The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘First,’ he lied, ‘I’ve heard that reinforcements are on their way. All we have to do is hold out till mid-morning then we’ll make them sing a different tune.’ There was a loud cheer, which made an odd clash with the music of the Redeemers.

  Did they believe him? What other choice was there? Everything for Vague Henri was now about the art of delay. He decided to offer the Redeemers talks about surrender, not really thinking it worth the risk. When the messenger failed to return he was furious with himself for wasting a man’s life when he knew, really, what the answer would be. You’re weak and useless, he said to himself. He turned to the immediate problem: the shortage of bolts. He’d been setting the loaders to making the new ones all day so there was a good supply but keeping the Redeemers back for long enough would probably need more by far than he’d stockpiled. If reinforcements arrived at all it had better be by nine in the morning. After that no one would need to worry any more.

  The plan he’d put together was simple enough: the raised platform gave them a line of sight everywhere to the front except for an arrow’s shadow about six feet in front of the wagons. Any Redeemers who made it to the shadow would be able to fight the defenders without being picked off by the crossbows on the tower. Vague Henri’s job was to keep the Redeemers back from the wagons so that only a comparatively small number in the protective shadow could fight hand-to-hand with the defenders. But this plan, he was sure, depended more on Cale than on him: the defenders on the wagons needed an exterminating angel on their side if they were to make it through the night.

  Still singing, on came the first line of Redeemers, slamming their shields with their swords in slow accompaniment to the dirges Vague Henri had been forced to listen to as a boy morning, noon and night. Through a stroke of luck he’d discovered a second case of overstrungs when there should only have been three for an entire camp: close-quarter fighting didn’t require such long distance power so they were only used for sniping, and then hardly ever. On another occasion this mistake might have been a disaster but today incompetence had been a glorious gift. With ten of these crossbows against them the Redeemers would be getting a nasty shock on their way to the wagon barricade.

  So it proved. The Redeemers were expecting to come under fire from the much weaker crossbows Vague Henri had designed for close in-fighting, and against which their shields were a pretty good defence. They hadn’t even started to advance when bolts from the overstrungs took out four centenars, four others and wounded a further two. Worse was to come. Almost immediately another volley of five from the other overstrungs, handed to the crossbowmen by their loaders, again struck the dense Redeemer ranks with the same result. Taken by surprise, there was enormous confusion about what to do and for a moment Vague Henri thought they were going to retreat out of range. He was almost right but then one of the centenars, lashing to the left and right and screaming bloody murder, blocked the way and drove them forward.

  ‘Run! Run! Run! Get under the safety of the wagons!’

  As the eight hundred or so Redeemers made a chaotic dash for the shadow of the wagons where the bolts couldn’t reach them they took heavy losses from the crossbows on the mound and as they got closer the less powerful crossbows in the wagons had greater effect. Worse still for the Redeemers, too many had come to attack the wagons – there wasn’t enough room in the shadow for all the priests who made it there. More than two hundred were left directly in the line of fire from the mound. After a short period of carnage in which more than fifty Redeemers were killed, the centenars managed to work out their mistake and drove back only three-quarters of the number of men that just a few minutes before they had driven forward.

  The Redeemers at the wagons fought on, protected from Vague Henri but not from the defenders inside the wagons, now under intense and deadly pressure. Still, the defenders were well protected and died only at a rate of one of them to six Redeemers. It was Vague Henri who held the balance. As Redeemers slowly died in front of the wagons they had to be resupplied by Redeemers now hiding in the dark back, beyond the old perimeter. Once enough Redeemers had died the centenars raced forward from the dark in groups of thirty or so to replace them. Life and death for the defenders depended on the rate of fire from the stumpy hillock and how many Redeemers the crossbowmen could kill as they made their dash from the dark across the open space to the relative safety of the wagons.

  A murderous rhythm was being beaten out by Vague Henri and the defenders and they’d survive only as long as that rhythm stayed the same. If they ran out of bolts or the wagons were breached the fight was over. Vague Henri now believed it was over anyway. If only Cale was here, he kept thinking to himself. He’d know what to do.

  By now the exterminating angel was snoring away in his carriage, being watched over by the former blacksmith, Under-sergeant Demsky. Briefly visited by the surgeon a few hours into this second fight, Demsky was told that Cale would be unconscious for hours and that Demsky would be of much more use in the field.

  ‘I should watch over him,’ said Demsky.

  ‘If those Papist scum get over the wagons,’ said the surgeon, ‘all you’ll be watching over is his death and then your own.’ Cale snored on. The surgeon’s point was impossible to disagree with and after a brief check they left Cale to the dark.

