by Paul Park
Across from him, at the other end of a raked path, there was a marble bench set into the wall. On it sat a boy, young and handsome, with a thin, high-boned, delicate face. He was richly dressed in a uniform of blue and gold, the mark of the highest of the six varieties of Caladonian Starbridge. But the sleeves of his uniform had been extended past his hands, and they had been tied behind him, so that he sat hugging himself as if against the cold. He was staring down at the gravel in front of him, and with the toe of his boot he was obliterating the careful marks of the rake.
He kicked at the gravel with his foot, digging a trough down to the bare earth. He jerked his head back and noticed Thanakar for the first time. Instantly his face took on a look of bitter scorn, and his fine black eyebrows drew together. “Well,” he said, “what are you staring at? You also, have you come to laugh at me?”
Thanakar found this question hard to answer. Involuntarily he glanced around the little garden, though he knew they were alone.
But the stranger had a way of speaking that Thanakar, though he had used it often, had never heard addressed to himself—a phraseology pitched from high to low, as if he, Thanakar Starbridge, had been a jeweler or a slave. The stranger’s voice was thick with drugs, and the contempt in it was almost palpable, like spittle on the doctor’s face.
The doctor made a gesture in the air, one of the ninety-seven gestures of self-revelation. But the boy had already dropped his head. As he did so, Thanakar realized who he was.
The king of Caladon had had two sons. The younger one was still an infant, a strange, misshapen boy, the source of many rumors. The elder had been grown when the younger was born—a popular, erratic prince, a drinker and carouser, a singer and a poet. Many nights when he was growing up, he would slink down from his cold palace, fooling the ancient priests who were his teachers and his guardians with a series of preposterous disguises. Alone or with a few companions, he would pass the night among the brothels and the wineshops of the lower town. Enraged, his father had sequestered his allowance, and even at one time had locked him naked in his room, but he had always managed to escape. Once Craton Starbridge, his best friend, had held a ladder to his window, and he had come down in borrowed clothes to be among his people. Poor folk came from miles around to be with him and hear him sing. His poems were on everybody’s lips—long songs, drinking songs, songs of harsh captivity. In the brothels of the lower town the prostitutes tied silken scarves to the posts of their beds, to show that he had been there.
But on the first day of July, in the eighth phase of spring, Prince Argon Starbridge had been born in Caladon Cathedral, and five days later the king had disinherited his elder son. A crowd of fifty thousand had marched in protest all the way from Starbridge Covenant to the cathedral, carrying signs and banners, and wicker cages full of pigeons and white doves. But on the steps of the cathedral, the queen had met them, heavily veiled, with her newborn baby in her arms. There she had shown the child to the multitude, and they had gone down on their knees.
And after that the troubles of the elder prince had been forgotten. He was convicted of insanity—a long list of mental maladies that had been dormant in his mother’s family—and imprisoned in a lunatic asylum. In the city, new violence and epidemics claimed public attention. The Peacock Prince, as he was called, Samson Mantikor was soon forgotten, though his songs were everywhere. And in the brothels certain combinations of solicitude were still named after him: the pigeon’s tail, for example, the flutter of wild wings.
Now, in his royal straightjacket, he leaned back against the stone wall of the courtyard and wagged his handsome head from side to side. It had been five months since his first incarceration, and his hair had grown down past his shoulders. It was dusted with rough sugar, and there was sugar on his knees and on his boots. Ignoring Thanakar, he was humming a tune to himself, a tune then popular in Caladonian dancehalls:
To the wings of the wild dove,
The winds and rocks are cruel.
I have been battered without cease,
By flatterers and spies.
“I am not here to laugh at you,” said Thanakar angrily, at last. “I came this way by chance.” He used the tone of discourse between equals, as was his birthright, and at the sound of it, Samson Mantikor raised up his head.
“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “The door was locked.”
“It was not locked,” retorted Thanakar. “I came this way by chance.”
