The Beating of His Wings

  Perhaps no historical subject has been written about so thoroughly as the rise of the Fifth Reich under Alois Huttler. The failure to explain how a man of little education, less intelligence and no obvious talent except for windy inspirational speeches about his country’s manifest destiny to rule the world could come as close as any man in history to achieving this end is obvious. No one knows how he managed the rise from imprisonment for aggressive begging to ruling the lives of millions across vast territories and bringing a level of destruction to the world never seen before in human history. No historian will conclude at the end of a book that there is no explanation for the things he describes. In the case of Alois there is none. That it happened is all the reason that will ever be uncovered. It is a good deal easier to explain satisfactorily how, by the end of the week following the disaster at Bex, Thomas Cale, boy lunatic, had become the second most important military commander in the Swiss Alliance.

  Because of his new-found heroic status he had been invited to attend the conference to discuss what to do now that the Redeemers had sealed up Switzerland from the rear and had only to cross the Mississippi to crush Spanish Leeds in a vice. There was no army left to stop them and no one left alive to lead it even if there had been. There were a fair number of speeches given indignantly making it clear that the speakers had never been in favour of attacking the Redeemers in such a disastrous fashion, although solid evidence of their stand was somehow lacking. The only person who’d clearly stood out against the action, Artemisia, went unmentioned, although she had without any fuss been allowed back in to attend the conference.

  Before she attended Vipond had tried to mark her card as well as Cale’s.

  ‘Whatever you say at the conference you won’t say “I told you so”, will you?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ said Artemisia.

  ‘She won’t say it,’ said Cale.

  ‘I will.’

  Cale looked at her. ‘She won’t say it.’

  It was not an order, or even a demand. Indeed it was hard to say what it was – a laying out of an inevitable fact, perhaps. With a sigh, she less than gracefully accepted the advice.

  At the conference itself Cale made a point of saying nothing at first in order to let the accusations and hand-wringing go on for long enough for them to demoralize everyone in the room. Then the lamentations began.

  ‘How long before they come?’ asked the King. It was a morose Supreme Leader of the Allied Forces who replied.

  ‘They’ll take all summer to build the boats needed to come across the Mississippi. The autumn floods will make the river treacherous and the winter ice more treacherous still. It will be late spring next year.’

  ‘Can we rebuild an army in seven months and hold them at the river?’ asked the King.

  It was the question, or something like it, that Cale had been waiting for.

  ‘No, you can’t, Your Majesty,’ he said, and stood up. Thin and pale in his elegant black cassock (he was comfortable in them after all the years he’d worn them, although his tailor designed the cut more elegantly and made it out of the softest Sertsey wool), Cale looked like something out of a fairy story to frighten intelligent children. The King, affronted, turned his hand aside and an explanation was given in whispers as to who this was and his (largely undeserved) heroic status.

  ‘You were a Redeemer, I understand.’

  ‘I was brought up as one,’ said Cale. ‘But I was never one of them.’ There was more whispering in the King’s ear.

  ‘Is this true that you commanded a Redeemer army?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It seems unlikely – you’re very young.’

  ‘I’m a very remarkable person, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes. I destroyed the Folk and after I destroyed the Folk I came back to Chartres and destroyed the Laconic army at the Golan. You had no one to rival me even before Bex. Now I’m all there is.’

  ‘You’re very boastful.’

  ‘I’m not boasting, Your Majesty, I’m simply telling you the truth.’

  ‘Are you telling us you can hold the Redeemers at the Mississippi?’

  ‘No. It can’t be done. You couldn’t have stopped them there even with an army and now you don’t even have an army.’

  There was an outcry at this: that the Swiss and their allies would raise thousands to their cause, that you could take their land but you could never take their freedom, that the people would fight them in the woods and on the plains and in the streets, that they would never give in, and so on. Zog, a very much more sober person than he’d been only a week before, signalled them to stop.

  ‘Are you saying that we must lose?’

