The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  ‘The Klephts aren’t like that?’ asked a worried Kleist.

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cos we’re not mad for one thing and because we came to the Quantocks and kicked them out a thousand years ago.’

  ‘So you’re like the Materazzi – not much in the way of being religious?’

  ‘Oh no – we’re very religious.’

  This was a blow.

  ‘How?’ he asked, heart sinking.

  Her description of her faith, despite her protestations as to its importance, didn’t really seem to amount to much that he could pin down. It seemed to restrain them very little so far as he could make out. It was strong on the distinctions between eating clean and unclean animals of a kind it seemed to Kleist no one would want to eat anyway. It was strictly forbidden to eat bats, for example, or anything that crawled or wriggled. Eating spiders meant you were unclean for a fortnight and should Kleist be tempted, which he was not, to go back to his former butchery skills the consequences would involve an exile of six months. Their notion of God seemed very distant. The Klephts talked of him as if he were a rich uncle who was benign enough but had lost day-to-day interest in their side of the family. For himself he could not shake his guilt at having deserted Vague Henri and, to a much lesser extent, IdrisPukke. All reason told him that he had every right not to risk his life so hideously for other people who had not even asked him if he agreed to go along. On the other hand he realized that if he really felt so clearly about the rightness of his position he wouldn’t have left them like a thief in the night. About Cale he did not feel guilty at all.

  ‘What about you and me? You know?’

  ‘I’m not a cow,’ she said. ‘My father doesn’t own me. He is a civilized person who will thank you for helping me.’

  So it proved. But despite his welcome Kleist was uneasy because he couldn’t bend his mind to understand the Klepht way of thinking about the world. It was not just that he understood the Redeemer mentality because he’d lived among them for so long; he felt he had a pretty good handle on the Materazzi even after only a few weeks. And Memphis was full of races and types from all over the world. But none of his meetings with remarkable races in Memphis had left him with a vague sense of missing something that he felt all the time in the Quantocks. The Quantocks were a conundrum in limestone, riddled with spatey gorges, rocky unclimbable juts and chasms. Everywhere secret recesses punctured the high cliffs providing a hideaway or a place to gather for an attack. From here the Klephts disrupted trade by sacking, snatching, grabbing, nabbing, dispossessing, confiscating and generally depriving passers-by of everything but the clothes they stood up in – and not always those either. Their energetic approach to larceny became so notorious that amongst the dwellers round about (which other than the aggravating Musselmen was the only label the Klephts could be bothered to attach to the rich and ancient cultures they robbed) anyone who stole was known as a klephtomaniac. From time to time the other hill tribes would decide the rapacity and general nuisance level of the Klephts was no longer to be tolerated and they would band together for a punitive expedition into the mazy and innaccessible middle of the Quantocks.

  It was no more than three weeks after Daisy had brought him into the heart of the Quantocks that Kleist had his first taste of their, to him, unique way of waging war. He had no intention of volunteering his services, and had been furious with Daisy about her boasting concerning his epic brutality to Dunbar and his men. His principle since Memphis was to keep his mouth shut about everything he possessed in terms of goods and services that might be useful to others and he told her to do the same in future.

  ‘Why?’ she said, astonished.

  ‘Because I don’t want them trying to stick me in the Vanguard to see if I’ll play Barnaby the Berserker.’

  ‘You worry too much.’

  ‘That’s why I’m still alive.’

  ‘No one’s going to ask you to do anything. It’s got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Just remember that.’

