The fuss certainly helped Cadbury to move more safely within the crowd in the hope of finding Deidre and getting out without, he hoped, having to deal with either of the Two Trevors.
Before all of this, Cale had been sitting in the Priory cloisters with Sister Wray, discussing the existence of God – it was on Cale’s insistence, a challenge to her born out of his bad mood at failing to make it to the top of the hill.
‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘be taking your ill-temper out on me – but in case something else inside you is listening I’ll tell you about God. When I was upon the hill today, looking out over the sea and sky and the mountains, I could feel him everywhere. Don’t ask me why, I just could. And don’t worry, I know just as well as you do that much of life is hard and cruel.’ She turned her head and he had the strongest sense she was smiling. ‘Well, not perhaps quite as well as you. But hard and cruel as it is I still feel his presence. I still find the world beautiful.’ She laughed, such a pleasant sound.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Tell me what you saw when you were up there. With the mountains and the sea and the sky. Tell me honestly.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I saw a river delta easy for a landing from the sea but impossible to defend. Up from that I saw a river plain – you could bring an army up easy … but then it narrows and a land slip cuts it in two, about eight feet deep. You could defend for days against four times the men. But there’s a small bypass to the left cut into the hill. If they took that it would be over. But there’s also a path to the back of the valley. If you timed it right you could pull your men back in packs of a hundred or so and get them out even though it’s constricted. They could cover the remainder from the hills when they needed to abandon the line. But any attempt to follow with numbers and you’d be jammed tight like a cork in a bottle.’ He laughed. ‘Sorry, not what you want to hear.’
‘I’m not trying to reform you.’
‘Don’t mind if you do. I’m sick of myself. Sick of being like this.’ He smiled again. ‘Redeem me all you want.’ A pause. ‘Can you make me better?’
‘I can try.’
‘Does that mean no?’
‘It means I can try.’
Another silence, or as much as the pulsing thrum of the tree cicadas would permit.
‘What about you?’ he said, after a minute or two.
‘When you saw the sun over the mountain today did you see a round disc of fire somewhat like a gold dollar?’ Sister Wray asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I saw an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”’
Yet another silence.
‘Quite a bit different then,’ Cale said eventually.
‘Yes,’ said Sister Wray.
‘There is no God,’ said Cale. He did not intend this as an insult. He did not intend to say it at all. It burst out of him. He felt Poll moving up his arm and whispering very quietly in his ear, so that Sister Wray would not overhear, ‘Blasphemous cunt!’
At that moment something extraordinary happened, a coincidence so outrageous that it could only be encountered in either an improbable fiction or life itself: four resounding clangs sounded from the bell tower and a powerful voice from above shouted: ‘Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you.’ But Cale misunderstood – although Cadbury’s shout was intended as a warning he interpreted it as a threat from the heavens, to punish him for his sacrilegious outburst.
At once he looked around into the dark and realized that the cloister was a natural trap – a box with only one entrance, four times longer than it was wide with a covered walkway creating deep shadows on all four sides. The bell rang out again, followed by the shout, ‘Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale! Two men are here to murder you.’
Sister Wray began to rise. He grasped her arm and at the same time pushed against the ground, so that the wooden high-backed bench on which they were sitting toppled backwards.
As they moved through the shadows of the cloisters, getting into position, the bells and the warning astonished the Trevors. Having separated to move either side of the covered walkway, both decided to let fly with their small overstrungs – but by toppling backwards on the bench Cale was a fraction faster and the bolts moithered overhead with a venomous zip. On his feet, Cale grabbed Sister Wray with his other hand and dragged her backwards into the darkness of the covered walkway. He dumped her forcefully next to a statue of St Frideswide and whispered, ‘Stay here – don’t move.’
There was only one course possible for his killers. One of them would stay near the only exit to his left, while the other would already be moving up the other walkway to close in on him from the right. Cale was in a pinch. If he tried to make the diagonal run across the open centre of the cloisters they’d have plenty of time to put a bolt in him front and back. He couldn’t stay where he was.
‘Give me your habit and your veil. Quick.’
She did not waste time being shocked, but she was afraid and fumbled at the line of buttons. ‘Quickly!’ He reached for the front of her habit and ripped it apart. She gasped but did not flap and helped him haul it down to her feet. Then, without asking, he lifted off her veil. Too much afraid to stop and stare at what he saw, Cale stepped into the habit and dragged on the veil, ripping away the small, perforated patch that covered her eyes. ‘Don’t you move,’ he said again and, black habit pulled up to his knees, launched himself into the middle part of the cloister. But he didn’t try for the long diagonal run to the exit but sprinted straight across by the shortest way towards the opposite side. Lighter than the deeply shadowed walkway, it was still only dimly lit by the clouded moon and the poor light and black habit made his movements indistinct and odd. Thrown by the strange appearance of the nun, and wary of a decoy being used to force them to give their position away, the Two Trevors hesitated and let the figure go as it flapped into the unseeable shadows of the walkway.
Cale had given the Two Trevors a problem: what was simple had become complicated. They were, of course, not long in working out what had probably happened. But only probably. It was probably Cale wrapped in the nun’s habit. But only probably. Perhaps she was young and fit. Perhaps Cale had threatened to cut off her head if she didn’t make the dash. Perhaps the nun had decided to sacrifice herself for Cale and got away with it. Lugavoy had the exit covered and it was clear that he must stay there; it was Kovtun at the top of the cloister who had to decide whether Cale was still to his left or now to his right dressed head to toe in black. And he had to be quick. The warning from the tower meant that they were being looked for. The problem about being quick was that it meant they might easily make a mistake. But to act more slowly meant dealing with the guards of the more dangerous lunatics farther inside the Priory. He was now in a trap himself – to one side a presumably harmless nun, to the other a homicidal maniac. He was unnerved even more by a strange convulsive sound like an animal bellowing in the dark.
He was not to know, of course, that his position was considerably less serious than he thought. He wasn’t to know that the sound was nothing more than Cale chucking up his guts at the terrible demands he had made of his miserably collapsing constitution. But Kovtun had to move and his skill and instinct made him choose correctly. He went back the way he’d come, closing in on the distressed and exhausted boy. Cale was unarmed, not that it would have made much difference if he’d been holding the Danzig Shank itself, and he knew that he must make his move to the exit or die where he was. He was soaked in sweat, his lips full of pins and needles. He moved towards the exit slowly – any faster and he would have fallen down. Fortunately for him, the still spooked Kovtun was following pretty gingerly himself. Neither Cale nor the Two Trevors had time on their side but all three knew that too little patience could get them killed. Cale was on all fours, feeling his way towards the right-hand corner of the cloister, heading for the exit and whoever was waiting there and trying not to breathe too hard or give himself away by throwing up again. Behind him, Kovtun was slowly beating up the walkway. Cale realized the greatest obstacle to his having any chance of getting out was the moonlight coming through the large entry into the cloisters. Anyone trying to make it through would be lit up like St Catherine on a wheel. He shuffled forwards to the edge of the light and braced himself to run, hoping to catch whoever was guarding the exit by surprise. Behind him he heard the sound of Kovtun scuffing his foot lightly on an uneven slab. He ran for it – one second, one and a half, two seconds – and then felt a huge crack to the side of his head as Trevor Lugavoy, who’d been waiting just the other side of the line of moonlight, stepped in and struck him with the heavy end of his overstrung. It would have taken a lot less to knock Cale down in his dreadful state and he fell like a sack of hammers, collapsing with his back to a statue of St Hemma of Gurk.