by Paul Park
Her skin was ageless and unlined, her face clear and handsome. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she was dressed in a long gown of Starbridge silk, cut low over her breasts. She was tall, with an expression of uncompromising pride upon her face. Standing in a circle of naked warriors, she made a proud and regal figure. But when she stepped down to the beach, Charity noticed that her teeth were badly stained.
The stranger was making a low, stricken whine. But he stopped abruptly when the White-Faced Woman spoke. “Where are you going?” she asked, and her voice was soft without being gentle. It was almost a whisper, audible only in the perfect silence, coldly arrogant in its softness, as if it were not even imaginable that anyone could speak while she was speaking. “Where are you going?”
“To Caladon,” said Charity.
“To Caladon. No. Your guide mistook the way,” whispered the White-Faced Woman. “It is easy in the dark.”
“We mean no harm,” said Charity, looking back over the lake. A pale fin broke the surface near where Gudrun Sarkis had disappeared. Beyond, Charity could see the five boats slowly approaching, paddled gently by their crews.
“They were hunting a big fish,” whispered the White-Faced Woman. “They say it lives near here—a very big one. Big as a ten-man boat. I came to watch them.”
“We mean no harm,” repeated Charity. “Show us the way and let us go. Please. I was told to give you this.”
She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out the glassine pouch of heroin. When the woman saw it, a yellow stain was spreading in her eyes; she stepped across the beach and plucked it out of Charity’s hand. With her fingernail she slit the tape that held it closed. She licked her little finger and scooped some of the powder onto the pad and rubbed it on her gums. “It is second-quality,” she said. “Where did you get this?”
She closed the pouch and tucked it underneath her clothes. When Charity didn’t answer, she continued: “This is good, but I have heard of better. There is a new medicine, a new kind of vaccine. Have you heard of it? It interrupts the hierarchy of nature. It desanctifies the blood.”
“Please let us go,” said Charity.
“No. I need this medicine. Come with me.” She turned and walked away into the darkness. Her men came down from the rocks to help Charity and the stranger from the boat. They pulled the boat up onto the beach. Then they escorted the two travelers away, down a muddy track among the boulders and over a small creek.
In single file, they passed over an expanse of packed dirt and then entered a narrow tunnel. Countless footsteps had worn a groove in the rock floor, and the ceiling was seared by the fire of countless torches. Above their heads were cracks and fissures in the rock, and Charity could hear the scurrying of rodents and lithe bats, and perhaps even larger animals. When finally they came out into an open cavern, the air above them was full of circling white birds.
At the outskirts of a small town of canvas tents, the White-Faced Woman waited for them. “You are my guests,” she whispered. “Though that may change. Until it does, I will prepare a place for you, with food and water. When you are ready, come to me.” Again she turned and walked away, but Charity could see where she was going. The shantytown of tents was built around the base of a small hill, and there was a stone staircase leading to the top. Each step was flanked with urns of burning fire, and Charity could see the White-Faced Woman passing up between them, followed by two men carrying torches.
At the top of the hill was a stone mausoleum. Charity walked up there some time later, after she and the stranger had sat and rested in a tent, and naked men had brought them bowls of mushrooms. “I won’t go,” the stranger said. “I’ll tell you that right now.”
So Charity went alone, and climbed the stone staircase in between the urns of fire. At the top she stood for a while against the parapet, looking down at the lights among the tents, and listening to the shouts of children playing. Then she turned and walked along a wall, a six-foot frieze of carved obsidian depicting the exploits of the eighteenth bishop of Charn. This had been his mausoleum—Charity recognized it from photographs. In some places she recognized the story of the carvings: the bishop receiving the felicitations of the guild of prostitutes; the bishop wrestling with sleep; the bishop at the end of his life, mad and blind, grazing on grass as if he were a pig.
Again the wall was lit with glowing urns. But at the first corner stood a man with a torch, and he bowed solemnly as Charity approached, and motioned her inside a narrow door. She looked up and caught a glimpse of the roof of the cavern, high above her beyond the circling birds, and then she stooped down to enter, for the gate was low. It was just a slit cut into the stone.
