by Paul Hoffman
The disapproving silence grew as cold as the ice on the top of the great glacier of Salt Mountain. Had he been older or more experienced in the art of presentation, Vague Henri might have stopped and cut his losses. But as he was neither, Henri blundered on to his last great mistake. To one side Henri had draped a large object with one of the tarpaulins from the palazzo cellar. There was no excited magician’s brio this time. With Cale’s help he slid the tarpaulin aside to reveal a steel crossbow twice the size of the last one but bolted onto a thick post set firmly into the ground. A large winding mechanism was attached to the back end of the crossbow. Vague Henri began cranking the mechanism and shouting over his shoulder. “This is too slow for the battlefield, of course, but using a windlass and steel for the bow, you can hit a target at up to a third of a mile.”
This claim at least produced a reaction other than icy disapproval. There were outright snorts of disbelief. Because he had not shared the possibilities of his new discovery with either Cale or Kleist, they were equally dubious, though silent. This skepticism now cheered up Vague Henri. He was still young enough, foolish enough, innocent enough, to believe that when you proved people wrong, they would not hate you for it. He signaled to one of Albin’s men to raise a flag. There was a brief pause, then another flag at the far end of the park was raised in turn and a second tarpaulin was pulled from a white-painted target about three feet in diameter. Henri put his shoulder to the crossbow butt, paused for effect and fired. There was a tremendous twang! as the half ton of power locked into the steel and hemp let loose. The red-painted bolt shot away as if impelled by its very own devil and vanished from sight toward the white target. Ingeniously, Henri had covered the bolt in red powder paint, and as it hit the target the powder sprayed dramatically over the white surface. There were gasps and there were more grunts. Even, or especially, from Kleist and Cale. It was certainly an outstanding piece of marksmanship—although it was not as outstanding as it seemed. It had taken Vague Henri many hours to fix the windlass crossbow exactly and firmly in place and tune the bow to the exact distance.
There was a long silence, which the Marshal tried to conceal by walking over to Vague Henri and asking a great many questions. “Really?” “Goodness me!” “Most extraordinary!” He called his generals over and they proceeded to examine the crossbow with all the enthusiasm of a duchess asked to inspect a dead dog.
“Well,” said one of them at last, “if we ever need someone murdered from a safe distance, we’ll know where to come.”
“Don’t be like that, Hastings,” scolded the Marshal like a disapproving but still jovial uncle. He turned to Henri. “Don’t pay him any mind, young man. I think this is fascinating. Well done.”
That said, it was over and the Marshal and his generals were gone.
“You’re lucky,” said Cale to Henri, “that he didn’t chuck you under the chin and give you a Spanish gobstopper.”
“That crossbow,” said Kleist, nodding at the steel giant bolted to the post. “How many hours did it take to get it to do that?”
“Not long,” lied Henri. There was a brief silence.
“I learned a new word in Memphis market the other day,” said Kleist: “Balls.”
“There’s no reason,” said Vipond to the three boys in his office the following day, “why you should understand the way things work amongst the Materazzi, but it’s time you started to learn. The military are a law unto themselves subject only to the Marshal. While I advise him on matters of policy, I have much less influence when it comes to the business of war. Nevertheless, I must take an interest in war in general and a further interest in your considerable talents for violence in particular. I am ashamed to say,” he continued unashamedly, “I may have a need for your talents from time to time, and this is why there are certain things you need to understand. Captain Albin is an excellent policeman, but he is not one of the Materazzi, and in allowing the generals to witness your demonstration he failed to show an understanding of something he now grasps and which it would be wise for the three of you to grasp as well. The Materazzi have a deep repugnance for killing without risk. They regard it as something utterly beneath them, the province of common murderers and assassins. Materazzi armor is the finest in the world, and it is for precisely this reason that it’s so appallingly expensive. Many of the Materazzi take twenty years to pay off the debt incurred for just one suit of armor. It is beneath them to fight those without their armor and training. They pay these huge sums in order to fight men of equal rank whom they can kill or be killed by and maintain their status even in death. What status is to be won slaughtering a pig-boy or a butcher?”
“Or to be slaughtered by them,” said Cale.
“Precisely so,” said Vipond. “See things from their point of view.”
“We’re not pig-boys or butchers but trained soldiers,” said Kleist.
“I don’t mean to be offensive, but you’re of no social significance. You use weapons and methods that defy everything they believe in. To them you are a kind of heresy. You understand heresy, don’t you?”
“And what difference will that make?” said Cale. “A bolt or a dog arrow doesn’t know or care who your grandfather was on your mother’s side. Killing is just killing—just like a rat with a gold tooth is still just a rat.”
“Fair enough,” said Vipond, “but you don’t have to like it to understand this has been the Materazzi way for three hundred years, and they’re not going to change just because you think they should.” He looked at Kleist. “Can one of your arrows pierce Materazzi armor?”
Kleist shrugged. “Don’t know—never shot any Materazzi all dressed up. But it would have to be damned good to stop a four-ounce arrow at a hundred yards.”
“Then we must see what we can do so that you can test it out. This steel bow of yours, Henri. Do the Redeemers have many?”
