Soldiers of Paradise (41 page)

Instantly Lord Chrism’s voice was heard commanding torches to be laid on. Instantly the fire leapt up, for the latticework of logs had been soaked in gasoline and aromatic oil. At its apex rose a wooden stake. The bishop was to have met death there, tied to it with silken cords. Now she twisted around it in the shape of a python, illuminated by the leaping flames. But then she disappeared, and the stake itself seemed to grow, to flower and take root, roots creeping downward through the burning logs. The stake bloated, and grew bark, and swelled into a mighty tree, its limbs stretching out over the multitude, arching into a canopy of leaves as if it were midsummer. No one there had seen a tree before, not in full flower, and they stared up at it, enchanted.

 

The boy could see down into the courtyard through the bars of her cell. He sat at the window while his cat played with shadows underfoot. And when he saw the fire burning in the lower branches of the tree, he smiled. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “Can you make oranges grow among the leaves?”

“It’s a chestnut tree,” answered the bishop. She stepped from the dark behind him and looked down. Nevertheless, in an instant the boughs were heavy with strange fruits. The boy clapped his hands.

“And can you put a songbird on the topmost branch?” he asked. Instantly a bird darted down from the sky into the foliage. It had long red feathers and a silver voice. “A firebird,” the boy exclaimed. “Can you make her wings burst into flame?”

“That would be cruel.

“Why? It’s not a real bird.”

“No? How sweet it sings.”

The cell was in a high tower. Above, the sky shone with magnesium and grenades. “My secretary is a fool,” said the bishop. “The city burns down every year. Tonight he risks a fire here for the first time. I wish he had more sense. There are more treasures here than I can carry.” She had prepared knapsacks for their journey, full of warm clothing and dry food. In the bottom of one, wrapped in a bundle of old manuscripts, reposed the jewel-encrusted skull of Angkhdt.

“It doesn’t matter. Let it burn.”

“Not to you. This was my home.” She stood looking for a moment over the rooftops towards the light in the bishop’s tower, and then she stooped over the knapsacks. “I have brought us fruit from my garden, and the first hibiscuses. We’re going a long way.”

Behind them, the cell door swung open, slowly, quietly. “Lord Chrism thinks I’m dead,” said the bishop. “He has released the lock. Come with me.”

They passed through the doorway and up the stairs to the roof. At the second landing of the second stair, the way leveled out for fifty feet along a row of cells. The bishop paused. “These have been locked all winter,” she said. “It is time for them to open.” She moved down the line of heavy padlocks, and under her fingers the steel pulled away like taffy. The doors groaned open, and from a farther landing, they turned to watch the prisoners escape, dark spirits, some of them, half smoke and half shadow, smelling of gunpowder and sulphur. Some had hooves and curling horns, and dark heavy faces. They thundered up the stairs in clouds of roaring wind, crushing the travelers against the wall. Others seemed milder; they staggered from their cells out into the corridor, blinking feebly in the light, and their flesh was soft and pink, their faces blobby and unformed. Some were old, their withered arms covered in tattoos, and they carried quadrants, and astrolabes, and telescopes, and perfect spheres, and machines in perpetual motion, and precious equations on chalk slates. And some were beautiful, radiant, aureoles glowing around their heads. They smiled shyly at each other, unsure after so long. They made stylized gestures of recognition with hands that were mostly air, while their wings stirred up fragrances of musk and attar of lavender.

The bishop laughed to see them and clapped her hands. “Old friends,” she cried. “Old friends.” And as they drifted up the stairwell they paused to greet her, joining their fourth fingers to their thumbs in careful ellipses and fluttering their wings. “They are the spirits of the changing world,” said the bishop to her companion. “New freedoms, new ideas. It’s time,” she said. And when the last had disappeared, she stooped to pick up her knapsack. “Come,” she said, and sprinted upward, not pausing, up and up until the stairwell gave out on the rooftops and a small cloister, a shrine to St. Basilon Far-Fetched, patron of travelers. She ran lightly along the balustrade, out into the open air, while the boy followed. The image of the saint hung down over vertiginous heights, and she sat down beside it, swinging her legs over the edge. Far below her, some of the outer courtyards of the temple were already in flames, and others were full of gunfire and struggling soldiers. But for an instant the mist had cleared, and she could see the lights of the city in the distance, and the silhouette of the dark mountain, and above it a spiderweb of lights. Only for an instant. They flickered out one by one as the clouds regrouped, and then it started to rain, a sugar storm, hard and sudden, the phosphorescent drops bursting like sparks along the tiles.

