The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Vipond is right. Without you to fire them up I can only see it going one way, to be frank.’ Cale didn’t reply. ‘I suppose taking that stuff your witch-doctor gave you wouldn’t help?’

  ‘Into a hole, six by two.’

  ‘Pity.’

  A thought struck Cale, tired as he was.

  ‘That woman who gave me St somebody or other’s ashes. I didn’t think the Antagonists believed in relics – or saints.’

  ‘Antagonism is a pretty broad church, which is to say they have an expansive number of ways of loathing each other. She must have been a Piscopalian – they’re pretty much just like Redeemers in what they believe except they don’t accept the authority of the Pope. The others can’t abide them because of all the ritual and saint worship but mostly because they believe in the Verglass Apocalypse – they think the world was once nearly destroyed by ice as a punishment from God and that in ice it will end.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The others insist that God uses water to discipline mankind – ice is a blasphemous invention from the mind of heretics.’

  ‘I need to sleep.’

  A few seconds later he heard the door close and in seconds he was out.

  He was in a valley surrounded by high and craggy mountains swept by wind and lightning. He was tied to a post, arms and legs bound, and a small cat was eating his toes. All he could do was spit at it to drive it off. At first the cat retreated but as he ran out of slobber the cat slowly made its way back to his feet and began eating them again. He looked up and in the distance he could see an enormous puppet Poll laughing and holding out a naked foot, twiddling her toes to show that she still had them and shouting, ‘Eat up, kitty, kitty!’ Next to her, on each of the other mountain ridges that surrounded the valley he saw three versions of himself striking a theatrical pose. In one he was holding his sword pointing at the ground, in another he was kneeling on a high rock with a massively ornate sword held across his chest. The final version of Cale was on the highest of all the ridges, legs akimbo, back arched as if he was about to soar into the air, with his cloak flailing behind him like a ragged wing. But what struck him most was that he was hooded in all of them, his face completely obscured in shadow. I never wear a hood, he thought to himself, and then the cat started eating his toes again and he woke up.

  ‘I had a dream,’ he said to IdrisPukke and Vague Henri a few hours later.

  ‘What would it take,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘for you not to tell it to me?’

  ‘There was three of you?’ said Vague Henri when Cale had finished. ‘I’d call that a nightmare.’

  ‘You can smirk all you like,’ said Cale, and then smiled himself. ‘I never saw the hand of God so clear in anything.’

  ‘I can’t say I feel the same,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain it for those of us without a direct line to God Almighty.’

  ‘Imagine there were thirty of me – spare me the jokes.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You saw what happened today. I didn’t do anything – I was just there. They did it all; I did nothing. They needed someone to save them.’

  ‘There’s nothing much to that,’ said Vague Henri. ‘You already have saved them. They want you to do it again, that’s all. There’s nothing magic about it.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I’ve seen generals worshipped by the crowds for some great victory. But they don’t want a man now, they want a god, because only the unearthly can save them.’

  Vague Henri looked at Cale.

  ‘Isn’t that what Bosco wanted you to be?’

  ‘Well, if you can come up with anything better, you gobshite, be my guest.’

  ‘Children!’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Play nicely together.’ He turned to Cale. ‘Go on.’

  ‘They don’t need me – they need the Left Hand of God. So we give it to them. That’s what the dream was telling me – all that standing on a mountain in a cloak and waving a sword. Be seen! it was saying – but where you can’t be touched, show them you’re watching over them. Wherever they fight, there I’ll be; wherever they die, there I’ll be. Lose – there I’ll be. Win – there I’ll be. In the darkest night – or in the brightest day.’

  ‘But you won’t, though, will you?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘All right, it’s a lie. So what? It’s for their own good.’

  IdrisPukke laughed.

  ‘Vague Henri is quite wrong,’ he said. ‘Don’t think of it as a lie, think of it as the truth under imaginary circumstances.’

  ‘What about the cat eating your toes?’ asked Vague Henri. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It was just a stupid dream.’

