Soldiers of Paradise (18 page)

She laughed and ran up the steps into the cloister, into the sanctuary on the way to her own room. She stopped, reflexively, though she was eager to go on, eager to pull the curtains and lie down in her own bed. Yet she was unwilling ever to waste a moment in the sanctuary, walking through it as if it were just a place between two places. So she hesitated by the marble columns at the entrance of the shrine, a cave where Angkhdt had lived for one full month of his great journey, sleeping here with the so-called “black woman” (“… arms like night, midnight, three o’clock, dawn …”). Here he had written verses seventy-one through one hundred and sixteen.

Nothing remained from that time. But at the end of the altar, next to an oil lamp, sat a statue of the prophet. The marble gleamed in the light, heavy and yellow, the hard heavy shoulders, heavy thighs. The sculptor had gestured gently towards the old myth, elongating his jaw a little, putting hints of hair along his forehead and his cheeks, just a roughening of the stone. His eyes were simple slits, but besides that his face was human, and the small marks of deformity only emphasized his human parts, his wide straight nose, his marble lips.

He held out his stone hands, empty most of the year, but today they carried the holiest relic in the world, the skull of Angkhdt himself. It was broken in places and the jaw was gone, but all the cracks and joints were filled with silver, the jaw rebuilt with silver. The skull was tilted in the statue’s hands, and the stone eyes looked down into the empty sockets of bare bone as if scanning them for movement, like a dog.

 

“Please,” asked Abu, “can I have a drink of water?”

“There is water,” said the boy’s voice.

“Can’t you light a light? I’m sick of this darkness. I feel as if I had been swallowed. There’s no air in here.”

“Light can’t help that.”

“No. I don’t suppose any of you have a drink,” continued Abu petulantly.

“Suppose.”

“Oh, never mind. Water will do fine.”

The boy lit a match. It shone on tired faces, or people curled up sleeping. Nobody moved, and it burned out.

“Well?” demanded the prince.

“I don’t understand,” said the boy. “You want water. There is water. Are you lying to me?”

“I want someone to get it. Please, will someone get it for me?”

“I don’t understand,” said the boy again after a pause. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m tired. I want someone to get it. Or I won’t tell you any more stories.”

Abu felt a cup pushed into his hands. He took it and drank.

“You have no pride,” observed the boy.

Abu took another drink. “You don’t understand at all,” he said. “You never will. Why you stay here is a mystery to me. Why you don’t go home.”

“I was born here. This is my home.”

“Yes, but there is nothing for you here. Why not go back?”

“I know the songs,” replied the boy. “No one can live there. There’s nothing to eat. There’s nothing but snow.”

“But … hasn’t it gotten warmer here since you were a child? It’s spring there too. Up by Rangriver, it’s nothing but green grass. No large animals yet, but plenty of rabbits. The trees won’t grow back for another generation. But God knows it’s a better life than here.”

He heard movement in the little cave, exclamations, and a hand closed painfully around his knee. “You’re lying,” said the boy. “Don’t lie.”

“Why should I lie? Don’t you know? Hasn’t anybody ever left here to go back?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “They are alive or dead. We are not like you. We can’t see it through their eyes.”

“Then let me tell you.”

“No. You see, but you don’t understand. I don’t want to see that way. Now there is grass. What color?”

“Green and gold.”

“Long or short?”

“Waist high.”

“Snow on the mountains?”

“Yes. Near the peaks.”

“Birds?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Abu.

“Yes,” said the boy. “You see, I do know. There are birds of prey. Hawks and harriers.”

There was a long silence, and then Prince Abu broke it. “Let me finish my story,” he said. “About the cannibals. I haven’t finished.”

“No,” said the boy. “I know what you will say. They wanted to kill us after we ate them. So they sent an army when the weather changed. The Paradise thaw. They burned our town. Your cousin was there.”

“You’re right,” said Abu, surprised.

“You think I’m stupid. But I was born here. I know how to talk, how to think. I learned everything I could. I am young, and I can’t live in a past I never knew, like my fathers and my mothers. Always in the past. The eternal present, always in the past. But I can’t live that way, because I want compensations for slavery. I want comfort … in my mind. I want to want things, to believe things.”

There was a pause. Abu broke it dubiously. “Well …”

“Tell me about God,” said the woman’s voice.

Abu sighed and cleared his throat.

“The truth,” demanded the boy fiercely. “No lies. Not even one.”

