Soldiers of Paradise (31 page)

He remembered the circle of hot faces in the firelight, the sudden blow, his hand half-severed, the knife stuck between his bones, his ears ringing like cymbals, the faces around him changing into masks—ah, ah, ah, his enemy receding as if lost in a black mist, only his eyes and his teeth showing as he smiled.

He remembered the stone table in the snow, the statue of dog-faced Angkhdt, the broken foot and that same smiling face, that dancer in the freezing air, dancing his last dance. In his tent Aspe’s memories were deafening. He thought: Other men have turned to biting out of love, or misdirection, or musical ineptitude. But with me it has been hate, always hate, and hatred is a kind of love, a way of refusing to accept the cacophony of certain kinds of music in the world.

Along the river, his sweet brothers and his sisters lay as dead as meat. The images banged around his ears. And then suddenly Aspe saw, in the middle of that circle of discord, the bishop’s face, a poisonous harmony of black curls, black eyes, sweet skin. So young, she was. He struck the table with his steel fist. Hatred, memories of hatred, cadenzas of hatred spun and jostled in his mind, until he cried: “Enough! Great Angkhdt, enough. No more.”

 

The bishop tended the shrine in her turret chamber while the boy watched her from the bed. Unlike all but six in the city, it was a shrine not to Angkhdt but to God Himself, not to the servant but to the master. In most temples, Angkhdt the prophet stood between men and the God of Love, but not here. The room smelled of lovemaking. She filled a crystal bowl on the altar from a ewer of water, reciting lists of prayers.

She had had a tiring day. She had consecrated forty newly gelded priests, their faces lumpy from painkillers and pain. And she had performed the feather celebration on the altar of St. Unity Bereft, a long boring dance whose significance was lost, but still it was recurrent in the endless calendar of worship. She had danced it once before, a little girl.

While she was gone, the boy had lain in bed. Today he seemed a little restless, she thought. He watched her with a curious absorption as she wrote symbols in the air above the bowl. The cat covered his lap, and he stroked the long fur under its throat and around its slitted eyes.

“Something bad happened,” he said.

The rain was pouring down. The bishop shivered in her white dress, because that day she had felt the same thing, and when she was talking to her secretary, she had thought it would be a relief to know something of the world. The heart beats in darkness, separate from the brain, the old man would say. She accepted that, but sometimes it would be a relief to know: there was a war, and it had gotten closer.

She had seen a stiffening desperation in her secretary and the members of her council, in their dedication to the small details of worship. But for a few days now there had been something like triumph in the old man’s chicken step, and his attention had been inclined to wander. True, the feather dance was a terrible ordeal. During some of the slower movements, she had been inclined to doze herself.

But sometimes she thought that since the land, and the people, and everything that breathed belonged to her, she should be allowed to take a closer interest. Sometimes as she sat in her own temple in the clothes of the living goddess, listening to supplications, she could catch wisps of news—a mother’s prayer for four sons in the army, a wife’s prayer for her husband. Knowledge bred opinions, and opinions interfered with love, that’s what her secretary said. He would tell her what had happened sometimes when all the news was cold, when it was no longer possible to take sides. In the meantime, she read hungrily: history, natural history, theology.

The boy leaned his head back against the wall. “It’s a feeling,” he said. “I feel … unhappy.”

Sympathetic, she touched his forehead. He reached up and brought her wrist down to his mouth to kiss it. “How long have I been here?” he asked. “I don’t know why I came.”

“To kill me.”

He frowned. “I forgot everything you said. Explain it to me once more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your soldiers.”

“I have no soldiers.”

His grip tightened on her wrist, and there was some tired danger in his voice when he said, “That’s not true. They lit fires at the entrance of the tunnel, until the air was full of smoke.”

“God has given us many laws. Some are cruel.”

“Is it against the law for me to be here?”

“The laws aren’t my concern,” she said. “They don’t apply to me.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I’ve been so poor. I mean in my mind. My fathers and my mothers didn’t need to think to fill their world. It was full already—horses, dogs, freedom, snow, things to do, feelings. I never had those things. So instead I want to learn to think. But I don’t want to learn something and have it not be true.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the bishop. “I am not allowed to lie.”

