The Left Hand Of God (24 page)

His reverie was broken by the sound of the boy down by the river, who had now woken up and was on the move. He had backed away from the bank to a distance of twenty yards or so. He started calling out with a low “Whooooooo!” then launched himself at the river’s edge, running faster and faster. Raising his voice to a high-pitched shout, he leapt from the bank, formed a bomb in midair and splashed in the water. Almost immediately he shot to the surface, screaming with laughter at the freezing cold, and thrashed his way back to the bank. Naked as the day, he danced up and down, laughing and shouting at the dreadful pleasure of the cold water and the warm summer air.

“Nice to be young, eh?” said Cadbury. It was impossible not to share in the boy’s delight. And then with astonishment he saw how true this was. Jennifer Plunkett was smiling, her face transformed like a painting of a holy saint. Jennifer Plunkett was in love. As soon as she was aware of Cadbury looking at her, she vanished in an instant from whatever paradise the boy had taken her to. She looked at Cadbury, blinked like a hawk or a feral cat and then turned back to the river, her expression now utterly void.

“What do you think Kitty the Hare wants with him?” she said.

“No idea,” said Cadbury. “But nothing good. It’s a pity,” he added, quite sincerely. “He seems such a happy little chap.” He regretted saying this as soon as it was out, but he was still unnerved at what he’d witnessed. It was like seeing a snake blush.
That’ll teach you
, thought Cadbury,
to think you know what’s going on in other people
. Full of wonder at this strange turn of events, he sat down and laid his back again against the mulberry tree.

As it turned out, it didn’t take long to find out. He appeared to Jennifer Plunkett to be asleep, but Cadbury had far too much nous not to be thrashing out this unforeseen development. He kept his not-quite closed eyes on Jennifer’s back and drew his Mott knife and hid it, hand around the hilt, under his right thigh, the one farthest away from her. For fully thirty minutes he watched her motionless back while time and again he could hear the boy’s repeated “Whooo!” and the splash and the scream of laughter. And then she turned and moved toward him, again without the least fuss, knife in hand, and began the killing blow. He blocked it with his left and stabbed upward with the Mott knife in his right. He marveled at her speed even as they rolled around in the dried-up autumn leaves that covered the forest floor. Back and forth, back and forth they rolled in their dreadful clutch, only the two of them hearing the hot low rasp of each other’s breath and the rustle of dead leaves as, almost lip to lip, they stared into each other’s eyes. And slowly his greater strength began to tell. She wriggled and squirmed and writhed with all her sinewy might, but Cadbury had her pinned and she was done. But Jennifer had one more weapon beyond her hatred and her rage that she could call on: her dreadful love. How could she give him up and die? And with a heave she slipped to one side, unbalanced Cadbury, wrenched free of his left hand’s grasp and was up and haring down the hill to her darling boy.

“Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!” she cried. The boy looked up as he climbed naked onto the mossy riverbank. Openmouthed, he gawped at the screaming harpy racing desperately down the hill and calling his name over and over: “Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!”

In a life cursed with many extraordinary sights, this was one of the strangest of them all: a wild-faced sexless thing was shouting his name, waving a knife and rushing toward him with a dreadful madness in its eyes. Astonished, he ran for his clothes, fumbled for his sword, dropped it, picked it up again and raised it to strike as she was almost upon him, shouting wildly. Then he heard a sharp buzz, and a hollow thud like the slap of a man’s hand on a horse’s flank. Jennifer gave a sharp cough and went flying head over arse past the terrified Cale and hit the trunk of a sawtooth oak with a wallop.

Cale legged it behind a tree, his heart thumping and fluttering like a just-trapped bird. At once he started looking for an escape. Surrounding the tree there was a rough arc of cover-free ground varying between forty to sixty yards in width. He looked at the body. He could see now it was a woman, and she was lying crumpled against the base of a tree with her backside in the air and to one side. She had what looked like a three-ounce arrow in her back, the tip just emerging from her chest. Her nose was bleeding, a single drop falling to the ground every three or four seconds. It would have been no easy shot, hitting a moving target like that, but neither was it exceptional. She’d been running away from the direction of the arrow, whereas if he went now, immediately, he would be running across the line of fire. From a standing start it would take five or six seconds to reach cover. Enough for one shot, not more, and it would have to be a fine one. But then maybe he was as good as Kleist. Kleist could make a shot like that three times out of four.