Inside, Charity found herself walking through a narrow corridor, barely wider than her shoulders. It was lit with candles set in niches in the wall and decorated from the floor to the ceiling with painted friezes from the visions of Beloved Angkhdt: the constellations of the zodiac as seen from Paradise; the angel with a thousand mouths.
The corridor led her to the burial chamber where the White-Faced Woman sat waiting for her. A brazier of raked charcoal had filled the air with smoke and with a strange, hot odor that made Charity dizzy. The brazier was set below the bishop’s black sarcophagus, next to a marble throne. On the throne sat the White-Faced Woman. Guardsmen came and went around her, perhaps six men in that small space, and they were tending the fire and bringing lights and vessels from a room farther back.
From a grate over the fire hung strips of some strange substance, and everywhere there was a smell of murdered animals. Charity sagged against the wall and put her hand over her nose. But she could not go back, for there was a man standing in the door behind her, blocking the whole space. “My God,” she cried, “you did not bring me here to murder me?”
As she spoke, the White-Faced Woman was aware of her for the first time. She clapped her hands, and instantly one of the men ran forward and pulled the grate of meat out of the fire. But the smell remained. To steady herself, Charity leaned back against the wall and put her head against the stone. In that moment all her courage left her, and all she could think about was the sunlight far above her head. She had a pain in her heart that felt like hopeless love, and she was very tired.
“Come closer, child,” whispered the White-Faced Woman, and in her voice there was a parody of real concern. “Poor child,” she said, smiling softly, but again there was a tone of falseness deep within the words, as if she were trying to reconstruct from memory a gentleness that she no longer felt.
“Poor child,” she continued. “Don’t be afraid. It is meat from fishes. Dumb, cold, stupid fish—these men have always eaten it. It is what there is.” She rose and came towards Charity, smiling. All her men had disappeared except for two, who stood as stiff and quiet as cadavers, on either side of her throne.
“It is against the laws of Angkhdt,” said Charity.
“It is what there is. Besides, the laws of Angkhdt are not for you and me. Let me see your hand.”
Before Charity could pull away, the woman had seized hold of her right hand and bent her fingers back. Charity could feel the aching coldness even through the woman’s gloves. She shuddered and tried to close her fingers. But the woman was too strong. She pulled Charity forward into the torchlight.
“The silver rose,” she whispered. “Yes—I knew your mother well. Yes. I held you in my arms when you were first baptized.”
Charity shuddered at the thought. The woman, who had been scanning her face with an eager, rapt expression, scowled suddenly. She pulled her lips back to reveal her teeth, and then she turned away, back to her chair. “Come close,” she whispered, and Charity took a few steps forward and then stopped.
“I hate the smell,” she said.
“You will get used to it. I have.”
“I’m surprised their stomachs tolerate it.”
“Nonsense, child. Don’t be naive. It’s what keeps them strong.” The woman put her hand out to the guardsman
on her left, a tall, muscular figure, dark-skinned and naked, with white paint on his face and genitals.
“We others have become decadent,” whispered the White-Faced Woman. “We have spoiled our strength. But the fire of life burns very hot here, underground.”
As she spoke, she was stroking the man’s thigh, fingering the muscles down his leg and on his knee. Then she reached up to hold his testicles in her left hand, weighing the sac, stroking the flesh until it came alive. She slid her fingers around the root of his sex and teased it until it stiffened, and then she put her hands around the shaft and squeezed until its veins stood out. “This one is particularly strong,” she whispered. “You can have him if you like.”
Charity was looking at the man’s face. He had not moved, or shifted his position. He was staring straight ahead of him, not even blinking as the woman stroked his penis with her thumb.
“No, thanks,” said Charity.
“You come from a family of prudes,” whispered the White-Faced Woman. Then she let go of the man’s sex, as if it suddenly disgusted her. When she continued, her voice was wistful and a little sad: “I was a prude myself.”
