The Last Four Things by Paul Hoffman Page A

then chose the men to carry it out by lot rather than any blasphemous play with devotion. He added one name himself, that of a centenar he had recognized during the initial conflab as a Redeemer who had once beaten him on the arse with a rope as thick as a man’s wrist for talking during a training session. Possibly the Redeemer might have lived had it not been for the fact that it had not even been Cale doing the talking but Dominic Savio, who had been whispering to Vague Henri that he might, indeed probably would, die that very night and be shat out by a devil for all eternity.
    For a second time Cale withdrew along with Gil to the scrubby rise about half a mile away from Duffer’s Drift. Again the wait, two days this time, which Cale passed occasionally tormenting Gil in any trivial way he could think of – hinting at lascivious experiences in Kitty Town, which, being in the early stages of love, he had not visited along with Kleist and the guilty but fascinated Vague Henri. ‘You could get a beezle,’ said Cale to Redeemer Gil, ‘for a dollar or less. And,’ he added, ‘a bumscraper for two.’
    He had made up the names of these perversions and therefore thought they did not exist. He was wrong about this. In Kitty Town even a depravity no one had ever thought of could be found if you had the money.
    Most of the rest of the time he slept, ate most of the food allotted to Gil and the two guards, and made notes and imagined over and over the attack that had happened on Duffer’s Drift and the ones that might happen. And also he thought about Swan-Neck and the next meeting, where she would throw herself into his arms, weeping with loss while the dying Bosco with his last gasp would admit her betrayalhad been an evil trick. Then he would be ashamed of his absurd delusion and imagine slowly wringing that beautiful neck without pity or remorse as she choked and gargled under his merciless hand-grip. After these often lengthy daydreams he would feel ashamed and a little bit mad. But this did not stop him from revisiting them on many occasions to commit, as the Holy Redeemer Clementine called it, the sin of pursuing evil thoughts. Cale found himself pursuing evil thoughts on an ever more demented and epic scale than even
Clementine could possibly have imagined. ‘It is as well for the world,’ IdrisPukke had said once to Cale, ‘that the very wicked are generally as pusillanimous about turning their thoughts into deeds as anyone else.’
    When Cale had looked down from the Great Jut on Tiger Mountain, he had felt an uneasy joy and delightful unpleasantness and now on the rise above Duffer’s Drift he felt the same uneasiness and unpleasantness and the same delight and joy. There’s nothing like an itch, after all, you can finally scratch.
    The centenars under a millenar had agreed that while deepening the trenches was of no use, the strength of the soil would allow them to dig a shelf at the bottom of the trench so that each man could escape from the rain of projectiles coming from the ballistas. To cover the main trench at the centre of the U more trenches were built outside it to the left and right. The plan to cut and burn every bush outside the U for four hundred yards was prevented by Cale because he would only let two hundred men do the work and not the eighteen hundred that were available. ‘You won’t have more than two hundred men in future so what’s the point in having them now?’
    Besides, there were hiding places enough with large rocksand the concrete-hard termite hills that were scattered across the landscape like pointy but badly made beehives. On the hill inside the U, the trench was moved to cover the blind spot that had been missed in the previous attack.

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    â€˜You’re my hero.’
    Kleist and the girl were sitting in front of a partly dead and hollowed-out oak that held a fire in such a way that it looked like a