The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘No idea – months, years. Not enough time anyway.’

  ‘So that’s it?’

  ‘Mmm … no … maybe not. I was talking to Vague Henri. He told me he’d made his crossbows much easier to load – but it means they’re much less powerful.’

  ‘We don’t need them to be powerful – they’re for close range fighting – a few feet.’

  ‘You never said that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So? It’s everything. What’s the maximum range you’ll be fighting at?’

  ‘A few yards mostly – our men will be behind wooden walls – as little man to man fighting as possible.’

  ‘Will the Redeemers have armour?’

  ‘Some, but not much. But I suppose they’ll start using more.’

  Hooke looked down at the shooting iron. ‘Then you don’t need this.’ He held up a large lead shot the size of a chicken’s egg. ‘You don’t need this either.’ He gestured Cale over to a table covered by a cloth and drew it off like a conjuror at a children’s party revealing a magic cake.

  ‘It’s just a wooden mock-up – but you can see the principle.’

  It was similar to the shooting iron – a tube sealed at one end and open at the other – but cut longways in two so you could see the inner workings.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Hooke, ‘is not to overload it. You need the right amount of villainous saltpetre – as little as possible – and something light to be exploded out the other end.’

  ‘How light?’

  Hooke opened up a small canvas bag and spread its contents on the table. It was just a collection of nails, small shards and nuggets of metal – even a few stones. It was hard to be impressed. ‘The main thing is to get the size of the charge right. Every time. No offence but your men’ll overdo it. And then I thought – why not put a uniform charge in a little canvas bag, easy to load, always the same charge? Then I thought, why not do the same with the metal and stone shot? Then,’ he said, warming to his brilliance, ‘I thought – why not put them both into another bag? Easy to load, and damn quick. Brilliant.’

  ‘Will it work?’

  ‘Come and see.’

  Hooke ushered Cale outside where two of his assistants stood next to an iron pipe, much like the shooting iron, held in a wooden vice. About ten yards away was a dead dog strapped to a plank. Hooke, Cale and the assistants took cover behind a pouisse. One of the assistants lit a taper on the end of a long stick and carefully eased it out to the shooting iron. As he was trying to expose as little of himself as possible it took several tries to light the pan. Able to watch through a set of drilled holes, Cale saw the villainous saltpetre in the pan flash, followed a few seconds later by a BANG! – loud, but not as loud as he’d expected. They waited a few seconds and Hooke walked out through the dense smoke, followed by Cale, and over to the dead dog. He’d expected to see something terrible but at first he thought the shot must have missed. It hadn’t – at least, not entirely. Once Hooke pointed out the wounds there were clearly half a dozen bits of nail and stone embedded quite deep in the animal’s flesh.

  ‘It might not kill. But you get hit by this and you won’t be taking part in anything more than groaning in agony for some time. And the thing is – if you only use it at mass ranks close in, each shot will wound two or three or more every time.’

  ‘How many times a minute to load and fire?’

  ‘We can do three. But we’re not in battle conditions. I’d say – conservative – two.’

  They spent another hour discussing the men and materials he needed and where the new shooting irons could be cast and how reliable the supply would be.

  ‘There shouldn’t be a problem. The stress on these will be much lower so it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with the quality we need. Besides, I suppose it’s pretty clear what’ll happen if they deliver anything second-rate.’

  He looked at Cale thoughtfully.

  ‘Everyone knows it was you.’

  Cale looked back at him.

  ‘Everyone knows it was me who laughed at Conn when he died. Everyone knows it was me who cut off a man’s head for ordering me to bring him a drink of water.’

  Hooke smiled.

  ‘Everyone knows it was you.’

  ‘Everyone,’ said Bose Ikard, ‘knows it was him.’

  ‘There was an old lady,’ said Fanshawe in reply, ‘who swallowed a bird.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘You see, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider that she swallowed in order to catch the fly that she swallowed.’

  ‘You mean something but I’m too irritable for your cockiness.’

  ‘I was merely suggesting that even if the cure for the disease is not as bad as the disease, Thomas Cale might be very bad indeed for you.’

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘Indeed he might. The Laconics are outnumbered four to one by serfs.’

  ‘Our peasants are the salt of the earth, not slaves. We don’t kill them without compunction. So we’re not afraid to go to sleep in case they cut our throats. We are one nation.’

