Soldiers of Paradise (16 page)

They leapt and turned in front of him, leapt and turned, back and forth, back and forth, banging on their drums with blistering palms. And as they passed, he could feel the rhythms in his body, as if a drummer had gotten loose in there and was drumming on his heart as if to break it, because he knew what came next. These parades were all the same. Elephants and skeleton dancers, shaking rattles to imitate the chattering of bones. Elephants; and then he could see them too, the flagellants, and hear the singing of their whips, and then his heart was breaking, as it always did, and he could feel tears closing his throat. They passed in front of him, the flagellants, his private symbol for what the Starbridges had made out of the world.

They were naked to the waist, their hair and beards were long, their faces stony hard. Their whips were knotted with nails and fragments of shell, and the blood ran down their backs. They scourged themselves to a rhythm of stamping, over their shoulders, alternating sides, the thongs licking their armpits and the tender flesh under their arms. With every breath they struck, and with every exhalation they stamped another metal step, their ankles chained together. In the interstices between the rhythmic crash and stamp rose up the voices of a boys’ choir, like wild reeds growing through an iron grate; they walked between the men, dressed in white surplices, nursing candles, singing hymns, their sweet wild voices poking up high.

The doctor turned away. Coming up from the railway yard, he had already seen horrible sights. After they had left the prince, he and the antinomial had climbed the barricade and walked along it looking for a place to cross. In the mouths of narrow streets above the yard, crowds had gathered, throwing stones and firebombs. Here and there, groups of soldiers made more organized assaults. For a while, they had got nowhere, for the antinomials had blocked them, fighting like lunatics with no discipline or order. For a while, strength and courage had prevailed against numbers. The crowd fell back before a single furious giant wielding a length of four-by-eight, batting gasoline bombs out of the air so that they burst around him in a burning rain. Other antinomials stood around or squatted, watching, until for no apparent reason they too found themselves filled up with the same spasmodic rage and would leap down from the barricade, screaming like demons, throwing huge chunks of masonry down into the crowd. Flailing two machetes, a woman jumped down twenty feet into a mass of soldiers.

Watching from a protected spot, Thanakar had put his hands up to his face. The antinomials were magnificent—their pride, their power like a force of nature. One man was storming through the mob, his head and chest and shoulders looming far above their heads, smashing them down with a hammer in each hand. Another lifted a soldier up above his head, one hand in his crotch and the other round his neck, bending the backbone like a bow until it snapped.

It couldn’t last. Thanakar saw some soldiers of the purge, in black and silver uniforms, hanging back to organize their fire. One carried a sharpshooter’s rifle; he lifted it, and an antinomial fell to her knees, stumbling and roaring, shot through the eye. And then, one by one, the rest went down and sank into a surge of bodies. The crowd broke through.

From their place of safety on a deserted stretch of wall, Thanakar’s antinomial had watched with expressionless eyes. He turned and pointed down a quiet slope of refuse and barbed wire. “That way,” he said, and handed Thanakar the lantern.

“Thank you. You’re not coming?”

“No.” The man undid his cloak, stepped out of it, and tossed it onto the wire fence, where it caught and hung like a ghost. Old and white-haired, he was still muscular, his body hard and strong. He unbuckled his machete from his belt and tested the heavy edge along his palm. “No,” he repeated gently. “This is far enough. Far enough, I think. Far enough for me. No, I am with my family. Brothers and sisters.” He swung the blade slowly around his head, a last salute from someone who never in his life had said goodbye. There seemed something else he wanted to say, but whatever it was, he didn’t say it. He turned and walked back towards the hopeless fighting, whistling a little song.

In the parade, in the din of the drumming and the stamping flagellants and the high pure voices of the boys, Thanakar tried to recollect that little song. It had sounded so unsure. If there was language in it, it was almost meaningless, just a little stuttering at the end of a sad life. One kind of music, he thought. And this is ours, the rhythm and the whips. Men lashing themselves bloody for no reason. Some of the seminarians around him hid their faces, blocked their ears.

