Soldiers of Paradise (22 page)

“She is alive,” she said.

“Yes,” confirmed the doctor, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “She’ll live. Will you change her bandages? I’ll show you how.”

“No biting, Doctor. There’s no need. She is free to change them or not.”

The doctor shrugged and closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the wall. Presently he heard the jingle of a chain, and he opened them again. The woman was pulling her manacles back along one wrist, uncovering a silver bracelet. She fumbled with the clasp. “I can pay you,” she said.

“No. There’s no need.” He smiled in spite of himself.

“No. You don’t understand.” She gestured towards the captain. “He understands. Death is the silent music, the still dancing, the dark mountain, the snow that never breaks under your feet. You’re cheating her. But even so I have no wish to owe you anything. Nor does she.”

She undid the clasp and threw the bracelet to him, and he caught it. It was a beautiful thing, a circlet of carved silver, a pattern of animals devouring one another. “Your men are very honest,” remarked Thanakar to the captain.

Locke shrugged, and stubbed his cigarette against his boot. “It’s real silver,” he said. “I’m forbidden to touch it. It’s no use to any of my men. She’s offered it all round.”

“Ah yes, of course.” Silver and gold were Starbridge metals. Other people had to use stone currency. The doctor held the bracelet in his hand, examining it in the light. It made him think of something, reminded him of something. He looked at the woman curiously. What was it?

She was tall, with golden hair and yellow eyes, a shade common among her people: dark yellow, almost brown. Her skin was dark, still dark after more than eighty months’ imprisonment. She was dressed in rags, as they all were, but hers had once been red and made of some softer material, maybe velvet. That also resonated in his memory. It was not that he had seen her before. But certain things about her reminded him of elements to a song.

Then he remembered. When he had gone down to the docks the first time, and Abu was drunk—it had been a long night, and the white-eyed antinomial had played and sung and talked about his childhood up above Rangriver, when all the world was snow—it had been a boring night, and much of the music Thanakar had neither heard nor understood. But one thing had touched him. There was a girl in the story, and when the antinomial had spoken about her, every time she had come into the story, a little music had come in with her and mixed with the other music. It was his way of naming her, and he had sung it sometimes with a kind of hunger and sometimes hesitantly and unsure, and then especially, listening, Thanakar had caught a glimpse of how she must have been, half delicate, half wild, running and stumbling through the crusty snow, her golden hair wild around her face, or later in the last days of the thaw, dancing under risen Paradise, or riding through that high red valley where the sun barely rose, in red velvet and a bracelet on her wrist. Just a few sweet notes, a song of hunger still unsatisfied, but later Thanakar could hear how all the other notes and music took their tone from those few notes, and he had thought that when that man had said he loved her, that was what the world meant to him, that her music had entered into his, and there was nothing he could ever do to separate them.

In the hot cell, Thanakar sat forward and tried to explain it to her, but without the notes it was useless, and the notes eluded him. She just sat there, her eyes as empty as windows, stroking her sister’s hair. With music, he felt that he could break her heart; without it, it was just barbarian drivel—he could hear the clattering as he tried to talk. “ ‘The night the soldiers came …’ ” and then he stopped, because she was staring at him patiently, vacantly, stroking, stroking.

The music came to him late that night. He sat up in bed, and when he lay back down, he thought he had it imprisoned in his heart. But by morning it was gone, and he ate breakfast with the rain coating the windows, trying to remember. A dozen notes, that was all, what was it? Gone. But he had kept the bracelet. And afterward he went to show Abu. He met the commissar in the hall.

“He’s still in there,” complained the old man. “Damned inconvenient. Just because I didn’t … well. I don’t know what I could have done. Pure chance that I found him at all. He was in one of those caves. Safe and sound, not a scratch. He’s been in bed ever since. Only opens up for meals. You don’t think,” he continued anxiously, “that he’d try anything stupid. I haven’t seen him this bad for months, damn him. Just like his father. Temperamental. Damned rain.” He was very worried. His eyes avoided the doctor’s, and he sucked nervously on a sourball. The rain was cracking the slates, flooding the terraces.

The doctor asked him about Spanion Locke.

“Can’t help you there,” said the old man. “Like to. Can’t. That’s the purge up there. But the chaplain’s deaf and blind; he might not notice. I’m the regular police. Not our jurisdiction. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Would you? Thanks.”