  Half an hour later Cale woke up, the Valerian and Poppy mixture having worn off. The same could not be said of the Phedra and Morphine that Sister Wray had so fearfully given him. Even more demented than before he’d fallen into his herb-induced sleep, he picked up a poleaxe and rushed outside. His carriage had been moved to the safest place on the far side of the small hillock and about thirty feet from the water of the tarn. Under normal circumstances he would have been seen within a few steps, even in the dark – but it was two hours into the battle and everyone was wrapped up in the fight for survival going on in front of them. This was why only Cale saw the line of Redeemers in the lake, wading their way towards the completely exposed rear of the camp along some kind of raised shallow that they’d discovered, the width of two men. The water was still waist-high and their progress was slow but there were enough of them to turn the fight in a matter of minutes. Roaring for help, which went unheeded due to the great noise of the battle, a naked Cale – the surgeon had stripped off his blood-glazed clothes – ran into the lake and waded towards the startled Redeemers – a lone boy, completely naked and screaming at them.

  Not even the gentlest and most loving dove of peace could fail to thrill at the majesty of his angelic violence – no hero had ever fought with such strength and graceful skill, such divine rage and cruel magnificence. As each Redeemer came on he dealt out such savagery to arms and legs and heads that soon the shallows of the lake were awash in severed limbs and fingers and heels and toes – all the frigid lake incarnadined with Redeemer blood as they came on at him relentlessly to be martyr-fodder in the cold black water.

  If anyone in the battle behind him had found the time to look back into the lake they would certainly have seen something not soon forgotten. For an hour, lashing around him in the water, the hallucinating Cale fought madly against an endless line of Redeemers who did not exist, deadly foes magnificently vanquished who were entirely figments of his drug-drenched imagination. After an hour of deluded heroism all his mind-enemies were dead. And so, exhausted but triumphant, he made his way back to his carriage while the real battle continued, touch and go, and fell into a peaceful sleep.

  On the mound, Vague Henri could feel the sweat dripping down his back as if, realizing he was going to die, fear beetles had hatched from his spine and were making their escape. On and on it went and the pile of bolts that were keeping them from a horrible death diminished like sand in a timer that would never be reversed. Then, at first unnoticed, the sky began to lighten and the pale red of dawn began to bathe the wagons below in a delicate pink and then the sun moved up above the horizon and a breeze blew up, dispersing somewhat the smoke that hung over the fight. Then the fight stoppe
d and a peculiar silence fell on the men, Redeemer and New Model Army alike. Surrounding them on the low rise that overlooked the tarn, at a distance of a mile or so, were perhaps five thousand soldiers who had marched through the night to save their exterminating angel.

  The Angel of Death himself was fast asleep and he was still asleep half an hour later when Vague Henri came to check on him, along with the surgeon and Under-sergeant Demsky. They looked down on him for a minute or two.

  ‘Why is he so wet?’ asked Vague Henri.

  ‘All the herbs, probably,’ said the surgeon. ‘The body’s way of trying to get rid of all the poison inside. He is our saviour – what can be said in praise of him that’s good enough?’

  It would be hard to say whether Cale’s supernatural reputation inflated more from his (as it was now believed) single-handed destruction of the Redeemers just as they were about to claim victory, or the fact that having completed this extraordinary feat he’d retired to sleep through the remainder of the fight, as if he knew, indeed had in some way guaranteed by his single intervention in the battle, that victory was certain whatever the Redeemers then did or did not do.

  It was a mark of Vague Henri’s maturity and the strength of his moral fibre that he was able to find a sufficiently strong chamber in his heart to lock away for ever his incandescent fury that all the credit for the success of that most crucial night went to Cale. Mostly, at any rate.

  ‘I won the battle of Crispin’s Tarn.’

  ‘If you say so,’ replied Cale whenever Vague Henri brought it up in private, which was quite often. ‘I can’t remember much about it.’

  ‘You said that not even you could have kept the Redeemers out.’

  ‘Really? Doesn’t sound like me.’

  Of the real attack Cale had launched against the Redeemers he could only recall the odd fleeting image. For some time afterwards, all that remained of his heroic attack on the non-existent Redeemers in the tarn itself was the occasional strange dream. But soon even that faded. Vague Henri had his revenge for being robbed of the credit in a manner that would have been applauded by all fifteen-year-olds at all times and in all places. So impressed and grateful were the people of Spanish Leeds that a public subscription was filled ten times over to provide a fitting reminder of the heroic victory at Crispin’s Tarn. At the site of the battle a stone statue was erected, in which an eight-foot Cale stood on the bodies of dead Redeemers while those about to be hideously slaughtered cowered before his unearthly mightiness. Vague Henri had bribed the stonemason to alter the inscription at the foot of the statue by one letter so that it now read:

  In eternal memory of the heroic deeds of Thomas Cake

  33

  In the two weeks after the battle of the tarn Cale felt horrible and slept on and off almost continuously. When he was awake he either had a vicious headache or felt he was about to throw up and often did. One of the ways he found to take his mind off his misery was to lie in a dark room and remember all the wonderful meals he’d eaten with IdrisPukke: sweet and sour pork, angel’s hair noodles with seven meats, blackberry crumble with the berries just picked and served with double-thick cream. Then, a double-edged pleasure, he’d think about the two naked girls and what it was like to touch them and be inside them (still a notion that astonished him whenever he thought about it – what an idea!). As long as he could avoid the hatred he felt for Arbell and the guilt – and such a complicated guilt – over Artemisia, then it seemed to help him vanish to a place where pain was dulled, including those. Often he would remember specific days and nights and fall asleep while thinking about them. After two weeks he woke up one morning and felt much better. This happened from time to time, the sudden arrival of several days of feeling almost normal – as long as he didn’t do much. A few hours into this oasis he began to feel very strange; an intense desire would not leave him alone. It was so strong that he felt it was impossible to resist. Probably, he thought, it was caused by nearly dying at Crispin’s Tarn. Whatever the reason it was driving him mad and it was not going to be resisted.

