The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘I only got it on the side for thirty seconds before they cut it,’ said the sergeant who’d used it. ‘But I got a good pull on it from my horse. More might do it – but the wagon was tethered down far in. We’ll have to pull them apart not just topple ’em. Stronger horses, bigger hooks and chains not ropes might do it. But they can pick off the horses real easy.’

  ‘What about fire? They’re just made of wood, yes?’

  ‘Might work, sir, but wood won’t burn ’less you can get a lot of fire going.’

  ‘Arrows?’

  ‘Real easy to put out. I’ve seen some used at Salerno had oil and packing to set a fire. Never done it myself.’

  ‘A word,’ said Blair to Partiger. They walked to one side. ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘A siege, perhaps?’

  ‘They’ve probably got more food than we have. Besides – why are they here? There’s nothing worth protecting.’

  ‘Look, Redeemer,’ said Partiger. ‘We’re not really equipped, as you say. We should withdraw and report this. This is for siege troops not mounted infantry.’

  This was a fair point. ‘Did you notice anything about the wounded?’ said Blair, knowing that he had not.

  ‘The wounded?’

  ‘Yes. Their wounds – they’re mostly crushing wounds: head, hands, elbows.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They’re not going to heal quickly – or at all – most of them.’

  ‘Your point, Redeemer?’

  ‘What if it’s deliberate?’

  They didn’t get time to continue the discussion. Fifty Swiss cavalry emerged from the fort and swept through the unprepared Redeemer camp, killing a hundred and scattering the rest. Within fifteen minutes they were back inside the protective ring of wagons just as the sun went down.

  The traumatized Redeemers pulled out from their position during the night but within an hour of dawn the Swiss were back as they tried to retreat. They were badly hampered in their efforts to withdraw by the numerous wounded from the attack on the bastion, which had delivered much more in the way of broken arms and smashed knees than the fatalities of the unexpected Swiss attack just before dark. The dead could just be left behind. The Swiss kept up a continuous long distance sniping from the dozen heavy-duty crossbows Vague Henri had assigned to each wagon fort. Every few minutes there were skirmishes from the more expert Swiss cavalry, who would race in and pick off stragglers then run away before the able-bodied Redeemer guards could respond. By the time they left off and returned to the bastion, Redeemer numbers were half what they had been when they first set eyes on the fort three days earlier. The New Model Army had lost ten dead and eleven wounded.

  Blair, though not Partiger, survived to give a report and to urge a swift response. But it was an odd story and entirely isolated so no one in the lower levels of authority Blair could reach took him seriously. But over the next few weeks the general headquarters of the Redeemer Fourth Army were forced to change their opinion. The bastions started turning up in increasing numbers and causing terrible casualties. Now aware of the danger, they sent out heavily armed counter forces equipped with ladders, siege hooks and siege torches but by the time they arrived the bastions were long gone. Once he was made aware of the problem, Princeps, furious at the delay, doubled the number of his patrols in order to identify bastion sites quickly and bring larger forces to bear on them. But it was here that Artemisia’s scouts came into play: operating mostly on their own, they were able to provide constant information about Redeemer movements. In effect, each wagon fort operated at the centre of a web of information up to fifty miles in all directions. Any small Redeemer force they could ignore, anything somewhat larger they could resist and anything larger than that they could move with half an hour’s notice and have vanished by the time a major force had arrived. There was no catching them either – Michael Nevin’s wagons could move much faster than any Redeemer army. The Redeemers were caught in a trap: small, light units could catch up with the bastions but were not strong enough to break in; heavy units that might have succeeded were too slow.

