The Left Hand of God

31

In the shadowy rooms underneath the Opera kept only for the Materazzi about to try to slaughter each other, Cale sat in silence with Vague Henri and Kleist, brooding on what was to come. Until two days ago his thoughts had been of uncomplicated rage and revenge-all powerful but entirely familiar to him. But then everything had changed as he had lain in bed naked with Arbell Swan-Neck under rich cotton sheets and understood for the first time in his life the astonishing power of bliss. Consider what it was like for Cale-Cale the starving, Cale the brutalized, Cale the killer-to be wrapped in the arms and legs of this beautiful young woman, naked and desperately passionate as she stroked his hair and kissed him over and over again. And now he was waiting in a dim chamber smelling slightly of damp while above him the Opera was filling with thirty thousand people expecting to see him die. Until two days ago what had driven him was the will to survive: deep, animal, full of rage-but always part of him had not cared at all whether he lived or died. Now he did care, and very deeply, and so for the first time in a long time he was afraid. To love life is, of course, a wonderful thing, but not on this day of all days.

So the three of them sat, Vague Henri and Kleist alike catching the completely unfamiliar sense of dread coming from someone they had come, like him or not, to see as untouchable. Now with each muffled shout or cheer, with each thud of huge doors and lifts, unseen machines clanking and echoing, expectation and belief were replaced by doubt and fear.

With half an hour left there was a soft knock on the door, and Kleist opened it to let in Lord Vipond and IdrisPukke. They spoke softly, daunted by the strange mood in the dark room.

Was he all right?

“Yes.”

Did he need anything?

“No. Thank you.”

And then the silence of the sickbed descended. IdrisPukke, witness to the terrible slaughter of the Redeemers against all odds at the Cortina pass, was baffled. Chancellor Vipond, so wise and crafty, who knew he had never met such a creature as Cale before, saw now a young boy going to a hideous death in front of a bellowing crowd. These duels had always seemed to him merely reckless and unwarranted; now they were grotesque and impossible to accept.

“Let me go and talk to Solomon Solomon,” he said to Cale. “This is criminally stupid. I’ll make up an apology. Just leave it to me.”

He stood up to leave, and something surged in Cale, something to him that was astonishing and that he’d thought he could never feel again. Yes, let it stop. I don’t want this. I don’t. But as Vipond reached the door, something else, not pride, but his deep grasp of the reality of things, caused him to call out.

“Please. Chancellor Vipond. It won’t do any good. He wants my hide more than life itself. Nothing you can say will make any difference. You’ll give him the advantage over me for no gain.”

Vipond did not argue with him, because he knew he was right. There was a loud rap on the door.

“Fifteen minutes!”

Then it opened. “Oh, the vicar’s here to see you.”

A strikingly small man with a gentle smile entered the room dressed in a black suit and with a white band around his neck that looked something like a dog collar.

“I’ve come,” said the vicar, “to give you a blessing.” He paused. “If you’d like me to.”

Cale looked at IdrisPukke, who fully expected him to throw the man out. Seeing this, Cale smiled and said, “It can’t do any harm.” He held out his hand and IdrisPukke took it.

“Good luck, boy,” he said and left quickly. Cale nodded at Vipond and the chancellor nodded back, leaving just the three boys and the vicar.

“Shall we get on?” said the vicar pleasantly, as if he were officiating at a marriage or a baptism. He reached into his pocket and took out a small silver container. He opened the lid and showed Cale the powdery contents. “The ashes from the burned bark of an oak tree,” he said. “It’s thought to symbolize immortality,” he added, as if this was a view to which he, of course, attached little credibility. “May I?” He dipped his forefinger in the ash and spread it in a short line on Cale’s forehead.

“Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” he intoned cheerfully. “But remember also that though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow, though they be as red like crimson, they shall be like wool.” He snapped the lid of the silver container shut and put it back in his pocket with the air of a job well done.

“Um… oh… good luck.”

As he made for the door, Kleist called after him. “Did you say the same to Solomon Solomon?”

The vicar turned and looked at Kleist as if trying to remember.

“Do you know,” he said, smiling oddly, “I don’t think I did.” And with that he was gone.

There was one more visitor. There was a faint knock, Henri opened the door, and Riba slipped into the room. Henri flushed as she briefly squeezed his hand before passing on into the room. Cale was staring at the ground and appeared lost. She waited for a few moments before he looked up, surprised.

