by Paul Park
King Argon made a tiny gesture with his hand. His courtiers moved away from him down off the dais, leaving him alone. Then, with effort, he stood up, supporting his weight upon the arms of his chair. He turned his head towards Samson Mantikor. But at that moment Craton Starbridge raised his hand, shouting from the back of the rotunda: “My lord, it’s true. Aspe has crossed the Moldau, with fifteen thousand men.”
Bewildered, the king turned to face this strange new voice. In the interval, Bartek Multiflex, standing by the altar, gestured to be heard. “This outbreak is unseemly,” he protested. “We have the situation well in hand. As we speak, our own courier is riding south to propose a conference.”
“Conference!” shouted Samson Mantikor. “He is across the river. You would talk until he reached the city walls.”
He turned and hurried up the southern aisle. He did not see his father raise his hand or hear his father’s soft, sweet voice—“Wretched boy. Because of you, we cannot win this fight. We have lost the people’s love, because of you.”
The king was right. When the prince’s armies were assembled, they numbered fewer than ten thousand men, and most of those were Starbridge officers. The desertion rate was high among the other ranks. Many Starbridges from Charn had joined the prince, but that did nothing for morale. When they saw the Starbridge flags unroll over the plain of Caladon, many of the common soldiers turned aside and spat, remembering dead comrades. Too recently those same flags had been arrayed against them.
But it was more than that. Samson Mantikor’s appeal for power had hurt his family’s authority. At the battlefield of Charonea seven companies deserted, refusing at the last to fight for him. Without the infant prince the monarchy had lost its heart. Of the three of them—the father and two sons—it was the child who had caught the public mind. He was the innocent one, the long-awaited king, the seed of Blessed Angkhdt. And while the other two were sunk in bickering and accusations, the voices of the common people rose in outrage and despair. In those days, every day at noon, the cathedral steps were crowded with mute protesters, wearing shirts that had been printed with a single question mark. In restaurants and taverns the proprietors posted a tally on the bar, a record of the days since the infant prince had last been seen.
“It was a mistake,” said Craton Starbridge. “It was a bad mistake,” he said, as the night rain beat upon the canvas by his head. “We should have brought him back and put him in a temple of our own.”
“No,” said Mantikor. He lay back upon his couch, propped up on pillows, plucking idly at the strings of a small guitar. “No,” he repeated. “They would have murdered him. My own men would have murdered him, to make my claim more safe. A little boy, Craton—I could not have stopped them. A little, crippled boy, crippled in his mind. I would be ashamed to use him in this fight.”
“You are softhearted,” grunted Craton Starbridge.
“I am not. Besides, why think of it? It’s too late now.”
Mantikor lay back. Out of random notes his fingers formed a song, a wistful melody. “It’s best to sleep,” he said. “And yet, if we are to die tomorrow, it is a shame to waste the time.”
With a grunt, Craton Starbridge paced the length of the tent—five steps—and then he stood in the open doorway looking out into the rain. The darkness below him was pricked with soldiers’ fires, a reassuring sight, somewhat. His hands were restless. He rubbed them on his pants.
Behind him the young prince started to sing. His voice was supple without being strong, yet had an earnestness that made it pleasing. He sang,
Science can grasp
The stars in the night,
But her love is without measure.
“It’s all right for you,” interrupted Craton Starbridge from the door. “But I am just another soldier.”
Mantikor put down his instrument. “Is that what’s bothering you?” he asked. “Craton, I am sorry. I was thoughtless. Don’t worry, I will keep you by me.”
“I’m not afraid,” grunted the older man. “But I’m restless. That is natural. I have staked my life upon this throw.”
“So have I.” Mantikor bit his lips. His handsome face was twisted to a frown, but then it cleared. He clasped his hands. “I know,” he said. “We’ll throw the cards. Then we’ll sleep.”
“It’s atrocious luck,” said Craton Starbridge, scowling down over the valley. In the distance on the hill of Charonea, he could see the bonfires of the enemy.
