The Left Hand of God

5

Ah!” said Redeemer Picarbo, the Lord of Discipline, to himself with deep satisfaction as he found what he was looking for, a long, thin skewer with a sharp pincer on the end. “Praise God.” He tested it. Snap! Snap!

Satisfied, he turned back to the girl on the table and peered thoughtfully into the terrible but beautifully made wound. He reached down and, taking gentle hold of her hand, now lifeless, he placed it at her side. Then he took the skewer in his right hand and was about to continue when the girl in the corner started to try to scream again. This time he spoke more firmly, as if he had run out of patience.

“I told you to be quiet.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll get to you in good time.”

Whether he heard something or whether it was just the instinct born of long experience, the Lord of Discipline turned and raised his arm to block the blow aimed at the back of his head by Cale. The Redeemer caught Cale just below the wrist, a blow of such force that the half brick in his hand shot across the room and hit one of the cupboards with a crash, shattering into a dozen pieces. Cale was off balance, and the Lord of Discipline shoved him violently to the left, sending him flying into the base of the table where the bound girl was lying. She let out another muffled scream.

The Lord stared at Cale in utter astonishment. It was just not possible that an acolyte could attack him, not here, not in this place, not at any time at all. In a thousand years no such thing had ever been heard of. For a moment they stared at each other.

“Are you mad? What are you doing here?” demanded the Lord in a furious rage. “You will be hung for this… hung and quartered. You will be strangled and disemboweled while you are still alive and have your guts burned in front of you. And…”

He stopped after the fast torrent of words, again overtaken by astonishment that he had been attacked. Cale was white with shock. The Lord of Discipline turned to one side and picked up what looked like, and indeed was, a butcher’s knife.

“I’ll do it now, you little shit bag.” He moved toward the prone boy and raised the knife, standing over him, legs apart. And then Cale struck out with the skewer that had fallen beside him in the struggle, taking the Lord of Discipline on the inside of his thigh.

The Lord staggered back, not because he was hurt, but out of an even deeper astonishment than he thought it possible to feel.

“You struck me!” he said. Astonishment. Incredulity. Wonder. “You struck me.” He looked down at the boy. “By God, you’ll die slowly. By all that’s-” The Lord stopped, quite suddenly, mid-flow. A puzzled expression came over his face, as if he had been asked a difficult question. He cocked his head to one side as if listening for something.

He sat down, slowly, as if pushed by a giant but benevolent hand. He looked at Cale as the boy moved back, shifting away from him. Then the Lord looked down at his legs. A large pool of blood was staining the skirt of his cassock. Cale suddenly seemed not to be either a frightened boy or an enraged murderer. An odd calm had fallen on him, and now he looked more like a curious child watching something of considerable but not overbearing interest. Redeemer Picarbo continued pulling at his cassock, bewildered, now revealing his undertrousers massively stained with red. He drew his hand back as if affronted, looked at Cale as if to say, “Do you see what you’ve done?” then reached down and tore the undertrousers away from the wound to expose the skin of his thigh. Blood was pumping out of the small wound in spurt after spurt. He stared down at it, utterly perplexed, then looked at Cale with the same expression. “Bring me a towel,” he said, gesturing over to a pile of large swabs on the table near the dead girl. Cale responded by standing up but stayed where he was. It was as if only part of what he was seeing was real. The Redeemer in front of him trying to stem the bleeding with his fingers and sighing in irritation as if he had sprung a small but deeply inconvenient leak-the black stain of blood spreading relentlessly across the floor. The sight and what it meant for him were impossible to take in. The part of him not able to grasp what he had done was thinking that it would be possible to go back and things would be like they were less than a minute before, and that the longer he waited to change things back the harder it would be. But he also knew there was nothing to be done. Everything was changed, utterly changed, horribly changed. A line he had heard a hundred times from the Redeemers’ Book of Proverbs came back to him and kept repeating itself over and over in his head: “We are like water spilled on the ground that cannot be gathered up again.” And so he kept on looking, paralyzed, as Picarbo leaned back as if terribly tired, resting first on his elbow and then on his back.

Cale continued watching as the breath of the lord’s body stopped and the light in his eyes failed. Redeemer Picarbo, the fiftieth Lord of Discipline of that name, was dead.