Soldiers of Paradise (37 page)

“Oh, sir, how can you be so calm? Your own mother, back from the dead.” The housekeeper was close to tears.

“I’m thinking. She seems calm enough.” He took a step into the room.

“Please don’t go any closer, sir. She’s not to be trusted, back from the dead like that. She’s lost her mind, and it’s a small wonder. Such a good mistress, too.”

He took another step into the room. The princess opened her mouth, and he seemed to feel her cold breath from ten feet away, like a draught from an open doorway. “Son,” she said in a cold whisper, her voice cold as death. “I’m hungry, Thanakar.”

“Beloved God,” sobbed Mrs. Cassimer. “Look at her eyes.”

“Son,” the princess said again. “Tell the old fool to go away. Tell her to bring food for me. Tell her to bring tumbril pie and sandwiches. Tell her to bring fishes cooked in wine. I want them.”

The doctor turned to Mrs. Cassimer. “Did you hear? Eight days—almost a week. She must be starving.”

“Oh, sir. Fishes, she says.”

“I have brought a guest here,” continued Thanakar. “Perhaps he and the princess have tastes in common. It sounds like it. As for me, can you make me a fruit salad? I was up all night.”

“Beloved Angkhdt. Fishes, she wants.”

“Please, Mrs. Cassimer.”

“But sir, she killed a man.”

“Yes,” whispered the princess. “What’s done is done.” She turned her eyes to the housekeeper, and the woman fled.

“Well, Mother,” said the doctor, coming forward into the room. “You’ve made rather a mess.” He walked towards her, kicking through books and broken vases.

“Yes,” breathed the princess. “Not too close, my son. That’s close enough.” He stopped uncertainly, and she continued. “Why, you’re a man now, Thanakar. Are you married?”

“No.”

“No. No need. Does your leg give you much trouble?”

“Not much.”

“No.” She looked almost young. Her hair was glossy and her face unlined, but her dead white pallor and her changing eyes made her a creature out of nightmares and sick dreams, trapped between worlds. She looked around the room. “How long?” she asked. “What is the date?”

“October 46th, in the eighth phase of spring. It’s raining.”

“So. More than fifty months, then. More than five thousand days. Are you religious, Thanakar?”

“No.”

“Good boy. They stole my life from me. I want it back. I want it.” Her eyes caught her reflection in the shards of a broken mirror on the wall; she turned away with an expression of disgust. “Not like this. Why did you wake me? It was the heroin solution. I could feel it pulling me upward as soon as you had shot it in, but I took such a long time to reach the surface, I was down so far. Look—your father looks as young as when I married him.”

The doctor picked up a chair from off its side. “Tell me,” he said.

His mother turned, and he watched her eyes fade from pink to white. “No,” she whispered. “Not now. A world of dreams, my son. Not now. I’m thirsty now. Bring me pear whiskey in a crystal glass. Bring me clusters of white grapes. I want them.”

Thanakar rubbed his nose. A sound came from somewhere else in the apartment. The antinomial blew into his flute to clear it, and then started to play a small tune. The princess heard it. She tilted her head curiously, and Thanakar watched a stain of yellow spread and darken in her eyes. “What is that?” she asked.

 

He went to find Jenny Pentecost, but she was gone. The house was burned—charred timber, nothing. The police at the local station were obsequious and useless, because the mud and the ashes where the house had been still stank with perfume, and a blackened post was daubed with a cross and circle in red paint. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the policeman, picking at a pimple underneath his lip. “I wouldn’t have touched them, knowing your lordship to be interested, and a friend of the poor commissar’s too. We knew they were runaways, a girl marked like that. But who isn’t, nowadays? The whole district is clearing out. Evil times, sir, evil times. But look here.” He pointed out the red mark on the post, though no one could have missed it or failed to understand it. “See that? Not our jurisdiction. That’s the purge. Smell that? Now, no offense, sir, but we’ve heard some rumors about you too. I’d be careful, sir.”

The clouds looked bruised and swollen over a light rain. In the street, mud reached over the ankles. It was quiet here, the fire far away, the streets deserted. Thanakar sat down on a projecting beam while the policeman walked around. Near his hand, a bird huddled disconsolately among some bricks, ruffling its green feathers.

