Soldiers of Paradise (7 page)

One we captured alive. A boy had opened up the gate to go out scavenging for weapons, and just outside, in a litter of sledgehammers and iron bars, we found a man. At first I thought he had been wounded in the stomach, because he was curled up like a baby. He would not look us in the face. And he was praying with fanatic speed; he would not stop, even when my brother lost patience and tried to pull him to his feet. “Holy beloved, deliver me. I have done no harm, by the hair of your head, deliver me, by the power of your thighs, by the strength of your love. Hold me in your arms, so that I may say, ‘Sweeter than sugar is your taste in my mouth, sweeter than sugar is the taste of your ministers …’ ” He went on and on. He wouldn’t shut up. So we dragged him up into the town by his shirt, up to the dancing hall, and left him outside, where he lay in a heap.

My brothers and my sisters had no interest in him, for the barbarians did not come back that day. But I was interested. He pulled himself upright, and in a little while I saw him sitting upright, supported in the angle of a wall, crooning to himself, his eyes closed whenever I looked at him, open when I didn’t.

In the evening I brought him food, a mush of corn in a bowl, and for a while I stood without knowing what to say as he rocked and prayed, one hand clamped on his genitals, the other on an amulet around his neck. It was unusual just to watch someone so closely. Barbarians took no offense. This one sat cross-legged, rocking. He was an old man, his skin pale and spotted, loose and shrunken at the same time. His hair was gray, streaked with white, tied in a black rag at the nape of his neck. It hung long down his back. He had no beard, and I could see his skinny face. There was no meat on it, or on his bone-white arms. His belly was soft and fat.

I didn’t know how to talk to him. Old man? Barbarian? Coward dwarf? But he didn’t look afraid anymore; he seemed happy, in fact, smiling at intervals, as if at inner jokes. He showed his teeth; they were dirty, but looked strong. “Old man,” I said.

He started, and his eyes flickered open, as if I had just woken him. And when he turned to me, I saw in his face and in his eyes an expression I had not looked for, something you see in the faces of small children, a mixture of delight and fear. He put his hand out towards me, and I could see the amulet around his neck. It was molded from heavy plastic in the shape of a man’s genitals.

“Old man,” I said, holding out the bowl I had brought. “Here is food for pigs.”

He smiled up at me, looking into my face but not my eyes. “Is it … flesh?” he asked, almost reverently. “I cannot eat … flesh.”

“It is not,” I said. He looked both disappointed and relieved, but he made no motion, and so I squatted down and pushed the bowl into his face.

“Thank you,” he said, words I’d never heard, and the tone made me think he was refusing. But when I tried to pull my hand away, he grabbed the bowl and held it in his lap without looking at it.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am God’s soldier. And I am happy here. Happy to be here.” He looked around. “Very glad to have seen it, at the end of my life.”

The sun was down, the sky darkening. Someone had started to play music in the hall behind us. Children came to stand in the bright doorway. One raised his hands and twirled a child’s pirouette. “Listen,” said the soldier, as if I had no ears. “How beautiful!” I squatted down beside him. I could hear the sound of a wooden flute, played in a difficult and obscure key called “waterbird.” In that particular tempo you could see a bird rising from the surface of a pool, fanning the water into ripples with its wings. Usually the bird is small and white, with a long straight bill; the pool is crisp on a bright day, but tonight the musician—a very young girl, I knew her tone—had chosen the luminous dark of early evening, a great bird of prey, its wings outstretched, the feathers of its wingtips stretching wide like fingers, circling exhausted over an endless sea. In the alien water it will sink without a trace. The music changed, the bird disappeared into the dark, and you could see the stars coming out one by one, a song we called “first stars.”

The soldier spoke again. He said, “We only have tonight to listen. My prince is camped under the hill. Cosro Starbridge. Tomorrow he will burn the town. He’s sworn an oath to level every stone. The parson has already blessed the gallows. He’s going to kill you all. And me, too.” His voice was dreamy, and I was surprised by how much he seemed to understand. Not the bird, not the water, not the stars. That was part of a language only we could hear, the images summoned out of forms and choices meaningless to a stranger. Yet he was responding to the music’s other part, the melody, the song of the artist, as sad as she could make it at so young an age. She was afraid of death. Death sang in every note. Like me, she was afraid.

