by Paul Park
She moved slowly, one hand and then one foot. She had no idea how long, but slowly behind her the embers of the campfire were submerged in darkness, and the voices grumbled and grew less, losing their edges as she made her way. One hand, and then one foot. She stared into the blackness, inches from her nose. There was no wind. In front of her the Whisper Bridge was silent.
Finally she climbed up over the breast of the hill. Around her a strange light began to burn, objectless, unilluminating, as if the darkness had become a different color. Behind the outline of the horizon the sky took on a different color, a soft, dull brown, and then a line of red. It was the Caladonian frontier.
From between two boulders she stared out. She had reached the hilltop. Below her, half a mile away, the Whisper Bridge shone like a beacon, a span of yellow metal glowing from within, still lit by some ancient art. Under it the abyss was black, the river silent, but on the other side, along the lip of a cliff which ran to each horizon, the sky was lit by a red glow. An ancient barricade of glowing wires sprawled out of the darkness and sprawled along the cliff.
A half mile away, up on the ridge, Charity could feel a gentle wind upon her face, and then she could hear the bridge, too, breathing softly in the night. She looked for the third man, the soldier with the torch, and then she spotted him, a small daub of fire below the first rungs of the bridge.
By the time she reached him, his torch had flickered low. He had perched it in a cleft between two rocks: a crooked stick from which the bark still hung in rags. At the top a nest of straw was soaked in burning phosphorus; it cast an eerie, bluish light. Under it the soldier sat, his revolver in his lap.
Ten feet behind him, the bridge reached up into the darkness. From close at hand, the gleam of the metal seemed less noticeable. It struggled dully with the torchlight, which spread out around the base of the bridge in an uneven pool. In the middle sat the soldier, his head sunk on his breast as Charity crept close.
She crouched behind a boulder, watching him for many minutes. He never moved, and she was hoping that he was asleep, had dozed off in his waiting. Experimentally, she moved her knee, shifting her weight and making a small sound. The soldier raised his head. His face was illuminated in the fitful glow, and Charity suppressed a cry. He was a great, tall hulk of a man, and his face was terribly deformed. He seemed to resemble not a human being but another species, shocking in its strangeness. At first Charity could make no sense out of its face, its bumps and holes, its rough places and smooth. She shuddered and bent low, murmuring an inward prayer, making with the smallest motion of her forefinger the sign of the unclean.
She turned away her face, counting under her breath. When she reached one hundred, she turned back, and she was calm enough to see a pattern in the alien flesh—the great mane of hair, the fat fleshy nose, the small revolting eyes.
Once when she was young, her uncle had taken her into the Starlight Temple, to see the great brass statue of dog-headed Angkhdt. There had been torchlight and darkness and silence like a heavy weight. Before the altar, the image sat cross-legged, its hands clasped around the base of its brass penis. The penis was like a power in its hands; under the bridge the soldier held his gun upon his lap, the thick, ugly snout pointing at the sky. Calm and quiet, he stared out into the darkness. It seemed to Charity that he could not fail to see her, yet still he made no movement. Not daring to retreat, she was huddled up between some boulders. In her silken gown, she was shivering with cold. The wind had come up slightly, a cold breath on her face. From time to time the Whisper Bridge moaned ominously, a low sound rising out of nothing.
Charity prayed. “Sweet God of Childhood, fill me with Your love. Let me feel Your power in my body, for You are all my hope and all my pride, and all my strength is from Your seed.”
She prayed: “By the rushing river I sat down, and by the clear brook I lay down. My God was like a shadow on the grass. He was like a whisper in the trees.”
These were verses she had learned when she was young, how great Angkhdt came upon a woman by the water. Her lips trembled as she prayed, but her heart and mind were strangely still. As if soothed by the rhythm of her thoughts, the soldier closed his eyes. In a minute, his head fell down upon his breast. He was asleep.
Charity waited. Above him the bridge stretched away into the night. Every two feet along its span the way was studded with a steel rung, representing one of the five hundred and eleven visions of Immortal Angkhdt, incidents in his great journey through the stars. In the winter of the year 00011, the nineteenth bishop of Charn had taken the first line from five hundred and eleven verses of the holy song, and woven them into a poem of his own. It was a poem that seemed to guarantee, as if by divine right, the bishop’s own vision of empire; victorious here, on the banks of the Moldau, his army had been broken on the plains of Caladon.
