’d started in the destruction of the Materazzi at Silbury Hill. But Conn lived, even if Fauconberg had needed to practically drag him onto a horse to make his getaway. ‘There’s nothing you can do except survive,’ the old man had shouted at him. ‘Living is the best revenge.’

  Mostly heroes die, mostly heroes fail. The darkest hour is not before dawn and nor does every cloud have a silver lining. Life is not a lottery: in a lottery, finally, there is a winner. But it is also the case that no news is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. In this instance, the hideous defeat at Bex did have a silver lining and more than that. What kind of disaster it was – and for those involved it was certainly that – depended very much on who you were. For Artemisia Halicarnassus and Thomas Cale it worked out very well. Within sixteen hours it became clear there were only some two thousand survivors from the Swiss and their allies, half of whom had made it over the Glane bridge before it was set alight. But the survivors were very far from safe – mostly unarmed and unarmoured, they were still a long way from the protection of the Schallenberg Pass some eighty miles away. The burnt bridge had slowed their pursuers but not stopped them. In a matter of hours the Redeemers were over the stream and intent on finishing what they’d started.

  But it was precisely on this kind of rearguard action that Artemisia had cut her teeth. Adding to her own guerrilla militia of three hundred with a small number of escapees still able to fight – less than two hundred – she divided her forces with Cale, who made it clear he expected not to take orders but to do as he saw fit; she made it equally clear that he would not.

  ‘Do as I say or you can bugger off back to Leeds. I know what I’m doing and these are my men.’

  Cale thought about this.

  ‘There’s no need,’ he said at last, ‘to use such bad language.’

  The ground between Bex and the Schallenberg Pass was always rising and the roads passed through any number of woods and over small hills. From these positions, always retreating slowly and avoiding a direct fight, Artemisia plagued the Redeemers as they began to catch the exhausted and often wounded Swiss with volleys of arrows and individual snipers in an endless hit and run. While sacrifice and martyrdom were enthusiastically pursued by the Redeemers in general, even they had a limited taste for being struck by someone they couldn’t even see in pursuit of the scraggy remnants of a defeated army. They backed off and contented themselves with murdering the occasional straggler. In short order they lost their enthusiasm even for this when Artemisia started setting traps for them using carefully placed men pretending to be wounded in places where the Redeemers could be easily ambushed. Over the following two days, nearly fifteen hundred men made it back to the Schallenberg Pass and safety. Among them were Conn Materazzi and Little Fauconberg.

  21

  The aftermath of any disaster usually demands two things: first, the person responsible for the disaster must be named, shamed and punished in the most elaborate manner possible; second, though less important, it was highly desirable to find someone who demonstrated, through their personal courage, intelligence and skill, that the dreadful disaster could and should have been averted. In the case of the disaster at Bex, that there wasn’t anyone to blame or anyone particularly to praise was neither here nor there. Already, by virtue of his great experience of triumph and disaster, Little Fauconberg was alert to the likelihood of retribution and some three days after the miserable remnants of the Swiss army returned to Spanish Leeds, Fauconberg realized the way things were going and sent a message to Conn Materazzi that he might do well to make himself scarce. He took his own advice and by nightfall was well on his way towards a little-known pass over the mountains that he had marked out for this purpose as soon as he was appointed second-in-command.

  But by then Conn had already been arrested and charged with misfeasance in the face of the enemy and failure to strive. In short, he was accused of not winning a battle, a crime of which he was unquestionably guilty. The rage of the King and the people did not permit any great amount of time to pass and Conn’s trial was ordered to take place in the Commons on the following Wednesday. Just as Conn was being unjustifiably blamed, Cale found himself being unjustifiably praised, much to the fury of Artemisia Halicarnassus. All the credit for heroically saving the remnants of the army and seeing them safely to the Schallenberg Pass had been given to Cale: the idea that the only soldier who’d shown the necessary bravery and skill was a woman was not just unacceptable in a crude sense but impossible to grasp.

  ‘There’s no point blaming me,’ said Cale.

  ‘Why not?’

  This was hard to answer. He entirely understood her anger but, as he unwisely pointed out, that was just the way things were. ‘There’s no point whining about it.’

  ‘Take that back!’

  ‘All right. Whining will make an enormous difference.’

  ‘I’m not whining. I deserve the credit.’

  ‘I agree. You deserve the credit for saving fifteen hundred men. Absolutely.’

  ‘W
hat do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t mean anything.’

  ‘Yes, you do. What are you driving at?’

  ‘All right. You deserve the credit for saving fifteen hundred men. They’re giving it to me and I don’t deserve it – but what they’re really saying is that whoever’s responsible for that – which is you – would have beaten the Redeemers.’

  ‘And you’re saying that I couldn’t.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Conn did everything right. I couldn’t have done it better.’

  ‘So of course that’s proof enough. No one could do better than you.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to.’

  ‘I admire you.’

  ‘Not as much as you admire yourself.’

  ‘That would be asking a lot,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I can see right through you, don’t worry. You’re not joking, I know.’

  ‘You could run that battle a hundred times and Conn would have won fifty of them. What the people are screaming is that whoever saved the fifteen hundred – you – would have won the battle. That’s credit you don’t deserve, even if it’s been given to someone who deserves it less.’

  ‘You, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘I don’t deserve the credit. You do.’

  She said nothing for a moment.

  In the meantime another charge had been added to the accusations levelled against Conn: that he had, in a manner cowardly and craven, set fire to the bridge at Glane and, in order to save his own treacherous skin, condemned thousands to die at the hands of the Redeemers. Of all the counts against him this was the most damaging. It was also the most unfair. Conn hadn’t been within five miles of the bridge and couldn’t, therefore, have set fire to it. But even if he had, it had been a necessary act. The stranded men killed on the left bank would have made it over and survived only to be chased down and killed once the Redeemers crossed to the right behind them. Those already on the right bank survived only because someone took the hard decision to burn the bridge. The person who had set fire to the bridge, disguised by means of an abandoned helmet, was Thomas Cale.