  ‘Do you have hanging gimbals?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any history of thrads?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have a history of the drizzles?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like a pigeon? That would be extra, of course.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A Huguenot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A gob lolly?’

  Like all obnoxious boys of his age, Cale was wary of being made a fool of.

  ‘Are you making this up?’

  The sex-barker was indignant.

  ‘We are celebrated, sir, for our gob lollies.’

  ‘I just want …’ Cale paused, irritated and awkward, ‘… the usual.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the sex-barker, ‘at Ruby’s House of Comforts we supply the unusual. We are notable for the unconventional most of all.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want it.’

  ‘I understand,’ said the disdainful barker. ‘Sir requires the mode ordinaire.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Would sir want to avail himself of our kissing service?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kissing is an extra.’

  ‘Why?’ Cale was more bemused than indignant.

  ‘The fille de joie at Ruby’s are women of quality and hold kissing to be of all acts the most intimate. They are therefore obliged to ask for extra.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Forty dollars, sir.’

  ‘For a kiss? No thanks.’

  In a sex-barker’s working life awkward customers were the rule but the pale young man with the dark circles around his eyes (though pale and dark didn’t do his unhealthy colours justice) was now really and truly getting on his nerves.

  ‘All that remains is for the young sir to provide proof of age.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At Ruby’s House of Comforts we are strict on such matters. It’s the law.’

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘Indeed not, sir. There can be no exceptions.’

  ‘How am I supposed to prove how old I am?’

  ‘A passport would be acceptable.’

  ‘I forgot to bring it with me.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid my hands are tied, sir.’

  ‘Is that extra too?’

  ‘Very droll, sir. Now piss off!’

  There was laughter at this from the waiting customers and the tarts arriving to take them away for their rented ecstasy. Cale was used to being denounced, he was used to being beaten, but he was not used to being laughed at. Nobody smirked at the Angel of Death, the incarnation of God’s wrath. But now he was just a sick little boy and how he burned for his former power as they sniggered. If he had not been so weak it’s hard to see how he could have controlled himself under such provocation – they would have seen the terrors of the earth to shut their gobs. But watching him from the other side of the room was a very large man with a hard look in his eyes. Despite the scorn-acid eating into his soul he was obliged to walk away, already working out a plan to do something hideous to spite Ruby’s House of Comforts in due course. So it was lucky for Ruby herself that, hearing the raised voice of her barker, she had come down to see what was up. She was even luckier that she recognized Thomas Cale.

  ‘Please!’ she called out, as Cale went to open the door. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. My person here,’ she signalled towards the barker as if he were something that had waited too long to be thrown into the bins, ‘is an idiot. His stupidity will cost him a week’s wages. I’m most dreadfully sorry.’ Cale turned around, enjoying the look of aggrieved injustice on the barker’s face.

  ‘Two weeks’ wages,’ said Cale.

  ‘Let’s agree on three,’ said Ruby, smiling. ‘Please come through to the privatorium. Only our most honoured guests are taken there. And everything tonight, of course, comes with our compliments.’

  ‘Even the kissing?’


  She laughed. The boy, it seemed, was willing to be smarmed.

  ‘We’ll find places you didn’t even realize could be kissed.’

  Although the barker was no wiser as to the identity of the boy, he’d never seen Ruby treat anyone with such deference. But it was more than deference, she was afraid. At any rate, he realized three weeks’ wages were the least of his troubles.

  In the privatorium was a sight to bulge the eyes of any boy, no matter how wicked. There were women everywhere, cocooned on banquettes of goya kidskin, on sofas of yellow velvet and day-beds covered in bittersweet vicuna from the Amerigos. Tall women, short women, tiny women, large women – brown and white and yellow and black women, one of them covered from head to foot except for one breast with the nipple painted poppy red. Another dressed like the innocent daughter of a Puritan was modestly clothed in white linen and a black dress – except that she wept tears of sorrow and held up a sign: I have been kidnapped. Help me, please! Others were naked and seemed to sleep. One young girl, her feet and hands bound inside a wooden frame, was being tormented by a woman tickling between her outstretched legs with a swan’s feather.

  ‘Dutch champagne!’ called out Ruby to a pageboy wearing leather blinkers. She turned to Cale. ‘It’s the best vintage in a hundred years.’

  She gestured for him to choose one of the women in the room, trying to give Cale the impression she was at ease, but something terrified her about the white-faced boy and she hoped he would decide quickly. She was astonished at what he said next.

  ‘I want you.’

  Ruby was in her early fifties and had retired from whoring more than twenty years before. During that time such requests had been made but delicately or firmly rejected as the case might be.

  ‘But these are some of the most beautiful women in the country.’