Paul Hoffman - The Left Hand of God

Vipond looked at him for so long without saying anything that it began to make Cale uneasy and then annoyed. He was about to speak when Vipond asked him a question.

“Do you expect me to believe you, that someone of your age, whatever that is, would be asked to prepare a plan of attack of this kind and then that plan would be carried out in exact detail? I’d have credited you with something more plausible.”

At first Cale simply went blank, a kind of dead expression that made Vipond begin to regret the tone of his frankness and remember the cold delight with which Cale had dispatched Solomon Solomon. This boy is barely sane, he thought. But then Cale laughed, a short and sudden bark of amusement. “Have you seen the moneymen playing chess in the Ghetto?”

“Yes.”

“There are lots of old men playing but also kids, I mean much younger than me. One of these kids always wins-not even the old rabbite with all the ringlets and the beard and stuff and the funny hat can beat him. So the rabbite says-”

“It’s rabbi, I understand.”

“Oh. I wondered about that. Anyway, so this rabbi, he says that chess is a gift from God to help us see his divine plan and this kid who can barely read is a sign to us to believe in the order that lies under everything. Me, I’ve got two gifts: I can kill people as easy as you could break a plate-and the other thing I can do is look at a map or stand in a place and I can see how to attack or defend it. It just comes at me like the game comes to the boy in the Ghetto. Though I don’t suppose it’s a gift from God. If you don’t believe me, tough. Your loss.”

“And how would you stop them?” He paused. “If you were going to.”

“For one thing, don’t let them reach the Baring Gap or they’ll be away. But I need a more detailed map from here to here,” he said, pointing at a section of some twenty square miles, “and two or three hours to think about it.”

Should he believe this strange creature in front of him or leave well enough alone? It had been a much-loved joke of Vipond’s father that when it came to a crisis, half the time it was better to wait: “Don’t just do something,” he would say, “stand there.”

“Wait in the room next door and I’ll bring the maps to you myself. Stay away from the windows.”

Cale stood up and walked over to the private office, but as he was about to close the door behind him, Vipond stopped him “The massacre, was that part of your plan too?”

Cale looked at him oddly, but whatever kind of expression it was, it was not one of offense.

“What do you think?” he said quietly and shut the door.

Vipond looked at his half brother. “You were very quiet.”

IdrisPukke shrugged. “What’s there to say? You either believe him or you don’t.”

“And do you believe him?”

“I believe in him.”

“And the difference is?”

“He’s always lying to me because he can’t bring himself to take more risks than he has to. Being too secretive is sometimes a mistake, and it’s one he’s still making.”

“I’m not sure it’s that much of a fault myself,” said Vipond.

“But, like Cale, you’re also a secretive person.”

“What about now?”

“I think he’s telling the truth,” said IdrisPukke.

“I agree.”

Once he had made the decision to intervene, Vipond became increasingly tense and impatient to see Cale’s plan, one that took not three hours but more than three days to complete. “Do you want it good or do you want it now?” said Cale in reply to Vipond’s repeated demand to see something at least of his ideas. If he was uncharacteristically impatient for such a cool-headed thinker, it was because he had been deeply upset at the deaths of the villagers and what these deaths said about the strange reports from the few Antagonist refugees coming out of the north. Something about Brzica’s glove had set his nerves on edge, as if all the malice and vindictiveness in the world had been made physical in the care that had gone into its design, the quality of the stitching and the way the blade was attached with such fine workmanship to the leather. He was all the more uneasy because he had thought himself to be a man of the world, almost a cynic, certainly a pessimist. He had come to expect little of people and was rarely surprised in his expectations. That there was murder and cruelty in the world was no news to him. But this glove was a witness to the possibility of something so terrible that could not be imagined, as if the hell he had long ago dismissed as a terror for children had sent a messenger not with horns and a cloven hoof but in the shape of a carefully crafted leather glove.

It was no easy matter for Vipond to influence the tactics of the Materazzi, who were jealous of their preeminence in such things to the point of hysteria. Vipond was not a soldier but he was a politician, both equal grounds for suspicion. There was also the problem that Marshal Materazzi had become increasingly unwell: the irritating problem with his throat had become a debilitating chest infection, and he was less and less able to appear at the innumerable meetings called to discuss the campaign. Vipond must deal with a new, if temporary, reality. He managed, however, with his usual skill. When the Materazzi scouts lost track of the Redeemer army in the Forest of Hessel, there was no great alarm, given that they expected them to emerge heading for the only passage into the Scablands.

It was then that Vipond had a secret meeting with the Marshal’s second-in-command, Field General Amos Narcisse, and informed him that his own network of informers had news about the real intentions of the Redeemers, but that for many complicated reasons he had no wish to be seen in the matter. If Narcisse were to present this information to the Materazzi council as his own, then this would reflect considerable glory on the field general, as would the battle plan that Vipond would also offer for the general’s consideration if he so wished. Vipond realized that Narcisse was a worried man. He was not a fool, but neither was he more than competent, and he was alarmed to find that with the Marshal’s poor health he was effectively in charge of the whole campaign. He would not admit it to anyone, but he did not in his heart believe he was the man for the job. Vipond encouraged his complete cooperation with veiled but clear promises of changes in the taxation law that would hugely benefit Narcisse and an offer to ensure the end of a long-running dispute concerning a vast inheritance in which Narcisse had been involved for twenty years and looked like losing.

The field general was not entirely venal, however, and even he would not agree to a strategy that put the empire in danger. He spent several hours poring over Vipond’s plan, which is to say Cale’s plan, before seeing that his financial interests and his military conscience were one and the same thing. Whoever thought up the plan, he told Vipond, knew what he was doing. He made not entirely convincing sounds about not taking another man’s credit, but Vipond assured him that it was the work of a number of people and that the real skill would in any case be in the leadership abilities of the man executing the plan. It was, in effect, really Narcisse’s plan when all was said and done. By the time he had presented and defended it to the council, this was no more than the truth, the clincher for the council being that the missing Redeemer army had turned up precisely where Narcisse predicted it would.

It was once famously said that it is as well that wars are so ruinously expensive, else we would never stop fighting them. However well said, it seems also to be endlessly forgotten that, while there may be just wars and unjust wars, there are never any cheap wars. The problem for the Materazzi was that the most expert financiers in their empire were the Jews of the Ghetto. The Jews, on the other hand, were deeply wary of other people’s wars because they frequently spelled disaster for them whatever the outcome. If they lent money to the losing side, there was no one to pay them back, but if they financed the winning side, all too often it was decided that the Jews had been in some way responsible for the war in the first place and should be expelled. As a result it was no longer necessary to pay them back. So the Materazzi insincerely reassured the Jews that the war debts would be settled, while the financiers of the Ghetto equally insincerely claimed that credit was hard to come by in such vast amounts and only at prohibitive rates of interest. It was during these negotiations that Kitty the Hare saw his opportunity and resolved the problem by offering to finance all the Materazzi war debts. This came as an immense relief to the Jews, who regarded Kitty Town as an abomination before God. It was well known that they would not do business with its owner under any circumstances, not even at the price of expulsion. Kitty was more concerned with the Materazzi. For all his bribery, blackmail and political corruption, he knew that public opinion in Memphis was growing against the disgusting practices that went on in Kitty Town and that a move against him was more or less inevitable. He calculated that a war, particularly one where public feeling was running so very high, would trump what he considered to be a temporary flush of moral disapproval over his place of business. By funding what he thought would be a short campaign, Kitty the Hare felt reasonably confident that bankrolling the whole enterprise would secure his own position in Memphis for a long time to come.