Soldiers of Paradise (27 page)

The inhabitants, rotten with adventism, had rebelled. They had joined King Argon as his army had come through, and many of them had abandoned everything to follow it as it receded. Others had stripped off their clothes and run naked into the hills. In an adventist delirium, expecting their savior every minute, they had burned their crops. The monks had allowed only one food in each village, turnips for one, cabbages for another, and the tattoos of the villagers had prohibited them from touching anything but that one vegetable, boiled whole. For many that had been the bitterest part of slavery, and when King Argon came, they had torched their own fields, thinking that the land would blossom under the conqueror’s feet, and sprout up fruits and flowers, and need no tending. Argon had encouraged the fantasy, but even so he had had them whipped, for he was desperate for the food. They had run off terrified into the hills.

So by the time King Argon’s army had retreated to the monastery at the head of the valley, and Colonel Aspe was chasing stragglers towards it up the road, these villages were almost deserted. Aspe ordered that the remnants of the population be spared, and he sent the antinomials the long way round. At one gate, he reined his horse next to the immense stone statue there, wondering what it was. For generations, the villagers had made a little wooden toy in the shape of a duck. Only a few old men and women were left now, huddled in the shadow of the gate, and some came out when they saw him and went down on their knees next to his stirrup, begging for food. They had brought as offerings a few samples of the little toy. Aspe leaned down to take one. It was a duck, and when he pushed his finger into the bottom of its base, its bill sagged open and its tail sagged down.

Aspe sat in his saddle, chewing a piece of melon. He played with the duck without looking at it as he squinted up the valley into the sun. Then he leaned and spat a few melon seeds meditatively onto the bald head of one of the villagers, and he was amazed to see the man grab them and put them into his mouth. Aspe dropped the rest of the melon rind onto a woman’s back as she searched among the pebbles for a seed that might have dropped. Another man grabbed it, but there was no fight; he broke off pieces of it and handed them around, making little bowing motions with his head.

The colonel gestured with his hand and his adjutant rode up, a slick officer of the purge. “Give them something to eat,” the colonel commanded. “Feed them.”

The officer shrugged. “It’s a waste, sir,” he said. “These people always die when the rains come. They’re used to it.”

“Feed them,” repeated the colonel harshly, and then he spurred his horse.

But his order was ignored.

 

Two days later, Thanakar saw some of the battlefront. He had crossed over to the valley and road, following the army’s baggage, and he had accepted an invitation from Micum Starbridge to ride his elephant. It was a hairy beast, healthier than most, but even so its shaggy back was clotted with scum, and scum hung down from its great lips, for it had caught a lung infection in the rain, in the cold nights. Thanakar was sorry he had come. He and the commissar rode in a carriage on its back, and Thanakar resented sitting so close to the old man, not because he disliked him. In the days of the campaign, he had grown fond of him. But if he had liked him less, he would have resented him less, because if a man is a fool, perhaps you have a moral obligation to try and hurt him secretly, to sleep with his wife if you can. Not quite that, thought Thanakar, smiling. But at least you don’t feel so guilty. As he rode, he looked for things about the old man to dislike, and in his mind he drew a caricature of Micum’s profile against the slate-blue side of the gorge, his nose and lips protruding like a pig’s snout, his eye peering out from a little puckered whirlpool of flesh, his hair cut short like bristle. Thanakar relaxed, and the man became human again. His features slid back into place; he turned and smiled, his face warm and friendly, his eyes sad. Thanakar wished that he had come another way, but his leg was too sore for him to ride a horse.

The river valley was paved with smooth white stones. It was a flat mile across, and the slopes came down sheer on either side. The river ran a dozen twisting courses over the stones, and the road skirted the cliff along the east bank, one of a great skein of roads called the Northways, which twisted like the river all over the district. The army followed it upstream, towards the monastery of St. Serpentine Boylove high up ahead: spires and battlements cut into the mountain, but still out of sight from where they sat on elephantback. The view was blocked by rocks, a configuration known locally as the Keyhole. A few miles up, the cliffs on each side of the river jutted in until they almost touched, and the road led through a narrow defile while the river roared beneath it. And high above the road, the overhanging cliffs almost touched. There they were joined by a span of masonry, and Thanakar could see the heads of enemy soldiers walking back and forth along it.

