The Left Hand Of God (3 page)

Cale took the light from Kleist and examined the door.

“This plaster isn’t that old—a few years at most.”

In the corner something scuttled and the three of them had the same thought: rats.

The eating of rats was forbidden to the boys on religious grounds, but this was at least one taboo with a good reason behind it—they were disease on four legs. Nevertheless, the meat of a rat was considered a great treat by the boys. Of course, not everyone could be a rat butcher. The skill was much prized and was passed from butcher to trainee in exchange only for expensive swag and mutual favors. The rat butchers were a secretive lot and charged half the rat for their services—a price so high that from time to time some catchers had decided to dispense with them and try butchering for themselves, often with results that encouraged the others to pay up and be grateful. Kleist was a trained butcher.

“We don’t have time,” said Cale, realizing what was on his mind. “And the light isn’t good enough to prepare one.”

“I can skin a rat in the pitch black,” replied Kleist. “Who knows how long we’ll be stuck?” He pulled up his cassock and removed a large pebble from a pocket hidden in the hem. He took careful aim and then lashed it into the semidark. In the corner there was a squeal and a horrible scuttling. Kleist took the candle from Cale and walked toward the sound. He reached into his pocket and with great care unfolded a small piece of cloth and used it to get hold of the creature. With a flick of his wrist he snapped its neck and then put it in the same pocket.

“I’ll finish later.”

“This is a corridor,” said Cale. “It must’ve led somewhere once, maybe it still does.” As the one with the candle, Kleist took the lead.

After less than a minute Cale began to revise his opinions. No doorways, bricked up or otherwise, appeared as Cale had hoped.

“This isn’t a corridor,” said Cale at last, still keeping his voice low. “It’s more like a tunnel.”

For more than half an hour they walked on and moved quickly, despite the dark, because the floor was almost completely smooth and clear of rubbish.

Eventually it was Cale who spoke.

“Why did you tell me there was food when you’d never even been here?”

“Obvious,” said Vague Henri. “You wouldn’t have come otherwise, would you?”

“And how stupid that would have been. You promised me food, Kleist, and I was idiot enough to trust you.”

“I thought you were famous, you know, for not trusting people,” said Kleist. “Besides, we have a rat. I didn’t lie. Anyway, there is food.”

“How do you know?” said Henri, his voice betraying his hunger.

“There are lots more rats. Rats need to eat. They have to get it from somewhere.”

Kleist stopped suddenly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Henri.

Kleist held out the candle. In front of them was a wall. There was no door.

“Maybe it’s behind the plaster,” said Kleist.

Cale felt the wall with the palm of his hand and then tapped it with his knuckle. “It’s not plaster, it’s rice flour and concrete. Same as the outer walls.” There would be no breaking through this.

“We’ll have to go back. Maybe we missed a door in the side of the tunnel. We weren’t looking for that.”

“I don’t think so,” said Cale. “And besides . . . how long will the candle burn for?”

Kleist looked at the tallow he was holding. “Twenty minutes.”

“What’ll we do?” said Vague Henri.

“Put the candle out and let’s have a think,” said Cale.

“Good idea,” said Kleist.

“Happy you think so,” muttered Cale, and he sat down on the floor.

Having sat down himself, Kleist opened the glass and extinguished the flame between thumb and forefinger.

They sat in the dark, all three of them distracted by the smell of the animal fat from the candle. For them the stench of burned rancid tallow was a reminder of one thing: food.

After five minutes, Vague Henri spoke.

“I was just . . .” His sentence trailed off. The other two waited.

“This is one end of a tunnel . . .” Again he paused. “But there has to be more than one way to get into a tunnel . . .” His voice faltered again. “Just a thought.”

“A
thought
?” said Kleist. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Henri did not reply, but Cale got to his feet.

“Light the candle.”

It took a minute for Kleist with his moss and flint, but soon they were able to see again. Cale sank onto his haunches.

“Give it to Henri and get on my shoulders.”

Kleist handed the candle over and then clambered onto Cale’s back and settled his legs around his neck. With a grunt Cale pushed him into the air.

