The Beating of His Wings

It was not Vague Henri but this horrible demon holding him in his arms – reaching for anything to save himself he pulled out a sharpened pencil he’d been using to count off his list of those he was to hang and, with the strength of the utterly terrified, he stabbed at the creature holding him who cried out and fell away, dropping the Redeemer and finally breaking his neck.

  ‘Ow! Ow!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Bastard stabbed me.’

  Cale started pushing his way through the hanging bodies that mocked him by banging into him and each other. There was a little more space around the now dead Redeemer – when he’d come to hang himself there was room left over. Vague Henri was feeling around under his arm and towards his back.

  ‘He stabbed me,’ he said, indignant. ‘He stabbed me with a fucking pencil.’

  The Redeemer, soul now in everlasting bliss, or not, did indeed have a pencil grasped in his right hand.

  ‘Lucky that’s all it was. Bloody stupid bloody thing to do.’

  ‘Shut up – have a look.’

  He held up his left arm and turned his back. It took a while to find the hole in the wool – Cale had to cut his way in to get a proper look.

  There was indeed a pencil-shaped hole – but not much blood, though it was pumping a bit.

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want one – it’ll sting a bit.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘It’s not too bad. Let’s go back, get it seen to.’

  ‘It’s all right. We’ve come this far. Give me a couple of minutes.’

  He took a few deep breaths and then began to recover.

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Just down the corridor a bit.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll still be alive? He might be waiting to take you with him.’

  ‘He probably won’t even be there.’

  ‘Bet you a dollar.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What would be the point?’

  ‘I feel a bit wobbly,’ said Vague Henri. He looked it, too. Beads of sweat, small ones, had begun to cover his face and he was looking pale. He sat down, using the wall to support his weight. Cale didn’t like the look of him.

  ‘Let me see the wound again.’

  Vague Henri turned to his right. Now it was pumping blood slightly, so not too bad, but there was more than he expected. It must have gone in a bit deeper than he thought. But even as Cale looked the blood stopped flowing. He eased Vague Henri back to rest against the wall but by now he was already dead.

  40

  IdrisPukke was standing in the main square of the Sanctuary talking to Fanshawe, whose mind was elsewhere, wondering if Windsor had managed to kill Thomas Cale. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice at first that IdrisPukke had stopped talking. Then everyone around them went silent as well. Across the large square Cale was walking slowly towards them, carrying Vague Henri piggyback, as if he were a small child who’d fallen asleep after a too-exciting day. For a moment no one moved, unable to grasp what they were seeing. Were they fooling about? They often did. Cale stopped and then hitched the boy further up his back as if he were about to slip off. Then a dozen men ran towards them and he allowed them to take Vague Henri into their arms. IdrisPukke and Fanshawe walked slowly up to him. Vague Henri was dead – they had too much experience not to recognize the terrible absence.

  ‘What happened?’ asked IdrisPukke.

  Cale didn’t seem to hear. ‘He’s not going back into a room in this place. Get one of the tables out of the refectory over there. They’re big – you’ll need a dozen men.’

  It was clear he didn’t want to talk so they stood for five minutes with Cale as he looked around the Sanctuary as if he was trying to remember where he’d left something, with Vague Henri being held carefully in the arms of four of his own people. Then the table, clearly as hefty as Cale had said and some thirty-foot long, was hauled into the middle of the square. Cale took Vague Henri from the men and laid him carefully in the middle and then arranged the body at first with his hands by his side and then folded on his chest. Death had already drawn his top lip back over his front teeth, mocking him with the rabbity smile of the dead. It was with some difficulty that Cale pulled it back into shape. Then his eyelids started to open and Cale couldn’t get them to stay shut. He signalled one of the sergeants to give him a white scarf he was wearing; he folded it several times and then put it over Vague Henri’s eyes like a blindfold. Still no one said anything until one of the soldiers gasped: ‘Good God!’

  Everyone looked up except for Cale, who was lost in a world of his own, staring down at his friend. Around him there was silence so intense that it finally pierced the fog of his disbelief that Vague Henri was gone for good. He looked up. At the far end of the square, barefoot, dressed in white linen and with the penitent’s noose around his neck, Pope Bosco XVI was walking towards them with a gentle smile on his face. He was much thinner than when Cale had last seen him and the linen tunic was much too large which, along with the gaping of his mouth as he made the effort to walk, gave his face the look of a chick not quite ready to leave the nest. It took the old man almost a minute to make it over to the group standing next to the huge table and whose eyes moved silently back and forward between Cale and the old man shambling towards them. Cale did not move nor blink but watched Bosco entirely transfixed. It seemed to those watching that the old man and Cale had become the only people who existed in the square. Bosco stopped, still smiling lovingly at the boy.

  ‘I’ve been waiting patiently for you – to explain everything and to ask your forgiveness for the terrible suffering I caused you.’

  Still Cale did not move or say anything. He looked as if he would never speak again.

