Soldiers of Paradise

by Paul Park

  Watching from a protected spot, Thanakar had put his hands up to his face. The antinomials were magnificent—their pride, their power like a force of nature. One man was storming through the mob, his head and chest and shoulders looming far above their heads, smashing them down with a hammer in each hand. Another lifted a soldier up above his head, one hand in his crotch and the other round his neck, bending the backbone like a bow until it snapped.

  It couldn’t last. Thanakar saw some soldiers of the purge, in black and silver uniforms, hanging back to organize their fire. One carried a sharpshooter’s rifle; he lifted it, and an antinomial fell to her knees, stumbling and roaring, shot through the eye. And then, one by one, the rest went down and sank into a surge of bodies. The crowd broke through.

  From their place of safety on a deserted stretch of wall, Thanakar’s antinomial had watched with expressionless eyes. He turned and pointed down a quiet slope of refuse and barbed wire. “That way,” he said, and handed Thanakar the lantern.

  “Thank you. You’re not coming?”

  “No.” The man undid his cloak, stepped out of it, and tossed it onto the wire fence, where it caught and hung like a ghost. Old and white-haired, he was still muscular, his body hard and strong. He unbuckled his machete from his belt and tested the heavy edge along his palm. “No,” he repeated gently. “This is far enough. Far enough, I think. Far enough for me. No, I am with my family. Brothers and sisters.” He swung the blade slowly around his head, a last salute from someone who never in his life had said goodbye. There seemed something else he wanted to say, but whatever it was, he didn’t say it. He turned and walked back towards the hopeless fighting, whistling a little song.

  In the parade, in the din of the drumming and the stamping flagellants and the high pure voices of the boys, Thanakar tried to recollect that little song. It had sounded so unsure. If there was language in it, it was almost meaningless, just a little stuttering at the end of a sad life. One kind of music, he thought. And this is ours, the rhythm and the whips. Men lashing themselves bloody for no reason. Some of the seminarians around him hid their faces, blocked their ears.

  “Thanakar! Thanakar!” Someone was shouting to him. An enormous palanquin, yoked back and front to braces of elephants, was loaded with Starbridges. They waved to him, and he pushed through the crowd and stepped down into the road. In a few steps he reached them. The palanquin was slung low, so that his head was almost at a level with the head of Cargill Starbridge, a young man in military uniform, a relative of his.

  “Intolerable noise,” the man shouted, smiling, indicating the flagellants up ahead.

  “I’m surprised you can stand it,” the doctor shouted back.

  “Bah. Lunatics.” Cargill Starbridge tapped his head confidentially and lowered his voice to a soft roar. “Completely gone.”

  The elephants walked slowly, and Thanakar had no trouble keeping up, his hand resting on the litter’s golden rail. “Listen,” he shouted. “There’s a riot down at the railway yard. At the waterfront.”

  Cargill Starbridge winked one eye. “I know,” he replied. “Bishop’s idea. Bishop’s secretary. Not bad, really, using civilians. Teach those cannibals a lesson. No way to do it properly, of course. No men. You’d need a regiment.”

  “Prince Abu is a prisoner down there,” bawled Thanakar, but the drumbeats knocked the sound away.

  “You know about the adventist? Returned prisoner. Gave a speech. Completely mad.”

  “I was there.”

  “Lucky dog. I missed it. I was at the hanging. Secretary made a speech. Counter example: spontaneous outrage of the people. Death to all heretics. You know the kind of thing. Then he passed out weapons. That started them off. You should have seen them. Madmen.”

  “Abu’s a prisoner down there,” but the man had already turned away, was yelling something to a woman at his side. “I’ve got to find the commissar,” shouted Thanakar.

  The man turned back. “He’s right behind you.”

  “Where?” but then Thanakar saw him, unrecognizable in his festival clothes and a demented turban of pink silk, waving down at them from the back of an elephant not far behind.

  Thanakar let the palanquin go by, and as the elephant came up, he jumped for the rope ladder hanging down its side and climbed up to the howdah on its back.

  “Smoothly done,” said the commissar. “Your leg all right?” It was quieter here, up above the level of the crowd.

