The Last Four Things

‘They didn’t do any of those things to you. He promised to make you a great man. Aren’t you? Didn’t he keep his promise?’

  This was too much. In a few strides he was over to her as she backed away to the wall holding her hands out in terror to protect her child. He reached behind her head and grabbed her golden pony tail and dragged her over to the sofa pushing her to her knees.

  ‘I’ll show you how he kept his promise, you lying bitch.’ He kept tight hold of her hair with one hand and pulled the lamp on the table next to the sofa so that it cast a better light. Then with his free hand he reached into a back pocket and took out the letter given to him by Bosco and over which he had squabbled with Vague Henri. He unfolded it on the sofa rug, violently pushing her head down so that her face was almost touching it.

  ‘Read!’ he said.

  ‘You’re hurting me.’

  He twisted her hair sharply. She called out.

  ‘Scream quietly,’ he whispered. ‘Someone might be unlucky enough to hear. Now read who it’s from.’ Another encouraging tug.

  ‘From Redeemer General Archer, Commander Forces of the Veldt, to Redeemer General Bosco.’

  ‘You can skip the first five lines.’

  Arbell continued with some difficulty – his grip was fierce and she was too close to the script.

  ‘Before he left Thomas Cale ordered us to sweep up every village on the Veldt within fifty miles of our camps and bring in all the women and children, their animals to be used to feed the three thousand souls we managed to intern. Some sort of rinderpest killed most of their cattle and reduced very much the milk of those that survived. Often lacking sufficient rations ourselves there were none to spare. Given their weakness many have succumbed to starvation, measles and the squits, in all about two and a half thousand. I was not informed until very late and when I inspected the camp I saw such wretchedness any heart would have rued the sight …’

  ‘Don’t worry about the next bit,’ said Cale pointing further down the letter, ‘start again there.’

  ‘Out of every corner of the place they came creeping on their hands and knees because their legs could not bear them; they looked like the very anatomy of death and spoke whispers like ghosts crying out of their graves. It was told to me that they were happy to eat moss where they could and then finally in desperation to scrape the carcasses out of their graves also. I know you to be a person of clemency but though I describe pitiable things, and ones easier to read about than to witness, there is no hope that these Antagonists will amend and it is a dire necessity that they be cut off. This judgement of the heavens that makes us tremble touches us not with pity.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said letting her hair go and bouncing her head off the soft bolster of the sofa – not the cruellest violence he had offered the world it must be said.

  Slowly she pulled herself up and eased into a sitting position.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last. ‘What has this got to do with me? Or even you? This dreadful thing wasn’t what you intended, was it?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. My intention is to be left alone with a decent bed and some decent food to go with it. But what I do is just what you said. Catastrophe follows me everywhere. I sat in the shadows back there listening to your chinless wonder whining about his reputation –’

  ‘He’s not chinless!’

  ‘Be quiet. My reputation is that I’m a bloody child who cares no more for the lives of people than he cares for the life of a dog. My reputation is that I consume everything I touch. You put me there back with them. The blood of everyone I’ve wasted since then is on your hands as well as mine.’

  ‘Why don’t you just stop killing people instead of blaming everyone else?’

  She said this more violently than was perhaps wise given the circumstances. But she did not lack courage.

  ‘And tell me how am I supposed to do that? The Redeemers won’t stop, not for anything. They intend to wrap this world in a blanket, pour on the pitch, and then set fire to it like a match. There’s no stopping.’ He stood back glaring like the Troll of Gissinghurst. To be fair, she glared back giving as good as she got. ‘Now I’m going to leave by the door – not how I got in, just in case you were wondering. I want you to think about that in the nights to come. You’re not going to call anyone because I’ll kill them if you do and even if I’m caught I’ll be sure to mention to your chinless wonder of a husband that you claimed I was the father of his child.’

  ‘He won’t believe you.’

  ‘He will a little bit.’

  And with that he walked to the door and was gone.

