The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  But not even the sharpest river pilot with the greyest beard could see under the ice where the great bergs jutted downward towards the silty bed and created vicious eddies in the current that carved great swathes out of the bottom of the river. These turbulent and restless undertows came and went with the shifting ice above. The oak tree, water-fat, passed the berg-watchers on the shore unseen, no more breaking the surface in its massive thickness than a hunting crocodile. Then it hit the ice dam with a thud like the low bass of the deepest note in a cathedral organ. It was felt by the lookouts on the ice itself as much in the bowels as in the ear. They waited for the great crack that might split the field and loosen the dam of bergs – and kill most of them. It never came. Pushed underneath the ice by the current the oak tree began to roll – down it went like the Jesus whale, down to the bottom of the dam where a few hours before two great fangs of ice had formed. Around them the current, powerful but slow, became in a moment frenzied, unstoppable and mad, driving the great trunk, sodden and three times its former weight, faster and faster as the current was squeezed more and more between the jagged ice and the riverbed. Sideways on, the tree trunk battered between the two great crags of downward-pointing ice, sending strange but incomprehensible tremors to the blind watchers above as it boomed and bashed deep beneath them. And then it was free, the now shooting current taking the tree’s super-saturated weight into a rapid but shallow climb to the surface so that it kept momentum from the currents speeding from underneath the ice. At eight miles to the hour, even an ordinary runner could have kept pace with it as it headed towards the fleet of boats – but it was not the speed that mattered but its size and terrible sodden weight. Still, only so much damage might have been done had it not glanced a mid-stream rock with its snout; the great leviathan of trunky wood began to turn flat towards the slowly crossing fleet.

  Despite all efforts to prevent it, the twenty boats had been bunched together by the day’s strange currents and they were no small boats – thirty-five men in each. The oak did not so much smash into them as roll them up and under as if they were hardly there – barely a cry went up before each boat was at once struck beneath the water and turned over on its side. Because of the crowding, eleven boats went down in less than fifteen seconds. The tree moved on into the cold, wet dark leaving behind three hundred and eighty-four drowned men and one drowned woman.

  As IdrisPukke finished telling Cale his grim news the sun came out and a warm shaft of light came through the partly stained glass windows, projecting delicate blues and reds onto the table and illuminating the bright dust in the air.

  ‘It’s certain?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘As these things ever are. My man is reliable and said he saw her body before he left.’

  ‘What was the cause?’

  ‘It’s thought a wall of ice that broke away from a bigger field upstream. Bad luck, that’s all.’

  ‘But you predicted it,’ said Cale, softly.

  ‘To be unfair to my prodigious powers of foresight, I always make it a point to predict more or less every possible outcome. It could have as easily succeeded as it failed.’

  ‘Can it be kept a secret?’ asked Vague Henri.

  ‘Had they all lived or all drowned, perhaps. Not now … I’d say that …’

  ‘She’s a great loss,’ interrupted Cale, awkwardly and in an odd tone of voice.

  ‘Yes,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘She was a remarkable young woman.’

  Nobody said anything. There was a knock on the door and Lascelles the butler crept into the room.

  ‘A letter for you, sir,’ he said to IdrisPukke, who took it and waved Lascelles away, waiting until he left the room before speaking. ‘There’s something iffy about that man. His eyes are too close together.’ He opened the letter. ‘Apparently Bose Ikard knows about the crossing and Artemisia.’

  ‘How?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘The same way that I knew about it, I suppose.’

  ‘No … how do you know Bose Ikard knows?’

  ‘Kitty the Hare’s red books are like windows into the souls of the great and good of Spanish Leeds. Little birds everywhere sing.’

  ‘What’s he going to do?’ asked Cale.

  ‘He’s got two choices, I’d say: go along with what we say until he has a chance to use it when things get really bad; or use it to arrest us now and make peace with the Redeemers.’

  This startled Vague Henri, who had planned to be cock-of-the-walk for at least six months more. ‘You really think he’ll do that?’

  ‘On balance? No. It’s not enough to be sure of victory. He knows the consequences if he gets it wrong. He’ll lay it down in the cellar till he can use it. But we have to be quick off the mark, present this as a heroic effort treacherously betrayed – noble woman, daring raid, heroic. Last words.’ Cale looked at him. ‘Sorry,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I’ve lived too long and have too many bad habits. But we won’t honour her memory by allowing it to be seen as a total disaster. It has to be seen as a heroic failure.’

  ‘It was a heroic failure.’

  ‘Only if we present it as one. People need stories of individual daring, of courage and selfless sacrifice, of near victory and treacherous stabs in the back.’

  ‘Let’s hope we get them then,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Hope has nothing to do with it,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I have my people writing them now. They’ll be posted all over the city by tomorrow morning.’ He turned to Cale, feeling himself mean-spirited and cynical. ‘I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a pity death took her off so soon.’

  IdrisPukke left the two boys, the soft sunlight beaming through the windows as if the house were a domestic cathedral blessed by angels.

  ‘When are you away?’ Cale said at last.

  ‘Tomorrow. Early.’

