‘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.