The Left Hand of God

  “No.”

  “Remember that as you listen to what I’m about to tell you. You must be sure that the importance of what I’m going to say lies far beyond such kinds of pettiness. And to make my good faith clear to you I am going to let your friends go, all three of them.”

  “Prove it,” said Cale.

  Bosco laughed. “In the past such a tone of voice would have proved painful.”

  He held out his hand, and Redeemer Stape Roy handed him a thick leather-bound book. “This is the Testament of the Hanged Redeemer. ” Cale had never seen one before. Bosco placed the palm of his hand on the cover.

  “I swear before God at the cost of my everlasting soul that the promises I make now and everything I say today is the truth and the whole truth and not anything but the truth.” He looked at Cale. “Are you satisfied?”

  The mere fact that, among all the other atrocities Bosco had visited on him, perjury wasn’t one of them certainly didn’t prompt Cale into believing him. But an oath was of central importance to Bosco. And, besides, he had no choice.

  “Yes,” said Cale.

  Bosco turned to Redeemer Stape Roy. “Give them what they need, within reason, and a warrant of passage, then let them go.”

  Stape Roy walked over to IdrisPukke, grabbed him by the arm and shoved him toward Vague Henri and Kleist. Then he pushed all three of them toward the door. Cale was reassured that Bosco might be telling the truth: his instructions not to give the three too much and the casual roughness of their treatment seemed genuine—anything more generous or less churlish would have been suspicious.

  “What about Arbell Materazzi?”

  Bosco smiled. “Why so determined to discover just how deluded you are about the world?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll show you. Though you must allow yourself to be gagged as well as bound and agree to stay behind that screen in the shadows there and make no fuss, no matter what you hear.”

  “Why should I promise you anything?”

  “In exchange for the life of your friends? That doesn’t seem unreasonable.”

  Cale nodded, and Bosco gestured for one of his guards to take him behind the small screen at the back of the room. Just before he reached the screen, Cale turned back toward Bosco.

  “How did you take the city?”

  Bosco laughed, almost self-deprecatingly. “Easily and without a fight. Princeps sent news of the Fourth Army’s great victory to Port Erroll within three hours and ordered the fleet to withdraw and attack Memphis without delay. Here the entire population went into the most Godless funk. Fifty miles out the fleet saw a panic of ships heading away from Memphis. We simply landed without any fuss. Quite surprising, all in all. But very satisfying. Stay quietly back there and you will see and hear everything.”

  With that Bosco waved him behind the screen. The guard took a gag out of his pocket and showed it to Cale.

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard. I don’t mind which.” But Cale was anxious to see Arbell and did not resist. There was a pause of a few minutes, Bosco’s presence and the strangeness of his manner creating growing uneasiness in Cale. He watched as a table and three chairs were placed in the center of the room. Then the door opened and the Marshal and his daughter were shown in.

  Cale did not know that it was possible to feel relief of such depth—a powerful, joyous surge of happiness. She was white and terrified but seemed unharmed, as did her father, though his eyes were gaunt and his face haggard. He looked twenty years older, and a sick twenty years at that.

  “Sit down,” said Bosco softly.

  “Kill me,” said the Marshal. “But I ask you in all humility to let my daughter live.”

  “My intentions are far less bloody than you imagine,” said Bosco, still softly. “Sit down. I won’t ask you again.” This uneasy mixture of benevolence and menace cowed the two of them even further and they did as they were told.

  “Before I begin, I want you to try to grasp that the requirements and zeals of those who serve the Hanged Redeemer are not to be understood by the likes of you. I neither want nor seek your understanding, but it is necessary for your sake to appreciate how things stand.” He nodded to one of the Redeemers, who pulled back the third chair, and then Bosco allowed himself to be seated. “Now I will be unequivocal. We are in complete control of Memphis and your army now consists of no more than two thousand trained soldiers, most of whom are our prisoners. Your empire, vast though it is, is already beginning to fall apart. You agree this is so?”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes,” said the Marshal at last.