“I only heard of them before, I never saw one. My master had only seen two, so I don’t think so.”
“I saw how long it took to load. The Materazzi were right to discount it for the battlefield.”
“I said that when I showed it you,” protested Vague Henri. “A bolt from one of the other crossbows could go through armor. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it.”
“But Materazzi armor?”
“Let me try it out.”
“In due course. I’m going to send one of my secretaries to you tomorrow and one of my military advisors. I want everything you know about Redeemer tactics put on paper, understand?”
The three of them looked shifty at this but did not dissent.
“Excellent. Now go away.”
28
In the history of duels there must often have been pressing reasons that led to the slaughtering of one man by another. What they were, however, is rarely recorded. Those reasons that are known to us consist of minor insults, real or imagined, differences of opinion over the beauty of a woman’s eyes, remarks held to have slighted the honesty of another’s dealing at cards and so on. The notorious duel between Solomon Solomon and Thomas Cale began over the question of precedence in choosing cuts of beef.
Cale had become involved with this matter because the cook hired to feed the thirty men needed to guard Arbell Swan-Neck night and day had complained about the terrible quality of the meat being delivered. Raised on dead men’s feet, the three boys had not really noticed that the meals they’d been eating were not very good. The soldiers had complained to the cook, and the cook then complained to Cale.
The next day Cale went to see the supplier, and for want of anything better to do, Vague Henri went with him. If Kleist hadn’t been on duty, even he would have gone. The thing is that guarding a woman twenty-four hours a day, however beautiful the woman, was extremely boring, especially if you knew that the danger she was in was almost entirely invented. It was different for Cale because he was in love and spent the hours with Arbell Swan-Neck either just looking at her or putting into action his plan to make her feel the same.
&nb
sp; His plan was working—even as Cale and Vague Henri wandered into the market to sort out the meat supplier. Back in her quarters Arbell Swan-Neck was trying to prize stories about Cale from a reluctant Kleist. This reluctance flowed from the fact that he was perfectly aware that she wanted desperately to hear anecdotes of Cale’s past that showed him in a pitiable or generous light, and he, almost as desperately, didn’t want to give Cale the satisfaction of providing them for her. She was, however, an extremely capable and charming interrogator and very determined. Over several weeks she had winkled out of Kleist, and the much more cooperative Vague Henri, a great deal about Cale and his history. In fact Kleist’s reticence served only to convince her more of the truly terrible past of the young man with whom she was falling in love—his tense and reluctant confirmations of Vague Henri’s stories acting only to make them more plausible.
“Was it true about the brutality of that man Bosco?”
“Yes.”
“Why did he pick on Cale?”
“I suppose he had his number.”
“Please tell me the truth. Why was he so cruel to him?”
“He’s a lunatic, specially where Cale was concerned. I don’t mean he was like your usual lunatic, raving and ranting—in all the years at the Sanctuary I never heard him raise his voice once. But he’s as mad as a sack of cats for all that.”
“Is it true that he made him fight to the death with four men?”
“Yes—but the reason he won is just because of how that hole in his head means he can tell what you’re going to do.”
“You don’t like Cale, do you?”
“What’s there to like?”
“Riba told me he saved your life.”
“Seeing he was the one who put it in danger in the first place, I’d say we were even.”
“What can I do you for, young man?” asked the cheery butcher, shouting above the racket of the marketplace.
Cale shouted back equally cheerfully: “You can stop sending the meat from dead dogs and cats up to the guardroom in the West Palazzo.”
The butcher, now very much less cheery, picked up a vicious-looking club from under the counter and started to walk round it toward Cale. “Who do you think you are, you little shite, talking to me like that?”
He moved toward Cale surprisingly quickly, given his size, swinging the club as he came. Cale ducked as the club lashed past the top of his head, unbalancing the butcher, who was helped on his way into the mud as Cale clipped his heels. Then he stood on the butcher’s wrist and twisted the club out of his hands.
“Now,” said Cale, bouncing the end of the club gently up and down on the back of his attacker’s head. “You and me are going to go into wherever it is you store the meat and you’re going to choose the very best, and every week you’re going to send me stuff just as good. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes!”
“Good.” Cale stopped bouncing the club on the butcher’s head and allowed him to get to his feet.
“This way,” he said, his voice full of repressed bile.
The three of them made their way into a storeroom behind the stall full of haunches and sides of meat, beef and pork and lamb as well as a corner devoted to the smaller carcasses of cats, dogs and other creatures Cale did not recognize.
“Choose the best,” said Vague Henri.
The butcher had started lifting the best of the rump and sirloin from their hooks when a familiar voice called out, “Stop!”
It was Solomon Solomon with four of his most experienced soldiers. If it seems odd that a man of Solomon Solomon’s rank should be out choosing meat for his men, it should be pointed out that soldiers will endure death, injury, privation and disease much more readily than bad food. Solomon Solomon made a great deal of the business of providing his men with the best eats when such was possible, and he made sure his soldiers knew it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked the butcher.