  He moved quickly down the almost empty corridors – where the only guards were the young and inexperienced and easy to avoid – and considered his evening’s work with a peculiar satisfaction. He had made her feel worse and that was what mattered. Whether he was also truly heartbroken at the unintended consequences of his orders concerning the women and children of the veldt was hard to tell. As the Englishman used to say: the truth depends on where you start the story.

  By the next day Cale was thinking better of his late-night visit. He had, all said and done, threatened a pregnant woman with violence and made himself look like the monster Arbell had claimed him to be as he stood listening in the shadows. And as for the child, she was certainly lying to save her skin. He could hardly bear to think about what it meant if not. So he didn’t.

  Depressed and ashamed he had gone for a walk and stumbled by accident on the great park that spread eccentrically shaped as a salamander just north of the centre of the city. It was a warm day for the time of year, bright sunshine, and the park was full of people, flirting young men and women, children playing and shouting, older couples walking up and down the great promenades with their budding lime trees doing the passagiata for which Spanish Leeds had been famous for two hundred years – the seeing and being seen. Feeling oddly woollen-headed and with one ear blocked as if water from a bath had become stuck, he walked in the sunshine until he came to one edge of Salamander Park – a huge wall carved into the granite that topped the city. It had been cut flat and into it, and thickly carved were the great figures of the Antagonist Reformation who had taken refuge in Spanish Leeds during the initial persecution and before they had moved on to found the Antagonist city at Salt Lake. Here were thirty-foot-high reliefs of men who had fought against the Redeemers to the point of hideous death and yet he had never heard of them: Butzer, Hus and Philip Melanchthon, Menno Simons, Zwingli, Hutt and the unhappy-looking Mosarghu Brothers. Who were these giants in front of him and what in the name of God did they believe? It was almost impossible to grasp that the rejection of the Redeemers had such heft to it. Then he moved on across the park feeling ever more distant and removed from the flow of ordinary human happiness taking in the sun and each other as they would do a week today and all spring and summer long. And now he had to get away, out of the great ornate cast-iron gates of the north end of the park and round the side heading for his room. But he was so tired now, utterly weary, exhausted in a way that was completely new to him. He walked ever slower down the street as if each step was ageing him by a year, but it was so much worse than ordinary fatigue. He felt he had been on the move for a thousand years and nowhere to sit down, no rest, no peace, nothing but fighting and fear of the next blow. His heart was so heavy in his chest he felt it dragging him to a halt. How was it possible to feel like this and live? By now he was at the West Gate and he stopped and rested his head, pouring sweat against the sandstone.

  ‘Are you all right, son?’ But he did not have the strength to reply. Afterwards he could not remember how he made it back to his room, not even unlocking the door, only his lying on the bed gasping like a fish drowning on dry land. And then it came for him – the earthquake in his guts, a shaking and an avalanche of collapse and burst. His inside world gave way of flesh and soul together, hideo
us pain of tears and eruption. He rushed towards the jakes and retched and retched and nothing came but so violent it was as if his soul was trying to leave his bowels and belly while he was still alive. And so it went on for hour after hour. And then he went back to bed and wept but not like any child or man and nothing to do with release, and then when he thought, whatever thinking was, that bellowing in tearless pain would never stop, that was when he began to laugh over and over and for hours on end. And laughing was how Vague Henri found him just before dawn, still laughing, weeping and retching.

  31

  For a week they kept him in his room but he did not improve. He would sleep for twelve hours or more but wake more exhausted and black-eyed and white-lipped with weariness than when he went to sleep. There would be a pause for three hours during which he would lie on his side, knees bent, and then the retching would begin – a hideous sound more like some great animal trying to expel some poisonous thing it had eaten. After a few days the terrible laughter stopped – no relief to Cale, only to those who had to listen to it. Cale kept retching and such tears as he wept clearly gave him no ease or peace. Soon the tears stopped too. But he kept on retching though never being sick and even though he ate and hungrily enough. After that week it settled into a dreadful pattern: hours of sleep that gave no rest, eating hungrily, then the spasms lasting for an hour, then rest in silence, another attack, more food and then an exhausted sleep. Then the cycle would begin again.

