The Last Four Things

  Gil on the other hand had planned the murder of Parsi to take account of chance. It was increasingly in Parsi’s nature not to be seen at all. What had once been an unease concerning open spaces had grown in recent years to become almost fear of them. Even his audiences in the Pontiff’s Palace took place by means of a tunnel underground. He did emerge into the light for twenty minutes every day walking around his covered cloisters exposed to the open on only one side to read the versicles of the Didache from his breviary (‘Scour me of desire, O Lord, batter my soul’, and so on). Information about his comings and goings was scant. But he had followed up a casual reference to one of Parsi’s daily rituals by going to the top of Carfax tower and, after a long wait, observing it for himself. The timing of his daily prayer circuit was always the same, the pace he took was pretty much exact as he went round and round. Only part of the holy garden was cloistered; unluckily for Gil the only part that could be overlooked from his hidden eyrie in Carfax tower looked onto the side that was covered by a deep roof and left Parsi in dark shadow and hence unseeable from the tower except for the lower quarter of his cassock-covered extremities. It was impossible to get in a killing shot from the tower, in other words. But Parsi walked at an almost constant speed, a monotonously rhythmic rolling gait, and Gil knew that out of his sight in the tower but at the other end of the garden he was in the open for perhaps as long as twenty seconds. He was not in his eagle’s nest to take a shot himself but to measure the walk and calculate when Parsi was in the open but out of his sight, then signal to a group of forty archers in a courtyard three hundred yards away to fire their arrows over the wall of their own yard, arch over two streets then down into the end of the cloisters where Parsi was in the open praying to be punished for his sins – concerning which Gil, with enormous contrivance, was hoping to oblige him.

  There was a witness, as it turned out, to what happened next, saved from execution by Gil because he was curious about the precise details of what happened to Parsi.

  Gil gasped himself as the archers loosened their sharps, the terrible and beautiful curve flocking towards the unseen mumbling prelate on the ground, the graceful whoosh as they passed towards their mark and then the mixing of the thwack and ping and thud as they struck wall and earth and man. Gil, as it turned out, got the numbers right but only just. Parsi was hit by three arrows but only from the extreme edge of the cloud; one in the foot, another in the groin, a third in the belly. The shocked cry and the scream of agony reached Gil in his tower just as he made to leave. But such pain can come from any wound. He was not satisfied for sure until he saved the witness, a novice who had been sitting down in the cloisters while his master said his prayers, more than four hours later.

  Four hundred yards away an irritable Moseby, unused to being kept in the dark and ready to give Bosco a bad-tempered reminder of who he was dealing with, waited in the nearest room that Bosco had to an oubliette. It was small with a window high up so that no one could see out, and as far away from the arrests and slaughter as was possible. Moseby politely asked a servant for a drink (he regarded it as a sign of inadequacy to be rude to servants) and Brzica came in with a jug to see it done, moving behind him and tinkering with a mug and cup and pouring the requested water. Then someone with a resemblance to Bosco entered and Moseby looked up. ‘I must –’ but what he must was lost in eternity as Brzica took him by the hair and cut his throat.

  Meanwhile Jonathon Brigade was beginning to feel that he must stop looking for some ideal site for his murder and yet he was sure that if he only looked on a little further there it would be. All the time a voice, not his conscience to be sure, nagged at him to revert to his first plan however unsatisfactory and risky it was. Something is better than nothing. This is going to get you killed. Stop. But he could not – always he felt that just a little further on would be the answer. And then a door opened in front of him and he was face to face with Redeemer Gant and behind him half a dozen priests. They stared at each other as Gant tried to place him and failed. Brigade’s mind went blank for a second but every cell of his body was that of the instinctive murderer. He stepped forward gently so that Gant was forced to stay in the doorway blocking the priests behind. Then an idea – a truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

  ‘My Lord Redeemer,’ said Brigade, ‘an assassin has been sent to kill you. Come with me.’ He took him gently by the arm and smiled at the priests. ‘Please wait here until Redeemer Gant sends for you. Protect this doorway with your life.’ He then shut the door and gripping Gant by the arm pulled him swiftly down the stairs, building up speed as they reached a spacious landing on which he grasped Gant by the shoulders and, pushing the protesting Redeemer at ever greater speed, launched him out of a large window which splintered into a thousand pieces as the great prelate fell screaming to his death on the cobbles fifty feet below. A brief look and Brigade was on his way to find his escape, haring down the stairs and shouting: ‘Fire! Fire!’

  This was the famous First Defenestration of the Holy Peculiar. The second is another story.

  What a day!

  Momentous, spiteful, terrible, tragic, cruel – no word or list could capture its horrors and its brutal drama of lives lost and empires won. There were, perhaps, fewer than fifteen hundred Redeemers that required executing but it had to be done quickly and this was awkward even for a man as experienced as Brzica and as reluctantly determined as Gil. High-quality executioners are as rare as high-quality cooks or armourers or stonemasons – and mass executions were, in fact, extremely rare. After all, except to demoralize one’s opponents, as in the massacre at Mount Nugent that sent such a clear message to the Materazzi or the peculiar circumstances of the death of Bosco’s so carefully chosen Redeemers in the House of Special Purpose what was the need? The real point of an execution was either to dispose of an individual permanently in private or to do so extravagantly in public to make an example of them. If the former then you could take your time; if the latter, it was necessary to produce something spectacular and highly individual. Killing fifteen hundred men not weakened by hunger and months of darkness and cold was a difficult matter. He did not have the assistants for this number of killings because normally he didn’t need them. So this was a damned difficult job for Brzica and Gil.

