The Left Hand Of God (34 page)

“Was it true about the brutality of that man Bosco?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he pick on Cale?”

“I suppose he had his number.”

“Please tell me the truth. Why was he so cruel to him?”

“He’s a lunatic, specially where Cale was concerned. I don’t mean he was like your usual lunatic, raving and ranting—in all the years at the Sanctuary I never heard him raise his voice once. But he’s as mad as a sack of cats for all that.”

“Is it true that he made him fight to the death with four men?”

“Yes—but the reason he won is just because of how that hole in his head means he can tell what you’re going to do.”

“You don’t like Cale, do you?”

“What’s there to like?”

“Riba told me he saved your life.”

“Seeing he was the one who put it in danger in the first place, I’d say we were even.”

“What can I do you for, young man?” asked the cheery butcher, shouting above the racket of the marketplace.

Cale shouted back equally cheerfully: “You can stop sending the meat from dead dogs and cats up to the guardroom in the West Palazzo.”

The butcher, now very much less cheery, picked up a vicious-looking club from under the counter and started to walk round it toward Cale. “Who do you think you are, you little shite, talking to me like that?”

He moved toward Cale surprisingly quickly, given his size, swinging the club as he came. Cale ducked as the club lashed past the top of his head, unbalancing the butcher, who was helped on his way into the mud as Cale clipped his heels. Then he stood on the butcher’s wrist and twisted the club out of his hands.

“Now,” said Cale, bouncing the end of the club gently up and down on the back of his attacker’s head. “You and me are going to go into wherever it is you store the meat and you’re going to choose the very best, and every week you’re going to send me stuff just as good. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes!”

“Good.” Cale stopped bouncing the club on the butcher’s head and allowed him to get to his feet.

“This way,” he said, his voice full of repressed bile.

The three of them made their way into a storeroom behind the stall full of haunches and sides of meat, beef and pork and lamb as well as a corner devoted to the smaller carcasses of cats, dogs and other creatures Cale did not recognize.

“Choose the best,” said Vague Henri.

The butcher had started lifting the best of the rump and sirloin from their hooks when a familiar voice called out, “Stop!”

It was Solomon Solomon with four of his most experienced soldiers. If it seems odd that a man of Solomon Solomon’s rank should be out choosing meat for his men, it should be pointed out that soldiers will endure death, injury, privation and disease much more readily than bad food. Solomon Solomon made a great deal of the business of providing his men with the best eats when such was possible, and he made sure his soldiers knew it.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked the butcher.

“I’m setting aside cuts for the new guard at the palazzo,” he replied, nodding at Cale and Vague Henri, both of whom Solomon Solomon pretended not to see. He walked over and curiously inspected the sides of meat and then looked around the storeroom.

“I want everything here delivered to the Tolland Barracks by this afternoon. Though not that shit in the corner.” Then he looked down at the meat intended for Cale. “This is to be included.”

“We were here first,” said Cale. “This is already spoken for.”

Solomon Solomon looked at Cale as if he had never seen him before.

“I have precedence in this matter. Do you dispute that?”

Though warm outside, it was cold in the storeroom, built deep into the rock, with the corners stacked high with thick slabs of ice—but the temperature fell still further with Solomon Solomon’s question. There could be no doubt that something dreadful hung on Cale’s reply. Seeing this, Vague Henri tried to be sweetly reasonable with Solomon Solomon.

“We don’t need much, sir, only enough for thirty men.”

Solomon Solomon did not look at Vague Henri, and indeed seemed not to have heard him.

“I have precedence in this matter,” he repeated to Cale. “Do you dispute that?”

“If you like,” replied Cale.

Very slowly, letting Cale see exactly what he was doing, Solomon Solomon raised his right hand in what was clearly a ritual, and with the palm open struck Cale almost tenderly on the cheek. Then he lowered his hand and waited. Cale also then raised his hand, again slowly, and brought it carefully to Solomon Solomon’s face, but at the last moment he flicked his wrist with all his strength so that there was a
clap!
that rang in the intense silence like a holy book slammed shut in a church.

The four guards, furious at Cale’s blow, started forward.

“Stop!” said Solomon Solomon. “Captain Gray will call on you this evening.”

“Oh yes?” said Cale. “Why’s that?”

“You’ll see.”

With that he turned and left.

“What about our meat?” called out Cale jovially as he left.

He looked at the wide-eyed butcher, astonished and afraid at the murderous drama that had just played out in his storeroom. “I don’t suppose you can be relied on to deliver my order.”

“It’s more than my life’s worth, sir.”

“Then we’d best take some of it with us.” He lifted a huge side of beef onto his shoulder and walked out.

A
s when lightning strikes a tree in a parched forest and then quickly engulfs the rest, the hullabaloo that resulted from the meeting in the butcher’s storeroom raged in every house in Memphis. Marshal Materazzi swore fit to be tied when he heard. Vipond cursed. They both sent for Cale and demanded he refuse to fight.

“But I’m told that if I refuse, anyone has the right to kill me on sight. Without warning.”

