by Paul Park
Later chroniclers, with the objectivity of hindsight, would say that if the king had acted then, with the people behind him, no force could have withstood him. If, in answer to the people’s acclamations, the archbishop had produced the infant prince, if he had demonstrated to the mob the new-made flesh, then the Starbridge party would have been dissolved that day. But instead the prelate discoursed vaguely on the duty of each citizen. He did not even mention the young prince. Later it was clear why he did not. But in the meantime the crowd was full of noxious rumors: The prince had succumbed to black brain fever, he was dead, he had disappeared, it was a trick, it was a lie, a wax effigy in a golden cradle, animated by some mechanism. Rumors seemed to grow up out of nothing.
* * *
The truth is, on the night of November 78th, Zenith Malagond, a junior acolyte at the cathedral and a former friend of Samson Mantikor, choosing a quiet section of the litany, stole behind the inlaid screen, bearing an embroidered pillow in his hands. That much is well known. But chroniclers of the period, and even some contemporary historians, have confused what followed, some for corrupt reasons, and some through honest ignorance. Caladonian legend has transformed Samson Mantikor into a murderer. Sixty months after these events, the play God’s Death opened in Caladon. In it Prince Mantikor, a tragic figure dressed in black, murders the boy himself, after a hesitant soliloquy. Zenith Malagond does not appear; the prince smothers the child himself, holding a jeweled pillow over his tiny nose. In the play, the death of Samson Mantikor a month later on the battlefield of Charonea achieves a kind of tragic symmetry.
On November 79th, the body of a man, tortured beyond recognition, was buried privately beneath the stones of the cathedral. Whether that was Zenith Malagond, or else the captain of the watch, remains conjecture. The fact remains: In the morning the cradle in the sanctuary was empty. Three days later, in response to certain rumors in the capital, Lord Bartek Multiflex issued a proclamation. He announced that the infant prince had been taken to a place of safety, to an estate outside the city, following an attempt upon his life. Official historians of the period, who believed that Zenith Malagond was executed for an attempt that failed, account for the prince’s disappearance in this way. They claim the prince was murdered later, after the fall of Caladon. They claim he was disposed of secretly by Charnish troops.
Predictably, the adventists present a third alternative. Later, a legend was to be retold as part of the scriptural cycle of the Cult of Loving Kindness: how the young prince, perfect in his innocence, ascended up to Paradise. Or in another version, through good luck and the power of God, he evaded all the snares that had been set for him and escaped into a far country, to the town of K——, where he grew to manhood.
It is this version that is closest to the truth. On the night of November 78th, between compline and morning invocation, while Argon Starbridge sat slumbering upon his throne, Zenith Malagond stepped behind the golden screen, a pillow in his hands. In the morning this pillow was discovered with the prince’s mantle cunningly arranged on top of it. But the child was gone, stolen away, and by morning Zenith Malagond was far away inside the labyrinth of the cathedral, carrying the child underneath his robe.
* * *
On the morning of November 81st, Thanakar Starbridge was working at the new dispensary at Kethany, in a shed of fallen brick under the city walls. That day Samson Mantikor had issued the first of many public proclamations, charging that the infant prince was dead and challenging his father to produce him. Towards three o’clock, as Thanakar stood up to stretch his leg, the bells in the steeple of St. Pandolph Unguentine started to ring, a plaintive scattering of notes. From the field outside the shed the cries of fever victims rose up to the sky, mixing with the bells and the clatter of the rain.
Thanakar had been kneeling at the cot of a young woman, administering a sedative. Now he stood up, a scowl of disappointment on his lips, his head dizzy with nausea and despair. His clothes and gloves were streaked with black.