“Who are you?” asked Charity.
“I am the White-Faced Woman,” she answered, her mouth twisted with contempt, whether for Charity or for herself, the princess couldn’t tell.
That was all that she would say. When Charity pressed her to speak further, she shook her head. “Those things are finished, gone,” she whispered. “I have come so far along another road, I cannot recognize myself.”
She had been studying Charity with some curiosity, but now she looked away. Her face was white and still, the only movement the changing color of her eyes, from black to red, from red to yellow. “Do you believe in Paradise?” she asked suddenly.
“I don’t know.”
“Then you are a fool. But I was more foolish than you. More foolish, and fresher and more beautiful than you will ever be, when I let the priests of Charn take hold of me and fill my body with their drugs. They stole my life from me. Chrism Demiurge! But he will pay.”
“Some say Paradise is in the mind,” murmured Charity. She was thinking about other things.
“Do they? No one ever said anything like that to me. No. They drew me diagrams of my soul’s journey. The exact trajectory, they said, for Paradise was in orbit around Mega Prime. Two hundred million miles, they said; not very long. They told me I would wake up in my father’s house. They told me he’d be young and happy, as he was before the accident. They said it would be summer there. Summer all year round, and there was nothing for me here, after my prince was broken from the army. Just my crippled child, and it was not enough. I chose to go. But it was lies.”
In Charn before the revolution, some high-ranking men and women had been sent to Paradise prematurely, some in disgrace and some in honor. They had not waited for their natural deaths. Instead their bodies had been put to sleep, their souls set free to start the long cold climb through space. “I was asleep for fifty months,” the woman whispered. “I tell you Paradise does not exist, not even in our dreams. They pumped the blood out of my body. They turned me into a monster, and for what? Only they never expected me to wake. How could they have known that I had such a clever doctor . . . in the family?”
“He woke you up,” said Charity.
“Yes. He woke me up. Yes. By giving me a hunger that I couldn’t bear. He woke me after fifty months of restless dreams, and I fled down here into the darkness, where I fitted like a key into a lock, into these people’s monstrous superstitions.”
Charity glanced up at the guardsmen, but they hadn’t moved. They stood quiet and impassive while the White-Faced Woman slouched between them, gnawing on her fingers. Then she snarled a few words of an unknown language. Still staring straight ahead, the men fitted their hands over their ears.
“You see?” whispered the White-Faced Woman. “They are savages.” She clapped her hands, and someone appeared in the doorway behind her, a bent old man carrying a silver tray. He came and knelt beside her chair and put the tray down on the step. On it were some stoppered vials, an oil lamp, a hypodermic, and a silver spoon.
Crooning to himself, he shook some powder from a vial into the spoon. The White-Faced Woman ran her thumb down the inside of her arm. But when the old man put the spoon over the fire, she jumped to her feet. “Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.” And without another word she left the chamber.
Part Six:
Chrism Demiurge
ON THE 50TH OF OCTOBER OF THE EIGHTH PHASE of spring, in the year 00016, elements of the new people’s militia had captured the Temple of Kindness and Repair. But by the time they had penetrated all that way—two miles of courtyards and corridors from Slaver’s Gate to the council chambers of the Inner Ear—the council had had opportunity to flee. The bishop’s private doctor had administered the sleeping drug to two hundred of the members then in residence, to start them on their flight to Paradise. By the time the soldiers had broken through the chamber doors, it was too late. The members of the council sprawled unconscious in their chairs and could not be revived. Their trials for treason and subsequent executions were a grim affair, for even the most fanatic supporters of the new government could take no joy in executing sleeping men.
At the trial the indictments against Chrism Demiurge, the secretary of the council, ran to forty-seven pages. Offering no defense, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was executed in absentia on the 92nd of October. This was a curious spectacle: At noon precisely, various effigies were set alight on scaffolds all over the city, for the government had never managed to procure Lord Chrism’s body, though they had hunted for it in the temple for three weeks.
