The Last Four Things

  ‘My word of honour,’ shouted the rider, laughing.

  ‘Do Sodomites have any honour?’ asked Vague Henri.

  ‘Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Come forward. Slowly,’ shouted Cale. ‘Try anything and you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.’

  The rider moved forwards as he was told until he was about ten yards away.

  ‘That’ll do.’

  The rider stopped. ‘Lovely morning,’ he said. ‘Makes you glad to be alive.’

  ‘Which you won’t be,’ said Vague Henri, ‘if you’ve got any little friends planning to join us. I can put one in you and we can be back to our patrol before you hit the ground.’

  ‘There’s no need for all that, my dear,’ said the young man, clean-shaven and with elaborately beaded hair.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Cale.

  ‘I thought we might talk.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘You’re Redeemers, aren’t you?’

  ‘Might be. What’s it to you?’

  ‘Forgive me for saying so but aren’t you a bit young to be out and about when there’s going to be so much blood and screaming.’

  ‘I thought Laconics were supposed to be brief of speech,’ said Cale.

  ‘They are, that’s true, usually. But it would be a sad world, wouldn’t it, if we were all the same?’

  ‘Are you Krypteia?’

  The man’s eyelashes flicked and he moved his head to one side. He smiled.

  ‘Might be. You’re very well informed, if I may say so.’

  Cale took a quick look behind and to either side to check what might be about and knowing that Vague Henri had his mark fixed on the man’s chest.

  ‘Does your friend with the crossbow have a steady nerve?’

  ‘I can’t say that he does, to be honest,’ replied Cale. ‘So I’d stay still if I were you. I asked you already – what do you want?’

  ‘I just thought we might have a chat.’

  ‘Is that what they’re calling it now?’ asked Vague Henri.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand you,’ replied the young man although he clearly knew mockery when he heard it.

  ‘I wouldn’t distract him, if I were you,’ said Cale, ‘not while he’s got that thing pointed at your chest.’ The young man looked at Cale, amused and not at all nervous.

  ‘Your name, young man?’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘Robert Fanshawe.’ He dropped his head, all the while keeping his eyes on Vague Henri. ‘Yours to the lowest pit of hell.’

  ‘Dominic Savio,’ said Cale his return nod unnoticeable to all but an eagle blessed with particularly sharp sight. ‘And that’s where you’re going if you do anything my friend here doesn’t like. I’m always going on at him about his jumpiness, by the way.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Dominic Savio.’

  ‘The pleasure’s all yours.’

  But then something odd, a flicker of something in Fanshawe’s eyes. Cale’s horse, restless for some reason, had begun drifting to one side. He took one more step.

  ‘Steady!’ But Cale was no great horseman and the horse moved anyway. The hoof seemed to sink impossibly into the heather mix of sedge and wild grass and then the ground itself rose up as if it were some creature looking for its prey. Screaming with terror and off balance the horse reared up throwing Cale with a hefty thud back onto the ground, winding him so badly he just lay on his back groaning. Then a blur of movement as a man rolled out from under the sedge and grabbed the stunned Cale, turned him over on top of himself as a shield and had a knife at his throat.

  ‘Easy! Easy!’ shouted Fanshawe at Vague Henri, who, startled as much by the event as the speed of it, had not fired. This was as well: had he done so it would have certainly killed Fanshawe but also Cale.

  ‘Easy! Easy!’ said Fanshawe again. ‘We can all live through this. Let me explain.’

  Vague Henri, shaking, said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’d just left my man here under that,’ he looked over at the six-by-four sheet of cloth covered in sedge and grass stitched to the surface, ‘when I saw you heading straight for him. Thought I’d track you to make sure you went by – but you got too close. By then I’d realized you weren’t old enough to be soldiers. Thought I’d lead you away. Wrong again, eh?’ He smiled, hoping to calm Vague Henri down. He looked, thought Fanshawe, a dangerous combination: jumpy but knew what he was doing.

