by Paul Hoffman
“It’s all right, they’ve gone,” he said to the weeping lump beside him, his hand covering his face and curled up into a ball. There was no reaction. The boy just kept whimpering. “I won’t hurt you. They’ve gone.” Still there was no reaction. Somewhat irritated now, Cale touched him on the shoulder. The boy burst into life, lashing out with such speed that his hand cracked Cale on the forehead. With a cry of astonishment and pain, Cale leapt back as the boy looked at him in utter astonishment and scrabbled backward toward a wall, looking around, terrified, for his tormentors.
“Shit!” said Cale. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” The boy had knuckles of iron, and it was as if he’d taken a glancing blow from a hammer. “What’s the matter with you, you bloody maniac?” he shouted at the wild-eyed boy. “I was trying to help you and you nearly take my head off.”
The boy kept on staring at him but finally spoke; only it was not speech but a series of grunts.
Because he was not used to the lame and the blind—they didn’t live long at the Sanctuary—it took a while for Cale to realize that the boy was dumb. He held out his hand. Slowly the boy took it and Cale pulled him to his feet. “Come with me,” he said. The boy stared at him. Deaf as well as dumb. Cale gestured to him to follow, and slowly, weeping with pain and humiliation, he did so.
Ten minutes later Cale was cleaning the boy up in the temporary guardhouse in Arbell Swan-Neck’s quarters, when she came rushing in, attended by Riba. She gasped on seeing the bleeding boy sitting in front of Cale, and cried out, “What have you done to him?”
“What are you talking about, you mad bitch?” he shouted back. “He was being given a hammering by a gang of your little charmers and I ran them off.”
She stared at him, full of remorse for having undone the good work of the last few days.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said, so pitifully and clearly stricken with regret that Cale felt an intense pleasure. For once he had an advantage in her presence. He gasped with dismissal, however. “I am so very sorry,” she repeated, then went up to the boy, all anxiety and worry, and kissed him. Cale had never seen her show this kind of concern for anyone. He looked on, amazed. The boy almost instantly began to calm down. Arbell Swan-Neck looked at Cale as she stroked the boy’s hair.
“This is my brother, Simon,” she said. “Most people call him Simon Half-Wit—though never in front of me. He’s deaf and dumb. What happened?”
“He was on the practice field. A group of younger boys were throwing stones at him.”
“Monsters!” she said, turning back to her brother. “They think they can get away with anything because he can’t tell on them.”
“Doesn’t he have a guardian?”
“Yes, but he wants to be on his own, and he’s always escaping to the practice field because he wants to be like the others. But they hate and fear him because he’s slow. They say he’s possessed by a devil.”
Happier now, Simon began pointing at Cale and grunting, acting out the stone throwing and his rescue.
“He wants to thank you.”
“How do you know?” replied Cale, rather too bluntly.
“Oh, well. I don’t know, but he has a good heart, even if he is simple.” She took Simon’s hand and formed it into an open palm and held it out for Cale to shake. Once Simon realized what he was to do, it took Cale some time to stop the energetic pumping of his hand. All the while the blood was soaking the temporary bandage Cale had placed on Simon’s wound. He gestured for the boy to sit and, anxiously watched by Arbell, peeled it back. It was a nasty gash nearly two inches long.
“The little bastards could have had his eye out. It’ll need stitching.”
Arbell Swan-Neck looked at him in astonishment. “What do you mean?”
“It’ll need stitching, just like you mend a shirt or a sock.” Cale laughed at what he’d said. “Obviously, not like you do.”
“I’ll get one of our doctors.”
Cale snorted with derision. “The last Materazzi doctor to treat me would have killed me given the chance. It’s not just that he’ll have a huge scar—a jagged wound like this won’t heal. Ten to one it will get infected, and then, God knows. Three or four stitches will close it up and you’ll barely know it’s there.”
Arbell Swan-Neck looked at him, completely at a loss.
“Let me get a doctor to look at him first. Please try to understand.”
