The Last Four Things

  ‘Why would they go on a crusade now? They haven’t bothered in six hundred years.’

  ‘Because they’re changing. And if you don’t buck your ideas up you’re going to go the way of the Materazzi.’

  ‘Why should I believe you?’

  ‘You know something, I’m almost offended. Help me to bring Cale in.’

  ‘I’ll have to consider all this.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take too long if I were you.’

  Señor Bose Ikard was certainly very much more alarmed after IdrisPukke had left than before he arrived. He fancied he could tell when he was bluffing but today he sounded altogether too convincing. On the other hand he knew, as IdrisPukke did not, that the Laconics had finally agreed to march on the Golan. Once the Redeemers and their adolescent monstrosity had been in a real fight with those murderous pederasts from Laconia he’d decide whether they were a threat or not. Till then IdrisPukke could go and whistle ‘Paddington Polly’ – and his murderous brat along with him.

  Go into any corner bibliothèque and you will find a hundred books on the flight of the Materazzi after the fall of Memphis: books fantastical, magical, mystical, historical, rough and ready, elegant mythical, hard-boiled tragical, plain and to the point, blackly embroidered, red with blood and suffering – somewhere in all of it will be the truth. To tell a tenth of it would be dull beyond enduring, in that one tale of horror and pain in such a time of bitter cold and scantiness becomes much like another. It’s dreadful to say but there it is. A hard time they had of it before the four thousand escapees made it in half that number to Spanish Leeds, where their welcome had not been much warmer than their journey there.

  ‘Well?’ said Vipond when IdrisPukke wandered back to the recently vacated Jewish ghetto, the Chief Rabbi having decided that the Redeemers being in the ascendant it was time to put as great a distance between them and his congregation as was humanly possibly – which was to say so far that any further and they would be on their way back.

  IdrisPukke gave his half-brother a summary.

  ‘Will he see me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To be fair, neither would I in his position.’

  ‘You men of the world,’ mocked IdrisPukke. ‘So shocking.’

  ‘Will he see you again perhaps?’

  ‘It depends. You know his type – always want you to know they’ve got a finger up your arse.’

  ‘So to speak.’

  ‘He’s uncertain what to do next, for all his vanity. But he wants you off his municipality as soon as he can. Depending on that old bastard Zog’s kindness isn’t much of a guarantee.’

  ‘No.’ There was a long silence.

  ‘What do you think Cale will do?’

  ‘What can he do but wait? Ikard has put most of his troops to the margins. Cale and Vague Henri are facing six hundred miles of Antagonist trenches and a two-hundred-mile line of twitchy Swiss border troops. He’ll be staying put, I’d say.’

  There was a knock on the door which was instantly opened from outside. The guard, all reverence and solicitude, showed Arbell Materazzi into the room. She might well be the last ruler of the Materazzi, a rump now so diminished as to be barely thought of as being ruled, but at least she looked like the almost queen she was. Older, more beautiful, suffering having given her a kind of grey power to her looks. Everything had changed in only a few months, her world destroyed, her father dead, now first among the remaining Materazzi, married to her cousin, Conn, and heavily pregnant.

  21

  It was another four days before the Laconics began to move, as Cale had hoped, around the back of the Golan and directly to take Chartres. Whatever the losses they had taken of their profoundly precious soldiers during the victory on the Machair these deaths had to be balanced against their need for Antagonist silver. Their only alternative to the money gained from hiring out military power was the wealth provided by the vast number of Helot serfs who lived in Laconia and the enslaved countries that surrounded it on nearly all sides. They could terrorize the Helots and purge their leaders but doing so only decreased the Laconics’ income – a dead slave was a dead slave – and ensured that the Helots repeatedly threatened to rebel because the Laconics killed them in large numbers whether they did so or not. Every cull of a few thousand Helots made them smug in the short term but more suspicious in the long. Unafraid of death they were nevertheless terrified of annihilation. This was what drove the Laconics back to the battlefield and the attack on Chartres.

