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

by Paul Hoffman

  Arbell and her two maids were met by her new guards several miles from the camp and removed to her comfortable prison so that no one would see her. Kleist barely noticed; he could barely contain himself as he took his wife and child to see Cale and Vague Henri.

  As soon as he came into their command post, where they were failing to come up with a solution to the impregnability of the Sanctuary, they could see a miraculous change in his manner, not just because he was happy where he’d been for so long miserable, but that he had about him an intensity that made him seem almost mad. With him came the wide-eyed Daisy, holding her baby on her hip. In garbled bursts of rapturous speech the story flowed out of him, disjointed and hard to follow. But the basics were clear enough: this was the wife and child come back from the dead. For the three of them one thing united them – astonishment that life could ever be so madly kind. They were beside themselves; surprised, no, shocked by joy. They hugged Daisy, hugged the baby, then hugged Daisy again and demanded a repeat of the whole story, full of questions about where she’d been and who with. And though she was mortified when Kleist told them why she’d been on the run from Leeds, they were delighted, particularly Vague Henri, whose loathing of the ruling class of the city had only increased with his absence. They ordered food and drink and gave her an official pardon for all crimes in the past, and, as they were so happy, in the future as well. And then Daisy noticed that Kleist had gone completely white. As she reached for him he fell off his chair, hit his head – an appalling blow on the leg of the table – and threw up. The quacks were called and he was taken up carefully by the guards and put in Cale’s luxurious wagon.

  ‘He’s just overwrought,’ said the doctor. ‘Not surprising, really – I’d have a stroke if it had happened to me. He just needs some peace and quiet with his wife and child. He’ll be all right.’

  ‘I’ll leave my steward with you,’ said Cale to Daisy. ‘Anything at all you want, just tell him. We’ll come back later.’

  ‘Make it tomorrow,’ interrupted the doctor.

  ‘… we’ll come back tomorrow. Anything at all.’

  They went back to the command centre and had several drinks and a smoke.

  ‘He has a baby. Amazing,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’

  ‘Yeah. It all got a bit too much, that’s all.’

  But he was not all right. Certainly he recovered in a manner of speaking, but he was shook, as the Irish say. And over the next few days he remained shook, always a slight trembling and the stance of someone who’d just taken a blow, an overwhelmed look, a dazed look. During a brief visit the next day the two of them, puzzled because it didn’t seem to make sense that he might be worse, began to realize that they might be wrong: their experience of suffering in their lives (brutality, death, violence) might have been unusually intense but it was not necessarily broad. On the way to talk to the doctor, the other unfortunate subject surrounding Kleist’s return involved them in a bitter discussion: Vague Henri, until Kleist mentioned it in passing, had no idea that he’d come to the Sanctuary dragging Arbell Materazzi with him.

  ‘You’re a bloody idiot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now?’

  Cale didn’t say anything.

  ‘This could stir up a lot of those snakes you’re always going on about.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Nobody loves us – but nobody loves her either. The Materazzi are nothing – just a nuisance.’

  They walked on in silence for a while.

  ‘What does IdrisPukke say about it?’

  ‘IdrisPukke doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to know.’

  ‘And you’re sure of this because …?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘So what are you going to do with her?’

  ‘Let her poach delicately in her own juices.’

  In fact, he discovered that keeping Arbell interned nearby but not having to see her gave him a certain ease. He had control of a kind he’d lost: he knew exactly where she was. That was something else about power he’d noticed, something good this time: it was like drinking – it made the world glow. At dinner with Vague Henri that night he was unusually silent. After half an hour without speaking he looked at Vague Henri and asked casually, ‘Do you think I’m mad?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vague Henri. But it was an odd question oddly asked and he was spooked.

