The Left Hand Of God (22 page)

“Of course, you are young and have yet to feel the strongest impulse of all: the love of women. Don’t get me wrong—every woman and every man should feel what it means to love and be loved—a woman’s body is the best picture of perfection I’ve ever known. But to be perfectly honest with you, Cale—not that it will make any difference to you—to desire love, as some great wit once said, is to desire to be chained to a lunatic.”

He would then open another beer, pour a quarter—never more and never too many times—into Cale’s mug and refuse to give him any more tobacco, pointing out that when it came to smoking, you could have too much of a good thing, and that in excess it could damage a young man’s wind.

And after that, sometimes long into the early morning, Cale looked forward to what had become almost his greatest pleasure—a warm bed, a soft mattress and all utterly, completely on his own—no groaning and crying out and snoring and the smell of farts of hundreds—just wonderful silence and peace. Bliss was it in those days for Cale to be alive.

He began wandering aimlessly in the woods for hours at a time, vanishing as soon as he had woken up and only returning to the hunting lodge as night closed in. The hills, the occasional meadow, rivers, the wary deer and the pigeons cooing in the trees during the hot afternoons—the wonderful bliss of just wandering on his own was a more intense pleasure even than beer or tobacco. The only thing to mar his happiness was the thought of Arbell Swan-Neck, whose face would come unbidden to him late at night or in the afternoon lying by the river, where the only sounds were of an occasional fish jumping, the song of birds and the faint wind in the trees. The feelings he had when she came into his mind were odd and unwelcome—they clashed unpleasantly with the wonderful peace he felt. She made him angry and he didn’t want to feel angry ever again, he just wanted to feel like this—free, lazy, answerable to no one in the warmth and green beauty of the great summer forest.

The other great delight he discovered was eating. To eat to live, to have intense hunger satisfied just by filling your stomach was one thing, but for a boy whose diet had for much of his life consisted of dead men’s feet, the possibility of good food in his new life meant that something people often took for granted could become a source of wonder.

IdrisPukke was a great food lover and, having lived at one time or another almost everywhere in the civilized world, considered himself, as on most subjects, an expert. He loved preparing meals almost as much as he loved eating them, but unfortunately his desire to teach his willing pupil about the world had some false starts.

His first attempt to introduce Cale to the great art of eating ended badly. Cale had returned to the lodge one day after a ten-hour absence and ravenous enough to eat a priest, only to be confronted by the Emperor’s Feast—IdrisPukke’s improvised version of the most spectacular meal he had ever eaten, a specialty of the House of Imur Lantana in the city of Apsny. Many of the ingredients had to be substituted: pork pizzles because they were not to be found in the mountains as the locals considered pigs to be unclean; saffron because it was too expensive and no one had ever heard of it anyway. Also, a dish considered by many to be the highlight of the meal was missing: IdrisPukke, though no sentimentalist, could not bring himself to drown ten baby larks in brandy before roasting them in a hot oven for less than thirty seconds.

When Cale arrived, brown-faced from the sun and starving, he laughed aloud at the delicacies laid before him by a proud IdrisPukke.

“Start there,” said the smiling cook, and Cale almost literally launched himself at a plate of minced freshwater prawns fried on white bread with a sauce of sour wild raspberries. After five of these IdrisPukke nodded to the grilled duck and plum sauce fingers and then, along with a gentle warning to slow down, fried chicken wings in bread crumbs and strips of deep-fried potato.

Cale was soon, of course, violently sick. IdrisPukke had seen many people vomit during his life and had frequently done so himself. He had witnessed the disagreeable Kvenland habit of interrupting thirty-nine-course banquets with visits to the bilematorium or spew-parlor, visits that were necessary every ten courses or so if you were to finish and thereby avoid the deadly insult to your hosts implied in not making it to course thirty-nine. Cale’s heavings were on an epic scale as his overburdened stomach expelled everything he had eaten in the previous twenty minutes and, as it appeared to IdrisPukke, pretty much everything else in his entire life.