“Thanakar! Thanakar!” Someone was shouting to him. An enormous palanquin, yoked back and front to braces of elephants, was loaded with Starbridges. They waved to him, and he pushed through the crowd and stepped down into the road. In a few steps he reached them. The palanquin was slung low, so that his head was almost at a level with the head of Cargill Starbridge, a young man in military uniform, a relative of his.

“Intolerable noise,” the man shouted, smiling, indicating the flagellants up ahead.

“I’m surprised you can stand it,” the doctor shouted back.

“Bah. Lunatics.” Cargill Starbridge tapped his head confidentially and lowered his voice to a soft roar. “Completely gone.”

The elephants walked slowly, and Thanakar had no trouble keeping up, his hand resting on the litter’s golden rail. “Listen,” he shouted. “There’s a riot down at the railway yard. At the waterfront.”

Cargill Starbridge winked one eye. “I know,” he replied. “Bishop’s idea. Bishop’s secretary. Not bad, really, using civilians. Teach those cannibals a lesson. No way to do it properly, of course. No men. You’d need a regiment.”

“Prince Abu is a prisoner down there,” bawled Thanakar, but the drumbeats knocked the sound away.

“You know about the adventist? Returned prisoner. Gave a speech. Completely mad.”

“I was there.”

“Lucky dog. I missed it. I was at the hanging. Secretary made a speech. Counter example: spontaneous outrage of the people. Death to all heretics. You know the kind of thing. Then he passed out weapons. That started them off. You should have seen them. Madmen.”

“Abu’s a prisoner down there,” but the man had already turned away, was yelling something to a woman at his side. “I’ve got to find the commissar,” shouted Thanakar.

The man turned back. “He’s right behind you.”

“Where?” but then Thanakar saw him, unrecognizable in his festival clothes and a demented turban of pink silk, waving down at them from the back of an elephant not far behind.

Thanakar let the palanquin go by, and as the elephant came up, he jumped for the rope ladder hanging down its side and climbed up to the howdah on its back.

“Smoothly done,” said the commissar. “Your leg all right?” It was quieter here, up above the level of the crowd.

“I hate this parade,” he continued after a pause. He reached down to stroke the elephant’s neck, and when he brought his hand back it was wet with sweat and a peculiar white scum. “Look at this. It’s murder. Poor brute. Where’s the prince?”

“At the waterfront. He’s a prisoner.”

The commissar sighed. “I was afraid of that,” he said after a pause.

“That’s all you have to say?”

“Too late now. The operation’s over.” He looked at his watch. “Limited objectives, the swine. Why didn’t he come back with you?”

“He preferred to stay.”

“Then it’s his own damn fault. Prisoner. He should be ashamed.”

“He might get hurt,” said Thanakar.

“I doubt it. I can’t see them shooting prisoners. That’s more our style, these days. Did you hear? There was a hanging at the city gallows, a big crowd. The bishop’s secretary promised them a month’s remission for every atheist they kill before five o’clock. Lying pig. As if it were that simple.” The commissar frowned. “Abu will be all right. They might knock him around some. Might knock some sense into him.” He was staring down into the flagellants, and as usual his eyes were very sad.

 

For a while Abu had done some good. The rioters had hung back, confused. They had held their fire, afraid of hitting him. But he was on one single rampway; there were others, and around him the antinomials were being pushed back, overwhelmed by numbers and the force of hate. The rioters were desperate for blood. They had been offered some remission for their sins, the chance of a better lifetime in whatever hell was waiting for them in the sky after their deaths, if they could only just kill one, just one, even a little one. And finally, as the minutes ticked towards five o’clock, Abu found that he could no longer hold them back, though maybe if he had been someone else, stronger, braver, smarter, better, sober … But the crowd no longer cared. They drove him back, pelting him with rocks and curses. In the hope of murder, they were delirious, and he would have been trampled if a woman hadn’t grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away.