  ‘I truly doubt that. But of course you’re in the middle of a wonderful experiment to test your confidence. It will be so interesting if Cale pulls it off to see whether your people are happy to go back to a life of sheep-shagging and forelock-tugging.’

  ‘What’s your point, if you have one?’

  ‘That you have to know when to stop swallowing. Do you want to know how the song ends?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Bose Ikard.

  ‘But it’s enchanting. “There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead of course.”’

  28

  ‘Fanshawe has offered to supply a hundred Laconics to train the New Model Army.’

  The three boys, Kleist ever more silent, were eating oysters in lemon juice with IdrisPukke, accompanied by a dry, flinty Sancerre to cut out the saltiness.

  ‘Obviously you can’t trust him,’ said IdrisPukke, enjoying the puzzle concerning what Fanshawe was up to as much as the oysters and the wine. ‘But in what way can’t you trust him?’

  ‘He doesn’t expect me to believe he’s doing it out of the goodness of his heart. He doesn’t think I’m that stupid.’

  ‘So how stupid does he think you are?’

  There was a delightful snigger from Vague Henri at this. Nothing from Kleist. He seemed not to be listening.

  ‘I think Fanshawe’s realized we might stop Bosco and they want to be on the … not losing side.’

  At this point they were joined by Artemisia.

  ‘Oysters, my dear?’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said sweetly. ‘Where I come from we feed them to the pigs.’ He was highly amused by this, rather to her surprise, because she’d intended to take him down a peg: for some reason she wrongly suspected him of condescending to her. He turned back to Cale.

  ‘How is he intending to explain the presence of so many Laconics to the Redeemers?’

  ‘It’s only a hundred. He’s going to claim they’re renegades.’

  ‘All right. You don’t believe him. But again, how don’t you believe him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not yet. But I need his instructors whatever his reasons. Losses are going to be high. We need to churn out replacements at five thousand a month. And that’s cutting it fine. It’s going to be a damn close-run thing.’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ said Kleist, ‘worth discussing, I think.’ When he spoke these days, which was rarely, it was about details. He seemed to find some peace in the minute particulars of the heel of a boot or the way the leather was stitched to keep out the wet. ‘We’ve been assuming they aren’t going to try to come across the Mississippi in the winter.’

  Artemisia groaned in irritation.

  ‘I’ve told you – the Mississippi doesn’t freeze over like other rivers, not completely. It becomes a mass of ice blocks breaking and crashing into each other. Treacherous doesn’t begin to describe it. They’re
not coming over in numbers until well into the spring.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Kleist, quietly. ‘But you said they couldn’t come over in numbers.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘But it would be possible to cross …’

  ‘Not with an army or anything like it.’

  Kleist didn’t react to the irritated interruption, he just kept on in his dull monotone. ‘But it would be possible to cross a small force.’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘I don’t mean for the Redeemers to cross in small numbers, I mean for us to cross in small numbers over to them.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘To do what?’ said Cale.

  ‘You said it would be close.’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘What if you had more time … months, maybe a whole year?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The Redeemers are building boats over the winter for an invasion in the spring. Do you know where they’re building them?’

  ‘I don’t see …’ said Artemisia.

  ‘Do you know where they’re building them?’ Now it was Kleist doing the interrupting.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The section on the North Bank between Athens and Austerlitz is packed with boatyards but the Redeemers have moved the factories back, along with the builders, to Lucknow so they can control construction of the fleet.’

  ‘So all their boats are in one place?’

  ‘Mostly, as far as I know.’

  ‘So if you could get a force of, say, a thousand across the river in maybe early spring, could you attack Lucknow and burn their fleet?’

  ‘I couldn’t get a thousand across,’ said Artemisia. ‘Or anything like it.’

  ‘How many then?’ said Cale, clearly excited.

  ‘I don’t know. I’d have to talk to the river pilots. I don’t know.’

  ‘Two hundred?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘It would be worth the risk,’ said Cale.

  ‘It would be my people taking it,’ said Artemisia.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cale. ‘That’s true. But if it could be done.’

  ‘I’d have to lead it,’ she said.

  Cale wasn’t happy with this.

