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

by Paul Hoffman

  The Swiss looked on, some amused, the more intelligent suspicious. The only way through the wagons was through the spaces underneath – but this was soon closed as four more planks of wood were lowered through slots in the floor. For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a shout from inside the circle and the outriders started firing their crossbows at the Swiss ranks. Vague Henri’s design might have been less powerful but from a hundred yards the bolts, blunt as they were, hit the massed ranks of armoured men with a ferocious clang. The Swiss had only brought ten archers and they were trained for shooting at massed ranks, not ten men on agile horses. In a five-minute exchange only two New Model Army riders were hit, painfully enough and drawing blood, but they themselves hit more than twenty of the Swiss. Their armour and the bluntness of the bolts prevented any deep wounds but it was clear that a real bolt would have killed or badly wounded nearly all of them. After five minutes there was a trumpet burst from the wagons and the outriders moved back to the circle. A wooden shield was removed to let them in and they were gone.

  Then three other walls were taken out and about twenty men with mallets and stakes rushed out and began hammering them into the ground. This was more to the Swiss archers’ taste, but before they could start shooting, volley after volley of arrows emerged from the centre of the wagons, causing huge confusion and yet more considerable injury to the lightly armoured Swiss archers.

  Under this fearsome protective cover, the peasants knocking in the posts finished the job and ran back to the safety of the wagons, leaving behind the wooden stakes connected by thin ropes with sharp metal barbs woven into them every six inches. The odd thing about this was that the stakes and barbed ropes only covered about an eighth of the circle, leaving the attackers free to go round this unpleasant obstacle. It was hard to see the point.

  With the arrows still raining on them, the Swiss had no choice but to advance and take the wagons in hand-to-hand combat. The blunted arrows were nothing more than nuisance value to men in such high-quality armour and fighting close was their life’s work. Skirting the barbed ropes – several of the knights slashed at them as they went past but wire had been threaded through the rope to prevent such an easy cure – they approached the wagons, determined to break their way in and give the occupants a bloody good thrashing. Although the wagons were neither particularly big nor tall, once they were close there seemed no obvious or easy way in. As they approached they noticed small square holes in the sides of the wagons – six in each. Out of them, crossbow bolts shattered into them, devastating at such short range despite their bluntness. And fast too – one fired every three or four seconds. They were forced to come right up to the wagon sides to grasp the wheels and heave them over. But the wheels had been hammered into the ground with hoops of steel. Then the roofs of the wagons were heaved up and crashed over the side on a hinge with blunted spikes on the leading edge, designed not to pierce the armour of anyone they hit but to deal a crushing blow. Dozens of arms and heads were broken in this move. Then the reason for the low height of the wagons became clearer. In each there were six peasants, armed with the wooden flails they’d been used to using all their lives as much as the Swiss professional soldiers had used swords and poleaxes. Even without the addition of the nails that would have been used in a real fight, the head of the flail moved with such ferocious speed that it crushed hands and chests and heads alike, armoured or not. And still the bolts kept coming. They may not have been able to kill but they caused terrible pain and deep bruising. The Swiss were hardly able to land a blow in return. The killing range of a few feet they were used to, dictated by the length of a sword or poleaxe, had been extended by Cale by no more than a few feet – but it was everything. Men they could have dismembered in a few seconds in the open were made untouchable by strong wood and a few extra feet in height. And now they were vulnerable to an insulting collection of modified agricultural tools wielded with confidence and familiarity by mere peasants. After fifteen minutes of pain and damage they withdrew – angry and frustrated, poisonously impotent. Their retreat was conducted to a mocking but still painful volley of blunt arrows from a dozen of Cale’s Purgators until he signalled them to stop. He watched with great pleasure as the Swiss generals went to inspect the damage to their baffled elite. He was gracious enough not to go with them; even from forty yards away, the effect of the metal flails, clubs, hammers, blunt woodaxes and rocks was clear.

  After ten minutes of inspection it was Fanshawe who walked back to Cale, apparently as easy-going and frivolous as usual; but the truth was that he was shaken by the implications of what he’d seen.

  ‘I was wrong,’ he said to Bose Ikard. ‘It could work. I’ve got questions though.’

  ‘And I have answers,’ said Cale. They adjourned to a meeting later that day. On the way off the field Bose Ikard caught up with Fanshawe and spoke quietly.

  ‘Can this really work?’

  ‘You saw for yourself.’

  ‘And we can win?’

  ‘Possibly. But what if you do? What then?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘You’ve shown your hillbillies that they’re as good as their masters. Are they going to fight and die in their thousands – and they will die – and then just hand it all back? Would you?’

  At their meeting that afternoon there were a great many surly questions, all of them dealt with easily enough by Cale. If he’d been them he would have made things much more awkward – he knew there were weaknesses even if they couldn’t see them. The questions from Fanshawe failed to materialize: he could see the flaws too, but also that they could be managed. Cale answered calmly and pleasantly until the very last comment – the suggestion that once it was a matter of life and death the peasants would break in the face of blood and mutilation.