“It’s atrocious luck,” he murmured. In front of him the prince’s standard hung down listless from its pole. There was no wind.
But Samson Mantikor had taken a pack of cards out of his kit. They were wound in a silk scarf. He untied it, and laid them out upon the bed. He made them into piles, discarding all but the face cards and the Starbridge suit; these he shuffled together and then reshuffled. “I will draw three times,” he said. “Once for Caladon, once for myself, and once for you.”
He laid the twenty-seven cards before him in a line, face down. Then he touched each one in turn, hesitating at the third and fifteenth cards. He put his fingers to his lips. Then, with a sudden movement, he reversed the third card from the end. It was the Tower. From the clouds, dog-faced Angkhdt frowned down upon a castle of black stones. In his hand he held the thunderbolt.
Mantikor closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. He put his hand down on the card, hiding it beneath his palm. Then he turned over the fifteenth card.
“It is the Garden,” he said when he could speak. “Craton, look—it is the Garden.”
In the doorway Craton Starbridge didn’t turn around. Mantikor gathered up the cards, reshuffled them, and laid them out again. “This is for me,” he said, turning over the ninth card. It was the Dead Man.
Again he laid his hand over the card. “It is the Chair,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Craton, look—some would say it is a throne, but I don’t think so. To me it looks more like an old man’s garden chair. What do you think? Will you come to see me when I am a grandfather?”
He swept the cards into a pile. Craton Starbridge turned around. “Once more,” he said.
“No,” protested Samson Mantikor. “No, you’re right—it’s awful luck. Besides, I’m tired.”
But when the man came to stand beside him, he relented and laid out the cards. Carelessly Craton Starbridge took the last one from his hands and flipped it over. It was Paradise, shining red and gold and amber, rising above the bitter hills of Earth.
With a grunt, Craton Starbridge dropped it on the others. “There,” he said. “You see?”
He turned and walked out of the tent and down the hill. Prince Mantikor lay awake after he left. He lay awake until the morning. “God grant it never comes,” he prayed, but it did come. And when it came it brought a trick of nature. The rain had stopped during the night, and the ground was covered with a layer of mist. On the field it drifted to the height of a man’s chest, and gave a spectral look to the assembled soldiers.
From the heights it seemed as if the armies fought the sea, the men up to their chests in foam. Samson Mantikor looked out from his tent and saw Aspe’s army like a host of shadows. Only their flags were clearly visible, black and midnight blue, snapping crisply in the higher air.
Below him on the slopes of the small hill, the footsoldiers of Caladon stood with rifles in their hands, dressed in purple, yellow, blue, and all the colors of the morning. Scarlet banners fluttered from their pikes. Elsewhere the great standards of the Starbridge clans rose through the mist, figured in gold, silver, and green. Under them the horses swayed and blundered, and Mantikor could see the helmets of the captains: Antrim Starbridge, Lakshman Starbridge, Strontium Starbridge and his sons.
Towards seven in the morning, Aspe’s standard on the Charonea Ridge started to move. Supported by its corners from four poles, it bellied like a sail, a great square of solid black moving slowly down the hill. Shortly afterwards, standing by his tent, Mantikor heard the first sounds of the battle: gunshot
s and explosions, men shouting, and the screaming of the horses. Yet through some trick of the mist, the noise was muffled and unclear, seeming more distant than it was, and full of nauseating echoes. Mantikor bit his lips and found a taste of copper in his mouth. He looked for reassurance in the faces of the men around him, and the boys too young to fight.
Above him fragments of mist tugged at the sun and seemed to harry it across the sky. Samson Mantikor climbed the hill. He looked out from a flat place of rock; he watched the battle for a long time. He listened to its hundred voices, until they all resolved into one voice.