The Whisper Bridge still stood, the only remnant of his dream. A line of letters was inscribed above each rung, poetry in seven languages. Love lyrics from the Song of Angkhdt had been ransacked to provide words of bloodshed and conquest. The nineteenth bishop had seen an angel in his sleep, who had given him the key.
When she was young, Charity had won prizes in mnemonics. Crouching underneath the bridge, she found the words of the poem clean in her mind, rising up out of her lonely prayer. After another hour of waiting, after the torch had sputtered into darkness, after the soldier’s head had fallen forward so that she no longer saw his face, she rose. The soldier slept. She could hear his snoring as she stumbled forward, her limbs recalcitrant and cold. She laid hold of the first rung of the bridge. It seemed warm to her touch, and the line of poetry above it glowed, as if cut from fire. “ ‘I have walked in this sad place too long,’ ” she murmured. And then swung herself up: “ ‘This simple garden in my lady’s heart. But from an upstairs window I have seen another land. A dry land rising out of sight. A dry ridge in the desert. Love—you and me and seven others, we will smear our palms with lime, and with spikeweed in our hands we will continue up, up into the morning of the world, burned white and ocher by the laughing sun. Where women wash their clothes beside the stream, crimson, scarlet, and the nine kinds of red, we will lift them onto poles. These cloths will be our flags, for we are kings upon this earth, this bitter, worthless ground.’ ”
The wind shook the bridge and filled the air with groaning. Around her there was nothing, only blackness and the glowing steel, until she came up over the crest of the arch, weary and cold, and saw the wire fence below her, stretching out to each horizon, shining bright as she climbed down. Some of the rungs had fallen loose, and once she slipped and almost fell. Once her gown caught on a corner of torn steel, which opened up a gash above her knee. And always the bridge was shifting in the wind, trembling and groaning while the rungs burned her hands. And always she was chanting the bishop’s poem in her mind, the words and images disjointed, reduced to their bare sounds. Sometimes she closed her eyes. And at the very end she slipped the last few rungs, twisting her ankle, falling to her knees on the sharp rocks.
Near her stood the fence, a mass of tangled wire perhaps twelve feet tall. With her back to the cliff’s edge, she stared at it, adjusting her eyes to the strange light. It seemed impenetrable, tightly woven, cruelly barbed. Charity sat nursing her foot. She leaned back against a pile of rocks and looked into the mesh of colored filaments, searching for a flaw. The fence glowed scarlet, green, and cobalt blue.
Towards morning it began to rain, fluttering, small drops which sizzled as they hit the wire. Charity sat dozing, but then she started awake, cursing the rain. Cursing, she stumbled to her feet, ignoring the pain in her ankle. In the gathering daylight she found a path down the rock slope, leading parallel to the clifftop for a hundred yards, and then turning inward towards the barricade. There, for a distance of a couple of feet, the lower portion of the fence was shorted out. Several wires had been cut. They hung colorless and dull. Charity went down on her hands and knees; there was a tunnel cut into the heart of the wir
e. Wriggling on her belly in a slough of sugar mud, she entered in, picking her way as if into a briar of poisoned thorns. In front of her the wires had been severed and bent back, but still they caught in her clothes, ripping her fine gown to shreds, scratching her wet skin. In this way she came at last to Caladon, emerging out into the rain. Shivering and miserable, she lay on her stomach in the rain.
It was there that the district customs officer found her, after his morning walk. Tall, angular, swathed in strips of gauze, he stepped down from the porch of his cabin and raised a white umbrella to the sky. Moving with great slowness and precision, he walked out across the road. His mailbox was empty; that was no surprise, but beyond it, huddled in a culvert, lay a human woman. She was watching him as he approached, with a dazed, puzzled expression, in which curiosity had not yet given way to loathing.
She was dressed in silken rags. He bent down above her till their heads were very close, and she did not flinch away. “Good morning,” he said softly, using the common tongue. “Have you anything to declare?”