  ‘I’m saying that you can win.’

  ‘With no army?’

  ‘I’ll give you a new army.’

  ‘That’s very good of you.’

  ‘Goodness has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘How can you do this?’

  ‘If you will see me tomorrow in private I’ll show Your Majesty.’

  It’s been said that a confidence trickster gets his name not by gaining the confidence of those he tricks, but by giving them some of his own. The truth was very simple: they were utterly lost and now one person was claiming he could find them again. In such circumstances his implausibility was a sign in his favour: only something unbelievably strange could save them.

  At Bex, the Redeemers now had the appalling job of burying the thirty thousand they’d killed there. It was a week after the battle itself and the two days of intense cold directly following the fight had given way, as it often did in that part of the world, to a warm spell. The bodies that stank the worst were those who had died from internal injuries caused by the heft of the poleaxes. The blood stayed inside and rotted and when the Redeemers moved the bodies the blood poured out of the noses and mouths. Then it got hotter still and the bodies began to bloat, so big that on the cheaper armour the rivets burst open with an enormous SNAP! Then the bodies went blue and then black and the skin peeled and those who had to burn them thought they’d never get the smell out of the backs of their throats.

  Most news is never as bad or as good as it first seems. This was certainly true of the great Redeemer victory at Bex. Redeemer General Gil was impressed by the skill with which the Office of the Propagation of the Faith had managed to pull off the contradiction involved in praising the courage, strength and sacrifice of the Redeemer army while also suggesting that God had ensured victory was inevitable. As Gil knew from his many protégés who had been in the fight at Bex, it had been a damned close-run thing. The bad news was that Cale had been seen by a handful of Redeemers but he hadn’t heard of it early enough to quarantine them and stop the news from spreading.

  ‘Tell me exactly what you saw – don’t add anything. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, Redeemer General.’

  He’d decided to see the snipers who’d stumbled into Cale in the woods one by one, starting with the sergeant.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He was seven foot tall and a great light shone from his face. Around his head was a halo of red fire and the mother of the Hanged Redeemer was next to him all in blue and with seven stars at her forehead and she was weeping tears of sorrow for our glorious dead. And there were two angels holding arrows of fire.’

  ‘And did they have halos as well?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Redeemer General.’

  For half an hour he tried to get some sense out of the sergeant but someone who believed Cale was seven-foot tall and that his face shone with anything but suspicion and loathing was clearly not going to be of much help. After interrogating two more of the group, whose accounts were even more ridiculous, he gave up.

  He was now faced with two questions. Was this just an excess of holy glee, or had they really seen Cale? If so, what did it mean? Why was he skulking in the woods and not leading troops in the battle? It didn’t even solve the problem of what had happened to Cale afte
r the Two Trevors had been killed. Gil had hoped he’d died of his injuries – surely the Trevors must have got in at least one blow before he killed them? They were supposed to be the best murderers in the Four Quarters and Cale was supposed to be sick. Maybe Cale was dead, in which case the stories about him appearing at the battle were even more worrying. Or were they? Was it better to have him alive and without power or dead and turning up seven-foot tall and with a halo, creating God-knows-what havoc among the unwary faithful? If this seemsunusually sceptical for a man of deep spiritual beliefs in the One True Faith, the fact of the matter was that Gil was changing in his old age. As long as miracles and visions concerned people or things he hadn’t experienced directly he’d been ready to accept them without question. But the reality of his personal experience of Cale and the progressively more nonsensical stories about him increasingly stuck in his throat. He had known Cale since he was a smelly little boy, had trained him day after day under Bosco’s instructions, had seen him wet himself with fear after a fight before the blow on the head gave him that odd talent no one could match. It was the work of God, said Bosco. But it was just too hard for Gil to think of Cale as someone chosen by the Lord to bring about the end of everything. In his heart, Gil thought of him as a boy he didn’t like. What Gil did not realize, or want to realize, was that such realism was poisoning his faith. Not to believe in Cale was not to believe in Bosco: not to believe in Bosco was not to believe in the need for the end of the world. To acknowledge this was to question his central place in bringing it about. Better not to go there. But it was easier not done than not thought about.