Around him in the operating shed, men and women lay unconscious on low canvas cots. Thanakar was skilled at trepanning, and he had taken several desperate cases to see if he could find, through trial and error, a way of relieving some of the pressure in their brains. In some manifestations of the fever, the victims’ heads swelled up until they cracked apart. Thanakar had thought—but it was hopeless. From the eyes of the woman he had just abandoned, a black bile had poured out over his hands. Choking with disgust, Thanakar turned away. The woman had been young, a handsome woman, what was left of her. She was from Charn, with tattoos of the oil pressers’ caste. The marks of her horoscope, cut into her palms, foretold the onset of a loathsome and untreatable disease. How did they know? Thanakar asked himself. How did they fucking know?
Incense smoke was rising from a brazier in the middle of the floor. It flickered slightly in the draft, and the light from the doorway was interrupted for a moment as a man bent underneath the flap and stepped inside. He was a heavy man in a rich cloak and a big hat, and he carried a small burden in his arms. It was a child, wrapped in a coarse, linen sheet, and Thanakar watched with a sense of sickening inevitability as the man pulled the sheet away from the small face.
The man was Craton Starbridge, seventh minister for agriculture, leader of the party of Prince Mantikor. Embarrassed, apprehensive, he took off his hat and looked around at the recumbent bodies, wrinkling his nose up at the stench. “He doesn’t eat,” he said, as if that were sufficient explanation for his presence. “He is suffering from dehydration. They told me I could find you here. I sent for you at your hotel.”
The child was swaddled tightly, so that it could not move. Its head was swathed in bandages, and its lips were sealed with transparent tape. Its little cheeks were purple and distended; it was close to suffocation, Thanakar could see at once. Without a word he snatched up a scalpel from his table and, coming close, he slit the tape over the baby’s lips. Relieved to take some clear and useful action after a morning full of failures, he stripped off his glove and put his fingers into the baby’s mouth, clearing out a wad of vomit the color and consistency of clotted cream. He pushed his fingers down its throat to clear its nasal passages. “You people are beyond belief,” he said.
“It is my son,” said Craton Starbridge.
Thanakar passed his hand over the outline of the child’s swaddled head. “You must take me for a fool,” he replied angrily. In the distance the churchbells were still ringing; then they stopped.
Again Craton Starbridge glanced around the room. “All right,” he said. “But remember, I have your deportation papers in my pocket. If you are tempted to make a public statement, now or later, just remember: Sentiment against you refugees runs high. There is a proposal in the Cabinet to quarantine this entire area.”
Thanakar had taken the child into his arms. It was snuffling weakly, trying to cry, and he was cleaning its face with a wet cloth. Where the cloth touched its lips or the inside of its mouth, the skin began to bleed, it was so dry. “You people are beyond belief,” he said again. “Why me?”
“Who else? The doctor’s guild has come out for the king, like all the middle class. There is not one whom I could trust. But you are not like them. You are a Starbridge and a foreigner, here on our sufferance.” He turned away, embarrassed. “You will be given a place of refuge, far from here. Soon you will go. The child is not safe, not even from some members of our party. He is not safe in my own house. Yet it is clear he needs a doctor’s care. It is the deepest wish of Samson Mantikor that he not be harmed.”
The baby had begun to wail, a dry, clicking noise deep in its throat. “Go now,” said Thanakar. “Fetch me a nurse with an IV. She’ll know. I will think over what you’ve said.”
Craton Starbridge nodded. “Very well. In the meantime I have given you a guard. At the moment he is engaged in transferring your household here from your hotel. He is putting up a tent here, for your use. It will be very private.”
“No,” said Th
anakar. “I don’t want my daughter here.”
Craton Starbridge shrugged his shoulders. He replaced his hat over his face. “I understand,” he said. “I understand—this is a place of death. But let me say this: You will be well rewarded.”
Part Eight:
The Whisper Bridge
IN THOSE DAYS AT THE END OF THE EIGHTH PHASE of spring, the city of Charn was broken and divided by bitter factional disputes. East of the Mountain of Redemption, from the river to the Morquar Gate, the Desecration League had claimed its territory. Its partisans wore scarves, and feathers in their hats. They chalked their palms with reddish powder, to leave their mark on everything they touched. They swaggered everywhere, armed with knives and cudgels, urinating against walls, covering the buildings with their nihilist graffiti.