  ‘We can all walk away from this,’ repeated Fanshawe. ‘Just lower the crossbow and my friend here will let Dominic go.’

  ‘You first,’ said Cale. ‘I told you.’

  ‘I’ll cut this little boy’s throat and then come for you!’ said the man holding Cale.

  ‘Let’s all calm down. Now I’m going to ask my chum here to bring Dominic to his feet and then we can go from there. All right?’

  Vague Henri nodded.

  ‘Going to count to three. One, two, three.’

  With that the man holding Cale pulled him upwards till they were both standing – the knife at his throat never giving a smidgeon or a jot.

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Fanshawe. ‘We’re all getting along famously.’

  ‘Now what?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Tricky, I admit. What if we …’ With that Cale raised his right foot, scraped it down the shin of the man holding him while driving his elbow into his ribs and grabbing the man’s wrist and twisting with all his strength. The man’s shout was smothered by the air leaving his lungs. Whippet quick, Cale squirmed away, cracked his elbow again to the forearm of the man and had the knife from his fingers. To Cale’s astonishment the man could still move. He blocked the blow Cale struck with the knife and lashing out with his fist caught Cale on the side of his head. With a cry of pain, Cale stepped back to give himself room for another blow. As he lashed at his chest the man dodged once, twice and then kicked out at Cale’s left shin, knocking one foot off the ground so that he fell to one knee. Another hefty blow from the man, which had it landed would have smashed every tooth in Cale’s head, but he dodged back, his knuckles taking him at the lowest point of his chin and glancing away. Cale was on both feet now as his opponent overbalanced at the missed strike and scrambled away. They stood, Cale with the knife and the advantage, staring at each other and waiting for a chance to strike.

  ‘Stop! We can stop here! Tell him!’ shouted Fanshawe to Vague Henri. ‘We can all go free. Nobody needs to die here.’

  ‘It’s all one to me,’ said the man, glaring at Cale.

  ‘Not me, it isn’t,’ shouted Fanshawe. ‘Do as you’re bloody well told and back away. Do it or by God I’ll come over and help him.’

  Trained to obedience even more than to slaughter, slowly the man eased back step by step as wary as you like.

  ‘Congratulations. Every one of us. Get up behind me, Mawson.’ He looked over at Vague Henri. ‘May I, dear boy?’

  ‘I’m not your dear boy.’

  Fanshawe reached for the reins and eased his horse over to Mawson, who was still looking at Cale as if he were wondering whether to eat his heart first or his liver.

  ‘Get on behind me, Mawson.’

  ‘My knife,’ said Mawson. Fanshawe sighed and looked at Cale with a weary what-can-you-do-with-them look.

  Cale stood back then raised the knife and threw it with considerable force some forty yards in the direction he wanted them to take.

  ‘I’m obliged,’ said Fanshawe. Without an order Mawson, the blank expression of a much-experienced killer now absent, picked up his sedge blanket and leapt up behind Fanshawe as easily and gracefully as if he had pulled out a chair to sit down to his dinner. He looked much younger now.

  ‘Till we meet again, boys,’ said Fanshawe. With that he turned his horse and, pausing only to let Mawson pick up his knife, they were soon five hundred yards away and behind the rise he had emerged from only te
n minutes before.

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Vague Henri, ‘I’m cut out for this stuff.’

  ‘You were absolutely gorgeous,’ said Cale. With that he went off to get his horse and they beat it back to the Golan as quickly as possible.

  Fanshawe and Mawson, however, were not much further away than when the boys had seen them disappear behind the rise. They had found a small gulley and having spread the grass and sedge blanket beneath them were indulging themselves energetically in Laconic beastliness.

  * * *

  It was the night before the Battle of Eight Martyrs, so called because over the last six hundred years this number of Redeemers had given their lives for the faith in or around what was to be the battlefield. It was by no means a matter of luck that there should be a place of conflict already consecrated by the blood of martyrs. So hated were the Redeemers by their many adversaries that over hundreds of years there remained few places where one or more of them had not been hanged, decapitated, broken, dismembered, strangled, garrotted or crucified. There was an embarrassment of riches for the Redeemers when it came to naming battlefields after martyred saints. Indeed there was barely a village fist-fight that could not have been named after one.