She pulled him back into the dark and up a small dark slope. At the top stood a line of railway cars, and one had fallen on its side. Climbing on the wheels, the woman undid the clasp and pulled the door back along its sliding track. It revealed a hole leading down into the hillside. The woman grabbed him by the arm and pitched him in over the side. He climbed down obediently. As she stood on the door above him, preparing to descend, trying to light an electric torch with inefficiently large fingers, Abu realized she was hurt. A stone had opened up a deep cut over one eye, and there was blood crusted around her lips. She had broken some teeth, and she was crying and slobbering and wheezing music through the ragged gaps. Tears flowed down her cheeks. This sign of weakness made her seem somehow even more violent and intimidating; standing below her, Abu thought he understood some of the animosity that ordinary people felt for the antinomial women. It came from fear. At hangings, the spectators wailed with delight and shouted obscenities. In prison, gangs of jailers raped them.

Sniffling and wheezing blood, the woman fumbled with the torch. The prince reached up to help her, but she hit him across the face with the back of her hand, a careless slap, so that he staggered and fell down. She pushed back her hair and shook the flashlight furiously. Nothing happened, and so she threw it against the side of a nearby car, laughing when it shattered.

The hole led down into a tunnel in the earth, barely big enough to crawl through. The woman pushed Abu along it in the dark; he was on his hands and knees, and she pushed him from behind. Then, after a long while, the walls and ceiling seemed to open out, and she stopped pushing him; he sat down on a pile of stones while the woman muttered in the darkness, and groped around him, and found a lamp, and lit it. She squatted near him and ran her fingers experimentally over her face. The tune she hummed had changed. The frustration had gone out of it, and it seemed more methodical, more regular. She rose and went out of the circle of the lamp into the dark, and returned with a bucket of water which she put down on the floor and sat cross-legged around it, washing her face and rinsing her mouth. Then, to Abu’s surprise, she took a mirror and a comb out from a pocket in her shirt. The humming changed again as she examined her reflection—an intake of breath mixed with the melody, and Abu seemed to hear some humor in it too, when she smiled and displayed her broken teeth. She started to comb her hair.

“Where are we?” asked the prince.

The woman looked at him and frowned, a puzzled expression on her face, as if she had forgotten who he was.

“Why did you bring me here? Please tell me …”

She said nothing and resumed combing her hair.

“Where am I?” repeated the prince miserably. He felt sick. His clothes were filthy and he was very tired.

“You are free to go,” she said, motioning away into the dark.

“No. I don’t know where I am. Do I sound ungrateful? I guess you saved my life. Back there it was so …”

“Stop that,” she interrupted, pouting into the mirror. “There is a tune called, ‘I forget.’ ”

“I can’t forget. It just happened.”

“It is a hopeful tune.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“You’re safe here. There’s no need to be afraid.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean I don’t …”

“Stop talking!” she said. “You are like a baby. I try to help, but you can only remember the last time you were fed and look forward to the next time. Why should you understand?”

“Thank you,” muttered the prince. “Thank you for explaining so well. You people can be very irritating sometimes.” He leaned back against the pile of stones and closed his eyes.

“You also,” said the woman softly, examining her teeth.

“You’re awake,” said someone close to his ear.

“Yes.”

There was the sound of a match being struck, two sparks, and then a sudden light. The boy held a matchstick between his fingers. With his other hand, he stroked the cat in his lap. Before the match burned out, Abu could see other people around them, sitting, standing, nursing wounds, lying full length. The woman who had brought him there was lying down asleep.

“Where are we?” asked Abu in the dark.

Again the boy lit a match. It burned out, and he dropped it. When it was dark again, he said, “Picture it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fighting.”

Once again, Abu didn’t understand. It was as if two different languages shared the same vocabulary. He sat up in the dark and caressed his forehead with his fingertips.

“Picture it,” commanded the boy impatiently. He struck a third match, and Abu could see his imperious blue eyes, a man drinking from a bucket, other people looking at him.

“I don’t understand,” he said when the light was out.

“That’s right,” said the boy’s voice approvingly. “Confusion. Violence. Danger. Death. Picture death.”

“I can’t.”

“Neither can I. Neither can anyone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We are slaves to circumstances beyond our control,” said the boy’s voice in the dark.

“Can’t you make a light?”

“Of course.” The boy lit a fourth match. “My sister saved your life,” he said when it was dark again.