Authors: Paul Park
Sugar Rain (12 page)
Then for a moment everything fell silent. For a moment the protests of the other prisoners fell silent, and in the interval the old man heard another sound, hesitant, unclear, a woman’s voice, and even his barbarian ears could hear the music in it, though he couldn’t understand it. In front of the door the antinomial was grimacing in pain. He reached his hand out for the key. “Give it to me,” he said.
In one moment all the boy’s violence had drained away. Lord Chrism disliked violence. Yet even more, he disliked sudden change. These antinomials were great, empty casks of flesh, yet they were dangerous and unpredictable. Lord Chrism muttered prayers against pollution. But then he shuffled forward, dangling the key, while with his other hand he made stiff, arthritic gestures in the air.
He never thought the boy would understand the working of the lock. But the antinomial had grown up in Charn. Though he loved freedom, he had never known it, even in his mind. Locks and keys he knew; he had been in prison more than once. So he grabbed the key and held it up. Grimacing, he rubbed it between his fingers and fitted it carefully into the lock.
The door swung open. At one time, the cell beyond had been the richest in the tower. In his strange, sad way, the priest had loved his bishop. Now, that love mixed with his blindness, and it took a moment for the old man to realize what had changed. For a moment, as he looked in through the door, he saw his memory of the way the room had been, imprinted on his ruined retinas. He saw the cushioned wallpaper, the chandelier, the carpets, and the giant bed where Angkhdt himself had once made love. But then the vision faded as his nostrils caught the smell of smoke. With a jolt of bitterness and pain, he realized she had wrecked the room.
The wallpaper had been white, and decorated with a floral pattern. Lord Chrism had chosen it himself, a mixture of forget-me-nots and lilies of the valley. Now it was gray and scorched and soggy. She had lit the room on fire and then extinguished it with water. The furniture was battered into pieces, the bed turned on its side, the mattress ripped apart and oozing soggy cotton. The chandelier had fallen to the floor. And in the middle of the wreckage stood the bishop, straight as a candle flame, dressed in her immaculate white shirt.
To the old man’s eyes she appeared as a luminous white glow on a background of dark gray. But then a stain spread across the image as the antinomial leaped forward and took her in his arms. Lord Chrism turned his head aside and spat. The boy was his peace offering, his gift, but already he regretted bringing him. It nauseated him to see the sacred couple willingly with the unclean, nauseated him and broke his heart. Almost he regretted having come.
Before his eyes the candle flame burned free again. She had twisted from the boy’s embrace and turned towards him. “Well?” she asked. “What have you to say to me?”
For the last time in his life the old man made the gestures of respect. He looked down at the floor. “It is my painful duty to inform you,” he mumbled, “of the results of this morning’s roll call. The vote was one hundred and seven to ninety-five with twenty-one abstentions—”
The bishop interrupted him. “Don’t you think I guessed?” she cried. “My window overlooks the courtyard.”
She pointed, but the old man did not raise his head. He could not have seen, even if he had wanted to, what she was pointing at, out the bars of her window, over the retaining wall, in the Courtyard of the Sun and Stars. “It is my scaffold,” said the bishop. “They have been building it all morning. When is it to be?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“I am surprised you won the vote. You must have lied to them.”
“No, ma’am. Not entirely. Forgive me. But if I had told the truth, they would not have voted to convict. It was a question of … political expediency. And better for you, too, in the long run. When your great-great uncle was bishop of this city, he was tortured to death by the revolutionary tribunal, almost exactly one year ago.”
The bishop stood in the center of the room. The antinomial had moved over to the window. Lord Chrism leaned against the doorpost, looking down. Otherwise, he would have missed the smear of golden orange on the dark wood as the huge cat slunk across the threshold. It picked its way over the ruined carpet to rub up against the boy’s legs.
The bishop also looked down at the cat, so that her black hair obscured her face. A week’s imprisonment had not changed her, even in memory, her black eyes and heavy eyebrows, her petulant expression, her skin like edible sweet cream. Sadly, Lord Chrism recognized the reason he had come. He had wanted to see her one last time.