In that area they were paramount, but if they chanced to cross the Street of Seven Sins, they walked more circumspectly and pulled their cloaks around their shoulders. The fairgrounds of the Sugar Festival and south to the buildings of the National Assembly made up a narrow band of neutral ground, but farther west the sixth and seventh wards were in the hands of Rebel Angels, less numerous but better armed, dressed in coats of midnight blue.
These two companies of independent soldiery met frequently in bloody brawls. In the precincts of the National Assembly they preserved a wary peace. But elsewhere they fought viciously. There was no one to prevent them; in their respective territories, they had taken over the duties of the metropolitan police. Colonel Aspe, commander of the army, rarely came into the city and was not interested in keeping order. He sulked in his own quarters, spending most of every day in bed. His officers had requisitioned a small village seven miles from the southern gate, where their troops were more easily supplied.
In the city, the Rebels and the League fought freely. In this they reflected a political struggle that was just as fierce then taking place in the amphitheater of the National Assembly. There Raksha Starbridge still maintained a small majority, though by the last weeks in November the grotesque excesses of the Sugar Festival had changed the hearts of many waverers. During the roll call of November 76th over a minor point of precedence, five members changed their seats. The final vote, 418 to 411, was widely touted as a victory in the broadsheets of the Rim, but most political observers had their doubts. The majority had been achieved only after hours of lobbying by Raksha Starbridge, during which several delegates had had their teeth knocked in.
In those days the Desecration League provided the security for the assembly. They were everywhere in the chamber, lining the upper banks, moving back and forth between the deputies. First hired as pages, in theory they were an unarmed peacekeeping force, to be used at the discretion of the majority speaker. In fact they were the private thugs of Raksha Starbridge, and as his abuse of power grew ever stranger and more desperate, their truculence increased. In those days it was nothing, during a crucial vote, for them to physically restrain the members of the splinter opposition, locking their hands behind them, gagging them for minutes at a time, blocking out their speeches with derisive shouts.
But certain members were too powerful to be intimidated. By the middle of November the leadership of the minority had shifted away from Martin Sabian, though he still held his seat upon the Board of Health. After he had lost the vote over the Mountain of Redemption, after the gates of the great prison had been sealed, he made fewer public speeches. He devoted more time to his hospital and to his family. The members of his party changed their seats, moving up among the benches of the right side of the hall, where Earnest Darkheart sat beside his wife. The League never penetrated to that side of the chamber, where almost two hundred delegates sat together in a block, dressed in midnight blue.
Over the veto of the majority speaker, Earnest Darkheart was allowed to provide his own security, after the third attempt upon his life. The Board of Health had voted three to one, the president pro tempore abstaining. Colonel Aspe had voted for the first time that month. Standing alone at the top of the chamber, glowering down over the banks of seats, he had searched out Earnest Darkheart with his stare. The two men’s eyes had met, and later in the antechamber the Colonel’s adjutant was observed in conversation with a captain of the Rebel Angels.
That had been on November 63rd. By the seventh week in November, more than a dozen Rebel Angels sat around their master, blocking the steps, denying all but urgent access. They were evenly divided between men and women, for Earnest Darkheart was a man before his time. They were unarmed, but even so, their mere presence was significant, for Raksha Starbridge had argued strenuously against it. Politics is so often a matter of whim; that small victory was applauded loudly by the opposition. The exchange of glances between Darkheart and the colonel hinted to them a new axis of power. Starting that same week, the colonel came to the assembly every day. After the sessions he was often observed riding in the city with a small guard. And on the evening of November 85th, he spent several hours at the Sugar Festival, stalking in between the booths.