“Take the light.”

Kleist did as he was told. “Now look up by the roof.”

Kleist raised the candle, looking for something without any idea what it was.

“Yes!” he shouted.

“Be quiet, damn you!”

“It’s a hatch,” he whispered, overjoyed.

“Can you reach it?”

“Yes. I don’t even have to stretch hardly.”

“Be careful—just a gentle push. There might be someone around.”

Kleist placed his palm at the nearest edge of the hatch and pushed.

“It moved.”

“Try and push it away. Try and see something.”

There was a scraping sound.

“Nothing. It’s dark. I’ll put the candle up there.” There was a pause. “I still can’t see much.”

“Can you get up?”

“If you push my feet. When I grab the edge. Now!”

Cale grabbed his feet and heaved upward. Kleist slowly moved and then pulled away to the sound of the hatch clattering above them.

“Keep it quiet!” hissed Cale.

But Kleist was gone.

Cale and Henri waited in the dark, illuminated by the faint glow from the hatch above. Even this grew dim as Kleist searched his surroundings. Then it went dark.

“Do you think we can trust him not to clear off ?”

“Well,” said Vague Henri. “I think.” He paused. “Probably.”

But he didn’t finish. The light appeared in the hatch again, followed by Kleist’s head.

“It’s some sort of room,” he whispered. “But I can see light through another hatch.”

“Get on my shoulders,” said Cale to Vague Henri.

“What about you?”

“I’ll be fine—just both of you wait up there to pull me up.”

Vague Henri was much lighter than Kleist, and it was easy enough to lift him up to the hatch, where Kleist could haul him through.

“Hang the candle as far down as you can.”

Kleist lowered himself while Vague Henri held on to his feet.

Cale went to the wall of the tunnel, reached up to a crack in the wall and pulled himself up. Then he found another and another until he was able to reach toward Kleist’s hand.

They clasped each other’s wrists.

“You all right for this?”

“Worry about yourself, Cale. I’m going to give Henri the candle.”

He turned his hand back to Vague Henri, half his body length dangling out of the hatch, and the light disappeared back up into the darkness.

“On my count of three.” He paused. “One, two, three.”

Cale let go and swung out into midair—a hefty grunt from Kleist as he took his weight. He hung for a moment, waiting for the swinging to stop. Then with his free arm he reached up and pulled on Kleist’s shoulder as Henri heaved on his legs. They shifted only six inches, but it was enough for Cale to grab the edge of the hatch and ease the weight on Kleist and Henri. He held for a moment and then was pulled through the hatch and onto the wooden floor.

The three of them lay there panting with the effort. Then Cale stood up.

“Show me the other hatch.”

Getting to his feet, Kleist picked up the now nearly vanished candle and went over to the other side of a room that looked to Cale to be about twenty feet by fifteen.

Kleist bent down next to a hatch followed by the other two. There was, as he’d said, a crack to one side. Cale put his eye as close as he could, but beyond the fact that there was light, he was able to see nothing in detail. Then he put his ear to the crack.

“What do you . . . ?”

“Be quiet!” hissed Cale.

He kept his ear to the floor for a good two minutes. Then he sat up and went to the hatch. There was no obvious way to lift it, so he felt around the edges until he found enough of a gap to pull the hatch itself toward the fixed lip. It gave slightly, making a grating noise. Cale winced with irritation. There wasn’t room enough for even a finger, so he had to push his fingernails into the wood to get any kind of purchase. It hurt as he pulled at the edge, but then he eased it upward enough to get his hand underneath. He lifted the hatch away from its frame and then all three of them looked down.

About fifteen feet below them was a sight unlike anything they had ever experienced; indeed, more than they had ever dreamed of.

A
bsolutely still, absolutely silent, the three boys continued to stare down into the kitchen, for that was what it was. Every surface was covered in plates of food: there was roast chicken with its crispy skin rubbed in salt and ground pepper, beef in thick slices, pork with crackling so crisp to bite it would make the sound of a dry stick being broken. There was bread, thick sliced with the crust so dark it was almost black in places; there were plates piled high with onions tinged with purple, and rice with fruits, fat raisins and apples. And there were puddings: meringues like mountains, custards of a deep yellow and bowls of clotted cream.