  “I hate this parade,” he continued after a pause. He reached down to stroke the elephant’s neck, and when he brought his hand back it was wet with sweat and a peculiar white scum. “Look at this. It’s murder. Poor brute. Where’s the prince?”

  “At the waterfront. He’s a prisoner.”

  The commissar sighed. “I was afraid of that,” he said after a pause.

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “Too late now. The operation’s over.” He looked at his watch. “Limited objectives, the swine. Why didn’t he come back with you?”

  “He preferred to stay.”

  “Then it’s his own damn fault. Prisoner. He should be ashamed.”

  “He might get hurt,” said Thanakar.

  “I doubt it. I can’t see them shooting prisoners. That’s more our style, these days. Did you hear? There was a hanging at the city gallows, a big crowd. The bishop’s secretary promised them a month’s remission for every atheist they kill before five o’clock. Lying pig. As if it were that simple.” The commissar frowned. “Abu will be all right. They might knock him around some. Might knock some sense into him.” He was staring down into the flagellants, and as usual his eyes were very sad.

  * * *

  For a while Abu had done some good. The rioters had hung back, confused. They had held their fire, afraid of hitting him. But he was on one single rampway; there were others, and around him the antinomials were being pushed back, overwhelmed by numbers and the force of hate. The rioters were desperate for blood. They had been offered some remission for their sins, the chance of a better lifetime in whatever hell was waiting for them in the sky after their deaths, if they could only just kill one, just one, even a little one. And finally, as the minutes ticked towards five o’clock, Abu found that he could no longer hold them back, though maybe if he had been someone else, stronger, braver, smarter, better, sober . . . But the crowd no longer cared. They drove him back, pelting him with rocks and curses. In the hope of murder, they were delirious, and he would have been trampled if a woman hadn’t grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away.

  She pulled him back into the dark and up a small dark slope. At the top stood a line of railway cars, and one had fallen on its side. Climbing on the wheels, the woman undid the clasp and pulled the door back along its sliding track. It revealed a hole leading down into the hillside. The woman grabbed him by the arm and pitched him in over the side. He climbed down obediently. As she stood on the door above him, preparing to descend, trying to light an electric torch with inefficiently large fingers, Abu realized she was hurt. A stone had opened up a deep cut over one eye, and there was blood crusted around her lips. She had broken some teeth, and she was crying and slobbering and wheezing music through the ragged gaps. Tears flowed down her cheeks. This sign of weakness made her seem somehow even more violent and intimidating; standing below her, Abu thought he understood some of the animosity that ordinary people felt for the antinomial women. It came from fear. At hangings, the spectators wailed with delight and shouted obscenities. In prison, gangs of jailers raped them.

  Sniffling and wheezing blood, the woman fumbled with the torch. The prince reached up to help her, but she hit him across the face with the back of her hand, a careless slap, so that he staggered and fell down. She pushed back her hair and shook the flashlight furiously. Nothing happened, and so she threw it against the side of a nearby car, laughing when it shattered.

  The hole led down into a tunnel in the earth, barely big enough to crawl through. The woman pushed Abu
along it in the dark; he was on his hands and knees, and she pushed him from behind. Then, after a long while, the walls and ceiling seemed to open out, and she stopped pushing him; he sat down on a pile of stones while the woman muttered in the darkness, and groped around him, and found a lamp, and lit it. She squatted near him and ran her fingers experimentally over her face. The tune she hummed had changed. The frustration had gone out of it, and it seemed more methodical, more regular. She rose and went out of the circle of the lamp into the dark, and returned with a bucket of water which she put down on the floor and sat cross-legged around it, washing her face and rinsing her mouth. Then, to Abu’s surprise, she took a mirror and a comb out from a pocket in her shirt. The humming changed again as she examined her reflection—an intake of breath mixed with the melody, and Abu seemed to hear some humor in it too, when she smiled and displayed her broken teeth. She started to comb her hair.

  “Where are we?” asked the prince.

  The woman looked at him and frowned, a puzzled expression on her face, as if she had forgotten who he was.

  “Why did you bring me here? Please tell me . . .”

  She said nothing and resumed combing her hair.