The prince stared at him keenly and then got to his feet. “Come, then,” he said. “If you are not a liar, come loose my hands. Your voice is strange to me. Who are you?”
“I am from Charn,” said Thanakar, limping forward across the narrow courtyard, holding up his palm. And when the prince saw the tattoo of the golden briar wrapped around the doctor’s finger and down his wrist and forearm, some of the hostility left his face, and his eyes took on a look of sober calculation.
“From Charn,” he said. “Who was your father? A prince of the ninth rank—don’t lie to me. Swear to me that you are not some new utensil of my father’s. Swear to me—I have heard the virtues of our race are still alive in Charn. Loyalty, courage, and singleness of heart; I have heard the Starbridges of Charn still keep their ancient oaths.”
“You were misinformed,” said Thanakar.
But the prince wasn’t listening. He was speaking very fast, in a tone verging on hysteria. “Courage, honesty, and simpleness,” he said. “When my first ancestor made his vow to Angkhdt himself, how many men were there with him? And now how many, in this sink of treachery? And yet, I can remember when I had so many friends—come, speak to me! Are you deaf? Untie my arms!”
His voice was thick with medication, and his eyes were bright. He kicked his foot and made a clinking sound; Thanakar looked down and saw for the first time that he was chained. A chain locked around his ankle was stapled to the marble wall. It was cruelly tight, for the cloth of the prince’s boot was torn away.
“I mean no harm, I promise you,” said Thanakar. He reached out to untie the prince’s arms. But then Samson Mantikor pulled away.
“Do not touch me,” he said. “You have not the tools to loose this chain, and anyway the place is full of soldiers. They must not know that you were here with me, or they will take me to some other place. But you will take a message for me, to the home of Craton Starbridge. He is my faithful friend—tell him you have seen me. Tell him where I am. Take him this.” He inclined his cheek. There was an earring in his right earlobe, a golden stud in the shape of a wild bird in flight. “Take it,” said the prince.
* * *
Again the results of Jenny’s tests were inconclusive. Sick at heart, Thanakar took her from the sanatorium, and together they walked down the Avenue of Bliss towards their hotel. Jenny squeezed his hand. But the questions had exhausted her, and so he took her in his arms the last few blocks and carried her. He was limping and his knee hurt badly. But he would not stop to rest, not wanting to disturb the rhythm of her breathing, the pressure of her cheek against his cheek. She was asleep, and when he came to the hotel he went upstairs without a word and laid her down upon her bed. Mrs. Cassimer undressed her, but she was fast asleep. Thanakar stood in the doorway for a while, and then he turned and went downstairs.
Craton Starbridge was the seventh minister for agriculture. His house was in the Baekland Road. Thanakar gave the prince’s earring to a steward, wrapped in a written message, and within twenty minutes he was standing in the conservatory of the minister, a long gallery of glass at the top of the house. The room was lined with tables, from a few of which, in pots and trays, protruded feeble and malnourished plants.
The seventh minister was alone. He was a big man, burly and strong, with a wide face and a cropped head. He was older than the prince, about Thanakar’s age. When the doctor entered he was fiddling with a bank of fluorescent lights above one table. But in his left hand he was holding the prince’s earring by its golden shank, spinning it between his forefinger a
nd thumb.
“How do I know that you’re not lying?” he said at once. He turned, and strode rapidly across the floor towards Thanakar. “This earring could mean anything. It could mean the prince is dead.”
Bored, Thanakar turned to go. “That’s not my concern,” he said. “I am a foreigner. I wasted my own time to bring this message. What you believe is up to you.”
“Wait,” said Craton Starbridge. He came into the center of the room. He had a strong, open face, but it was strange with doubt. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t go.”
Thanakar made a bored, dismissive gesture with his hand and continued towards the door. Behind him, the seventh minister cleared his throat. “I cannot let you go,” he said. “Please try to understand. I don’t mean to insult you. You have given me a token of my friend. This is news that I have prayed for. It is because I want so much to believe you that I listen to my doubts.”