“I don’t think you know when you’re well off,” muttered Abu.

Then he spoke aloud. He told them about the power of the priests of Charn, how they owned every bird, every fish, every dollar, every stone. He told them about the episcopal factories, and the million-acre slave farms, and the towns of slaves clustered around a single temple, making umbrellas, silk, forks, olive oil, a different product from each town. He told them about the parsons coming to visit newborn children, casting horoscopes, checking for imperfections, listening to them cry. He said, “They believe that when a baby cries, it is saying something. It tells the story of another lifetime. It mourns its sins. And the priest listens, and in a few minutes he has given it a future and a penance. He names it. He engraves its future on its skin: education to such-and-such a level; work; address; permission to marry; name of wife; permission to breed; permissible food; permissible clothes; everything.”

“But you are different,” said a voice.

“Yes. I am a Starbridge.” He told them about the Starbridges, that enormous family from which all priests and rich men came, all generals and kings. “The laws aren’t meant for us; we have our own. And at one time we could be born from any family. But the fourteenth bishop argued that God punished sinners by placing them in poor families, and rewarded the virtuous by making them born rich. It’s a theory called predetermination.”

There was a silence, and then the woman’s voice said, “You’re not telling me what I want to know. There is a reason for all this. Some kind of … love. Tell me about that.”

“It’s the way things are.”

“No. I don’t believe that. There is a man—was—long ago. Someone. A reason why you live like this.”

“We have a story,” said the prince. He told them the travels of the prophet Angkhdt. He described for them the painting on the door of every temple—Angkhdt turning the planets back towards the sun with his bare hands; Angkhdt making an end to winter; Angkhdt bringing the rain.

He told them about Paradise and the nine planets of hell. “This is the first of the nine planets, the most beautiful of all. But there is something here, some smell of failure or decay that ruins everything. Some touch of death that ruins everything.

“And when it sinks from Paradise the soul comes here. And this is just the first of the nine planets. It takes a long time for a man’s flesh to burn away. It’s a chemical process. Am I making sense? It’s a long, long journey back to Paradise. A long journey through the stars. It takes a long time to come to Paradise again with all your human flesh consumed away.”

“But you. You are different.”

“Yes,” sighed Abu, depressed by this unlooked-for understanding. “I am a Starbridge. The world was put into my family’s hands to keep this system working. And I won’t die, unless I die by violence. I’ll be given drugs and put to sleep. And when I am asleep, I’ll dream. And out of every dream will grow another dream, and it will be like walking through a sequence of rooms until I open the last door, and I’ll be home in Paradise again.”

He took another drink of water.

“That’s the truth?” asked the boy’s voice, finally.

“That’s what millions believe.”

“Everywhere.”

“No. The world is big. I’m talking about this empire, these dioceses. Elsewhere …”

“Well?”

“Elsewhere there are other legends.”

“Legends!” Abu felt the boy’s hand grab his knee again, fingers pressing into his skin. “Barbarian! Do you think I care about your legends? Do you think I’m like you? I live in the world. Bricks and stone, no power on earth can change it. Barbarian! This is what we ran away from. My father’s father’s father’s … When he migrated into the physical world. Do you think I want to understand your theories?”

“Please,” said Abu. “You’re hurting me. I’m sorry. It’s … difficult.”

“Difficult!” The boy did not relax his grip. “Do you believe it?”

“I believe … something.”

“Something!”

“Life isn’t perfect. There’s a reason why life isn’t perfect. I believe that. Please. You’re hurting me.”

“But you live as if you believed it all, don’t you? Starbridge!”

“Yes. I suppose I do.”

“But how can you? Don’t you understand—if it is not true, every part of it, then it is a vicious lie, every part of it.”

Abu said nothing, and the boy continued. “You don’t care whether it’s true or not. What do you care? You have your money.” He let go of Abu’s leg to grab the purse out of his lap, and the prince wondered how he could see so clearly in the dark. Abu heard the purse rip open, the coins flung away.

“You don’t care whether it’s a lie or not,” repeated the boy, softer now. “But I have nothing. Nothing to lose. Listen to me. Your power hangs like a stone in a web of lies. Who is the spider? Who reknits the threads when they snap in every wind?”

“What do you mean? There are thousands of priests.”

“Yes. Who is the spider?”

“There’s the bishop.”

