To describe Cale’s mood as foul would be to do that mood an injustice. There is no word in any language ever spoken to describe the hurly-burly in his heart, his loathing at the idea of his return to the Sanctuary and the bitterness of his anger at his betrayal by Arbell Materazzi, known to everyone as Swan-Neck, and about whose beauty and gracefulness as a result nothing more need be said – nothing about the suppleness of her long legs, the breath-catching span of her narrow waist, the curve of her breasts (they were not proud, her breasts, they were overweeningly arrogant). She was a swan in human form. In his mind Cale was endlessly imagining the wringing of this swan’s neck and then miraculously reviving her and murdering her all over again – this time a violent snap, the next a slow strangling and then after that perhaps a cutting out and burning of her heart, followed by a good raking for it among the ashes to make doubly sure.
For two weeks since they had left Memphis he had not spoken once, not even to ask why they had changed direction in the middle of the Scablands and started travelling away from the Sanctuary. On balance Bosco thought it better to let his former acolyte stew. But he had underestimated Cale’s talent for mute anger and finally decided to break their silence.
‘We’re going to Tiger Mountain,’ volunteered Redeemer Bosco, softly and even with kindness. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’
It might be thought that someone whose heart was moithering with so much hatred for one person might not have enough intensity of feeling left over to loathe another in the same way. In part this was true, but Cale’s heart, when it came to hatred, was made of stern and capacious stuff: his aversion to Bosco had merely been shifted further from the centre of the fire, in the clinker at the side as it were, to keep warm, for bringing back to the broil later. Nevertheless, despite his current preoccupation with hating, Cale could not help but be puzzled by the great change in Bosco’s attitude towards him. Since he was a very small boy Bosco had driven him like a ship in a storm – relentless, merciless, pitiless, cruel, never slacking, never giving him a place to rest. Day after day, year after year he had scoured him black and blue, teaching and punishing, punishing and teaching until there seemed no difference between the two. Now there was only restraint, a great softness, almost something like tenderness. What was it? There was no answer to be had, even when he had the energy to spare from mind-murdering Arbell Materazzi (beating her to death with a stick, martyring her on a wheel, drowning her to applause in a high mountain lake). But despite the hammers beating out their cacophony in his soul something in Cale was paying attention to the terrain through which they were moving, resulting in a moment of understanding, though not of amusement exactly – he was in too dark a place for that. Now he could see why it was called the Great Testicle. Close in, the smoothness of its lines from thirty miles away had vanished to become a landscape deeply grooved with ridges, always moving down in the direction of the water that carved them but also sideways and across, curling around and even back on themselves where the rock was hardest. This close the experience was like the tiniest of fleas trying to get across the bollocks of the greatest of giants.
Moving through this hard-to-solve maze would have been immensely difficult, despite the fact that it was not particularly steep, had it not been for the help offered by the narrow causeway built by the Montagnards that wound over the ridges and the numerous filled-in ravines and defiles. This had been done not as an intentional sacrilege but in order to gain access to the salt deposits that marbled their way through the middle slopes of the mountain. Across the eighty years during which they held sway over the Redeemers’ most sacred place the Montagnards had created a huge network of tunnels. Intended sacrilege or not, when the Redeemers had re-emerged as a power after being weakened by their lengthy religious civil wars they repaid this blasphemy by wiping out the Montagnards to the last man, woman and child.
Once past the Great Testicle the slope steepened, again not greatly. High though it was, Tiger Mountain was not especially difficult to climb. In this more even landscape there were many small holes, the decayed entrances to the deposits of salt between thirty and a hundred feet below the surface. Despite his foul temper and silence Cale could not help but be distracted by the intriguing features of this sacred landscape. But while it lacked great crevices and dangerous crags, the going inevitably became tougher and soon they were forced to dismount and lead the horses up harsher and more awkward paths. Finally they did come to a narrow pass, with steep and rocky walls to either side.
Bosco ordered his men to make camp, though it was still early afternoon, and then turned to Cale and spoke to him directly for the second time.
‘They’ll stay here. We have to go on. There’s something I need to show you. We should also get something straight. The only way back down this part of the mountain is through this pass. If you attempt to come back down on your own you know what will happen.’
With this gently spoken warning he set off up through the pass and Cale followed. They climbed for thirty minutes, Cale always staying about ten yards behind his former master until they reached a shelf about twenty feet deep. To one side there was a simply constructed but beautifully made stone altar.
‘That was where Jephthah kept his oath to the Lord and sacrificed his only daughter.’ His tone of voice was odd, not reverential at all.
‘And I suppose,’ replied Cale, ‘that stain on the side there is supposed to be her blood. She must have been filled with strong stuff – you can still see it a thousand years after it was spilled halfway up a mountain.’
‘With God all things are possible.’ They looked at each other for some time. ‘No one knows where he killed her. This altar was built for the benefit of the faithful, some of whom are permitted to come here on Bad Friday – a painter comes the day after their visit and paints it again so that there’s time for it to weather in for the following year.’
