The Left Hand Of God (36 page)

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.”

C
ale fell into a black sleep just as the sun was coming up and with the grim words of Vague Henri ringing in his ears. He woke up fifteen hours later with the church bells doing the same thing. But the sound wasn’t a melodious peal calling to the mostly halfhearted faithful of Memphis on a holy day but a wild and raucous clanging of alarm. Out of bed and through the door he rushed bare-legged along the corridors to Arbell’s apartments. Outside there were already ten Materazzi guards and another five coming from along the corridor from the other direction. He banged on the door.

“Who is it?”

“Cale. Open up.”

The door was unlocked, and a frightened Riba appeared with Arbell easing her aside and coming out.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” Cale gestured to the Materazzi guards and turned her back into the room.

“Five of you in here. Keep the curtains closed and stay out of sight. Keep them in the corner of the room away from the windows.”

She stepped into the corridor again. “I want to know what’s going on. What if it’s my father?”

“Get back inside,” shouted Cale to this perfectly reasonable fear. “And do as you’re bloody well told for once. And lock the door.”

Riba gently took the appalled aristocrat’s arm and led her back as the five guards, startled at hearing Arbell addressed in such a fashion, followed them inside. Cale nodded to the guard commander as the door lock clacked behind him. “I’ll send news as I get it. Someone give me a sword.” The guard commander signaled one of his men to hand over his weapon.

“How about some trousers as well?” he added, to much amusement from the other soldiers.

“When I come back,” said Cale, “you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.” And with this sour reply he was off and running. He grabbed his clothes from his room and in less than thirty seconds was down two flights of stairs and out into the courtyard of the palazzo. Vague Henri and Kleist had already set guards around the walls and, armed with bow and the one-foot crossbow, were about to join them.

“Well?” said Kleist.

“Not much,” said Henri. “An attack somewhere past the fifth wall—men wearing what sound like cassocks. Could be wrong.”

“How in God’s name could Redeemers have come this close?”

The explanation was simple. Memphis was a trading city that had not been attacked in decades and was not likely to be. The vast array of goods bought and sold every day in the city needed to flow freely through six inner walls designed to do the exact opposite during a siege, the last of which had been raised fifty years ago. The inner walls had become a damned nuisance in times of peace and had been gradually penetrated by numerous exits and entrances, access tunnels for refuse and water and urine and excrement, so that their role as a barrier was much diminished. A sewerage superintendent had been blackmailed by Kitty the Hare—sins of the cities of the plain were almost as severely punished by the Materazzi as they were by the Redeemers—and it was he who had led the fifty or so Redeemers behind the fifth wall. Any link to Kitty the Hare, however, was not to be allowed. As the attack was launched against the palazzo, the superintendent of sewerage was lying upside down in a dustbin with his throat cut. It was in this way that Bosco’s attempt to provoke an attack from the Materazzi at the cost of a few undesirables and perverts led to a desperate fight right in the most guarded heart of Memphis. The attack behind the fifth wall had been a feint by ten of the Redeemers, but the remaining forty had made their way under the palazzo and up into the courtyard through a manhole cover. As they were emerging like a swarm of sewer beetles in their black cassocks, Cale was sending Vague Henri and Kleist onto the walls, bow-armed, and wondering what to do with the twelve Materazzi around him. It was then that, openmouthed, they all at once saw the forty Redeemers spreading like a stain toward them.

“A line! A line!” called Cale to his men, and then the Redeemers struck. There was a shout by Cale for Kleist, but as blow and counter-blow were struck, the fight was too close to risk a shot. But then a band of the Redeemers tried to spill around the line of Materazzi and head for the door of the palazzo. The sawfly zip and buzz of bolt and arrow struck as the Redeemers cleared the lines and Henri and Kleist could take clean shots. The scream of one of them, clawing at his chest as if a tiger wasp was trapped in his shirt, caught Cale’s attention, and he stepped back out of the line and ran toward the palazzo door, slashing one Redeemer through the tendon of his heel, the same to a second, but with the third ahead of him taking an arrow in the upper thigh. The man staggered backward, crying out as a thrust from Cale, mistimed, hit him in the mouth, severing his lower jaw and spine. Then Cale was through the crowd, had reached the front of the palazzo and turned to face the attacking Redeemers. Cowed by the bolts and arrows, the attack had already stalled as they sheltered behind a waist-high wall that led in a V-shape toward the palazzo. Cale stood in front of it, waiting for them to come to him. The Redeemers trying to get to him could now crouch against the dreadful rain coming from the walls, and on hands and knees they slowly made their way toward Cale. He reached into a six-foot pot that held an old olive tree that decorated the entrance, picked up the fist-sized pebbles artfully arranged inside and started throwing them. This was not a child throwing sticks: these stones cracked against teeth and hands and forced the Redeemers up and into the bolts and arrows from above. Desperate now, the unwounded five Redeemers rushed at Cale. He elbowed, kicked and bit, and as he fought, they fell, but even in the middle of the fight for life a part of him was thinking that there was something odd. The feeling grew stronger as he stood like some hero from a storybook, sending his opponents to their deaths as if they were nothing but tall grass and weeds—the punch, the block, the slash, the killing stroke, and then it was done. The Materazzi guards, reduced only by three, had pushed their opponents back—then the priests lost heart and tried to run, cut down either by the chasing Materazzi swords or Kleist and Henri as they turned from protecting Cale to picking off any Redeemer who looked as if he might make it to the manhole and escape.