The Left Hand of God

20

IdrisPukke had refused to give up trying to reeducate Cale’s stomach. His new diet would at first have to be simple-and was not simplicity, after all, a test of a good cook’s skill? The next time Cale returned to one of IdrisPukke’s special meals, it was to fresh trout caught in the lake next to the lodge, lightly steamed and with boiled potatoes and herbs and leaves. Cale was cautious with the potatoes because they had a tiny amount of butter melted over them, but they stayed down and he even asked for more.

And so the days and nights passed. Cale continued on his long walks with and without IdrisPukke. They sat in silence for hours and talked for hours, although it was IdrisPukke who did most of the talking. He also taught Cale to fish, how to eat in civilized company (no belching, slurping, eat with your mouth shut), told him about his extraordinary life-along with many stories at his own expense, something that Cale continued to find bewildering. To laugh at an adult meant a vicious beating-for one to invite you to laugh at him defied belief. At night he would sometimes feel almost uncontainable bursts of joy for no reason at all. IdrisPukke also continued to offer Cale the benefits of his philosophy of life. “Love between a man and woman is the best possible example of the fact that all this world’s hopes are an absurd delusion, and it is so because of the fact that love promises so excessively much and performs so excessively little.” And again: “I know you don’t need me to tell you that this world is hell, but try to understand that men and women are on the one hand the tormented souls in that hell and on the other the devils in it doing the tormenting.” And yet more: “No one of real intelligence will accept anything just because some authority declares it to be so. Don’t accept the truth of anything you have not confirmed for yourself.”

In turn Cale told him about his life with the Redeemers.

“At first it wasn’t just the beatings that scared us. In those days we believed what they said-that even if we weren’t caught doing something wrong we were born evil and that God saw everything we did so we had to confess to everything. If we didn’t and we died in a state of sin, we would go to hell and burn for all eternity. And we did die, every few months, and what they told us was that most of us went to hell and burned for all eternity. I used to lie awake at night in those days after the prayers that always finished ‘What if you should die tonight?’ Sometimes I was absolutely certain that if I fell asleep, I’d die and burn forever in agony.” He stopped talking for a moment. “How old, IdrisPukke, were you before you knew what terror was?”

“A lot older than five, anyway. It was at the Battle of Goat River. I was, what, seventeen. We were ambushed on a scouting trip. My first time in a real fight. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been trained. And I was pretty good, third in my year. The Druse Cavalry came over the hill and then there was just confusion and noise and chaos. I couldn’t speak, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I began to shake and I wanted to… well… I mean.”

“Shit yourself?” offered Cale.

“Why not be blunt? When it was all over, and it didn’t last more than five minutes, I was still alive. But I hadn’t even drawn my sword.”

“Did anyone else see?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“They didn’t beat you?”

“No. But if it happened again, well, you weren’t going to last long.” There was another pause. “So you’ve never felt like that?” said IdrisPukke at last.

It was by no means a simple question. One of the conditions on which his brother, or, to be precise, his half brother, had released IdrisPukke and put Cale in his control was that he must find out everything about the boy-and most important his apparent lack of fear and whether or not this was exceptional or in some way engineered by the Redeemers.

“I used to be afraid all the time when I was young,” said Cale after a while. “But then it stopped.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” This was not true, of course, or not entirely true.

“And now you’re not afraid at all?”

Cale looked at him. The last few weeks had amazed him, and he was grateful to IdrisPukke and had felt many odd and unfamiliar emotions of friendship and trust. But it would take more than a few weeks of kindness and generosity to shake Cale’s wariness. He considered whether or not to change the subject. But it didn’t, on the face of it, seem to matter much if he told the truth.

“I feel afraid about things that can hurt me in general. I know what the Redeemers want to do to me. It’s hard to explain. But fighting-it’s different. What you were saying about the Battle of…” He looked at IdrisPukke.

“Goat River.”

“… That stuff about shaking and wanting to shit yourself.”

“Don’t think you have to spare my feelings at all.”

“For me it’s the opposite. I just go cold-everything becomes very clear.”

“And afterwards?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you feel afraid?”

“No. Mostly I don’t feel anything-except after I gave Conn Materazzi a good hiding. That felt pretty good. It still does. But when I killed the soldiers in the ring, I didn’t feel good. After all-they never did me any harm.” He paused. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

And being wise, IdrisPukke did not push his luck. And so for the next few weeks Cale went back to his wandering, and in the evening they drank, smoked and ate together, the food slowly becoming richer as Cale was better able to take some fish fried in crispy batter, more butter on his vegetables, a drop of cream with his blackberries.