  ‘I need you here and alive. Your outriders are the eyes and ears of the fortress wagons.’ This was true enough, but it was not the only, or even the main, reason. ‘Besides,’ he lied, ‘it’s an unbroken rule that the man … the person who comes up with the plan has the right to put it into operation.’

  Artemisia stared at Kleist. ‘You have an extensive knowledge of riverwork and know the North Bank of the Mississippi in Halicarnassus?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I do have an extensive knowledge of riverwork and, as it happens, I own the North Bank of the Mississippi in Halicarnassus.’

  This even made Kleist smile.

  ‘I withdraw,’ he said. Cale looked at him, not pleasantly.

  ‘There’s another problem,’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘Are you an expert on riverwork and Halicarnassus as well as all your other achievements?’

  ‘No, my dear, I know nothing about either. This is more politics.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Everything comes down to politics one way or another. Is this a risky venture, would you say?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You might easily fail then?’

  ‘Cale’s right,’ said Artemisia. ‘If there’s even a limited chance of causing such damage we should take it. It’s my life and those of my people.’

  ‘I wasn’t so much, I’m afraid, worrying about the lives of two hundred people – there’ll be many sets of two hundred dead before this is over. I was worrying more about what the implications for everything else would be if you fail.’

  ‘I admit I don’t follow, but then that’s the point, isn’t it? You want me to seem like a stupid girl.’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied IdrisPukke. ‘But think about it. If you attack in late spring this will be the first action of the New Model Army against the Redeemers. Yes?’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Cale, seeing a hope of stopping her.

  ‘The army at large doesn’t need to know anything unless we succeed,’ said Artemisia.

  ‘I was talking about politics,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘You can keep it from the army and the people if you’re careful, but can you keep it from Bose Ikard and the High Command?’

  ‘I’ll persuade them it’s a risk worth taking.’

  ‘But politicians don’t like risks, they like deals. Remember that they’re so afraid of the Redeemers that they’re ready to put a mad boy in charge.’

  ‘He’s talking about you,’ said Vague Henri to Cale, ‘just in case you didn’t realize’.

  ‘They’re on the razor’s edge, all of them. Then the first thing you offer them is an abject failure – they’ll be begging Bosco for negotiations while the ashes are still warm on this young woman’s bonfire. You can live without this victory – you might not be able to live with a defeat.’

  ‘It’s worth the risk,’ said Artemisia.

  ‘I’m not sure that it is,’ said IdrisPukke.

  Cale had been given his chance and he was careful not to turn it down.

  ‘This is a new idea. We need to think about it.’

  ‘Think about it and say no, that’s what you mean,’ said Artemisia.

  ‘Not true. Talk to your river pilots. See what they have to say. Work out a plan. When you have we’ll talk about it again.’

  When Artemisia had left, Cale turned on Kleist.

  ‘We haven’t had a peep out of you in months but suddenly we can’t shut you up!’

  ‘You should have told us she was just along to improve the view – all we’ve heard from you till now is what a war genius she is.’

  This was true and he couldn’t think of the last word. He had it anyway. ‘Bollocks!’

  A few hours later Cale suffered another attack of the conniptions – longer and more violent in its retchings than usual. The demon, or demons, that inhabited his chest seemed to live in their own world, woke and slept on their own time, regardless of anything Cale did or did not do. They were unaware of the daily life of the boy they inhabited, indifferent to whether things went well or badly, if he was loved or hated, was kind or pitiless. The herbs worked up to a point, as he found out when he tried to stop taking them and the chest devils dry-heaved into existence two or three times a day instead of three or four times a week, which was bad enough. As for the Phedra and Morphine, he’d not had any reason to take it again and he wasn’t looking for one. The horrible down after he’d used it had lasted two weeks and made him feel as if he’d had a sip from death in a bottle. He did try offering the herbs to Kleist but he irritably refused, saying there was nothing wrong with him and he didn’t need Old Mother Hubbard’s helper to keep him going.

  Even at best Cale had to work in short bursts, resting all the time and sleeping twelve hours or more a day. However much of a disadvantage this was in some ways – he felt horrible nearly all the time – it did produce some useful effects. He could not stay in any meeting for more than a few minutes and there were plenty of them to squeeze the life out of any action that needed to be taken. Never a friendly presence to most, his attendance at any gathering was tense to the point where he seemed almost on the edge of furious violence. Because he had no choice, his already decisive character tore through complex and dangerous decisions as if he was ordering meat for the guards back in Arbell’s house in Memphis. Oddly, somewhere inside his damaged mind he was sometimes at his sharpest: there was a place there cut off from the outside world he’d been building since the first moment he’d arrived at the Sanctuary. Through all those years of long use this place of retreat was as tough as the skin on an elephant’s foot – and needed to be to keep out the madness that was destroying the rest of him.