  There was a month of this fighting before the Redeemers managed to delay a bastion long enough to catch them with a thousand heavy infantry armed with siege weapons. It took four days to break into the camp and annihilate the occupants. This was a blow to the New Model Army, puffed up by a month of easy victories and despite the warnings of the Purgators and Laconics who trained them that a defeat was inevitable. There was much corresponding joy in victory from Princeps when he heard the news – but it didn’t last once he heard the details: the lives of two hundred Swiss peasants had come at the price of nearly four hundred Redeemers, and another hundred with the crushing wounds that took so long to heal and used up so much in the way of resources. As worrying was the report of one of Princeps’ personal centenars, who he’d ordered to take part in the siege to give him a proper sense of the battle and the soldiers who fought it.

  ‘It was murderous getting in, Redeemer, as hard as any fighting I’ve ever done. They’d arranged it so that we were easy to hit but to strike back was almost impossible. But once we got inside, that was the shock – they had a few soldiers, maybe fifty, who knew what they were doing and were hard work but the ones who’d been killing us for three days – once we were inside and it was hand to hand – it was like cutting down big children.’

  From then on the problem facing Princeps was how to break the shell to get at the soft insides. The problem for Cale was that the creation of the war wagons had been far too successful for its own good. Their successes had been so easy and so comprehensive that the New Model Army was dead drunk on its triumphs. The defeats, when they started to come, winded them badly – there were, after all, no survivors. From euphoric arrogance to demoralized failure was such a short step and so great a fall that an emergency (one might almost have said a panic) meeting was held halfway between the Mississippi plains and Spanish Leeds. Cale was sicker than usual, it had been a bad few weeks, but he was forced into a war wagon filled with mattresses and, along with IdrisPukke and Vipond, tried to sleep his way to Potsdam where the meeting had been arranged with Fanshawe, Vague Henri and the Committee of Ten Antagonist Churches. On the way into Potsdam, he’d decided to get out and ride. For all its padding the converted war wagon was uncomfortable when he couldn’t sleep, and today all his old wounds – finger, head and shoulder – were throbbing and grinding out their claims on his attention (Me, too! they screamed, What about us!) To add to his misery his right ear was aching. He put on a coat and pulled up the hood against the cold and to keep the wind away from his sore ear. This was not something he would normally do because only the Redeemer Lords of Discipline wore hoods and they were not a memory he wanted to revisit. Cale was now, of course, more experienced in the strangeness of the world than many practised hands three times his age, but he was astonished at the electric effect even a word of his presence had on the soldiers camped on his way into the city. The mysterious force that moves rumour with astonishing speed through even the largest and most dispersed military force brought the New Model Army out in droves wherever he went. At first sight he was greeted with adoring silence that quickly burst into ecstatic cheers, as if he were the Hanged Redeemer entering into Salem. Cale was amazed that so many could draw such power from so sickly a hand-hurting, ear-aching, shoulder-groaning weakling such as him. Uncertain how to respond, he thought perhaps he should speak to them; but when he tried the retching, an hour earlier than it was due, silenced him, and it was all he could do to keep it under some sort of control. So he sat, dog-sick, on his horse and looked about at the men, in their hundreds and then thousands, inspired by his mere presence. To them his pale and cadaverous silence was far more powerful than anything he could say, even though he had learnt a dozen inspirational speeches from the writer whose plays he’d found in the Sanctuary library that seemed to cover the entire range of ways in which to manipulate a crowd: Friends, comrades, countrymen, lend me your ears; or: Once mor
e into the breach, dear chums; and the ever dependable: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

  But not even a tongue touched with the lighted coals of God himself could have done better than his enforced silence. They did not want anything so fallible as a human being who could talk to them man to man – they wanted to be led by an exterminating angel, not by some bloke. He may have felt like death but he now looked the part. And that was what mattered: he was something fatal from another world, something and not someone, who had made them powerful and all-conquering in the past and now was here to do the same again. They needed him to be inhuman, the essence of death and plague, to be wasted, pale and skeletal because he was those things and was on their side. The cry went up – one or two voices at first then tens, then hundreds and then a roar.

  ‘ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL!’