“Stupid fools. Both of you. I’ll see what I can do. Nothing, probably.”

“Thank you.”

The commissar went off muttering, and Thanakar was left alone. Thinking about Locke, he felt less patience for his cousin. The prince had suffered from morbidity ever since he was a child. Once he had tried to cut his wrists. “Imagine him as an adult,” the commissar had grumbled then. In fact, a young Starbridge had nothing to complain of: nothing but parties and dancing lessons and indulgent schoolteachers trying to recompense their students for long lives of marriage, or short lives at the battlefront. Abu’s morbidity had exempted him from the services. “Doesn’t make any sense,” remarked the commissar. “Suicides are what they need, especially among officers.”

Abu and the doctor had both been left behind, and sometimes it was depressing when relatives came back, wounded or decorated, and sometimes Thanakar wondered whether that was the only thing that had drawn them together, the cripple and the fool. Outside Abu’s room, he sat sketching furiously on an envelope—dragons, gangsters, the commissar with his piglike face. The pencil lead ripped through the paper.

Near where he sat at a desk in the hallway, a casement window blew open. He rose to close it, but it slipped from between his fingers as the wind caught it like a wing and beat it back against the wall. The window broke, so that even when he had forced it closed and bolted it, the day still spat at him through lips of broken glass. It was raining hard. He caught some water on his tongue and tasted it experimentally, even though he knew it was too early yet for the sweet rain, the sugar rain that changed the climate. Still, this was the start of it, and even though there was nothing in books or family histories but stories of disaster from this phase of spring, even so he was disappointed by the rain’s thin texture, its insipid taste, and he looked forward to new weather. Then the rain would fall for months on end, and flood the city, and wash all dirt and beggary down into the swollen sea, and kill what crops there were, and cover the hills with seed, the semen of Beloved Angkhdt piled ten feet deep. And then the summer jungles, the tiger and the black adder, the gorilla and the pregnant orchid, all the myths of his childhood would sprout up into life, watered by the rain.

Disappointed, he turned back into the hall. Abu’s closed door enraged him. He pounded on it and grabbed the handle as if to force it, but it wasn’t locked. It opened suddenly into the prince’s bedroom.

Inside, Abu stood in the dark next to his huge bay window, looking out over the city. Rain fell in sheets against the glass, and it was as if he were standing in a dark aquarium looking into an enormous tank, for the weather had filled the room with shadows, while all outside the world was turbulent and wet and full of water, and the thunderclouds were dark as rocks, and colored scraps of cloud flew everywhere like fish, high up above the colored rooftops, and in the farthest distance a huge rainbow leapt against the afternoon. The sun was burning in the tempest’s eye. A rainbow spanned the hills.

The prince didn’t move or turn. He was in his bathrobe. “Look, Cousin,” he cried out, and his voice was full of childish delight. Thanakar looked from where he was.

The room was padded like a child’s room, the walls and ceiling hung with tapestries—pictures from Starbridge nursery rhymes or children’s tales from holy scripture: innocent pastels of holy love, and Angkhdt himself still had his trousers on. The floor was thick with carpets and the room was dark, because the prince never burned electric lights. He preferred candles.

Thanakar looked around. The great four-poster bed was a tumult of soft quilts, and there was an uneaten avocado on a silver tray and undrunk liquor in a jar. The place stank sweetly of decadence and self-indulgence, because Thanakar had decided to forgive nothing this afternoon, and every little thing annoyed him more—the silver pillbox, the open book of poetry, the knife. The knife most of all. It lay on the bedstead on a silken pillow, and it angered him most because it was just a pose, like so much else, or so he thought until he saw his friend turn towards him, and saw the silken bandages all down his wrists and on his hands.

“Oh, Abu,” he said wearily. “What is this? What the hell is this?”

“No biting, Cousin. Please, Cousin.” The prince smiled at him. “Come look at the rainbow.”

“Oh, Abu,” repeated Thanakar. He reached out to put his arms around his friend, to comfort him, he thought, though it was he who was shaking, and the prince seemed perfectly calm, and smiled at him, and rubbed him clumsily across the back.

“Hush, Cousin,” said Abu. “It’s not what you think.”