  ‘Then bring your men back tomorrow and we’ll fight with sharp weapons, and no mercy,’ said Cale, still calm. ‘You won’t be back for a third time.’

  Bose Ikard, however, though mulling over the long-term consequences pointed out by Fanshawe, saw that he had no choice but to support Cale: there was no point in long-term thinking if there wasn’t going to be a long-term. He sent away his new High Command and got down to the details of money and the requisition powers Cale demanded.

  This did not come easily to the Chancellor: giving away money and power was physically painful to him. But he’d worry about getting them back, as well as the dangers of an armed and trained peasantry, when this was all over. By the end of the meeting, Thomas Cale was the most powerful little boy in the history of the Four Quarters. It felt to Cale, as the letter was signed, as if deep in his peculiar soul a small sweet spring of cool water had started to flow.

  Outside, Fanshawe signalled him to one side.

  ‘You were very quiet,’ said Cale.

  ‘Professional courtesy,’ said Fanshawe. ‘Didn’t want to piss on your pageant.’

  ‘And you think you could have?’

  ‘How are you going to supply them?’

  ‘Oh no! You’ve seen the big weakness – there’s no fooling you.’

  Fanshawe smiled.

  ‘Then you won’t have a problem answering, will you?’

  Ten minutes later they were in an old workshop deep in the slums of Spanish Leeds and Michael Nevin, outdragger and inventor, was proudly showing off one of his new supply wagons. Now he had money to back his ingenuity, the result, while still distantly related to his outdragger cart, was a thing of elegance and style.

  ‘Move it,’ said Cale.

  Fanshawe picked up a two-wheeled cart by the shafts at the front. It was much bigger than the original it was based on, and he was astonished at how light it was. Nevin was a peacock puffed with pride. ‘It’ll shift four times as quick as the supply wagons them junkie Redeemers use, tum right enough and heft near half as much. Don’t over-pack it and you only need one horse ’stead of six bullocks. Push comes to shove you don’t even need a beast – y’could budge it with four men and half a c
argo and still resupply near as quick as the Redeemers. I’m salivatin’ right enough. Haven’t I made it to be all things to all men.’ It was a statement not a question.

  Cale was almost as delighted with Nevin as Nevin was delighted with himself.

  ‘Mr Nevin worked with me on the war wagon as well. It was his idea to cut down the size so they can move maybe twice as fast as the Redeemer supply carts. The only way they can move with enough speed to follow and attack us is by sending mounted infantry after us but without supply wagons. Even if they catch up, Artemisia’s outriders will tell us hours before they arrive. We circle up, dig a six-foot trench around the outside, and what will they do? If they attack we’ll cut them to pieces, worse than we did today. If they wait, the outriders will have ridden for more troops to relieve us. Remember, there’ll be two hundred of these forts on the move every day of every week. Even if they can isolate one and destroy it we’ll take ten times as many of them with us.’

  ‘As easy as that?’

  ‘No,’ replied Cale. ‘But they’ll lose two men for every one of ours.’

  ‘Even if you’re right, and I concede you might be, the Redeemers are ready to die in numbers – are your hillbillies?’

  Cale smiled again.

  ‘We’ll find out, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you really think you can win a battle with your wagons?’

  ‘Don’t know that either, but I don’t intend to try. It’s like IdrisPukke says: the trouble with decisive battles is that they decide things. I’m not going to crush the Redeemers, I’m going to bleed them.’

  26

  According to the great Ludwig, the human body is the best picture of the human soul and so, like the body, the human spirit has its cancers and growths and infected organs. Just as the purpose of the liver is to act as a sump for the poisons of the body, the soul has its organs for containing and isolating the toxic discharge of human suffering.

  It is an axiom of the hopeful that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you strong: but the truth is that such deadly suffering can be held in isolation in this poison reservoir only for a time: like the liver it can deal with only so much poison before it begins to rot.

  Survivors of the Sanctuary had already taken more than their due share of grief. Add to this the loss of his wife and child, and the horror of the events in Kitty’s basement, and Kleist was on the brink of drowning in his past. The day after the mock battle on Silver Field he was delivering a pair of boots he had been working on for the campaign ahead (leather work had been one of Kleist’s designated skills at the Sanctuary) and was heading for the bootmakers in New York Road. Bosco had drummed into Cale that decent boots were third only to food and weapons for an army. Kleist was heading through the market, crowded because the weekly horse fair was on, when he brushed past Daisy carrying their son.

  He walked on for a few yards and then stopped. He had barely taken in the face of the young woman – he’d not been looking at her directly and they’d passed in a fraction of a second – but something shivered in him, even though she was older and thinner than his dead wife, much more drawn. He knew it could not be her – her dust was blowing about on a prairie three hundred miles away – and he did not want to look again and drag his misery out of the depths, but he could not stop himself. He turned to stare at her as she moved away through the crowd, baby on hip. But she was quickly hidden in the crush of buyers and sellers. He stood still as a stump and told himself to go after her, but then he told himself there was no point. A shiver of desolation passed through him, his grief now uncontainable, spreading slowly, a slow and malignant leak. He stood for a moment longer but he had things to do and he turned for the bootmaker’s. But from that moment in the marketplace Kleist was on borrowed time.

