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

by Paul Hoffman

  34

  There have been six battles fought at Blothim Gor. No one remembers any of these fights except in the name: ‘Blot’ is ancient Pittan for blood, as is ‘him’ in the language of the Galts, who wiped them out and stole their land. ‘Gor’ means the same in old Swiss. Blood, blood, blood – a fitting place for the first use of Robert Hooke’s hand-shooters. The war on the Mississippi plains had lasted six months by the time he got the balance of metals, powder and ease of use. Until then the fighting could have gone either way. The butcher’s bill was hideous, the Redeemers’ willingness to die in their thousands was beginning to edge out the advantage of the war wagons and the fraying soldiers inside them, born to cut wood, milk cows and dig potatoes. What kept them fighting was the sight, and rumours of the sight, of Thomas Cale. In the dying light of dusk he would appear on buttes and on cragged ridges and rocky wolds, still, except when the wind blew his cloak behind him like a wing, watching over them: pathfinder, dreadful guardian steward with his legs akimbo or kneeling, watching with his sword across his knees, shadowy predator, dark custodian. And then the stories began to make their way through bastion after bastion of a mysterious pale young man, no more than a boy, who would turn up wherever the fight was almost lost and battle side by side with the wounded and the lost, his presence calming their fear and radiating it back into the hearts of their almost triumphant enemy. And when it was over, and impossibly they had won, he would bind the wounds of the living and pray, tears in his eyes, for the dead. But when they looked for him again he would be gone. Scouts returned with stories of being trapped by the Redeemers when all hope was lost and they had surrendered themselves to a dreadful fate when an ashen young man emerged from nowhere, hooded and thin, and fought beside them against impossible odds only to prevail. Yet when the fight was over he was gone, sometimes to be seen watching from a nearby hill.

  Ballads were written and spread within the week to every wagon on the Mississippi plains. Many had been written by IdrisPukke himself, after these stories had filtered back to Spanish Leeds. He hired dozens of travelling singers to go around the wagons singing his folk songs. But they also picked up the ones written by the men of the New Model Army themselves, clumsier, more sentimental than those written by IdrisPukke but mostly more powerful, so much so that when the returning singers played them to him he could feel the thrill along his neck and arms, finding himself moved and shaken even though he knew they were just propagation.

  ‘What is truth?’ said Cale, when IdrisPukke told him, shamefaced, about how the songs made him feel.

  Cale, for whatever reason, perhaps shame or a cooler head even than IdrisPukke’s, claimed that while the circus, as he referred to the twenty puppet Cales, had its effect in keeping the New Model Army from disintegrating through the spring and summer campaign, their resilience owed as much, or more, to his ability to keep the wagons supplied with decent food and weapons and new men with good boots and warm clothes – all delivered through the lightweight carts that Nevin had made for him and which could move so fast even over bad terrain that the Redeemers were rarely able to interdict them. No one, he said to IdrisPukke, wants to sing a heroic song about a decent pair of boots and lightweight supply wagons.

  Even so, it was a damned close-run thing. It was Hooke’s killing machines that brought the Redeemers to their knees on the Mississippi plains. Until then, they were using new tactics against the wagons, Greek fire and a lighter battering ram under a hood of bamboo to protect them from the blows and arrows of the bastions. They also had an advantage because of their belief that death was merely the door to a better life and, of course, that the life they left behind was a desert. But Hooke’s guns offered not only more slaughter than even the Redeemers could deal with but also horrible injuries, each blast wounding as many as six men at a time with ragged cuts that could not be stitched or easily cleaned so that the wounds became septic and refused to heal. And Hooke’s was not the only inventive mind concerned with dealing out pain and injury: it had occurred to the peasants that if they mixed a little dog-shit with the contents of the handguns they could ensure that the hideous wounds inflicted by them would fester most painfully.

  Within three months the New Model Army was back over the Mississippi and with a bridgehead at Halicarnassus they were able to defend, despite the murderous counter-attacks of the Redeemers, for the same reason it had been the last place to fall.