The bishop jumped back into the shelter of the shrine and tried to scrape the rain out of her hair. The boy put his arms around her from behind, but she pulled free, and left the roof, and climbed a final flight of stairs up into the sanctum of the shrine, where the saint had lived. It was a barren, hive-shaped chamber, without windows or furniture, and the floor was covered with coarse sand. In the middle stood the sarcophagus of the saint, a heavy box of rotting stone. Once it had been intricately carved with scenes from distant countries, but in that room some secret force had sanded down their shapes to almost nothing, and some cancerous wind had gnawed at the stone features of the saint as he sat straddling his tomb, his arms outstretched, his hands eaten away. Sand dunes had blown around the statue’s legs. A single candle burned on the coffin lid.

The bishop sat down on the ground, and there she prepared the first meal of their journey, as if they had already traveled miles. She laid out everything that was too bulky to carry far: fruits, and spiced vegetables, and a bottle of wine. They sat and ate without a word, already sharing the peculiar silence of travelers, taking their meal as if sitting on the platform of a deserted station late at night. And when they had finished, they sat without speaking, and the bishop’s head nodded forward as if she were asleep. The boy sat staring at the candle flame, fingering his cat.

This animal was the first to sense the change. The candle flame, which had grown up straight and tall, seemed to tremble in a new current of air. The cat leapt out of the boy’s lap, and yawned and stretched its back. The bishop raised her head. At the limit of her hearing she perceived a small rushing sound, like wind in the back of a cave or a train passing through a distant tunnel. The cat seemed not to notice. She licked her paws. But the current which disturbed the candle flame had gotten stronger, and it made their shadows flicker on the walls, though they sat without moving. The candle blew out, and the dark shut around them like a mouth, but in time it was as if their eyes had grown accustomed to it, for above them they could see the silhouette of the stone sarcophagus against some lighter color in the vault. The wind stirred the sand around them and fanned their faces, and it was dry and cool, and smelled of foreign languages, and sagebrush, and the salt sea. Above their heads, the stars came out, and for them it was a sight out of the recesses of memory, for not since the first phases of spring had they seen stars in the night sky. More miraculous than that, the finger of a moon rose above some far hills, the first time in their lives, and it touched the forehead of the battered saint, and it shone on a broad sandy valley sloping down in front of them, and in the distance glowed the lights of some small town.

The boy looked up at the moon, and then he turned away. “There,” he said, pointing down the slope, where an animal was rooting in the dark.

The bishop reached out and put her fingers round his wrist. “Ssh,” she said. “How warm it is. It must be summertime.”

 

Mrs. Cassimer had locked the demon into the princess’s bedroom, but she couldn’t claim to feel much safer. She held conversations with herself to keep her spirits up and stopped her ears with cotton to block out the incessant music. From time to time she took small sips from a jug of whiskey, labeled “medicinal purposes only” in her neat hand. And to occupy herself, she cleaned the house from top to bottom, in preparation for its burning down. The fire had spread to the streets around the palaces, and even though their stone walls had withstood many springs, “You can’t be too careful,” she said to herself, sealing the spare washcloths in asbestos bags. “You can’t indeed,” she said, on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. “Angkhdt created work to be the consolation of the poor. Otherwise they’d have nothing to do. You can’t blame the gentry for being so strange, bless their hearts. Not with the life they lead. Nothing but fancy clothes, and idleness, and horrible deaths on top of it. It’s no wonder they’re lugubrious. You can’t blame them for what goes on. No, but I don’t condone it, either,” she said severely, shaking her finger at the bedroom door. “Back from the dead! Who ever heard of such a thing? She ought to be ashamed. As for the other one, tattooless trash, even for a demon. Doesn’t belong in a decent home. I can’t imagine what the mistress sees in him, all that music from the pit of hell. Some might call it vulgar.”