During the two months that Cale and IdrisPukke had been enjoying the calm and tranquillity of Treetops, a man and a woman had been watching over them. This should not imply care or concern-imagine the loving watchfulness of a mother over her child but without the love.

In stories of the good and bad it’s only the good who are subject to dreadful luck, mischance and blundering. The bad are always sharp and act with discipline, have cunning plans only just thwarted in the nick of time. The evil are always on the cusp of winning ways. In real life bad as well as good make simple and easily avoidable mistakes, have dreadful days and go awry. The wicked have weaknesses other than their willingness to kill and maim. Even the bleakest, cruelest soul can have its tender spots. Even the harshest desert has its pools, its shady trees and gentle streams. It’s not just the rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike, but good and bad luck, unlooked-for victories and unmerited defeats.

Daniel Cadbury, his back against a mulberry tree, closed the book he was reading, The Melancholy Prince, and grunted with satisfaction.

“Be quiet!” said the woman, who had been attentively facing away from him but, on hearing the snap of the book being shut, turned her head sharply in his direction.

“He’s two hundred yards away,” said Cadbury. “The boy heard nothing.”

Checking briefly that Cale was still asleep on the banks of the river below, the woman looked back at Cadbury and this time merely stared. Had he been other than he was-murderer, former galley slave and sometime intelligencer to Kitty the Hare-Cadbury might well have been unnerved. She was not ugly, exactly, perhaps just extremely plain- but her eyes, empty of everything but hostility, would have made almost anyone uneasy.

“Would you like to borrow it?” said Cadbury, gesturing at her with the book. “It’s very fine.”

“I can’t read,” she said, thinking that he was mocking her, which he was. Normally Cadbury would not have been so unwise as to taunt Jennifer Plunkett, a killer so admired by Kitty the Hare that he reserved her for none but his most difficult assassinations. He had groaned in dismay when Kitty the Hare had told him who was to partner him.

“Not Jennifer Plunkett, please.”

“Not an amicable companion, I agree,” gurgled Kitty, “but there are many very important persons interested in this boy, myself included, and it is my instinct that a good deal of mayhem of the kind at which Jennifer Plunkett so excels might be required. Abide her for my sake, Cadbury.” So that was that.

It was boredom that caused Cadbury to goad the dangerously talented butcher still glaring at him. They had been watching the boy for nearly a month now, and all he had done was eat, sleep, swim, walk and run. Even the pleasures of The Melancholy Prince, a book he had enjoyed through a dozen readings in as many years, was not enough to stop him from growing restless.

“No offense, Jennifer.”

“Don’t call me Jennifer.”

“I have to call you something.”

“No, you don’t.” She did not look away and did not blink. There were limits to her tolerance and they were not very great. He shrugged to suggest that he was giving way, but she did not move. He began to wonder if he should get ready. Then, like an animal, not the kind that cared for human company, she turned her head away and went back to staring at the sleeping boy.

It’s not just her eyes that are odd, thought Cadbury, it’s what’s behind them. She’s alive, but I can’t put my finger on exactly how.

Given his profession, Cadbury was entirely familiar with murderous persons. He was, after all, one himself. He killed when it was required, rarely with any pleasure and sometimes with reluctance and even remorse. Most murderers for hire took a certain pleasure, more or less, in what they did. Jennifer Plunkett was different in that he found it impossible to tell what was going on when she killed. His experience of watching her dispose of the two men IdrisPukke had bribed the soldiers to arrest was unlike anything he had witnessed before. On their release and unaware of their role as stooges, they had somehow blundered into the forest half a mile from Treetops and made camp. Without consulting him-professionally discourteous, but he’d decided to let the matter drop-she had walked toward them as they sat brewing up a pot of tea and stabbed them both. It was the lack of fuss that so astonished Cadbury. She killed them with as little effort as a mother might give to the picking up of her children’s toys, a kind of bored distraction. By the time the men realized what was happening, they were already dying. Even the most vicious murderers in his experience had to, or wanted to, work themselves up to kill. But not Jennifer Plunkett.

His reverie was broken by the sound of the boy down by the river, who had now woken up and was on the move. He had backed away from the bank to a distance of twenty yards or so. He started calling out with a low “Whooooooo!” then launched himself at the river’s edge, running faster and faster. Raising his voice to a high-pitched shout, he leapt from the bank, formed a bomb in midair and splashed in the water. Almost immediately he shot to the surface, screaming with laughter at the freezing cold, and thrashed his way back to the bank. Naked as the day, he danced up and down, laughing and shouting at the dreadful pleasure of the cold water and the warm summer air.