Cale shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
An hour later two doctors had been called and after loudly arguing with one another had failed to staunch the bleeding and, if anything, had made it worse by their poking and prodding. By now Simon was so confused and in such pain that he’d had enough and refused to let the doctors near him, all the while bleeding profusely from his head wound.
After a few minutes of this, Cale had left, returning half an hour later to find Simon standing in the corner and refusing to let anyone touch him, not even his sister.
Cale pulled the distraught Arbell to one side, “Look,” he said. “I’ve got some yarrow from the market to stop the bleeding.” He nodded at the drama going on in the corner. “This isn’t doing any good. Why don’t you ask your father what he thinks?”
Arbell Swan-Neck sighed.
“My father refuses to have anything to do with him. You have to understand—it’s a terrible shame to have a child like this. I can make the decision.”
“Then decide.”
Within a few moments the doctors had been dismissed and the room cleared but for Cale and Arbell. Simon stopped yelling but eyed the two of them suspiciously from his corner. Cale made sure Simon could see as he undid the curled paper of yarrow powder and poured a little into the palm of his hand. Cale pointed at the powder and then at Simon’s wound and then at his own forehead. He paused for a second and then carefully approached Simon and knelt down, showing him his open hand with the yarrow powder as he did so. Simon looked at him, suspicion changing to wariness. Cale took a pinch of the yarrow and slowly brought it up to Simon’s head. He then leaned his own head back and gestured to Simon to do the same.
As leery as you like, the boy did so, and Cale sprinkled the powder on the still-bleeding wound, repeating this six times. Then he stood back and let Simon relax.
Within ten minutes the bleeding had stopped. Now calmer, Simon let Cale approach him again so that Cale could clean the yarrow powder out of the wound. While this was clearly painful, Simon was patient as Cale delicately did his work, all the while watched by Arbell Swan-Neck. When he’d finished, he coaxed Simon back into the middle of the room and onto the table. Then, watched still leerily by Simon, he took out a small fold of silk material from an inside pocket and opened it on the table. It contained several needles, some of them variously curved, with short lengths of silk already through the eyes. The suspicion returned to Simon’s eyes as Cale took one of the needles with its thread and held it up to show him. He tried various pantomime shows of what he wanted to do, but all that showed on Simon’s face was a deepening alarm. Every time he tried to begin stitching the wound, the uncomprehending Simon shouted and screamed in terror.
“He won’t let you. Try something else,” said the distraught Arbell.
“Look,” said an exasperated and increasingly irritated Cale, “the wound’s too deep. I told you it’s going to get infected—then he’ll really have something to scream about—or it’ll just shut him up permanently.”
“It’s not his fault—he doesn’t understand.”
It was impossible to disagree and Cale simply stood back and sighed. Then he stepped back again, took out a small knife from his inside pocket and, before either Simon or Arbell Swan-Neck could react, cut a deep gash into the palm of his left hand, just at the fleshy point leading to the thumb.
For the first time for many minutes there was silence. Both Simon and his sister stared in shock and awe at what they had just seen. Cale put the knife away, and as the blood poured from the wound, he took a bandage from the table and pressed it har
d into the cut. For the next five minutes he said nothing and the other two just stared at him. Then carefully he pulled away the bandage and saw that the wound had stopped bleeding freely. He moved slowly to the table, picked up the needle and thread and showed it to Simon, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. Then he placed the needle carefully next to the wound and began pushing it through from one side of the cut to the next. He pulled it taut with an expression of concentration on his face as if he were darning a sock. Then he tied it off in a knot, reached for another threaded needle in his pack and repeated the action three more times until the wound was tightly closed. Then he held the stitched wound up to Simon’s face so that he could examine it carefully. When he had finished, Cale looked him in the eyes, nodded and waited. Simon, now pale with apprehension, took a deep breath and then nodded back. Cale took another needle from his pack, held it to the boy’s wound (he thought of him as a boy, even though they were the same age) and pushed.