  “Good. I will return the city of Memphis to your control and allow you to rebuild a standing army to reinstate the lines of power in your empire—subject to certain taxes and conditions, the details of which you will agree to at a later date.”

  The Marshal and Arbell stared at Bosco, eyes wide with hope and suspicion.

  “What conditions?” said the Marshal.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” said Bosco, so gently that Cale could barely hear. “This is not a negotiation. You have, of course, nothing with which to negotiate. You are utterly powerless and you have only one thing that I want.”

  “And what’s that?” asked the Marshal.

  “Thomas Cale.”

  “Never. Not for anything,” said Arbell passionately.

  Bosco looked at her thoughtfully.

  “How interesting,” he said.

  “Why would you do that?” asked the Marshal.

  “Swap a boy for an empire? It hardly seems likely, I agree.”

  “You want to kill him,” said Arbell.

  “Not so.”

  “Because he killed one of your priests doing something unspeakable.”

  “Well, you’re right: he did kill one of my priests and he was doing something unspeakable. I knew nothing of these heretic practices until the day that Cale ran away. All of those who were subsequently found to have been involved were cleansed.”

  “You mean killed.”

  “I mean cleansed and then killed.”

  “Why did Cale think you were responsible?”

  “I’ll ask him when I see him. But if you think that I would give away an empire in order to execute Cale for killing a murderous heretic and pervert . . .” He paused, looking sincerely puzzled. “Why would I do such a thing? It makes no sense.”

  “You could be lying,” said the Marshal.

  “I could be. But I don’t really need to. I’ll find Cale sooner or later, but I would prefer it were sooner. You have the means to give me what I want, but I only have so much patience, and once that’s gone, you have nothing.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Arbell.

  “And why are you so very concerned?” said Bosco. “Is it because you are lovers?”

  The Marshal stared at his daughter. There were no indignant demands to be told the truth, no condemnations for having tainted royal blood. Just a long silence. At last he turned back to Bosco.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Bosco drew in a deep breath.

  “There’s nothing you can do. There are not many people, if indeed any at all, Cale trusts, and certainly not you. Except for your daughter, of course, and for reasons now acknowledged by us all. What I require is for her to write a letter to Cale that she will give, as it were, secretly to one of his friends. In this letter you will ask him to meet you outside the walls at an appointed time. I’ll be there and with such numbers that he must surrender.”

  “You’ll kill him,” said Arbell.

  “I will not kill him,” said Bosco, raising his voice for the first time. “I will never do so, and for reasons that I will explain to him when he can see that I’m telling him the truth. He has no idea what I have to say to him, and until he knows, his life will be as it has been since he left the Sanctuary—violent, angry, a life that can bring down only pointless destruction on the heads of everyone he has anything to do with. Cons
ider the havoc he has brought to your lives. I alone can save him from this condition. Whatever you think you feel for him, you cannot understand what he is. Try to save him, which you can never do, and all you will achieve is to bring ruin upon your father, your people, yourself, and, above all, on Cale.”

  “You must write the letter,” said the Marshal to his daughter.

  “I can’t,” said Arbell.

  Bosco sighed sympathetically. “I know what it means to wield authority and power. The choice you have to make now is of a kind no one would envy. Whatever you do will seem wrong to you. You must either destroy an entire people and a father you love, or a single man you also love.” She stared at Bosco as if transfixed. “But though this choice is harsh, it is not so harsh as you fear. Cale will come to no harm at my hands and I will find him sooner or later in any case. His future is too bound up with the will of God for him to be anything but one of us—and a very special part.” He sat back and sighed again.

  “Tell me, young lady, for all your love for this young man, a love I can see now is certainly genuine . . .” He paused to let her swallow this sugary poison. “Haven’t you felt something . . .” He paused again, searching carefully for the right word, “Something fatal.”

  “You made him like that with your cruelty.”