When the man had gone, Thanakar asked among the neighbors. They told him nothing, in many cringing and resentful ways. They were interested in money. They hated him. One old woman with blue teeth said, “No good ever came from your kind. Not for poor folk. Nothing but trouble … sir,” and she cocked her head in the direction of the burned house.

But he found a little girl who told him. She was dressed in yellow rags. Sitting beside him on her porch, kicking her feet, wiping her nose along her arm, she told him how she had crept out that night to watch the house burn down, and how she saw the officers of the purge, in black boots and black uniforms, standing silhouetted by the flames, their horses stamping and tossing their heads. The roof had given way in an avalanche of sparks, and one of the horses had kicked back on its hind legs and pulled its bridle free. Standing on the ground, its rider had raised his whip and cursed.

“But the family?” interrupted Thanakar gently. It was starting to get dark. On the horizon, the sun had dropped below the clouds, and it glinted on the brass roofs of the pagodas and, just visible atop its pillar, the statue of Mara Starbridge wrestling the hierophant. Some women picked miserably through the mud, down towards one of the shrines at the bottom of the street, tolling hand bells.

The little girl swung and kicked her legs. Seriously, without a trace of fear, she told how she had seen a man and a woman handcuffed, gagged, led away. “Ama came to find me,” she said. “She told me to get back inside. But I saw them through the window.”

“There was a little girl about your age. A little younger.”

She wiped her nose along her arm. “I know. Jenny Pentecost. The freak. I called her that because she had a mark right here.” The girl gestured towards her cheek. “A devil mark. Ama says she should have painted her face.”

“Did you see her?”

“No. Ama says it isn’t right. She says it brings ’spicions down on everyone. She never went to prayer school. She never went outside.”

“You didn’t see her—that night?”

“No. I just told you.”

His leg hurt. He turned his face into the sun, where it showed in a cleft between two hills. It would have been restful, he thought, to live in an antinomial country, where the laws of cause and effect had been repealed, where actions had no consequences. Here, he felt chained to many deaths—Charity Starbridge, the Pentecosts. Without his attention to distinguish them, they would have escaped notice. He thought: there is a disease in my hands which pollutes everything I touch.

The little girl beside him kicked her legs. Her upper lip was covered with a small moustache of snot. She stroked it with her forefinger.

Thanakar got to his feet. It was night by the time he reached home. A policeman had come by when he was out, but the antinomial had killed him and dragged his body into the princess’s room, where he sat perched on the man’s buttocks, playing his glass flute. The princess lay listening on her stomach on the bed. The little notes penetrated the walls, and Mrs. Cassimer put her fingers in her ears. “I couldn’t keep the servants,” she said. “They left. They’re gone. Oh, sir, you can’t leave me here with them. Promise me. The chauffeur had a pet fish. They ate it.”

Smiling, he promised, and then he broke his promise almost instantly, for when the purge came back in force that night, Thanakar let himself be taken. He met the soldiers outside in the corridor, where the music of the flute was less. They didn’t search the house.

The soldiers weren’t authorized to touch him, but they had brought a young curate with them, who tied a silken rope around his wrists. Thanakar’s neighbor, a retired brigadier, stood in his doorway in shirtsleeves, his hands on his hips. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I’m being arrested.”

“Filthy pigs. What’s the charge?”

“Adultery.”

“Lucky dog,” said the brigadier. “Sign of the times. Never would have happened in my time. Just as well. What’s the news from the front?”

They chatted about relatives until the priest pulled Thanakar away.

 

At nightfall, violence overtook the day’s chaos in the streets, and gangs of armed men clashed at the street corners, under a light rain. The sky burned red, as if beyond every horizon the city was consumed. It was an illusion still; the houses were too wet to burn except where the fire had first started. That day the bishop’s council had imposed a curfew, and every shrine had announced the news that the church would confiscate the families of rioters, looters, drunks, or absentees. Nevertheless, east, west, and south the highways were choked with runaways, running nowhere and taking their families with them. In most cases they went prematurely, fire and flood still miles from their houses. But their minds were prey to rumors from their great-grandfather’s time, and his great-grandfather’s, and every spring since the birth of Angkhdt. Every spring, fire and water had destroyed the city. Panic was in the smoky air. Strange sights and miracles were reported. As the purge hurried Thanakar along the street, he saw an adventist preacher in the middle of a seething crowd, announcing some new and catastrophic portent of the second coming. Beside him stood a flagellant, naked to the waist, whipping himself till the blood ran down his shoulders. The torches shone on his dull, stupid face. All around, factions of heretics struggled in the mud: rebel angels, adventists, deserters, sodomites, spies. Beating great drums, dupes and agents of King Argon Starbridge marched under an effigy of the dog-headed prince. That at least would bring out the purge, thought Thanakar, but there was not even a policeman watching. His own guards hid their badges in their cloaks and kept to the shadows and the smaller alleyways.