  Another long silence.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss, too,’ said Vague Henri. ‘Don’t know what else to say. I liked her.’

  ‘She didn’t like me. Not in the end.’

  Another silence.

  ‘Well,’ said Vague Henri, ‘you’re easy to get wrong.’ A snort of derision from Cale. Vague Henri continued trying to be comforting. ‘It wasn’t your fault. It’s just how things are.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cale, after a moment. ‘I don’t know how I feel about her now she’s dead. I don’t feel the right way, that’s for sure.’

  PART FOUR

  ‘Now go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’

  1 Samuel 15:3

  31

  The Redeemers crossed the Mississippi in April, and to a landing largely unresisted. The scouts they sent out across the gently rolling plains, which extended for three hundred miles from the south bank of the river, returned with the news that almost every village, town and city was deserted and not only of people. All animals, from pigs to cows to rabbits, were gone along with the population. The fields were left unsown with wheat or barley and left to the poppies, which had come early with the unseasonably warm weather. ‘It’s beautiful,’ said a Redeemer scout on his return. ‘I doubt if the fields of heaven itself can match it: mile after mile of poppy and eyebright, hellebore and Deptford pinks, touch-me-not and fine-leaved vetch. But damn all to eat for fifteen days in any direction. Unless you’re a cow or a horse.’

  The scout had presumed too much on Cale’s generosity. He had no intention of allowing the Redeemers to feed their animals. As soon as the ground was soft enough he’d ordered the women and children out into the fields and instead of sowing wheat and barley had them planting Crazy Charlie, Stringhat and Stinking Willy – all poisonous to ruminants. There was considerable anger at this: ‘What will happen,’ they cried, ‘to our animals when we return?’

  ‘I’d worry about that,’ said Cale, ‘if you return.’

  However, he’d carefully mapped the poisoned areas, which reassured th
em though that hadn’t been his intention – he had just wanted to know where it was safe to feed the horses that drew the war wagons.

  It was General Redeemer Princeps and his Fourth Army who’d come across the Mississippi first, veterans of the destruction of the Materazzi at Silbury Hill. Princeps knew very well what Cale was capable of, having followed carefully much of the boy’s plan for the invasion of Materazzi territory when he was still at the Sanctuary. He knew that once he crossed the Mississippi there would be ugly things waiting for him and his men. He hadn’t expected the landing to be unopposed, but had expected the decision not to plant. But he hadn’t expected the sowing of toxic herbs to poison his horses and sheep. It took several weeks to bring in fodder and longer to find anyone who could identify the plants causing the problem. He’d expected he would have to hold a bridgehead on the south bank while the Axis tried to push them back into the Mississippi. Instead, he had three hundred miles to do with, so it appeared, as he wished. Cale had turned the prairie into a flowery wasteland. Supplying a large army in this desert of red and yellow and pink would mean a significant rethink and more time. For now, Princeps stayed close to the river and organized the means to support a new plan to advance on Switzerland. It was a week into this hiatus that a five-hundred-strong force of mounted Redeemer infantry – their horses now muzzled against the poisons waiting for them in the grass – encountered a most peculiar sight: some kind of round wooden fort, not large, containing about three acres and with a ditch dug all the way around it.

  When Redeemer Partiger was brought forward by his scouts to take a look, he said a quiet prayer to St Martha of Lesbos, patron saint of those who required protection from the unexpected. She had earned her place among the list of the holy because of the strange nature of her martyrdom – she had been forced to swallow a six-sided hook on a string, with hinges on each hook so that the device could travel through her digestive system without catching. Some twelve hours later, when her executioners felt the hook had travelled far enough, they hauled on the string and pulled her inside out. In Redeemer dogma, ingenuity was always portrayed as a threat and hence the need for a saint with a specific responsibility to intercede to protect the faithful from its perils.

  ‘Send someone forward under a white flag,’ said Partiger.

  Several minutes later, a rider under a flag of truce approached to within about fifty yards of the war wagons.

  ‘In …’

  Whatever he was going to say was cut short by a crossbow bolt in the middle of his chest.

  ‘Why has he stopped?’ said Partiger – then very slowly the messenger slumped to one side of the horse and fell off.

  The watching Redeemers were outraged at this breach in the rules of war, despite the fact that they never acknowledged such laws themselves. Given this, there was certainly no particular disadvantage to killing the herald but it was, in fact, an accident. The sniper who’d shot the messenger had merely taken a bead on the man as a precaution – but the wagons were cramped inside and a nervous former hop-picker had moved and jogged his arm.

  ‘I wonder what he wanted?’ called out someone and there was a nervous burst of laughter.

  Partiger considered what to do next. The Redeemers were skilled enough at siege warfare but the trebuchets they used were extremely heavy and the few they’d brought were all on the other side of the Mississippi because there were no important walled towns within three hundred and fifty miles of the river. It would take several weeks to get one here. Besides, the fort wasn’t very big and it was of wood not stone. Despite his understandable uneasiness at the novelty of what was in front of him, he knew he’d be expected to find out what sort of novelty it was so he couldn’t just go around it. However strange, it did not look particularly formidable. He ordered an attack by three hundred. Fifty of them were armoured cavalry – an innovation by the Redeemers themselves – the rest were more lightly-protected mounted infantry.

