‘Go on then.’
‘I watched other children playing even when I was very small – all they ever did was make things come out the way they wanted them to. But things never do – I knew that even when I was five. So I took an old pack of my mother’s cards and I used to write things on them – your best general falls off his horse and breaks his neck, a spy steals your plan of attack, thunder makes your enemies’ horses stampede, you suddenly go blind.’
Cale laughed again. ‘I take it back. You are cleverer than me.’
‘It’s not a question of being clever. Nothing’s lost on me, that’s all. Just like everyone, I see what I want to see – only I know that’s what I’m like, so sometimes I can make myself see things as they are. Only sometimes, though. That would be really clever – seeing things as they are all the time.’
But she was wrong about that, as time would tell.
And so what happened was everything you would expect. He told her about the Sanctuary and his life there (not everything, of course, some things are better left unsaid) and she was close to tears hearing him talk about the things he experienced there, which was, of course, very satisfactory to Cale. They talked and walked and kissed – something that to her surprise he was puzzling good at. To the great scandal of her servants, she brought him to the small house she had rented not far from Boundary Park and – a little guiltily, though not too much – spent several hours making a shameless beast of herself with her young lover’s body. She was aware at some level that he was very much more familiar with how to touch her than his age and history would have suggested. Her suspicions were moved to the place where all uncomfortable suspicions go – to the back of her mind. There they joined all her other anxieties and shames, including the one which she was most guilty about, that she was deeply excited by Cale’s certainty that there would be no agreement that kept the Redeemers on the other side of the Mississippi in exchange for money and more concessions of territory. They were coming and nothing would stop them except force. The realization that she wanted a war appalled her because she knew perfectly well that it would bring terrible pain and suffering everywhere, especially to the people she had built her private army to protect. Although they turned out to be a tough collection, the farmers and carpenters who had made up her militia were interested in cows and barley not war. The thing which she was most talented at, most excited by, most passionate about was an exercise in blood and suffering, though it wasn’t this that drew her to fighting but the delight she felt in trying to control the uncontrollable. There are some men and at least one woman for whom life is meaningless unless the greatest prize of all, life itself, is at stake. What was the point of chess, she used to complain to her husband when he was alive? He used to spend hours playing and claimed that it was a game so full of traps and subtleties it mirrored the deepest and most complex levels of the human mind.
‘Bollocks!’ she had said to him. She had heard this expression just that Sunday on the training ground and was not completely aware of the strength of its vulgarity. Bollocks was not a word that a Margravine ought to use to a Margrave and certainly not about chess. Eye-widening, startled at her outburst, he pretended only polite uncertainty.
‘Your exquisite reasons, my dear?’
‘I don’t have any exquisite reasons. It’s just that chess has rules and life doesn’t have rules. You can’t burn your opponent’s bishop, you can’t stab him either, or pour a bucket of water over the board or play when you haven’t eaten for three days. However clever you have to be to play it, it’s just a stupid game. To fight a battle,’ she said, ‘needs a mind a hundred times better than any stupid game.’ She was so rude because she felt guilty about wanting to go to war.
Her husband had thought about this for a moment. ‘Let us hope, my dear, that at some time in the future you get your chance to butcher as many of our friends and neighbours as will satisfy your ambition.’
She didn’t talk to him for three days – but unusually he was not the one to give in.
It was a secret relief that, when the time came to play with real death and destruction, she had absolutely no choice but to do the one thing that in all the world she most wanted to. The extreme nature of the Redeemers cleared her conscience.
At the war conference in Spanish Leeds (Cale was as dismissive of it as he was desperate to be there), there emerged a sudden demand for decisive action from the King himself. It was intolerable, he said, that so much had been lost to the Redeemers and he would not endure it and neither would his people, and he sincerely believed his allies would take the same view.
He did not sincerely believe anything of the kind. It is a truth, declared Vipond later, that the sincerity of anything said aloud should be divided by the number of people listening to it. Like nearly all kings, in another world Zog would have been an inadequate cattle farmer, a better than average grower of turnips or a mediocre butcher. The same would be true for many of the great and the good who surrounded him. This is why the best picture of the world is as a lunatic asylum. ‘If you only knew,’ IdrisPukke was fond of saying to Cale, ‘with how much stupidity the world is run.’
The last we heard of the great storm above the forests of Brazil it had passed the height of its unimaginable power by merely a fraction. Now, months later, it has dispersed that power across five thousand miles in all directions to the north and south and east and west. Descending from the warm skies above the Aleatoire Bridge over the River Imprevu, a great tributary of the Mississippi, it approached a large buddleia, as purple as the hat of an Antagonist bishop, covered in butterflies feeding on its nectar. As it touched the bush the last breath of wind of the great Brazilian storm finally died – but not before it ever so slightly lifted the wings of one of the butterflies, causing it to take to the air. The movement of the long-tailed blue just caught the eye of a passing swallow who dipped and, in a fraction of a second, took it in its beak, startling the mass of other butterflies who took to the air in hundreds like a bursting cloud and frightened a passing horse pulling a wagon badly loaded with rocks for the repair of a wall. The horse reared, turning the cart on its side and pitching the rocks into the River Imprevu below.
Some agricultural language followed this accident, and a kick for the unfortunate horse, but only some rocks were lost and not worth the effort of getting them out. So the wheel was put back on the wagon, the horse given another kick, and that was that.
In the river below, the not especially large pile of stones caused the current to flow more quickly round its sides and pointed the faster stream directly at the roots of one of the oldest and largest oak trees on the banks of the great tributary.
At the same moment, Zog was proposing that an army of the best Swiss troops and those of its allies should be sent through the Schallenberg Pass to engage the Redeemer army on the plains of the Mittelland. ‘We can do nothing less. In putting this plan forward I rededicate myself to the service of this great country and this great alliance.’ The speaker thanked the King and tearfully stated, ‘You have become for us all, your Majesty, a kaleidoscope king of our kaleidoscope alliance.’ There was loud applause.
The speaker then threw the King’s plan open for discussion to the Axis members gathered – which is to say that he threw the King’s plan open to them for their agreement, a consent that had already been guaranteed by persuasion and threats from Bose Ikard, despite the fact that he was profoundly opposed to doing anything of the kind. Given that he had not persuaded the King against a fight he realized that he must make up for disagreeing with him by now being deeply enthusiastic in its favour. He had neglected, however, to talk to Artemisia, because he didn’t consider her important enough. She listened for twenty minutes to various speeches in response, all supporting the King and all pretty much the same. She tried catching the eye of the speaker of the meeting but he refused to recognize her. In the end she simply stood up, as one of the prearranged speeches of support ended, and started talking.