by Paul Park
That should have warned him, that and a dozen other things. Inside the building, clerks scurried down the narrow passageways, and patient janitors pushed carts of wastepaper. But still Thanakar didn’t pay attention; he allowed himself to be led into the deep recesses of the building. And it wasn’t until he stood inside the door of the main waiting room with the child still hanging onto his arm, watching the first of the emaciated, veiled figures stalk towards him over the tiles, that he cried out and tried to turn away. By then it was too late. The door had closed behind him.
With a curse, Thanakar flung the boy aside and started back, but the door was locked. On each side a Caladonian soldier stood unblinking, and though their backs were rigid and their faces stiff, still it seemed to Thanakar that they were mocking him. Flight and resistance seemed suddenly undignified, so with a gesture of disgust he turned around and allowed the veiled figure to lead him into the room, past rows of chairs, mostly vacant, though old men watched him anxiously from some of them. He allowed himself to be led down an aisle between the seats, into an inner chamber made of movable partitions.
There, behind an old desk piled with papers, sat another of the veiled creatures. It was swaddled in black gauze, and the thin angularity of its body made it look inhuman, more like an insect than a man. Its face was covered with black cloth, and through it Thanakar could see its eyes and the hint of a long face.
Thanakar put his fingers to his cheek and made the gestures of contempt. He had heard about these creatures. In Charn they had been exterminated one full year before, in Thanakar’s great-grandfather’s time. Somewhere among the endless revolutions of that spring an angry crowd had set fire to the prison where they lay—there had not been many of them, even in those golden days of paperwork. But obviously some had survived in Caladon, and Argon Starbridge had found work for them. Unravelers, they had been called, part of an ancient and hereditary cult of civil servants, descendants of Lord Laban Coromex, who had been (or so he claimed) the Prophet’s catamite.
In Charn they had been arrested and imprisoned with other ritual practitioners of homosexuality, for the revolutionary council had been strict that spring. It was unclear how they reproduced. Popular songs of the period described them hatching like insects from the mold of books—it was ridiculous, thought Thanakar. Doubtless somewhere there existed a race of women as angular and secretive as they. The one in front of him could easily have been a woman. Thanakar experimented with the thought and then decided it was so, just as the creature opened her mouth. Later he was to have trouble telling them apart. Later he would look back on this one with a kind of wistfulness, for her voice, at least, was sweet and sympathetic.
She sat back in her chair and looked at him, while with one finger she hit the space bar of an old typewriter on her desk. It had no paper in it.
“Please sit,” she said, and then she turned her head and looked past him towards a corner of the wall. In her wheeled armchair, her whole attitude was one of listless melancholy, her drooping neck and shoulder, the line of her arm. “Please sit,” she said again.
“I don’t expect it’s necessary,” Thanakar replied. “I don’t expect to be here long.”
The absurdity of this statement didn’t seem to strike her. She heaved a long, melancholy sigh and rapped idly on the space bar of her typewriter. “No,” she said. “Not long.”
She stared past him at the wall. And then, after a good minute had gone by, she looked briefly at his face. She picked up a piece of paper from the litter on her desk and then cast it aside. “How old are you?” she asked.
The question took Thanakar by surprise. But it seemed as good a place as any to begin. “I was born on the twenty-second of December, in the eighteenth phase of winter,” he said.
“So. Ten thousand days.” She reached her hand out towards her desktop calculator and then let it drop. “Almost . . . ten thousand,” she repeated. “Where were you born?”
“Wanhope Hospital. In Charn.”
“In Charn,” she said, as if she heard the city’s name for the first time. “And . . . who are you?” she asked.
Thanakar rubbed his nose. “I am called Thanakar Starbridge,” he answered, feeling that strange mix of arrogance and shame that afflicted him whenever he had to name himself. It was arrogance for what he was, shame for what his family had made out of the world.
“Starbridge,” said the woman softly, and Thanakar could see her frown under the veil, as if the word brought up images and associations she was striving to recall. “King,” she said. “Argon Starbridge is our king. Are you a relative of his?”
“Not a close one.”
“Then . . . who are you?”
“I am a surgeon,” replied Thanakar uneasily. “I was a surgeon in the army of the late bishop of Charn.”
“The late bishop—is she dead?”
“She is dead.”
The woman sighed. “So many dead. Six thousand . . . almost seven thousand of our soldiers. Almost exactly seven thousand, in our last battle with the bishop’s army, on the Serpentine Ridge. Were you there?”
“I was there,” he said. “I was a doctor.”
“And now you wish to enter Caladon. Do you have some proof of your identity?”
Thanakar put out his hand. He had washed that morning, so that the lines were bright and clear, the silver dog’s head and the yellow briar, the emblems of his father’s family. He turned his palm a little, to show the golden key tattooed under his thumb, the key that opened all doors.
With her little finger the unraveler hit the space bar of her typewriter. “Starbridge,” she said softly. “Are you carrying a passport?”
Thanakar opened up his shirt, and from a secret pocket sewn into the seam he took out his passport and his letter of safe conduct, and laid them on the desk.