The boys had no words for most of what they saw: why have a word for custard when you had never even imagined the existence of such a thing, or think that the slabs of beef and breasts of sliced chicken bore any relation to the scraps of giblets and feet and brain boiled together and minced into offal tubes that were their only taste of meat. Think of how strange the colors and sights of the world would be for a blind man abruptly made to see, or a man deaf from birth hearing the playing of a hundred flutes.

But confused and amazed as they were, hunger drove them out of the hatch like monkeys, swinging away from the table and into in the middle of the kitchen. All three stood astonished at the abundance around them. Even Cale almost forgot that the hatch had to be closed. In a daze of smells and sweet colors he took some of the plates off the table and stood up on it. With his hands stretched to their farthest limit, he was just able to push the hatch across so that it fell into place.

By the time he was back on the floor, the other two were already plundering the food with the skill of long-practiced scavengers. They took only one thing from each place and rearranged the gap so it appeared that nothing was gone. They couldn’t resist a few bits of chicken or bread, but most of what they took went into the forbidden pockets that they had stitched into their cassocks to hide any contraband they came across that could be easily stolen and hidden.

Cale felt sick with the rich smells that seemed to surge in his brain and make him want to faint, as if they were baited with strange vapors.

“Don’t eat. Just take what you can hide.” He was instructing himself as much as the others. He took his share and hid what he filched, but there were few pockets to hide it in. They had no need of many hiding places, the pickings in their ordinary life being so thin and scanty.

“We have to get out. Now.” Cale walked toward the door. As if they had been woken from a deep sleep, Kleist and Vague Henri began to realize how much danger they were in. Cale listened at the door for a moment and then eased it open. It was a corridor.

“God knows where we are,” he said. “But we have to find cover.” With that he pulled the door open and walked out, the others warily following.

They moved quickly, keeping close to the walls. Within a few yards they came across a staircase leading upward. Cale shook his head as Vague Henri made his way over to it. “We need to find a window or get outside and see if we can find out where we are. We have to get back to the sleepshed before candle out or they’ll know we’re gone.” They moved on, but as they approached a door on the left it began to open.

In an instant they turned and fled back to the stairs and ran to the top. All three flattened themselves on the landing as they heard voices pass beneath them along the corridor. They heard the sound of another door being opened, and Cale raised his head, only to see a figure heading into the kitchen from which they had just come. Vague Henri moved beside him. He looked confused and afraid.

“Those voices,” he whispered. “What was wrong with them?”

Cale shook his head, but he too had noticed how strange they were and felt a peculiar movement in his stomach. He stood up, scanning the place where they were hiding. There was nowhere to go except through a door behind them. Quickly he turned the handle and eased into the room behind it. Except that it wasn’t a room. It was a balcony of some kind with a low wall ten feet or so from the door. Cale crawled toward it with the others doing the same until they were all crouched behind the wall.

From the space overlooked by the balcony there was a burst of laughter and applause.

It was not just the laughter that spooked the three boys—for all that laughter was something rarely heard in that place and never in such volume and with such easy joy—it was much more the pitch and sound of it. Like the voices they had heard in the corridor a few moments before, it set off an alien thrill deep inside them.

“Look and see,” whispered Vague Henri.

“No,” mouthed Cale.

“You must, or I will.”

Cale grabbed his wrist and squeezed.

“If we’re caught, we’re dead.”

Vague Henri, reluctant, eased back against the balcony wall. There was another burst of laughter, but this time Cale kept his eye on Vague Henri. Then he noticed that Kleist had moved onto his knees and was looking down, fascinated at the source of so much careless joy. Laughter for an acolyte was something droll, laconic, bitter. Cale tried to pull him back, but Kleist was much stronger than Vague Henri, and it was impossible to budge him without using so much force that they would have revealed themselves instantly.