  Four days later at the specific invitation of Daisy’s father he found himself sitting on top of a great limestone crop with (he had checked) plenty of rear avenues of escape, Daisy beside him, elated but not nervous. They were looking down into a valley about eight hundred feet across where the Klephts had built a rough wall. There were about five hundred Klephts in position, wandering up and down, talking, laughing and acting as if they didn’t have a care in the world. At the other end of the valley there was a Musselman force of about a thousand. They waited for half an hour and then advanced in close order, spears and silvered shields shining in the sun. At two hundred yards they stopped, at which point the Klephts started to pay them some serious attention, which took the form of shouting endless and colourful abuse about the Musselmen’s sexual practices with animals, the ugliness of their mothers, and the sluttishness of their wives and daughters. It was these last two that seemed to drive the Musselmen into an almost hysterical fury. Some, indeed, were so overcome with grief at this abuse to their honour that they burst into tears and knelt down and began throwing dirt over their heads. It settled into a routine. From one side of the defensive wall in the valley a dozen Klephts would call out a name: ‘FATIMA!’ and another dozen would shout back: ‘DOES IT BEHIND THE PIGSTY!’ And then again: ‘AIDA!’, to the chorus of: ‘LIKES THEM THREE AT A TIME!’ But the biggest reaction was provoked by what seemed to Kleist like the least offensive of them all: ‘NASRULA!’ To which a lone voice of unusual clarity shouted back: ‘HAS A MOLE UPON HER INNER THIGH!’ This instantly struck a nerve with one of the Musselmen, who screamed in fury at the precise nature of the description of his hapless wife and instantly started to run suicidally towards the Klepht front line. Fortunately in his hysterical haste he tripped over a stone and before he could get back to his feet half a dozen of his friends and relatives grabbed him and dragged him noisily protesting back to their front line.

  General order took a good ten minutes to restore. Still laughing Kleist turned to Daisy.

  ‘You don’t think it could be a mistake – twisting their ropes like that.’

  She shrugged but wouldn’t say any more. But now the attack began, the Musselmen advancing in good order, impressively disciplined as if they knew their business. To Kleist it looked like something bloody was coming. Still the insults poured on like the arrows at Silbury Hill. And then the final furious screaming charge. At this, the Klephts launched a not very impressive and completely inaccurate flight of arrows, turned and ran away. Daisy leapt up and down, clapping her hands in delight as the Klephts raced back into the endless winding defiles at the rear of the valley. The rough stone wall delayed the Musselmen by a minute, laden as it was with traps on the far side – sharp slivers of bamboo hidden in pits that could slice through a foot, poisonous snakes in the crevices of the walls and thousands of spiders poured over the walls just before the Klephts ran away. None of them were poisonous but spiders were unclean for the Musselmen even to touch let alone eat. By the time they had regrouped and started after the Klephts, most were well out of sight, except for the young blades who stayed back at the top of the defiles to shout even more insults. They didn’t hang about for long as some of the furious Musselmen chased after them but, met by a lashing of rocks from the limestone cliffs that fitted into the defiles like fingers, they soon realized a chase was both fruitless and likely to be lethal.

  ‘Come on,’ said Daisy, and pulled him back from the cliff and, via a circuitous route in case they were spotted by any Musselman scouts, took him back to the village. For the rest of the afternoon the Klephts from the great unbattle drifted in, delighted with themselves and boasting of their lack of feats of daring, the complete absence of any brave deeds, and their total success in not even standing to the first man let alone the last.

  Several days of celebration followed in which many war stories, endlessly exaggerated in the telling, were told of the cunning with which the teller caus
ed havoc to his particular enemy without sustaining any personal risk to himself or demonstrating the slightest bravery. Each one of them competed in fabricating outrageous claims concerning the ways in which, from the complete safety of an unbridgeable chasm or the top of an unclimbable cliff, they had tricked outrageously stupid Musselmen into revealing the names of their female loved ones so that a wife’s, sister’s or mother’s sexual purity could be defamed in ever more inventively grotesque ways. As Kleist listened in delight it became clear that to the Klephts the ultimate victory over an enemy was not to defeat him man-to-man in a heroic struggle of arms, but to cause, without risk to oneself, the absurd opponent to drop dead of a spontaneous heart attack or stroke, caused entirely by his gullibility regarding the honour of his women relatives and the ingenuity of the lies of his Klepht opponent. But however amused, Kleist was also somewhat shocked. The fact is that while the military philosophy of the Klephts appealed to him precisely because it was against everything he had been taught by the Redeemers in terms of pain, blood, self-sacrifice and duty, it also clashed for exactly the same reason: it was against everything he had been taught by the Redeemers.

