‘You’re nowhere near making such a thing.’
‘I could be. Give me the space and the means.’
‘And how would I know whether you were giving me the run-around?’
‘I know my obligation,’ Hooke replied, offended. ‘But you can see that to achieve my life’s work I must be able to fire a solid object from a metal tube. The search for knowledge and the discovery of a great weapon are virtually one and the same. War is the father of everything. Besides, if you become a great general my life is protected. Correct?’
‘As long as you don’t take me for an idiot. You might take advantage of my ignorance of these things once but I’ll catch you out if you try and play on me – then you’ll be bobbing up and down like an onion in a vinegar jar. Understand?’
‘Your threats are not necessary.’
‘I think they are. Did you watch me fighting on the hill today?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I didn’t have any strong feelings about these men one way or the other. What are the Folk to me? Yet they’re dead, all the same, gone as if they’d never existed. I’ll think about it. Now, I’m tired.’
9
By now Kleist had spent nearly a month living with the Klephts in the Quantocks. It had taken some time to persuade him that he would be safe there. Although he’d never heard of the Klephts or the Quantocks he had come across the bad-tempered and touchy tribesmen, the Musselmen, who inhabited the Quantocks’ lower foothills. He had seen them once in Memphis and had been told to stay away from them and particularly the few women they brought down to repair the carpets of the very rich and draw up designs for new ones. ‘Go near one of their women and they’ll kill you whatever the cost to them. And savages that they are they’ll kill the women, too, just in case.’
Alarmingly, Daisy had agreed that this was true and even more generous than it should be.
‘Musselmen are fanatics, loopy, wicked and bad. They hate their women and treat them like dogs but their religion curses them because, for all their fear that they are liars and sluts, their God has ordained that the wives and daughters contain all the men’s honour in a bowl inside their livers and that once it’s defiled then the only way they can get it back is to kill the woman and start again. Can you believe it? Even if the woman has been raped they strangle the poor bitch. Disgusting.’
‘The Klephts aren’t like that?’ asked a worried Kleist.
‘God, no.’
‘Why?’
‘’Cos we’re not mad for one thing and because we came to the Quantocks and kicked them out a thousand years ago.’
‘So you’re like the Materazzi – not much in the way of being religious?’
‘Oh no – we’re very religious.’
This was a blow.
‘How?’ he asked, heart sinking.
Her description of her faith, despite her protestations as to its importance, didn’t really seem to amount to much that he could pin down. It seemed to restrain them very little so far as he could make out. It was strong on the distinctions between eating clean and unclean animals of a kind it seemed to Kleist no one would want to eat anyway. It was strictly forbidden to eat bats, for example, or anything that crawled or wriggled. Eating spiders meant you were unclean for a fortnight and should Kleist be tempted, which he was not, to go back to his former butchery skills the consequences would involve an exile of six months. Their notion of God seemed very distant. The Klephts talked of him as if he were a rich uncle who was benign enough but had lost day-to-day interest in their side of the family. For himself he could not shake his guilt at having deserted Vague Henri and, to a much lesser extent, IdrisPukke. All reason told him that he had every right not to risk his life so hideously for other people who had not even asked him if he agreed to go along. On the other hand he realized that if he really felt so clearly about the rightness of his position he wouldn’t have left them like a thief in the night. About Cale he did not feel guilty at all.
‘What about you and me? You know?’
‘I’m not a cow,’ she said. ‘My father doesn’t own me. He is a civilized person who will thank you for helping me.’
So it proved. But despite his welcome Kleist was uneasy because he couldn’t bend his mind to understand the Klepht way of thinking about the world. It was not just that he understood the Redeemer mentality because he’d lived among them for so long; he felt he had a pretty good handle on the Materazzi even after only a few weeks. And Memphis was full of races and types from all over the world. But none of his meetings with remarkable races in Memphis had left him with a vague sense of missing something that he felt all the time in the Quantocks. The Quantocks were a conundrum in limestone, riddled with spatey gorges, rocky unclimbable juts and chasms. Everywhere secret recesses punctured the high cliffs providing a hideaway or a place to gather for an attack. From here the Klephts disrupted trade by sacking, snatching, grabbing, nabbing, dispossessing, confiscating and generally depriving passers-by of everything but the clothes they stood up in – and not always those either. Their energetic approach to larceny became so notorious that amongst the dwellers round about (which other than the aggravating Musselmen was the only label the Klephts could be bothered to attach to the rich and ancient cultures they robbed) anyone who stole was known as a klephtomaniac. From time to time the other hill tribes would decide the rapacity and general nuisance level of the Klephts was no longer to be tolerated and they would band together for a punitive expedition into the mazy and innaccessible middle of the Quantocks.
It was no more than three weeks after Daisy had brought him into the heart of the Quantocks that Kleist had his first taste of their, to him, unique way of waging war. He had no intention of volunteering his services, and had been furious with Daisy about her boasting concerning his epic brutality to Dunbar and his men. His principle since Memphis was to keep his mouth shut about everything he possessed in terms of goods and services that might be useful to others and he told her to do the same in future.
‘Why?’ she said, astonished.