* * *
In those days, in Caladon, certain noble families employed the services of child assassins, hereditary murderers, devotees of Angkhdt the God of Fire. On the same night that Charity crossed the border, past midnight on the morning of December 3rd, Mrs. Cassimer got up from her cot, in the camp at Kethany. She had heard children’s voices laughing in the dark outside her tent, squealing with delight as if at some new game. Pulling on her bathrobe, grumbling to herself, she got up and went outside, and stood watching in amazement while a half a dozen young ragamuffins practiced gymnastics in an open space nearby. They had hung a carbide lantern from a pole, and by its light they somersaulted and turned backflips, and danced upon their hands.
Standing in the flap of the tent, still half asleep, for many minutes Mrs. Cassimer watched the antics of the children. A little girl stood on her brother’s shoulders, juggling three rings and a rubber ball. A boy balanced a chair upon his chin. Many children lived in that camp of refugees below the city walls, and Mrs. Cassimer supposed that she was watching some of these: junior members of the guild of players, sharpening their skills.
But there was something wrong. She noticed a gold ring in the ear of one young boy. Though dressed in rags, some of the others, too, wore jewelry—sapphire rings and silver bracelets. Mrs. Cassimer was listening to a whisper in her mind, and it mixed with a noise inside the tent. Turning quickly, she ducked back inside, in time to see a small form bending low over the baby’s crib.
She waddled forward with a cry of rage. The child had something shining in its hand, but Mrs. Cassimer was in time. In the darkness of the tent the child mistook its aim. With an open razor, it sliced apart the pillow near the baby’s head, then twisted away, out of reach of Mrs. Cassimer, and slipped out through a cut in the tent wall.
“Nasty, filthy, thieving brat,” cried Mrs. Cassimer, bursting into tears. She gathered up the infant prince and held him to her breast. Jenny Pentecost sat up in bed. She reached for a small electric torch, which she kept beside her in the night, and turned it to illuminate the figure of the housekeeper, standing in the center of the floor, rocking the baby in her arms.
“That’s it, you just sit there,” cried Mrs. Cassimer with some bitterness. “What’s the matter, lizard got your tongue? I suppose it’s too much to expect—look at the little darling: still asleep.”
Her words were contradicted by the baby, who squirmed and fretted in her arms. After a moment, despite her best efforts, he began to cry, a weak, snuffling noise. “There, there,” said Mrs. Cassimer, fussing with a pacifier. “It’s all over now.”
In the past two weeks, unexpected quantities of maternal love had come out in Mrs. Cassimer, dormant since Thanakar was grown. And though retarded, the child was not insensible to her affection. Quite the contrary; in just a few days he had responded, seeming to recognize her, smiling and holding out his hand. The night before, for the first time, he had slept undisturbed till six o’clock.
In fact, his case did not appear as hopeless as Thanakar had feared. Some of the deformities of his great head had proved to be a ruse—painted ridges of putty and papier-mâ·ché applied by the priests of the cathedral, to make him look less human. Thanakar had repaired his deviated septum, had stitched together his harelip. He had removed a cataract from one eye and cut through the flaps of skin that had sealed his ears. There was sugar in the baby’s blood, that much was clear. But within certain limits he responded to the doctor’s care. And Thanakar worked on him with a kind of gratitude, a full feeling in his heart, because in that hospital, in that stricken settlement of refugees, so much of his work was hopeless. That week he had six new cases of the black brain fever, two in newborn children.
On the morning of December 3rd he had been working in the clinic. Past midnight, he had left his work unfinished. Returning to the tent where his family was staying, he had stopped to watch two children juggle hoops of fire. Mrs. Cassimer was awake, he saw. He raised his hand, but she turned back under the flap of her tent. Laughing, the children scattered, leaving their hoops to smolder in the dirt.
Thanakar heard the voice of Mrs. Cassimer crying out inside the tent. Wearily, he turned his feet in that direction, entering just in time to catch the brunt of her attack.
“You!” she cried as he came in. “What have you to say? Up at all hours playing the fool while we get our throats cut. A lot you care. It’s bad enough to live in this disgusting place.”
