by Paul Hoffman
Cale, Kleist and Vague Henri stood over the Redeemer lying unconscious with his back against the palazzo wall, his face swollen, lips fat, teeth missing.
“He looks familiar,” said Vague Henri.
“Yes,” said Cale. “It’s Tillmans, Navratil’s acolyte.”
“Redeemer Bumfeel?” said Kleist, looking down at the unconscious young man more closely. “Yeah, you’re right. It is Tillmans.” Kleist snapped his fingers in Tillmans’s face twice.
“Tillmans! Wake up!” He shook him by the shoulders and then Tillmans groaned. Slowly his eyes opened, but they were unfocused.
“They burned him.”
“They burned who?”
“Redeemer Navratil. They roasted him over a griddle for touching boys.”
“Sorry about that. He was decent enough, all said and done,” said Cale.
“As long as you kept your back to the wall,” said Kleist. “He gave me a pork chop once,” he added, a memorial as close to a eulogy as Kleist was ever likely to give a Redeemer.
“I couldn’t bear the screaming,” said Tillmans. “It took nearly an hour to finish him. Then they told me they’d do the same to me if I didn’t volunteer to come here.”
“Who was watching you on the way?”
“Redeemer Stape Roy and his cohort. They told us when we got to this place, there’d be God’s spies to fight with us, and if we did well, we’d get a fresh start. Don’t kill me, Boss!”
“We’re not going to hurt you. Just tell us what you know.”
“Nothing. I don’t know anything.”
“Who were the others?”
“I don’t know—just like me, not soldiers. I want . . .”
Tillmans’s eyes started to move oddly, one losing focus, the other looking over Cale’s shoulder as if he could see something in the distance. Again Kleist snapped his fingers, but this time there was no response, except that Tillmans’s gaze became more unfocused and his breathing more erratic. Then for a moment he seemed to come to—“What’s that?” Then his head fell to one side.
“He’s not going to last the night,” said Vague Henri. “Poor old Tillmans.”
“Yeah,” said Kleist. “And poor old Redeemer Bumfeel. What a way to go.”
He had been told to report at three to the chancellor’s office and keep his mouth shut. When he was finally shown in, Vipond barely looked at him.
“I have to admit that I had my doubts when you predicted the Redeemers would try an attack on Arbell in Memphis. I wondered if perhaps you weren’t making it up in order to give yourself and your friends something to do. My apologies.”
Cale was not used to anyone in authority admitting they were wrong—especially when they were right—and so he just looked shifty. Vipond handed Cale a printed leaflet—on it was a coarsely drawn picture of a woman with her breasts exposed and above this the headline: THE WHORE OF MEMPHIS. The leaflet went on to describe Arbell as a notorious defiler and shaved-headed whore who prostituted herself and all innocents in mass orgies of devil worship and sacrifice. She is a sin, declared the leaflet finally, crying out to heaven for vengeance!
There were hammers working in Cale’s brain trying to figure all this out.
“The attackers outside the walls left these pamphlets all along their trail of attack,” said Vipond. “There’ll be no keeping a lid on it this time. Arbell Materazzi is widely considered to be whiter than snow.”
While this was clearly no longer entirely true, the grotesque lies of the pamphlet were as deeply puzzling to Cale as to Vipond.
“Any idea what this is about?” asked Vipond.
“No.”
“I heard you interrogated a prisoner.”
“What there was left of him.”
“Did he have anything to say?”
“Only to tell us what was already pretty clear. This was never a serious attack. They weren’t even real soldiers. We knew about ten of them—field cooks, clerks, a few soldier types who slacked off once too often. That’s why it was so easy.”
“You’re not to repeat that anywhere else. The form all around is that the Materazzi have delivered a great victory against a cowardly attack by the pick of Redeemer assassins.”
“The pick of Redeemer pig-boys.”
“There is outrage at what has happened and great regard for our soldiers’ skill and heroism in repelling them. Nothing must be said to contradict that claim. You understand?”
“Bosco wants to provoke you into an attack on him.”
“Well, he’s succeeded.”
“Giving Bosco what he wants is a stupid idea. I’m not lying about this.”
“That makes a change. But I believe you.”
“Then you have to tell them that if they think taking on a real Redeemer army will be anything like this, then they’ve got another think coming.”
For the first time Vipond looked straight at the boy in front of him.
“My God, Cale, if you only knew with what little sense the world is run. There has been no disaster visited on mankind that was not warned of by someone—never, not in all the history of the world. And no one who ever gave such warnings and was proved right ever got any good out of it. The Materazzi will not be told by anyone in this matter, and certainly not by Thomas Cale. That’s how the world is, and there is nothing an insignificant nobody like you, or even a significant somebody like me, can do about it.”
“You’re not going to say anything to stop them?”