The five stitches were duly done but not, understandably, without a good deal of yowling and screaming from Simon. When he finished, Cale smiled and shook Simon’s hand, and while Simon had gone as white as Melksham milk, he had endured the pain of hell. Cale turned to Arbell Swan-Neck, now almost as white and shaking as her brother.
“He’s got the right stuff,” he said to her. “There’s more to your brother than people think.”
Cale’s shameless showing off was having the effect he had hoped for. As she stared at the extraordinary creature in front of her, Arbell Materazzi, dazzled, shocked, afraid and astonished, was now very nearly half in love.
The Guelphs—a people of notoriously ungenerous disposition—have a saying: no good deed goes unpunished. Cale was soon to discover the occasional truth of this miserable proverb. Unfortunately for him, he had not been brought up to police the behavior of nasty little boys with their childishly cruel ways—he had been brought up to kill. Moderation in violence was a deeply unfamiliar notion, and sadly the kick he had delivered to one of Simon’s tormentors had been harder than he had intended and had broken two of the boy’s ribs. By unfortunate coincidence the boy’s father was Solomon Solomon, who already wanted his revenge on Cale for having thrashed five of his best students and who now was beside himself with rage at his son’s injury. As is often the case with murderous brutes, Solomon Solomon was a kind and indulgent parent. Nevertheless his anger, which was incandescent, had to be contained. It was not possible to challenge Cale to a duel when the reason for doing so was that the injury to his boy had been caused while the little monster was attacking Marshal Materazzi’s son. Mortified and ashamed as the Marshal might be at having a half-wit for a male heir, he would be furious at the attack on his family honor, and for all his importance and martial skill, Solomon Solomon would find himself shipped off to some dump in the Middle East to supervise burials in a leper colony. To an already festering anger against Cale was added a murderous hatred just waiting for an opportunity. The opportunity would not be long in coming.
It was not surprising that Simon Half-Wit, as he was universally known when not in the hearing of his father or sister, took to spending as much time with Cale, Kleist and Vague Henri as he could. Surprisingly, this addition to their company of someone who could neither speak nor hear was not as irksome to the three of them as might be imagined. Like them, he was an often maltreated outsider, but they also pitied him because he was so near to having everything that would have seemed to them like heaven—money, position, power—and yet so unreachably far from it. In addition, he wasn’t allowed to become a nuisance. It was true that his behavior was erratic and emotionally wild, but that was only because no one had taken the time to instill in him what the boys considered polite behavior. This they did by shouting at him whenever he annoyed them—which, being deaf, made no difference to him—and giving him a swift kick up the arse, which did. Most useful of all, as they quickly came to realize, was to ignore him completely when he went into one of his unintelligible rants or otherwise misbehaved. He hated this more than anything, and he soon learned the basic social skills of the Redeemer acolyte. These, while they may not have been of much social benefit in the drawing rooms of Memphis, were still the only proper skills for dealing with people anyone had ever taught him.
Arbell told Cale that Simon had been given the very best teachers, and nothing had come of it—but the boys had one advantage over even the best teachers in Memphis. The Redeemers had developed a simple sign language for the various days and weeks during which they were forbidden from speaking. The acolytes, who were forbidden from speaking even more often, had developed the sign language further. Having tried unsuccessfully to get Simon to speak a few words, Cale started teaching him some of their signs, which he quickly picked up: water, stone, man, bird, sky and so on. Three days after they’d started, Simon had pulled Cale’s sleeve as they were walking through a garden with a large pond and a couple of ducks and had signaled “waterbird.” It was then that Cale began to think that perhaps Simon might not be entirely slow-witted after all. Over the following week Simon absorbed the Redeemers’ sign language as if it was water poured onto a parched sponge. It turned out that, far from being a half-wit, he was as sharp as a tack.
“He needs someone,” said Cale as the four of them sat in the guards’ room eating their dinner, “to invent more words for him.”
“What’s the good of that,” said Kleist, “if no one else knows what he’s signing? What good’s it going to do him?”