  ‘I could not understand how God was speaking to me through all your many victories over us. Waterless and without food I prayed for day after day. I could see but I could not perceive, hear but not understand. Then in his mercy for my stupidity he cut away the skin from my eyes. When you came here as a boy I saw at once what you were but I thought that you needed me to teach you how to wipe away his great mistake. Every night I wept at the pain and suffering I must inflict on you so that you would have the strength of soul and body to do such unspeakable work. All of the things I did to make you strong only built hatred where there should have been love. The death of the world was an act of holy tenderness to mankind and not a punishment – it was to be done as a gift so that he could begin again. I thought you were the incarnation of God’s wrath but you were his love made flesh, not his anger. In my incompetence I maddened you and made you hateful when all I should have done was treat you with the kindness that you were to show the world by helping all its souls into the next life to start again. My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.’

  Bosco knelt down in front of Cale.

  ‘Forgive me, Thomas. God was telling me through all your victories against us that the damage done to your soul had to be undone by the man who caused that damage. I thought that I and my fellow priests would be the last to join God for the great renewal of souls, but now it’s necessary for us to be first, so that you can go about God’s work with a spirit at peace. Only by our poor sacrifice can your soul-hatred be wiped away.’

  Bosco, tears of gratitude pouring from his eyes, held out both of his arms and began to pray.

  ‘Purge me with hyssop, Lord, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Deliver me from my guilt so that the spirit and the heart of Thomas Cale, which I have broken, may rejoice.’

  As Bosco prayed, Cale began to look around as if for a key he had absentmindedly misplaced. Everyone else stared at him, horribly thrilled at what was happening. Fanshawe spoke softly to IdrisPukke as Cale walked over to the far end of the table on which Vague Henri’s body was lying and started pulling at a small piece of two by four that had been nailed to the refectory wall and the table to keep it from moving.

  ‘
Think of the information we can get from Bosco,’ said Fanshawe. ‘We need him alive.’

  ‘I agree. Be my guest.’ Fanshawe did not move.

  Cale’s attempt to pull away the block of wood, no more than nine inches long, was unsuccessful, the nails still being in too deep. Then he gave the block an almighty wrench and it came free. As he walked back to Bosco the old man was still praying.

  ‘With this sacrifice of your priests wipe away all tears from his eyes so that there shall be no more sorrow, nor shall there be any more pain.’

  Slowly Cale began to circle behind him – a weighing up of something clearly going on in his mind.

  ‘Just as the Hanged Redeemer offered his broken neck for our salvation, with the sacrificial chokings of Your Redeemers wipe clean the needless insults to his soul, so that he will be free at last to do his terrible kindness to the world. Free at la – ’

  Cale took two steps forward and brought the block of wood down on the top of the old man’s head. But it was not an especially hard blow and it was not an especially heavy piece of wood. Bosco’s head jerked forward slightly, not much, and a thin line of blood dripped down his face. He opened his mouth as if to continue but not a sound emerged. He tried to speak again but immediately there was another blow and again his head jerked forward but again the blow was much less heavy than it could have been. The men watching were not at all strangers to the hideous but already some of them were looking away. Then another blow. Another trickle of blood.

  Bosco was waving his head about and his hands had fallen halfway to his sides. He gasped.

  ‘Into … thy … ha – ’

  Another blow stopped his mouth but still he was too strong to fall or the blows deliberately not heavy enough. Then another crack of wood against skull and another. This time he almost fell on his face but something drew him nearly upright again. Another blow and this time a cry from Bosco as half a dozen lines of blood flowed down his shaved skull and covered his face.

  ‘For God’s sake, Thomas, enough,’ said IdrisPukke. Cale looked directly at him like a fox smelling a slight sniff of something in the wind: Important? Not at all. Then the interruption was entirely dismissed as if it had never happened. He turned to concentrate on Bosco again. He dropped the stained block of wood and then, with great care, took hold of the penitents’ rope around Bosco’s neck and started to sway him gently from side to side, supporting his neck so he would do no harm, the way a mother holds the head of a baby she’s about to bathe.

  ‘Thomas!’ called out IdrisPukke.

  But it was no use: he was somewhere very far beyond the reaches of pity. Cale pulled Bosco up to his face and slapped him with one hand to bring him round. Slowly, Bosco woke up. As he recognized Cale he started to smile lovingly at the boy.

  ‘I want …’

  But what Bosco wanted was cut short in a second as Cale, hyena-souled, whipped the rope upwards and then down with a snap so furious it broke the old man’s neck with a loud crack.

  There was a sound from the men around, an intake of breath. Cale pulled Bosco’s face back to his own until they were almost touching, fixing his death in his mind so that he would not forget – then, very carefully, he laid the dead man on the ground and walked away. The witnesses were shaking, every one of them, even Fanshawe. They had all seen hard deaths before, and anger, but nothing like this, not from someone who was still, really, a boy.

  41

  The fire that had nearly suffocated Vague Henri the day before had still not been put out completely and after a few hours it regained its hold, though only in the ghetto where the girls had been held. Still it was enough to give off an orange glow that lit the undersides of the grey clouds that had settled low over the Sanctuary and enabled IdrisPukke to find Cale, about half a mile from the gate, about four hours after he’d killed Bosco.

  ‘I’m very sorry about Vague Henri,’ said IdrisPukke.

