by Paul Park
“Thank you, Captain.”
“Thank you too, sir, in a way. I won’t be sorry to leave this place. It’s not like I’ve got a family. My son died here, in Ward Thirty-One. He was crippled, sir. Like you.”
They walked together up the ramp. “Where are the people from Rangriver?” asked Thanakar. “The last crusade. Are there any left?”
“I think there are a couple.”
They walked past cages of increasing size. Some had several dozen inmates.
“Here,” said the captain. “Try these.” He unlocked the door of one and stood aside. Thanakar forced himself to step in without looking, and when he was inside he turned around gratefully and smiled in spite of himself. It could have been worse. The captain reached in and turned on an overhead bulb. It illuminated six women against the far wall, lying or sitting in heaps of straw. They paid no attention to him.
The captain wrinkled his nose at the stench. “No rats here, sir,” he remarked. “They eat them.”
Thanakar looked around, relieved and encouraged by this small attempt to disgust him. The place was no worse than the worst nightmares: the smell, the sweaty walls, the women lying in rags, the oppressive silence emphasized rather than disturbed by the whine of the fluorescent light.
“These were from Rangriver?”
“Yes, sir. The males were all killed, by and large. The females were brought down, I forget the reason. It was before my time. There used to be a lot more.”
They had been young girls then. Now they were fully grown, and some even looked old, or at least their bodies did, withered and wasted on their giant skeletons. But their faces still looked young, because, again, no experience had marked them—the eternal present of their childhoods, the eternal present of their cell. Because it’s not pain that changes you, thought Thanakar; it’s the memory of pain, the memory of happiness. No one else could have survived so long here. In a way, their childhoods had been perfect training for a life in prison. Here in their cell, freedom and bondage had resolved.
“They used to sing all the time in here,” remarked the captain. “All day and all night, when I first came. You used to hear them all the way down. They’ve stopped, now.”
Thanakar remembered the storyteller from Rangriver, singing to him and Abu the whole night while Abu drank. “Even in the purest there are deep biting instincts,” he had said. Thanakar remembered the phrase now, because one of the women was looking at him with eyes full of calculation. It made her look foreign in that place: a large woman, with yellow hair and straight hard features. She seemed healthier than the others, more flesh on her bones, more supple and muscular under her ripped clothes.
“You,” she said. Her voice was low and musical, even in a single word, because music seemed to surround it, like the setting around a jewel. She might be beautiful, thought Thanakar. Or perhaps she once had been, before her face was branded with the cross and circle, and marred by self-awareness. She sat cross-legged, stroking the hair of another woman, who lay with her face hidden in her lap. “You,” she repeated.
“Yes? Please talk to me. Don’t be afraid. I’m a doctor.”
“Yes, Doctor. My sister is dying.” She dropped her eyes and stroked the woman’s hair. Thanakar stepped to look and squatted down. The woman lay on her side, breathing softly. Her right forearm was swollen, and the skin was green and mottled purple. He could smell the rot.
“It is best to kill her. She is in pain,” said the yellow-haired woman in her luminous voice.
“She thinks I’m a parson,” muttered Thanakar. He took the sick woman’s wrist in his hand, but she whimpered and pulled away.
“Look at her,” said the yellow-haired woman. “She is in pain. She is free to live or die, but pain is something else.”
Thanakar sat back on his heels in the straw. “She can’t stay here,” he told the captain.
Spanion Locke stared at him evenly, and then shifted his eyes to look out through the bars of the cell, out into the dark.
“We’ve got to take her down,” said the doctor presently.
When the captain turned back, his face had changed, as if softened in the heat of the room. It was still ugly, or rather still more so, as if his deformed features were struggling with feelings even more deformed. “You can’t, sir,” he said at last. “You just can’t. You know you can’t. Why do you . . .” and he broke off, his mouth still working, his eyes filled with tears.