“No, I am not, and neither will you. Memphis is the heart of the greatest power on earth. Some very simple forces, Cale, hold that empire together: trade, greed and the general belief that the Materazzi are too powerful for it all to be worth the risk of defying us. Waiting behind the walls of Memphis while the Redeemers lay siege to us is not an option. Bosco can’t win, but we can lose. All it requires is for us to be seen to be hiding from him. We could wait out a siege in Memphis for a hundred years, but it wouldn’t be six months before revolts would have sprung up from here to the Republic of Pisspot-on-Sea. It’s war—so we’d just better get on with it.”
“I know how the Redeemers will fight.”
Vipond looked at him, exasperated. “So what do you expect? To be consulted? The generals who are planning the campaign have not only conquered half the known world, they either fought with or were trained by Solomon Solomon, even if most of them didn’t care for him much. But you—a boy . . . a nothing who fights like a starving dog. You can forget it.” He waved Cale away impatiently, adding so as to send him away with a flea in his ear, “You should have let Solomon Solomon live.”
“Would he have done the same for me?”
“Indeed he would not—so all the more reason to have exploited his weakness. If you had let him live, you could have won yourself golden opinions from the Materazzi and made him look like nothing. Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it as it is to its victims—the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is that nobody really possesses the kind of power that you have for long. Those who have it on loan from Fate count on it too much and are themselves destroyed.”
“Did you make that up or was it someone else who never had to stand in front of a mob, barking to see them gutted for something to do of an afternoon?”
“Self-pity, is it? You need never have been there and you know it.”
Irritated, not least because he had no good answer, Cale turned to leave.
“By the way, the report on what happened last night will diminish significantly your contribution and that of your friends. You will not complain about this.”
“And why’s that?”
“After your performance at the Red Opera, you are much loathed. Think about what I’ve just told you and it will become clear enough. Even if it does not, you will say nothing about what happened yesterday.”
“I couldn’t care less what the Materazzi think one way or the other.”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it, that you don’t car
e what people think? But you should.”
Over the next week Materazzi from their estates came pouring into Memphis. It was barely possible to move for knights, their men-at-arms, their wives, their wives’ servants and the vast number of thieves, histers, tarts, gamblers, bagmen, hot prowlers, loan sharks and ordinary traders all after the opportunity to make the large amounts of money to be had from a war. But there was wheeling and dealing other than that concerning money. There were complicated matters of precedence to be settled among the Materazzi nobility. Where you were placed in the order of battle was a sign of where you stood in Materazzi society—a Materazzi battle plan was partly a military strategy and partly like the seating arrangement at a royal wedding. Opportunities to give and take offense were endless. So it was that, despite the pressing business of war, the Marshal spent most of his time throwing dinners and gatherings of one kind or another solely in order to smooth dangerously ruffled feathers by explaining that what looked like a slight was in reality an honor of the greatest significance.
It was at one of these banquets to which Cale had been invited (at Vipond’s request, as part of his attempt at rehabilitation) that events, yet again, took an unexpected turn. Despite the Marshal’s general desire not to have Simon in his presence, and particularly not in public, it was not always possible, particularly when Arbell had begged that Simon be invited.
Lord Vipond was a master of information, true and untrue. He had a considerable network of individuals at all levels of Memphis society, from lord to lowly bootblack. If he wished something to be widely known, or at least widely believed, these informers would be given a story, true or untrue, and then they would spread the word. Such a means of disseminating useful rumors and denying damaging ones has, of course, been used by every ruler from the Ozymandian King of Kings to the Mayor of Nothing-upon-Nowhere. The difference between Vipond and all these other practitioners of the black art of rumor was that Vipond knew that, for his informers to be believed when it really mattered, nearly everything they said had to be true. The result was that any lies that Vipond did want generally accepted were nearly always swallowed whole. He had used up some of his valuable capital on Cale because he was only too aware of the spirit of revenge that had been fired in those related or close to Solomon Solomon. His assassination was a near certainty. Vipond, despite what he had said to Cale, had it put about that Cale had fought bravely alongside the Materazzi in helping to save Arbell, and thus the immediate threat to Cale of poison or a knife in the back in a dark alley had been much, although not completely, diminished. Unusually, had Vipond been asked why he was spending so much time on someone of no significance, he would not have been able to say. But then there was no one to ask him.
Vipond and Marshal Materazzi had been meeting together for several hours in a frustrating attempt to create a battle plan that took into account all the complicated questions of status and power posed by putting the Materazzi into the field. The truth was that they were missing Solomon Solomon, whose heroic reputation as a soldier had made him invaluable as a man who could negotiate and deliver compromises between the various Materazzi factions struggling for precedence in the line of battle.
“You know, Vipond,” said the Marshal, miserably, “as much as I admire the subtleties of the way you deal with these matters, I have to say that, when all’s said and done, there are few problems in this world that can’t be solved by a large bribe or by shoving your enemy over a steep cliff on a dark night.”
“Meaning, my lord?”
“That boy, Cale. I’m not defending Solomon Solomon—you know I tried to stop it—but if the truth be known, I didn’t think the boy had a chance against him.”