  Cale should have rested for a week but there was no time and in three days he was back in Spanish Leeds, having worked out the details of his forgeries.

  ‘Numbers.’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Too many.’

  ‘They don’t have to do anything – they’re not impersonating me. They just have to be good at striking poses. A pantomime is all we need. The theatres are shut so we’ll have our pick.’

  ‘And if they talk?’

  ‘We put the fear of God into them. And pay them decent money. And keep them isolated and watched – four people at all times.’

  When they arrived back it was to some upsetting news for Cale.

  ‘We heard you were dead.’

  The unusual thing was that, despite the fact it was untrue, the issue of a formal confirmation that Cale was indeed alive didn’t do much to stop the rumour that he was dead from gaining ground. More strongly worded official denials were issued. ‘Never believe anything,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘until there’s an official denial. You’ve been invited to an engagement at the Palace – with the King. He thinks it might be true.’

  ‘He wishes it were true,’ said Cale.

  ‘I’m in two minds about what’s at the root of all this – the attempt to kill you at Potsdam, obviously. But I don’t think they want you dead – not yet. No doubt in the fullness of time if you were to fall off a cliff it would be very acceptable. But not now. For the present they’re more worried about the Redeemers than they are about you.’

  ‘Should I go?’

  ‘I think so. This is one lie that won’t be doing any good – best to strangle it now. If we can.’

  ‘But I’m not dead,’ said an exasperated Cale. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘But proving that isn’t so easy.’

  ‘But I’ll be there. They’ll be able to see me.’

  ‘What if you’re an imposter?’

  One person who had no mixed feelings at all about the possibility of Cale being dead was Bose Ikard. He arranged for priority in invitations to be given to those who had met Cale in the past. But Cale kept his inner circle pretty close – and they weren’t vulnerable to Ikard’s promises or threats.

  He decided to pursue another tack: sex. It was not subtle but Bose was too old and experienced to believe there was any particular virtue in subtlety. The walls of his apartments were, so to speak, cluttered with the mounted heads of sophisticated opponents who had looked down on his powers of discrimination as rather crude and had done so right up to the moment he’d had them killed. He’d once had IdrisPukke sentenced to death – a mistake, he now conceded; he’d swapped him for someone whose death, at the time, seemed more pressing. The truth was that Bose was afraid of IdrisPukke because he was an artful man with a penetrating grasp of complex matters, able to put the boot in when it was called for. It was this respectful loathing that fuelled his belief in the rumours about Cale being dead. It was the kind of thing he feared IdrisPukke could pull off. This was why he was talking to Dorothy Rothschild. Dorothy was certainly not a whore but she was something like one: reassuringly expensive, though no fee as such was ever negotiated. Her reward came in the shape of access to power, introductions concerning expensive contracts for this and that – she went on her back cushioned by the exp
ensive silken sheets of enormous influence.

  In truth, Dorothy was a deeply interesting woman but she didn’t look like one: she looked like sex. If two frustrated young men with a little artistic flair had thought up the woman of their desires and drawn her on paper she might have looked like Dorothy: hair long and blonde to the point of being white, of medium height, a waist tinier than that of a young boy, breasts bigger than was really plausible on such a tiny frame, legs improbably long for someone under six foot tall. She shouldn’t have been possible but there she was.

  She had a corrosive wit, kept mostly under control, born out of her sensitivity, which was considerable. Her intelligence and emotional insight had been set on the wrong path by a dreadful event when she was nine years old. Her older sister, beloved by all, had gone on a picnic to a nearby lake with family friends, where she had drowned when a boat capsized. On hearing the news the dead child’s mother, not realizing her youngest was standing behind her, called out: ‘Why couldn’t it have been Dorothy?’