“But Simon isn’t just anybody, is he? He’s the Marshal’s son. They can pay for him to have someone to read his signs and speak them aloud.”
“Swan-Neck will pay,” said Vague Henri.
But this wasn’t in Cale’s plan. “Not yet,” he said, looking at Simon. “I think he deserves revenge on his father and everyone else but Swan-Neck. He needs to do something big, something to really show them. I’ll find someone and pay them.”
While this was certainly a true account of his reasons, it was not wholly true. He was well aware that Arbell Swan-Neck had changed her attitude toward him, but not by how much. He was not, after all (and why should he be?), very skilled in such matters as the feelings of a beautiful and much-desired young woman for someone who still frightened the life out of her. He felt he needed something dramatic to impress her, and the more astounding the better.
And so it was that the next day, along with IdrisPukke, his advisor in this matter, Cale found himself in the office of the comptroller of the Buroo of Scholars, an institution widely known as the Brainery. Here were trained the many bureaucrats needed for the administration of the empire. The most important postings were, of course, reserved for the Materazzi—not just the governors of this or that province but also any job of power and influence. However, it was understood, if not publicly acknowledged, that insufficient numbers of them had enough wit or general good sense to run so large a dominion efficiently or, indeed, at all. Hence the foundation of the Brainery, a place that operated on strict principles of merit so that the administration of things did not quickly fall into incompetence and chaos. Wherever there was an idiot son or profligate nephew of the Materazzi appointed governor of this or that conquered state, there was always a significant number of graduates from the Brainery to make sure there was a limit to how much damage he could do. It was therefore solely out of aristocratic self-interest that a wisdom had been born that ensured that the clever and ambitious sons of merchants (though not the intelligent poor) had scope for their ambitions and a stake in the future of Memphis. This kept them out of involvement in the kind of conspiracy against the order of things that has ruined many an aristocracy before and since.
The comptroller eyed IdrisPukke, a man whose up-and-down reputation went well before him, with some suspicion. This suspicion was not allayed by the vicious-looking young ruffian beside him whose reputation was even worse—if somewhat more mysterious.
“How may I be of help?” he asked as unhelpfully as he could.
“Lord Vipond,” said IdrisPukke, taking out a letter from his inside pocket and placing it on the table in front of the comptroller, “has asked that we are given your best assistance.”
The comptroller eyed the letter suspiciously, as if it might perhaps not be entirely authentic.
“We need your best scholar as an equerry to an important member of the Marshal’s family.”
The comptroller cheered up—this might be useful.
“I see. But isn’t that kind of position normally something kept within the Materazzi?”
“Normally,” agreed IdrisPukke, as if this utterly and irrevocably cast-in-stone tradition was of no real significance. “On this occasion we need an equerry with intelligence and skill—language skills, that is. Someone flexible, capable of thinking for himself. Do you have such a person?”
“We have many such persons.”
“Then we’ll have your best.”
And so it was that two hours later a stunned Jonathan Koolhaus, hardly believing his luck, made his way up through the keep and was taken, with the deference due to a Materazzi equerry, into the palazzo quarters of Arbell Swan-Neck and then to the guardroom.
If Jonathan Koolhaus had not heard the dictum of the great General Void—“No news is ever as good or as bad as it first seems”—he was about to learn the truth of it. He had been expecting to find himself in a grand apartment, the waiting room to a grand life, something he felt that was no less than his talents deserved. Instead he found himself in a guardroom stacked with numerous beds against the wall along with numerous vicious-looking weapons of one kind or another. Something was not quite right. Half an hour later in walked Cale with Simon Materazzi. Cale introduced himself and Simon grunted at the now bewildered scholar. Then he heard what was expected of him: he was to use his skills to develop a proper sign language for Simon and was then to go everywhere with him and be his translator. Imagine the galling disappointment of poor Jonathan. He had been expecting a glorious future at the very peak of Memphis society, only to discover that in reality he was to be the mouthpiece for the Materazzi equivalent of the village idiot.