by Paul Park
And for weeks the League kept guards around the mountain’s base, for fear of sabotage to the wet masonry.
For weeks, on every street corner, wherever the summit of the mountain could be seen, crowds gathered with telescopes and binoculars. And whenever there was a break in the mist, cries of anger and disgust rose to the skies, for the crowds could see the prisoners swarming on the mountain’s upper slopes. From time to time, a prisoner would jump down from an upper balcony. Though the bulk of the building would prevent him from ever reaching the street, still he might fall a thousand feet before he disappeared.
This was the worst crime. But there was another that was even more spectacular, and in some ways more symbolic of the season. On November 9th, Raksha Starbridge opened the so-called Sugar Festival, on the fairgrounds out beyond the Morquar Gate. It was to run for more than ninety days. But within a week of its opening it had become the center of the life of Charn. All day and all night the festival was packed with noisy, celebrating people, and they scarcely noticed, or they scarcely cared, that every day among the carousels, the colored lights, and the free candy, dozens of prisoners were being hung, shot, buried, crucified before their eyes. For many, it was the reason they had come.
* * *
On the morning of November 21st, when Charity Starbridge was scheduled to die, the fairgrounds at the Morquar Gate were still only half built. Yet to come were the ferris wheels, the electric roller coasters, and the bumper cars. Yet to come were the circus acts, the trapeze artists and the tightrope walkers, the tumblers and performing dogs. Yet to come were the bandshells full of drummers, and choirs singing new patriotic lyrics to old hymns.
Nevertheless, the heart of the fair was already then in place; hundreds of small cardboard booths, housing potshies, gunshoots, soothsayers, wheels of fortune, guess-games, cardswaps, number tables, duckstools, finger-switches, and a dozen more, games of skill and games of chance. Already in place were the distribution booths, where script won in the games could be exchanged for clothing, and blankets, and liquor, and painkillers, and little bags of new synthetic meal. Already in place were the massive canvas awnings, stretched tight from poles over the cardboard streets, sheltering them from the weather and the constant rain. And in the center, beneath the shadow of the Morquar Gate, the execution grounds were already in place, the whipping posts, the burning pits, and around them a circle of steel crosses, forty feet high, bolted together, held up with steel wire.
In the sixth ward, the city walls had been demolished long before. The Morquar Gate stood by itself in the middle of the fairgrounds, a gigantic structure of carved brick. On it the League had hung a series of enormous banners proclaiming the maxims of Raksha Starbridge’s new civic religion. Prisoners on the cross could spend their last remaining hours pondering these messages. “Life is senseless suffering,” cautioned one, white words on a gray background. “I am the spirit of denial,” claimed another: “Through me lies the gate of joy.”
Charity squinted up towards another banner, hanging from the end of a long pole. “What have you got to lose?” it asked ambiguously. Another was more simple: “God does not exist.”
“Small consolation,” murmured Charity, as they rode in through the gate. In the early morning light, the carnival looked tired and unprofitable to her. The sun bleached out the colors of the neon and the crystal lanterns, and gave the crowds a pasty, furtive look.
“Morning crowd’s never the best,” remarked a soldier of the League. He was standing by the donkeys, wiping down their bellies with his hand. “Dark’s the best, or in the rain. Then you can see the lights.”
“I was expecting more excitement,” Charity confessed. She had heard about the carnival from Mr. Taprobane.
“Ah. They are a lot of cowards really. They are frightened of your friend.”
As soon as he had stopped the cart at the loading platform underneath the gate, the driver had jumped out and disappeared. Now Charity saw him, standing in a group of men next to a few wretched-looking canvas stalls. He was pointing back at them and shouting, and making the sign of the unclean.
“He’s frightened of the singing,” continued the young soldier. He was dark-haired and would have been good-looking, except that when he smiled his teeth were full of holes. His brows met in a line over his nose. He had loosened the bridle on the lead donkey. The dye from his red hands had made a smear across the animal’s cheek and on its belly, too, in the place where the scales joined the flesh. “Life is meaningless,” he said. “What can it matter if we sing or not?”