It was a distant crashing like the crashing of the sea. And the mist seemed to suck men under to their deaths. Once a man was down, he disappeared, and the mist closed over him. Sometimes the prince would see a man throw up his hands and disappear, but then he looked away, following the Starbridge banners as they swept across the field. One of the boys called to him and pointed. He smiled and called back. The scarlet crab of Castle Blaylock nodded proudly in the wind, halfway to the Charonea Ridge.
But there was another banner, too, that seemed unstoppable. Already it had covered half the distance to the prince’s hill. It was the largest on the field. It seemed to tower above the rest. Elsewhere, other, smaller flags of black contended in the mist, moving back and forth, and some broke and went down and were sucked under.
Above him on the hilltop his own flag caught the breeze—wild birds upon a sky of blue. Watching it, suddenly dizzy, the prince felt terribly alone. He knew what was happening. Around him people moved away. They were embarrassed, saddened, grieved. As for him, grief and fear were like a hunger in his guts, for there below him on the field, the golden lilies of Iskandar Starbridge fluttered down, the pole broken and the cloth in rags. Nearby, the great sea dragon of Lord Mara Starbridge, Prince of Charn, jerked back and forth and then was snapped off short.
Time seemed to stop upon the little hill. Smiling foolishly, Mantikor looked around him. He put his hands over his eyes, then took them away. The silver leopard of Mercator Starbridge had gone down. With him had ridden Lakshman Starbridge and the high constable of Charn. Now only remnants of their force remained: single flags of animals or birds of prey, surrounded and hemmed in by hosts of black. But the dark flags were fewer too—the great black standard of the colonel stood alone, now three-quarters of the way across the field. From the prince’s hilltop, men pointed and gesticulated. Someone shouted something that he didn’t understand, and then he saw Craton Starbridge lurch out of the mist, coming up from below. He was with his brother and his sister’s son, and they were dressed for fighting.
He climbed up to where the prince was standing, and saluted. “Sir,” he said. “I see a way. There’s no one between him and us; look at him.” And he thrust into the prince’s hands a pair of field glasses.
“Look,” he said, and the prince looked. He saw the black flag looming towards him, out of focus, and he twisted the screw. Tendrils of mist coiled around the flagpoles; he moved the glasses down and then he saw him stagger into range, a tall black rider on a giant horse. His hair was gray, wild around his head, and his raised fist was made of metal.
“Request denied,” said Samson Mantikor. But he spoke softly, biting his lips, staring through the glasses, listening to the sounds around him, the jingle of the saddles as men swung themselves onto their horses, the whirr of the sharpshooters’ rifles near his ear.
And when he lowered the binoculars, the hillside was deserted, save for his own orderlies and guards. Below him, down the slope, he heard the hooves of many horses scattering on the rocks, and that was all. Then he saw a single horseman jump over a ridge of earth, carrying the flag of Craton Starbridge and his family, a white ship under sail upon a sea of mist.
Other horsemen followed him. Mantikor turned his face away. The sharpshooters were putting down their guns. They were staring open-mouthed, and he was watching in the mirror of their faces how that crazy little boat drove on, drove on, shuddered and drove on, and then subsided under that black storm.
Then the men were all around him, tugging at him, pulling him away. “Sir, you cannot stay,” they whispered, pulling at his arms. And he suffered them to lead him, for he was thinking of a poem, and he was mumbling a final poem as he went along. Later it was to become famous, and was engraved along the arch of a stone gate, later, much later, when the sweet summer grass of Charonea made the work a joy. Then workmen brought their families from Caladon, and while their wives and children picnicked in the grass, the men erected a great marble gate, to commemorate the place where the Starbridges went down. And along the arch they carved these words, meaningless to all but one or two:
My heart went out to where
that boat
Broke on that silver sea.
Above it on the clumsy wind,
Wild birds are scattering.
But in the days after the battle, the news of Charonea spread over the diocese and came at last to that small village in the mountains, where Thanakar had made his home. Early in the morning of the twelfth of January, when the light was fresh upon the windows, he sat up in bed. Then slowly, so as not to wake her, he rose up and dressed himself. Something felt different to him, and perhaps it was just the passing of a dream. He took his hat and cane. He stepped across the room. Carefully, so as not to make a noise, he opened the door and walked out onto the veranda.