“Hey! Sonny Jim!”

About two hundred yards and dead ahead,
thought Cale.

“What do you want?”

“How about ‘thank you’?”

“Thank you. Now why don’t you piss off ?”

“You ungrateful little shit, I just saved your life.”

Was he moving? It sounded like it.

“Who are you?”

“Your guardian angel, mate, that’s who I am. She was a very bad girl, that one, a very bad girl.”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to cut your throat, mate. That’s what she did for a living.”

“Why?”

“No idea, mate. Vipond sent me to keep an eye on you and his ne’er-do-well brother.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“No reason. Don’t care, anyway. I just don’t want you coming after me. I wouldn’t want to have to put one in you, not after all the trouble I’ve taken to keep you alive. So you just stay there for the next fifteen minutes, and during that period of patience I’ll be on my way and no harm done. All right?”

Cale thought about this: make a run for it, follow him, catch him, beat the truth out of him. Or along the way get an arrow in his back. He sounded, this man, as if he knew what he was up to. Anyway, there was an alternative.

“All right. Fifteen minutes.”

“Word of honor?”

“What?”

“Never mind. How about that ‘thank you,’ then?”

And with that both Cadbury and Cale were on the move. Cadbury was yomping it back into the deepest part of the forest, and Cale, using the tree as a screen, had slipped into the river and was carefully swimming along its edge and away.

Three hours later Cale and IdrisPukke were back by the river examining the body of the dead woman under the cover of a cloud of trees. They had spent two hours searching for any sign of Cale’s alleged savior but had found nothing. IdrisPukke frisked the body and quickly discovered three knives, two garrotes, a thumbscrew, a knuckle duster and, in her mouth, alongside the left gum, a flexible inch-long blade wrapped in silk.

“Whatever she was up to,” said IdrisPukke, “she wasn’t trying to sell you clothes pegs.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Your savior? Sounds plausible. I don’t know about whether I believe him, exactly. But let’s face it, if he’d wanted to kill you, he could have done it at any time during the last month. Still—it stinks.”

“You really think Vipond sent him?”

“It’s possible. Lot of trouble to go to on account of someone like you. No offense.”

The reason Cale was not affronted by IdrisPukke’s remark was because he’d been thinking the same thing.

“What about the woman?” he said at last.

“Dump her in the river.”

So that’s what they did and that was the end of Jennifer Plunkett.

That evening the two of them were eating inside the lodge to be on the safe side and discussing what to do about the day’s strange events.

“The thing is,” said IdrisPukke, “what can we do? If whoever killed that young woman wanted to do the same to you, they would already have done it. Or they could do it tomorrow.”

“You said it stinks.”

“It’s entirely possible that Vipond sent someone to keep an eye on us, even if it was for his own reasons. It is also possible that one of the Mond you humiliated so publicly paid someone to encoffin you. They have the money and the bile. It looked like the woman was coming to attack you: she had a knife in her hand. This man stopped her and then cleared off. Those are just facts. They’re obviously not all the facts, and subsequent discoveries may make us come to see those facts that we have in an entirely different light. But until then, speculation is just that. Stay here or go somewhere else—we remain entirely vulnerable to anyone with a good aim and malice or a reward in their heart. We assume what the facts we know tell us because we might just as well do so. Have you any alternative?”

“No.”

“There we are, then.”

Realizing there wasn’t much point in skulking inside, Cale went outside for a smoke. He could see the sense of IdrisPukke’s fatalism, but it wasn’t, after all, his fate that was the one in question. As IdrisPukke was always saying himself, every philosopher can stand the tooth-ache except for the one who has it. Preoccupied, he barely registered there was a sleek pigeon walking up and down the terrace table eating stale bread crumbs.

“Don’t move,” said IdrisPukke softly from just behind him, and holding out a piece of bread he slowly approached the bird and began feeding it, carefully putting his hand around its body and then grasping it tightly. Turning the pigeon over, IdrisPukke began removing a small metal tube attached to one of its legs. Cale looked on, utterly bemused.