Finally the exhausted boy was finished and he went to bed. The next morning Cale came outside with a greeny white tinge to his face that IdrisPukke had previously seen only on a three-day-old corpse. Cale sat down and took, with considerable caution, a cup of weak tea without milk. In a wan voice he began to explain to IdrisPukke the reason he had been so violently ill.

“Well,” said IdrisPukke after Cale had finished telling him about the Redeemers’ way with food. “If I’m ever disposed to think badly of you, I shall try to excuse you on the grounds that little should be expected of a child brought up on dead men’s feet.” There was a short silence. “I hope you don’t mind me giving you some advice.”

“No,” said Cale, too weak to be affronted.

“There’s a limit to how much we should expect of the capacity for acceptance of other people. It might be better, should the subject ever arise in good company, not to mention the rats.”

V
ague Henri and Kleist had seen Cale for only a few minutes before his hurried departure, so they had barely time to register the deeply suspicious reappearance of IdrisPukke, let alone receive a satisfactory account of all that had happened to Cale after he had been dragged out of the summer garden. Kleist, to his considerable irritation, didn’t even have time to point out to Cale that his lack of discipline and general selfishness had left the two of them stranded up shit creek. But as it turned out, Kleist’s reasonable fear that Cale had drawn down hostile interest from everyone around them turned out not to be entirely the case. There was hostility, certainly, but the ferocious beating Cale had handed out to the cream of the Mond had made those anxious for revenge extremely wary of Vague Henri and Kleist in case they were similarly gifted. It was not that the Mond were afraid of violent injury or death so much as the humiliation of being given a hammering by people who were so obviously their social inferiors.

Vipond had the two of them reassigned to the kitchens, where there was no chance of them encountering anyone who mattered. The lengthy and repeated curses Kleist brought down on Cale’s head for leaving him washing dishes for ten hours a day hardly need to be imagined. However, there was an unexpected benefit in that servants with a grudge against the Mond for their cockiness and arrogance, and there were many of them, regarded the two of them with admiration; enough, anyway, after a month or so to let them help with more interesting tasks than washing dishes. Kleist offered to help in the meat bay, and they were impressed by his abilities as a butcher: “A natural.” He was wise enough not to be specific about the small animals on which he had learned his skill. “Me,” said Kleist to Vague Henri as he happily dismembered an enormous Holstein cow, “I like to work on a bigger scale.”

Vague Henri had to make do with feeding animals and taking the occasional message to the servants’ doors of the surrounding palazzos. This gave him the chance to see Riba, now pretty much always on his mind. When he saw her, it was never for long, but her face would light up and she would talk excitedly, touching his arm and smiling at him with her beautiful little white teeth. But, as he began to notice, hardly anyone passed without receiving the same smile, the same show of pleasure. It was in her nature to be open and winning toward everyone, and people responded to her, often surprising themselves at how much they came to value that lovely smile. Vague Henri, however, wanted it just for himself.

He had been nursing a dark secret about Riba for some time, since they had been alone in the Scablands for nearly five days. At first he had treated her with astonished deference, the way someone might while on a walking trip with an angel. All men have been entranced by the beauty of a woman, but imagine the fascination for someone who had grown up never seeing or imagining such a creature. After a few days of her company, he had started to calm down a little, if only at the emergence of baser feelings than reverence and adoration. He took meticulous care not to treat this divine presence in a way that might demean his own wonder (though what demeaning it might involve he was profoundly unclear about). Things stirred deep inside for which he had no name. After a few days they had come to a small oasis with a spring, luckily in full spate, that had created a small pool. She laughed in delight and Vague Henri’s natural delicacy had caused him to offer to withdraw to the other side of a small hillock alongside the pool. He lay on his back and slowly began his first truly great struggle with the devil. Opportunities for great temptations in the Sanctuary were scant. Redeemer Hauer, his spiritual advisor for nearly ten years, would have been mortified to discover how weak was Vague Henri’s resistance, how ineffectual the endless harassment about the certainty of hell for those who committed crimes against the Holy Spirit. (It was, for reasons never explained, the Holy Spirit who was particularly traumatized by sinful desires of this kind.) Henri’s will was suddenly owned by the devil, and he turned onto his stomach and slowly crawled like the reptile servant of Beelzebub he had become to just below the brow of the hill. Had temptation given in to ever been so richly rewarded? Riba stood with the water up to her mid-thighs and lazily splashed herself. Her breasts were huge, not that Henri had anything to compare them to, and the areolae that covered the tips were an extraordinary rose pink unlike anything he had ever seen before. They moved when she moved but shivered with a grace that made him gasp. Between her legs . . . but we must not go there—though this was not a ban that Vague Henri countenanced even for a moment. The devil had taken him entirely. His breathing stopped, utterly struck at this most secret place. Henri had many images of hell branded into his soul, but until this divine moment not a single image of heaven. It was a picture of grace in softly folded skin never to be surpassed, still vibrant, still ringing in his soul until the day he died. So it was that Vague Henri, transfigured with holy terror, slowly slid back below the brow of the hill. The transgressed-against Riba carried on for many more minutes, unaware of the epiphany going on just over the hill. Had Henri simply stayed by the pool and watched, she would not have thought it amiss. She loved to give pleasure to men. This was what she had been raised for, after all. As for poor Vague Henri, he had been struck like a tuning fork and months afterward was still vibrating. Nature had given him intense desire, but his life had left him bereft of any experience or understanding that might make it possible to deal with it.