  “Where am I?” repeated the prince miserably. He felt sick. His clothes were filthy and he was very tired.

  “You are free to go,” she said, motioning away into the dark.

  “No. I don’t know where I am. Do I sound ungrateful? I guess you saved my life. Back there it was so . . .”

  “Stop that,” she interrupted, pouting into the mirror. “There is a tune called, ‘I forget.’ ”

  “I can’t forget. It just happened.”

  “It is a hopeful tune.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “You’re safe here. There’s no need to be afraid.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I mean I don’t . . .”

  “Stop talking!” she said. “You are like a baby. I try to help, but you can only remember the last time you were fed and look forward to the next time. Why should you understand?”

  “Thank you,” muttered the prince. “Thank you for explaining so well. You people can be very irritating sometimes.” He leaned back against the pile of stones and closed his eyes.

  “You also,” said the woman softly, examining her teeth.

  “You’re awake,” said someone close to his ear.

  “Yes.”

  There was the sound of a match being struck, two sparks, and then a sudden light. The boy held a matchstick between his fingers. With his other hand, he stroked the cat in his lap. Before the match burned out, Abu could see other people around them, sitting, standing, nursing wounds, lying full length. The woman who had brought him there was lying down asleep.

  “Where are we?” asked Abu in the dark.

  Again the boy lit a match. It burned out, and he dropped it. When it was dark again, he said, “Picture it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fighting.”

  Once again, Abu didn’t understand. It was as if two different languages shared the same vocabulary. He sat up in the dark and caressed his forehead with his fingertips.

  “Picture it,” commanded the boy impatiently. He struck a third match, and Abu could see his imperious blue eyes, a man drinking from a bucket, other people looking at him.

  “I don’t understand,” he said when the light was out.

  “That’s right,” said the boy’s voice approvingly. “Confusion. Violence. Danger. Death. Picture death.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Neither can I. Neither can anyone.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We are slaves to circumstances beyond our control,” said the boy’s voice in the dark.

  “Can’t you make a light?”

  “Of course.” The boy lit a fourth match. “My sister saved your life,” he said when it was dark again.

  “I’m very grateful.”

  “Picture now. Sunrise. The barbarians go away.”

  “Look,” said Abu. “Couldn’t you please light some kind of lamp? Please?”

  “No. The picture is unpleasant.”

  “It’s hard for me to concentrate in the dark,” complained the prince.

  “No light. I prefer it. We prefer it. Someone would have lit one otherwise. There is a lamp.”

  “I know.”

  “But this is not a happy time for us. Not a proud time. Some of us are hurt. Tell me: why did you come here?”

  “I came to watch you dance. You invited me.”

  “Yes. I danced for you. You promised me a gift, and I refused. Now I want something.”

  “I brought you something.” Abu fumbled in his pockets as the boy struck a light. He had brought a purse filled with gold dollars, each one stamped with the head of the Beloved Angkhdt.

  The light went out, and Abu felt the boy take one of the coins out of his palm. “What good is this?” he asked.

  “It is more useful than guns.”

  “For a biter. I don’t know how to use it. I have a simple mind. No, I want something. Not this. Don’t make me say it. Guess.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I mean I can’t guess.”

  “Then I’ll tell you,” said the boy. “I want to understand my life. Is that shameful? You can see why I don’t want a light.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t say that anymore! I mean, why do men attack us in the night? Why do we have to live like this? What is the power in this horrible place? Where does it come from? How does it work? I’ve lived here all my life and I don’t know.”

  “I’m not sure . . .”

  “Don’t you understand? I live without history or knowledge. When we were free, that kept us free. Now we are slaves, it keeps us slaves.”

  There was a long silence, broken by the sound of splashing water. Finally Prince Abu cleared his throat.

  “They hate you,” he began, “because you are heretics. Atheists.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Because you eat meat.”

  “I don’t eat meat. I can remember every time I’ve tasted meat in my life. Nine times. We have nothing.”

  “Then they are told to hate you.”

  “Who tells them?”

  Prince Abu tried again. “Have you ever heard,” he asked, “of Nicobar Starbridge?”

  “Speak louder,” said a woman’s voice.