  Cale’s immediate concern was that the Laconics might have worked out that the Redeemers were going to try and stop them with the wall of the Golan on one side and, admittedly, only a slight rise on the other. The rise did little more than inhibit their level of sight of a much bigger field of battle, but for all its apparent unimportance it was almost as good as a great stone wall in that it would serve to funnel them into a much narrower space than anything before or after it. Once Cale could engage them not even the Laconics would be able to rearrange themselves mid-battle.

  Unfortunately for Cale the newly elected Laconic King, Jeremy Stuart-Clarke, had indeed seen the problem but his choices were limited: he could move on Chartres via the Golan and risk the dangers of a bottleneck or he could stay where he was and wait, using up the valuable supplies he had only just received and bringing his men not only to a physical halt but also a mental one. However well disciplined no soldier was ever a patient man. Soldiers went off the boil and having prepared themselves for a final push after a drearily long wait, stopping dead again was not something King Stuart-Clarke would do without good reason. He did not have one. Moving further south to attack Chartres from the flatter rear would take at least a week and give the Redeemers even more time to prepare – and they had been given enough of that. He knew the Antagonists were about to put extra pressure on them by attacking the trenches that extended west from the Golan – a manoeuvre he could not delay now and which would be completely pointless if he did not press on directly.

  He weighed one set of risks against another and given he had already slaughtered one Redeemer army he thought it sensible to continue. Besides, the entire camp had been afflicted with an unpleasant stomach ailment which, while not as bad by a long way as dysentery, had left almost everyone with terrible runs and unpleasant stomach pains. All risks balanced it made by far the most sense to take the shortest route to Chartres.

  It was with a mixture of delight and sudden fear that Cale watched the Laconics, after a pause of nearly three hours, move into his only advantageous defensive battlefield for a hundred miles in any direction. But now it occurred to him that in his two previous experiences of a major battle he had been watching from a place of safety, a dismissive onlooker full of opinions as to what was being wrongly done. Now standing facing this most terrible of armies he was forced to recognize the difference between knowing something and feeling it. Now he felt the difference. For some reason it was a different fear from the one that had left him motionless with terror in the fight with Solomon Solomon in the Red Opera. This time it was his knees that seemed to suffer from terror. They were actually shaking. In the Red Opera it had been a terrible palsy in his chest.

  He had ordered a tower built to the rear of his last line of men so that he could see the battle unfold but now he was worried that he would not be able to climb the thin ladder of the lightweight structure. He looked at his knees as if to rebuke them. Stop shaking. Stop. And on came the Laconics in their lazy squares. For a moment everything seemed hopeless, his soldiers weak, his ideas for defence and attack laughable in the face of the great device for killing moving slowly towards them. Then it was one foot on the ladder and another, slowly, a pause, another step. He wanted to be somewhere else, for there to be a rescuer for him, to take him away and keep him safe. Then another step and another. And then like a baby seabird reaching the shore after an over-ambitious swim in a rough sea he eased over onto the platform of the
tower and was helped to his feet by the two guards already up there with their oversized shields to shelter him from arrows, bolts and spears. Staring out at the Laconics he calmed himself that it would be all right as long as nothing went wrong with the exploding Villainous Saltpetre.

  Which it duly did. It started to rain. Villainous Saltpetre, as Hooke was later to explain, did not like water – or rather it liked water too much. It absorbed the slightest damp the way the desert sand loved rain. Within two minutes of the clouds opening the Villainous Saltpetre was as flammable as a marsh. Knowing this weakness, Hooke had been extremely careful to avoid demonstrating his invention whenever it was wet, not out of a desire to hide its vulnerability but simply because it would not work. His only experience of warfare had been on the veldt during a time of year when it never rained. In hindsight it seemed obvious that he should have mentioned it but it had simply never occurred to him, at least not until it started raining: the life of the experimenter was quite naturally a life that involved creating the best possible circumstances for his experiment.

  Unaware of his damp nemesis, Cale watched the Laconic advance from his tower protected by the two Purgators and waited in high tension to give the signal to set fire to the oil-soaked fuses. It was an ecstatic and agonizing wait, then his signal came and the trumpets blew, harsh as crows. At the first note the front line of the Redeemers stepped back behind the yew stakes driven into the ground and then teams of two waiting hammered in more stakes into the gap so that while it was not a fence, as such, it was impossible for a man to slip between the gap, not least because all the stakes had sharpened meat hooks screwed into the stake itself at ten-inch intervals. Cale had had two teams of two practise their speed for twelve hours a day during the last two weeks and before the lit fuses reached the casks another layer of staggered hooked stakes had been hammered into the ground.