Thanakar turned back to face him. “I have told the truth,” he said.
Craton Starbridge spun the prince’s earring in his fingers. “It is hard to believe that they would have left him unguarded. You say you found the door unlocked?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I wonder. My friendship with Prince Mantikor is well known. Don’t be insulted. But if the king wanted to tempt me to an act of treason, what better tool for him than you, a foreigner from Charn? Impossible to trace. Anyone else, and I would know their sympathies.”
* * *
When the brother of Prince Mantikor was born in Caladon, in July of the eighth phase of spring, there had been festivities around the clock. The story was that even in his mother’s womb, Prince Argon Starbridge had recited verses from the Song of Angkhdt. Philosophers, the story went, had been invited into the cathedral. They had pressed their ears against the queen’s vagina; it was a lie.
The prince’s birth, the story went, was painless and uncomplicated, despite the largeness of his head. When he was just a few days old, his mother had been strong enough to hold him in her arms on the steps of the cathedral, confronting the protesting crowds. He had spoken to the protesters, calling them by name until their leaders had dropped down in the dust upon their knees, their hands clasped out in front of them.
It was all lies. On that occasion the queen had been heavily veiled. In fact, she had died in childbirth. Her labor had lasted for more than fifty hours, and her screams had penetrated from the sanctuary far into the labyrinth of the cathedral. In Caladon it was the custom for the queen to be delivered in the sanctuary of Beloved Angkhdt, behind a silver screen. It was the custom, at the perfect moment in the litany of kingship, for the nurse to bring the newborn child from the altar to his father on his throne a dozen yards away. The nurse would walk in rhythm to the drums, and the king would wait for a particular passage of the singing before he lifted up the child to his breast. All would be performed in silence, the child’s mouth taped to stop its crying, until the supplicant before the altar had reached a certain section of his recitation. Then he would ring a little bell, a signal for the seal upon the child’s lips to be undone.
That was how Samson Mantikor had come into the world, taking his place like an actor on a stage. But on the night of July 1st, after the queen’s labor had gone on for forty hours, the supplicant had dismissed the congregation. The king had sat, immense, immobile on his throne, his expression hidden behind his golden mask, while the queen’s screaming echoed to the utmost vault. The candles in the sanctuary were all extinguished, all but one. The midnight ritual and benediction were suspended; the musicians and the dancers were dismissed. The king had sat immobile in the dark. Perhaps he slept. But as the queen’s delivery reached its climax, one of the acolytes reported seeing a drop of moisture run down under his mask and down his neck. And at the moment of crisis, when the screams burst out redoubled and then stopped, the acolytes saw him lurch heavily to his feet, his jeweled fingers curved in a gesture none of them had seen before.
Despite appearances, the king was not a fool. Towards four o’clock, when the litany had been resumed, he beckoned with his little finger. In the pause between the versicle and the response, Lord Bartek Multiflex, the king’s first minister, inclined his ear to Argon Starbridge’s fat lips, and in a few short, whispered words, he received the instructions that reshaped the kingdom.
For the king was a student of history. He had made himself aware of the progress of events. In July and August of that phase of spring, his armies reached the gates of Charn before they were repulsed; what on both sides was perceived as one more surge of strength against his ancient enemies was really an attempt to forestall a revolution there. For he was aware that in the course of seven of the past nine springs, uprisings in Caladon had quickly followed those in Charn. His own great-grandfather had ended his auspicious reign upon a scaffold. Tensions in both cities were the same—the people desperate and malnourished, the Starbridges exhausted and corrupt.
But when his son was born, King Argon saw one difference, and saw how to exploit it. What in Charn was heresy, in his city was the people’s faith. In shrines and pulpits throughout Caladon, adventists proclaimed the coming of the risen Angkhdt, the dog-headed master, the new made flesh. For generations they had waited, fervently, impatiently, for God to come and tread the Earth again, as He had in the beginning of all things. They waited for His touch.