Ordinarily there was more of a ritual in these proceedings. But the sunlight put a weight on things. This was only the first of sixteen tumbrils expected at intervals throughout the day, and the mode of execution was not spectacular. Even so, ordinarily there would have been a crowd. This morning, frightened of the antinomial, the people retreated back into the fairgrounds, where some squatted down to watch from a safe distance.
Another soldier had come forward and climbed up into the cart. Smiling, he forced the stranger to his feet, but the antinomial rose by herself. She stood up straight in the back of the cart, her legs spread wide, and now she started to sing in earnest, staring at the sun.
The stranger put his hands over his ears. He was gibbering with fear, and when the soldier touched him, he cried out. Charity looked at him, surprised; he was afraid of death.
Fear required a concentration that she did not have. Reflexively she touched her lion’s-head tattoo. It was good to be a Starbridge, but it was not necessary. All around her were distractions.
The handsome soldier was still stroking the donkeys and untying their tails. But in a little while he came to help his friend put down the tailgate. Grinning at each other, they helped Charity to the ground. Then they dragged out the stranger; he was kicking and biting until they hit him on the head, and then he began to cry. They threw him out onto the concrete, and he knelt, weeping, on all fours. Charity went to him and raised him up. “Hush,” she said. “You’re not dead yet.” It was no consolation. He put his face into her neck and wept.
The antinomial jumped down unaided, singing all the time. Singing, she followed the others to an open space of poured concrete a hundred feet away, where a metal cover was set into a concrete ring. The soldiers opened it, and they poked down a ladder that was lying to one side. They held it steady for Charity and the stranger, and then they stood up, waiting. But the antinomial was busy with her music. She looked up at the sun; it was burning like a fire overhead. She sang part of the fire song while the two soldiers smiled at her. And then she climbed down the ladder until she stood in darkness, and she was still singing very quietly, just whispering, because she could still see some sunlight through the little hole above her head, until someone pulled the ladder up and closed the cover with a clang.
* * *
There was air from someplace, cold, new air. And the bottom was not muddy. It was dry. Deep sand, it felt like. Charity sat down and ran some through her fingers. In the blackness it gave out a comforting, small sound.
Her hands were tied together, but not tightly. She poured a stream of sand onto her foot. The antinomial was quiet, finally. “Sweet God, deliver us,” prayed the stranger, next to her ear.
Thirty feet above them shone a ring of orange light, where the manhole cover made an imperfect seal. The light was not enough to penetrate the darkness or allow Charity to guess the dimensions of the well. She could not see her two companions.
Hearing about this new form of punishment from Mr. Taprobane, she had pictured it a different way. She had thought she would be gagged and trussed and lowered down into a space barely larger than herself. She had thought that she’d be lying on her back, watching the workmen pick up shovels above her head, and then there would be dirt in her face—it would be over in a moment. She had not pictured it like this, lying in the comfortable sand, and everything so quiet. She poured some sand onto her foot.
“It’s not so bad,” she said
.
“Just wait,” murmured the stranger, close to her ear. He was calmer too. He too had been expecting something worse.
The air was cool and had a faintly sour smell, as if it came to them over a stagnant lake.
“It’s as if we’d come into another country,” said Charity after a while. “There must be an opening somewhere.”
She put her cheek down on the sand. She watched the orange ring, suspended in the dark.
Once, not long before, the last time Paradise was close to Earth, she and her cousin Thanakar had gone out on the balcony, when Paradise was rising above Monmouth Hill. For a moment they had been alone. Then Paradise had been as big as the whole world, when they were leaning on the balustrade, their elbows almost touching. The light from the planet had been on his face when he turned towards her, smiling. That was all.
