Chapter 12 #5
“We had, by this time, reassembled your late father,” he went on.
“We had realised that Kotkel was out of control and presented a clear and present danger. We felt responsible, since it was our deployment of a walker that prompted the provisionals to follow suit. We sent your father to stop Kotkel, in which he was partially successful. We also recruited a specialist hunter from the Mesoge and arranged for him to come to Choris, as quickly as possible. Allied to our feeling of responsibility was the hope that, if Kotkel was destroyed or removed, Aviragus would lose his hold over you, and you would not proceed to obstruct the road to schism. In that, broadly speaking, we were successful. You did not disrupt the council meeting. One sad consequence of that was Aviragus’s death, from a heart attack, brought on by rage and frustration.
” He paused for a moment. “He was my opponent, but I respected and honoured him. I had no idea his health was so poor, or I would have taken steps to save him. Too late now, of course.”
“My sympathies for your fucking loss. He was an arsehole. So are you.”
He rose above me, like the rising sun over a bog.
“The rest,” he went on, “should be self-evident. We still had a chance of bringing about a schism in Holy Mother Church, and healing the schism within our own ranks. That happy end could have been achieved by Vitimer’s assassination.
I blame myself. I chose you as my instrument, based on my assessment of your character.
I thought you to be weak, cowardly, primarily motivated by your love or lust for the woman Svangerd.
I believed that you would find some way to justify your act in terms of your own abstruse and woolly-minded philosophy – frankly, I believed that as an atheist you had no principles, only physical urges masked by a veneer of sophisticated decadent rationalisation.
In short, I overestimated your intelligence.
It never occurred to me that you’d turn out to be stupid.
My mistake, and I accept full responsibility for my choice. ”
“Just a minute,” I said. “What about Krimhild? Turning her into a walker. Whose brilliant idea was that?”
“Nobody’s.” He gave me a haven’t-you-been-listening-to-a-word-I-said look.
“It just happened. Or, to be exact, she succumbed to her inherently malignant Mesoge nature. I believe,” he added, “she’s some sort of relative of yours, third cousin once removed or something like that?
No, it wasn’t part of any plan. Sometimes, things just happen.
And of course she was under nobody’s control but her own, so it’s just as well that your lady friend was able to deal with her so quickly. ”
“But that’s—” I stared at him. “But it made sense.”
He raised an eyebrow. “To you, maybe.”
“It was pure Evil,” I said. “Taking the body of a particularly holy saint and turning it into an abomination. It was the ultimate desecration.”
He shrugged. “I suppose you can view it in that light if you want to. But if so, it was sheer random chance. We had nothing to do with it, and I happen to know from my sources inside their organisation that the provisionals were as surprised and shocked as we were.” He made a sort of tongue-clicking noise.
“Doubtless at some point in the future, the provisionals will claim it as a masterstroke on their part, because of the part it played in putting a stop to the schism once and for all, but if they do, they’ll be lying.
And they’ll know it. No, the simple fact is, it was something that nobody intended and nobody predicted. Things like that happen all the time.”
For some reason, I had a strong mental image of a Mezentine mechanical clock, washed up on a beach.
Things, I wanted to tell him, don’t just happen, not in your entirely fictional mechanical universe, in which I don’t believe.
But I couldn’t see any point in making a fool of myself, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, “Vitimer has prevented the schism. Doing so means he’ll enjoy unprecedented honour and prestige, which is another unintended consequence that nobody foresaw.
We all had him down for a nonentity, but now he’s acquired genuine stature.
Which,” he added, “is a good thing, as it turns out. We’ve been back to the drawing-board, and we’ve reshaped our entire plan based on him.
In point of fact, it’s a much better plan than the one we were compelled to abandon, and since the outcome will be exactly the same, I can honestly say that this whole process has turned out to be positive, and the Cause as a whole has benefited from it.
There’s even a possibility of a window of opportunity for a reconciliation of the two wings of our movement.
They were always opposed to a schism. We, for the reasons I’ve just stated, are now entirely content that no schism should take place at this time.
This gives us common ground, something we might just possibly be able to build on.