  Partiger watched as his men spread around the wagons with the intention of attacking from four directions. While they were waiting, Partiger struck up a conversation with his newly appointed second-in-command, Redeemer George Blair. He did not trust or like Blair, who was part of a new order of Sanctuarines, established by Pope Bosco himself to ‘aid fidelity in all Redeemer units and ensure actions free of doctrinal or moral errors.’ In other words, he was a spy whose task it was to ensure that Bosco’s new religious attitudes and the martial techniques that went with them were obeyed without question.

  Partiger somewhat surprised Blair by engaging in a conversation that had nothing to do with the attack on the wooden fort.

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Partiger, ‘of embarking on the Seventy-four Acts of Abasement.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The seventy-four acts of homage to the authority of the Pope.’

  ‘I know what they are,’ said Blair, irritably. ‘I don’t understand the relevance – a battle’s about to start.’

  Am I being tested to say the wrong thing? thought Partiger. He decided he was.

  ‘We must keep our eyes on eternal life even in the midst of death.’

  ‘There’s a time for everything. This isn’t it.’

  ‘But surely,’ continued Partiger, ‘if I were to wear dried peas in my shoes and abstain from drinking water on hot days and whip myself with nettles in an act of mortification of a kind that the saints endured, and which leaves us aghast with admiration,’ he had learned the phrase about being aghast by heart from a papal letter, ‘then would I not be more open to the wisdom of God and a better leader to my men?’

  Finally Blair turned to look at him square on, aghast himself, but not in admiration.

  ‘Yes, you are, of course, correct. I’d say that the more pain you inflict on yourself the better.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I understand self-flagellation with a whip made from scorpion tails is especially effective in this regard.’ He turned back to the battle, leaving Partiger to consider scorpion tails. It sounded painful. Still, he remembered Padre Pio’s words: When mortifying the flesh, make sure that it hurts.

  Eight hundred yards away, the battle had begun. At first there were only feints from three groups of ten cavalry, meant to trigger a response so that they could size up the strength of the occupants. There was none. Close up, they could see the ditch around the wagon was not particularly deep but was full of sharpened sticks. One of them rammed their heaviest lance into one of the wagons to see how stable and well-built it was. Nothing to write home about, he said, when he returned. So it was decided to rush in from all four sides, the signal being a volley of forty or so arrows into the centre of the fort. The arrows went up, the men rushed the wagons and Cale’s New Model Army and its way of making war came to its first great test.

  The trouble for the Redeemers was that they lacked any of the basic tools – no ladders, no battering rams and only a few ropes. Once they got into the ditch they dropped down only a few feet, but with the sides of the wagon walls at six foot tall they were nine feet away from their wooden-wall-protected opponents. As soon as the Redeemers attacked, the slot windows were partly opened and Vague Henri’s light crossbows went into action. They were shot at a distance of only a few feet – they were so close to their opponents it didn’t matter they were so much less powerful. In the restricted space bows were useless but the crossbows were devastating, particularly now they could be reloaded so quickly. The roof of the wagon was double-hinged so that it could be pushed up and over to either side depending on circumstances. This time they flew off with the roofs crashing backwards to the inside of the fort. Immediately half a dozen peasants and one Penitent stood up and, with most of their bodies protected by the wall of the wagon, started to stab and swing down into the mass of Redeemers standing in the ditch. The flails with lead balls and spikes did huge damage crushing the flesh under the Redeemers’ light armour, though it could penetrate too. Excitable in their success and inexperience, some of the polemen
leant out and exposed too much of their upper bodies, and a couple went down to archers.

  ‘Keep under guard! Stay in! Stay in!’

  The Purgators in each wagon had to keep pulling back the over-eager peasants as they enjoyed the thrill of hurting an opponent without them being able to hit back. The Redeemers, ten times the soldiers of the men who were wounding them with every blow, were impotent. They were four feet further away from their enemy than they could reach. They couldn’t get under the wagons either, and the wheels were covered with earth to stop rope from being tied around the spokes. Their position was hopeless. After five minutes they withdrew – but not without being picked off by the crossbow men, now able to stand up and take good aim at the retreating priests, many of them moving slowly because of the blows to their upper thighs and knees.

  The peasants stood and cheered. The Purgators told them to shut up.

  ‘They’re going to get better every day at taking us on. Can you say the same?’

  This quietened them down but they were delighted with their first mouthful of killing.

  The Redeemers withdrew back to Partiger, who was bemused as well as angry. He berated the men while Blair walked around and examined the wounded.

  ‘Didn’t you inflict any damage?’

  ‘We think we got a handful,’ said one of the centenars.

  ‘A handful? We have thirty dead. And for what? Anyway, that was the archers, not you. How many did you kill?’

  ‘You can’t kill someone if you can’t reach them.’

  ‘Don’t answer back!’ shouted Partiger.

  ‘What about the grappling hook?’ asked Blair. There was only one in the whole unit. No one saw the need for more.