“Why?” I asked.

He smiled as if he were smarter than I. A dog was slinking past the porch, his head down. “He knows,” said the soldier, pointing. “Ask him.”

This meant nothing to me. Then, I knew nothing of barbarian heresy, or adventism, or the prophecies that foretold their god’s rebirth in the first days of spring. I would have had no patience for it. This soldier was an adventist, I know now. He was a rebel against his own kind. Here in this dark city there are armies of them, waiting for their king, their savior. The jails are full of them. They swing from every public scaffold. In those days they had a prophecy that god would be born out of my people. Without understanding freedom, they worshipped it.

I knew nothing of all this. I made no distinction between barbarian creeds. But I was interested in the soldier. He was listening to the music, which was changing, and I wondered whether he could sense its change. His eyes were full of tears. “I am so happy to be here,” he repeated. “Here at the end of all things.”

His food still lay untasted in his lap. And in a little while he spoke again: “So happy just to listen. I have heard so much about your music. In midwinter, when I was young, in the ninth phase, the bishop would have whipped a man for whistling in the streets. Already then they were afraid. Already they had begun to lose control. Now they are a hundred times more desperate. They want to kill you all.”

“Tell me,” I said.

He smiled. He brought his hand up to his mouth. “This is the last night,” he said, pointing towards Paradise, just rising. “It won’t be visible again, not in my lifetime. But look, you can see the mountain where I used to live, that black spot. Look.” He sniffed. “It has been warm here. Tonight it will snow. And tomorrow morning, that will be the end. I think the sun will never rise again. And look.” He motioned to the stone table not far away, the statue lying on its back. “The idols are broken. Tomorrow we shall see. False priests and false governors. At the hour of seven-times-ten they shall be overthrown.” He was a fanatic. He told me of a plot to murder his commander. His eyes stretched wide. But in a little while he spoke more softly, and then he turned to me. “Our general pretends to take advantage of the thaw. He pretends he is hunting atheists and cannibals, and clearing out these hills for good and all. But it is more than that. He is afraid. He is searching for the One. The risen One. The risen Angkhdt.”

I looked around at the gathering dark. Music had started again, one of the many kinds of fire music, boastful, proud, and you could see fire flashing from the empty doorway of the hall. The soldier sat with his own thoughts, rocking and humming, and fingering his amulet. So I settled back to listen, and I watched the stars gather and combine as darkness fell, solitary at first, the brightest, one or two in all the sky. As I watched there were always more, filling up that aching space with light, with stars and patterns, numberless, nameless.

Some children came down through the bright doorway, running and laughing, and carrying torches. You could see their faces in the torchlight, dirty, thin, and full of joy. One threw her torch high up into the air, meaning to catch it as it came down; she missed, and it exploded in a shower of sparks. And then they all ran down together across the open stones towards the tower gate, their bodies disappearing in the dark, until below us all that remained were their high, wordless voices and the flickering lights, chasing and spinning, part formless dance, part ruleless game.

The soldier, too, was covered up in darkness. His body had retreated from my sight, and in the long silence I would have let his image go as well, until I remembered nothing. I would have cleared my mind, opened up my hand, and like a timid animal he might have stayed for a while, trembling on my palm until I prodded him away. In the end he would have gone, just as if he had been eager to escape. I would have forgotten him and everything. For that night I was in love. It filled me like a brimming flood, too deep, too painful for joy. I felt it around me as if for the last time. In the cooling dark, I could hear it in the music, in the scattering voices, see it in the children’s restless torches, mocked from above by an eternity of stars.

But in time the soldier spoke again. I was surprised to hear the sadness in his voice, for without thinking I had thought that my new ecstasy was filling all the world. “The stars will shine like day,” he said. “And in the new light, the earth will blossom like a flower in springtime, and it will need no tending. Stones will move, and fish will speak. Birds will speak. The earth will bring forth all good things, and all men will be free. And Angkhdt will wipe the dirt from our faces, and He will stand up like a giant in the farthest north, and He will say, ‘Bring to me all tyrants and false priests, all kings and Starbridges …’ ” The old man’s voice sounded so sad. “I shall not live to see it,” he said, turning towards me, and I could see the outline of his face. “I have come to prepare the way … I had hoped to see Him,” he continued, his voice breaking. “No matter. In the new starlight He will come, born of this music.”