No thanks,” he added quickly, “to you. Thanks rather to the exceptional recuperative and regenerative powers of the orthodox movement, which enabled us to—”
Enough is enough, I thought. So I hit him.
She was still in the chapel. Here goes, I said to myself.
“What happened to your hand?” she said.
I unwrapped the bit of cloth I’d bound round my knuckles. “Cut myself,” I said.
“What on?”
“Someone’s teeth.”
She clicked her tongue. “You want to put some plantain on that,” she said. “Or it’ll turn nasty.”
Everything does, I didn’t tell her, sooner or later. “I’ve been talking to someone.”
“Who?”
I told her, most of it. She sat there in solemn silence, then shook her head. “That’s not how it happened,” she said.
“No?”
“No. The Enemy tried to wreck the council with schism and monsters, but Mother Krimhild stopped them. She gave her life for Holy Mother Church. Then they tried to spoil it all by stealing her dead body, but I prayed to her and I was given grace, and I drove the devil out of her body, and now it’s going to be a shrine.
” She looked at me. “Isn’t that what happened? ”
“Of course it is,” I said. “Didn’t I just say that?”
There was, of course, a ceremony. At that point in the consolidation of his power, Vitimer needed all the ceremonies he could get.
So there was a formal consecration of the shrine of Saint Krimhild, attended by the entire council.
The Order of St Krimhild was graciously bestowed on Svangerd by Vitimer himself.
On closer inspection, it turned out to be a little badge, enamel on gold-plated brass.
Couldn’t you at least have managed real gold, I asked him later.
He gave me a foul look and pointed out that all the available gold had been used up making the shrine; and besides, Svangerd had sworn a vow of poverty, and it was the thought that counted.
He also said that, in light of my rather clever idea of building the shrine, which had got a lot of people off a lot of hooks, he’d decided not to press charges against me and I was free to go back home, as soon as I liked, or maybe even sooner.
“Charges of what?” I asked.
“Theft,” he said. “Breaking and entering. Assault on two delegates. Multiple counts of criminal damage. Conspiracy to murder my predecessor. Conspiracy to propagate heresy. Conspiracy to—”
“Ah,” I said. “Those charges. In that case, thank you for being so broad-minded.”
He looked at me. “If ever you breathe a word about what we—”
I drew my fingertip across my lips. “Sealed,” I said. “Cross my heart and hope to die in a cellarful of rats.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “It could be arranged. Now please, go away.”
We managed to get two berths on a freighter carrying dried bat manure to Scona.
Two days there, just long enough for Svangerd to recover from an amazingly productive bout of seasickness, and we caught a lumber barge headed up the west coast of the Friendly Sea to Sirupat.
On the fifth day we were boarded by pirates, but Svangerd was too ill to join in, and by the time she’d dragged herself up on deck they were all dead.
It had been, I told her, that sort of a mission.
“The hell with it,” she said. “I just want to go home.”
I’d wanted to avoid Mavais, so it was practically inevitable that the ship we boarded in Sirupat, bound for the Pillars with a cargo of salt cod and copper ore, should be blown off course by a singularly unpleasant squall, and end up in the Mavais roads.
By this point it had lost one of its masts and both rudders, so there wasn’t much point in my making out a case for soldiering on to the Pillars.
I tried, but I knew it was a losing battle.
We landed in Mavais, me and what was left of Svangerd after three days and nights as the plaything of the wind and rain.
I counted our remaining money, which was going to have to get us home, unless we wanted to beg, which I personally didn’t.
Fortuitously, I knew a cheap inn just across the road from a tannery.
Technically, Svangerd was barred for life for rowdy behaviour on a previous visit, but the old landlord had died and been succeeded by his daughter, which I maintained constituted a sort of general amnesty.
The daughter didn’t recognise us, so that was fine.
“Will you be all right for a bit?” I asked her. “There’s someone in the town I want to see.”
She groaned. It could have been a yes groan or a no groan. I put a blanket over her and went out.
When I got there, the shop was closed, on account of having burned to the ground. There was a man sitting on a folding stool among the ashes and bits of blackened rafter. He wore a monk’s habit and a big straw hat, and when I approached he looked up from his book and smiled.