The Left Hand of God

by Paul Hoffman

  “It was what we were taught to recite twice a day at Mass. I don’t believe anything the Redeemers say.”

  “But what do you know about the Antagonists—about their beliefs?”

  Cale looked puzzled and thought for a few moments.

  “Nothing. We were never told that the Antagonists believed anything. All they cared about was destroying the One True Faith.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  Cale laughed. “You didn’t ask questions about the One True Faith.”

  “If you knew the Antagonists hated the Redeemers so much, why didn’t you try and escape into the East?”

  “We’d have had to travel fifteen hundred miles through Redeemer land and then try to cross seven hundred miles of trenches on the Eastern Front. And even if we had been stupid enough to try, we were always told that the Antagonists would martyr a Redeemer on sight. They were always telling us about Saint Redeemer George who was boiled alive in cows’ urine or Saint Redeemer Paulus who was pulled inside out by having a hook forced down his throat and then tying it to a team of horses. They never stopped talking about dungeons, fire and sword, or singing about them. Like I said, it never really occurred to me that the Antagonists actually believed in anything except killing Redeemers and destroying the One True Faith.”

  “Did all your fellow acolytes think that way?”

  “Some thought like me—a lot didn’t. To them it was all they’d ever known, so they never questioned it. That’s what the world was to them. They thought they’d be saved if they believed, and that if they didn’t believe, then they’d burn in hell for all eternity.”

  Vipond started to become impatient.

  “The war against the Antagonists has been going on since two hundred years before you were born. What you’ve consistently told me is that, along with being part of the One True Faith, all you were ever prepared for—and you in particular—was to fight, and yet you know nothing about victories or defeat or tactics or how this and that battle was won or lost? I find that hard to credit.”

  Vipond’s skepticism was completely justified. Cale had gone over every battle and skirmish between the Redeemers and the Antagonists with Redeemer Bosco standing over him and hitting him with his belt every time he made an error in his analysis of what had gone well or badly. Cale had eaten and drunk the battles in the East four hours a day for ten years. But it was true, on the other hand, that he knew nothing about what the Antagonists believed. His decision to lie about what he knew about the war was based as much on instinct as calculation: if war between the Materazzi and the Redeemers was coming, then with it was coming terrible misery and death. He was not going to be a part of any such thing, and if he owned up to what he knew, then Vipond would pay any price to drag him into it.

  “All they told us about were glorious victories and treacherous defeats. They were just stories—no details. You didn’t ask questions. Me,” he went on lyingly, “I was just trained to kill people. That’s all—close combat and the three-second kill. That’s all I know.”

  “What, in God’s name,” asked IdrisPukke from the window, “is the three-second kill?”

  “What it says,” replied Cale. “A real fight to the death is decided in three seconds, and that’s what you aim for. Anything else—all that arty stuff you train the Mond in—that’s just bollocks. The longer a fight goes on, the more chance comes into it. You trip, your weaker opponent gets in a lucky blow or he sees you have a weakness and he happens to have a strength. So—you kill in three seconds or take the consequences. The Redeemers at the Cortina pass died like dogs because I didn’t give them a chance to die any other way.”

  Cale was being deliberately shocking. Since he was a small boy, he had been as proficient a liar as he was now a killer. And for the same reason: it was necessary to be so in order to live. He had deflected their interest in the one side of his past he did not want to reveal, by an admission of the truth elsewhere. And the more shocking, of course, even for such experienced hands as Vipond and IdrisPukke, the better. If the Materazzi believed that he was just a young and pitiless killer and no more, then encouraging them was in Cale’s interest. It was true enough, which made him persuasive, but it was not the whole truth by a long chalk.

  Vipond asked him a few more questions, but whether he believed Cale entirely or not, it seemed clear that the boy was giving nothing more away and so he went on to his plans for guarding the safety of Arbell Swan-Neck.

  It was clear from his written arrangements for keeping her safe and his answers to Vipond’s questions that Cale was as skilled in preventing death as he was in enabling it. Finally satisfied with Cale’s answers, in this at least, Vipond took a thick file from his desk and opened it.

  “Before you go, I want to ask you about something. I have had a number of reports from Antagonist refugees and double agents, and captured documents about a Redeemer policy they refer to as the Dispersal. Have you heard of this?”

  Cale shrugged. “No.” This time Vipond was convinced by the puzzled look on his face.

  “These reports,” continued Vipond, “are about something called Acts of Faith. Is this a term familiar to you?”

  “Executions for crimes against religion witnessed by the faithful.”

  “It’s claimed that up to a thousand captured Antagonists at a time are being taken to the centers of Redeemer towns and are being burned alive. Those who recant their Antagonist heresy are shown mercy and strangled before being burned.” He paused, looking at Cale carefully. “Do you think these Acts of Faith are possible?”

  “Possible. Yes.”

  “There are other claims supported by captured documents that these executions are only the beginning. These documents refer to the Dispersal of all Antagonists. Some of my people say this is a plan once victory is achieved to move the entire Antagonist population onto the island of Malagasy. But some Antagonist refugees claim that the Dispersal is a plan, once they are removed to the island, to kill the entire Antagonist population in order to wipe out their heresy for good. I find this difficult to believe—but you have more experience than any of us as to the nature of the Redeemers. What do you think of such a thing? Is it possible?”