The boy stroked the cat and looked unhappy.

“There’s no reason for me to be humble,” she said. “I am the bishop of Charn.”

“Yes. There is a part of you I don’t like so well. But there is another part.” He put the cat aside, and then he reached to pull her down beside him and comb the hair out of her face. He combed his fingers through her hair and ran his thumb along the underside of her ear, admiring the softness of the skin, the delicacy of the black hairs that grew along her cheek. “You’re so different from my sisters,” he said.

She made a face, but he couldn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to him if he had. He couldn’t read the language of expressions. He couldn’t understand it. She lay down beside him and bent to take one of his testicles into her mouth, while he wrapped his hand around her tail, stroking the hair at the base of her spine. She licked carefully along his underside, using a technique described in Angkhdt 710, while he leaned back happily. “So different,” he said.

She laughed, releasing him. “I hope so. I’ve heard about your sisters. Muscles like steel and monstrous teeth …” She dragged her incisors along his inner thigh.

He grabbed her by the neck, pushing her face into his leg. She tried to twist away, but he held tight. “Stop hurting me!” she cried. “Can’t you tell you’re hurting me?”

“I can’t feel it.”

“Let go!”

Outside, night was falling, and spring rain. Lightning licked the hills around the city. It never really stopped; the silk-lined room was never absolutely dark.

“Lie to me about one single thing,” he said, “and I’ll break your neck. You know we have a music for lying. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Let go!”

He released her, and she jumped up and stood facing him, hands to her neck. “What are you talking about? Why are you such a child?”

“Because I am.” He dropped his eyes humbly. “I don’t know anything about love. Barbarians know all about it.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He was right, he didn’t know anything about it. Later he fucked her with a kind of desperation, as if she held hidden inside her body some vital secret. He searched for it, his fingers locked around her tail, and fucked her until she was like a river inside, and he couldn’t even feel her anymore. She cried out, exhausted, but still he kept on and on, and the sweat made their bodies skid and slip. And then, still hard, he lay on his stomach on the saturated sheet, his eyes unfocused, reflecting nothing. She let him go. It was part of what fascinated her, that enormous capacity for nothingless which stilled his soul and took the place of Angkhdt. She lay with her cheek against his back, her fingers in the groove of muscle along his spine.

 

She was a beautiful woman, and not in the normal masklike way. In some women, beauty speaks of who they are. In her it spoke eloquently, the more so because her training as a priestess and a goddess had muted other voices. She had grown up practically alone. Her skin was the color of custard or sweet cake, of something edible and good to eat. She was not tall. Her hair was Starbridge black and fell in thick untidy curls around her face and shoulders.

His form too, the shape of his features and his enormous body, seemed the most expressive part of him. Along with so much else, his race had rejected the idea that people differed, because they saw it as a way of chaining actions to reactions. So while they worshipped freedom, they rejected individuality. Free men and women resembled one another a great deal, it had turned out. They were arrogant, irrational, impulsive, humorless, ecstatic. And though this boy was trying to change, was eager to accept some shackles, still his body was the most expressive part of him, the only part he knew. He touched it often, scratching and rubbing, and he was always moving his arms and legs to stretch the muscles, and rotating his ankles and his wrists to hear the bones snap and realign.

He had been there for a week, living in secret in the bishop’s chamber, eating the food she brought him, before the old man found him. The bishop’s secretary limped up the stairs one night when they were half asleep. Devils and angels cavorted in his clothes, peeping with long-nosed faces out from his sleeves, hanging by their tails from his chain of office, playing hide and seek in his hair. They bounded past him up the spiral stairs, full of play. The old man reached the landing and stretched his hand out for the stone statue of the faun at the entrance to the bishop’s quarters, stroking it with withered pale fingers. Lamps burned bright here. And every angle of the corridor, every discoloration of the marble floor was known to him, illuminated by the lamp of memory for his blind eyes, for he had been a child here, a chaplain in the temple. But there was something unfamiliar now, an unfamiliar smell in this sacred place, something that made him pause, something that had brought him fumbling up the stairs from his own rooms, something. He smelled a faint, lingering smell of sin.