The letter of safe conduct was an impressive document, issued to Thanakar’s great-grandfather and hereditary in his family, signed by the emperor himself. The unraveler perused it wearily. On her desk stood an array of stamps and inkpads; she reached her finger out to touch one, and then looked up at him again. “Are you traveling alone?”
“No. My housekeeper and adopted daughter are accompanying me.”
“And . . . where are their passports?”
“They don’t need passports. The letter states that clearly: ‘Thanakar Starbridge, his family, and whatever property he wishes . . .’ ”
The unraveler stared at him a moment and then turned away. “The document refers to relatives by blood, not by adoption. And your housekeeper, is she also a member of your family?”
“Of course not. She belongs to me. She was my mother’s servant.”
“Nevertheless. Perhaps in Charn a human being is considered property. Not here.”
There was a long silence. Thanakar broke it by pulling a chair from the wall behind him and sitting down, for his leg was hurting him.
The unraveler leaned towards him. “So,” she said. “You understand what I am saying. You, I am powerless to prevent. These others, well. Perhaps I am not powerless.”
“What do you suggest?” asked Thanakar.
“You must return to Charn. I will provide you with a list of documents you need. Then we will see.”
“I can’t go back. How can I go back? I escaped from the city with my life and nothing else.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was soft and sympathetic.
Thanakar possessed a sapphire ring. He twisted it uneasily on his finger, but the unraveler guessed his thoughts. “Please don’t try to bribe me,” she said. “I cannot be bribed.”
He let his hands drop to his lap. The unraveler leaned back in her chair. “Come back tomorrow morning,” she suggested. “Please don’t give up hope—there’s always hope.”
* * *
Thanakar went back the next morning and again each day that week. He moved Jenny and Mrs. Cassimer into a hotel near the square. But on the morning of October 78th he went for a walk outside of to
wn, to a small half-ruined chapel out of sight of the sea, bombed months before by the Brothers of Unrest. He had heard there was a priest there, like himself a refugee from Charn, and one morning he came out of the rain and stood in the shadow at the back of the church, leaning on an old umbrella, waiting for the priest to finish morning mass.
A dozen men and women clustered near the altar rail, where the roof was solid. They were dressed in the colors of the Caladonian working class, muted grays and browns. But it was not their poverty that made Thanakar feel self-conscious. He was used to that. No, it was their devotion, the way they bowed their heads and pressed their knuckles to their foreheads, the tears in their eyes as they repeated the words of the general confession, the humility with which they touched the sacred image of Immortal Angkhdt. It made Thanakar unhappy. The rite was unfamiliar, but he recognized parts of it, enough to smell the sickness that had spread from Charn all over that northern country. Here, too, men worshiped their oppressors. He had hoped it would be different.
He looked up at the crack in the roof above his head, the white sky showing and the sugar dripping through. Then he turned back towards the priest. He would have felt better, he decided, if he could have found it in his heart to hate the man. But as always, circumstances had combined to frustrate him. There was nothing contemptible in that gentle face. There was nothing contemptible in the way the old man moved among his people, bending down to touch them and to whisper words of consolation in their ears. He moved down the line of kneeling figures, holding the sacred image out for them to kiss, the lingam of Beloved Angkhdt, giver of life. Then he opened his cassock, and into each pair of outstretched hands he thrust a small package of rice flour, though he himself looked as though he could have used a meal, thought Thanakar.
The priest made the sign of absolution, and the parishioners started to disperse. Thanakar waited until he was alone, standing by the altar, wiping out the vessels with a greasy rag. But he turned his head when he heard the patter of the doctor’s limp and the click of the steel spike of his umbrella coming towards him over the stone floor. For a moment he looked frightened. But then Thanakar took his hat off and stepped out from the shadow of the arch into a circle of candlelight. He saw relief wash into the old man’s face, together with that humble look that never failed to irritate him, the more so when it seemed sincere. He raised his hand.
“My lord,” said the priest. He bowed and made the gestures of respect.
Thanakar stared at him sourly. All his life he had hated priests, hated their arrogance and power. This one seemed different, his ragged clothes, his tired face. His humility seemed genuine. The first of a new breed, thought Thanakar.
“You are from Charn,” he said. “I had heard you were from Charn.”
Again the old priest bowed. “God was kind to me,” he said. “I was smuggled out in an empty wine cask. Of my convocation, I alone am not a martyr.”
“You sound sorry.”
“I am not sorry. Life is sweet. Come,” he said. “We will be safer in the open air. I am followed everywhere I go.”
He led the way down the aisle and out onto the porch, walking quickly and then waiting for the doctor to catch up. The front end of the chapel had collapsed, but the porch was still intact. The priest waited there.
Outside it was raining, a slow, scummy drizzle. The chapel stood in a countryside of fields, divided from each other by stone walls, and Thanakar was encouraged to see some greenness there, and some signs of agriculture. It was greener country than around Charn. The soil was not so pitiful, and even the rock gorges were not barren, as they were back towards the city. A green fungus grew over the rock, and Thanakar knew that it was edible, for he had seen children in the evening scraping it from the stones, and women boiling it in huge kettles.