  Even an emotional clod would have been marked for life by this and Dorothy was very far from that. But the wittiness she developed to deflect the world often outraged it and she was constantly having to apologize for this or that wounding remark. She had married young but within two years her husband had been killed in a war vital to the survival of the nation for reasons that no one could now remember. As a person from a family of minor importance she had naturally been visited by minor royalty, a matriarch set aside for state condolences. She’d been asked by her regal visitor if there was anything she could do for her – the proper answer being no.

  ‘Get me another husband.’ It was out before she knew it. It resulted in the appalled matriarch giving her an angry telling off for making light of her late husband’s tragic sacrifice.

  ‘In that case,’ said an unrepentant Dorothy, ‘how about going and getting me a pork pie from the shop on the corner?’

  It was this outrage that led to Dorothy being ostracized from all but the margins of society and ending up, after many adventures on the wilder shores of love, as the greatest and least perpendicular of all the great horizontals of the four quarters. It was this reputation that brought her to the chair opposite Bose Ikard.

  ‘So I want you to charm the little monster.’

  ‘Won’t it be too obvious?’

  ‘That’s really your problem. I can have you introduced innocently enough, then it’s up to you.’ He passed a file over to her. ‘Read this.’ He began offering his opinions but she was more concerned with finding room in her vanity bag for the file, slowly emptying its contents onto the desk in front of her in order to create room. Eventually the file was squeezed into place and she began refilling the bag with the objects she had put on the table. Last among them was an extremely old, dried-up apple that had been lurking unseen at the bottom of the bag for over a week. Bose Ikard was staring at the apple with disapproval: it hardly spoke of her reputation for sophisticated entrapment. ‘Don’t mind that,’ she said, seizing the ancient apple with mock delight. ‘It was given to me by my nanny when I was a little girl and I can’t bear to part with it.’

  Cale’s visit to Potsdam had produced an upsurge in morale among the troops and a renewed determination to fight that diminished in power in proportion to the distance from Potsdam. It gave IdrisPukke time to create his troupe of imposters but that was all. Getting actors wasn’t difficult but getting ones that could be relied on to keep their mouths shut was more of a problem, as were the costumes. After the first day of try-outs it was clear that they had a major difficulty: the actors were too small, which is to say they were normal height, but Cale’s dream of a powerful cloaked figure standing on a lonely mountain crag to encourage the faint-hearted came up against a practical snag: once the costumed actors were at any kind of distance – a precaution necessary not to give the game away – no detail about them could be recognized: not the grand gestures, the menacing hood or even whether they were kneeling or standing. They were just black specks and, worse, black specks against a black background.

  ‘We have to make everything big,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Big costume, big gestures, big everything. A pantomime larger than life.’

  Within a week he’d hired every theatrical fabricator in Spanish Leeds and for two hundred miles around and built several giant costumes with stilts and extended arms and huge shoulders and enormous heads.

  ‘The head’s about right,’ said Vague Henri to Kleist, when they were shown it. ‘Not sure about the rest of it.’

  ‘Kiss my ears,’ replied Cale.

  ‘It’s got to be like this or we’ll have to think again.’

  In fact, IdrisPukke did both. The puppet Cale could be made to work in the right place, with fires behind it to create enough light to see it and with puppeteers to wave his ten-foot-tall cassock about so it looked as if he were braving great winds. But they also had to go back to a version of their first model, with padded shoulders and false arms, made by a man who usually built the mannequins for the magician’s trick of sawing the woman in half using imitation legs. ‘In pantomime,’ he said, ‘everything has to be big, it’s true, but it’s got to be the right kind of big.’

  This second version had to be viewed from a much closer proximity but in the twilight where it couldn’t be seen so clearly. Best of all for showing it off was the magic hour, the time before evening falls when the light allows even the crudest shape to take on the glow and power of another world.

  ‘Why,’ said Cale, ‘is everything always more difficult than you think? Why is stuff never less difficult?’

  Feeling ill and irritated he arrived at that evening’s festivities in a very bad mood. That the entire evening had been set up to try to discover whether or not he was dead made him even more snaky. ‘If they’re looking for an excuse to take me on, let them try.’ He had taken recently to muttering to himself. This time it was loud enough to attract Vague Henri, who was in the next room writing a letter about boots.