A minute passed, and then the doctor shrugged and started to unpack his bag. He leaned over the sick woman and took her arm into his lap. She tried to pull away, and turned to face him, and opened a pair of glass-green eyes. The doctor tried to lose his misgivings in activity, arranging bottles on the floor, choosing syringes, but whenever he touched her she cried out. He took out slicing hooks, and clamps, and body shears, and incense, and a gold statuette of Angkhdt the Preserver, and he arranged them on a piece of cloth. He took out a chart of the planets and, glancing at his wristwatch, made calculations in red chalk on the stone floor, and drew circles with stars inside, and diagrams of the zodiac, and abbreviated prayers in a special doctor’s script. Yet every time he touched her, the woman kicked and moaned. “Don’t torture her, Doctor,” said her sister with the yellow hair. “It’s pointless, now that she is almost free.” Thanakar lit a candle and said nothing, only frowned at the hypodermic point as he prepared an anaesthetic. Then he put it down. He looked at Captain Locke. “What do you think?” he asked.
“She’ll die anyway, won’t she, sir?”
“Probably. Up here.”
“Then don’t be selfish, sir. Give her what she wants.”
* * *
Charity Starbridge switched on the light in her bedroom in the commissar’s tower far below. At the moment when the doctor was making the first gestures of his art, had lit the incense and made a row of chalkmarks along the antinomial’s forearm, representative of the Angkhdtian symbols for cleanliness and health, as well as chemical diagrams of the nine principal causes of infection—at that moment Charity was thinking about him as she lay in bed. Though not as he appeared then, stripped to his undershirt, his long face dripping sweat, but in his dark blue Starbridge uniform, as he looked that night when her husband had invited him to dinner. He was not handsome, but that didn’t matter. Her life had been so sheltered, she had never formed an image of the word. Except for Abu and the commissar, she had not seen another man of legal breeding age since before the time she found them interesting. Not even a servant, not even at a distance. Her bedroom had no windows. It contained nothing but one enormous bed. According to scripture and commentary and tradition, she was not supposed to let a single outside interest diffuse the energy of holy love. According to scripture; but her parents had married her to a man three times her age, who had already been burned to a cinder on the altar of matrimony by three dedicated wives. She had inherited their bed and their library, but the devotional literature disturbed her rest, so that sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night, out of breath from dreaming.
Awake, her natural modesty, her simplicity, her ignorance all filled her mind with such a mist that the figures of her dreams were lost in it. They capered just beyond the limits of her imagination. And though in her dreams they had no faces, when she was awake that’s all they had, or rather, one face only, the doctor’s, the only face she knew. She saw it now, rising from the mist, huge, disembodied like a god, his high pale forehead, his long hair, his short black beard. That afternoon, she had fallen asleep over a book, and in the evening when she turned on the electric light beside her bed, his face was all that she had left, even though she knew her dream had not been about him.
For months she had been suffering from a kind of lethargy. She lost weight, slept twelve hours out of the day, had no interest in anything. She barely spoke. It was against law and tradition for her to have unpleasant and unhappy thoughts. That was impossible to police, but lately she found it hard to think of anything acceptable to say. She h
ad forgotten all of the charm, all of the manners that she had learned in school. The commissar had noticed it. He was a gentle old man; too gentle. When the doctor came to see her, he stood behind her and stroked her neck, and the commissar was so kind, he didn’t even stay in the same room. She had everything to make her happy, she reflected sadly.
She picked up her book from where it had fallen beside her pillow. Aspects of Religious Theory. She tried to find her place.