“Where are you taking me?” asked Thanakar. They had paused to let a mob of heretics go by, rough men in from some farm, aimless and determined, carrying pikes and sickles and a symbol Thanakar didn’t recognize, sheaves of cut grass hanging from the ends of poles. The curate knew it. He cowered in the shadows, making the sign of the unclean. “My God,” he moaned. “How many of them are there? There’s not wood enough in all the world to burn them all. This month the Inquisition sat in shifts, even more since Lord Chrism made his proclamation. G-God help me. He’ll never, ever catch them all. Every one he traps has made a dozen converts.” The curate was a small man with a drunkard’s bloated face, a drunkard’s sniveling. “God help us all,” he said softly.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Wanhope Prison. I’m sorry, Captain. B-believe me. The case has been decided.”

“What about the other defendant?”

“The lady?”

“Yes.”

“Th-that was a mistake,” said the curate. “A cruel mistake. Since Chrism’s proclamation there have been more, I-I admit it. These are sinful times. I don’t judge you. With evil spread to such high places, how can ordinary men keep clean?”

“Is she still alive?”

The curate bit his lip. “N-no,” he said. “It was to be expected. She came from a proud family. Sister to a martyred saint.”

“A saint?”

“That’s what men say.”

“Rejoice at every death,” suggested the Starbridge catechism. Thanakar turned his face away. He too was from a proud family. “Were they burned?” he asked. The mob had passed, the street was quiet.

“Yes. N-no. I’ve said enough,” stammered the curate. “A man must be careful, since Lord Chrism …”

“Damn you, what proclamation?”

The curate opened his mouth, astonished. “Y-you haven’t heard?”

“I’ve been with the army.”

“Even so.” He seemed uncertain, then he spoke. “The bishop’s secretary … was … used to be … Chrism Demiurge. Lord Chrism, now. He’s taken a new title, while confirmation is still coming from the emperor. The bishop’s been deposed.”

“What?”

“She’s to be burned, they say. Witchcraft.” The curate bent close. “They say she has a p-penis growing between her breasts. A man’s p-penis. Here.” He touched Thanakar’s chest. He was an alcoholic. He wore too much perfume not to be covering up some other odor. Thanakar turned away, nauseated. “He calls himself Lord Chrism,” said the curate, bringing his face still closer. “He’s searching for a wide appeal. Some of the adventists are already calling him a g-god.”

Thanakar laughed. “That’s heresy,” he said.

“He’s not responsible for what they say. In a weaker man, yes, I suppose it might be heresy. But he is a strong man. He has the council behind him.” He looked away. “It makes no difference. He was always the power in this city. It’s just a matter of a name.”

“And an execution.”

“Yes. P-poor child. A p-penis.”

They were standing in the shelter of an archway. The soldiers of Thanakar’s guard had waited patiently in the rain, but as the two men talked, ragged men with rifles had started gathering at the bottom of their street, carrying some flag, chanting some slogan. A second-lieutenant of the purge had waited patiently at Thanakar’s side, nursing a cigarette. Now he came up and saluted. “My lords,” he said, “we can’t stop here. It’s too dangerous. It’s the festival tonight, in honor of the new saint. Starting at midnight. We’ll have to be at Wanhope Prison before then, sir.”

“B-but we are on a holy errand,” said the curate. “In Lord Chrism’s name.”

“Tell it to them.” The lieutenant jerked his thumb back down the street. The crowd had gotten closer. One of their banners unfurled next to a streetlight. “October 47th,” it read. “A Festival of Faith.” Red letters on a white ground, and underneath, a phoenix rising from a nest of flame. In front of the crowd, a man and woman danced drunkenly, waving a jug. When they saw the curate’s red robes, they gave a shout.