  “Nicobar Starbridge,” Abu continued, “was the founder of your . . . sect. A great heretic. This was . . . eight seasons, almost two full years ago.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the boy’s voice from close by. “Nicobar Starbridge. A barbarian.”

  Abu smiled. “Yes, a barbarian. Did you think you were a different species? There are men in Banaree who look just like you.”

  There was silence in the cave. The sensation of gathered human presence vanished suddenly, as if the space had emptied out and he were left alone, talking to the empty dark. “This was not so very long ago,” he said loudly. “Eight seasons, almost. Seven generations. Your father’s grandfather’s great-great-grandfather. I can’t believe you’ve never even heard of him. It was in summertime.”

  And then he told them, in the simplest language that he knew, their own story: how Nicobar Starbridge had been born a priest; how he had lived and studied in the capital, in the Twilight Temple. Even as a young man he had been famous as a conjurer and theologian, but he had run away before his first irrevocable vows, the night before he was to offer up his manhood on the altar. A temple servant had unlocked his cell, a woman, a seductress, and he had run away, taking some volumes from the library.

  He told them how the fugitive had lived like a beggar on the roads, dressed as the lowest kind of laborer, his tattoos covered with dirt. He had labored in the mines, in the quarries, in the lumberyards, among the poorest of the poor. And about how he had resurfaced
in the company of another woman, a Starbridge from Banaree. She had left her husband and her children to join him, and had cut the chains of matrimony to join him on the road and bring him money so that he could print the first of his books—a reinterpretation of the Song of the Beloved Angkhdt, and a new translation.

  Abu summarized the arguments of the book: how Nicobar Starbridge had claimed that the bishops and the archbishops had founded their authority on mistranslations. He claimed that the prophet’s great description of his soul’s journey through the universe, through Paradise and the planets of the nine hells, had never been intended allegorically. It was a simple travel diary in verse, telling of real places a real man had been; some he liked, some he hated. The prophet’s description of the perfect love that chains the universe and all mankind was, according to the new translation, part of a long erotic poem.

  Abu told them how, later, the priests had woven the erotic language of the Song of the Beloved Angkhdt back into allegory, so that later it had come to be accepted and become part of the myth. But in those days even to suggest that the song had a pornographic part was blackest heresy: Nicobar Starbridge and his mistress were hunted up and down the country, and the book was burned.

  Abu stopped talking. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m telling this badly. Am I making any sense?” How could they possibly have understood a word? And in fact nobody answered him, so he stopped to catch his breath. In a way, the darkness and the silence helped him to concentrate, and when he continued, it was as if he were explaining a series of pictures he never could have seen so clearly in the light. Some were real, some imaginary; the real ones better drawn but less well colored. Dark browns and grays, pictures from his nursery walls: Nicobar Starbridge sitting at a table in his monk’s cell, an ugly, pale boy, surrounded by books and all the hardware of conjuring and priestcraft, grinning devilishly at his image in a mirror. Nicobar Starbridge in yellow rags, preaching to the multitude, while to one side a naked woman is molested by monkeys and wild dogs, and in the window of a nearby house an old man is playing drunkenly upon a harpsichord. The riot at the bishop’s market and the destruction of the tea exchange, the crucifixion of the merchant princes, with Nicobar Starbridge in the foreground, a demonic figure in mock judicial robes, ripping pages out of a book held by two angels. And finally, the destruction of the rebel armies—October 51st, third phase of summer 00014: Borgo Starbridge, the bishop’s general, seated on a hill, poring over a military map, while on another hill stood the rebel city in the shape of a great chamber pot, and all around, the plain was covered with struggling black and yellow figures, soldiers and rebels, painted in exquisite detail. And in the background, the canvas is lit by a row of funeral pyres tended by skeletons and happy patriots, a picture in itself, the burning of ten thousand heretics, for the fires burned for months that summer, and on the horizon whole forests are cut down to feed the pyres, and men are building a pile of wood up higher than a hill to burn the temptress, the seductress, Nicobar Starbridge’s mistress and companion, devilishly beautiful, with burning hair, while from the clouds above her, dog-faced Angkhdt scowls down.