  They brought doctors who prescribed noxious substances at enormous cost that Cale refused to take. Then finally, in desperation, they brought in John Bradmore at Vague Henri’s suggestion.

  He sat with Cale for an hour or two and tried him with some honey mixed with wine and opium, which seemed to make him calmer until, for the first time, he threw the lot up in one great spew all over the bedroom floor.

  Later IdrisPukke, Vipond and Vague Henri talked with Bradmore outside.

  ‘Other than to point out he’s horribly sick I can find nothing wrong. From what you say he gets neither worse nor better. If you can pay him I would try and fetch Robert of Salerno.’

  ‘Salerno is five hundred miles away.’

  ‘But the money is here. He treats the mad girls of the aristocracy and merchants of Spanish Leeds, God knows there are enough of them.’

  ‘He’s not a girl.’

  ‘Neither is he sick in any way that I can treat. Robert of Salerno is an irritation and a pest, full of himself, but he’s had good results with people who are sick in the head.’

  ‘Bradmore is right,’ said Robert of Salerno, the next day standing in the same corridor. ‘This is well outside his understanding. There’ll be no ingenious devices here.’

  ‘Thank you. The point?’

  Robert of Salerno with a hundred dollars of Kitty the Hare’s money in his pocket was not as easy to insult as was normally the case – normally it was very easy indeed.

  ‘Do you know where you can find the best picture of the human soul?’

  ‘I am sure you’ll tell me.’

  ‘For a hundred dollars I would tell anyone. The best picture of the human soul, Mr IdrisPukke, is the human body. The soul has its kidneys and its liver, its stomach, its arms and legs. And it has disease of every limb and organ too: there are different fevers of the soul as there are scarlet fevers of the body, yellow fevers; for every rash that degrades the skin there is one for the will, the soul has its hard abscesses and its weeping ones; there are many ulcers of the mind, cancers of the passions.’

  ‘We understand,’ said Vipond. ‘The boy?’

  ‘You know, I think, as well as I do what’s wrong with him. According to this young man’ – he gestured at Vague Henri – ‘you are familiar with his history. He’s been treated like a dog all his life, moiled, beaten, fed bad food by wicked men. He has seen and done horrible things.’

  ‘Why hasn’t it happened to me?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Who’s to say it won’t. I’ve been in cities where bubonic plague has carried away three quarters of the population and left the rest untouched. Who knows the answer to these things?’

  ‘A hundred dollars in pocket says that you should.’

  ‘As my old nurse used to say: “The doctor who can mend this boy isn’t born and his mother’s dead.” Your boy is like one of those mountain trees that’s grown up in the teeth of the wind. This is his shape and you can’t unbend him into another.’

  ‘So what are we to do now? Nothing?’

  Robert of Salerno sighed. ‘Treat him kindly and don’t allow anyone to give him any painful treatments. There are plenty who will offer to make him better by harsh means. Don’t allow it. They will open holes in his skull, keep him in vats of freezing water for a day or feed him drugs that would kill a horse. You would better show your love for him by drowning him in a bucket. I will write a letter to the Sisters of Mercy in Cyprus. People will tell you they are very strange, and they are, but they are good-natured. They help the mad by talk and kindness. They won’t make him any worse.’

  ‘How long do you think it will be before he gets better?’ said Vague Henri.

  Robert of Salerno looked at him and did not reply to the question. ‘Do you want me to make the arrangements?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vipond.

  Robert of Salerno bowed very slightly and was gone.

  At the same time some two hundred miles away in Upper Silesia, Kleist along with twenty-one men between the ages of eighteen and forty-two entered the coal town of Bytom, as grim a dump as any they had ever seen.