That evening, at nine o’clock, a spectacle of grotesque cruelty was offered to the patrons of the festival. Coriel Starbridge, widow of the former postmaster of Charn, had been discovered hiding in a garret in the thirteenth ward. A neighbor had alerted the police after she had seen the face of a child in an upstairs window, in a house where two old pensioners, former postal employees, were known to live alone. The Desecration League had found a secret stair. Behind a bookcase in a tiny attic underneath the eaves, they had discovered the unfortunate lady and her son, a boy not seven months old.
The pensioners had been killed during the search, but on the night of the 85th, the public was invited to attend the execution of the lady and the child. Almost four thousand people crowded near the scaffold. In the words of a contemporary chronicler:
There were so many, part of the gallery collapsed and four were trampled. Though it was worth the sight—they lit torches, and first the young man’s eyes were put out with the heated iron, and then his body broke in pieces, all the time his mother was kept by. And though her hands were marked with silver, and though she had the blood of parasites and tyrants in her veins, yet still she impressed many with her beauty and her courage, for while others of her cursed race had put abuse upon their persecutors, or called out to their God to take them up, still she did neither, only turning from the crowd to hide her tears, and saying to the hangman, “Sir, do not make me wait,” which sound was so pitiful, that many of the spectators wept sweet tears, and some risked death to call for her relief . . .
This passage is instructive because it shows for the first time a kind of satiation with the violence of revenge. And it is this sense of satiation, rather than any event or personality, that was responsible for what later became known as the December Revolution. But as so often happens, it is in the action of a single individual that the feeling of the time is first made manifest. On the gallery that evening, surrounded by his officers, Colonel Aspe glared down with brooding, bloodshot eyes.
The hangman, perhaps distracted by the reaction of the crowd, required seven strokes of the hammer to complete his work. After the fourth stroke, the colonel dropped his marijuana cigarette and crushed it with the heel of his boot. His adjutant, in his memoirs, describes him leaning with his elbows on the rail, staring down upon the place of death, his hard, hatchet face thrust forward, his steel hand and his gauntlet clasped in front of him. And when the seventh stroke was done, he hawked a great gob of spit out of his throat. Turning aside, he spat it down between the slats of the floor, splattering the people in the gallery below. “Enough,” he whispered in his harshest voice. “Enough.”
And the next morning he was up at dawn. At the sound of the whistle, when the first soldiers tramped out onto the parade grounds—a muddy, open plain outside the city, where for a month they had drilled and skirmished, and fought mock battles—he was there already, sitting motionless on his horse. His face was shaven and clean, his gray hair combed over his shou
lders. All morning he sat without moving, without speaking in the center of the vast ground, while his troops drilled in concentric circles around him in the rain. Towards two o’clock he beckoned to his adjutant and bent low to whisper in his ear.
Those who saw the colonel in this period report that he had changed much from his earlier campaigns, when he had led the bishop’s armies to a series of spectacular victories in the last phase of the fighting against Caladon. If anything he was less communicative, harsher, more morose, more susceptible to fits of anger. He was less active, more prone to delegate authority, often staying in his tent for days at a time, staring at nothing with his angry eyes. But at the same time he seemed more sensitive to politics, less irrational in his command. Always before, he had shown his undisguised contempt for strategies and plans, discussion and debate, preferring always action. Military analysts attribute his early victories less to his tactics, which were nonexistent, than to his ability to forge an army into an instrument of his own will, which he could then lay about himself with wildness and irrational abandon, battering his enemies into submission.
But in his later career as commander of the revolutionary armies, and later still as virtual dictator of Charn and Caladon, he showed a new political acumen. At three o’clock on the afternoon of November 86th, his adjutant rode in over the Harbor Bridge, into the sixth ward of the city, where Earnest Darkheart had his party headquarters. He stayed there for perhaps two hours, after which he rode east towards the Mountain of Redemption. There, at about six o’clock, a company of soldiers chased away a small detachment of the League, which was guarding the new masonry at Patience Portal. There, with sledgehammers and iron bars, the soldiers broke the seal on the door, reopening the mountain for the first time since it had been closed, by order of the National Assembly, seven weeks before.