In another moment her husband and her brother had arrived, laughing and making fun. With mock seriousness, the old man had pointed out a scar on Paradise’s surface—the Ocean of Iniquity, where his family once had a beachhouse. His grandmother had seen it in a dream.
It was with thoughts of her cousin Thanakar that Charity fell asleep, and her head was full of thoughts of him when she awoke. She had no recollection of where she was, until she turned onto her back and saw the glowing ring above her. It had lost its orange color; it was a milky gray.
She strained her ears to hear something of the festival, but there was nothing, only the sound of a deep muttering close beside her. Turning her head, she could see the outline of the stranger’s shape, deep black against a gentle black. Beyond him was another shape standing erect. It was the antinomial.
The stranger was saying prayers. Charity sank back down onto her elbow and listened for a while to the quick, careful rhythm of the chant, and from time to time the incantation of her brother’s name. It was a blurred, restful sound, mixing with her thoughts—she was not quite awake.
“As You suffered injustice, now deliver us,” chanted the stranger. “None of us can suffer as You suffered. Nonetheless we have no wish to try.”
His voice went on for a long while. And then it stopped suddenly, because the antinomial had spoken too, and her voice was different.
“Some,” she said.
There was breathless silence for a moment, and then the stranger’s prayer started again, quick and soft, almost inaudible.
“Now,” said the antinomial. “Black now bright now fire. See.”
Again the prayer stopped, and there was silence. “I don’t see anything,” said Charity.
“Not eyes.”
The antinomial’s speech had none of the sweetness of her music. It was deep and very rough, with an uncouth rumbling at the back of it. Yet even so, there was some music in it, Charity was sure. She could feel it rubbing at the back of her neck, tingling on her skin, as if it existed in a frequency beyond the range of Charity’s ears, so that she perceived it only indirectly.
“See,” said the woman.
Charity looked, and for a long time she could see nothing. She stared at the woman’s outline in the dark. After a moment she thought she could distinguish the antinomial’s outstretched arm, and so she looked in that direction, trying to penetrate into the darkness layer by layer. At length she saw the faintest glimmer of a light.
“There is something. Over there,” she said.
For a while it burned unsteadily, a beacon marking the farthest limit of her sight. Then it sagged and glimmered out, and reappeared again, lower down. Then it seemed larger, shaky and more blurred, until it split apart into two separate lights, closer now. For the first time she could hear a noise, the sound of lapping water.
She was lying in a stone chamber. She could see that now. Its diameter was not more than forty feet. But a large, jagged hole had been broken through the wall. She saw its outline as the lights came closer, the blocks of fallen stone, the low boundary where the hole approached the sandy floor. Beyond the hole she could distinguish nothing, for soon all that space was filled with light.
The light came from two guttering lanterns held on poles. It was not bright, but even so, Charity turned her head away because her eyes had been made sensitive by so much darkness. She looked instead at her companions, their faces illuminated by the long red beams, their bodies half in shadow. More than ever the stranger looked like Prince Abu, for the light was bleaching out their differences and covering the marks of surgery. His terrified expression was very like the prince’s, the way his mouth flapped open.
Charity’s hands were still bound together at the wrist. The stranger’s hands were also bound; he put them up together to block out the light. But the antinomial had loosened hers. She was standing with her arms crossed on her chest. One of her eyes was swollen shut, and her face was covered with bruises.
Yet she stood in an attitude of fierce indifference, almost of inattention as she stared into the light. It reassured the princess. Awkwardly, because of her tied hands, she rose to her feet.
Two men were climbing through the hole and down into the chamber, while two others held the lanterns on the other side. They were dark-skinned and almost naked. Their hair was yellow, hanging straight to their shoulders, and their faces were sharp and cleanly formed. Their cheeks were covered with a kind of powder or dark paint that made them shine like masks. Their eyes were large and very pale, blue or gray, one of the illegal shades, Charity couldn’t tell which. Their movements were quiet and sure, and they said nothing as they dragged the stranger to his feet.