“Nice to be young, eh?” said Cadbury. It was impossible not to share in the boy’s delight. And then with astonishment he saw how true this was. Jennifer Plunkett was smiling, her face transformed like a painting of a holy saint. Jennifer Plunkett was in love. As soon as she was aware of Cadbury looking at her, she vanished in an instant from whatever paradise the boy had taken her to. She looked at Cadbury, blinked like a hawk or a feral cat and then turned back to the river, her expression now utterly void.

“What do you think Kitty the Hare wants with him?” she said.

“No idea,” said Cadbury. “But nothing good. It’s a pity,” he added, quite sincerely. “He seems such a happy little chap.” He regretted saying this as soon as it was out, but he was still unnerved at what he’d witnessed. It was like seeing a snake blush. That’ll teach you, thought Cadbury, to think you know what’s going on in other people. Full of wonder at this strange turn of events, he sat down and laid his back again against the mulberry tree.

As it turned out, it didn’t take long to find out. He appeared to Jennifer Plunkett to be asleep, but Cadbury had far too much nous not to be thrashing out this unforeseen development. He kept his not-quite closed eyes on Jennifer’s back and drew his Mott knife and hid it, hand around the hilt, under his right thigh, the one farthest away from her. For fully thirty minutes he watched her motionless back while time and again he could hear the boy’s repeated “Whooo!” and the splash and the scream of laughter. And then she turned and moved toward him, again without the least fuss, knife in hand, and began the killing blow. He blocked it with his left and stabbed upward with the Mott knife in his right. He marveled at her speed even as they rolled around in the dried-up autumn leaves that covered the forest floor. Back and forth, back and forth they rolled in their dreadful clutch, only the two of them hearing the hot low rasp of each other’s breath and the rustle of dead leaves as, almost lip to lip, they stared into each other’s eyes. And slowly his greater strength began to tell. She wriggled and squirmed and writhed with all her sinewy might, but Cadbury had her pinned and she was done. But Jennifer had one more weapon beyond her hatred and her rage that she could call on: her dreadful love. How could she give him up and die? And with a heave she slipped to one side, unbalanced Cadbury, wrenched free of his left hand’s grasp and was up and haring down the hill to her darling boy.

“Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!” she cried. The boy looked up as he climbed naked onto the mossy riverbank. Openmouthed, he gawped at the screaming harpy racing desperately down the hill and calling his name over and over: “Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!”

In a life cursed with many extraordinary sights, this was one of the strangest of them all: a wild-faced sexless thing was shouting his name, waving a knife and rushing toward him with a dreadful madness in its eyes. Astonished, he ran for his clothes, fumbled for his sword, dropped it, picked it up again and raised it to strike as she was almost upon him, shouting wildly. Then he heard a sharp buzz, and a hollow thud like the slap of a man’s hand on a horse’s flank. Jennifer gave a sharp cough and went flying head over arse past the terrified Cale and hit the trunk of a sawtooth oak with a wallop.

Cale legged it behind a tree, his heart thumping and fluttering like a just-trapped bird. At once he started looking for an escape. Surrounding the tree there was a rough arc of cover-free ground varying between forty to sixty yards in width. He looked at the body. He could see now it was a woman, and she was lying crumpled against the base of a tree with her backside in the air and to one side. She had what looked like a three-ounce arrow in her back, the tip just emerging from her chest. Her nose was bleeding, a single drop falling to the ground every three or four seconds. It would have been no easy shot, hitting a moving target like that, but neither was it exceptional. She’d been running away from the direction of the arrow, whereas if he went now, immediately, he would be running across the line of fire. From a standing start it would take five or six seconds to reach cover. Enough for one shot, not more, and it would have to be a fine one. But then maybe he was as good as Kleist. Kleist could make a shot like that three times out of four.

“Hey! Sonny Jim!”

About two hundred yards and dead ahead, thought Cale.

“What do you want?”

“How about ‘thank you’?”

“Thank you. Now why don’t you piss off?”

“You ungrateful little shit, I just saved your life.”

Was he moving? It sounded like it.

“Who are you?”

“Your guardian angel, mate, that’s who I am. She was a very bad girl, that one, a very bad girl.”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to cut your throat, mate. That’s what she did for a living.”

“Why?”