  The more immediate problem was what, if anything, to tell Bosco. Tell him about this miraculous drivel and he’d be certain to be inspired. Not tell him and if he found out there would be trouble. He decided not to take the risk and several hours later he was with Pope Bosco and coming to the conclusion of his report on the unusual sighting of Thomas Cale.

  ‘Do you believe them?’ said Bosco when Gil had finished. Answering this was tricky. Hedge his reply with thoughtful doubt and perhaps he might be able to shape Bosco’s response. But he decided it was a test and he was right. But even telling Bosco what he wanted to hear presented problems. Too much enthusiasm would make him suspicious and Gil feared what might happen if Bosco cooled any more towards him.

  ‘I remain reasonably sure, Your Holiness, that Cale has not grown by more than a foot and nor does his face shine with a holy light, but I believe they saw him. The question is: what was he doing there?’

  Bosco looked at him but he, too, wanted the old trust between them to return. It was lonely and strange to stand on your own to bring about the promised end.

  ‘Whatever he thinks his purpose is, he is about God’s business whether he knows it or not. But while God may not have increased his height or blessed his face to illuminate the faithful he’s given us a signal. We must attack Arnhemland now and not wait for another year as you advised. And we must increase the speed at which we send people to the west.’

  The private meeting with the King that Cale attended the next day was not really private in the way he’d either expected or hoped. In fact, the King was no more used to privacy than Cale had been growing up in his dormitory of hundreds. Being on your own was a sin to the Redeemers and it might just as well have been the same for the King to all intents and purposes. Unlike Cale, he didn’t seem either to mind or even to notice, unsurprising, perhaps, in a monarch who had a special appointee of considerable power, the Keeper of the King’s Stool, to examine his excrement on a daily basis.

  ‘You expect us to hand over our army to a boy?’ said Bose Ikard.

  ‘No,’ said Cale. ‘Keep your army. Do what you want with it. I’ll create a New Model Army.’

  ‘From where? There are no men.’

  ‘Yes, there are.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Campasinos.’

  All were startled; not everyone laughed.

  ‘Our peasants are the salt of the earth, of course. But they are not soldiers.’

  ‘How do you know, Your Majesty?’

  ‘Mind your manners,’ said Bose Ikard. ‘But as it happens you’re not the first to come up with this idea. Twenty years ago Count Bechstein created a company made up of bogtrotters and bumpkins and took them off to the wars against the Falange. I believe one or two who had the sense to desert in the first week might have survived.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘But we do. It will not work.’

  ‘Yes, it will. I’ll show you how.’

  With that he went to work with his designs and plans.

  An hour later he finished: ‘The simple fact is this: there’s no other way. If I fail you can have the satisfaction of watching the Redeemers roast me in the town square. That is, Chancellor, if they don’t start with you.’ He turned to the King. ‘All I need is money.’

  They might have barely any soldiers but money was something they had in great quantities. After the slaughter at Bex, no one believed, not even Bose Ikard, that surrender was an alternative. It was clear that the Redeemers didn’t recognize the notion of allowing their enemies to give in. Cale was right. There was no other way.

  ‘You can do this in seven months? You seem very sure.’

  ‘I told you, Your Majesty. I’m a remarkable person.’

  If Cale was not as confident as he claimed, neither was he as desperate as he seemed to Ikard. He had been working on his New Model Army since he was ten years old (or nine – he was not sure about his date of birth). Since then, whenever he’d had a few minutes, sometimes only once a week or once a month, he’d draw a diagram or make a note about something of the working habits and the different kinds of tools the peasants around him were used to handling, the hammers and flails, the sharpened small shovel used by the Folk in the fight at Duffer’s Drift. Even in the worst days at the Priory, when Kevin Meatyard was tormenting him, he’d watch the threshers and pickers at work in the fields with their scythes and hoes and wonder what might be made of them and their way of life. He’d worry about what to do if it worked or not when things became clear. But here was a chance to work on a plan of retreat as well – one which would likely involve heading over a mountain pass with as much cash as possible.