  Up until Bex the war against the Redeemers brought only defeat; after Hooke’s handguns it was only victory. But there was not an easy triumph in any battle, from the clash at Finnsburgh between barely enough men to fill a public house (and where the only member of the Swiss royal family died during an unlucky visit to bring a tonic to the troops) to the five hundred thousand who drew up to face one another in the battle for Chartres.

  Who remembers the individual battles in any war, more than the occasional name, let alone what happened there or why it was important – or even the war itself? Which of you has forgotten the battles that led Thomas Cale to the walls of the Sanctuary itself? Where are the cenotaphs remembering Dessau Bridge or the battle at Dogger Bank? Where are the memorials to the First Fitna, the siege of Belgrade, the Hvar Rebellion or the War of the Oranges? Who can tell you about the Strellus and their matchless defence of the grain silo at Tannenberg, or the slaughter at Winnebago, or the defeat at Kadesh where twenty thousand men froze to death in a single night? Where are the henges at Pearl Harbour or Ladysmith? Where are the shrines, the headstones as far as the eye can see, for Dunkirk or the fall of Hatusha, for Ain Jalut and Syracuse or the massacre at Tutosburg? And why remember the first day of the Somme with so many tears when more died more horribly at Towton in an afternoon? After a three-month siege of the Holy City, the total deaths were how many? No one was counting any more.

  Later the same day, after the city fell, Cale and Vague Henri stood in the Sistine Chapel under its glorious ceiling depicting God creating man – hands outstretched to one another in eternal love.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Cale, and meant it. ‘Have it painted white.’

  There was a knock on Gil’s door that immediately seemed to say ‘I am a timid and guilty person.’

  ‘Come in.’

  It was a timid and guilty person: Strickland, Bosco’s body servant, a man whose sense of his own miserable inadequacy and innate worthlessness hung about him like a personal fog.

  ‘There was no one in the ante-room,’ said Strickland. ‘So I knocked.’

  What Gil wanted to say was: So what? Get on with it. What he actually said was: ‘How may I help you, Redeemer?’ In fact, he was extremely curious. Not even Strickland would have acted so guiltily if he’d been instructed to come. Something must be up. He hedged and ummed and then came out with it.

  ‘His Holiness has been in his room for six days and nights without food and only a cup of water once a day, which he’s instructed me to leave outside his locked door.’

  While the denial of pleasure was more or less a permanent state of affairs for the Redeemers, fasting for more than a day was regarded with suspicion. Fasting for six days was forbidden: such extremes brought about strange results. Most of the Redeemer heresies, including Antagonism, had begun with mad visions brought on by starvation. But Gil wasn’t surprised, exactly. The gaps between audiences with Bosco had become ever longer – three weeks was not uncommon. The more victories won by Cale, and these days there were only victories, the more meetings were cancelled because the more incomprehensible was God’s plan to bring about the remaking of the human soul. For Bosco, Cale was not the executioner of the plan but rather the plan’s incarnation on earth. Now that incarnation was at the outskirts of Chartres and certain to take it, Bosco and ten thousand Redeemers had withdrawn to the Sanctuary. ‘God means something by this,’ Bosco had said. ‘He’s telling me but I can’t hear.’

  Gil’s decision to leave had come up against the problem of a
ll such decisions: it was easier said than done. Where would he go? What would he do? How would he live? The withdrawal to the Sanctuary had helped. Not even Cale could break into this place – not a thousand like him. Two thousand men, let alone ten thousand, could keep this place for ever – and the army wasn’t made that could stay outside it for more than a few months. So Gil decided to wait and see and put one or two devices into operation. Perhaps Bosco would starve himself to death but he doubted it. Something told him that there was trouble in this. He stood up.

  ‘Let’s go to his rooms.’

  Taking several men with him he made his way to Bosco, trying to work out what he was going to do – but when he arrived at the tiny corridor leading up to Bosco’s apartments the Pope was standing in the doorway and smiling.

