The Left Hand Of God (8 page)

Then he tried one of the doors leading off the room, avoiding looking as he did so at the poor creature on the dissection table.

He opened it, and at once a strong smell of stale priest afflicted his nostrils. He had noticed before whenever he was in the midst of more than two Redeemers in a confined space that they smelled odd. But this room seemed to be stained in its very walls with the odor—something rotten, as if everything inside them, the very living spirit, was in the process of becoming rank. On his way out, Cale did not want to look at the body of the girl, but something drew him toward it. He looked only for a moment at the careful and meticulous mutilation of the beautiful young woman. He felt an unaccustomed surge of pity that something so soft and delicate should be laid to waste in such a way. Then his eye caught the small, hard object in the metal dish that the Lord of Discipline had removed from the girl’s stomach just before Cale left the first time. It was not bone or anything that looked very gruesome—it was the shape and texture of a small pebble washed smooth by long exposure to a fast-flowing stream. It was milkily transparent, and a golden brown color. Wary, Cale touched it with his forefinger. Then he picked it up and looked at it. Then he sniffed. The smell almost overpowered him, as if every cell in his brain was taken over by its strange but wonderful perfume. He stood for a moment, dazed and ready to faint. But he had to move on. He took a deep breath and continued searching, taking a few more things he thought could be useful and a few things he just liked the look of; then he was out the door and off to his hiding place.

F
or nearly two years Cale had been planning his escape. This was not a plan that he ever intended to use if it could be avoided, because the chance of success was so very poor. The Redeemers moved heaven and earth to recapture runaways, for whom the punishment was to be hung, drawn and quartered. No one, as far as Cale knew, had ever succeeded in evading the Dogs of Paradise, and his long-term plan to escape the Redeemers involved patience, waiting until he was twenty and sent to the frontier and taking his chance as it came. Still, he thought to himself, well done for preparing for this. He tried, as he crept along the ambo, not to think of the chances of success. Nevertheless he could not stop the resentment at what it had cost to intervene. Saving the girl was
pointless
. All he had achieved was his own almost certain death, as well as, though less important, the deaths of Vague Henri and Kleist. Stupid! He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. But she had looked so happy the night before, her smile so . . . what? It was hard to describe what he felt about happiness, watching someone actually being happy. That was what had come back to him as he tried to leave and stood in the dark corridor, trembling at what he had seen in the Lord of Discipline’s room and the horror of the disgusting cruelty. It had made him livid with anger and he was used to that, but this time, for the first time in his life, he had given way to it.
But you didn’t do any good
, he thought to himself.
No good at all.

But now he had arrived. He was in a small niche off the main ambo that had a gap at one end, not an entrance but just where one part of an internal wall did not quite meet with the main Sanctuary external battlements. He slid sideways into it, breathing in and struggling to push himself inside. In a few months he would be too big to squeeze through. But he reached out and grasped a handhold he had dug out of the wall when he was smaller, and just about managed to pull himself inside. It was too dark to see, but the space was tiny and the hiding place familiar to his touch. He squatted down and pulled out one loose brick and then the one next to it, then shifted the two half bricks resting on top.

Then he reached inside and pulled out a long rope braided with painstaking care, at the end of which was a bent iron hook. Then he stood up straight and squeezed back between the walls.

Back in the niche he listened for a moment. Nothing. He reached up and felt around the rough surface of the main wall and jammed the hook into a small crevice he had made months before, just after he had finished making the rope. He had made the rope not of jute or sisal but from the hair of the acolytes and Redeemers he had collected from the washrooms over the years during his time as cleaner—a disgusting task, sure enough, and one that had made him gag many times, but one he had steeled himself to as a possible chance for life. He tugged on the rope to make sure it was fixed. Then he pulled himself up and jammed himself between the two walls of the niche, back against one wall, feet against the other. He loosened the hook, reached up with it again for another crevice and repeated the move again and again. Over the next hour, moving no more than two feet at a time and often less, he hooked and jammed his way to the top of the Sanctuary battlements.