“I came to wish you good luck,” she said, speaking quickly and nervously, “and to say sorry and to give you this.” She held out a note. He took it and broke the elegant seal.

I love you. Please come back to me.

No one spoke for a minute.

“What do mean about being sorry?” asked Cale.

“It’s my fault you’re here.”

There was a snort of derision from Kleist, but he didn’t say anything. Cale looked at her as he handed the note to Vague Henri for safekeeping.

“What my friend here is trying to say is that this is all my own doing. I’m not being kind. It’s the truth.”

As might any of us in her situation, she wanted to be sure of her absolution and so she pushed her anxiety too far. “I still think it’s my fault.”

“Have it your own way.”

She looked so crestfallen at this that Vague Henri instantly took pity on her, put his hand in hers again and led her out of the room into the even darker corridor outside.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said, in tears and angry at herself.

“Don’t worry. He meant it about it not being your fault. He’s just got to give his attention to this now.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Cale’s going to win. He always wins. I have to go.” She squeezed his hand again and kissed him on the cheek. Henri stared after her, feeling many strange things, then went back into the waiting room.

With ten minutes left, Cale had begun, silent and automatic, to do his exercises before a fight. Kleist and Vague Henri joined in-arms milling, legs stretching, grunting softly with the exertion in the dim light. Then the loud knock on the door.

“Time, gentleman, pleeeease!”

The boys looked at each other. There was a short pause then a loud rap! as the bolt slid across a second door at the far end of the room. It groaned open slowly, and a ray of light bit through the gloom as if the sun itself waited just outside for Cale, the bright light arcing across the once dim room with all the weight of a blast of wind wanting to push them back into the safety of the dark.

As he started forward, Cale could hear her last words. “Run away. Leave. Please. What does any of this mean to you? Run away.”

In a few strides he was at the threshold and then out into the two o’clock sun.

Along with the second blast of light, the bear-pit roar of the crowd, like the end of the world, assaulted his eyes and ears. As he moved forward ten, then fifteen, then twenty feet and his eyes adjusted, he made out not the wall of the faces of the thirty thousand moving and booing, cheering and singing, but at first only the man waiting in the center of the arena holding two swords in their scabbards. He tried not to look across to Solomon Solomon, but he could not stop himself. Solomon Solomon, thirty yards to his left, walked straight, eyes fixed on the man in the center of the arena. He was huge, far taller and broader than Cale remembered, as if he had doubled in size since Cale had last seen him. Cale was astonished at himself as terror drained him of the strength that had made him invincible for nearly half his life. His tongue, dry as sand, stuck to the roof of his mouth; the muscles in his thighs hurt, barely able to support him; his arms, oak strong, felt as if to lift them would be an impossible feat; and there was a strange burning in his ears, louder even than the noise of the crowd, the booing and cheering and snatches of song. Along the amphitheater wall several hundred soldiers were standing at attention every four yards or so, alternately looking in at the crowd and out into the great ring itself.

The high-hatted hooligans sang joyfully:

NOBODY LIKES US, WE DON’T CARE

NOBODY LIKES US, WE DON’T CARE

BUT WE LOVE LOLLARDS AND HUGUENOTS

DO WE? DO WE? DO WE? DO?

OOOOOOOH NO, I DON’T THINK SO

BUT WE DO LOVE THE MEMPHIS AGGRO…

Then they raised their hands high over their heads and clapped in time to the beat of a new song, raising their knees up and down as they did so:

YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,

OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE

YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,

OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE

YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,

OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE

YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,

OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE

Trying to outperform them and taunt the participants at the same time, the baldy Lollards chanted happily:

HELLO, HELLO, WHO ARE YOU?

HELLO, HELLO, WHO ARE YOU?

ARE YOU A RUPERT? ARE YOU A FRED?

IN A MINUTE YOU’LL BE DEAD.

WHO ARE YOU?

OH WE DON’T LIKE TO SAY, WE DON’T LIKE TO BLAB

BUT SOON YOU’LL BE LYING ON A MARBLE SLAB

LYING ON A SLAB COVERED BY A WREATH

MISSING YOUR PRIVATES, MISSING YOUR TEETH

HELLO, HELLO, WHO ARE YOU?