  Cale had not been asked to attend the final instructions for battle but neither had he been excluded. Lurking behind Van Owen’s battle shack with Vague Henri and waiting for a group to form at the door so he could slip inside unnoticed, Cale whispered to Vague Henri, ‘What have I got to do?’

  ‘Keep your big mouth shut.’

  ‘Right.’

  Then five or six Redeemer subalts arrived and Cale followed them in, close behind, and moved to the darkest and most densely packed corner of the large room, which in any case was only well-lit where the large plan of the battle hung from the wall.

  To Cale’s great disappointment Van Owen outlined nothing spectacularly stupid in the way of tactics. Neither was there anything interesting beyond the use of much heavier armour for the front rank of the Redeemers who would take the initial brunt of contact with the Laconics. Cale had to admit that given the little that Van Owen knew about Laconic field tactics – he did not, of course, have access to the testaments in Bosco’s library – it was hard to criticize any of his decisions. His only slight satisfaction was to sneer at the small size of Van Owen’s reserves. Given the two-to-one advantage, he thought Van Owen should have kept back a much bigger share of his army to give him the option to deal with anything unexpected.

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Vague Henri, after Cale had slipped out unobserved in the general rush to leave and prepare for the next day, ‘suppose he weakens his first attack by not using his better numbers. Keeping too big a reserve is like dividing your forces. I’m not sure I’d do much different in his place.’

  ‘Nobody asked you.’

  ‘You did as it happens.’

  ‘Well, now I’m sorry and I’ll pray to God for forgiveness.’

  ‘Do you? Still pray, I mean.’

  Cale did not reply.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes, I still pray.’ There was a pause. ‘I pray for deliverance from evil and having to look at your ugly face all day long.’

  ‘Me? I’m gorgeous. You said so yourself.’

  When they got back to the Purgators’ hut there was a message from one of Van Owen’s adjutants: Cale and his men were to observe the battle if they wished but were instructed to stay away from either the command centre or the battlefield. On no account were they to intervene in any way whatsoever.

  This was excellent news. Cale’s one fear was that Van Owen would include him in something dangerous out of spite. It was clear that in the event of victory or defeat he did not want to risk Cale making a further name for himself. Cale wrote back repeating the order and went cheerfully to sleep.

  He gave most of the Purgators a lie-in the next day, something by which they were always delighted, but left at dawn with Vague Henri and ten men. At the opening of the gates the small band moved through the army as it stirred itself for the day’s action. They made their way around in front of the Field of Eight Martyrs mostly ignored by men with too much else on their mind and rode away to the north and to a small bluff with a good sight of the battlefield they had marked out before the encounter with Fanshawe. Cale had his men check their surrounds for Laconic outposts put in place since they were last there and confirmed for himself two routes of escape in case things went wrong. Then they climbed the bluff and waited in silence for the day to begin. Already the Laconics were loosely gathered at their end of the plain, though not in any disciplined formation but like a crowd at an unusually large county fair watching as the Redeemers deployed.

  First of all came the Black Cordelias, seven thousand strong, armour covered in purple and the black from which they got their name. Even from a couple of miles away on the bluff the wind brought snatches of a hymn. The boys, laughing, began mockingly to sing along.

  ‘Remember man as you pass by

  As you are now, so once was I

  As I am now, so you must be

  Prepare for death and follow me

  Today me, tomorrow you

  I am dust and you are too

  Hideous the truth of Death

  Dreadful is the final breath.’

  The two boys grew nearly hysterical with joy – observing their enemies, whatever the outcome, going to their deaths and they watching safe and sound. Vague Henri remembered a song the quads in Arbell Swan-Neck’s palazzo used to sing. It took a moment to get the tune back and he had forgotten the first few lines.