As he rolled onto the top, he let out an exhausted grunt of delight. He lay there for five minutes, his arms like deadweights, lifeless except for being agonizingly painful. He daren’t wait any longer. Reaching down, he pulled the unfurled rope up behind him and placed the hook into the largest crevice he could find. Then he fed the rope over the side.

He hoped it would make a sound when it hit the ground, but there was nothing clear about the noise it made as he jerked it up and down. The rope was half as long again as the wall on the Sanctuary side but, for all he knew, this part of the wall might have been built on the edge of a cliff.

He looked down into the fathomless dark and paused for a moment. Then with his right hand he felt for the rope and pulled it taut so that the hook was forced to bite into the crevice. With one hand on the wall, the other holding the rope taut, he paused once more as he realized how appalling his situation was.
Still, better to go this way than being hanged and fried.
And with this consoling thought, he let go of the wall, let the rope take the strain and slipped over the edge.

With his legs crossed over the rope, Cale let himself down hand over hand. This was the easy part, with his weight doing the work for him. Indeed, he would have felt exultant if it were not for the fact that the rope was untested and might snap or come apart from rubbing against the rough walls—and also the unpleasant thought that it might not be long enough and he could be left dangling a hundred feet from the ground. Even a ten-foot drop onto rocks would break his leg. But what was the point in worrying about it? It was too late now.

E
very few minutes Kleist and Vague Henri would light the candle Cale had stolen from the Lord of Discipline and look at the girl. They had agreed it was best to keep an eye on her every now and again. After all, there were nine candles, so they could afford to be generous. They had seen people go quiet in the way the girl was quiet and with that odd sightless stare, usually in boys who had taken more than a hundred strokes. If they stayed like that for more than a few days, they were taken away and never came back. Those who pulled themselves together often used to start screaming in the middle of the night, weeks or even months later—in Morto’s case it had been years. Then they vanished, too.

This, they told themselves, was why they kept checking on the girl. If she started screaming, maybe someone would hear.

Every time they lit the candle, Vague Henri would say to her, “It’s going to be all right.” She did not respond except by shivering every now and again. The third time they lit the candle, Henri remembered something from the very distant past, a phrase that came into his head, something comforting he had once heard and long forgotten. “There, there,” he said. “There, there.”

But there was another reason they kept lighting the candle besides checking on the girl: they couldn’t stop themselves from looking at her. They had both come into the Sanctuary as seven-year-olds from a life that now seemed as remote as the moon. Vague Henri’s parents had been dead since not long after he was born. Kleist’s parents had sold him for five dollars to the Redeemers, and had been only a little less brutal toward him. They had not seen a girl or a woman since they came through the great gates of the Sanctuary, and all that the Redeemers had told them was that women and girls were the devil’s playground. If, by any chance, they were to see one when they left the Sanctuary for the frontier or the Eastern Breaks, they were immediately to cast their eyes down. “The body of a woman is a sin in itself, crying out to the heavens for vengeance!” There was only one woman who was to be regarded without disgust and alarm: the mother of the Hanged Redeemer who, alone among her sex, was pure. She was the source of compassion, perpetual succor and solace—though what these virtues entailed the boys had no idea, none of these qualities ever having come their way. About what it involved, this business of women being the devil’s playground, the Redeemers were equally vague. As a result, Kleist and Vague Henri were driven to watch the girl by an intense curiosity, mixed with fear and no little awe. Anyone who could get the Redeemers into such ecstasies of loathing and hatred had to be very powerful indeed and, therefore, in ways they could not begin to guess at, worth being afraid of.

At the moment, shivering and terrified in the candlelight, the girl did not seem like something fearful. She was still, however, fascinating. She was, for one thing, such an extraordinary shape. She was wearing a linen shift of fair quality, much better than anything the boys had ever worn, tied around her waist with a cord.