He borrowed the commissar’s field glasses. Heads in black helmets moved back and forth, and on the rampart, someone had painted a white phoenix rising from its nest of fire, a symbol of adventism. Below that, Thanakar followed some ropes down into the blue sky below the bridge, and at the ends hung bodies. He was used to that. King Argon had decorated each hilltop in the district with a thicket of crucifixes, and nailed up loyalists and monks. Their red robes fluttered in the wind like flags, and carrion crows perched along their outstretched arms. Here and there a cartwheel had been hoisted to the top of a long pole, and a man had been spread out on it, disemboweled for the crows, while other men hung by one wrist from the rim until their arms fell off. Thanakar was used to it. As he watched the bridge above the Keyhole, another man was lifted to the rampart and pushed over, to jerk at the end of a rope. He was dressed in golden robes. Thanakar passed the glasses to the commissar, who peered through them. “Abbot,” he said briefly, and made the customary gestures of respect.

In the shadow of a boulder up ahead, Colonel Aspe sat with some officers and antinomials. He was eating grapes and spitting out the seeds while the others argued. It was a peculiar kind of argument. The captain of his regiment, a bandy-legged southerner with a round head and false teeth, was angry. He pointed and swore at the antinomials, but his accent was thick, and his teeth clattered when he spoke. “Schob. Thamn you. Fwerk,” he said, but nobody could understand him. And so he shook his fist, and looked up at his orderly standing near, and relapsed into his native language, all spitting sounds and growls.

The orderly saluted stiffly and translated. “He says it was for you, loping the ridge. For you kept. No. Colonel’s orders; he was telling you. I tell you! Scrape that shit off the rocks!” He gestured towards the enemy soldiers above their heads. “Now what you do here? What are you? Where you go?”

One of the antinomials was a wide man with a shaved head and a flat, white, masklike face. He wore sunglasses, and his skin after weeks in the sun seemed to be getting paler as the others burned and tanned, bleaching like shell or bone. He turned his face away and then he smiled, humming an inquisitive little tune. He didn’t understand.

The southerners glared at him, the captain spitting and cursing while his orderly clicked his heels and translated. “You bastard, please!” he said. “Cowardly shithead! Cannibal! Why not ridge? You, on ridge.” He saluted.

“He’s saying,” said the colonel’s adjutant, “that you were supposed to follow the hills. He says those were your orders. He says if you had followed orders, we wouldn’t be stuck here in the valley with those fellows above us.”

“Supposed,” said the antinomial thoughtfully. “Supposed to do.” He frowned, and the tune he was humming changed.

The colonel smiled. “Suggested, my brother.” He sang a little song in his harsh voice.

“Hot there,” said the antinomial, putting words together with difficulty. And he coated them with humming, which made them hard to understand. “Too hot up there. No water. I come along the river.”

“Besides,” said the adjutant, dapper and smooth. “I don’t understand the fuss. We’re not stuck here. We can ride right through. Argon’s at the monastery.”

The southern captain started to spit and growl. His orderly translated, saluting. “Fool! You are fool! Sir!” He gestured towards the bridge above their heads, and the helmets of the enemy soldiers. “They kill us here. Too …” He put his palms an inch apart, indicating “narrow.”

The antinomial looked at him with scorn. “Slaves are afraid of death,” he said. “Only slaves.” He got to his feet and started walking towards the road, but the colonel laughed and sang a song that made him turn around.

“Maybe you should let him go through, sir,” said the adjutant. “We need a scout.”

“Not him,” replied Aspe. “Get me fodder.” He squinted down the river road, where the army stretched and coiled for a mile or more. “Starbridges. Who’s on the elephant? Read me their flags.”

His adjutant lifted a pair of field glasses. Above the carriage on the elephant’s back rose a pair of fluttering white ensigns. “Thanakar and Micum Starbridge,” he said.

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“Transport corps,” said his adjutant. “One’s a doctor. You shouldn’t waste him, sir.”

“Is he brave?”

“Of course.” A list of obligations was sewn onto each flag. “Fourth degree, both of them. They were born under the same sign.”

“Fourth degree?”

“Up to and including loss of life.”

“Good. That’s handy. What about obedience?”

“You can see it. It’s that red crescent on the commissar’s flag. The doctor doesn’t have it. He’s a … cynic, it says. He believes in … nothing.”

The colonel frowned. “He sounds like a fool.”

“No, sir. You can see from here. Fifth degree intelligence. It’s that triangle right at the top of the flag.”