  Meanwhile, halfway up the Golan, Cale’s plan of battle was disintegrating even further. Even though the rain was already easing off, the strength of the brief downpour was such that not only had it deliquesced the Villainous Saltpetre but it had wet the ropes of the mortars and reduced the power with which they could eject the unusually heavy bolts. Hooke had quickly covered them up but in order to reach the right wing of the advancing Laconics the mortars were operating at the extreme edge of their range. Now the ropes were slightly wet that range was reduced by a quarter, a distance that rendered them useless.

  A desperate Hooke had a flag to signal that he was unable to fire and it was duly noted by an alarmed Cale on his rickety tower. He could also see lots of other makeshift flags waving from the Golan. They had not arranged a sign about the Villainous Saltpetre because there had been no good reason to do so. Now the Laconics were approaching the casks, as were the excellently timed burning ends of the fuses.

  Another signal from Cale and another ear-cracking blast from the horns beneath him. This time the entire Redeemer front line ducked down and faced away from the caskets, each one curled up into a protective ball. The Laconics kept advancing, breaking into a run just as they had at Eight Martyrs. The fuses burnt as calculated, the Laconics arrived as hoped for and nothing happened. Many stepped on the lightly earth-covered container but though they could feel the ground change beneath them they were in no position to stop. Then one of the boxes exploded, the last but one on the Laconic right. It had been designed to explode forwards but wood is unreliable stuff and the force of the blast shot out to front and back, killing almost as many Redeemers behind as it did their advancing enemies.

  What this single explosion managed to do was bring the Laconic line to an astonished halt. None of them had ever seen such violence, the earth itself blown into the sky and the ear-blasting sound worse than thunder. The ranks shuddered and stopped and staggered back as if a single startled creature. Carnage delivered by the human hand is one thing, horrible in its close and personal gash and mangle of flesh and bone. Think, though, what it was like to witness for the first time the calamity of such a flash of power and smoke. For a moment after the roar of armies striving to come to grips, there was a great and sudden silence as if the hand swipe of some bilious god had lashed the ground between them. Used to delivering the hideous blow or cut, none of them had seen a man ruptured, pulverized and torn in less time than it took to blink.

  Slack-jawed and stupefied at the failure of the casks, panic and fear ran riot in Cale. But he was not the only one – King Stuart-Clarke had been thrown from his horse as it reared from its terror at the explosion as had half a dozen of the messengers with him. Frightened horses were bolting everywhere and the attack, the worst of nightmares, had completely stalled and all the vital momentum along a line of a thousand yards was lost. All the commanders had been unseated like the king or were trying to control their mounts. Cale, horrified by the failure of the casks, had a few moments to collect his shattered wits.

  He was short of archers but had held them back in any case to pick off the Laconics after they had been hit by all twenty casks, guessing that some were bound to fail. Now he was down the tower and onto his waiting horse and shouting at the four hundred archers in front of him to let loose their first volley and sending a messenger to the four hundred hiding on the rise to wait until the Laconics tried to come around his right. Then as the Laconics began to sort themselves to renew the attack he waved Gil to take the reserves as planned to reinforce his already much stronger left. The reserves, mostly the surviving Black Cordelias, began a slow run towards their left-hand flank and Cale stopped and realized that in the pause between altering his plans and the re-start of the fight he had no idea what to do. Wait and see, wait and see. But the horror of inaction, the panic induced by the sense that he should stay where he was or go back to the tower and wait, was simply too great to stop. He raced up and down the rear for perhaps twenty seconds – an age on an age – like some lost and desperate child before he came to grips with himself and stopped. Now, as he used to do during his terrible panics during the long and bitter nights as a child, he bit deep into his hand below the thumb and felt the rush of pain begin to calm him down. He stopped, breathing deeply, a few seconds, and then turned the horse back to the tower and in a few moments was in control of himself, watching the battle collect itself and the Laconics begin the attack again.