‘So it’s not true.’
‘What is truth?’ he said and did not wait for an answer.
After two hours they were only some five hundred yards from the snow line and into the last climb before they could talk to God himself. But it was just here that Bosco turned aside and began to walk around the mountain parallel with the snow. Here the thin air made the going harder for all that they were no longer climbing. Cale’s head began to ache. As he followed Bosco around a small bluff he lost sight of him for a moment and when he made contact again almost knocked him over. Bosco had stopped and was looking with great intensity at a flat rock cantilevered out from the mountain like the abandoned first section of a bridge.
‘This is the Great Jut where Satan tempted the Hanged Redeemer by offering him power over all the world.’ He turned to look at Cale. ‘I want you to come out there with me,’ he said, pointing at the end of the Jut.
‘You first.’
Bosco smiled. ‘I’m putting my life as much in your hands as you are in mine.’
‘Not really,’ replied Cale, ‘given there are thirty guards below us with spiteful thoughts on their mind.’
‘Fair enough. But do you think I’ve gone to all this trouble to try and throw you off a mountain?’
‘I don’t care to think anything about you.’
In the past Bosco would have beaten Cale severely for speaking to him like this. And Cale would have let him. It was then that Cale realized something, though he could not have said what it was exactly, about just how great was the change that had come over both of them in only a few months.
‘If I say no?’
‘I can’t make you and I won’t try.’
‘But you’ll have me killed.’
‘To be honest – no. But however great your hatred for me – something that gives me great pain – you must realize by now that you and I are bound together by unbreakable chains – I believe that’s the expression you used to Arbell Materazzi when we left Memphis.’
Perhaps Bosco realized how
very close he was to having his neck broken. If he did, he didn’t show it. But there was anxiety there, the anxiety, incomprehensible to Cale, of someone who deeply wants to be believed, to be understood, and fears that they will not. ‘Besides,’ added Bosco, ‘I have something to tell you about your parents.’ With that he walked down the rough granite of the Great Jut. Cale watched him for a moment, shocked, as he was meant to be, by what Bosco had said. It is not easy to imagine the feelings of someone like Cale for whom the notion of mother and father was as notional as the sea to the landlocked. What would such a person feel in the moment they were told the ocean was just over the next hill? Cale walked out onto the Jut, a good deal more warily than Bosco – he was not afraid of heights but he did not love them. Besides, walking on the Jut proper it seemed a good deal more fragile than standing in front of it. As he came up behind Bosco his former master stepped aside as carelessly as if he were in the middle of the training field of the Sanctuary and gestured Cale up beside him, a few inches away from the dreadful spaceless fall below.
Cale looked out over the world feeling as if he was being held in the middle of the sky itself; heart pumping, eyes astonished, he could see around for miles with the vast blue sky above and the yellow earth beneath bending to meet it in an arc of shimmering purple haze. It seemed as if it was the entire world he was looking at and not just a crescent of fifty miles or so. Bosco said nothing for several minutes as Cale was battered by the vastness. Finally Cale turned to face him.
‘So?’
‘Firstly – your parents. I heard the rumours …’ He paused for a moment. ‘… the rumours from Memphis not long after your slaughter of Solomon Solomon.’
‘He got what he deserved, which is more than can be said for the men you had me kill.’ Of all the many unpleasant memories the two of them shared this was the worst. Convinced that Cale’s murderous gifts were divinely inspired it had barely occurred to Bosco that being obliged to fight half a dozen experienced, if disgraced, soldiers to the death might have been deeply traumatic for a boy of twelve or thirteen, however skilled or callous.
‘My heart was in my mouth for every second I thought you were in danger.’ This was not quite the lie it seemed. At first he had been ecstatic at the murderous proof of the boy’s talent for killing. It was of an excellence that only religious inspiration could explain. But after the sixth death Bosco realized that God might resent his desire for proof and punish his presumption by allowing Cale to be hurt. It was realizing his presumption that suddenly made Bosco afraid for Cale and caused him to put an end to the slaughter.
It was more astonishment than restraint that prevented Cale from throwing him off the Jut there and then. The man who had beaten him for every reason that malice could devise, and half as many times again for none at all, was professing concern for him all along in tones that would have penetrated the hardest heart. But Cale’s heart was a good deal harder than that. If he let Bosco live it was only because his curiosity was even greater than his hatred. And besides, there were thirty evil bastards still waiting for him below.
‘Tell me about the rumours.’
‘After you killed him it was bruited about that the Redeemers had taken you while you were a baby from a family related directly to the Doge of Memphis – that you are a Materazzi and not an inconsiderable one.’ Can silence be stunned? You would believe it can had you been standing there on the Great Jut.
‘Is it true?’ Cale’s voice was only a whisper despite himself. There was a brief pause.
‘Absolutely not. Your parents were illiterate peasants of no importance in any way.’