  Vipond and IdrisPukke, following just behind, no beginners in the seen-it-all-before and surprised-by-nothing stakes, were left amazed and even shaken by what they were seeing and hearing and, above all, what they were feeling: even they were carried along, like it or not, by the power of the crowd. But the preachers and padres and moderators of the Committee of Ten Churches heard it too and recognized it for the devil worship that it was.

  ‘I expected loss heavier than this – and from the start – getting worse as the Redeemers worked out how to deal with us. These deaths. They can be replaced. I’ve planned for this.’

  A tired and irritated Cale was in a furtive meeting set up before the official one with the Committee of Ten Churches was due to begin – it was thought necessary to get their story straight to minimize any religious contributions.

  ‘But Thomas, darling,’ said Fanshawe, ‘what did you expect? Killing and being killed is a profession. These people are peasants, salt of the earth, of course – no doubt – but fashioned by a lifetime shovelling shit and gleaning turnips – whatever they are … it’s no preparation when it comes to the big red one. You can’t expect it.’

  ‘We need,’ said Cale, ‘to plan on losing one wagon train in three. I always expected losses like that.’

  ‘You can expect what you like. It can’t be done,’ said Fanshawe. ‘It’s not in their souls to die in those numbers – any more than it’s in yours to reap cabbages and have carnal knowledge of your more fetching sheep.’

  When Fanshawe was gone he left behind a miserable inner circle.

  ‘Is he right, do you think?’ said IdrisPukke to Vague Henri.

  ‘Underneath the piss-take? Pretty much. In the fight at Finnsburgh the Redeemers almost broke through. I was shitting myself if you want to know. Now they know what’s coming if the Redeemers win a brawl. Nobody gets used to that.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘No’

  There was a depressed silence.

  ‘I have a suggestion.’ It was Vipond.

  ‘Thank God someone has,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘I’d wait,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘until you heard it before you get your hopes up.’

  ‘In spite of my brother’s sneers,’ continued Vipond, ‘I think we saw something remarkable today. The conventional view of people like myself is that a leader must be either loved or feared to be effective in a time of crisis – and given that love is a tricky thing and fear is not so tricky – then fear it is.’

  ‘You want me to make them more terrified of me than they are of the Redeemers?’

  ‘In other circumstances I don’t see that you’d have any choice.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘I’m sure you can. But there may be another way, less damaging to your soul.’

  ‘My lugholes,’ said Cale, ‘are open as wide as a church door.’

  ‘Good. You saw your effect today on the very kind of man Fanshawe said was about to break?’

  ‘Yes, I saw it.’

  ‘Whatever seized them, it wasn’t love or fear.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what it is but you could feel it between your thumb and forefinger – I don’t know … belief, perhaps. It doesn’t matter of what kind, in their eyes wherever you are the gates of hell are on their side.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That’s why the noses of the Holy Joes were out of joint. They knew what power was moving through their flock. But seeing is believing, Cale – you need to be out and about, among them every day and everywhere. They need the Exterminating Angel where they can see him. Watching over them, working through them.’

  Cale looked at him.

  ‘You might just as well ask me to fly. As far as what was going on today, I felt it all right, but what it was about you can read in the stars. They saw a bad angel watching over them, I agree – but it was all I could do not to fall off my horse or throw up all over them.’ He smiled, one of the not so pleasant ones. ‘I couldn’t do it if my life and the life of everyone around me depended on it.’

  At this point – and in a way that in other circumstances might be regarded as theatrical – Cale threw up on the floor.

  In fact, he felt a little better once the vomiting had stopped but the meeting was at an end and so, dish-rag weak, Cale left the Cecilienhoft where it had been held and headed for a night’s sleep at the No-Worries Palace. As everyone knew where he was, a vast crowd had collected outside and at the sight of him great shouts went up.