  ‘Gil, my dear!’ he said. ‘When I tell you what all this means you’ll laugh at me for failing to see something so very obvious. I couldn’t see for looking. Come in, my dear fellow. Come in.’ And in this mood of jubilation an alarmed Gil was hurried into Bosco’s most private rooms.

  So now the armies of the Axis turned south towards the great barbican and buttress of the Redeemer faith, to the fountain and the origin of it all: the great catastrophe itself. There was not much of a sense of triumph as the siege army camped outside the hulking mass of the tabletop mountain on which the Sanctuary was constructed. Chartres was not built to be held against an army and yet it had needed three months of blood and suffering before the New Model Army were able to get inside its defences. The Sanctuary was a problem of a different order. No one had come close to taking it in six hundred years. It was hard to see how anyone could: it was vast enough to feed itself on the miraculously fertile soil transported from the Voynich oasis and there were vats to store water for two years or more. But on the arid scrub that surrounded it even dog grass and arse-wipe struggled to survive. In summer the heat was unbearable even though the nights were freezing, and in the winter, only four months away, it could get so cold it was claimed birds fell out of the sky frozen solid. This was an exaggeration, of course, not least because there wasn’t anything much for birds to live on. It was also the case, for reasons no one understood, that winters were sometimes almost mild. Mild or not, the scrublands before the Sanctuary were not suitable for men to live in and particularly not men in such large numbers. But there were many more difficulties than merely feeding twenty thousand soldiers in hostile circumstances miles from anywhere in a landscape which, for two hundred miles in every direction, had been scoured of every source of food, every well poisoned and every building burnt.

  Cale was nicely looked after, it had to be said, in comfortably outfitted wagons with leaf springs and a decent mattress to keep him comfortable on long journeys, and another larger wagon in which to work and meet the great and the good. For all their success, the forces gathered around the Sanctuary represented, in part, those as hostile to Cale as the Redeemers gawping down at him from the walls of the Sanctuary. Once they realized the Redeemers must lose, the Laconics had changed sides and had contributed an army of three thousand to the Axis, which was now camped alongside the New Model Army. The Laconic general notionally in charge, David Ormsby-Gore, was in fact answerable to Fanshawe, whose central problem was whether to move against Cale now, when there would be many opportunities, or wait until the Sanctuary fell and then get rid of him. The trouble with waiting was that it was now clear that conquering the Sanctuary might take a long time, easily long enough for the Redeemer Fifth, Seventh and Eighth armies, who’d retreated to their vast territories in the west to regroup after their mauling at Chartres, to counter-attack. The Laconic Ephors wanted Cale dead out of a desire for revenge for the defeat at the Golan, but Fanshawe was more concerned for the future. It was a long time since he’d learned that Cale had not only declined to expel the Helots but had made sure they had been trained to create an insurgency against the Laconics. Once Cale had defeated the Redeemers, or at least forced them back beyond the Pale, he feared he would have enough power and sympathy for the Helots to train and supply them. He might even intervene directly to support a rebellion. In fact, looking for a cause of any kind, other than that of his own survival, was very far from Cale’s mind.

  ‘When it’s all over, we could buy a nice house,’ said Vague Henri. ‘What about that Treetops place you’re always going on about?’

  Cale thought about this pleasant notion. ‘Hard to defend. Treetops. It’s a bit too close to a lot of people with ungenerous thoughts. We need to go over the sea.’

  ‘What about the Hanse? I bet with all that money they’ve got nice houses. One with a lake or a river.’

  ‘Best to go where we’re not known. I hear good things about Caracas.’

  ‘We could bring the girls with us.’ The girls in the Sanctuary were a difficult subject between them.

  ‘They might already be dead.’

  ‘But they might not.’

  ‘All right. I agree: a nice house with lots of girls in Caracas then.’

  ‘Do they have cakes in Caracas?’

  ‘Caracas is famous for its cakes.’

  There was no more time to work on the future because IdrisPukke arrived unexpectedly with bad news from Spanish Leeds.

  ‘They’re planning to impeach you,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Cale, ‘impeach isn’t a good thing – not medals and a parade an’ that?’