It was difficult to argue with him on this, because it was true. Cale played the innocent party in this, and it was impossible not to agree. So then it was Solomon Solomon who was hauled before the Marshal and his chancellor, but despite a fearful torrent of abuse by the former, and clear threats by the latter that should he go through with it he could expect a career spent burying lepers in the Middle East, Solomon Solomon was unmoved. The Marshal was furious.

“You will put a stop to this or you will hang,” shouted the Marshal.

“I will neither stop nor hang,” shouted back Solomon Solomon. And he was right; not even the Marshal could prevent a duel where blows had been struck, nor could he punish the participants. Vipond tried appealing to Solomon Solomon’s snobbery.

“What could killing a fourteen-year-old boy bring you except dishonor? He’s a nobody. He doesn’t have even a mother or father, let alone a family name worthy of a trial by combat. What on earth are you thinking by lowering yourself in this matter?”

This was a telling point, but Solomon Solomon dealt with it simply by refusing to answer.

So that was that. The Marshal barked at him to get out, and full of solemn rage, Solomon Solomon did so.

Cale’s meeting with Arbell Swan-Neck was as distraught as might be imagined. She begged him not to fight, but as the alternative was so much worse, she soon turned to a furious diatribe against Solomon Solomon and then rushed off to see her father to demand he put a stop to this.

During the tearful reunion with Arbell, Cale had made sure to bring Vague Henri to back up his version of events. After the distraught young woman had left, Cale saw Vague Henri looking at him and clearly not thinking anything generous.

“What’s your problem?”

“You are.”

“Why?”

“Why are you trying to pretend you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen when he asked if you disputed his right to choose ahead of you?”

“I was there first. You know that.”

“You’re going to kill or be killed for what—a few cuts of meat?”

“No. I’m going to kill or be killed over the fact that he thrashed me a dozen times for nothing. No one is ever going to do that to me again.”

“Solomon Solomon isn’t Conn Materazzi, and he’s not a handful of half-asleep Redeemers who didn’t see you coming. He can kill you.”

“Can he?”

“Yes.”

“I hope he agrees with you that I’m stupid—because then he’s going to be even more surprised when I break him like a plate.”

T
he Opera Rosso is a magnificent semicircle of a theater with a view of the Bay of Memphis to astonish even the most widely traveled. It rises so steeply from the arena itself that overexcited members of the audience have been known to fall to their deaths from the upper tiers. But the purpose of Il Rapido, as this vertiginous rise is called, is to enable the crowd of thirty thousand to gather around the field it encloses and yet feel as if they can touch the action even from the topmost seats.

Duels were of two kinds: duels simplex and duels complex. In the first, just the drawing of blood could lead to the fight ending; in the second, one of the combatants had to die. The Marshal’s opposition to duels complex was driven not so much by compassion, though in old age he found no pleasure in such murderous spectacles, as by the enormous trouble they created. The feuds, squabbles and revenge murders that a deadly quarrel stirred up caused so much general grief that the Marshal had taken to bringing every power he had, formal and informal, to making sure they did not take place. Fights to the death were something that could only cause trouble in general and encourage disrespect for the ruling classes in particular. These days the Red Opera was where Memphis came only to see bullfighting and bearbaiting (though this was becoming unfashionable). Professional boxing matches and executions were also staged there. The opportunity, therefore, to see their betters—and no one knew any different about Cale—murdering each other in public was not to be missed. Who knew when the chance would come again?

From early in the morning of the fight, the huge plaza in front of the Opera Rosso was already packed. The queues for the ten entrances were already thousands deep, and those who soon realized they would not get in milled around in the markets and stalls that appeared on these big occasions like a tented city. There were peelers and riot gendarmes everywhere, watching for thieves and trouble, knowing that disappointment could turn into an ugly fight. All the spivs and gangs of the city were there—the Suedeheads with their gold and red waistcoats and silver-colored boots, the hooligans in their white braces and black top hats, the rockers in their bowlers, monocles and thin mustaches. The girls were out in force too, the Lollards with their long coats and thigh-high boots and shaved heads, the Tickets with their shaped red lips like a cupid’s bow, their tight red bodices and long stockings black as night. There was the calling and shouting and booing and laughing—bursts of music, fanfares as the young Materazzi turned up to be gawped at and envied. And of every penny earned, half ended up with Kitty the Hare.

At executions the hoi polloi used to throw dead cats at the condemned. While this was considered entirely fitting for criminals and traitors, such behavior was strictly forbidden on an occasion like this—disrespect involving one of the Materazzi was on no account to be allowed. However, such bans did not prevent the locals trying, and as the morning wore on, large piles of dead cats, along with weasels, dogs, stoats and the occasional aardvark, grew outside the ten entrances.

At twelve a blast of fanfares for the arrival of Solomon Solomon. Ten minutes later Cale, along with Vague Henri and Kleist, made his way unrecognized through the crowd, only causing attention as the peelers overseeing the queues halted the moving lines and watched with morbid curiosity as the boys passed into the Opera Rosso.

I
n 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.”