He shuffled forward, almost tripping on a seraph that had curled its rubbery body around his ankle. At the temple doorway he hesitated again, but the smell was stronger here. He shuffled through the doorway and along the corridor, and pushed through heavy curtains into the shrine itself. He summoned all his powers of perception—it was here. His blind eyes caught the image of a boy sitting naked on the bishop’s bed. The bishop herself was asleep, her mass of curls falling over the stranger’s thigh.

Trembling, the old man reached out his arms, as if in supplication. “Unclean,” he whispered, so as not to wake her. Triumphant, miserable, mad, he opened up his hands. His was the loneliest office in the world, the hardest duty. How sweet she seemed, lying asleep, and he could hear the softness of her breathing and see the blackness of her eyebrows. “Unclean,” he whispered. From underneath his skirts, demons and cherubs uncurled and somersaulted slowly over the floor towards where the stranger sat, stroking a golden cat, his blue eyes curious.

 

That same night, Abu Starbridge was sitting in the taproom of a tavern in a vicious section of the city, a tangle of alleyways and rotting houses called the Beggar’s Medicine. Around the walls of an episcopal prison and the gallows there, the streets seethed like worms. In those days, the sugar rain just starting, the sewers and gutters overflowed and filled the streets with caustic mud. It slopped into the first floors of the houses and bit at their foundations. Already some facades had crumbled away, exposing ruined interiors and holes for the rats to play in, uncounted thousands of them, up from the docks, fleeing the rising water. It was against the law to harm them or even to frighten them, and so they ran everywhere, over men and women sleeping in their beds, gnawing corpses in their coffins, biting the ankles of the customers in the tavern where Prince Abu sat.

Though it was not yet dark, the lamps were lit. The windows were opaque with grime, though they let in the rain. It soaked the tattered wallpaper and made it shine with the beginnings of a dull phosphorescence. Later in the season, there would be no need for lamps.

The company huddled around a coal stove, and Prince Abu sat apart, drinking, wrapped in a flannel cloak. He was listening to their voices, the high, sharp accent that the law required from the absolutely poor. It was an ugly sound, and the men and women who gathered there were ugly too—pickpockets, housebreakers, gamblers, unlicensed prostitutes, musicians, drunks. They lived outside the law, but even so, some laws still bound them when all the rest were broken, the so-called “character laws,” which had made them what they were. It was against the law for them to talk, except about themselves, their business, or their belongings. It was against the law for them to use any word describing or referring to an idea. It was against the law for them to practice courtesy or politeness, except to social superiors. It was against the law to speak kindly, except to their own children.

Five men and women sat eating around the stove, and Abu was happy to see fruit and bread on the table, and all manner of illegal delicacies. One of them had brought a rotten piece of cheese, stolen from some shop. It would have been enough to hang them; even their clothes would have been enough, for mixed with the yellow rayon of their caste, Abu saw rags of cotton, linen, even silk, in many proscribed colors.

A tall man, wearing a shirt that had once been white, sat balanced on the back legs of his chair, cleaning his teeth with a pocket knife. His hair was coarse under a black cap, and his black beard was stiff with dirt. Dirt lined the wrinkles and the cuts around his eyes, and lay smeared like a doctor’s salve over his pimpled cheeks. When he laughed, his teeth flashed strong and hard and very white. They were his pride, and he was always picking at them with the point of his knife or with fragments of wood. His name was Jason Mock. He was a thief.

“It tastes like shit,” he remarked, picking a piece of cheese out of his gums and scowling darkly at it on the point of his knife. He spoke in the high pitch common to them all. It seemed particularly out of place in his fierce mouth.

“You wouldn’t say that,” whined another man. “Not if you knew how slick it was. Hard to catch. Six months if you’re caught, just for that one piece. Second offense. It’s valuable.”