  ‘No. More like put you on trial in secret in the Star Chamber followed by a private meeting with Topping Bob.’

  ‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ asked Vague Henri.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It does to me,’ said Cale.

  ‘Set fire to the bridge after Bex.’

  ‘They can’t prove I did it.’

  ‘They don’t need to. Besides you did set fire to it. Also perjury is a capital case.’

  ‘They told me to lie.’

  ‘But you still did it. The summary execution of Swiss citizens.’

  He did not say anything in reply to this accusation because it was also true.

  ‘The illegal raising of taxes.’

  ‘They agreed to that.’

  ‘You have it in writing?’

  ‘No. What else?’

  ‘Isn’t that enough? Just setting fire to the bridge would have the entire population of Switzerland fighting to get their hands on the rope.’

  ‘What choice did I have?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, ask them. An impeachment before the Star Chamber doesn’t at all require that the accusations are true in order for a guilty verdict – but it doesn’t help that you actually did all these things.’

  ‘You could march on Spanish Leeds yourself.’ This from Vague Henri.

  ‘Not without taking the Sanctuary first.’

  Cale turned to IdrisPukke. ‘Why aren’t they waiting to get me until after it falls?’

  ‘They’re worried it will take too long – or that if it doesn’t the New Model Army will do exactly what Vague Henri says.’

  ‘But the New Model Army is still Swiss – and the King rules by the will of God. The same God they believe in.’

  ‘They’re peasants, not Swiss citizens – and they’re not peasants any more. Wars change people.’

  ‘It’s asking a lot,’ said Cale.

  ‘Try asking it.’

  ‘Not till we’ve taken the Sanctuary. Then we’ll see.’

  ‘And your invitation to Leeds?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure you can find the right words. Besides, it may not be as long as the whingers think – taking down the Sanctuary. Hooke will be here tomorrow with a new engine.’

  ‘And if it works, what then?’

  ‘I’ll worry about that when it happens.’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t think you can afford to do that. You need to start making plans now.’

  ‘We were thinking,’ said Vague Henri, ‘of going to Caracas.’

  ‘I’m afraid this isn’t the time for stupid jok
es. I’d say the chances of you being allowed to retire to a peaceful retreat are approximately none.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked?’

  ‘Something like that. You have many talents, Thomas, and making enemies is one of them.’

  ‘Nobody likes us,’ said Vague Henri. ‘We don’t care.’

  IdrisPukke looked at him. ‘You’re being more than usually trying, Henri. I wonder if perhaps you might like to stop.’ He turned his attention back to Cale. ‘You’ve shown yourself to be a great tactician, but the time for tactics is coming to an end. Where are you going? That’s the question for you now.’

  But Cale was only a boy when all was said and done and he had no idea where he was going and never had known.

  The next day Hooke arrived with three of his new howitzers: big fat barrels of steel, in principle the same as his all-conquering hand-shooters but so strongly built that they could fire a ball of iron the size of a small melon. It took several hours to set up the howitzers in their ugly wooden cradles and work out their elevations for the first assault on the walls of the Sanctuary, which were uniquely strong because the stones had been mortared together with a mixture made from rice flour, which set like the hob of hell.

  Confident of success, Hooke had arranged for all three to be set off by men in specially padded armour. The army who gathered to watch pressed in so closely that the firing had to be delayed while they were pushed back, a process so laborious that Cale decided to let them stay. A wiser head prevailed in Hooke and eventually the watching soldiers were far enough back to satisfy him that the firing could go ahead. The three men in their special armour lumbered with their torches towards the howitzers and lit the fuses. There was a short fizz of powder and then a massive and almost simultaneous explosion, which burst two of the howitzers into a dozen pieces, cutting down all three of the armoured men and shooting back into the crowd of soldiers and killing a further eight. The third gun fired as it was meant to and sent the massive cannon ball smashing into the wall of the Sanctuary, where it simply bounced off, leaving behind a small dent. There would be no quick end to the siege of the Sanctuary.