Each step forward dragged Cale further down, as if weakness and fear, alive in him for the first time in years, ran riot in his guts and brain.

Then finally he was there and Solomon Solomon beside him, his rage and power burning alongside him like a second sun.

The master at arms gestured them to his left and right. Then he called out:

“WELCOME TO THE RED OPERA!”

With that, the crowd, almost as one, rose bellowing to its feet-except for the section reserved for the Materazzi, where the men cheered and the women applauded indifferently. This was not, in any case, the top drawer of Materazzi society, who would not readily associate themselves with something as vulgar as either this occasion or the not-quite-one-of-us Solomon Solomon, who, though respected for his power in the military hierarchy, was the great-grandson of a man who had made his fortune in dried fish. This is not to deny that a few of the choice of Materazzi society had come late, including a deeply reluctant Marshal, and were watching from carefully recessed private boxes while eating that morning’s catch of prawns. In the section reserved for the Mond, the blazing hatred they felt for Cale erupted in a sea of arms jabbing toward him and a chorus of derision.

“BOOM LACALACALACA BOOM LACALACALACA TAC TAC TAC.”

From high up on the West Bank some skillful thug or hooligan, having escaped the searches of the peelers, threw a dead cat in a massive arc, the body thudding into the sand only twenty feet from Cale, to a roar of delighted approval from the crowd.

Panic ran riot though Cale’s wilting soul, as if some reservoir of fear had been dammed up in him for all these years and now had burst its banks and swept away all nerve and guts, all gall and the will to power. His very spine shook with cowardice as the master at arms handed him his sword. He could barely now raise his hand to pull it free, so weak had he become. It was so heavy that he let it fall to hang loosely at his side. Everything now was just sensation-the bitter taste of death and terror on his tongue, the bright and burning sun, the noise of the crowd and the wall of faces. And then the master at arms raised his hands. The crowd hushed. Then he dropped his arms to his sides. The crowd bellowed as if one beast, and Cale watched as the man who was about to slaughter him raised his sword and cautiously, thoughtfully, moved toward the trembling, panic-stricken boy.

From deep inside, something in Cale called for protection, begging to be saved: IdrisPukke save me, Leopold Vipond save me, Henri and Kleist save me, Arbell Swan-Neck save me. But he was beyond all help except the help of the man he hated most in all the world. It was Redeemer Bosco who rescued him from the sickening blow and the red blood spilling on the sand; it was the years of violence at his hands, the daily dread and fear-those were what delivered him. Beginning in his chest, the waters of terror began to freeze. As Solomon Solomon quickly circled, the coldness spread downward through Cale’s heart and guts and into his thighs and then his arms. In only a few seconds, like a miraculous drug suppressing an agonizing pain, the old familiar, numbing, lifesaving indifference to fear and death was back. Cale was himself again.

Solomon Solomon, wary at first of Cale’s immobility, was moving in quickly for his attack, sword raised, eyes intent, controlled, the skillful emissary of violent death. He moved within striking distance, then held for a moment. Both stared into each other’s eyes. The crowd hushed. All sights seemed to come to Cale as in a tunnel-an older woman in the crowd was smiling at him like a kindly grandmother while pulling her finger across her throat, the dead cat so stiff on the ground it looked like a badly made toy, the young dancer at the arena’s edge, her mouth wide open in alarm and fear. And his opponent shuffling in the sand, the grating noise much louder than the crowd, who seemed to be so far away. And then Solomon Solomon gathered his strength-and struck.

Cale ducked and moved under his arm, stabbing downward as Solomon Solomon’s sword tried to cut him in two. Then both had swapped places-the crowd roared, desperately excited and confused. Neither of them had been touched. Then something began to drip from Cale’s hand and then it poured. The little finger on his left hand had been severed and lay on the sand, small and ridiculous.

Cale stepped back, the pain now hit, horrible, intense and agonizing. Solomon Solomon stood and took in carefully the blood and pain, the job not finished but the work of killing seriously begun. As the crowd started to see the blood on the sand, a slowly growing roar rippled around the Opera. There were boos from some of the hoi polloi, now rooting for the underdog, cheers from the Materazzi, more chattering mockery from the Mond. Then slowly the crowd went silent as Solomon Solomon, knowing that everything was now in his control, waited for the loss of blood, the pain and the fear of death, to do its work for him.