That season, rumors of Lord Chrism’s whereabouts were as common as the rain. He had been seen disguised in Beggar’s Medicine, in Durbar Square, in Caladon. He had been photographed crossing the southern border, dressed as an old woman. He had escaped into a hidden tower in the temple built entirely of mirrors, invisible to the naked eye.
Other citizens, more practical, swore that he was safely dead, that his body had been so mutilated during his interrogation that there was nothing left to burn. About an equal number claimed that he had risen up to Paradise in a golden car.
It wasn’t until the following autumn that two speleologists, working for the University of Charn, proved from dental records the identity of a body they had discovered in the lower town beneath the city’s streets. It was the body of an old man. The flesh of his hands had deteriorated, so that his tattoos could not be read, but he was carrying the crystal seal of the council on his forefinger, and a silver chain of office around the bones of his neck.
He was found in an old burial ground, a site important to the tribal history of Charn. By then nothing remained of the old cult of the White-Faced Woman, and the caves and crypts were dark under the city. But at the time we speak of, in the eighth phase of spring, the lower town was full of energy and light and a new species of religion. When Princess Charity Starbridge came out of the mausoleum above Tribal Site Number 471, she stood at the top of the stone stair amazed, for the floor of the cavern was lit to its far recesses with torchlight and with bonfires. On the parapet in front of her, the White-Faced Woman raised her hand, and from down below them came a roaring and a shouting, the clash of metal and the beat of drums.
Hundreds were gathering to see her, from every corner of the underworld. They surged towards her up the steps, chanting her many names.
“Better to lick cocks in Paradise than reign in hell,” muttered the White-Faced Woman. It was a paraphrase of holy scripture. Nevertheless, she was a queenly figure as she started down the steps: her rich black hair, her eyes, the dead white pallor of her skin. She was supernaturally pale; the blood had been pumped out of her body and replaced with a cold, colorless fluid, a nutrient developed by the bishop’s council.
Charity followed her down into the throng. The White-Faced Wo
man reached out her hands, and in an instant her people were around her, grasping, touching, plucking, struggling with each other to get near. They were desperate to touch her, to feel the cold miracle of her flesh. For it was not every man or woman, even in those days, who could claim to have touched a god and held her hand. And this was not just any god, but an incarnation of the White-Faced Woman, who had spread her legs for Angkhdt himself. “Onandaga! Onandaga!” they shouted, struggling in a mass around her.
At first she accepted them. She held out her hands as if to warm her fingers, and smiled back at Charity through the crowd. But when she reached the end of the stair and stepped out onto open ground, the mob around her grew. Charity lost sight of her among the flailing arms and heads, but could see by the movement of the crowd how she was jerked and pushed from place to place. Then there was a shout and a scream, and the crowd pulled back for an instant, long enough for Charity to see the White-Faced Woman, disheveled, with her bodice torn and her mouth contorted. She had bitten a young woman who had come too close.
But the tribal people of the caves did not require politeness or good manners from their deities. Proof of inhumanity was enough for them, and after a moment they closed in again. But the White-Faced Woman pulled a whistle from around her neck, a piece of silver jewelry in the shape of the penis of Beloved Angkhdt, and she put her lips to it and blew a note so high and pure that Charity could hear it in her bones and in her teeth. Instantly members of the woman’s bodyguard, who had been standing idle on the edges of the crowd, cut through it to the center, cleaving their way with sticks of scented ebony. The mass of people broke apart, and some were battered to their knees. The White-Faced Woman stood in the middle, with her men ringed around her.
She looked back towards Charity and gestured for her to come closer. “Follow me,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “I’ve got something to show you,” she said. She turned as if to walk away. But then she hesitated, because a woman was kneeling in her path, a mother who had brought her child to receive the blessing of the god. Charity saw the White-Faced Woman stoop, and with a gesture that was almost careful, she brushed the hair back from the child’s head and rearranged his blanket.