  “Not so,” replied Bosco reasonably, as if he understood the accusation. “The first moment I saw him when he was very young, there was something shocking about him. It took me a long time to put my finger on what it was because it simply didn’t make sense. It was dread. I dreaded this little boy. Certainly it was necessary to mold and discipline what was already there, but no human being could make Cale what he is. I am not so boastful. I was merely an agent of the Lord to incline his nature for our common good and in God’s service. But you have seen this in him and it frightens you—as well it might. The kindnesses in him that you have sometimes seen are like the wings of the ostrich—they beat but will not fly. Leave him to us and save your father, your people and yourself.” He paused a moment for effect. “And Cale.”

  Arbell started to speak, but Bosco held up his hand to silence her. “I’ve nothing more to say. Consider it and make your decision. I will send the details of the time and place when we will meet Cale. You will either write the letter or you will not.”

  Two Redeemers who had been standing by the door moved forward and gestured for Arbell and her father both to leave. As she went through the door, Bosco called out to her as if reluctantly sympathetic to her plight. “Remember that you are responsible for the lives of thousands. And I promise never to raise my hand to him again, nor allow anyone else to do so.” The door closed and Bosco said softly to himself: “For the lips that to him now are as luscious as honeycomb, shall be to him shortly as bitter as wormwood, and as sharp as a two-edged sword.”

  The Lord Militant turned and gestured Cale forward into the light. The guard removed the gag and led him over to Bosco.

  “Do you really think she’ll believe you?” said Cale.

  “I can’t think why not: it’s mostly true, even if it’s not the whole truth.”

  “Which is?”

  Bosco looked at him as if trying to read something in his face, but with an uncertainty Cale had never seen before.

  “No,” Bosco said, at last. “We’ll wait for her reply.”

  “What are you afraid of ?”

  Bosco smiled. “Well, perhaps a little honesty between us would be no bad thing at this stage. I fear, of course, that true love will conquer all and she will refuse to deliver you into my hands.”

  Back in her palazzo, Arbell Swan-Neck was suffering the terrible pangs of private desire and public obligation, the dreadful and impossible betrayal involved in either choice. But it was worse than it seemed because in her heart of hearts (and the yet more secret one that lay within that heart) she had already decided to betray Thomas Cale. Understand her loss, the numbing shock of witnessing all she had ever known collapse in front of her. Then understand the dreadful power of Bosco’s words that echoed her most fearful thoughts in almost every way. Thrilling though Cale was to her, it was the same strangeness that roused her that also roused distaste for him. He was so violent, so angry, so deadly. Bosco had seen right through her to the other side. How, given who she was, could she be other than refined and delicate? And, make no mistake, this refinement and delicacy were what Cale adored; but Cale had been beaten into shape, hammered in dreadful fires of fear and pain. How could she be with him for long? A secret part of Arbell had been searching for some time for a way to leave her lover—although she was unaware of this, it is only fair to record. And so as Cale waited for her to save him while he worked out a way of saving her, she had already chosen the bitter but reasonable path of the good, of the many over the one. Who was there, after all, to say otherwise? Not she. Surely even Cale himself would understand in time.

  36

  Nearly six hours later Bosco entered the locked room in which Cale had been confined. He was carrying two letters. He handed one of them to Cale. Cale read it without expression, apparently twice. Then Bosco offered him the second.

  “She asked me, tearfully, to give this to you after we had taken you prisoner. It asks you to believe how hard it was to deliver you into my hands and to try and forgive her.”

  Cale took the offered letter and threw it on the fire.

  “I dreamt something wonderful,” said Cale. “Now I’m awake I’m angry at myself. Say what you have to say.”

  Bosco sat down behind a table that made up the only other furniture in the room.

  “Thirty years ago, when I went into the wilderness to fast and pray before I became a priest, the Hanged Redeemer’s mother, peace be upon her, appeared to me in three visions. In the first, she told me that God had waited in vain for mankind to repent for killing His son and had now despaired of its nature. The wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was continually evil. He repents that He had ever made him. In the second vision, she told me that God had said: ‘The end of all flesh is come before me; every living man and woman that I have made you will destroy from the face of the earth. When you have accomplished this the world will end, the saved will enter paradise, and men and women will exist no more.’ I asked her how it would be possible to do this, and she told me to fast and wait for a third and final vision. In the third and final vision, she brought with her a small boy carrying a hawthorn stick, and from the end of that stick dripped vinegar. ‘Look for this child, and when you see him, prepare him for his work. He is the left hand of God, also called the Angel of Death, and he will bring about all these things.’ ”

  Throughout all this it seemed as if Bosco had become transfixed, as if he were not in a room in Memphis but back in the deserts of Fatima thirty years before, listening to the Mother of God. Then it was as if some light had been put out and he was back. He looked at Cale.