  Cale said nothing for some time, clearly torn between his loathing of the Redeemers and the enormity of what he was being asked. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I never heard of anything like that.”

  “Look, Vipond,” said IdrisPukke, “the Redeemers are clearly a brutal collection, but I can remember twenty years ago during the Mont uprising there were all sorts of rumors about how, in each town they captured, they’d collect all the babies, throw them up in the air in front of their mothers and impale them on their swords. Everyone believed it—but it was all bloody lies. None of it ever happened. In my experience, for every atrocity there are ten atrocity stories.”

  Vipond nodded. It had not been a productive meeting, and he felt both frustrated and ill at ease about the stories from the East. But something more trivial was also nagging him. He looked suspiciously at Cale.

  “You’ve been smoking. I can smell it on your breath.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “It’s whatever I choose to make it, you insolent young pup.” He looked over at IdrisPukke, who was still looking out of the window and smiling. Vipond turned back to Cale. “I would have thought you had more sense than to imitate IdrisPukke in anything. You should look to him as an example of how things should not be done. As for smoking—it is a childish affectation: a habit loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, causes the breath to stink and makes any man who takes it for long enough effeminate. Now get out, both of you.”

  25

  Four hours later Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist were settling themselves into their comfortable rooms in Arbell Materazzi’s quarter of the palazzo.

  “What if they find out we don’t know anything about being bodyguards?” said Kleist as they sat down to eat.


  “Well, I’m not going to tell them,” said Cale. “Are you? Anyway, how difficult can it be? Tomorrow we go through the place and make it secure. How many times have you practiced doing that? Then we stop anyone new from coming in and one of us stays with her wherever she goes. If she leaves here, which we discourage, she can’t go outside the keep, and two of us plus a dozen guards go with her. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Why didn’t we just take a reward for saving her and get out?”

  Kleist’s question was a good one because it was exactly what Cale knew they should be doing, and if it wasn’t for the way he felt about Arbell Swan-Neck, it was exactly what he would have done.

  “We’re just as safe here as we would be anywhere else” was all he said. “We’ll get the reward we were promised and the money for taking care of business here. This job is money for old rope, and the truth is we’ve got an entire army guarding us from the Redeemers. If you’ve got somewhere better to go, be my guest.”

  And that was that. That night Arbell Swan-Neck slept with Vague Henri and Kleist outside her door. “We’d better be careful until we can make a plan of the place tomorrow,” said Cale, planning all the while how he was going to make his entrance the next day as her all-powerful protector. He would show her his disdain for everything about her, and she would be cowed and afraid, and he would be delighted with himself as well as devastated.

  It was nine o’clock the next morning when Arbell Swan-Neck emerged from her private apartment, having been told by the maids who’d brought her breakfast that there were two guards outside accompanied by two scruffy-looking herberts who they’d only seen before clearing out the stables.

  Wearing her coldest face, she was put out to discover that, besides the two guards standing formally to attention on either side of the door, she was faced not by Cale but by two boys she’d never seen before either.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  “Good morning, lady,” said Vague Henri affably.

  She ignored him.

  “Well?” she said.

  “We’re your bodyguards,” said Kleist, controlling his urge to be bowled over by her staggering beauty and covering it with a look that signified he had seen any number of beautiful aristocrats in his life and he wasn’t impressed, especially and particularly, with this one.

  “Where’s your . . .” She couldn’t think of a word insulting enough. “Ringleader?” she said, at last, unsatisfied.

  “Looking for me?” called out Cale as he turned the corner from a nearby passage accompanied by two men carrying several long rolls of paper.

  “Who are these people?”

  “These are your bodyguards. This one is Henri, the other one is Kleist. They have all my authority and you will please do as they ask.”

  “So, they’re your familiars,” she said, hoping to be as offensive as possible.

  “Familiars? What’s that?”

  “Devils,” she replied triumphantly. “Like the flies who go with Beelzebub whenever he leaves hell.”

  Unsurprisingly this put out Henri and Kleist but delighted Cale.

  “Yes,” he said, smirking at the two of them. “These are certainly my familiars.”

  “They’re a little on the puny side for bodyguards, wouldn’t you say?”

  Cale looked at them regretfully. “I’m sorry about their condition—I wouldn’t want to have to look at them all day myself. But as for puny? Perhaps you’d like to set a couple of Materazzi on them, then you’ll see how puny they are.”

  “So they’re killers like you?”

  Henri was deeply offended by this, but Kleist clearly liked the insult.

  “Yes,” replied Cale easily, “killers exactly like me.”

  Unable to think of a reply, Arbell Swan-Neck walked back into her apartments and slammed the door behind her.

  Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door, and Arbell Swan-Neck signaled her personal maid to answer it. When she did so, the maid was pleased to see that Cale’s eyes widened with astonishment. It was Riba.