This close to the sea the land was kinder. The people here ate seaweed and set traps for sea vegetables, the first of the season. Nevertheless, wherever Thanakar went, he was surrounded by a swarm of beggars. Several had followed him up from the town, and they stood in the shelter of a gray stone wall as Thanakar and the priest looked out from the porch.
“Do you have anything to give them?” asked the priest.
“I had brought something for you.”
“Let us eat it here, and we will share it.”
Thanakar had brought a kind of pie, cheese baked in a thick pastry and wrapped in silver foil. He undid the upper buttons of his overcoat and fished it out from an inside pocket. It made a messy meal, and he and the priest sat on the steps to eat it. With his pocketknife the old man cut aside a small portion for themselves, and he sliced the remainder into strips and placed it on the lowest step. They settled down to wait, and in a little while the beggars came close, timidly at first, making exaggerated signs of self-abasement. One of them, finally, a gap-toothed, red-haired man, squatted down below them and stretched out his hand, once, twice, until the priest nodded his head. And then the beggar grabbed the food and hurried off with it and carried it to the shelter of a pile of rocks not far away, where the rest clustered around him.
“They distrust you,” remarked Thanakar.
“They have been shamefully abused,” replied the priest. “Their own parish chaplain has run away. Between here and the city, most have fled. They have heard terrible rumors, most of which are true. I cannot blame them.”
“And you?”
The old priest shrugged. “I do what I can,” he said. “Tomorrow I move on.”
“Where to?”
“Caladon City, eventually. I am carrying the daily execution lists from Charn, until one week ago, when I escaped. My late master thought that they might interest the king.”
“Can I see them?”
The priest turned away and stared out over the green fields. “I have no wish to cause you pain,” he said. “They contain the names of many relatives of yours.”
The doctor put his fingers to his head. “They are in Paradise,” he said.
The old man’s eyes were tired and old and rimmed with yellow. “That’s just it,” he said. “We can’t be sure of that. Not anymore.” He swallowed, and then went on: “The new tribunal contains a defrocked priest. I am ashamed to say it. January First, he calls himself—he has developed a vaccine. It reacts with what is sacred in the blood. When my late master was condemned, this man visited him in his cell. He injected him with this vaccine—my late master was condemned to hell, and so were all the members of the bishop’s council, those they found alive. Down to the ninth planet, do you know what that’s like? I have seen photographs. The surface pressure is enough to flatten steel.”
“January First?”
“Raksha Starbridge, his name was. He changed his name to January First. There is a motion before the new assembly to reform the calendar. The new majority speaker changed his name.” The old man shook his head. “Tell me, is it possible? The desanctification vaccine—God help me, the thought of it has hurt my faith. You asked me if I were eager to die, to accept martyrdom like so many others. I tell you, I am afraid.”
Thanakar shifted on the stone step and stretched out his crippled leg. “I don’t believe it’s possible,” he said. “Tell me,” he continued. “Tell me what has happened. Who is the leader of this revolution?”
“Raksha Starbridge!” muttered the old priest, making the sign of the unclean. “Traitor! No, he is not the only one.” He turned towards Thanakar, a doubtful expression on his face. “I can’t believe that this is news to you.”
The doctor shrugged. “I left the city thirty days ago, after the bishop’s execution. I have heard many rumors, but no news.”
“You are here alone?”
“With my adopted daughter. She is sick.”
The chapel stood on the outskirts of the town. From where Thanakar sat, he could see the slate roofs of the houses and the end of the main street, where it stumbled out into the fields. A procession of a dozen men was coming along the muddy track, partly hidden by the stone walls and the hedge
rows. They were pushing wheelbarrows and carrying baskets full of seaweed up to the drying shed at the end of town. It was a wooden building set on stilts above the soaking ground, wall-less, open to the air, the roof supported by posts at the four corners. Some women were already there, raking out the morning catch with long wooden rakes. And the village shaman was there also, in a white, featureless paper mask and a loose white shirt with flapping sleeves. He was moving in a circle around the perimeter of the floor, ringing a wooden bell.
This was a ritual practiced in the seacoast towns. The shaman was frightening away ghosts, scaring away the ghosts of anyone who had ever died of hunger in that town. The people feared their starving ancestors, afraid that their spirits might gather like birds to feed upon the crop, and pluck away the ghost of nourishment hidden in the heart of their poor food, and leave only the worthless husk.
Thanakar settled back to watch. At his side, the priest settled back against the stone pillar of the porch and cleaned the blade of his pocketknife against the skirt of his habit. “After the bishop died,” he said, “the city fell apart. It was as if the center of our life was gone. The simplest tricks no longer worked. There was no power anywhere. The army and the purge split into factions. Chrism Demiurge and his council were besieged in the temple. When the rebels finally broke in, they found that most of them were gone, fled to Paradise. Some were arrested with the hypodermics still in their hands—that was in the middle of the month, October 50th, old style. Chrism Demiurge had disappeared. It was thought he knew some secret bolt hole below ground. He was never found.”
In the drying shed the shaman danced and rang his bell. Thanakar sat watching him, and with the nail of his little finger he picked some cheese out from between his teeth.