  ‘Oh! Death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling

  Oh! Grave thy victoreee?

  The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling

  For you but not for meee!’

  The wind must have changed slightly as the hymns faded in and out of hearing but impressively dominating their formation was the giant censer the size of a cathedral bell the Black Cordelias always took into battle as it swung back and forth, incense blooming upwards in a great pillar of smoke.

  Still the Laconics drifted about in front of their camp like a crowd watching a vaguely interesting pageant. Now the fourth army of the Golan, known as the Hierophants, with its five Sodalities, ten thousand in all: the slaves of the Immaculate Heart, the Poor Simons of Perpetual Adoration, the Norbetines, the forbidding Oblates of Abasement and then, grimmest of all, the Brotherhood of Mercy. For the next hour the Redeemer army deployed: cloth of gold, ensigns of red, banners of purple, the petioles of the confessors, the pink fronds of the medical friars not allowed to touch the dying until they called out the unctions in extremis. All of it now to the sound of bagpipes loud enough to defy the everchanging wind and which Van Owen, watching from the promontory sticking out of the Golan, would signal once the battle started and the hymns stopped to act as his voice, each Sodality having its own particular sound and its own instructions to advance, turn or retreat.

  Now when the Redeemers were half drawn up in line to attack, the Laconic soldiers began to move but still with the same lack of intensity with which they previously seemed to watch. But within less than three minutes they formed into a loose series of ragged squares as if from nowhere. But then it was as if they had lost interest again, the groups remained clear enough but still without the precise and martial discipline of formal rank and file. Now they watched again as the Redeemer second army finished its own formation – a continuing line of Black Cordelias to the front and the others formed behind six deep, the most lightly armoured and most mobile to the rear. In a tight group half a mile back stood a thousand reserves. Then with a trumpet blast the six pipers cut short their skirling music, the sound drifting in the wind like the last breath of a great and wounded animal.

  For a minute there was nearly silence, only the odd shout of a sergeant or the snort of a horse from the five hundred cavalry behind the right f
lank of the Redeemers.

  In front of the Laconics there was movement as eight men with two flags each ran out and to each side in front of their still loosely grouped army.

  Once they had dispersed they raised the flags and began to signal. Like a lazy horse midstream convulsed by the touch of a shocking eel, the army of Laconics flexed to life – six flabby squares hardened to edges sharp as a builder’s float. A flash again of flags and then they began to march towards the Redeemers, nearly a mile below; perfect in step and rhyme like any dance troupe or crew of mimes.

  Then again the flags. The six squares stopped as one. A beat and then the flags again. A shout, one voice, eight thousand men. Then a great clash of sword on shields, the inward face then quickly turned to their enemies. A vast great flash of colour, yellow and red. Each line headed in turn to left and right so each square became a line spreading across the field, moving from thirty deep to ten. Another wave of the flags and with another shout, another turning in and out of the shields, the six lines moved together into a wall a thousand yards across and six men deep. From Van Owen’s watch on the Golan Heights the trumpets bellowed and a cry went up from every priest.

  ‘DEATH! JUDGEMENT! HEAVEN! HELL!

  THE LAST FOUR THINGS ON WHICH WE DWELL!’

  Even from the safety of their bluff and wrapped in the neutral malice that Cale and Vague Henri bore both sides an unpleasant thrill of fear ran from the nape of their necks and down their spines. Vague Henri defied the power of this hideous prayer by singing softly to Cale under his breath:

  ‘I’d rather dwell on Marie the whore

  And what she does with a cucumbore!’

  The great army of the Redeemers lurched forward like a bull freeing itself at last from a riverbank of mud. Then astonishment from Cale and Vague Henri. The Laconic mercenaries began to run towards their enemy as if desperate and overjoyed to die. This was no jog or trot but a burst of speed that must be fatal to the order and power of their massy wall that relied on thousands acting together as a single will.