While Cale’s intelligence, schooled by long training, meant that he evaded the Redeemers trying to recapture them, his habitual bad luck led to all four walking into a patrol of Materazzi cavalry out of the great city of Memphis, a place richer and more varied than any Paris or Babylon or Sodom, another one of the few references in the ‘Lay’ that has any echo of the truth about it. In Memphis the four came to the attention of its great Chancellor, Vipond, and his unreliable half-brother, IdrisPukke, who for reasons unclear to anyone, even to himself, took a shine to Cale and showed him something he had never experienced before, a little kindness.
But it would take a good deal more than a touch of decency to get round the back of Cale, whose suspicion and hostility quickly began to earn him the loathing of almost everyone he encountered, from the Materazzi clan’s golden boy, Conn, to the exquisite Arbell Materazzi. Usually known as Swan-Neck (no coincidence that the murderous dream which begins our story has a swan as its object of hate), she was the daughter of the man who ruled a Materazzi empire so vast that it was one upon which the sun never set. Bosco, however, placed very great store by Cale’s hostility and he had no intention of letting Cale misuse it where it was only likely to get him killed. It is of no surprise that for all her dislike of him, a person like Cale could not fail to fall in love with a distant beauty such as Arbell Materazzi. She continued to regard him as a thug even, or especially, after he saved her life during a pitilessly lethal act of violence (dismissed later by his enemies as no more than a form of pretentious swashbuckling). Kleist’s complaint about Cale that wherever he went a funeral shortly followed came to be more widely understood, particularly by IdrisPukke, who had been witness to the murderously cold rescue of Arbell. However, the alien and the strange can be a strong brew for the young, hence the reference in the ‘Lay’ to the attempted seduction of Cale by the lovely Arbell. Except that there was no seduction, if seduction implies persuasion of the reluctant, and there was never any point at which the word ‘No!’, or anything like it, ever crossed his lips. She certainly never paid to have him assassinated – nor, as Kleist later joked when he eventually read the poem, would she have needed to, given there were so many people willing to do it for nothing.
Equally unreliable is the claim that Arbell’s father had ever nursed the slightest intention of attacking the Redeemers. His entirely fictional aggression had been invented by Bosco with the sole intention of providing an excuse to his superiors to wage a war that was in fact designed for one purpose: to return Cale to the Sanctuary. The law of unintended consequences being what it is, Bosco’s desperately disease-wasted army under the generalship of Redeemer Princeps found itself trapped by a Materazzi army ten times its size at Silbury Hill. The ensuing battle was watched by a horrified Cale (who for reasons too complicated to explain here had provided the plan of attack for both armies) as a mixture of bad luck, confusion, mud, folly and a lack of crowd control that caused one of the most lethal reversals of fortune in the history of warfare.
To his astonishment Bosco found himself the conqueror of Memphis and possessed of every prize the world could offer, except the one he wanted: Thomas Cale. But Bosco had long had a finger in Memphis’s nastiest pie, one owned by the appalling wheeler-dealer, businessman and pimp, Kitty the Hare. Kitty knew that Cale had lost his abnormally inexperienced heart to the beautiful Arbell just as he also discovered in due course that her intense passion for this most peculiar boy was already beginning to burn itself out – strange fruit, as Kitty joked, for such a hothouse flower. All the better for Bosco, whose men had taken her prisoner. As soon as he arrived in Memphis, Bosco applied his talent for human nature – one far too advanced for a beautiful young princess, however intelligent – by convincingly threatening to lay waste to the city if she did not give up her lover, while also reassuring her, entirely sincerely as it happened, that he had no intention of harming him. So she betrayed Cale, if betrayal it was, but with what kind of conscience it would be hard to say. So it was that Cale gave himself up, at the additional price of the release of Vague Henri and Kleist, only to learn that he had been delivered up to the man he hated above all things by the woman he loved above all things. This then brings us to the last of the lying verses of the ‘Lay of Thomas Cale’, with our hero heading into the wilderness with two great hatreds blistering his heart: one for the woman he once loved and the other, more familiar, for the man who had just told him one more thing about himself that had his brain spinning in his head. Bosco told him to stop feeling sorry for himself because he was not a person at all, not someone who could be either loved or betrayed but, as the ‘Lay’ had assured us all along, no more than the Angel of Death. And it was now time to go seriously about his God’s business.
From now on everything that follows is the truth.
There are taller mountains than Tiger Mountain, many far more dangerous to climb, those whose sheer heights and dreadful crevices make the soul shiver with their hostility to any living thing. But there are none more impressive, none more likely to raise the spirits, to inspire wonder at its solitary splendour. Its great cone shape grows up from the Thametic plain that surrounds most of it and flatly stretches into the distance so that from fifty miles away its majestic symmetry seems like the work of man. But no man ever lived, not the most egotistical, no Akhenaten or Ozymandias, who could build a giant peak like this. Closer, its inhuman vastness is revealed, a hundred thousand times as big as the great pyramid of Lincoln. It’s not hard to see why it has been held by many different kinds of faith to be the one place on earth from which God will speak directly to mankind. It was at the top of Tiger Mountain that Moses received the tablets of stone on which the six hundred and thirteen commandments were written. It was here in exchange for victory over the Ammonites that Jephthah the Gileadite, with considerable reluctance it must be said, cut the throat of his only daughter upon an altar after he had promised to sacrifice to the Lord the first living thing that greeted him on his return home. Willingly she went and to the very last the miserable Jephthah hoped for a compassionate reprieve – a voice, an angelic messenger, the stern but merciful proof that it was just a test of faith. But Jephthah returned from Tiger Mountain on his own. It was here, on the Great Jut below the snow line, that the Devil himself, at the instigation of the Lord, showed the Hanged Redeemer all the world that lay below and offered to give it to him.
On the other hand the Montagnards, a tribe without much of a place for religion in their lives, and who had controlled Tiger Mountain for eighty-odd years, referred to it as the Great Testicle. The reason why was starting to occupy Cale as, along with the Lord Militant Bosco and thirty guards, he made his way up the lower reaches of the mountain.
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.