“No idea, mate. Vipond sent me to keep an eye on you and his ne’er-do-well brother.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“No reason. Don’t care, anyway. I just don’t want you coming after me. I wouldn’t want to have to put one in you, not after all the trouble I’ve taken to keep you alive. So you just stay there for the next fifteen minutes, and during that period of patience I’ll be on my way and no harm done. All right?”

Cale thought about this: make a run for it, follow him, catch him, beat the truth out of him. Or along the way get an arrow in his back. He sounded, this man, as if he knew what he was up to. Anyway, there was an alternative.

“All right. Fifteen minutes.”

“Word of honor?”

“What?”

“Never mind. How about that ‘thank you,’ then?”

And with that both Cadbury and Cale were on the move. Cadbury was yomping it back into the deepest part of the forest, and Cale, using the tree as a screen, had slipped into the river and was carefully swimming along its edge and away.

Three hours later Cale and IdrisPukke were back by the river examining the body of the dead woman under the cover of a cloud of trees. They had spent two hours searching for any sign of Cale’s alleged savior but had found nothing. IdrisPukke frisked the body and quickly discovered three knives, two garrotes, a thumbscrew, a knuckle duster and, in her mouth, alongside the left gum, a flexible inch-long blade wrapped in silk.

“Whatever she was up to,” said IdrisPukke, “she wasn’t trying to sell you clothes pegs.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Your savior? Sounds plausible. I don’t know about whether I believe him, exactly. But let’s face it, if he’d wanted to kill you, he could have done it at any time during the last month. Still-it stinks.”

“You really think Vipond sent him?”

“It’s possible. Lot of trouble to go to on account of someone like you. No offense.”

The reason Cale was not affronted by IdrisPukke’s remark was because he’d been thinking the same thing.

“What about the woman?” he said at last.

“Dump her in the river.”

So that’s what they did and that was the end of Jennifer Plunkett.

That evening the two of them were eating inside the lodge to be on the safe side and discussing what to do about the day’s strange events.

“The thing is,” said IdrisPukke, “what can we do? If whoever killed that young woman wanted to do the same to you, they would already have done it. Or they could do it tomorrow.”

“You said it stinks.”

“It’s entirely possible that Vipond sent someone to keep an eye on us, even if it was for his own reasons. It is also possible that one of the Mond you humiliated so publicly paid someone to encoffin you. They have the money and the bile. It looked like the woman was coming to attack you: she had a knife in her hand. This man stopped her and then cleared off. Those are just facts. They’re obviously not all the facts, and subsequent discoveries may make us come to see those facts that we have in an entirely different light. But until then, speculation is just that. Stay here or go somewhere else-we remain entirely vulnerable to anyone with a good aim and malice or a reward in their heart. We assume what the facts we know tell us because we might just as well do so. Have you any alternative?”

“No.”

“There we are, then.”

Realizing there wasn’t much point in skulking inside, Cale went outside for a smoke. He could see the sense of IdrisPukke’s fatalism, but it wasn’t, after all, his fate that was the one in question. As IdrisPukke was always saying himself, every philosopher can stand the tooth-ache except for the one who has it. Preoccupied, he barely registered there was a sleek pigeon walking up and down the terrace table eating stale bread crumbs.

“Don’t move,” said IdrisPukke softly from just behind him, and holding out a piece of bread he slowly approached the bird and began feeding it, carefully putting his hand around its body and then grasping it tightly. Turning the pigeon over, IdrisPukke began removing a small metal tube attached to one of its legs. Cale looked on, utterly bemused.

“It’s a messenger pigeon,” said IdrisPukke. “Sent by Vipond. Here, hold it.” He handed Cale the bird and unscrewed the tube, removed a piece of rice paper and began reading. As he did so his face became grim.

“A troop of Redeemers has taken Arbell Swan-Neck.”

Cale’s face reddened in astonishment and confusion.

“Why?”

“It doesn’t say. The point is that she was staying at Lake Constanz. It’s about fifty miles from here. The quickest route back to the Sanctuary is through the Cortina pass-that’s about eighty miles north of here. If that’s the way they’re going, we have to find them and get word to the troops Vipond is sending behind us.” He looked worried and confused. “This doesn’t make any sense. It’s a declaration of war. Why would the Redeemers do this?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a reason. This wouldn’t have happened without Bosco’s nod. And Bosco knows what he’s doing.”

“Well, there’s no moon, so they can’t travel at night, and neither can we. We’ll pack now, get some sleep and start at dawn.” He drew in a deep breath. “Though God knows we’ve got little chance of catching them.”