  Despite Bosco’s rare enthusiasm for information, and his desire to improve its quality amongst those who served his cause, it was not easy for Redeemers to pass themselves off as anything other than what they were. They had paid but unreliable informers and also fellow travellers, unofficial converts to the One True Faith whose desire to become Redeemers was as intense as their reasons were vague. They tended to be the despised, the failed, the hurt, the slightly mad, the deeply resentful – and often for good reason. But their limitations were plain enough: they were not disciplined or very competent, however zealous they might be. Had they been capable and rooted, it’s unlikely they would have been such fertile ground for insurrection. But it was one of the more level-headed and skilled of these converts who’d made his way to the Cecilienhoft where everyone knew Cale was planning the destruction of the Pope. There were guards there certainly, but no one had expected or planned for the crush of the soldiers of the New Model Army desperate to see him, along with the people of the city packed together with the mass of refugees evacuated from the Mississippi plain. Indeed, the confusion almost saved Cale from his attack – there was no planned route and so no way of being somewhere he could be expected to pass by. So crushed was he by the crowd that the assassin too was flotsam and jetsam, compelled to follow the flow and swirl of the river of people as it moved forward and back. Sometimes Cale moved away from him, sometimes back towards him. At one point, as the crowd grasped for a touch of his clothes or called for a blessing, an old woman who must have been stronger than she looked forced a small jar into his hand: ‘The ashes of St Deidre of the Sorrows – bless them, please!’ In the general racket he couldn’t properly hear what she was saying; he thought the ashes were a gift and didn’t want to be unkind. Given the state of him she would probably have had the strength to grab it back but the crowd decided and swept her away as she cried out for her dreadful loss.

  With Vague Henri and IdrisPukke a good ten yards behind, the exhausted Cale was spilled into a break in the crowd made by the few guards who had been able to stay with him but where his murderer could finally get to him, too. The would-be assassin was no skilled killer and it’s hard to hide the look of someone with slaughter on his mind. It was within a second or less that Cale saw him coming at him and it was his eyes that gave him away. Kitten-weak and weary as he was, millions of nerves came to his aid like angels and, as the man brought the knife down to his chest, Cale took the lid off the jar of Deidre’s ashes and threw it in his face. As anyone will know who has looked closely at the ashes of the dead they are not like ashes much at all, more gravel than anything fine enough to
easily blind a man. But Cale was lucky that these relics were fakes and consisted of the clinker from the forger’s fire. The effect was instant: in terrible pain the murderer cried out and dropped the knife to try to clear the spiky cinders from his eyes. The few guards around were quick enough to grab the assassin and they’d already stabbed him three times in the heat of their panic before they realized Cale was shouting at them to stop. Any chance of getting something useful out of the man was gone. Cale stood and watched as Vague Henri and IsdrisPukke joined him. Perhaps it was the mixture of sudden fright and exhaustion, but he thought he had never seen blood so red or ashes so white. The murderer muttered something before his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Cale.

  The guard who’d been closest to the dead man looked at Cale, shocked and confused by what had happened.

  ‘I’m not … I’m not sure, sir. It sounded like “Do you have it?”’

  ‘You look gruesome,’ said Vague Henri. ‘The Angel of Death warmed up.’

  Cale had come back into the room from boaking up in the jakes of his apartment at the No-Worries Palace, a newly built refuge with all the most recent innovations in plumbing. Fortunately he had held off vomiting in front of the crowd; his slow and fragile departure was interpreted by all who witnessed it – and even more strongly by those who didn’t – as a sign of his ethereal detachment from even the most terrifying events. He lay down on the bed and looked so dreadful that Vague Henri repented of his lack of sympathy. He was, in truth, angry with Cale for nearly having died.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘A cup of tea,’ said Cale. ‘With sugar lumps.’

  With Vague Henri gone, Cale was left alone with IdrisPukke.

  ‘I thought you were feeling better?’

  ‘Me too … but I made the mistake of trying to do something.’

  IdrisPukke walked over to the window and stared out over the newly installed lavender maze.