The courtyard of his house was empty. He squinted up into the sun. Turning his head, he saw a gleam of artificial light from Jenny’s room, through the slats of wooden shutters on the second floor. He frowned, then smiled, and imagined her asleep upon her desk, her forehead cradled in her arms, her pen still in her hand.
There was a bird in the courtyard, picking at the moss with its long bill.
He passed out through the gate and out onto the boardwalk by the lake. There he strolled along the fronts of the deserted villas, admiring the day. They had had no rain in half a week. The sun shone clear and calm over the shoulder of Mount Rigel. On the other side, the entire range of the Caryatids stretched away, visible for miles. There was no sugar to distort the air.
Thanakar raised his hand against the light. In front of him the boardwalk ended on a beach of sand. There a small crowd had gathered near a man on horseback.
As he watched, the man dismounted wearily. Someone held a sack of water, and he drank from it and splashed it on his face. His horse was pulling on its bridle, eager to get down to the lake.
Thanakar walked faster, and he switched his cane to his left hand. He soon met people coming back the other way. One was a technician in the tuberculosis sanatorium where he worked.
Thanakar raised his hat. The woman strayed from her companions. “We’re having breakfast at the hospital,” she said. “You care to come?” She extended her gloved hand. Thanakar touched it with his own.
“What news?” he asked, turning back the way he’d come.
The woman shrugged. “Events,” she said. “Samson Mantikor is dead at Charonea. Strangled by his own guard—that’s what they say. Argon Starbridge is deposed. Aspe sits in his tent outside the walls of Caladon. The governor has asked him in, but he won’t go.”
“You don’t seem concerned.”
The woman smiled worriedly and shook her head. “What help is it to be concerned? What can I do? These things are far away. Now I don’t know—my husband’s here. We’ll keep our heads down. With any luck we can escape their notice.”
They were passing Thanakar’s house. Nodding and smiling, he slowed to rest his leg, letting them go on ahead. Then he turned aside, entering the wicker gate, walking through the hall and through the courtyard. The light in Jenny’s window had burned out. Across the way, by the fountain, Mrs. Cassimer held the baby in her arms. She was rocking him and playing, but pretended not to see the doctor. They had had an argument the day before.
He limped up onto the veranda, and opened the door of his own room. It was still in shadow. The slats of the shutters drew th
ick lines on the floor.
He hooked his cane over a chair, removed his hat, his gloves, his jacket, and his shoes. He was fumbling with the buttons of his trousers as he stood above the bed. Charity pushed the sheets away and rolled onto her side. Her eyes were closed, her face softened by sleep. He sat down on the bed and touched her hair, and she came awake under his fingers, turning up to kiss his thumb. “What?” she said. “What is it?” and he smiled. Nothing of importance. No. Nothing that can’t wait forever. He took off his trousers and lay down. Charity opened up her arms, still half asleep, still lingering in a countryside of dreams. But part of her was there with him, her body soft and strong, her skin tasting of sweat, her breath slightly foul as he found her mouth.
This ends the second part of the Starbridge Chronicles, which are continued in Part Three: The Cult of Loving Kindness.
Also by Paul Park
Soldiers of Paradise (The Starbridge Chronicles: Volume I)
Locus Poll Award Nominee and Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominee.
In the lowest slums of the city-state of Charn, a Starbridge doctor and a drunken prince defy the law to bring medicine to the poor and hear the story-music of the refugee Antinomials. As a decades-long pitched battle approaches the city and the Bishop of Charn herself is condemned for impurity, the doctor and the prince will follow their compassion into the heart of a revolution, just on the eve of spring, with its strange and treacherous sugar rain.
The Cult of Loving Kindness (The Starbridge Chronicles: Volume III)
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