  There was no reply at first.

  ‘How did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘I didn’t. I sent people out but I thought that somewhere here would be a possibility.’

  Cale was sitting on a rock about a hundred yards from the isolated compound where Arbell Materazzi was being kept. ‘Were you thinking of going in?’

  ‘I was mulling it over, yes.’

  ‘Would you mind if I asked you not to?’

  Again there was no reply for a time.

  ‘I was thinking of burying Vague Henri at the Voynich oasis,’ he said eventually.

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘Not far from here. A lake. Nice trees, birds singing and stuff. He’d like that.’

  ‘He would, yes.’

  ‘I want the girls to go. They’ll cry, I suppose. He’d like that as well. Stupid really. What difference does it make?’

  ‘I’ve been to a fair number of funerals. They make a difference sometimes.’

  ‘Not to him.’

  ‘No, not to him.’

  A few minutes’ more silence. Then Cale laughed.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about Vague Henri and the upside down prayer book?’

  ‘I don’t believe you did.’ In fact he’d told IdrisPukke the story when they were at Treetops.

  ‘Don’t know where he got the idea but he tore the cover off the missal we were supposed to read for an hour a day and glued it on upside down. He’d take it out whenever he came across a pig who didn’t know him and start reading. It drove them crazy when they saw it – pretending to read the Holy Missal … blasphemy! They’d come racing over and rip it out of his hands and clip him on the ear. But he didn’t mind. Then he’d show them the cover had been stuck on upside down and tell them he was waiting for a new one. Even piggy Redeemers had to do a grovel at that. Some of them even said they were sorry. He made a fortune betting the acolytes he could get a Redeemer to ask for forgiveness.’

  Another silence.

  ‘I hate her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never hated her before. I pretended I did, but I didn’t. I was ashamed that she stopped loving me and sold me up but I didn’t stop loving her, not for a moment.’ Another silence. ‘Do you know about mortification?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bosco said it meant that you could die of shame – you know, shame for your sins. I felt mortification by loving her. So weak – weak and ashamed.’ For the first time he looked over at IdrisPukke. ‘Do you know why Henri died?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because of her.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘See, I came back here because of her. I brought her here to show her. I mean I didn’t plan it or anything, not in my head. But I can see it now. Now he’s dead.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘I wanted her to see the Sanctuary – so she’d understand why I was so odd and then she’d love me again. And then I wanted to show her that I could destroy it – that she didn’t have to give me away to Bosco because I could have beaten them. I would have done. I have done. I wanted her to see what a dreadful thing she did for no good reason. But all I did was bring Vague Henri back so that he could die in this shithole. Here of all places. To die here.’

  He began putting his fists to his head, grinding his temples with his knuckles as if to drill a hole to let something out.

  ‘Don’t go down there,’ IdrisPukke said.

  ‘Think I might.’ Cale stood up. ‘Bosco was right, you either kill the past or it kills you.’

  ‘Don’t go. You’re in a state of mind where something grim might happen.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s true – unspeakable things are on my mind.’

  ‘What would Vague Henri say?’ He was getting desperate trying this one.

  ‘Vague Henri’s dead. No votes for him.’

  ‘I don’t know how bad or good she is. I barely know the girl. What I do know is that she’s a blight on you. You can only make things worse if you go anywhere near her. The two of you share a madness that will cut you both in two.
Get her away from you.’

  Another short silence.

  ‘When I murdered Kitty the Hare there was something I didn’t tell you about. It was the look in his eyes – I suppose he was terrified as well but it wasn’t his fear that stuck in my mind, it was the shock. This can’t be happening to me, he was thinking while I beat the life out of him, not me. Day after day Kitty was guilty of every kind of cruelty and violence yet when that violence came to him in his own home he was dumbfounded. Couldn’t get that look of amazement out of my mind.’ He turned again to IdrisPukke. ‘Know why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve just realized myself. I want to see that look again, really I do. I want to see it in the eyes of that shit-bag Zog, and Bose Ikard, and Robert Fanshawe and his Ephors and everyone like them everywhere in the world. I want to see that shock in their eyes: Me? Not me. This can’t be happening. The world is full of people who need to die like that.’

  ‘So, the Left Hand of God after all.’

  Cale laughed.

  ‘Who said anything about God?’

  ‘What about all the people you’re going to have to kill to get to them?’

  ‘I’ll give everyone the chance to budge out of the way.’

  ‘And if they don’t agree to budge?’

  ‘Then they’ll get what’s coming to them.’

  ‘And so will the thousands upon thousands who won’t be able to get out of the way even if they wanted to. Bosco thought you could rule the world – but he was mad. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘What choice do I have?’

  ‘We always have a choice.’

  ‘You know, I’ve never heard you say anything stupid before. Are you really telling me I can stop? Not even if I wanted to. No one’s going to let me be, no one’s going to let me take myself off somewhere and eat cake with girls in peace and quiet. I tried that. I wouldn’t last six months if I walked away now.’ He looked at IdrisPukke. ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’

  ‘Your joy is all in laying waste to things – blight and desolation is what makes your soul glad.’