Kleist gestured to Vague Henri to move away and bent his head to whisper in his ear.

“What are those humps on her chest?” he asked.

Vague Henri, with as much deference as possible, considering he had no knowledge of how to behave toward a woman, held the candle toward her breasts and looked at them thoughtfully.

“I don’t know,” he whispered at last.

“She must be fat,” whispered Kleist. “Like that shit bag Vittles.” There were, of course, no fat boys at the Sanctuary. There was barely an ounce between all ten thousand.

Vague Henri considered this.

“Vittles is saggy and round. She goes in and out.”

“Go on, then,” said Kleist.

Vague Henri thought about this for a moment.

“No, I think we should leave her alone. I suppose,” he added, “he must have given her a beating.”

Kleist let out a deep breath as he considered the girl.

“She doesn’t look like she could take a hiding, not one like the kind Picarbo can hand out.”

“
Used
to hand out,” corrected Vague Henri. They both grunted with a strange satisfaction, given that his death had put them in so much danger. “I wonder why he beat her.”

“Probably,” said Vague Henri, “for being the devil’s playground.”

Kleist nodded. It seemed plausible.

“What’s your name?” asked Vague Henri, not for the first time. Again she did not reply.

“I wonder how long Cale will take,” said Vague Henri.

“Do you think he really has a plan?”

“Yes,” said Vague Henri, with a tone of complete certainty. “If he says something, he means it.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re so sure. I wish I was.”

Then the girl said something, but so softly they couldn’t hear.

“What did you say?” asked Vague Henri.

“Riba.” She took a deep breath. “My name is Riba.”

C
limbing down in the deep black, Cale’s two worst fears became real. First, his feet hit the large knot he had made at the end of the rope still leaving him in midair with no idea how far he had left to fall. Second, he could feel that the strain had been too much for the iron hook holding his weight in the cranny at the top of the wall. Even at this distance he could feel it begin to give. “You’re going to fall anyway,” he said to himself, and with one push out with both feet from the rock face, he raised his arms to protect his head and began to fall.

Fall, that is, if a drop of less than two feet can be described as such. A delighted Cale stood and raised his hands in triumph. Then he pulled out one of the candles he had stolen from the Lord of Discipline and tried to light it with dried moss and a flint. In time he got a flame and lit the candle, but as he held it up to the vast darkness, its light was so feeble he could barely see anything. Then the wind blew it out.

The dark was absolute, with thick clouds blotting the moon. If he tried walking, he would fall, and even a minor injury that slowed him down in the course ahead would mean death. It was better to wait the two hours or so until dawn. With that decision made, he wrapped his cassock around himself, lay down and went to sleep.

Nearly two hours later he opened his eyes to find that the dark gray dawn had given him enough light to see by. He looked back at the rope hanging from the walls, now showing the place where he had begun his escape like a huge pointing finger. But there was nothing to be done about it, or about his regret that he was leaving behind something that had taken him eighteen months, and much retching, to make. It looked, although Cale had never seen such a thing, like a two-hundred-foot ponytail. He turned and in the rising light made his way down the rocky, pathless slant of Sanctuary Hill, happy that it might be another hour before they found the body of the Lord of Discipline and, with luck, another two before they came across the rope.

He had luck on neither count. The body of Redeemer Picarbo had been discovered half an hour before dawn by his servant, whose hysterical screams had the entire Sanctuary, enormous as it was, awake and in ferment within a few minutes. Quickly every dormitory was roused and roll call taken, and it soon became clear that three of the acolytes were missing.

Pathfinder Brunt, dog ostler and the Redeemer charged with catching the very few acolytes who were foolish enough to escape, was sent immediately to Redeemer Bosco and for the first time in his life was shown into his offices immediately.

“I want all three of them returned alive, by which I mean you will do everything in your power to do so.”