  Riba’s rise to such an exalted position had been as strange in its own way as Cale’s. As soon as Anna-Maria had supervised Riba’s ejection from Mademoiselle Jane’s apartments, the old servant made her way quickly to the palazzo occupied by the Honorable Edith Materazzi, mother to Arbell Swan-Neck and the estranged wife of the Marshal. It should be said that since their arranged marriage twenty years before, they had never been anything but strangers, and the conception of Arbell Swan-Neck must have been one of the chilliest royal mergers in history. The Marshal’s attempts to avoid his wife at all costs were often successful, but much less so his attempts to deny her all power or influence over the course of Memphis affairs. The Honorable Edith Materazzi was a woman who knew where the bodies were buried, and there was very little that took place in Memphis that was murky or underhand about which she was not, in some way, informed—or, when occasion demanded it, the origin of. Despite having no official power of any kind—something expressly seen to by the Marshal—the Honorable Edith Materazzi had influence backed up, often as not, by her knowledge of those skeletons and lapses prone to inhabit every family be they never so proud and great. So it was that within thirty minutes of Mademoiselle Jane’s conniption attack over Riba, the Honorable Edith Materazzi knew of it from her spy, Anna-Maria, and had arranged for the angry if bewildered Riba to be a given a room in her own palazzo.

  When Vipond heard what had happened and that Riba was now in the Honorable Edith Materazzi’s clutches, he summoned Mademoiselle Jane immediately and gave his niece a most frightful bollocking. She emerged from his office, sobbing and wailing in terror, but there was nothing to be done but wait and see what the old witch was up to.

  The Honorable Edith Materazzi did not waste time. She knew that something was up and that it involved her daughter. There had been wild rumors about her absence after visiting Lake Constanz three weeks before, rumors including a secret marriage and a secret birth. None of them so wild, however, as the truth itself. The Honorable Edith Materazzi had spent much time and money to get to the bottom of what happened but with little success—and little success was not something she was prepared to tolerate.

  “Have they been treating you well?” asked the Honorable Edith Materazzi as she patted the sofa beside her and signaled with a warm smile that Riba should sit. Nervously, but also warily, Riba did as she was asked. She was already experienced enough in the social distinctions of Memphis to realize that something odd was going on—respect for the slightest difference in rank was insisted upon as if it had been ordained by God himself, and outsiders were treated with ridicule no matter what their status in the provinces. Riba had heard it said repeatedly of the Countess of Karoo, who had come to Memphis more than ten years ago, that she paid for the journey by selling her pigsty. This was a grotesque slander, as everyone well knew, because the people of the Karoo regarded swine as unclean. Why then, wondered Riba as she sat, was a woman of such eminence treating her with such kindness?

  “First of all, my dear,” said the Honorable Edith Materazzi, “I am sorry that you were subjected to so much unpleasantness by Jane. It’s not an excuse, of course, but I was a friend of her late mother and there is no other word for it: she was spoiled, always given her way in everything. But, that’s the way of things now, children get everything they ask for and you can see the result for yourself. But there it is,” she said, sighing and patting Riba’s hand. “And I’m sorry for it.”

  Riba was not certain what to say. “Yes, madam.”

  “Good,” said the Honorable Edith Materazzi, as if pleased. “Now I want to ask you a great favor.”

  Riba could barely believe what she was hearing.

  “I have a daughter too, you know,” said the Honorable Edith Materazzi sadly. “And I worry about her.” She turned to Riba. “You have seen her?”

  “The Mademoiselle Arbell? Yes, madam.”

  “Ah,” the Honorable Edith Materazzi
sighed softly as if speaking of a distant memory. “She is so beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  Now the Honorable Edith Materazzi picked up Riba’s hand.

  “Now I want to take you into my confidence and also to help you because I feel that you are a girl with a kind heart and to be trusted with the concerns of a mother. Is that so, Riba?”

  “Yes, madam, I hope so,” replied the startled girl.

  “Yes, I think so,” said the Honorable Edith Materazzi, as if she had looked into Riba’s soul and seen only kindness and a deep appreciation of maternal disquiet.

  “We must speak of things that are difficult for me—but being a mother comes before pride, as I’m sure you’ll discover for yourself one day.” She sighed. “My husband hates me and does everything he can to stop me from seeing my daughter. What do you think of that?”

  Riba’s eyes widened in astonishment.

  “I think it is very sad, madam.”

  “And so it is. He prevents my seeing her and poisons her against me. But I cannot defend myself, because if she were to take sides against the Marshal, it would destroy her future prospects. This I cannot do. So, Riba, I must endure. My own daughter, whom I love, I must endure her belief that I am cold and distant and care nothing for her. What do you think of that?”

  “I . . .” Riba hesitated. “I think it must be terrible for you.”

  “It is. But you can help me.”

  Riba’s eyes opened still farther, but she was unable to think of a reply.

  “I have heard that you are an excellent companion and a beautifier of wonderful skill.”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  “Everyone talks about how your talents have transformed that ungrateful madam, Jane. She was no great beauty, if truth be told, but you have almost made her one.”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  There was a pause.

  “Now, what I want you to do is this, and it will help you to a great place besides. I have arranged for you to become the beautifier to my daughter.”