  Daisy’s village, Soho, was surrounded by a path shaded with specially planted olives where every evening Klephts would walk in pairs and talk about all and everything under the sun. Kleist was in much demand as a talking partner because of the Klephts’ immense curiosity about everything in general and about the Redeemers in particular, whose practices and beliefs they found completely incomprehensible and therefore utterly fascinating. They assumed that every tale of brutality, every ghastly story of heaven and hell, every detail of the faith that Kleist recounted was merely an outrageous and entertaining lie. There was nothing he could do to persuade them that there were people who really believed and acted as the Redeemers believed and acted. ‘VIRGIN BIRTH? HAR! HAR! HAR! WALKING ON WATER? HE! HE! HE! BACK FROM THE DEAD? HO! HO! HO! THE LAST FOUR THINGS? TEE! HEE! HEE!’ A few days after the fight against the Musselmen, this time it was Kleist busy asking questions of Daisy’s father – a good-humoured old villain who had taken an immense, if not to be relied on, liking to him.

  ‘Look, Suveri, I’ve got nothing against running away but we were taught it’s the quickest way to get yourself killed.’

  ‘I’m alive, aren’t I? How many funerals can you see being prepared?’

  ‘You wouldn’t get away with that stuff in many places. Anywhere a horse could go they’d ride you down. Infantry, too, if they were good enough.’

  ‘But we didn’t fight in many places, we fought here.’

  ‘But what if you had to?’

  ‘We don’t.’

  ‘You raid.’

  ‘And sometimes we get killed – but we take what we’ve stolen into these mountains – and if we have to stop to fight a pitched battle, well, we just dump whatever we’ve filched and leg it back here.’

  ‘What if they trap you before you get here?’

  ‘I suppose you fight and get out or you don’t and you die.’

  ‘You can’t win a war without standing and fighting – that’s just a fact.’

  ‘True enough, I suppose. But we don’t fight wars. We just steal and rob. It’s none of my business if the Redeemers want to die for God or the Materazzi for glory. It wouldn’t suit us, that kind of thing, but it takes all sorts to make a world.’ He laughed and gestured at the limestone landscape around them with its endless crags and chasms and canyons. ‘Deserts make fanatics, everyone knows that. But a place like this breeds a noble cowardice. We know how to let other people be.’

  ‘You steal from other people all the time.’

  ‘Other than that. Nobody’s perfect.’

  Over the next three months Cale and Gil expanded the campaign against the Folk by splitting the Purgators into groups of ten, each in charge of two hundred ordinary Redeemers.

  There were more defeats in the early part of the campaign than victories but the vicious nature of the fighting had the advantage of killing off those who were unable or unwilling to grasp the new tactics. To his surprise most of the Purgators survived and even flourished. It was, supposed Cale, because they had broken with a life of complete obedience already – that was why they were Purgators in the first place. Something in him refused to accept that something else was just as important – their adoration of Cale. Gil saw it and regarded their faith in him as yet further evidence of his peculiar divinity. Cale was not holy, of course, not to be revered as a saint or prophet. He was not, so far as Gil understood Bosco, a person in the sense that even the most apostate Antagonist was a person. He was, in a sense, not really alive. He was the incarnation of a divine emotion. He was, perhaps, becoming an angel, pure in the way that emotions given absolute expression are pure. Everything else about him was in the process of being burnt away. He had to be human in order to be born and grow up. But that was not required any more and Gil could see Cale the boy disappearing in front of him. There were occasional flashes of what you might call a person: he would laugh at something ridiculous that happened in the camp or you could see his tongue sticking out the way you saw in a small boy when he was lost in concentration on some task – but less and less. No wonder then that the Purgators were drawn to him and tried to please him even at the cost of their own lives. IdrisPukke would have had a more mundane explanation. Cale hoarded the Purgators as he might pearls or diamonds. Sometimes, war being the unjust and drastic creature it is, those in whom he invested hopes took an arrow in the chest, the useless, by chance, thrived to irritate him another day. But they realized, even if they misunderstood his motives, that each one of them was important to him, more than important even. As week followed week followed week he slowly turned relentless defeat into stalemate, then occasional victory. Along the front he established twenty-three new semi-permanent forts to be supported by five major forts within fifty miles of each of them. Slowly he fought the Folk to a standstill, locking them in the veldt so that no supplies could reach them from the Antagonist ships (he could not prevent their landing on the endless inlets of the coast). On horseback the Folk could easily slip in and out of Cale’s front but no wagon larger than a small buggy could pass without using the roads that the semi-permanent forts controlled and which the Folk could now only rarely take and then not for long enough to let more than the occasional convoy through. Even this suited Cale. Hope, he had realized a long time since, was the real killer for most people. Hope made you weak; only expecting nothing from life could save you. But not even that would work for the Folk.