  There was no running attack this time; the Laconics simply advanced and expected to close. This was what happened with their strongest forces facing Cale’s now massively reinforced left. But he did not have the men to offer such a depth of soldiers to resist the Laconics’ strongest wing and also have a line six or eight deep in the middle and the right. Hence the yew stakes and the hooks. This would slow the Laconics down and protect this so much weaker line. Then once the Laconics were through he had trained the Redeemers here to fall back slowly as they fought and refuse to make a stand. Then four hundred archers on the rise would hit the Laconics from the rear where they would either have to turn to defend their unarmoured backs and take the pressure off the attack or be picked off by ten volleys every minute by the best archers in all the four quarters.

  There were no such measures to his left. The Laconic right wing was twenty deep of their strongest and most experienced but now the Redeemers opposing them were nearly fifty deep. As long as the helmets protected them from the crushing blows of the Laconic swords, and the dreadful push and shove of so many men did not lead to a collapsing crush, then he hoped to reverse the push of the Laconic right and drive them back and around to their left do what they had done to the Black Cordelias twenty days before.

  Whether all this would have worked by itself was argued over for months and years. It was touch and go said Cale as he talked about his victory late into the night with Vague Henri.

  ‘You were utterly useless,’ he said to him, pleasantly, ‘stuck up there with that half-wit Hooke – but without the dead dogs in the stream I don’t think we’d have done it.’

  The battle had been as hideous
as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life. Six hours after it had begun so violently it was finished. King Stuart-Clarke was dead along with eight thousand of his men, the survivors fighting a retreat over four weeks, legendary for its courage and resilience. Not that their survival made much difference to the Laconics when all was said and done. Thomas Cale changed their history for ever on that day and all because of three things he thought at the time were less important than his great mortars and the mass destruction of the boxes of saltpetre: the reinforced helmets of the dead Materazzi, intelligent tactics, and a bad dose of the squits induced by the decaying animals in the stream that fed the Laconic camp had sapped, by just a little, just enough, the terrible strength that was required to fight in heavy armour for a day. And, credit where credit was due, the insane courage and self-sacrificing skill of the Redeemers. Throughout the day he was back and forth with his ten Purgators who were aching to die for him. He was on top of the tower one minute, scrambling down and heading to a section along the front threatening to decay and shouting at those who could not see where they were needed to rush here or withdraw from there. Along to his right he rode repeatedly, Purgators terrified on his behalf and shielding him as if their eternal life itself depended on it as he tried to get the line first to hold the Laconics along the razor wall of the spikes of yew and when they were through to pull back in steady order so that they were kept penned in where the archers on the rise could hurt them most. Then it was back to the great scrum on the left where the battle would be won or lost, urging on the deadly push and shove, picking up men who fell, shouting for others where the lines of force had eased to move around the other side and add their weight. Now the fear had gone and he was so busy in the fight he had no time to worry that he was in his element, that for once he was neither angry or sad but exhilarated beyond all reckoning and only now and again a still small voice calling to him to show some sense. All day throughout the fight he was like some fly or wasp at a window buzzing back and forth as if he were trying to find a weakness in the glass. Lead from the front: always, sometimes, never. It was the last he always promised to himself but today it was impossible. Sometimes he had to lay into the Laconics as they cut a hole into the Redeemer line, sealing it up, lashing his enemy like the calmest madman in the asylum, cutting and blocking like the machine he had been brought up to be, his Purgators and the men he most hated in the world running into die next to him as if they had no other destiny but this. And then the Purgators would form a ring around him and he’d withdraw and back onto his horse and up his spindly tower like God in his heaven surveying the chaos of his own creation. Then the glass impossibly bowed to the wasp and bulged and broke. The right flank of the Laconics warped and twisted and then not so much broke as burst. In such a beast as this it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of bravery or even strength, and once it was down it was finished as a battle. But not as an individual slaughter – now the creature was breaking into its parts, disassembled into each man, alone and weak and easy to kill where he could not re-form himself into a smaller beast to run away.