  ‘You ever cut the throat of a pig?’ said the former to the latter.

  ‘No.’

  ‘When I was a boy on my father’s farm,’ Brzica pointed out gloomily to Gil, ‘he used to reckon it took two years to train someone to slaughter a pig. It’s a lot harder to kill a man.’

  ‘I’ve brought you experienced men. They know why this is necessary.’

  Brzica grunted with the impatience of a man who was used to having his great talents diminished.

  ‘It ain’t nothing like … nothing like killing a man in battle or running away from battle – it has its own rhymes and reasons, its own knacks and techniques. Few’re cut out to kill in cold blood constantly – and specially not kill their own kind. But I don’t suppose you believe me.’

  ‘You’re more convincing than you give yourself credit for, Redeemer,’ replied Gil. ‘But I’m sure with your guidance we’ll manage.’

  ‘Are you now?’

  Manage they did, grim though it was. First Gil reassured the prisoners, collected in half a dozen halls of up to three hundred – that they had nothing to fear unless they were guilty of involvement in that day’s Antagonist uprising of fifth columnists. It was regretfully necessary to question them all to find the few believed to be involved. But it was, as they would themselves understand, necessary for them to be questioned before the overwhelming majority could be released. They would also, he was sure, understand that they would need to be bound hand and foot but that it would be done with respect due to the great number of the innocent among them. He asked for their co-operation at a time of great crisis for the faith. To demonstrate his sincerity Gil allowed himsel
f to have his hands tied loosely behind his back and – again loosely – from ankle to ankle. He then shuffled meekly out of the room. Reassured the arrested Redeemers allowed themselves to be bound and led out in groups of ten. The first groups were led into the nearest courtyard where Brzica and his four assistants forced them to their knees and cut their throats as a demonstration for Gil’s watching chosen men.

  Initially Brzica’s baleful predictions proved accurate and only the fact that Gil had so skilfully prepared the victims and the fact of their being carefully bound prevented a fiasco as the inexperienced executioners found that cutting a throat fatally required more accuracy and precision than they were used to displaying on the battlefield. Brzica saved the day with a simple improvisation – he used a piece of charcoal to mark a line along the throats of the victims just before they were led out so that the increasingly nervous and jumpy executioners had something to follow. It remained an ugly business even for men very used to ugliness. But, as Brzica quoted, smug as well as grim, after it was over (and who would know better than him?): even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course.

  By evening the plot, like some brutal harvest, was gathered in and for all the errors and stupidities Bosco’s great gamble was closing in his favour; even this calm madman was astonished that it was done. But there was a twist of sorts to come. With the city secure, many more successes than failures, a few escapes and some regrettable errors of identity, the news of Cale’s great victory was released to a fearful and mystified population wound up to breaking point by the dreadful events of the day. News of victory gave wings to the claims that Antagonists, deep sleepers in the city’s life, had risen up and been defeated at a terrible cost in famous men and Holy Fathers of the church. It all made sense and any other explanations would have been far less plausible: a coup? A revolution? Here in Chartres? There were, besides, few left willing to contradict it. In less than thirty-six hours the Redeemers had themselves been redeemed and in Bosco’s mind the world had turned towards its greatest and most final purge.

  In the late evening Pope Bento had retired to sleep knowing as much of the real nature of the day’s events as the nuns in the doorless convents of the outskirts of the city. Bosco finally had the chance to pause and eat in the palace itself, joined by Gil. Both were exhausted, worn out in ways neither of them would have thought possible, and neither spoke much.

  ‘You’ve done a man’s job,’ said Bosco at last. ‘And God’s great work, too.’

  ‘And might do more,’ replied Gil, but very softly as if he hardly had the strength to speak.

  ‘And how’s that?’

  Gil looked at him as if he had some enormity on his mind that might be better left unsaid.

  ‘I want to speak freely.’

  ‘You can always speak freely to me. Now more than ever.’

  ‘I want to speak of something that can’t be spoken about.’

  ‘It must be infandous indeed if you need to beat about the bush so much.’

  ‘Very well. I’ve done horrible things in your service. Today I’ve walked knee-deep in the blood of good men. I’ll sleep differently now for as long as I breathe.’

  ‘No one would deny that you have risked your soul in our business.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. My soul. But having risked it to the door of hell itself I do not want to have taken such a dreadful chance and let it be for nothing.’

  ‘I’ve taken the same risk.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You are, if you dare, able to be the voice of God on earth. Whatever you loose on earth would be loosed in heaven. Yet his current proxy sleeps a dozen rooms from here, babbling into his pillow and dreaming of rainbows and warm milk.’

  ‘What of it? He is the Pontiff.’

  ‘This feeble-minded creature is in the palm of your hand. Let me close it for you.’