His breath stank. I reached out to grab the string around his neck, to twist it in my hand until the slack was taken up. I held him at arm’s length and shook him once, gently. He went quiet, and I looked up at the stars. “Please,” he said, his voice full of fear. “You don’t really … eat flesh? You are not cannibals … as they say?”

I released him and stood up. It was too cold to sit. He followed me into the doorway and grabbed me by the arm. Inside the hall, my brothers and my sisters had slaved in from somewhere the corpse of a horse. Some were stripping the skin away from the flesh, pouring off the blood into wooden buckets; some were sawing through the bones, breaking the joints apart; some were building up the fire. It was like a drug, the smell of fresh-cut meat. For me and for the barbarian too: he looked past me into the uncertain light, and at first he didn’t understand what they were doing. When he did, the strength of his body failed. He leaned against the doorpost, panting heavily, his eyes wide with fear, and there were tears in his eyes, and his shoulders and his neck fell forward. He raised his hand up to his face, and with infinite effort dropped his forehead to his palm, and then ducked it to his armpits, once to each side, and murmured a little prayer.

I left him and walked down into the hall, looking for someone. The music was saying something to me. It was in a form called “no regret,” played with wavering purity on the long horn, a large, difficult, metal instrument, which someone had left behind when all the rest of us were left behind. The boy who had picked it up to make it his still did not possess the lungs for any but the easiest modes. This one, “no regret,” he played tentatively, using a melody plainer and sweeter than usual. He knelt wheezing on his bed in the hot firelight, and others squatted near him, listening. And the music told me something too. I thought, if I am going to die tomorrow, I don’t have time to cleanse myself of my desire. I may have time to satisfy it.

My brothers and my sisters were moving towards the center of the feast, to where the butchered horse was thrown onto the fire. Their desires were of the simplest kind. But mine was different. I had no interest in the food, though I was hungry. Instead, I turned aside and walked away under the shadows of the wooden arches, to my own bed and the bed beside it. She was lying on her side, with one arm stretched out. She was still asleep, or asleep again, for she had stripped off some of her red clothes and lay part-naked under dirty blankets.

I sat cross-legged, and she lay beside me with her face pressed against the outside of my thigh, her elbow in my lap. She lay soft and responsive, so I touched her with more force, to press some hardness back into the long muscles of her arm. And as her body came alive under my hand, her spirit coming back from wherever it had been, I thought of all the times I had seen her, every image, every song. So we woke to each other, my fingers suddenly sensitized by memory, her fingers opening under mine, responsive at first, then tight and hard as she woke up. That was the moment. I will remember it. And since then I have dreamed of loving, and all my dreams have been like that, trying to recapture the brittle tension not even of her kisses, but of that one moment, that moment when I held her by the wrist, reawakening to her as if from sleep while she pulled sleepily away. She tried to pull away, and I clamped my hand down on her wrist.

She let me hold her. Without relaxing in the slightest degree, she raised herself up on her other arm and looked around.

Around us, the fire was burning brighter. On a table in the center of the hall, my brothers and sisters had piled roasted joints of horsemeat, high up to keep them from the dogs. A little girl had jumped up on the table’s back, straddling the carcass like a rider; with a stick she beat away their snapping mouths, until my little brother reached up for the horse’s head, bigger than his own. Holding it up between his hands, he did a dance, grinning from behind its cruel, empty beak. And then he threw it far away into a corner where it rolled along the floor, the dogs skidding and sliding after it, biting at each other. And to the other side he flung the neck, a bucketful of entrails, its feet and claws, and even a great haunch of meat, so drunk he was with generosity. My sister hit him with her stick. But I could see there was enough for all, because the pony was a fat one, a barbarian beast, shot in the white grass, and not one of our starving nags.