There was more to do when the doctor came home. The elevator man had run away during the night, so when Thanakar came home in the morning, he carried Jenny Pentecost upstairs, wrapped in blankets. His knee was creaking like a metal hinge, and he could hardly bend it. “It’s like when you were a child,” said Mrs. Cassimer. “You would go out without your crutches, and you would play kickball with the others, and then you’d come home limping like a criminal, just so the mistress would see. Well, she’s past caring now. What’s in the bundle? Another nasty surprise, I’m sure. Beloved Angkhdt preserve us, it’s alive! Oh, sir, you’re doing it on purpose.”

“This is Jenny Pentecost,” said the doctor wearily. “She needs a bath.”

“And a change of clothes. What a getup! Where did you get this one, the circus? If I might be permitted to ask.”

“Please, Mrs. Cassimer, just do it. I’ve had a long night.”

“I suppose you have. Out all night, and then you stroll in with this … with this … I don’t know what to call her. If she was a little older, I’d know exactly. Little strumpet!”

“Please …”

“I suppose you’re the only one who’s had a long night. I’ve done the work of ten around here. Not that I get any thanks. I’d like a bath myself.”

The doctor tried to lower Jenny into an armchair, but she wouldn’t let go her hands from around his neck. “Don’t make me go with her,” she whispered. They were the first words that she had spoken.

Mrs. Cassimer was cleaning the cotton out of her ears, and she heard them. In an instant, her anger subsided into tears. “Oh, sir,” she sniffed. “You left me alone. You said you wouldn’t.”

“I was arrested.”

“Hmph. Easy to say. I’ve heard that one before.”

The doctor disengaged Jenny’s fingers from around his neck and sat down on the arm of the chair. “How’s my mother?” he asked.

“A lot better than she has any business being, if you want my opinion,” retorted the housekeeper. “And that music all night long, it’s enough to drive you crazy. You can hear it now.”

But she relented when Jenny was asleep, curled up on the sofa with her thumb in her mouth. “She’s just a child,” she said. The doctor took off her headdress and bandaged her feet, and together they sponged away some of her makeup and perfume, and found a flannel nightgown for her. Then the doctor tended to himself, injecting oil into his knee to soothe the joint. He wrapped it in a bandage of hot silk. “The elevator man has run away,” he remarked.

“Some people have no pride,” said Mrs. Cassimer.

“What will you do?”

She shrugged. “I took an oath to serve your family. I wish I hadn’t, but it’s too late now, as the parson said when he chopped his mother’s head off by mistake.”

“It will mean going away. I’m a fugitive.”

“Don’t give yourself airs. It’s a fine place for a fugitive, your own armchair.” She frowned. “Most people go away this time of year,” she said. “The whole place is burning down.”

 

Mrs. Cassimer had locked the bedroom door and sealed it with signs and incantations written in chalk. “You spelled it wrong,” said Thanakar. “That wouldn’t have stopped a cat.” He was sitting over a cooker in the bedroom, preparing a hypodermic full of heroin. His mother stretched out her hands for it.

“Thank you, Thanakar,” she whispered. “I was feeling so tired.”

She also had had a busy night. She had butchered the policeman’s corpse, draining off his blood into vases and flowerbowls, filling the washstand with his entrails. She had toasted strips of meat over the grate, at the end of a long skewer. Now she shot the needle and sat back on the floor next to the bed, her hands over her face.

The antinomial squatted in a corner, his flute to his lips. Though he still moved his fingers along the glass, he wasn’t blowing into it anymore, just breathing quietly, so that the music had subsided into light, papery noises. He seemed asleep.

“I’m leaving the city,” said Thanakar. “Will you come with me?”

“No,” answered the princess. Her eyes went through their slow rotation, the colors mixing and purifying in her colorless face. “I never liked crowds. I like them less than ever now.” She looked over at the prince, where he lay under his shroud. “I have someone to avenge,” she whispered. She had not asked Thanakar to try to wake his father, seeming to realize what a monster she’d become. “I’m tired all the time,” she complained. “It’s the change of diet.” She smiled mournfully and showed her stained teeth. “The passports are in the cabinet, and money too. There’s a letter of credit. You can draw your salary at any Starbridge bank—that is, if things haven’t changed too much.”

“Things have changed. Have you looked outside?”