All winter and all spring the people of Caladon had turned their famished hearts to these teachings. Each change in the weather, every discoloration of the sky, was enough to bring them out into the streets. On the night of July 2nd, in the eighth phase of spring, Lord Bartek Multiflex announced the horoscope of the new prince from the steps of the cathedral. That night there was jubilation in the streets. And for months afterwards the government was born aloft, drifting on a swell of popular enthusiasm. Rumors from Charn could find no purchase. New decrees were greeted with a frenzied acclamation—taxes, laws, and military stratagems—as if even the most mundane aspects of public policy were suddenly made sacred.
And in the general euphoria, people gave no thought to the disappearance of Prince Mantikor. It seemed reasonable and just for him to surrender his claim to his divine younger brother. A golden cradle was installed in the sanctuary of the cathedral, a dozen paces from the throne. It was surrounded with mirrors, and every day the court was crowded with pilgrims seeking entrance, to prostrate themselves before the holy child. Priests and philosophers interpreted his screams and wails.
But still, there were rumors of unpleasantness. A palace servant, dismissed for drunkenness, published an account of how, at five months old, Prince Argon’s eyes were still unfocused; how he cried incessantly unless his mouth was taped; how he was still incapable of reaching out his hand, of recognizing those around him. She had been, or so she claimed, a midwife at the birth, and it was she who first published the rumor that the queen was dead, that the person who had presented the baby to the multitude five days after his birth had been a fraud, a veiled imposter, a nun out of the sanctuary, or else Lord Multiflex himself.
After this account was published, the servant disappeared. Some said she’d been suppressed by the authorities, but it was more likely she had fled the city, chased by angry crowds. For days, wherever she was, people had spat on her, and pelted her with mud, and called her Onayan Kundega, “she who mocks the living God.”
But on the morning of November 79th, the situation changed. In a front-page editorial of the leading opposition daily, Craton Starbridge announced the formation of a new political party, a coalition of reactionary and progressive Starbridge elements, unified by a new political agenda. Warlike, secular, antimonarchist, they advocated a return to ancient Starbridge values and denounced the government of Argon Starbridge, which was sunk in bureaucracy and superstition.
The editorial was widely ignored, for party politics had little use in Caladon, which was ruled by the king and nineteen ministers. Party officials were entitled to wear certain clothing and were permitted
certain seats in the sanctuary of the cathedral. Certain salaries were paid them by the state, and that was their whole function. Nevertheless that same day fifteen members of the new party broke into the offices of Dr. Karan Blau and liberated Samson Mantikor, who had been held against his will. In the evening they staged a rally on the Goostep Road, calling for the abdication of the king. Samson Mantikor read several poems which he had written in captivity.
He was greeted rapturously by the crowd, which included a fair sprinkling of common people. But there must have been two thousand Starbridges, young and old, sick of the inertia of the government and bored by the expectations of their careers in civil service. They applauded wildly the speech of Major General Antrim Starbridge, who recited in his ancient voice the ancient duties of their caste. “We have sold our pride,” he quavered. “Many thousands of our cousins have been martyred on the scaffolds of Charn, and what have we done to succor them? The king has sent his protests to the embassy. On many sheets of paper he has recorded his disapproval, while our armies lie idle at the frontier. But I tell you, out of the new National Assembly in Charn a wind is rising to engulf us all, while we do nothing. Now we must act. Now!” He raised his hands, and on the podium he embraced the doddering form of General Tarpon Starbridge, leader of the government-in-exile of Charn. It was a touching moment, for on the battlefield they had been frequent enemies.
This kind of language was unusual in Caladon, where even public protest tended towards certain ritualized forms. Offended, the editors of the other major newspapers rallied to support the government. The signatories of the new manifesto included the assistant chief of police and most of the general staff; nevertheless, public opinion was staunchly with the king. The next day more than ninety thousand people demonstrated around the cathedral, while the archbishop read a statement from the steps.