“It’s a messenger pigeon,” said IdrisPukke. “Sent by Vipond. Here, hold it.” He handed Cale the bird and unscrewed the tube, removed a piece of rice paper and began reading. As he did so his face became grim.

“A troop of Redeemers has taken Arbell Swan-Neck.”

Cale’s face reddened in astonishment and confusion.

“Why?”

“It doesn’t say. The point is that she was staying at Lake Constanz. It’s about fifty miles from here. The quickest route back to the Sanctuary is through the Cortina pass—that’s about eighty miles north of here. If that’s the way they’re going, we have to find them and get word to the troops Vipond is sending behind us.” He looked worried and confused. “This doesn’t make any sense. It’s a declaration of war. Why would the Redeemers do this?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a reason. This wouldn’t have happened without Bosco’s nod. And Bosco knows what he’s doing.”

“Well, there’s no moon, so they can’t travel at night, and neither can we. We’ll pack now, get some sleep and start at dawn.” He drew in a deep breath. “Though God knows we’ve got little chance of catching them.”

T
he next day IdrisPukke would not start until it was light enough to see clearly. Cale argued it was necessary to take the risk, but IdrisPukke would not budge.

“If one of these horses goes lame blundering about in the dark, we’re stuck.”

Cale realized he was right, but he was desperate to be on the move and groaned in dismissive irritation. IdrisPukke ignored him for a further twenty minutes and then they were on their way.

For the next two days they stopped only to rest the horses and eat. Cale continually urged IdrisPukke to go faster. IdrisPukke calmly insisted that the horses, and he himself, could not take it even if Cale could. All four of them needed to catch the Redeemers, if indeed they were to be caught. And they had to have one of the horses at least in a fit state to ride quickly back to the Materazzi to give the information about numbers and direction.

“You don’t seem worried about the girl,” said Cale.

“It’s precisely because I am worried that we’re doing this my way—because I’m right. Besides, what’s Arbell Swan-Neck to you?”

“Nothing at all. But if I can help to stop the Redeemers, then the Marshal will have a good reason to feel more generous to me than he does. I have friends in Memphis who are hostages, too.”

“I didn’t think you had any friends—I thought it was just circumstances that brought you together.”

“I saved their lives—I’d have thought that was pretty friendly.”

“Oh,” said IdrisPukke. “I thought you were a reluctant hero in all of this.”

“So I was.”

“So what are you, then, Master Cale, noble by calling or merely by circumstance?”

“I’m not noble at all.”

“So you say. But I wonder if there isn’t an incipient hero growing in there somewhere.”

“What does ‘incipient’ mean?”

“Something beginning to appear, something beginning to exist.” Cale laughed, but not pleasantly.

“If that’s what you think, let’s hope you aren’t in the position where you’re going to find out.”

And with this, IdrisPukke decided to be quiet.

On the second day, they descended onto the main road to the Cortina pass. It wasn’t much of a road.

“No one uses it these days and they haven’t for sixty years—not since the Redeemers shut the borders.”

“How far to the Sanctuary from the pass?” asked Cale.

“You don’t know?”

“The Redeemers didn’t leave maps lying around—nothing to make it easier for us to escape. Until a few months ago I used to think Memphis was thousands of miles away.”

Had IdrisPukke not been distracted by a beautiful vermilion and gold dragonfly, he would have seen a liar’s expression on Cale’s face, just in the moment he thinks he’s given himself away. “I mean,” added Cale, “before I came here and realized it wasn’t.” Now IdrisPukke noticed the awkward tone.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“If you say so.”

Terrified that he had revealed something he was very anxious not to reveal, Cale stayed wrapped in alarmed silence for the next ten minutes. When IdrisPukke next spoke, it was as if he had forgotten the whole thing—which indeed he had.

“The Sanctuary is a good two hundred miles from the pass—but they don’t need to get that far. There’s a garrison twenty miles from the border—Martyr Town.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well, it’s not so big, but its walls are thick. It would need an army to take it.”