“I had to lie,” he said. “If I had told the truth, it would not have been enough. Though it was enough for me. They did not see what I saw. If they had found you naked in your chamber with this … this … this … carnivore.”
“And wasn’t that my right?” she cried, looking up with angry eyes. “I am bishop of Charn.”
“It was your right, but it was not well done. In part, I blame myself. These atheists, I should have burned them all. And I ask myself, how did you find him? Through what crack did he crawl?”
“He climbed up to my tower window. He was starving and wet through. Do you blame me? I was brought up in this temple among men like you. Old men, blind. I thought he was the God Himself.”
Standing at the window, the antinomial scowled and frowned. He tugged on one of the bars of the window as he looked back into the room. Outside, the weather had closed in, and it was raining.
“I do not blame you,” said the priest. “I chose your education. I might have known the effects that so much holy scripture would have had on a young girl. Only I wish you had chosen something worthier. Some worthier object for your … love. It is unfortunate.”
The cat was pacing back and forth under the window. The old man paused, and then continued. “It was his cat which gave me the idea,” he said. “I told the council I had found you coupled with a demon. The demon from the ninety-second psalm—you know, Palagon Bahu, in the shape of a cat. I showed them in a living image, and they trusted me. Now I am sorry, but to tell the truth, what else could I do? Believe me, child—dear child—you will hardly feel it. I’ll give you a drug, and you will hardly feel the fire. Or just a little bit—you will fall asleep, and you will wake in Paradise. Believe me, I have prayed for you. Every night of this past week, I have prepared a room for you. In the house of our beloved Lord.”
“I think you are a monster,” she said.
“Don’t call me that. I am being generous. This afternoon my nephew burns, my own sister’s son, and I have cursed him. Or rather, I’m not sure. I still have plans.” Lord Chrism smiled at his own cleverness, and yet it was a guilty smile. He felt a compulsion to shame himself by telling everything. Yet he was gleeful, too, and proud, because the bishop, after all, was just a little girl. She could not be expected to understand.
“I came here to ask you for absolution,” he said. “But now I see it is a wasted trip. Nevertheless, please try to understand. I have prepared a miracle. I have made my nephew’s double. Surgically. Or rather, I have caused him to be made. I have made a man who looks just like him, from a distance. Understand: I want to make a miracle, to burn one and then use the other, as if God had saved him from the fire. Only I haven’t yet decided which to burn.”
“I think you are a monster,” she repeated.
“Yes. Well, perhaps.” Lord Chrism swallowed, and then he looked away. His voice had risen defiantly, but now it resumed its soft, insinuating tone. “But in a sense, it doesn’t matter what you think. You are deposed. You lack … authority.”
“I am Bishop of Charn.”
“Yes. Perhaps. For a little while longer, I suppose.”
By noon the news had spread throughout the city. The churches and chapels were all packed for morning prayer; after the distribution of the grain, the parish priests stood up to give the news, and later many of them took refuge in the crypts, cowering among the tombs while the crowds rampaged above their heads. One at least, the chaplain at St. Soldan’s Gate, stripped off his miter and went down to join his angry congregation. With his own crosier he beat in the stained-glass portrait of Lord Chrism Demiurge above the altar, and with his own hands he rang St. Soldan’s Bell and called the folk to arms.
“Which one of you has not received some comfort from her hand?” he asked rhetorically. “Which one of you has never felt the comfort of her grace?” His name was Ripon Starbridge, and within a month he would be dead, broken on the gallows of the revolution. For the sake of his name and his tattoos, he would be broken and condemned, but on that day he was a hero of the revolution, the first to raise his hand against oppression. Later chroniclers would call that time the Starbridge Uprising; from the 45th of October to the fall of the temple five days later, much of the violence against the government was led by rebel officers and priests, seeking first to free the bishop, later to avenge her death.
Too late these men would realize their own danger: They were rousing passions that would overwhelm them. That day, when Ripon Starbridge rang the bell above St. Soldan’s Church, he rang the tocsin for his race. All over the district men and women stopped what they were doing and looked up.