She was standing with the baby in her arms, illuminated by Jenny’s torch. He blinked stupidly at her, and at his daughter sitting hidden by the light, upright in her bed. Then, again, Mrs. Cassimer started to cry. Wordlessly, shaking her head, she showed him the split pillow, the cut in the oilcloth of the tent.
“But he’s all right,” said Thanakar.
“Yes, he’s all right, no thanks to you. A fine excuse for a doctor. Up all night, God knows where. Don’t you ever sleep?”
Thanakar sat down upon the cot. His leg was hurting him, and he was very tired. “I was trying some research on my own time,” he said. “No more. Tomorrow we will go.”
“And high time too,” cried Mrs. Cassimer, unmollified. She had been fussing with the baby, but now he was sucking on the pacifier and she was free to speak. “It’s been weeks since that gentleman came to give you your safe-conduct. We could have left here anytime. But every day you have been gone, with people dying all around, and all the riffraff of the country, God knows why—”
Thanakar held up his palm. “Enough,” he said. “You don’t understand. I had work to do. No more. We leave at the first light. Soon as we can. I’ll send to Craton Starbridge for some horses.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Cassimer, suspiciously. “And why the sudden change of heart? Don’t tell me it’s because of this.” She motioned to the pillow in the crib.
“No,” confessed Thanakar. He held up his hand. “Please, Jenny,” he said, and she switched off the light, leaving them in a murky half-light, which filtered in through the oilcloth walls.
“The director asked me to go,” Thanakar confessed. “She fired me. I have been experimenting upon animals, and four have died. That is still a crime, in Caladon.”
In an instant Mrs. Cassimer had changed. Her voice was softer as she came to sit down next to Thanakar on the cot. “It’s a crime all over the world,” she said. “Oh sir, Great Angkhdt tells us to love all animals. Especially in springtime, when they are so few.”
“I had thought, in this camp, that there were rats enough,” said Thanakar. “Not that it matters—it will be good to go. You’re right, it was unfair to keep you. Now that Craton Starbridge has provided such a . . . generous alternative.”
In Mrs. Cassimer’s arms the baby was asleep. The pacifier dropped out of his open mouth. Thanakar looked up and saw that Jenny Pentecost had gotten out of bed. She was standing in front of him in a nightgown, her hair braided on the nape of her neck, and she was staring intently at his f
ace. She reached out her hand, and before he could move away, she touched with her forefinger the locket round his neck.
* * *
Later that same night, while Charity was lying in the rain outside the unraveler’s house, Thanakar Starbridge got up from his cot. He couldn’t sleep.
Working in the hospital laboratory at midnight, for the first time he had caught glimpses of a theory. When the doctors had broken in and found him with the carcasses of four fat rats, he had been excited. He had been too excited to explain himself, too excited to speak, though he had slapped one of his superiors across the face. But when he saw they were not interested, that they did not even want to hear what he had found, then his excitement died, and he had stumbled home, disgusted and angry with them and with himself. “It serves them right,” he thought, stumbling back through the rows of tents.
That feeling had not lasted long. Coming home to his own tent, he had passed the orphans’ hospital, and his lantern had reflected in the eyes and faces of abandoned children, curled up on pallets of raw straw. Once he had stopped to listen to some children laughing, and his anger had not survived the sound.
It had been replaced with weariness and a dull strange ache, which helped him fall asleep once his family was calm and he had helped them to their beds. But in the middle of the night, suddenly the excitement of his discovery resurfaced, and he jumped out of bed and paced upon the floor. It was not yet light.
He limped to the flap of the tent and stood looking out over the deserted hospital. He shook his head to clear it. Wisps of a theory seemed to surround him in the air, drifting close around him, then receding.
He shook his head, resolved to march on back to the laboratory and break in, and if the doctors were still there, to slap them in the face and make them listen. Listen to what? The theory drifted out of reach. Still, he limped back to his cot and pulled on his boots. He pulled on his overcoat. But then he paused, looking around at his sleeping family and at the cut in the tent wall. Mrs. Cassimer had taken the infant prince into her bed. Jenny was sleeping curled away from him, her long hair covering her pillow.