  ‘So,’ said Hooke. ‘You have a stalemate. No victories for them and none for us beyond holding these forts.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Cale. ‘I mean to go on the offensive very soon.’

  ‘How? You don’t have the troops.’

  ‘No, but I’ll soon have the services of two great generals.’

  ‘Greater than you?’ mocked Hooke. ‘How could that be? Who are these paragons?’

  ‘General December and General January,’ said Cale.

  While Cale was working to cut off the lifeblood of the Folk, Bosco was engaged in slowing the attempt by his enemies at the Pontificate to do the same to him. Instead of violence they used theology, and their means of putting a foot on his windpipe involved the commissioning of a conference instead of a blockade.

  The theological question involved concerned oil and water. Only an omnipotent God could save a creature like man, so vicious, low and debased was his nature. Yet it was a tenet of central faith that the Hanged Redeemer was both man and God. How could this be possible? Until recently the problem had been dealt with by ignoring it but Redeemer Restorious, Bishop of Arden, had stirred things up by preaching the theory of Holy Emulsion. The Hanged Redeemer’s two natures were like, he claimed, oil mixed with water and stirred together. For a time during his life on earth, the mixture looked to the observer like a single fluid of one kind, but over time that liquid would separate into clearly definable oil and water a
gain. It could be mixed but was always separate. ‘Nonsense!’ replied Bishop Redeemer Cyril of Salem. ‘The nature of the Hanged Redeemer was like water and wine – they are separate until they are mixed and become inseparable in a form that no power could reverse.’

  Despite the bitterness of this disagreement neither Parsi nor Gant had the slightest interest in indulging the rancour of a pair of squabbling clerics until, during a brief period of lucidity, Pope Bento expressed a desire to resolve the issue. The reason why was lost in the fog that descended on his brain the following day, but Gant and Parsi had been given the authority to establish a conference to decide the matter wherever they saw fit. They saw fit to hold it in the Sanctuary because wherever such a commission was being held temporarily became subject to the presiding authorities – which in this case were Gant and Parsi. They would have the right to go anywhere in the Sanctuary and talk to anyone. You will understand now how very important in so many ways the issue of emulsification had become. Unfortunately for Bosco the deadly blow of the death of the three hundred had meant that even so great a tactician became subject to Swinedoll’s Law of Momentum: if you are not moving forwards you are moving backwards. He could now only retreat as slowly as possible. He had influence in Chartres but it was fragile, built over the years from many favours and with unreliable allies not easy to keep an eye on from the Sanctuary. Those favours were now being used up, and while the unreliable allies did not desert him they would not risk exerting themselves on his behalf until it was clearer how the struggle for power between Bosco and the two cardinals would work itself out. Gant and Parsi’s plan to hold the conference in the Sanctuary and do so within the month suddenly became unblocked in the Apostolic Camera and moved ahead without any serious opposition. This was all bad news for Bosco. His counter was to use up most of his remaining store of favours. A committee was set up in Chartres duly packed with those who for whatever reason either owed Bosco or were committed secretly to his belief in a reformed Redeemership. A mission to the veldt was dispatched and duly confirmed Cale’s great success. Gant and Parsi made an attempt to prevent it but failed. One reason was that the Redeemers required a victory to repair the morale of the faithful much tested during the long stalemate on the Eastern Front, morale that had been further damaged by rumours that the Antagonists had discovered a silver mine in Argentum so large that they could hire an entire army of Laconic mercenaries. The second reason was that while theology and politics were all very well, there was nothing like the defeat of an enemy to raise the spirits. And if the enemy was really more of a pest than a threat then the faithful could do with a reminder that the word ‘pest’ came from pestilence and that the lack of importance that had formerly been ascribed to the Folk had been a serious underestimate of the danger they truly represented. A new star in the firmament was just what was required and the name of that star was Cale. The implausibility of someone so very young being possessed of such great powers only added to the sense among the faithful that God himself had finally shown his hand.