When Raksha Starbridge heard the sound, he was squatting over the workbench in his house on Spider Ghat, a beaker of what looked like urine in his hand. He turned his head and squinted up into the air. “What’s that?” he asked, but he already knew. And there was no one else to tell him; to Princess Charity the bell was just a noise, another cadence fighting with the squall of rain upon the tiles, the slap of water on the pilings underneath the house. Or more than that: After a while the sound of the bell seemed to drown out other rhythms. Charity shivered, and wrapped her skinny body in her arms.
She stood near the doorway of the parson’s house, leaning back against the bare studs of the wall. The house was larger than it looked from the outside, a single room, packed to the rafters with huge piles of junk. Near Charity, a mass of broken bicycles, scrap metal, and electrical supplies loomed up above her head. In front of her, occasional rodents wandered among bales of paper, chimney stacks of books.
Charity shivered, and listened to the tolling of the bell. After her morning in the streets, she was relieved to be inside. The outside world had proved so varied and intense, it was a relief to get away; concentrating on a single sound, she felt her strength return. In time she was secure enough to feel bored; that morning Raksha Starbridge had dragged her to his house. But once inside, he had abandoned her and disappeared. After an hour, she pushed away from the wall and walked down a pathway between boxes, following a line of revolutionary slogans painted on the floor. There, in an open space in the center of the house, Raksha Starbridge kept his bed and kitchen. There he kept his laboratory, a strange, eclectic cluster of burners and pipettes and dusty bulbs of colored liquids. And there he crouched over his workbench, stirring a beaker, while with his other hand he added pinches of some dark and dirty powder.
He was talking softly to himself. Standing above him, Charity noticed a new purpose in the way he moved, a new anxiety. “It’s Soldan’s Bell,” he said aloud, anticipating what was on her lips to ask. “God help us all,” he said.
Baffled, she shook her head, and he turned back to stare at her. “My God, you’re ignorant,” he said. “Even Rosa would have understood—listen,” he said, rising to face her, cradling the beaker in his hands. “Listen, why do you think I brought you down here? It’s because I needed you for my experiment. But I didn’t guess I needed you so urgently.”
Baffled, she shook her head. He tried again. “I have a friend in Kindness and Repair. He told me this: Last Wednesday Chrism Demiurge, returning late from midnight mass, surprised the bishop of this city coupled with a stranger, before the altar of her private shrine. Lord Chrism had them both arrested, and the bishop was indicted for witchcraft and impurity. That was on Sunday. This morning the council was to meet, to vote on the indictment, and I was sure she’d be released. That bell tells me I was wrong.”
The parson’s face was full of movement, even when he paused. Drugs and alcohol had penetrated every part of him; his eyes were dilated, and his eyelids twitched. Clouds of angry rashes and discolored skin seemed to move over his cheeks; his mouth was never still and never dry. Charity stared down at his trembling hands, watching the uneven surface of the liquid in his beaker.
He wasn’t finished: “I was wrong. The chaplain of Saint Soldan’s church is calling for armed demonstrations and a general strike. He is Lord Chrism’s cousin, but he is the bishop’s man. What can that mean, except she was condemned? What can that mean, except the moment I have feared and hoped for all my life is here at last, and I am unprepared?”
Raksha Starbridge held the beaker in one hand. The other he spread open, and Charity could see his strange tattoo: a dark thicket of leaves and underneath, almost invisible, a single seam of gold, a tiny lizard hiding in the grass. “Once their power splits,” he said, “then it will fall. I used to think, yes in my lifetime, yes in one thousand or two thousand days, the people would rise up. But that bell means that in a week—no more—the people will be hunting Starbridges through all the streets, and they will murder all they find.” He stared down at his palm, and with the forefinger of the hand that held the beaker, he touched the seam of gold. “And I mean to survive.”
Then suddenly he took her hand and led her over to another bench, under the shadow of a wall of books. “Stand here,” he said. He put the beaker down upon the bench. “I needed you,” he said. “For my experiment. Just for a moment—you will hardly feel it. The experiment has been complete, only I need the test. My own blood was never pure, and I have ruined it. Besides,” he said, glancing down at his mottled forearm. “I find it hard to raise a vein.”