“Yes. The bishop. I have heard of the bishop. This legend is a lie.”

“There are parts of it no one believes,” admitted Abu.

“How can you say it so calmly? You sit and grow rich in your palace. How can you do it? Are you happy?”

“No.”

“Nor I. But I have a plan for happiness. I have heard of the bishop. These soldiers who attack us, they’re called the Bishop’s Purge. They follow orders from the bishop, is that true?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Ultimately.”

“Then I will kill this bishop. And the stone in the web will fall.”

 

Part Three:
Thanakar in Love

 

S
pring is the bitterest season of the year. A man in autumn, looking back on the bloodshed and the frenzied cruelty of these seasons long before his birth, is terrified by visions of the future. Perhaps from a high window he can see men and women working in the endless afternoon, free in their own fields. They are happy, for they were born and grew up in the sunlight, in summer and in autumn, amid the birth and rebirth of new ideas, new technologies, new freedoms, new pursuits. The grip of tyranny has loosened from their lives.

But civilization is bound to a wheel among the stars, and already in autumn the nights are getting cold. The snow will come, the world will start to die as men, caught up in the process of their own survival, will abandon all they love, let it recede into the past, a memory of Paradise. New sciences, new art, all the new ways of making, the new freedoms will be lost under the snow. And all that time the priests will wait, blind and quiet in their temples as the world dies around them and new men are born who can’t even remember, and then they will take all the strands of power back into their own hands, slowly, patiently, one by one.

Spring is the starving time in Charn, eight thousand days from Paradise thaw until the sugar rain, and nothing grows until the rain comes. But a few things reawaken, and when the ashes of the waterfront were still heaped up in lingering piles, Doctor Thanakar experienced a new sensation—happiness. He could feel it inside him like a seed as he limped along the palace galleries between his laboratory and his apartments, between the apartments of his patients.

Prince Abu had not come home for days, but finally the commissar had found him living in a cave, an antinomial bolt-hole where he had waited out the danger, dazed and weak in everything but will. He had not wanted to return, so the commissar had waited till he slept, and then had him bound and drugged and carried home. He had woken in his own bed, in an uncharacteristic rage, and since then no one had seen him, for he had locked his door. For a few days the doctor had sent messages, and pounded on the door and waited outside, and sketched frustrated caricatures of his friend, emphasizing his baldness and his fat. The door was shut, and Thanakar pretended that he didn’t mind, pretended he was still angry at the way the prince had ordered him away the night of the riots. He was used to his friend. Abu was a man without the strength to resist. Fragile, clumsy, apologetic, he swallowed grievances until they choked him, and then spit them back in fits of petulance, forgettable and soon forgotten.

So even as he sat scribbling outside the prince’s door, Thanakar was happy. He sent messages and funny notes, which were delivered with the prince’s food. He drew cartoons of mutual acquaintances and patients—Starbridge officers whose hopeless faces and pitiable wounds he could make grotesque with a few deft slashes of his pencil; widows and spinsters past the legal age of childbirth, scared to death of dying, trying to delay with makeup and vitamins the moment when the bishop would send apothecaries to put them all to sleep; and a whole vicious series featuring Charity Starbridge, the prince’s sister, the commissar’s wife. These drawings were as cruel as he could make them, because his new happiness was half on her account.

Long before, Prince Abu had tried to kill himself, or tried to try. Even that, for ordinary people, was a desperate crime, the spiritual equivalent of breaking jail. In a Starbridge it was considered madness, cowardice, dereliction of duty. Thanakar thought that perhaps he should fear a second attempt, but he didn’t. It was part of his new optimism. He thought that eventually, if he sat outside long enough, the door would open and Abu would stumble out, vague, apologetic, and very thirsty. In the meantime, after he had folded up his drawings and slipped them under the door, Thanakar would limp down the hallway almost every day to visit Charity Starbridge. She was afflicted with a kind of melancholia common among young women of her class—a combination of idleness, loneliness, and drugs. The personality relaxers prescribed for married women by the bishop’s council had certain side effects. She complained of stiffness in her neck. She was still too shy to look Thanakar in the face, so he would stand behind her chair to talk to her. She would loosen the strings of her bodice and pull the cloth down over the hump of her thin shoulder, and he would stand behind her with his hands around her neck, rubbing and caressing so gently at first, and then harder until he felt her muscles loosen, and her head fell forward of its own weight, and her black hair fell around her face.