  Do this. Give him that. Take those. Put it there.
Do it again. Release these. Hang them. None of this denied the debt he owed to his friends. He smiled when he said, ‘Bring me solutions, not problems. You solve it. Every time I have to answer a stupid question think of it as hammering a nail into my coffin.’

  And for the moment it worked. Each one of them could rely on the fear and dread and hope that Cale’s reputation inspired. Even Vipond, a man of power if ever there was one, and who knew now even better what its nature was having lost so much of it, was amazed at what he could only describe as the magic others invested in Cale.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said IdrisPukke, who relished any chance to condescend to his half-brother. ‘The spirit of the times is in him. He has great abilities but that’s not why, or not mostly why, he’s in the ascendant. Look at Alois Huttler – you could find a thousand dunces like him giving out their half-baked opinions in any public house in the country. But Alois had the spirit of the times in him. Until he didn’t.’

  ‘When people are faced with annihilation,’ observed IdrisPukke, ‘it’s not difficult to see why they want to believe the Left Hand of God is behind them.’

  On this occasion he was sounding off about Cale in his presence. Vague Henri gurned at his friend.

  ‘Pity all they’ve got is you, then.’

  ‘Your sickness,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘is becoming a kind of blessing.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘Not for you personally, of course. But didn’t Bosco tell you that Thomas Cale is not a person?’

  ‘Yes, but he’s mad.’

  ‘But not stupid. Am I right?’

  ‘You might not be always right, but I agree you’re never wrong.’

  Laughter at this. IdrisPukke shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps in his madness he recognized something we’re only beginning to see ourselves. People find it easy to shine their dreadful hopes on you – the left hand of death, indeed, but on their side. It may be that the less you’re seen to do – the less of a person who’s like them – the more powerful you are.’ He sighed with enormous satisfaction. ‘I’m impressed by myself.’ More laughter. ‘We can make use of this.’

  Against the weariness of being sick was the pleasure of working on the tactics of the New Model Army. The training was going better than Cale had imagined. Protected by the wagons, and using weapons based on tools they were used to working with for hours every day of their lives, the confidence of the peasant soldiers soared. The most effective of these hillbilly weapons was the threshers’ flail – a pole of four or five feet long linked by a chain to another pole of eighteen inches or so. These men were used to using them for ten hours a day after harvest and the swinging heads generated such a powerful force they could badly injure a knight in full armour let alone the less protected Redeemer men at arms. But above everything they worked on finding out every weakness of the war wagons. Vague Henri had the Purgator archers shooting in massed ranks at the wagon forts to work out how to protect the occupants and came up with bamboo-covered walkways and small shelters into which anyone caught in the open during such an attack could run to protect themselves. It wouldn’t take the Redeemers long to try to use something like fire arrows to set the wagons alight so he had the Swiss soldiers – who would be mostly used for attacks outside the fort and so were not being used for much during attacks – train in teams to put out fires before they took hold, mostly using buckets filled with earth and using water only if they must. They objected to this with puzzling intensity. They were soldiers and gentlemen – it was demeaning digging dirt and so the peasants should do it. All their resentments at the bewildering changes they had been forced to endure came out in this single issue of putting out fires. Out of nothing, Vague Henri found he had a mutiny on his hands. Cale was always mocking him by saying what a nice boy he was. Up to a point this was true, but because they were used to Cale as contrast there was a general misunderstanding about Vague Henri and what he was capable of. He seemed very normal in a way that Cale was clearly not, but he had experienced the same corrosive brutality and deadliness of the Redeemer life. It was a part of him too. Realizing he was on the edge of something disastrous his first instinct was to deal with the problem the Redeemer way: kill a couple of the noisier protestors and leave them to rot where everyone could see their mistake. Whether he would have been ready to do this and sleep well afterwards was fortunately not put to the test. There was something of good nature but also something of calculation that made him look for another way first.