. . . in that area, orthodoxy has combined with an older paganism. They believe that the universe was created out of the semen of Beloved Angkhdt, and, more specifically, spring rain comes from the same source, which is responsible for its color and viscosity. They worship stone idols with enormous phalluses. Sodomy and fellatio, as described in Angkhdt verses 21 through 56, among others, they regard as sacraments, though even among these people there are fierce doctrinal disputes. The most austere, or Dharimvars, regard these passages as purely symbolic. Their priests lead lives of strict asceticism. But the Kharimvars, or “followers of the darker path,” interpret these verses literally, using the crudest translations. Worshippers take the celebrant’s sexual organ into their mouths when they receive the sacrament, though here again there are sectional debates: whether this is a public or a private ceremony, whether it should proceed to literal or symbolic orgasm, and so forth. The more extreme of these practices have been proscribed by the emperor, though they are thought to linger in the more backward areas of Charn. They choose their clergy democratically, from among the youngest and most virile, which is a heresy . . .
Thanakar relaxed and sat back, and stretched out his leg. The woman’s arm was off; it lay like a bleeding animal in the straw, bleeding through its open mouth. He had sewn the stump up with plastic thread and then with miraculous skill had spun a new arm for her out of memory and magic, and silver wire and rags of silver latex. He had joined it to her flesh and laid it on her breast, tied in a sling around her neck. It was lifeless still, but pulsing gently, a source of energy and light.
“It’s amazing,” said Spanion Locke, squatting by his side.
“Starbridge technology,” answered Thanakar. “We’ve had to specialize in battlefield injuries.”
“Will it work?”
“It should. Some people never learn to use them. The ones who try too hard.”
It had been a long operation. The blood had soaked their clothes. Spanion Locke had helped him when the woman struggled. She was unconscious now, and the two men looked at each other over her body, feeling a bond. Their hands had touched from time to time during the surgery, slippery with blood.
“Thank you,” said Thanakar, after a while.
For an answer, Spanion Locke took some cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his uniform, lit one and passed the other with his lighter, taking care not to pollute the filter end. The woman was breathing easier now, lying on her back with her head in her sister’s lap, a little spit in the corner of her mouth. Though he rarely smoked marijuana, Thanakar lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, and sat back with his shoulders against the wall. The cell was so hot, so filthy.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“I was wondering. Maybe you have some medicine for me. Some little pill, maybe. Something quick.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll see you again.”
“I doubt it, sir. The chaplain is a hard man to please. It’d have been different if you’d killed her. They might have laughed.”
“I know the bishop’s secretary. Don’t worry. I’ll go see him in the morning.”
“Please, sir, don’t make things worse. I’m not complaining. I’ve been God’s soldier my whole life. I’m not afraid. I won’t be sorry to leave. Except for . . . sometimes they’re a little rough.”
“I don’t carry poisons, Captain.”
“No, sir.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, sir.”
Only one of the antinomials had paid the operation any attention. The rest had sat and stared out between the bars. One lay on her stomach and drew patterns in a pool of tacky blood. But the woman with the yellow hair had sat staring evenly, stroking her sister’s head with gentle repetitive fingers.
“She is alive,” she said.
“Yes,” confirmed the doctor, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “She’ll live. Will you change her bandages? I’ll show you how.”
“No biting, Doctor. There’s no need. She is free to change them or not.”
The doctor shrugged and closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the wall. Presently he heard the jingle of a chain, and he opened them again. The woman was pulling her manacles back along one wrist, uncovering a silver bracelet. She fumbled with the clasp. “I can pay you,” she said.
“No. There’s no need.” He smiled in spite of himself.
“No. You don’t understand.” She gestured towards the captain. “He understands. Death is the silent music, the still dancing, the dark mountain, the snow that never breaks under your feet. You’re cheating her. But even so I have no wish to owe you anything. Nor does she.”
She undid the clasp and threw the bracelet to him, and he caught it. It was a beautiful thing, a circlet of carved silver, a pattern of animals devouring one another. “Your men are very honest,” remarked Thanakar to the captain.
Locke shrugged, and stubbed his cigarette against his boot. “It’s real silver,” he said. “I’m forbidden to touch it. It’s no use to any of my men. She’s offered it all round.”
