By the middle of the morning she was in a furiously bad temper, with all her fears confirmed even though in a manner that beggared belief. It was all the fault of that ungrateful slut Riba.
Three times that morning she had endured the lying protestations of heartbreak from young men who, it was now clear, had been coming to see her only because it gave them the opportunity to arrive early to go through the motions of groveling before Mademoiselle Jane, and then leave as quickly as possible only so that they could make cow eyes at that fat whore Riba. It was unthinkably humiliating; not only were they deceiving the most beautiful and desired woman in Memphis (something of an exaggeration-she was number fifteen at best-but allowance must be made for her understandable outrage), but also they were doing so with a creature the size of a house who wobbled like a blancmange whenever she walked.
This insult-and for a Materazzi female to call a woman fat was a deadly one-was by no means entirely accurate either. Certainly Riba made a striking contrast to her mistress, and indeed to all the Materazzi women, but she had never wobbled like a blancmange; besides, in the two months she had been at Memphis, Riba had been so busy that she no longer had either the means to eat so much as she had at the Sanctuary, or the time. The result was that she had lost a considerable amount of her buttery pulchritude. What before had been too much of an unusual thing had now become a very enticing and unusual thing. Because they were used to the boyish slenderness and bad temper of Materazzi women, the curves and swaying undulations of Riba made more and more of the Materazzi men watch Riba with greater and greater interest as she sauntered past them with her disdainful mistress. Almost as engaging was her cheerful smile and welcoming manner. The Materazzi men had been brought up on the rituals of a courtly love that involved a despairing and unrequited adoration for a distant object of affection who only ever treated all men like dirt. And so the quick conversion of a number of young men to a shapely good-looker who didn’t look down on them as if they were something the cat had dragged in hardly needed much explanation.
In a dreadful state, Mademoiselle Jane ran down from her hiding place and through the door of her main apartment and into the reception hall where Riba had just closed the door behind a young Materazzi, who was ushered smiling into the street in a haze of desire and longing. Mademoiselle Jane screamed out for her housekeeper.
“Anna-Maria! Anna-Maria!”
An astonished Riba stared at her mistress, who had gone quite red with fury.
“What’s the matter, mademoiselle?”
“Shut your mouth, you potbellied lump of lard,” replied Mademoiselle Jane in a most unmademoiselle-like manner as Anna-Maria, astonished by the feral screaming, hurried into the room. Mademoiselle Jane looked at her housekeeper as if she might burst and then pointed to Riba.
“Get this treacherous bilker out of my house. I never want to see this beezle ever again.”
Mademoiselle Jane was about to finish her tirade by fetching Riba a slap on the face but thought better of it as the young woman’s expression turned from astonishment to anger at being so furiously insulted. “Get her out of my sight!” she yelled at Anna-Maria and hissed back into her chambers.
20
IdrisPukke had refused to give up trying to reeducate Cale’s stomach. His new diet would at first have to be simple-and was not simplicity, after all, a test of a good cook’s skill? The next time Cale returned to one of IdrisPukke’s special meals, it was to fresh trout caught in the lake next to the lodge, lightly steamed and with boiled potatoes and herbs and leaves. Cale was cautious with the potatoes because they had a tiny amount of butter melted over them, but they stayed down and he even asked for more.
And so the days and nights passed. Cale continued on his long walks with and without IdrisPukke. They sat in silence for hours and talked for hours, although it was IdrisPukke who did most of the talking. He also taught Cale to fish, how to eat in civilized company (no belching, slurping, eat with your mouth shut), told him about his extraordinary life-along with many stories at his own expense, something that Cale continued to find bewildering. To laugh at an adult meant a vicious beating-for one to invite you to laugh at him defied belief. At night he would sometimes feel almost uncontainable bursts of joy for no reason at all. IdrisPukke also continued to offer Cale the benefits of his philosophy of life. “Love between a man and woman is the best possible example of the fact that all this world’s hopes are an absurd delusion, and it is so because of the fact that love promises so excessively much and performs so excessively little.” And again: “I know you don’t need me to tell you that this world is hell, but try to understand that men and women are on the one hand the tormented souls in that hell and on the other the devils in it doing the tormenting.” And yet more: “No one of real intelligence will accept anything just because some authority declares it to be so. Don’t accept the truth of anything you have not confirmed for yourself.”
In turn Cale told him about his life with the Redeemers.
“At first it wasn’t just the beatings that scared us. In those days we believed what they said-that even if we weren’t caught doing something wrong we were born evil and that God saw everything we did so we had to confess to everything. If we didn’t and we died in a state of sin, we would go to hell and burn for all eternity. And we did die, every few months, and what they told us was that most of us went to hell and burned for all eternity. I used to lie awake at night in those days after the prayers that always finished ‘What if you should die tonight?’ Sometimes I was absolutely certain that if I fell asleep, I’d die and burn forever in agony.” He stopped talking for a moment. “How old, IdrisPukke, were you before you knew what terror was?”
“A lot older than five, anyway. It was at the Battle of Goat River. I was, what, seventeen. We were ambushed on a scouting trip. My first time in a real fight. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been trained. And I was pretty good, third in my year. The Druse Cavalry came over the hill and then there was just confusion and noise and chaos. I couldn’t speak, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I began to shake and I wanted to… well… I mean.”
“Shit yourself?” offered Cale.
“Why not be blunt? When it was all over, and it didn’t last more than five minutes, I was still alive. But I hadn’t even drawn my sword.”
“Did anyone else see?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“They didn’t beat you?”
“No. But if it happened again, well, you weren’t going to last long.” There was another pause. “So you’ve never felt like that?” said IdrisPukke at last.
It was by no means a simple question. One of the conditions on which his brother, or, to be precise, his half brother, had released IdrisPukke and put Cale in his control was that he must find out everything about the boy-and most important his apparent lack of fear and whether or not this was exceptional or in some way engineered by the Redeemers.
“I used to be afraid all the time when I was young,” said Cale after a while. “But then it stopped.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” This was not true, of course, or not entirely true.
“And now you’re not afraid at all?”
Cale looked at him. The last few weeks had amazed him, and he was grateful to IdrisPukke and had felt many odd and unfamiliar emotions of friendship and trust. But it would take more than a few weeks of kindness and generosity to shake Cale’s wariness. He considered whether or not to change the subject. But it didn’t, on the face of it, seem to matter much if he told the truth.