The Last Four Things Read online

  By the same author

  The Left Hand of God

  The Last Four Things

  PAUL HOFFMAN

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2011

  Copyright © Paul Hoffman, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-95771-5

  For Richard Gollner

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specific world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even into a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.

  J. B. Watson, Psychologies of 1925

  I fought like an angel.

  Wilfred Owen

  Prologue

  Imagine. A young assassin, no more than a boy really, is lying carefully hidden in the long green and black bulrushes that grow in great profusion along the rivers of the Vallombrosa. He has been waiting for a long time but he is a patient creature in his way and the thing he waits for is perhaps more precious to him than life. Beside him are a bow of yew and arrows tipped with black country steel capable of penetrating even the costliest armour if you’re close enough. Not that there will be any need for that today because the young man is not waiting for some rascal deserving of his murder but only a water bird. The light thickens and the swan makes wing through the rooky wood, the cawing crows complaining bitterly at the unfairness of her beauty as she lands upon the water like the stroke of a painter’s hand upon a canvas, direct and beautifully itself. She swims with all the elegance for which her kind is famous, though you will never have seen movement quite so graceful in such still and smoky air on such steeple grey water.

  Then the arrow, sharp as hate, shears through the same air she blesses and misses her by several feet. And she’s off, web strength along with her grace convey her whiteness back into the air and away to safety. The young man is standing now and watching the swan escape.

  ‘I’ll get you next time you treacherous slut!’ he shouts and throws down the bow, which alone of all the instruments of death (knife, sword, elbow, teeth) he has never been able to master and yet is the only one that can give him hope of restitution for his broken heart. But not even then. For though this is a dream, not even in his dreams can he hit a barn door from twenty yards. He wakes and broods for half an hour. Real life is careful of the sensitivities of desperadoes but even the greatest scourge, and Thomas Cale is certainly one of those, can be mocked with impunity in his nightmares. Then he goes back to sleep to dream again of the autumnal leaves that strewed the brooks in Vallombrosa, and the great white wings beating into swirls the early-morning mist.

  1

  ‘The Lay of Thomas Cale, Angel of Death’ is the second worst poem ever to emerge from the Office for the Propagation of the Faith of the Hanged Redeemer. This institution subsequently became so famous for its skill in spinning the grossly untrue on behalf of the Redeemers that the phrase ‘to tell a monk’ passed into general usage.

  Book the Forty Seventh: The Argument

  Wake up! For sunrise in the spoon of night

  Reveals the Left Hand

  of the Lord of Might.

  His name is Cale, his arm is strong

  As the Angel of Death he does no wrong.

  Searching for traitors who’ll murder the Pope

  Cale left the Sanctuary by means of a rope.

  To protect the Pope he pretended to flee

  The quiet and care of the Sanctuary

  And Bosco his mentor he claimed to reject

  And all for the sake of the Pope to protect.

  In Memphis the city of Sodom and Vice

  He rescued a princess, a maiden of ice.

  With wiles and with lust his soul’s ruin she sought

  And when he said, ‘No!’ his assassins she bought.

  Now long had her father conspired ’gainst the Pope

  And attacked the Redeemers to further this hope

  But in the great battle at Silbury Hill

  With Princeps and Bosco, Cale gave them their fill.

  The Empire of Memphis they wasted that day

  Then Bosco and Cale they returned to the fray

  The Antagonist heretics them for to slay.

  For Pope and Redeemer let all of us pray!

  It is a generally accepted wisdom that true events pass into history and are transformed according to the prejudices of the person recording them. History then turns slowly into legend, in which all facts are blurred despite the interest of the tellers, who will by now be many, various and contradictory. Finally, perhaps after thousands of years, all intentions, good or bad, all lies and all exactness merge into a myth of universal possibility in which anything might be true, anything
false. It no longer matters, one way or the other. But the truth is that a great many things depart from the facts almost as soon as they happen and are converted into the great smog of myth almost before the sun has gone down on the events themselves. The doggerel above, for example, was written within two months of the incidents it so badly attempts to immortalize. Let us go then through this drivel verse by verse.

  Thomas Cale had been brought to the grim Sanctuary of the Hanged Redeemer at the age of three or four (no one knew or cared which). As soon as he arrived the little boy was singled out by one of the priests of this most forbidding of religions, the Redeemer Bosco, mentioned three times in the poem not least because he was the man who caused it to be written. It should not be thought that this was inspired by anything so simple as human vanity or ambition.

  The Redeemers were not only infamous for their harsh view of the sinful nature of mankind but even more for their willingness to enforce that view through military conquest led by their own priests, most of whom were brought up to fight rather than preach. The most intelligent and the most pious (a line more easily blurred among the Redeemers than elsewhere) were responsible for ensuring correct beliefs and the administration of the faith in all its many conquered and converted states. The rest were reserved for the armed wing of the One True Faith, the Militant, and were raised and frequently died (the lucky ones, went the joke) in numerous religious barracks, of which the largest was the Sanctuary. It was in the Sanctuary that Cale was chosen by Bosco as his personal acolyte – a form of favouritism only an inhumanly tough child could ever hope to survive. By the time he was fourteen (or fifteen) Cale was as cold and calculating a creature as you could ever have wished not to meet in a dark alley or anywhere else – and apparently animated by only two things: his utter loathing of Bosco and his indifference to everyone else. But Cale’s general bad luck was about to change for the worse as he opened the wrong door at the wrong time and discovered the Lord of Discipline, Redeemer Picarbo, dissecting a young girl, still alive if only just, and about to do the same to another. Choosing self-preservation over compassion and horror, Cale shut the door quietly and left. However, in a moment of madness which he claimed forever to regret, the look in the eyes of the young woman about to be so cruelly disembowelled caused him to return and in the ensuing struggle kill a man perhaps tenth in line to the Pope himself. What you already have gathered of the Redeemers will make clear the fate Cale could expect: one that, you can be sure, involved a great deal of screaming.

  If escape from the Sanctuary had been easy Cale would have already been long gone. While, as the twaddle of ‘The Lay of Thomas Cale’ claims, it did involve a rope there was no plot to murder the Pope – another invention of Bosco’s to cover up the flight of an acolyte he had particular reason to want back, a reason that had nothing to do with whatever bizarre and revolting business Picarbo had been up to. What the poem does not mention is that Cale was accompanied by three others: the girl he’d saved; Vague Henri, the only boy in the Sanctuary he remotely tolerated; and Kleist, who like everyone else regarded him with suspicion and dislike.

  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 m
ore 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.