Paul Hoffman - The Left Hand of God

“I’ve done all right so far.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been lucky, sonny, and very. And I don’t care how good you are with your fists. That you’ve made it this far without swinging on the end of a rope is as much luck as judgment.” He paused and sighed. “Do you trust Vipond?”

“I don’t trust anybody.”

“Any fool can say they don’t rely on anyone. The trouble is that sometimes you have to. People can be noble and self-sacrificing and all those admirable qualities-they do exist, but the trouble is that these noble virtues tend to come and go in people. No one expects a good-humored man or a kind woman to be good-humored or kind every day and every moment-yet they’re appalled when people are trustworthy for a month or a year and then they aren’t for an hour or a day.”

“If they’re not to be relied on all the time, then you don’t trust them.”

“And can you be relied on?”

“No-I’ve learned, IdrisPukke, that I can do noble things. I can rescue the innocent,” he smiled, mocking, “rescue them from the wicked and the unrighteous. But it’s out of character-it was a good day, or a bad day, when I saved Riba. But it won’t happen again in a hurry.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“No-but I’ll do my best.” They rode on in silence for another half hour. “Do you trust Vipond?” said Cale at last.

“It depends. What about?”

Cale shifted uncomfortably in his saddle.

“He promised that if I stayed with you and behaved myself then Vague Henri and Kleist would be all right. He’d protect them. Will he?”

“So… worried about your friends? Not as heartless as you try to pretend.”

“Is that what you think? Try depending on my heart-see where it gets you.”

IdrisPukke laughed. “The thing about Vipond is to remember that he’s a great man and that great men have great responsibilities, and not keeping his promises is one of them.”

“You’re just trying to sound clever.”

“Not at all. Vipond has a great many big fish to fry, and you and your friends are not very big fish at all. What if a hundred lives or the future safety of Memphis and all its million souls depended on breaking his word to three little tiddlers like you and your friends? What would you do in his place? You think you’re such a hard case, tell me.”

“Kleist isn’t my friend.”

“What do you think Vipond wants from you?”

“He wants me to learn to trust you, to tell you the whole truth about what happened with the Redeemers. He thinks they might be a threat.”

“And is he right?”

Cale looked at him. “The Redeemers are a poxy curse on the face of the earth…” He looked as if he wanted to continue but with an effort had stopped himself.

“You were going to say something else.”

“Yes, I was.”

“What?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Suit yourself. As for trusting Vipond… you can, up to a point. He’ll go out of his way to watch over your friend and the other one who isn’t your friend unless it becomes important not to. Until they become significant in the wrong way, they’re as safe as houses.”

And as they rode on in silence, still neither of them realized that Kitty the Hare’s eyes were watching and his ears listening.

At four that afternoon IdrisPukke dismounted and, signaling Cale to do the same, he turned off the trail into what looked like virgin forest. The going would have been tough even without the horses, and it took them the best part of two hours before the density of trees and bushes eased and then opened onto another clearly little-used track.

“I’d say you knew the way,” observed Cale to IdrisPukke’s back.

“I can see there’s no hiding anything from you, Mister Know-It-All.”

“How’s that, then?”

“I used to come here to Treetops all the time with my brother when I was a boy.”

“And who’s he?”

“Chancellor Leopold Vipond.”

Cale might have thought that the next two months at Treetops Lodge were the happiest of his life, if he’d had another happy experience to compare it with. But, given that two months spent in the Seventh Circle of Hell would have been an improvement on his life in the Sanctuary, his happiness was not to be compared to anything. He was merely happy. He slept twelve hours a day and often more, drank beer and in the evening would enjoy a smoke with IdrisPukke, who took great pains to assure him that once he got over his initial dislike, smoking would be both a great pleasure and one of the few truly dependable consolations that life had to offer.

They would sit in the evening outside the old hunting lodge, on its large wood veranda, while listening to the ribbit-ribbit of the insects and watching the swallows and bats diving and ducking and tumbling at the day’s end. Often they would sit for hours in silence, punctuated from time to time by one of IdrisPukke’s drolleries about life and its pleasures and illusions.

“Solitude is a wonderful thing, Cale, and in two ways. First, it allows a man to be with himself, and second, it prevents him being with others.” Cale nodded his agreement with a sincerity that was only possible for someone who had spent every waking and sleeping hour of his life with hundreds of others and always being watched and spied upon.

“To be sociable,” IdrisPukke continued, “is a risky thing-even fatal-because it means being in contact with people, most of whom are dull, perverse and ignorant and are really with you only because they cannot bear their own company. Most people bore themselves and greet you not as a true friend but as a distraction-like a dancing dog or some half-wit actor with a fund of amusing stories.” IdrisPukke had a particular dislike of actors and was frequently to be heard declaiming on their shortcomings, a distaste lost on Cale because he had never seen a play: the idea of pretending to be someone else for money was incomprehensible.

“Of course, you are young and have yet to feel the strongest impulse of all: the love of women. Don’t get me wrong-every woman and every man should feel what it means to love and be loved-a woman’s body is the best picture of perfection I’ve ever known. But to be perfectly honest with you, Cale-not that it will make any difference to you-to desire love, as some great wit once said, is to desire to be chained to a lunatic.”

He would then open another beer, pour a quarter-never more and never too many times-into Cale’s mug and refuse to give him any more tobacco, pointing out that when it came to smoking, you could have too much of a good thing, and that in excess it could damage a young man’s wind.

And after that, sometimes long into the early morning, Cale looked forward to what had become almost his greatest pleasure-a warm bed, a soft mattress and all utterly, completely on his own-no groaning and crying out and snoring and the smell of farts of hundreds-just wonderful silence and peace. Bliss was it in those days for Cale to be alive.

He began wandering aimlessly in the woods for hours at a time, vanishing as soon as he had woken up and only returning to the hunting lodge as night closed in. The hills, the occasional meadow, rivers, the wary deer and the pigeons cooing in the trees during the hot afternoons-the wonderful bliss of just wandering on his own was a more intense pleasure even than beer or tobacco. The only thing to mar his happiness was the thought of Arbell Swan-Neck, whose face would come unbidden to him late at night or in the afternoon lying by the river, where the only sounds were of an occasional fish jumping, the song of birds and the faint wind in the trees. The feelings he had when she came into his mind were odd and unwelcome-they clashed unpleasantly with the wonderful peace he felt. She made him angry and he didn’t want to feel angry ever again, he just wanted to feel like this-free, lazy, answerable to no one in the warmth and green beauty of the great summer forest.