  With every day that the Axis stood outside the Sanctuary gawping at the walls Cale’s power was slipping away. Increasingly, the only option was to disperse the army, leaving a rump to keep the Redeemers from getting out. But then all the Redeemers had to do was wait for the forces in the west to counter-attack and lift the siege the following year, or even the next. Then it could be resupplied and used as a base to move against the Axis. The Hanse were already complaining about the cost of their mostly Hessian mercenaries, the Laconics couldn’t be trusted and now new religious squabbles had broken out on all sides. Cale knew that the Redeemers had the resources to regroup and that Bosco would be putting all his energy into buying the means to copy Hooke’s handguns. If he succeeded, Cale’s greatest advantage would be lost. To make things worse, the poisonous but incomprehensible religious differences that had caused the ten churches of Switzerland to split from one another were re-emerging now that the threat from the Redeemers was fading. Preventing these religious schisms from infecting the unity of the New Model Army was an increasing headache. Cale needed to kill the war quickly and that meant taking the Sanctuary. But the Sanctuary didn’t want to be taken.

  He was sure there must be a way because there was always a way. Under Bosco’s brutal discipline he’d been forced to stand for hours in front of maps and a flat board littered with bits of wood to signify troops and towns and rivers and impossible odds and made to work a way out of intractable problems. If he didn’t, he took a beating. If he took too long he took a beating. Sometimes he even took a beating when he got it right. ‘To teach you the most important lesson of all,’ said Bosco. When he asked what it was, Bosco beat him again. ‘Perhaps if I hit you a couple of times?’ offered Vague Henri. Cale decided instead that they should walk around the problem. These days his safety meant having people around him all the time, something he hated, so taking a hefty guard with them they went for a ride around the walls of the Sanctuary, making sure to stay well back. He’d stop and look, stop and look. There was a solution. There was always a solution. He found it in the Little Brother.

  ‘Now you point it out,’ said Vague Henri, ‘it’s obvious.’ And it was. It was so obvious that it was clear the Sanctuary must fall. Nothing could stop it. In two months they’d be inside the walls.

  The next day he gathered the considerable number of interested parties, their mutual hostility growing ever more irksome, and took them through his plan. First, not with any great skill, he drew the outline of the flat-topped mountain on which the Sanctuary was built. His drawing didn’t have to be up to much for the assembly to recognize what it was: its shape haunted their dreams.

  ‘Something’s missing’ said Cale. ‘Any offers?’

  ‘The Sanctuary.’

  ‘Yes. But not that. Something else.’

  Silence. Cale went back to the drawing and added an outcrop of rock about fifty feet higher than the table-top mountain and with a slope on its far side, but with a gap of about eighty yards between the outcrop and the mountain proper. ‘This ridge is called the Little Brother. This gap between it and the walls of the Sanctuary – we’re going to fill it in.’ He drew a line between the two, ending at the very top of the Sanctuary wall.

  Do rooms gasp? This one did. As Vague Henri had said, once it was pointed out it was obvious.

  ‘The gap’s enormous. It’ll take years,’ said someone.

  ‘It’ll take a month,’ said Cale. ‘I’ve had Mr Hooke do the calculations.’

  ‘That would be the Mr Hooke who killed eight of my men with his exploding pile of crap?’

 
‘Without Hooke,’ said Cale, ‘most of the people in this room would be rotting quietly in the Mississippi mud. So shut your gob.’ He then went into detail about Hooke’s calculation – the volume of barrows of earth and the number of men they had to deliver them.

  ‘Their archers’ll pick us off by the hundred.’

  ‘We’ll build defensive roofs for them to work under.’

  ‘They’ll be heaving rocks over the walls too – they’ll have to be bloody strong roofs.’

  ‘If you’re telling me soldiers will die, yes, they will. But we can work from the top of the Little Brother as well if we need to. In the end it’s just filling a hole. When it’s done, they’re finished.’

  Later Ormsby-Gore and Fanshawe discussed the day’s events.

  ‘My men are soldiers, not bloody navvies.’