Riba had been a good deal luckier than the boys when it came to employment. She had started as maid to the maid of Mademoiselle Jane Weld’s personal maid, a position, however lowly in the cutthroat world of ladies’ maidships, that could take upward of fifteen years’ service in the field to obtain. Chancellor Vipond’s niece had taken on Riba with a particular sense of resentment that she should have, and be seen to have, an under-undermaid who was of so little standing. However, her resentment began to lessen (and with it the already intense resentment of the other maids to increase) when it became clear that Riba had in fact a genius for the skills for which ladies’ maids are much valued: she was a hairdresser of great delicacy and skill; she could squeeze a spot or blackhead, causing as little damage to the complexion as was humanly possible, and then disguise the redness so that it was invisible; complexions blossomed under treatment from Riba’s homemade creams and lotions, in the manufacture of which she was a magician; unsightly fingernails became elegant; eyelashes became thick; lips red; legs smooth (exfoliated as painlessly as possible, which is to say one degree below agony). In short, Riba was a find.

This left the problem for Mademoiselle Jane of what to do with her two other, now redundant, personal maids, the most senior of whom had been with her since she was a child. Mademoiselle Jane, though a cold beauty in many respects, had a sensitive side and could not bring herself to tell old Briony that she was no longer required. She knew that her ex-nanny would be deeply upset, and she was also rather concerned, now that she thought of it, about the numerous confidences that she had shared with Briony, confidences that a resentful person might be willing to reveal if she were given sufficient motive. Mademoiselle Jane spared Briony, therefore, the painful experience of being let go after twelve years’ faithful service by having Briony’s bags packed while she was sent off to buy a tub of rosemary cold cream. On the unfortunate maid’s return, she found only a bare room and a servant holding an envelope. The envelope contained twenty dollars and a note thanking her for her faithful service and informing her that she was being sent to become maid to a distant relative in a far-off province, and in recognition of the said service she was to be accompanied on her very long journey by the servant bearing the envelope, who was instructed to stay with her and protect her at all times until she reached her destination. Mademoiselle Jane wished her good luck and expressed her hope that she would make the very best of her good fortune. Within twenty minutes Briony was on her horse and, with her protector, off to a new life, never to be heard from again.

The other maid, just in case Briony had been as indiscreet as her mistress, was similarly dispersed, and Mademoiselle Jane was left to contemplate a life where spots, pimples, blackheads, thin lips and unmanageable hair were a thing of the past.

For several months the young aristocrat was in heaven. Riba’s skill in the arts of beautification made the very best of her only moderately good looks. Even more suitors came to call, enabling her to treat these would-be lovers—as was required by Materazzi traditions of courtship—with ever greater disdain and derision. As she well knew, no drug, however rare and expensive, offers the wonderful pleasure of being the center of another’s dreams and desires while being able, with only a smile and a look, to shatter them completely.