  Vague Henri put his head round the door.

  ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I heard you talking.’

  ‘I might have been singing. So what?’

  ‘It wasn’t singing, it was talking. You were talking to yourself again. First sign of madness, mate.’

  That night Bose Ikard made a point of re-introducing Cale to the comparatively few people who had spoken directly to him, all of whom had been instructed to ask him as many complicated questions as possible. His success in drawing Cale out reached its height when he was introduced to the King – his longest response to the supreme head of state was, ‘Your Majesty.’ For the rest it was a single word or a shrug. In desperation, Bose Ikard brought in Dorothy. She entered the room and it was no exaggeration to say that there was something like a gasp at her appearance. She was wearing a red velvet dress cut shamefully low and red velvet gloves that covered her arms a good deal more than the dress covered her breasts. Her waist was cinched skinny-boy-thin, the skirt of the dress was decorous enough when she was still, but when she moved it revealed her left leg almost to her hip. With her crimson lips and white-blonde hair she should have looked like an expensive tart – but she could carry it off in a way that simply caught you in the chest, whimpering with desire. And this was an effect by no means limited to the men. She stopped and talked to a few of the most important people in the room, her lovely smile revealing teeth like little pearls, all except one of them that was a little snagged, an odd proportion, which only made her seem more beautiful. She stopped for a little while to talk to Bose Ikard and positioned herself so that Cale could see and appreciate her gorgeousness. Then, when she noticed he had observed her two or three times while pretending to look indifferently around the room, she walked directly up to him. She’d decided that bold would work best with him, bold and beautiful.

  ‘You’re Thomas Cale. Chancellor Bose Ikard has bet me fifty dollars that I won’t get more than two words out
of you.’

  There was, of course, no such bet and she did not expect him to believe her. Cale looked at Dorothy thoughtfully for a moment.

  ‘You lose.’

  32

  Perhaps one day a great mind will discover the exact point in any given situation when the person who has to make the decision ought to stop listening. Until that day it’s no wonder that prayer, divination, or the disembowelling of cats are as useful strategies as any. Stupid advice sometimes works; intelligent advice sometimes fails. The appearance of Cale’s puppets had been a surprising success. Everyone agreed that the will of the New Model Army to fight had improved beyond measure – a will as important, perhaps, as weapons, food or numbers. It was so successful that it was decided the troops needed even more of it. The problem was that the Redeemers also had a will to fight that was founded on more than clever illusions: death for them was merely a door to a better life. So it was argued – not unreasonably – that if fake Cales could do so much good, how much more would the troops benefit from the presence of the real one. Mysteriously, morale amongst the New Model Army had increased as much in areas where the puppets hadn’t been seen as where they had. Clearly then just a few short appearances by Cale himself might tip the balance.

  Vague Henri was begged and cajoled and nagged until news arrived of another hideous victory by the Redeemers at Maldon. Everyone was shaken by this defeat, even Vague Henri, so he agreed to approach Cale. Had he known all the facts of the loss at Maldon he wouldn’t have done so. A few weeks later it became clear that the rout had not been the result of Redeemer superiority but was entirely due to the stupidity of the New Model Army commander, who had allowed the Redeemers to escape to high ground and ensured defeat from a position where victory would have been inevitable.

  In fact, if anything, the flow of victories was moving slightly in favour of the New Model Army, except nobody knew it. So it was that, based on a false proposition reasonably arrived at in the face of compelling evidence that was completely mistaken, Vague Henri persuaded Cale to tour the battlefield in person. Cale was deeply reluctant but Vague Henri said it wouldn’t be for long and they’d travel in a wagon-train much bigger than the standard one. Cale had been feeling a little better and his personal carriage had been fitted with springs so that it was much easier for him to rest on the move. Things were critical, apparently. It was a crisis. Something Must Be Done. What choice did he have?