  Zog was curious about Cale in the way he might have been curious about a monkey that could write better than a human being or a uniquely elegant dancing dog. He recognized that the boy was someone exceptional but it would never have occurred to him that he was anything but a wondrous freak of nature.

  ‘Tell me more, dear boy, about your defeat of an entire army of Laconics. Tell me all about it … Tell me all about it … everything … the entire history.’

  What Cale thought was that you might as well ask him to tell the history of a storm. He was, of course, about to start when Bose Ikard interrupted.

  ‘I’m afraid that Your Majesty has an important meeting with the Ambassador for the Hanse.’

  ‘Oh. Another time, perhaps,’ he said to Cale. ‘Most interesting.’ Then he was on his way out. Cale himself had an appointment too. The next day he was required to give evidence at Conn Materazzi’s trial, to which the Swiss had devoted almost an entire afternoon. The appointment was to make it clear to Cale what his evidence would be.

  ‘You are the most notorious traitor that ever lived!’

  The House of Malls would comfortably seat four hundred, ranged in banks on three sides. Today there were eight hundred, with thousands waiting outside for news. On the fourth side was a judge’s bench occupied that day by Justice Popham, a man who could be relied upon to engineer the correct verdict. Next to it, slightly to one side, was a prisoner’s dock, in which stood an unimpressed Conn Materazzi who looked disdainfully at the prosecuting attorney, Sir Edward Coke, the man who had just shouted at him.

  ‘You can say it, Sir Edward,’ replied Conn, ‘but you cannot prove it.’

  ‘By God, I will!’ said Coke, who looked like a bull without
a neck, all foul temper and belligerence.

  ‘How do you plead?’ asked Judge Popham.

  ‘Not guilty.’

  ‘Ha!’ shouted Coke. ‘You are the absolutist traitor there ever was.’

  Conn turned his hand slightly, as if he had to swat away a horsefly.

  ‘It does not become a gentleman to insult me in this way. Though I take comfort from your bad manners – it is all you can do.’

  ‘So I see I’ve angered you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Conn. ‘Why would I be angry? I haven’t yet heard one word against me that can be proved.’

  ‘Didn’t Fauconberg run away over the mountains because he had betrayed us at Bex? And didn’t that tergiversating sneak also plan to kill the King and his children?’ He sniffed loudly as if it were all too much. ‘Those poor babies who never gave offence to anyone.’

  ‘If Lord Fauconberg is a traitor what’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘Everything he did, you viper, was at your instigation!’

  At this there was a huge boiling over in the crowd. TRAITOR! MURDERER! HEAR! HEAR! HEAR! CONFESS! THE BABIES! THE POOR BABIES! Popham let them fulminate. He wanted Conn to get the point that his refusal to play the role of abject penitent, as he’d been told to, was doing him no good. ‘Silence in the court,’ he said. The trouble with trying to bribe Conn to go along with his part was that Popham knew perfectly well that sacrificing a goat required that the goat understood that he was it no matter what he said or did not say.

  Coke, now red in the face with fury, waved a piece of paper in the air. ‘This is a letter found hidden in a secret drawer in the house of that renegade Fauconberg. On it he states clearly that the vile Pope Bosco intended to pay six hundred thousand dollars to Conn Materazzi and that he would give Fauconberg two hundred thousand to assist him in losing the battle.’ He waved the paper once more and then brought it close to read with an expression on his face as if someone had used it to wipe their arse. ‘It says here, “Conn Materazzi would never let me alone”.’ He turned to the clerk. ‘Read that line again.’ Startled, the recording clerk blushed bright red. ‘Get a bloody move on, man!’ shouted Coke.