“Ah yes, of course.” Silver and gold were Starbridge metals. Other people had to use stone currency. The doctor held the bracelet in his hand, examining it in the light. It made him think of something, reminded him of something. He looked at the woman curiously. What was it?
She was tall, with golden hair and yellow eyes, a shade common among her people: dark yellow, almost brown. Her skin was dark, still dark after more than eighty months’ imprisonment. She was dressed in rags, as they all were, but hers had once been red and made of some softer material, maybe velvet. That also resonated in his memory. It was not that he had seen her before. But certain things about her reminded him of elements to a song.
Then he remembered. When he had gone down to the docks the first time, and Abu was drunk—it had been a long night, and the white-eyed antinomial had played and sung and talked about his childhood up above Rangriver, when all the world was snow—it had been a boring night, and much of the music Thanakar had neither heard nor understood. But one thing had touched him. There was a girl in the story, and when the antinomial had spoken about her, every time she had come into the story, a little music had come in with her and mixed with the other music. It was his way of naming her, and he had sung it sometimes with a kind of hunger and sometimes hesitantly and unsure, and then especially, listening, Thanakar had caught a glimpse of how she must have been, half delicate, half wild, running and stumbling through the crusty snow, her golden hair wild around her face, or later in the last days of the thaw, dancing under risen Paradise, or riding through that high red valley where the sun barely rose, in red velvet and a bracelet on her wrist. Just a few sweet notes, a song of hunger still unsatisfied, but later Thanakar could hear how all the other notes and music took their tone from those few notes, and he had thought that when that man had said he loved her, that was what the world meant to him, that her music had entered into his, and there was nothing he could ever do to separate them.
In the hot cell, Thanakar sat forward and tried to explain it to her, but without the notes it was useless, and the notes eluded him. She just sat there, her eyes as empty as windows, stroking her sister’s hair. With music, he felt that he could break her heart; without it, it was just barbarian drivel—he could hear the clattering as he tried to talk. “ ‘The night the soldiers came . . .’ ” and then he stopped, because she was staring at him patiently, vacantly, stroking, stroking.
The music came to him late that night. He sat up in bed, and w
hen he lay back down, he thought he had it imprisoned in his heart. But by morning it was gone, and he ate breakfast with the rain coating the windows, trying to remember. A dozen notes, that was all, what was it? Gone. But he had kept the bracelet. And afterward he went to show Abu. He met the commissar in the hall.
“He’s still in there,” complained the old man. “Damned inconvenient. Just because I didn’t . . . well. I don’t know what I could have done. Pure chance that I found him at all. He was in one of those caves. Safe and sound, not a scratch. He’s been in bed ever since. Only opens up for meals. You don’t think,” he continued anxiously, “that he’d try anything stupid. I haven’t seen him this bad for months, damn him. Just like his father. Temperamental. Damned rain.” He was very worried. His eyes avoided the doctor’s, and he sucked nervously on a sourball. The rain was cracking the slates, flooding the terraces.
The doctor asked him about Spanion Locke.
“Can’t help you there,” said the old man. “Like to. Can’t. That’s the purge up there. But the chaplain’s deaf and blind; he might not notice. I’m the regular police. Not our jurisdiction. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Would you? Thanks.”
“Stupid fools. Both of you. I’ll see what I can do. Nothing, probably.”
“Thank you.”
The commissar went off muttering, and Thanakar was left alone. Thinking about Locke, he felt less patience for his cousin. The prince had suffered from morbidity ever since he was a child. Once he had tried to cut his wrists. “Imagine him as an adult,” the commissar had grumbled then. In fact, a young Starbridge had nothing to complain of: nothing but parties and dancing lessons and indulgent schoolteachers trying to recompense their students for long lives of marriage, or short lives at the battlefront. Abu’s morbidity had exempted him from the services. “Doesn’t make any sense,” remarked the commissar. “Suicides are what they need, especially among officers.”