“Come quietly,” said another man, a fifth man standing framed outside the hole between the two lanterns. He was a different kind of man, older, with white hair, and he was dressed in a white robe. It was a type of clothing that Charity recognized from Starbridge funerals when she was young—the ritual garments of the corpse of some great gentleman, pilfered from some underground sarcophagus a long time ago, she guessed. The material was ripped under the sleeves. Nevertheless, the man’s face was kind.
“Nobody will hurt you,” he said. He gestured to his men. One of them was leading the stranger, cowed and unresisting, over the barrier of broken stones, while another put his hand out for the antinomial.
“Do not touch me,” she said softly, her voice resonant with music, and the man drew back uncertainly. He pulled a flashlight from a pouch at his waist and shined it in the woman’s face, while the man in white stepped over the barrier into the tomb. He spoke a few words in some foreign language, and then he smiled. He put his hands together in an old-fashioned gesture of greeting. “Welcome, sister,” he said, and then he added a few notes of music in a high voice. But he stopped when he saw the woman’s face fill up with fury and contempt and loathing.
“Barbarian!” she cried. “Barbarian!” She reached out suddenly and grabbed away the flashlight that was shining in her face and then leaped over the barrier between the two men with the lanterns. One put his hand out to restrain her, but she slapped it aside. Then she stepped out beyond the circle of the lamplight and disappeared into the darkness.
The man in white stared after her. Then he turned back to Charity, and again he made the same gesture of greeting, joining his palms together and bowing slightly. “My name is Freedom Love,” he said.
The name meant nothing. But the gesture reminded Charity of something, a description from some book, or perhaps an illustration: an old man joining his hands together in front of him, hiding his tattoos.
She tried to speak, but the man shook his head. “Come quick,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find her. Otherwise, she’ll starve to death here in the labyrinth.” He turned and led them out over the barrier through a gap of broken stones. On the other side the lanterns illuminated a low, straight corridor, hacked out of the rock.
They walked single-file, the lanterns first and last. Charity was behind the man in white, looking at him, searching for a clue somewhere, his clothes, his hair, his way of walking. And then she found it: a chain of amber beads around his neck
. In her religious history text, when she was a girl at Starbridge Dayschools, there had been a picture of a man joining his hands and bowing, and underneath a diagram of a necklace of small beads. Underneath that a caption was printed in small black letters—“The Cult of Loving Kindness.”
As she walked along the corridor, Charity cast her mind back to the book. Six generations before, in winter, the twenty-third bishop of Charn had had a dream, a chain without end, wrapped around the girdle of the Earth. After six days of meditation he had made a proclamation. He declared the existence of a great chain of precedence, a hierarchy in which every living creature was arranged according to its rank. He postulated a social language of infinite gradations, with forms of address peculiar to each individual, and gestures of respect or contempt that differed only by fractions of millimeters.
The twenty-third bishop had devoted his life to sorting out these differences. Subsequent bishops had abandoned the attempt. Such a structure was impractical on Earth, beyond the subtlety of mortal minds and fingers. But even so the dream had become part of the mythology of Charn. It was a vision, some said, of Paradise, where the soul of every creature would be arranged according to its worth, in a structure so harmonious and perfect, it would bring tears to the eyes of everyone who witnessed it.
Nevertheless, some sections of the Song of Angkhdt were open to quite different interpretations. In Charity’s great-grandmother’s time, St. Gossamer Marquette had preached another gospel, claiming that all human souls were equal in God’s love.
St. Gossamer Marquette was burned to death on the first day of autumn, 00015. Her disciples had scattered, and two seasons later her followers were so few as to be almost mythological. But the saint had worn an amber necklace, Charity remembered that from books. The necklace was the only thing that had survived the flames, and it had become the symbol of her heresy. That and a way of bowing she had preached.