‘Did you kill them?’
‘No. They sold you to us, and happily, for sixpence.’
Even Bosco was surprised by the bark of laughter that followed this.
‘I thought you might have been disappointed – about the Materazzi I mean – but it pleases you to have been bought for sixpence?’
‘Never you mind what pleases me. Why are we here?’
Bosco looked back over the great plain below.
‘When God decided to make mankind he took a rib from his first great creation, the Angel Satan. And from Satan’s rib he formed the first man out of the dust of the ground. Displeased that God had taken his rib while he was sleeping without consulting him, Satan rebelled against the Lord God and was thrown from heaven. But God took pity on mankind because he had been wrong to make him out of the rib of such a treacherous servant. And because it was God’s error he sent many prophets to save mankind from his own nature, hoping to bring out all those good things from which he had been formed. Finally, and desperately, he sent his own son to save them.’ Bosco turned slightly, his expression one of utter amazement, his eyes filling with tears. ‘But they hanged him.’
Again he said nothing for two or three minutes. ‘The Lord God brooded over this terrible wound for a thousand years, so loving a God is he. In all that time he turned over in his mind all that was good about men, all that was kind. But always he could hear and see the unbearable repartee between what was Godly and the poisonous error built into him by this loving, but terrible, mistake.’
Again there was a short silence as he stared out over the dizzying landscape below. When he spoke again his voice was even softer and more reasonable.
‘The heart of a man is a small thing but it desires great matters. It is not big enough for a dog’s dinner but the whole world is not big enough for it. Man spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound; from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child.’
Bosco turned back to Cale, his eyes shining with all the love and hope of a doting parent desperate to be understood by the person they love most in the world.
‘And who will exterminate him who exterminates all others? You. It is you who are charged with the slaughter of man. Of the whole earth, you will make a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed, without end, without measure, without pause, until the annihilation of all things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.’
Bosco smiled at Cale, tolerant, genuinely understanding.
‘Why would you do such a terrible thing? Because it is in your nature to do so. You are not a man, you are God’s anger made flesh. There is enough of mankind in you to wish to be other than what you are. You want to love, you want to show kindness, you want to be merciful. But in your heart you know you are none of these things. That is why people hate you and why the more you try to love them the more they fear you. This is why the girl betrayed you and why you will always be betrayed as long as you live. You are a wolf pretending to himself that he is a lamb.
‘Where else do you think you get your genius for mayhem and death? You kill with as much ease as others breathe. You turn up in the greatest city in the world and despite all your good intentions it took you six months to leave it in ruins. You do not bring disaster, you are disaster. You are the Grimperson, the Angel of Death, and you’d better like it or lump it. But if you don’t like it you’d better get used to wandering where everyone will despise you and everyone will try and kill you for no reason they’ll ever know. Come with me and when your work is finished and everything that lives now is dead, you will come here and be taken up into heaven. It is the only way you’ll ever have peace of mind. This is a promise.’
Within three hours the two of them had walked down to the Redeemers waiting for them and that night a respectful Bosco talked to a silent Cale late into the night.
‘Do you know why God made you?’ It was a quote instantly recognizable from the Catechism of the Hanged Redeemer. Cale’s reply, cautious, was nevertheless by rote.
‘He made us to know and love him.’
‘Do you think God made him well?’
‘Not in my experience,’ said Cale, ‘but I might just have been unlucky.’
‘But your experience is a good deal broader in the last eight months. In fact I’d say it was uniquely so. Clearly God ordained your escape and all the extraordinary things that have happened to you precisely so you could answer the question. You’ve walked hand in hand with the great and the good of this world, been loved in all the ways possible by the most beautiful, done mighty services and been mightily betrayed for your trouble.’
All of this had the great advantage from Bosco’s point of view of being more or less precisely what the young man himself believed to be the case: truth and self-pity formed a harmonious whole.
‘I’d say,’ continued Bosco, ‘that you’d seen as much as anyone that man is a wolf to man.’
‘Hypocrites,’ replied Cale, ‘I’ve come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are.’
‘That’s at my expense, I suppose,’ said Bosco, apparently not insulted. ‘If so, I’m afraid you must explain why.’
‘How do you look at me with a straight face and clack on about treachery?’
‘You’ve still lost me. Suppose I’d left you in the hands of the kind of people prepared to sell you for sixpence. Since the day you could walk you’d have been behind a plough staring at a horse’s arse for fifteen hours a day – stupid, ignorant, probably dead by now – a kind of nothing.’
‘God has been merciful. Besides, I thought I was special.’
‘There are a great many people who are born special. As the Hanged Redeemer said, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.”’
Cale laughed. ‘A flower? I am, it’s true, sweeter and more flowery than people give me credit for.’
‘Then let me put it more clearly: you were born to wade through slaughter to the throne of God. Many are called, few are chosen. But I chose you and made you fit to be the agent of the promised end.’