Bosco looked at him but he, too, wanted the old trust between them to return. It was lonely and strange to stand on your own to bring about the promised end.
‘Whatever he thinks his purpose is, he is about God’s business whether he knows it or not. But while God may not have increased his height or blessed his face to illuminate the faithful he’s given us a signal. We must attack Arnhemland now and not wait for another year as you advised. And we must increase the speed at which we send people to the west.’
The private meeting with the King that Cale attended the next day was not really private in the way he’d either expected or hoped. In fact, the King was no more used to privacy than Cale had been growing up in his dormitory of hundreds. Being on your own was a sin to the Redeemers and it might just as well have been the same for the King to all intents and purposes. Unlike Cale, he didn’t seem either to mind or even to notice, unsurprising, perhaps, in a monarch who had a special appointee of considerable power, the Keeper of the King’s Stool, to examine his excrement on a daily basis.
‘You expect us to hand over our army to a boy?’ said Bose Ikard.
‘No,’ said Cale. ‘Keep your army. Do what you want with it. I’ll create a New Model Army.’
‘From where? There are no men.’
‘Yes, there are.’
‘Where?’
‘The Campasinos.’
All were startled; not everyone laughed.
‘Our peasants are the salt of the earth, of course. But they are not soldiers.’
‘How do you know, Your Majesty?’
‘Mind your manners,’ said Bose Ikard. ‘But as it happens you’re not the first to come up with this idea. Twenty years ago Count Bechstein created a company made up of bogtrotters and bumpkins and took them off to the wars against the Falange. I believe one or two who had the sense to desert in the first week might have survived.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘But we do. It will not work.’
‘Yes, it will. I’ll show you how.’
With that he went to work with his designs and plans.
An hour later he finished: ‘The simple fact is this: there’s no other way. If I fail you can have the satisfaction of watching the Redeemers roast me in the town square. That is, Chancellor, if they don’t start with you.’ He turned to the King. ‘All I need is money.’
They might have barely any soldiers but money was something they had in great quantities. After the slaughter at Bex, no one believed, not even Bose Ikard, that surrender was an alternative. It was clear that the Redeemers didn’t recognize the notion of allowing their enemies to give in. Cale was right. There was no other way.
‘You can do this in seven months? You seem very sure.’
‘I told you, Your Majesty. I’m a remarkable person.’
If Cale was not as confident as he claimed, neither was he as desperate as he seemed to Ikard. He had been working on his New Model Army since he was ten years old (or nine – he was not sure about his date of birth). Since then, whenever he’d had a few minutes, sometimes only once a week or once a month, he’d draw a diagram or make a note about something of the working habits and the different kinds of tools the peasants around him were used to handling, the hammers and flails, the sharpened small shovel used by the Folk in the fight at Duffer’s Drift. Even in the worst days at the Priory, when Kevin Meatyard was tormenting him, he’d watch the threshers and pickers at work in the fields with their scythes and hoes and wonder what might be made of them and their way of life. He’d worry about what to do if it worked or not when things became clear. But here was a chance to work on a plan of retreat as well – one which would likely involve heading over a mountain pass with as much cash as possible.
Zog was curious about Cale in the way he might have been curious about a monkey that could write better than a human being or a uniquely elegant dancing dog. He recognized that the boy was someone exceptional but it would never have occurred to him that he was anything but a wondrous freak of nature.
‘Tell me more, dear boy, about your defeat of an entire army of Laconics. Tell me all about it … Tell me all about it … everything … the entire history.’
What Cale thought was that you might as well ask him to tell the history of a storm. He was, of course, about to start when Bose Ikard interrupted.
‘I’m afraid that Your Majesty has an important meeting with the Ambassador for the Hanse.’
‘Oh. Another time, perhaps,’ he said to Cale. ‘Most interesting.’ Then he was on his way out. Cale himself had an appointment too. The next day he was required to give evidence at Conn Materazzi’s trial, to which the Swiss had devoted almost an entire afternoon. The appointment was to make it clear to Cale what his evidence would be.
‘You are the most notorious traitor that ever lived!’
The House of Malls would comfortably seat four hundred, ranged in banks on three sides. Today there were eight hundred, with thousands waiting outside for news. On the fourth side was a judge’s bench occupied that day by Justice Popham, a man who could be relied upon to engineer the correct verdict. Next to it, slightly to one side, was a prisoner’s dock, in which stood an unimpressed Conn Materazzi who looked disdainfully at the prosecuting attorney, Sir Edward Coke, the man who had just shouted at him.
‘You can say it, Sir Edward,’ replied Conn, ‘but you cannot prove it.’
‘By God, I will!’ said Coke, who looked like a bull without a neck, all foul temper and belligerence.
‘How do you plead?’ asked Judge Popham.
‘Not guilty.’
‘Ha!’ shouted Coke. ‘You are the absolutist traitor there ever was.’
Conn turned his hand slightly, as if he had to swat away a horsefly.
‘It does not become a gentleman to insult me in this way. Though I take comfort from your bad manners – it is all you can do.’
‘So I see I’ve angered you.’
‘Not at all,’ said Conn. ‘Why would I be angry? I haven’t yet heard one word against me that can be proved.’
‘Didn’t Fauconberg run away over the mountains because he had betrayed us at Bex? And didn’t that tergiversating sneak also plan to kill the King and his children?’ He sniffed loudly as if it were all too much. ‘Those poor babies who never gave offence to anyone.’
‘If Lord Fauconberg is a traitor what’s that got to do with me?’
‘Everything he did, you viper, was at your instigation!’
At this there was a huge boiling over in the crowd. TRAITOR! MURDERER! HEAR! HEAR! HEAR! CONFESS! THE BABIES! THE POOR BABIES! Popham let them fulminate. He wanted Conn to get the point that his refusal to play the role of abject penitent, as he’d been told to, was doing him no good. ‘Silence in the court,’ he said. The trouble with trying to bribe Conn to go along with his part was that Popham knew perfectly well that sacrificing a goat required that the goat understood that he was it no matter what he said or did not say.
Coke, now red in the face with fury, waved a piece of paper in the air. ‘This is a letter found hidden in a secret drawer in the house of that renegade Fauconberg. On it he states clearly that the vile Pope Bosco intended to pay six hundred thousand dollars to Conn Materazzi and that he would give Fauconberg two hundred thousand to assist him in losing the battle.’ He waved the paper once more and then brought it close to read with an expression on his face as if someone had used it to wipe their arse. ‘It says here, “Conn Materazzi would never let me alone”.’ He turned to the clerk. ‘Read that line again.’ Startled, the recording clerk blushed bright red. ‘Get a bloody move on, man!’ shouted Coke.
‘“Conn Materazzi would never let me alone.”’
Coke looked around the room, nodding his head ingrim triumph. SHAME! called out the crowd. SHAME! TRAITOR!