“Not what I think? Look at you. You’re not fit to be left alone,” and he pulled the prince down to the bed and sat beside him, so that he could unwrap his hands. The prince was laughing. “Ow,” he said, “that really hurts,” because the bandages were rough, just torn from some shirts and soaked in oil, and they stuck to his scabs. His palms and wrists were a mass of cuts. Whole pieces of flesh had been cut away.

“Let me see it in the light,” said Thanakar. He stood up and walked to the door to the lightswitch, but Abu told him there were no bulbs, and then tried to light a candle, and laughed because the movement hurt his hands, until the doctor came and lit it for him.

“I wasn’t going to show you,” said the prince. “Not until they healed better.”

“My God, look at you,” said Thanakar, examining the cuts. “What have you done to yourself?”

“It’s not what you think,” said the prince again. “I was stupid, I know. But I wanted to see if I could cut them out. Cut them away.”

“What?”

“The tattoos.”

“Oh my God.”

“I couldn’t,” said the prince sadly. “They go all the way in. Down to the bone. How can you be something you’re not? Every layer, there’s another layer. The image just gets clearer and clearer the deeper you go, as if it were underneath and you were cutting towards it. The golden sun.” He closed his hand, and winced at the pain.

Thanakar leaned to smell his breath. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you drunk?”

Abu laughed. “Not very. But I’ve got some really good hash. Charity put it on my tray for breakfast. I mean, the commissar got it from some priest, but he doesn’t like it much.”

“From a priest?”

“Some priest in his department. Those bastards always have the best drugs.”

“You’ve seen Charity?”

“She’s been cooking my meals.”

“Charity?”

“Sure. She puts hash in everything. I couldn’t even finish the guacamole.” He reached for a silver pipe by his bedside, but his hands were still too clumsy to use. Thanakar fixed it for him and lit it, and the prince sucked in a lot of smoke. “Do you want some?” he squeaked, still inhaling.

“No thanks,” said Thanakar, nursing the match. “It makes me feel as if everybody hated me.”

The prince laughed until he choked and started to cough. “What’s so funny about that?” asked Thanakar.

In the end, Thanakar forgot about the bracelet. Instead, he smoked hashish, and when in late afternoon he staggered down to his car, the rain was still pouring. “Not good, this,” remarked his driver as they idled at a crossroad where a cart was stuck in the mud, the porters striving and shouting as the rain burst along their backs. “Rain’s early.”

“It’s not sugar rain.”

“No, Sir. It’ll come. My great-great-grandfather moved away south at the first drop last year, and didn’t come home till the third July that summer, when the prince was born. Your grandfather, sir. He was an old man then.”

“Who?”

“My great-great-grandfather. My father told me.”

Thanakar was finding this hard to follow. “So you’ll go too?” he asked.

“Not now, sir. Too old. Besides, the prince used to have property down there. Your grandfather, sir. Your father too.”

“Don’t rub it in.” Thanakar stared glumly out the window. The car could go no further. Imported, like all engines, from across the seas, it was feeling its age. It was a relic from the previous year, from before the winter snow had blocked the port. Thanakar felt its cylinders misfiring gently; the gunpowder was damp. Ahead, the way was blocked by skinny vagrants in their yellow clothes, shrieking and cursing and weeping at the rain.

 

Miles away, Colonel Aspe stood on a balcony in the Temple of Kindness and Repair, a vast sprawl of cloisters and shrines on a hill outside the city. He had been talking in the amphitheater of the Inner Ear when the storm broke, and he had stopped midword to walk out from among the shrill old men, to watch the lightning from the balcony and suck deep draughts of air while the clouds thundered and spewed. They sickened him, the priests of Charn. He turned to watch them through the window, the rain on the outside of the glass streaking their faces and their clothes. They didn’t even know that he had left, most of them, and he could hear them begging with him and pleading as if he were still there to hear. The bishop’s secretary, a bony-faced old man, was in the bishop’s chair, a cigarette hanging from between his bloodless lips, while all around him, in various attitudes of agitation and repose, reclined the members of his council. Some were clearly dead, others less clearly so, sleeping the last drugged sleep of the Starbridges. There were dozens of them lining the tiers of the amphitheater. All were dressed in red and golden robes, and since some were deaf, and most were blind, and some were dead, they communicated by means of art. A golden cord wound between them, up and down the steps. They held it in a variety of fingers, some fat and fleshy, some mummified and dry.