  “As soon as I saw that boy brought into the Sanctuary ten years ago, I knew him.” He smiled at Cale in the strangest way, a smile of love and tenderness. “It was you.”

  A week later a procession paused briefly in the keep. Among those on horseback were Lord Militant Redeemer Bosco and by his side was Cale. Among those gathered to watch them leave were Marshal Materazzi, Chancellor Vipond and such of his senior men who had survived the battle at Silbury Hill. Between them were two lines of Redeemer soldiers, there to make sure that the now free but unarmed Cale did nothing untoward. It suited Bosco for the time being to keep the Marshal where he was. However, he thought wiser of provoking Cale by having the girl present, and he had ordered her in person, much to her relief, to stay away from the official humiliation being handed out to her father and everyone else in Memphis. Instead she was to watch and listen from a nearby window. She needed no warning not to make her presence known. Despite his precautions, Bosco wondered if he had been wise to let Cale go unrestrained. Cale pulled his horse up and stared at the Marshal over the
heads of the guards. Standing next to him, distraught, was Simon. Cale did not seem to be aware of him. When he began speaking, it was so softly he could barely be heard over the noise of the restless horses.

  “I have a message for your daughter,” said Cale. “I am bound to her with cables that not even God can break. One day, if there is a soft breeze on her cheek, it may be my breath; one night, if the cool wind plays with her hair, it may be my shadow passing by.”

  And with this terrible threat he faced forward and the procession started once more. In less than a minute they were gone. In her shady room Arbell Swan-Neck stood white and cold as alabaster.

  Quickly and silently the Marshal and his people left to dwell on their mortification. As Vipond returned to his palazzo accompanied by Captain Albin, he turned to him and said quietly, “You know, Albin, the older I get, the more I believe that if love is to be judged by most of its visible effects, it looks more like hatred than friendship.”

  Half a day later the procession had cleared the outer reaches of Memphis and turned toward the Scablands and the Sanctuary beyond. During this time Lord Militant Redeemer Bosco and Cale had not exchanged a single word.

  From a small cloud of trees some distance from the road, Vague Henri, Kleist and IdrisPukke watched the procession pass out of sight. Then they began to follow.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Firstly, my thanks to Alex Clarke, my editor at Penguin, who has been a heroic champion of this book. Also thanks to Ben Sevier of Dutton, my American editor. They are a pleasure to work with. Thanks too to my agent, Anthony Goff, endlessly determined, and Alexandra Hoffman for her good sense. Without Lorraine Hedger’s uncanny guesswork while typing the illegible manuscript, it would have taken twice as long. Jeremy O’Grady was a reassuring long-stop. My gratitude also to the Rights Department at Penguin: Sarah Hunt-Cooke, Kate Brotherhood, Rachel Mills and Chantal Noel.

  This book draws on endless bits and pieces of everything I have ever read or heard, from the Book of Judges to The Duchess of Malfi to a line from an old children’s film—too many to mention individually. Some borrowings are crucial: I am indebted to John Keegan’s brilliant The Face of Battle, and not just for his description and analysis of the Battle of Agincourt. Agincourt by Juliet Barker was immensely useful in its detail of the complex days leading up to the battle itself, as was Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy’s The Great Warbow, from which I took precise details of the use of the bow and crossbow. For IdrisPukke’s philosophy of life, I stole heavily from Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms and On the Suffering of the World; for Chancellor Vipond’s, La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims set the tone. Scattered here and there are lines from Robert Graves’s great translation of Homer, The Anger of Achilles. The letter on page 309 is based on one written by Sullivan Ballou in 1861. There are two or three descriptive sentences from Tolstoy near the end—good hunting.