“Stay still,” said Solomon Solomon, “and perhaps I’ll finish you quickly. Though I can’t promise anything.”

Cale looked at him as if slightly puzzled. Then he moved his sword around in his hand, as if testing the weight, and made a lazy and slow pass at his opponent’s head. Years of instinct to counterattack such a weak attempt drew Solomon Solomon into striking at Cale, his great thighs pumping him forward like a sprinter. But with his second step he fell as if he had been struck by one of Henri’s bolts, crashing to the sand on his face and chest.

The crowd breathed in as if one creature-a great sigh of astonishment.

Cale’s stab downward in the first attack had not missed its mark at all. As Solomon Solomon’s first stroke took his finger, Cale had cut downward, severing the tendon in his opponent’s heel. This was why, along with the agony of the pain in his hand, he had been so puzzled that Solomon Solomon had been apparently untouched. That was why he gestured so carelessly with his second stroke-he simply wanted to make him move.

Despite his fear and astonishment, Solomon Solomon had instantly rolled onto the knee of his good leg, lashing out at Cale to make him keep his distance.

“You dirty little bag of shit!” he said in barely more than a whisper. Then he shouted in a huge burst of anger and frustration.

Cale kept back out of reach and waited. Another burst of rage and humiliation from Solomon Solomon. Cale simply watched as he began to accept that he had lost.

“Very well,” said Solomon Solomon-bitter and angry. “You win. I surrender.”

Cale looked at the master at arms.

“I was told that this had to continue until one of us is dead,” said Cale.

“Mercy is always possible,” said the master at arms.

“Is it now? Because I don’t remember anyone bringing it up at the time.”

“A defeated opponent may ask for mercy. It need not be granted, and no one may reproach the victor if he refuses. But I repeat that mercy is always possible.” The master at arms looked at the kneeling man. “If you wish to have mercy, Solomon Solomon, you must ask for it.”

Solomon Solomon shook his head as if a great struggle were going on inside him, which indeed it was. What was going on inside Cale was at first puzzlement and then a huge and growing indignation.

“I ask you for your-”

“Shut up!” shouted Cale, looking back and forth between his beaten opponent and the master at arms.

“You hypocrites! You drag me here on a rail, and when it suits you, you think you can bend rules because things haven’t worked out to your advantage. That’s all your camel shit about the nobility amounts to-that you have the power to make everything suit yourselves. Everything about you is just a pack of bloody lies.”

“He is obliged,” said the master at arms, “to pay you ten thousand dollars to redeem his life.”

Cale lashed out, and with a cry Solomon Solomon collapsed on the ground, a deep gash in his upper arm.

“Tell me,” said Cale, “are you worth more now or less? You beat me without reason or mercy, but now look at you. This is childish. How many dozens have you butchered without giving them a second thought, and now it’s your turn, you’re whining for an exception to be made for you?” Cale gasped in astonishment and disgust. “Why? This is your fate; one day it will be mine. What’s your beef, old man?”

And with that Cale stood over Solomon Solomon, pulled his head up by the hair and dispatched him with a single blow to the back of the neck. He dropped the now slack body onto the sand, face upward, eyes open and sightless, a trickle of blood still pumping from his nose. Soon it stopped, and that was that for Solomon Solomon.

Throughout the final seconds of Solomon Solomon’s life, Cale had been aware of nothing else, not the pain in his left hand or the crowd. Rage deafened him to everything. Now the pain and the crowd returned. The sound of the crowd was an odd one-no cheering but for a few small sections too drunk to know what they were a witness to, some shouts and boos, but mostly amazement and disbelief.

From the bench where they had been told to wait, Vague Henri and Kleist watched on in a state of shock. It was Vague Henri who realized what Cale was going to do next.

“Walk away,” he whispered to himself. And then shouted to Cale,

“Don’t!” He tried to move forward but was prevented by a peeler and one of the soldiers. In the middle of the Opera Rosso, Cale flipped the body on its back, dropped his sword onto the stomach of the dead man, then pulled his sprawled feet together and started to drag his body through the dust toward the enclosure filled with the Materazzi.

It took him about twenty seconds, the arms of the dead man spread out behind him, his head bouncing on the none too even surface and the blood from the corpse leaving an irregular bright red smear. The master at arms signaled the troops in front of the crowd to move closer together. The Materazzi women and men and the young Mond looked on in an almost stupefied silence.