  ‘So what do you think?’

  For the last ten minutes Cale had been watching Robert Hooke examining a four-foot-long tube of pig iron.

  ‘Have you tried to use it?’ asked Hooke.

  ‘Me? No. I saw one like it at Bex. The first time it fired it went through three Redeemers at one go – the second time it blew up and killed half a dozen Swiss. But if you could make it work it’d be a hell of a thing.’

  Hooke eyed the ugly-looking contraption. ‘I’m astonished it worked at all.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘I’d need a lot of money.’

  ‘Of course you will. But I’m not stupid. I know you were working on a tube for your collider. I’m not paying for you to research into the nature of things.’

  ‘You think all knowledge must be practical.’

  ‘I don’t think anything about knowledge one way or the other – what I think about is not being on top of a bonfire, one you’ll be joining me on if we don’t find a way to stop Bosco. Understand?’

  ‘Oh, indeed I do, Mr Cale.’

  ‘So, is it possible?’

  ‘It’s not impossible.’

  ‘Then give me a bill and get on with it.’ Cale walked off towards the door.

  ‘By the way,’ called out Hooke.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is it true you cut off a man’s head because he told you to bring him a glass of water?’

  Even for someone as sound as a roach Cale’s workload would have been murderous and he was very far from sound. Necessity forced him to delegate. There were candidates enough: IdrisPukke and a reluctant Cadbury (‘I have criminal enterprises to run’) could be trusted, Kleist even, silent and grim as he was, seemed to want work to occupy his mind. Vague Henri was everywhere doing everything. But it was still not enough. He went with IdrisPukke to ask Vipond for his help.

  ‘I’m sorry about Conn.’

  ‘I am,’ replied Vipond, ‘quite clear that you have nothing to be sorry for. There was no choice.’

  ‘I didn’t laugh at him.’

  ‘I know. But I’m afraid it doesn’t matter. You must bring in Bose Ikard.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Yes … not easy. He’s an able man in his way but he has the besetting fault of power: it’s become an end in itself. And he’s addicted to conspiracy. Leave him alone for five minutes and he’d start plotting against himself.’

  ‘I need control of the regular army,’ said Cale. ‘I thought I could build my own separate force. But it won’t work on its own. I need troops who can fight outside the forts.’

  ‘I understand you promised him otherwise.’

  ‘Well, I was wrong. The hillbillies are fine as long as they’re protected behind the walls and out of reach. But away from the wagons they’re as dangerous as a bald porcupine.’

  Vipond said nothing for a moment.

  ‘Desperate situations require desperate remedies,’ he said at last. ‘Try telling the truth.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘What it suggests. Be frank with him. He knows how desperate things are or you wouldn’t be where you are now. Point out to him that you’ll succeed together or you’ll die together. Or you could try blackmail if that person Cadbury has anything on him.’

  ‘Not enough,’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘Then honesty it is.’

  ‘And if honesty doesn’t work?’

  ‘Assassination.’

  ‘I thought you said it never worked.’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Extraordinary.’

  To Cale’s surprise his subsequent meeting with Bose Ikard was not just successful but pleasurable. Lies had to be elaborate and there was always something you hadn’t thought of to catch you out. It was a strain, lying. Telling the truth, on the other hand, was easy. It was so true. He liked telling the truth so much he decided that one day he’d like to tell it again. And so it turned out as Vipond had hoped: a lack of choice would drive Bose Ikard towards simplicity.

  ‘I can tell you that the High Command won’t be convinced. They don’t want anything to do with you.’

  ‘Then they’ll have to be replaced.’

  ‘They’ve only just been app
ointed.’

  ‘Is this true of all of them or just some of them?’ asked IdrisPukke.

  ‘If you could remove the triad that might be enough. If.’

  ‘Are you averse to special means?’

  ‘Special?’

  ‘You know: desperate times require desperate remedies.’

  Within ten days, two resignations and a suicide had accounted for the triad by way of Kitty the Hare’s red books. As a matter of courtesy and a show of good faith, one of the books was handed over to Bose Ikard, one that contained some unorthodox financial dealings involving Bose Ikard himself. IdrisPukke had, of course, made a copy.

  For different reason the Laconics and the Redeemers were societies built on the notion that war was an inevitable constant of human existence. The Axis armies were just armies. Cale was helped in his reforms, however, by the increasing awareness that it was not defeat that was at stake in the war but annihilation. This awareness was made all the greater by reprints of sermons given in the Great Cathedral of Chartres by Pope Bosco himself. In them, Bosco, quoting in precise detail from the Good Book, called on his followers to carry out God’s explicit command that ‘you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. In Makkedah utterly destroy it and all the souls therein. In Libnah destroy it and all the souls therein; and in Luchish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir, they utterly destroyed all them that breathed and they did not spare any, putting to death men, women and children and infants, cattle and sheep and camels and donkeys.’