  ‘Don’t be such a bore, darling,’ said Fanshawe. ‘I feel as if all my birthdays have come together. He really is a clever old thing. Pity he’s got to go.’

  The trouble with nay-saying doom-mongers is that they’re bound to be right eventually. No matter what great enterprise you set out on, things will always go wrong. So it was with the attempt to fill in the gap between the Little Brother and the Sanctuary. The predicted rain of arrows could be protected against with covered walkways but these could be easily smashed with rocks that were much heavier than expected because the Redeemers, once they saw what was intended, had come up with a sling device, based on the trebuchet, that could heave rocks weighing several tons two hundred feet from the walls. Nothing the Axis could build would sustain that kind of weight falling from such a height. No one, of course, was foolish enough to say ‘I told you so’ to Cale’s face but if words were fog it would have been difficult to find your way around the camp.

  The problem was solved in a few days and merely involved more effort. Barrels of rocks and stones were hauled to the top of the Little Brother and heaved over the edge. It was a sweaty, arm-bending, sinew-stretching curse but it worked. By the time Hooke devised a rail on which wagons could be pulled up the hill using counterweights it didn’t even speed them up much. Day by day, day by day, the gap was filled. Even if it was slow, every member of the fractious Axis could see progress and also the inevitable result of where that progress was leading. The promise of success brought harmony of a sort. The Swiss became more patient and put their plans for impeachment and a quick evacuation back until after the Sanctuary had fallen. Even the Laconics started pretending to treat their allies as equals: Fanshawe wanted the Sanctuary taken and with it the opportunity to paste Cale with no questions asked.

  Every night Cale would walk over to the compound where he was keeping Arbell. At times the temptation to go in was almost unbearable but his dreams about her kept him out. They took place in any number of different places he didn’t recognize (Why? he thought. Why not places that I know?) but it was always him hanging about, skulking like the lunatic draper in the mad ward at the Priory, who’d been left standing at the altar by the woman he adored and who spent the days weeping and asking everyone if they’d seen her. But the one constant in Cale’s dreams was the look on her face when, heart full of dreadful hope, he walked up to her. The look she gave him was bad enough in his dreams without seeing it in reality. So he watched the warm light inside the tent and the shadows lengthening and contracting as she moved about – though he knew it might just be the maids seeing to the boy or combing her hair. He tried to stop himself going to watch, of course, and sometimes succeeded but pathetically rarely.

  He had become very used indeed to the comfort and solitude of his comfortable wagon, now occupied by Kleist and his family, and to replace it had put several dozen expert carpenters and former upholsterers turned soldiers, who would have been better employed on the siege, to create something even more sumptuous.

  Kleist was a cause for worry. He was at once happy beyond words at the return to life of his wife and child and also shattered by the cruelties that preceded it. The sway of the one could not affect the weight of the other.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  The doctor shrugged, as if to indicate that it was obvious. ‘He was brought up in this awful place.’

  ‘So were the two of us,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Give it time,’ said the doctor. There was a difficult silence. ‘I’m sorry, I misspoke. I didn’t mean … um … to be unduly alarmist.’ But he very nearly did mean it, he just didn’t mean to express himself so bluntly. ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’ was his philosophy; if you bent a sapling out of shape while it was young it was obvious it would grow up even more deformed. Pleased as he was with his woody metaphors he was wise enough to prune this one back. ‘What I was … driving at was that obviously people are affected by their past but it’s just as important to recognize that even the same physical diseases affect different people differently – so how much more so with mental diseases.’ The two boys just stared at him. ‘I mean, even the strongest people mentally can only take so many shocks – Mr Kleist had the shock of being brought up in this place, then the delightful shock, but still a shock, of falling in love and marrying and becoming a father. Then the shock of discovering them murdered and burnt to ashes. Then the torture you told me about and being taken to the edge of death itself in the most painful and revolting way.’

  ‘But now he has them back,’ said Vague Henri, desperate for Kleist to be well.