‘Because I don’t want them trying to stick me in the Vanguard to see if I’ll play Barnaby the Berserker.’
‘You worry too much.’
‘That’s why I’m still alive.’
‘No one’s going to ask you to do anything. It’s got nothing to do with you.’
‘Just remember that.’
Four days later at the specific invitation of Daisy’s father he found himself sitting on top of a great limestone crop with (he had checked) plenty of rear avenues of escape, Daisy beside him, elated but not nervous. They were looking down into a valley about eight hundred feet across where the Klephts had built a rough wall. There were about five hundred Klephts in position, wandering up and down, talking, laughing and acting as if they didn’t have a care in the world. At the other end of the valley there was a Musselman force of about a thousand. They waited for half an hour and then advanced in close order, spears and silvered shields shining in the sun. At two hundred yards they stopped, at which point the Klephts started to pay them some serious attention, which took the form of shouting endless and colourful abuse about the Musselmen’s sexual practices with animals, the ugliness of their mothers, and the sluttishness of their wives and daughters. It was these last two that seemed to drive the Musselmen into an almost hysterical fury. Some, indeed, were so overcome with grief at this abuse to their honour that they burst into tears and knelt down and began throwing dirt over their heads. It settled into a routine. From one side of the defensive wall in the valley a dozen Klephts would call out a name: ‘FATIMA!’ and another dozen would shout back: ‘DOES IT BEHIND THE PIGSTY!’ And then again: ‘AIDA!’, to the chorus of: ‘LIKES THEM THREE AT A TIME!’ But the biggest reaction was provoked by what seemed to Kleist like the least offensive of them all: ‘NASRULA!’ To which a lone voice of unusual clarity shouted back: ‘HAS A MOLE UPON HER INNER THIGH!’ This ins
tantly struck a nerve with one of the Musselmen, who screamed in fury at the precise nature of the description of his hapless wife and instantly started to run suicidally towards the Klepht front line. Fortunately in his hysterical haste he tripped over a stone and before he could get back to his feet half a dozen of his friends and relatives grabbed him and dragged him noisily protesting back to their front line.
General order took a good ten minutes to restore. Still laughing Kleist turned to Daisy.
‘You don’t think it could be a mistake – twisting their ropes like that.’
She shrugged but wouldn’t say any more. But now the attack began, the Musselmen advancing in good order, impressively disciplined as if they knew their business. To Kleist it looked like something bloody was coming. Still the insults poured on like the arrows at Silbury Hill. And then the final furious screaming charge. At this, the Klephts launched a not very impressive and completely inaccurate flight of arrows, turned and ran away. Daisy leapt up and down, clapping her hands in delight as the Klephts raced back into the endless winding defiles at the rear of the valley. The rough stone wall delayed the Musselmen by a minute, laden as it was with traps on the far side – sharp slivers of bamboo hidden in pits that could slice through a foot, poisonous snakes in the crevices of the walls and thousands of spiders poured over the walls just before the Klephts ran away. None of them were poisonous but spiders were unclean for the Musselmen even to touch let alone eat. By the time they had regrouped and started after the Klephts, most were well out of sight, except for the young blades who stayed back at the top of the defiles to shout even more insults. They didn’t hang about for long as some of the furious Musselmen chased after them but, met by a lashing of rocks from the limestone cliffs that fitted into the defiles like fingers, they soon realized a chase was both fruitless and likely to be lethal.
‘Come on,’ said Daisy, and pulled him back from the cliff and, via a circuitous route in case they were spotted by any Musselman scouts, took him back to the village. For the rest of the afternoon the Klephts from the great unbattle drifted in, delighted with themselves and boasting of their lack of feats of daring, the complete absence of any brave deeds, and their total success in not even standing to the first man let alone the last.
Several days of celebration followed in which many war stories, endlessly exaggerated in the telling, were told of the cunning with which the teller caused havoc to his particular enemy without sustaining any personal risk to himself or demonstrating the slightest bravery. Each one of them competed in fabricating outrageous claims concerning the ways in which, from the complete safety of an unbridgeable chasm or the top of an unclimbable cliff, they had tricked outrageously stupid Musselmen into revealing the names of their female loved ones so that a wife’s, sister’s or mother’s sexual purity could be defamed in ever more inventively grotesque ways. As Kleist listened in delight it became clear that to the Klephts the ultimate victory over an enemy was not to defeat him man-to-man in a heroic struggle of arms, but to cause, without risk to oneself, the absurd opponent to drop dead of a spontaneous heart attack or stroke, caused entirely by his gullibility regarding the honour of his women relatives and the ingenuity of the lies of his Klepht opponent. But however amused, Kleist was also somewhat shocked. The fact is that while the military philosophy of the Klephts appealed to him precisely because it was against everything he had been taught by the Redeemers in terms of pain, blood, self-sacrifice and duty, it also clashed for exactly the same reason: it was against everything he had been taught by the Redeemers.