“I’m setting aside cuts for the new guard at the palazzo,” he replied, nodding at Cale and Vague Henri, both of whom Solomon Solomon pretended not to see. He walked over and curiously inspected the sides of meat and then looked around the storeroom.
“I want everything here delivered to the Tolland Barracks by this afternoon. Though not that shit in the corner.” Then he looked down at the meat intended for Cale. “This is to be included.”
“We were here first,” said Cale. “This is already spoken for.”
Solomon Solomon looked at Cale as if he had never seen him before.
“I have precedence in this matter. Do you dispute that?”
Though warm outside, it was cold in the storeroom, built deep into the rock, with the corners stacked high with thick slabs of ice—but the temperature fell still further with Solomon Solomon’s question. There could be no doubt that something dreadful hung on Cale’s reply. Seeing this, Vague Henri tried to be sweetly reasonable with Solomon Solomon.
“We don’t need much, sir, only enough for thirty men.”
Solomon Solomon did not look at Vague Henri, and indeed seemed not to have heard him.
“I have precedence in this matter,” he repeated to Cale. “Do you dispute that?”
“If you like,” replied Cale.
Very slowly, letting Cale see exactly what he was doing, Solomon Solomon raised his right hand in what was clearly a ritual, and with the palm open struck Cale almost tenderly on the cheek. Then he lowered his hand and waited. Cale also then raised his hand, again slowly, and brought it carefully to Solomon Solomon’s face, but at the last moment he flicked his wrist with all his strength so that there was a clap! that rang in the intense silence like a holy book slammed shut in a church.
The four guards, furious at Cale’s blow, started forward.
“Stop!” said Solomon Solomon. “Captain Gray will call on you this evening.”
“Oh yes?” said Cale. “Why’s that?”
“You’ll see.”
With that he turned and left.
“What about our meat?” called out Cale jovially as he left.
He looked at the wide-eyed butcher, astonished and afraid at the murderous drama that had just played out in his storeroom. “I don’t suppose you can be relied on to deliver my order.”
“It’s more than my life’s worth, sir.”
“Then we’d best take some of it with us.” He lifted a huge side of beef onto his shoulder and walked out.
29
As when lightning strikes a tree in a parched forest and then quickly engulfs the rest, the hullabaloo that resulted from the meeting in the butcher’s storeroom raged in every house in Memphis. Marshal Materazzi swore fit to be tied when he heard. Vipond cursed. They both sent for Cale and demanded he refuse to fight.
“But I’m told that if I refuse, anyone has the right to kill me on sight. Without warning.”
It was difficult to argue with him on this, because it was true. Cale played the innocent party in this, and it was impossible not to agree. So then it was Solomon Solomon who was hauled before the Marshal and his chancellor, but despite a fearful torrent of abuse by the former, and clear threats by the latter that should he go through with it he could expect a career spent burying lepers in the Middle East, Solomon Solomon was unmoved. The Marshal was furious.
“You will put a stop to this or you will hang,” shouted the Marshal.
“I will neither stop nor hang,” shouted back Solomon Solomon. And he was right; not even the Marshal could prevent a duel where blows had been struck, nor could he punish the participants. Vipond tried appealing to Solomon Solomon’s snobbery.
“What could killing a fourteen-year-old boy bring you except dishonor? He’s a nobody. He doesn’t have even a mother or father, let alone a family name worthy of a trial by combat. What on earth are you thinking by lowering yourself in this matter?”
This was a telling point, but Solomon Solomon dealt with it simply by refusing to answer.
So that was that. The
Marshal barked at him to get out, and full of solemn rage, Solomon Solomon did so.
Cale’s meeting with Arbell Swan-Neck was as distraught as might be imagined. She begged him not to fight, but as the alternative was so much worse, she soon turned to a furious diatribe against Solomon Solomon and then rushed off to see her father to demand he put a stop to this.
During the tearful reunion with Arbell, Cale had made sure to bring Vague Henri to back up his version of events. After the distraught young woman had left, Cale saw Vague Henri looking at him and clearly not thinking anything generous.
“What’s your problem?”
“You are.”
“Why?”
“Why are you trying to pretend you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen when he asked if you disputed his right to choose ahead of you?”
“I was there first. You know that.”
“You’re going to kill or be killed for what—a few cuts of meat?”
“No. I’m going to kill or be killed over the fact that he thrashed me a dozen times for nothing. No one is ever going to do that to me again.”
“Solomon Solomon isn’t Conn Materazzi, and he’s not a handful of half-asleep Redeemers who didn’t see you coming. He can kill you.”
“Can he?”
“Yes.”
“I hope he agrees with you that I’m stupid—because then he’s going to be even more surprised when I break him like a plate.”
30
The Opera Rosso is a magnificent semicircle of a theater with a view of the Bay of Memphis to astonish even the most widely traveled. It rises so steeply from the arena itself that overexcited members of the audience have been known to fall to their deaths from the upper tiers. But the purpose of Il Rapido, as this vertiginous rise is called, is to enable the crowd of thirty thousand to gather around the field it encloses and yet feel as if they can touch the action even from the topmost seats.