The Left Hand of God

18

Cale might have thought that the next two months at Treetops Lodge were the happiest of his life, if he’d had another happy experience to compare it with. But, given that two months spent in the Seventh Circle of Hell would have been an improvement on his life in the Sanctuary, his happiness was not to be compared to anything. He was merely happy. He slept twelve hours a day and often more, drank beer and in the evening would enjoy a smoke with IdrisPukke, who took great pains to assure him that once he got over his initial dislike, smoking would be both a great pleasure and one of the few truly dependable consolations that life had to offer.

They would sit in the evening outside the old hunting lodge, on its large wood veranda, while listening to the ribbit-ribbit of the insects and watching the swallows and bats diving and ducking and tumbling at the day’s end. Often they would sit for hours in silence, punctuated from time to time by one of IdrisPukke’s drolleries about life and its pleasures and illusions.

“Solitude is a wonderful thing, Cale, and in two ways. First, it allows a man to be with himself, and second, it prevents him being with others.” Cale nodded his agreement with a sincerity that was only possible for someone who had spent every waking and sleeping hour of his life with hundreds of others and always being watched and spied upon.

“To be sociable,” IdrisPukke continued, “is a risky thing-even fatal-because it means being in contact with people, most of whom are dull, perverse and ignorant and are really with you only because they cannot bear their own company. Most people bore themselves and greet you not as a true friend but as a distraction-like a dancing dog or some half-wit actor with a fund of amusing stories.” IdrisPukke had a particular dislike of actors and was frequently to be heard declaiming on their shortcomings, a distaste lost on Cale because he had never seen a play: the idea of pretending to be someone else for money was incomprehensible.

“Of course, you are young and have yet to feel the strongest impulse of all: the love of women. Don’t get me wrong-every woman and every man should feel what it means to love and be loved-a woman’s body is the best picture of perfection I’ve ever known. But to be perfectly honest with you, Cale-not that it will make any difference to you-to desire love, as some great wit once said, is to desire to be chained to a lunatic.”

He would then open another beer, pour a quarter-never more and never too many times-into Cale’s mug and refuse to give him any more tobacco, pointing out that when it came to smoking, you could have too much of a good thing, and that in excess it could damage a young man’s wind.

And after that, sometimes long into the early morning, Cale looked forward to what had become almost his greatest pleasure-a warm bed, a soft mattress and all utterly, completely on his own-no groaning and crying out and snoring and the smell of farts of hundreds-just wonderful silence and peace. Bliss was it in those days for Cale to be alive.

He began wandering aimlessly in the woods for hours at a time, vanishing as soon as he had woken up and only returning to the hunting lodge as night closed in. The hills, the occasional meadow, rivers, the wary deer and the pigeons cooing in the trees during the hot afternoons-the wonderful bliss of just wandering on his own was a more intense pleasure even than beer or tobacco. The only thing to mar his happiness was the thought of Arbell Swan-Neck, whose face would come unbidden to him late at night or in the afternoon lying by the river, where the only sounds were of an occasional fish jumping, the song of birds and the faint wind in the trees. The feelings he had when she came into his mind were odd and unwelcome-they clashed unpleasantly with the wonderful peace he felt. She made him angry and he didn’t want to feel angry ever again, he just wanted to feel like this-free, lazy, answerable to no one in the warmth and green beauty of the great summer forest.

The other great delight he discovered was eating. To eat to live, to have intense hunger satisfied just by filling your stomach was one thing, but for a boy whose diet had for much of his life consisted of dead men’s feet, the possibility of good food in his new life meant that something people often took for granted could become a source of wonder.

IdrisPukke was a great food lover and, having lived at one time or another almost everywhere in the civilized world, considered himself, as on most subjects, an expert. He loved preparing meals almost as much as he loved eating them, but unfortunately his desire to teach his willing pupil about the world had some false starts.

His first attempt to introduce Cale to the great art of eating ended badly. Cale had returned to the lodge one day after a ten-hour absence and ravenous enough to eat a priest, only to be confronted by the Emperor’s Feast-IdrisPukke’s improvised version of the most spectacular meal he had ever eaten, a specialty of the House of Imur Lantana in the city of Apsny. Many of the ingredients had to be substituted: pork pizzles because they were not to be found in the mountains as the locals considered pigs to be unclean; saffron because it was too expensive and no one had ever heard of it anyway. Also, a dish considered by many to be the highlight of the meal was missing: IdrisPukke, though no sentimentalist, could not bring himself to drown ten baby larks in brandy before roasting them in a hot oven for less than thirty seconds.

When Cale arrived, brown-faced from the sun and starving, he laughed aloud at the delicacies laid before him by a proud IdrisPukke.

“Start there,” said the smiling cook, and Cale almost literally launched himself at a plate of minced freshwater prawns fried on white bread with a sauce of sour wild raspberries. After five of these IdrisPukke nodded to the grilled duck and plum sauce fingers and then, along with a gentle warning to slow down, fried chicken wings in bread crumbs and strips of deep-fried potato.

Cale was soon, of course, violently sick. IdrisPukke had seen many people vomit during his life and had frequently done so himself. He had witnessed the disagreeable Kvenland habit of interrupting thirty-nine-course banquets with visits to the bilematorium or spew-parlor, visits that were necessary every ten courses or so if you were to finish and thereby avoid the deadly insult to your hosts implied in not making it to course thirty-nine. Cale’s heavings were on an epic scale as his overburdened stomach expelled everything he had eaten in the previous twenty minutes and, as it appeared to IdrisPukke, pretty much everything else in his entire life.

Finally the exhausted boy was finished and he went to bed. The next morning Cale came outside with a greeny white tinge to his face that IdrisPukke had previously seen only on a three-day-old corpse. Cale sat down and took, with considerable caution, a cup of weak tea without milk. In a wan voice he began to explain to IdrisPukke the reason he had been so violently ill.

“Well,” said IdrisPukke after Cale had finished telling him about the Redeemers’ way with food. “If I’m ever disposed to think badly of you, I shall try to excuse you on the grounds that little should be expected of a child brought up on dead men’s feet.” There was a short silence. “I hope you don’t mind me giving you some advice.”

“No,” said Cale, too weak to be affronted.

“There’s a limit to how much we should expect of the capacity for acceptance of other people. It might be better, should the subject ever arise in good company, not to mention the rats.”