“And if you had realized?”
“There’s no point in putting on that high-and-mighty tone; don’t tell me you always do the right thing rather than the wise thing. The point is we need Solomon Solomon; he could have smoothed things over and whipped these bastards into line. It’s simple—we need Solomon Solomon and we don’t need Cale.”
“Cale saved your daughter, my lord, and very nearly lost his own life in the process.”
“You see, there you go—of all people, you should know I can’t take things personally. I know what he did and I’m grateful. But only as a father. As a ruler, I’m pointing out that the state needs Solomon Solomon a lot more that it needs Cale. That’s just the obvious truth and there’s no point in you denying it.”
“So what do you regret, my lord? Not having him thrown over a cliff before the fight?”
“You think you can embarrass me into backing down? First of all, I would have given him a large bag of gold and told him to bugger off and never come back. Which, incidentally, is exactly what I intend to do when this war is over.”
“And what if he’d said no?”
“I’d have been pretty damn suspicious. Why is he hanging around here, anyway?”
“Because you gave him a good job in the middle of the most protected square mile in the entire world.”
“So it’s my fault? Well, if it is, I’m going to put it right. That boy is a menace. He’s a jinx like that fellow in the belly of the whale.”
“Jesus of Nazareth?”
“Yes, him. Once this business with the Redeemers is sorted, Cale is gone and that’s all there is to it.”
What also had the Marshal in such a foul temper was the prospect of having to sit with his son for an entire evening—the humiliation was almost more than he could endure.
As it turned out, the banquet went well. The nobles present seemed ready and even willing to set aside old resentments and squabbles and present a united front in the face of the threat from the Redeemers to Memphis in general and Arbell Swan-Neck in particular. Throughout the dinner she was so sweet and yet gently amusing and so astonishingly beautiful that she made the Redeemers’ grotesque portrait of her seem an increasingly powerful reason to put aside petty differences and face the threat that these religious fanatics posed to all of them.
Throughout the banquet she tried desperately not to look at Cale. So intensely did she love and desire him that she felt sure it would be obvious even to the most thick-skinned. Cale, for his part, was in a sulk because he interpreted this as her avoiding him. She was ashamed of him, he could see, embarrassed to be around him in public. The Marshal’s fears, on the other hand, that he would be mortified by Simon seemed to be groundless. True enough, the boy sat there inevitably saying nothing—but his habitual expression of alarm and terrified bewilderment had vanished. Indeed, his expression seemed entirely normal: now a look of interest, now one of amusement. The Marshal felt increasingly irritable as he had been unable to shake a tickly cough, probably caused by having to yap so much to his endless petitioners.
Another thing annoying the Marshal was the young man beside Simon. He did not recognize him and he said nothing all evening, but throughout dinner he endlessly twitched his right hand in a maddening series of small pointings, tiny jabs, endless circles and so on. In the end it started to get on the Marshal’s nerves so much that he was about to order his manservant, Pepys, to tell the young man either to stop or get out, when the young man with Simon stood up and waited for silence—an action so astonishing in such company that the buzz of laughter and conversation almost slowed to a halt.
“I am Jonathan Koolhaus,” announced Koolhaus, “language tutor to Lord Simon Materazzi. Lord Simon wishes to say something.” At this, the room went quiet, more out of astonishment than deference. Simon then stood up and began moving his right hand in exactly the same peculiar style as Koolhaus had been doing all evening. Koolhaus translated:
“Lord Simon Materazzi says, ‘I have been sitting opposite Provost Kevin Losells for the entire evening and during that time Provost Losells has on three occasions referred to me as a gibbering half-wit.’ ” Simon smiled, a broad and good-humored smile. “ ‘Well, Provost Losells, when it comes to being a gibbering half-wit, as the children say in the playground: it takes one to know one
.’ ”
The burst of laughter that followed this was fueled as much by the sight of Losells’s bulging eyes and red face as it was by the joke. Simon’s right hand flicked busily back and forth.
“Lord Simon Materazzi says, ‘Kevin claims it is a great dishonor to him to be seated opposite me.’ ” Simon bowed mockingly to Kevin and Koolhaus did likewise. Simon’s right hand moved again. “ ‘I say to you, Provost Losells, that the dishonor is all mine.’ ”
With that, Simon sat down, smiling benevolently, and Koolhaus with him.
For a moment the table stared on in astonishment, though there was some laughing and clapping. And then, as if by some strange unspoken agreement, the guests all decided they would ignore what they had just seen and pretend it hadn’t happened. With that, the buzz of laughter and conversation reignited and everything went on, at least on the surface, just as before.
In due course the evening came to an end, the guests were ushered out into the night, and the Marshal, accompanied by Vipond, almost ran to his private chambers, where he had ordered his son and daughter to wait for him. He was barely through the door before he demanded, “What’s going on? What sort of a heartless trick is this?” He looked at his daughter.
“I don’t know anything about this. It’s as much a mystery to me as to you.”