  Who knows what thoughts hammered away in Bosco’s extraordinary mind, the delicate and the gross together mixed. He did not say anything for some time.

  ‘You should have just done it,’ he said to Gil at last, ‘and said nothing. I am sorry that you blabbed and gave away an act that being done unasked I should have found it afterwards well done. I must sleep.’

  He left the room closing the door softly behind him. Gil helped himself to a large glass of sweet sherry.

  ‘And found myself no doubt,’ he said loudly to no one, ‘rewarded with a command in the forefront of the hottest battle like Uriah the Hittite.’ He took a deep swig of the hideous wine and sang softly.

  ‘Everyone knows it, even a dunce,

  Opportunity knocks once.’

  But, as we all know, there is never an end to garboils.

  22

  At the Golan Heights the victorious Redeemers celebrated even more grimly than was their custom. It had been hard, shoving, hacking, killing work and they were exhausted. Tired as he was, Cale could not sleep and he called a pair of guards to bring a captive he had noticed being brought into the camp, the jovial scout he had met out on the plains three weeks, but what felt like a thousand years, before. He left his hands tied in front of him and his feet tied to the chair then told the guards to leave completely – he didn’t want any earwigging to what he was about to say.

  ‘What about loosening my hands?’ said Fanshawe. ‘It’s not very relaxing talking to someone with your hands tied.’

  ‘I don’t care whether you’re relaxed or not. I want to make an indent with you.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A deal – an agreement.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘We have five hundred prisoners. Their outlook is gloomy. I want to let you take two hundred and fifty out of here and try to escape and make your way home.’

  ‘Sounds like a trap.’

  ‘I suppose so. It isn’t.’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’

  ‘What you can trust, Fanshawe, is that by midday tomorrow there’ll be two types of Laconic prisoners: the dead ones and the ones going to die.’

  He let Fanshawe consider this.

  ‘Some people would say it’s as well to die facing up to it as it is acting the goat in some game.’

  ‘It’s not a game.’

  ‘How do I know that?’

  ‘Do I seem playful to you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I have my reasons you don’t need to know anything about. How long will it take to get to the border?’

  ‘Four days, unopposed.’

  ‘You won’t be opposed because I’ll be following you – a few miles behind.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There you go again.’

  ‘You have to admit it sounds pretty fishy.’

  ‘It sounds pretty fishy.’

  Fanshawe sat back and sighed.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’ For the first time in their conversation Cale was on the back foot.

  ‘They won’t leave half their number behind.’

  ‘Let me persuade you to change your mind. You will be executed tomorrow and I can’t stop it. You should already be dead.’

  ‘Me?’ said Fanshawe, smiling. ‘I was convinced when you mentioned the word execution. But the other Laconics won’t see it like that. It’s not in their nature – and if I try to persuade them to betray each other I won’t be making it as far as tomorrow. You don’t have something to drink, do you?’

  Cale poured a mug of water and held it to Fanshawe’s lips. ‘Another would be luverly.’ Again Cale did as asked.

  ‘How do I know I can trust you to keep going and not to try to make a fight of it once you’re free of the camp?’

  ‘We haven’t been paid to take on a guerrilla war,’ said Fanshawe. ‘As long as we can leave honourably, which is to say not one half leaving the other half in the lurch, we’re duty-bound to return home as quickly as possib
le. We are possessions of the state, and very expensive ones.’

  He said nothing for a moment.

  ‘How many of us died today?’

  Cale considered lying.

  ‘Eight thousand. Roughly.’

  This seemed to shock even Fanshawe. He went pale and did not speak for a while.

  ‘I’ll be straight with you.’

  Cale laughed.

  ‘No, I will.’

  ‘We cannot replace so many in twenty years. We need this five hundred, every one of them, back home. There won’t be any revenge attacks.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less what you do once you’re over the border and arrange to bring me and up to two hundred of my men with you. That’s what we’re agreeing. I release all of the prisoners. You make sure we get safely across the border.’

  ‘If my hands were free I’d shake on it.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘I agree,’ lied Fanshawe.

  ‘I agree,’ lied Cale, in return. They discussed the details and within an hour Fanshawe was back with the other Laconics.

  Cale went through the deal with Vague Henri and left him to stand down the Purgators guarding the Laconics, tied hand and foot in a small stockade built for no more than fifty captives – prisoners not normally being a problem for the Redeemers. The Purgators were replaced with an assortment of cooks, clerks and other highly unsuitable persons and the same was done with the soldiers guarding the horses the Laconics would need to make their escape; Cale announced a celebration to be held as far from the stockade as was feasible and supplied it with enough sweet sherry as could be got.

  The escape itself was as undramatic as could be hoped except for the poor cooks and bottle-washers about whose fate no more sadly needs to be said. Vague Henri met Fanshawe as he came over the wall of the stockade with the five hundred-odd Laconics he had released from the ropes that bound them using the knife Cale had given him. As silently as an exaltation of swans they made their way to the hapless guardians of the horses and in ten minutes were leading their stolen mounts away from the Redeemer camp and on their way towards the Golan Heights and through the site of their recent so disastrous defeat.