  ‘But it was just another shock – do you see?’

  ‘No, I don’t see,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I was brought up here as well. I was in the cells with him at Kitty the Hare’s place. All right, I didn’t lose a wife and child but …’ But what? He couldn’t think of an objection – look at what had happened, even to Cale.

  The doctor was going to suggest that Vague Henri tried in future to live a more tranquil life, just in case; but he had the sense to keep it to himself this time.

  ‘What should we do about Kleist?’ asked Cale.

  ‘He needs calm. Get him away from here for one thing and to somewhere free from any strain or disharmony.’

  Cale smiled. ‘If I knew somewhere like that, I’d go myself.’

  ‘That would probably be a good idea,’ said the doctor, unable to help himself.

  ‘That shit-bag Bose Ikard and his pals are out to get us,’ said Cale to Kleist and Daisy. ‘It’s time that some of us weren’t here.’

  Neither of them, wary, said anything.

  ‘People are always out to get you, aren’t they?’ said Daisy.

  ‘Oh, indeed they are, Mrs Kleist. But the Swiss are sitting on all our money. We want Kleist to take as much as he can carry and put it beyond reach – set up somewhere we can retire to when the balloon goes up.’ The balloon, or balon, was a red flag used by the Redeemers to signal that an attack was imminent.

  ‘Where?’ said Kleist.

  ‘We were thinking somewhere over the sea. The Hanse is pretty welcoming to the wealthy. And Riba owes us.’

  ‘Does she know that?’ asked Daisy. ‘My husband told me when you were in the desert he suggested you should leave her there.’

  ‘She’s right, he did,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘But we never told her that,’ said Cale. ‘Besides, Riba was the cause of everything. She knows she let us down about Kitty so this is her chance to make it up.’

  ‘Why not send Vague Henri?’ said Kleist. ‘She won’t mind helping him.’

  ‘I’ve got to stay here.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Kleist. ‘Why?’

  There wasn’t the slightest hesitation.

  ‘The night before we make the assault on the Sanctuary I’m going to go in heavy-handed to take the quarters where the girls are being held. So you’re really the only person who can do it. Besides, you’re the only one of us with a wife and family.’

  So it was settled. Kleist would return to Spanish Leeds and with Cadbury’s help – Cadbury was very keen also to get some of his money out of harm
’s way – he’d get out of Switzerland with all their money and as much as they could sell off in the meantime.

  ‘You were a bit harsh on Riba,’ said Vague Henri, when Kleist and Daisy had left.

  ‘I’ll squeeze Riba dry if I have to – and it still wouldn’t be enough.’

  There was a bad-tempered silence. It was Cale who decided to make things up. ‘That was pretty quick thinking when he asked why you weren’t going.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t quick thinking,’ said Vague Henri. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid. He probably killed them months ago, years even.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Based on?’

  ‘Based on I don’t think so.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No isn’t clear enough?’

  ‘I’m not asking your permission.’

  ‘Look, I may have gone along with some half-wit notion of yours that we’re equals – nobody else thinks that. You’ll do as you’re bloody well told.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘Yes, you will.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  This bickering went on for some time. There were threats from Cale to have him arrested until the siege was over and invitations from Vague Henri to shove his threats up his arse. But what broke the deadlock was an appeal to Cale’s heart, peculiar object that it was.

  ‘Annunziata, the girl I told you about – I love her.’ This was not true. He cared deeply about her, more than the other girls although he cared deeply about them too. Why the desire to save them was so intense he could not say. But there it was. He had better insight into Cale’s soul than his own. Everyone has a sentimental spot for something, even, or especially, the wicked. It was said that Alois Huttler found it hard not to weep when he saw a puppy and that he kept a painting in his bedroom of a little girl feeding a lamb milk through a horn. At any rate, Cale could hardly deny the power of love, given its hold on his own soul. It was, after all, the source of much of his self-pity that he had risked his life so madly to save Arbell.