Daisy’s village, Soho, was surrounded by a path shaded with specially planted olives where every evening Klephts would walk in pairs and talk about all and everything under the sun. Kleist was in much demand as a talking partner because of the Klephts’ immense curiosity about everything in general and about the Redeemers in particular, whose practices and beliefs they found completely incomprehensible and therefore utterly fascinating. They assumed that every tale of brutality, every ghastly story of heaven and hell, every detail of the faith that Kleist recounted was merely an outrageous and entertaining lie. There was nothing he could do to persuade them that there were people who really believed and acted as the Redeemers believed and acted. ‘VIRGIN BIRTH? HAR! HAR! HAR! WALKING ON WATER? HE! HE! HE! BACK FROM THE DEAD? HO! HO! HO! THE LAST FOUR THINGS? TEE! HEE! HEE!’ A few days after the fight against the Musselmen, this time it was Kleist busy asking questions of Daisy’s father – a good-humoured old villain who had taken an immense, if not to be relied on, liking to him.
‘Look, Suveri, I’ve got nothing against running away but we were taught it’s the quickest way to get yourself killed.’
‘I’m alive, aren’t I? How many funerals can you see being prepared?’
‘You wouldn’t get away with that stuff in many places. Anywhere a horse could go they’d ride you down. Infantry, too, if they were good enough.’
‘But we didn’t fight in many places, we fought here.’
‘But what if you had to?’
‘We don’t.’
‘You raid.’
‘And sometimes we get killed – but we take what we’ve stolen into these mountains – and if we have to stop to fight a pitched battle, well, we just dump whatever we’ve filched and leg it back here.’
‘What if they trap you before you get here?’
‘I suppose you fight and get out or you don’t and you die.’
‘You can’t win a war without standing and fighting – that’s just a fact.’
‘True enough, I suppose. But we don’t fight wars. We just steal and rob. It’s none of my business if the Redeemers want to die for God or the Materazzi for glory. It wouldn’t suit us, that kind of thing, but it takes all sorts to make a world.’ He laughed and gestured at the limestone landscape around them with its endless crags and chasms and canyons. ‘Deserts make fanatics, everyone knows that. But a place like this breeds a noble cowardice. We know how to let other people be.’
‘You steal from other people all the time.’
‘Other than that. Nobody’s perfect.’
Over the next three months Cale and Gil expanded the campaign against the Folk by splitting the Purgators into groups of ten, each in charge of two hundred ordinary Redeemers.
There were more defeats in the early part of the campaign than victories but the vicious nature of the fighting had the advantage of killing off those who were unable or unwilling to grasp the new tactics. To his surprise most of the Purgators survived and even flourished. It was, supposed Cale, because they had broken with a life of complete obedience already – that was why they were Purgators in the first place. Something in him refused to accept that something else was just as important – their adoration of Cale. Gil saw it and regarded their faith in him as yet further evidence of his peculiar divinity. Cale was not holy, of course, not to be revered as a saint or prophet. He was not, so far as Gil understood Bosco, a person in the sense that even the most apostate Antagonist was a person. He was, in a sense, not really alive. He was the incarnation of a divine emotion. He was, perhaps, becoming an angel, pure in the way that emotions given absolute expression are pure. Everything else about him was in the process of being burnt away. He had to be human in order to be born and grow up. But that was not required any more and Gil could see Cale the boy disappearing in front of him. There were occasional flashes of what you might call a person: he would laugh at something ridiculous that happened in the camp or you could see his tongue sticking out the way you saw in a small boy when he was lost in concentration on some task – but less and less. No wonder then that the Purgators were drawn to him and tried to please him even at the cost of their own lives. IdrisPukke would have had a more mundane explanation. Cale hoarded the Purgators as he might pearls or diamonds. Sometimes, war being the unjust and drastic creature it is, those in whom he invested hopes took an arrow in the chest, the useless, by chance, thriv
ed to irritate him another day. But they realized, even if they misunderstood his motives, that each one of them was important to him, more than important even. As week followed week followed week he slowly turned relentless defeat into stalemate, then occasional victory. Along the front he established twenty-three new semi-permanent forts to be supported by five major forts within fifty miles of each of them. Slowly he fought the Folk to a standstill, locking them in the veldt so that no supplies could reach them from the Antagonist ships (he could not prevent their landing on the endless inlets of the coast). On horseback the Folk could easily slip in and out of Cale’s front but no wagon larger than a small buggy could pass without using the roads that the semi-permanent forts controlled and which the Folk could now only rarely take and then not for long enough to let more than the occasional convoy through. Even this suited Cale. Hope, he had realized a long time since, was the real killer for most people. Hope made you weak; only expecting nothing from life could save you. But not even that would work for the Folk.
‘So,’ said Hooke. ‘You have a stalemate. No victories for them and none for us beyond holding these forts.’
‘Not at all,’ said Cale. ‘I mean to go on the offensive very soon.’
‘How? You don’t have the troops.’
‘No, but I’ll soon have the services of two great generals.’
‘Greater than you?’ mocked Hooke. ‘How could that be? Who are these paragons?’
‘General December and General January,’ said Cale.
While Cale was working to cut off the lifeblood of the Folk, Bosco was engaged in slowing the attempt by his enemies at the Pontificate to do the same to him. Instead of violence they used theology, and their means of putting a foot on his windpipe involved the commissioning of a conference instead of a blockade.