But Aspe was no longer listening. He was singing for his horse, and it lifted its head where it was drinking by the river. Then it neighed and came running, and Aspe seized one of its horns as it ran past and swung himself up into the saddle. When he reached the road he spurred it to a gallop, even though that part of the valley was crowded with animals, and men standing and sitting, and waiting for something to happen. Men scattered in front of him, leaping for safety off the shoulders of the road, rolling in the dirt out of reach of his flying hooves.

“Who is this madman?” asked the doctor.

The elephant took up the whole road. When it saw the black horse coming down on it so fast, it trumpeted in terror and raised its blobby nose to the sky. The commissar stood up in the carriage and prodded it with his spike, distracting it into giving up all plans to flee or die. It just stood there, trembling and sweating, while the colonel reined his horse back on its haunches in the road in front of them. He raised his whip above his head.

The colonel’s voice was harshness without substance, the words like coarse dust in a breath of wind. Thanakar couldn’t hear him. The noise of the army was too thick around them, and the elephant seemed to sweat vibrations of thrumming terror through its pores. Aspe cursed and dismounted stiffly. His knees moved stiffly when he walked. It was as if he were only comfortable on horseback, but he grasped the ladder that hung from the elephant’s back, and swung himself up, and stood on the beast’s head while it bucked and swayed, his gauntlets on his hips.

“Starbridges,” he said. “I need spies. Ride through that notch and tell me what’s behind. I am Aspe.”

Thanakar peered ahead. “You fear an ambush, Colonel?”

“I fear nothing. I welcome an ambush.” Aspe grabbed hold of the elephant’s ear, preparing to descend. “Ride through.”

“With respect, Colonel,” said Thanakar, “if there is an ambush, they won’t spring it for us. They’ll wait for us to say the road is clear.”

Aspe shifted his hand to support himself on the doctor’s flagpole. “Intelligent,” he sneered. “What if I go? They won’t resist trying to kill me.”

“Your life is too valuable to risk,” said the doctor.

“Valuable! But I don’t care if the world is destroyed this instant. Listen to me. Ride through. Take my bugle. If Argon has stones or missiles lined along the cliff, blow an A sharp. If there are soldiers on the other side, blow an E flat.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel. I don’t know how.”

“Barbarian! I’ll do it myself, then. Does this beast know how to walk?”

Goaded, Thanakar grabbed the commissar’s spike and pushed it into the soft flesh around the elephant’s tail. The animal shambled forward, wagging its huge head, Aspe standing on its neck. But when it reached where the colonel’s adjutant stood in a group of officers and men clustered around the colonel’s ensign, it stopped by itself.

“I am going,” Aspe called down. “Pass me my flag.” A man uprooted it and threw it up to him; he caught it and thrust it through the socket in the carriage rail that already held the doctor’s and the commissar’s. It flew above theirs, meaningless red squiggles on a black background.

Aspe shouted orders, some in speech and some in music, and soon the officers were running to their stations, rousing their men. One stood still, a handsome man in a red uniform, a priest, the bishop’s liaison. “Colonel,” he shouted. “The abbot’s body must be recovered. There are certain ceremonies I must perform to free his spirit’s flight to Paradise. You must send men to cut him down.”

The colonel looked up at the abbot’s body, revolving in the last of the sun. “But your Paradise is just a lump of rock,” he said. “I wouldn’t waste the tenth part of a second on that fat carrion. Be thankful that there is no life to come. If there were, he’d rot in hell. Ride on,” he said, and then he paused. “Garin,” he called, and a young boy stepped out of the shadow of a boulder.

“Yes, sir.”

“I left my horse down by that arch of rock. Strip him and comb him. Give him oats mixed with red wine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

In front of them the sandstone wall rose like a rampart. The elephant ambled up the road towards the notch where the river ran out. A hundred feet above them, enemy soldiers started to shoot as they came in range. Commissar Micum lit a cigarette, and the sweet marijuana smell was comfortable to Thanakar as he held the elephant to a walk, to pace their bravery. And in a little while, the lower rocks around the Keyhole sheltered them from the soldiers. The rock formations, petrified remnants of old sand dunes, pink and scarlet in the setting sun, blocked their fire. But there were some soldiers on the bridge between the cliffs. They threw down firebombs and bags of what seemed like excrement as the elephant passed underneath.