Then Cale, still holding Solomon Solomon’s legs under his arms, stopped, looked over the crowd as if they were worth ten cents and dropped the feet-a thud onto the ground.

He stretched his arms high above his head and bellowed at the crowd in malevolent triumph. The master at arms signaled the peeler to let Henri and Kleist pull him away. As they ran to Cale, he started walking up and down in front of the soldiers and the crowd they were protecting, looking like a polecat searching for a way into the chicken coop. Then he began beating his chest heftily with his right hand three times, each time shouting with delight, “Mea culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea maxima culpa!” It was incomprehensible to the crowd, but they needed no translation. They erupted in fury and seemed to sway forward like a single living thing, baying their hatred back. Then the two boys caught up with him and eased their arms around his shoulders.

“That’s right, Cale,” said Kleist as he squeezed him carefully. “Why don’t you take on every one of them?”

“It’s time to go, Thomas. Come with us.”

Screaming defiance at the crowd all the way, he allowed himself to be guided back to the door of the waiting room, and within thirty seconds it had closed behind them and they were sitting in the dim light, dazed by horrible wonder. It had been ten minutes since they had left.

In her palazzo, Arbell Swan-Neck waited for news in an unbearable frenzy of terror. She could not bear to go to the Opera and watch him die, for she was sure he would. Every intuition screamed at her that she had seen her lover for the last time. Then there was a strange scramble outside her door; it burst open and a wide-eyed and breathless Riba rushed into the room.

“He’s alive!”

You can imagine the scene when they were alone that night-the thousand kisses of delight showered upon the exhausted boy, the caresses, the torrent of professions of love and adoration. If he had been through the Valley of the Shadow of Death that afternoon, he had been rewarded that night with a sight of heaven. Hell was with him also-the pain from his missing finger was intense, much worse than from more serious injuries he had taken. He could concentrate on his delirious reception only once Vague Henri had managed, at great expense, to find a small amount of opium that quickly reduced the pain to a dull ache.

Late on in the night, he tried to explain to Arbell what had happened to him before the fight with the late Solomon Solomon. Perhaps it was the opium, perhaps the sheer strain and horror of the day, the closeness to stark death, but he struggled to make sense. He wanted to explain himself to her but feared to do so. In the end she stopped him out of pity for his confusion and horror, and also perhaps for herself. She did not want to be reminded of her strange lover’s pact with killing.

“Least said, soonest mended.”

Ejected from her rooms before the dawn guard came on duty, Cale left (though after many more kisses and professions of love) to find Vague Henri on guard, alone.

“How are you?” said Vague Henri.

“I don’t know. Strange.”

“Do you want a mug of tea?” Cale nodded. “Then get it on the boil. I’ll join you when I’ve handed over the watch.”

Ten minutes later Vague Henri joined Cale in the guardroom just as the tea had finished brewing. They sat in silence, drinking and smoking, the pleasures of which Cale had introduced to both Vague Henri and Kleist, who now was rarely to be seen without a roll-up between his lips.

“What went wrong?” said Vague Henri after five minutes.

“I got the shits. Bad.”

“I thought he was going to kill you.”

“He would have done if he’d been less wary. He thought the reason I wasn’t moving was some sort of trick.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“So what changed?”

“Don’t know. It went in a few seconds-like someone poured ice-cold water over me.”

“Luck, then.”

“Yes.”

“What now?”

“I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Perhaps you’d better.”

“Meaning?”

“We’re finished here.”

“Why?” said Cale, shifting and pretending to concentrate on making another roll-up.

“You killed Solomon Solomon, then dumped his body in front of the Materazzi and dared them.”

“Dared them?”

“To do their worst, was that it?” Cale didn’t reply. “I imagine their worst could be pretty bad, don’t you? And it won’t be face-to-face next time. Someone will drop a brick on your head.”

“All right. I get the point.”

But Vague Henri was not finished.

“And what about when they find out about you and Arbell Materazzi? All you’ve got to protect you is Vipond and her father. What do you think he’s going to do when he finds out-arrange a marriage? Do you, Arbell Materazzi, with all your airs and graces, take this, the apprentice pig-boy and all-round troublemaker Thomas Cale, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

Cale stood up wearily. “I need to sleep. I can’t think about this now.”