  ‘If this is Upper Silesia,’ said Tarleton, ‘what in God’s name is it like in Lower Silesia?’ No one said anything, let alone laughed. They were too full of hopeless hatred. They wanted revenge it was true, but they were crippled by shame and despair at what they had allowed to happen to their wives and children.

  They bought a week’s worth of supplies with the money they had left and stood in the damp main square and talked about what to do next. After half an hour they decided. Four of them wanted to go north and get as far from the Redeemers as the earth would carry them. The remaining twenty-two and Kleist decided to head for Spanish Leeds, where they’d heard, wrongly, an army was being assembled to fight the Redeemers. The four going north took their share of the supplies, shook hands and left. The twenty-two and Kleist went east.

  Two days after they’d left Bytom the widow Kleist, heavily pregnant and thinking herself to be the last survivor of an obscure clan from the Quantock Mountains, made her way though the same square heading for Spanish Leeds, where she hoped her child would be born a citizen of that town and country, where it was said widows were paid a pension by the state and that there was free milk for babies under three years of age.

  * * *

  It had taken Redeemer Gil some time to learn to take pleasure in his new power, even if he disapproved of himself for enjoying the vast desk with its ornate carvings of the various atrocities commited on the bodies of the faithful, or the speed and obsequiousness of the answer to his bell as he summoned and dismissed men who were often of great substance in Chartres but now demonstrated so obviously the necessity of pleasing him. There were pangs of guilt now and again as there always must be for a Redeemer, but they were less and less frequent, or if not less frequent then less and less sharp. Only a very few months ago Redeemer Warren, the man opposite him listening so gravely and so attentively, would have regarded him as an uncouth member of the Militant, not to be treated with contempt but certainly condescended to. Now he was staring at Gil and horribly thrilled at the responsibility involved in what he was being instructed to undertake.

  ‘You’re to bring only the most reticent and trusted into your confidence and few of them, but you are to say nothing of the true identity of the impostor who stole the papacy. They’re only to know that they’re searching out vile women we have reason to suspect might have disguised themselves as clergy. They a
re to root out the truth of this one way or the other. If it is not the case I must know it. As to the means by which that abomination made her way to Pope I want you to get to the bottom of how it was done. Was it a conspiracy or was this creature acting alone?’

  There was a knock at the door and Monsignor Chadwick entered and with a deferential nod to Warren walked over to Gil and whispered in his ear, ‘The Two Trevors.’ Gil said nothing but Chadwick left, sliding out of the room as if he were on wheels.

  ‘You must excuse me, Redeemer,’ Gil said to Warren. ‘You have questions but there are few answers. Consider what I’ve said and give me your thoughts in a day or two. You’re to say nothing of what you’ve heard until we talk again.’

  Warren stood up, walked to the door in a state of shock and was gone. A minute later there was another knock from a small door on the left of the room. Again it opened and again it was Chadwick. This time he stood aside to allow in two men. One looked like a whippet, the other not just handsome but engaging, his expression warm and good-humoured. Gil gestured them to come forward and for Chadwick to leave.

  ‘Thank you for coming. Sit down.’

  The eel-faced Trevor Lugavoy stretched out his legs in an insolent manner as if to make it clear that he did not mind if he was here or somewhere else. It was the engaging Trevor Kovtun who spoke.

  ‘You want us to bring someone to Death’s attention?’ It was more playful but just as impudent as his companion’s outstretched legs.

  ‘In order to bring about certain prophecies in holy writ it’s necessary for you to martyr someone.’

  They seemed distinctly put out by the idea, although not because of the crime involved.

  ‘We don’t chastise people before we kill them,’ said Trevor Kovtun.

  ‘Yes, we’re not common torturers,’ added Trevor Lugavoy.

  Gil was not about to take any nonsense no matter what their reputation. ‘Fortunately for your fine sensibilities no chastising is necessary. You’ll be very well paid but let me remind you that you’ve had refuge at my say so on Redeemer territory for a good few years.’ The point did not need labouring.