by Paul Park
Abu and the doctor had both been left behind, and sometimes it was depressing when relatives came back, wounded or decorated, and sometimes Thanakar wondered whether that was the only thing that had drawn them together, the cripple and the fool. Outside Abu’s room, he sat sketching furiously on an envelope—dragons, gangsters, the commissar with his piglike face. The pencil lead ripped through the paper.
Near where he sat at a desk in the hallway, a casement window blew open. He rose to close it, but it slipped from between his fingers as the wind caught it like a wing and beat it back against the wall. The window broke, so that even when he had forced it closed and bolted it, the day still spat at him through lips of broken glass. It was raining hard. He caught some water on his tongue and tasted it experimentally, even though he knew it was too early yet for the sweet rain, the sugar rain that changed the climate. Still, this was the start of it, and even though there was nothing in books or family histories but stories of disaster from this phase of spring, even so he was disappointed by the rain’s thin texture, its insipid taste, and he looked forward to new weather. Then the rain would fall for months on end, and flood the city, and wash all dirt and beggary down into the swollen sea, and kill what crops there were, and cover the hills with seed, the semen of Beloved Angkhdt piled ten feet deep. And then the summer jungles, the tiger and the black adder, the gorilla and the pregnant orchid, all the myths of his childhood would sprout up into life, watered by the rain.
Disappointed, he turned back into the hall. Abu’s closed door enraged him. He pounded on it and grabbed the handle as if to force it, but it wasn’t locked. It opened suddenly into the prince’s bedroom.
Inside, Abu stood in the dark next to his huge bay window, looking out over the city. Rain fell in sheets against the glass, and it was as if he were standing in a dark aquarium looking into an enormous tank, for the weather had filled the room with shadows, while all outside the world was turbulent and wet and full of water, and the thunderclouds were dark as rocks, and colored scraps of cloud flew everywhere like fish, high up above the colored rooftops, and in the farthest distance a huge rainbow leapt against the afternoon. The sun was burning in the tempest’s eye. A rainbow spanned the hills.
The prince didn’t move or turn. He was in his bathrobe. “Look, Cousin,” he cried out, and his voice was full of childish delight. Thanakar looked from where he was.
The room was padded like a child’s room, the walls and ceiling hung with tapestries—pictures from Starbridge nursery rhymes or children’s tales from holy scripture: innocent pastels of holy love, and Angkhdt himself still had his trousers on. The floor was thick with carpets and the room was dark, because the prince never burned electric lights. He preferred candles.
Thanakar looked around. The great four-poster bed was a tumult of soft quilts, and there was an uneaten avocado on a silver tray and undrunk liquor in a jar. The place stank sweetly of decadence and self-indulgence, because Thanakar had decided to forgive nothing this afternoon, and every little thing annoyed him more—the silver pillbox, the open book of poetry, the knife. The knife most of all. It lay on the bedstead on a silken pillow, and it angered him most because it was just a pose, like so much else, or so he thought until he saw his friend turn towards him, and saw the silken bandages all down his wrists and on his hands.
“Oh, Abu,” he said wearily. “What is this? What the hell is this?”
“No biting, Cousin. Please, Cousin.” The prince smiled at him. “Come look at the rainbow.”
“Oh, Abu,” repeated Thanakar. He reached out to put his arms around his friend, to comfort him, he thought, though it was he who was shaking, and the prince seemed perfectly calm, and smiled at him, and rubbed him clumsily across the back.
“Hush, Cousin,” said Abu. “It’s not what you think.”
“Not what I think? Look at you. You’re not fit to be left alone,” and he pulled the prince down to the bed and sat beside him, so that he could unwrap his hands. The prince was laughing. “Ow,” he said, “that really hurts,” because the bandages were rough, just torn from some shirts and soaked in oil, and they stuck to his scabs. His palms and wrists were a mass of cuts. Whole pieces of flesh had been cut away.
“Let me see it in the light,” said Thanakar. He stood up and walked to the door to the lightswitch, but Abu told him there were no bulbs, and then tried to light a candle, and laughed because the movement hurt his hands, until the doctor came and lit it for him.
“I wasn’t going to show you,” said the prince. “Not until they healed better.”
“My God, look at you,” said Thanakar, examining the cuts. “What have you done to yourself?”
“It’s not what you think,” said the prince again. “I was stupid, I know. But I wanted to see if I could cut them out. Cut them away.”
“What?”
“The tattoos.”
“Oh my God.”
“I couldn’t,” said the prince sadly. “They go all the way in. Down to the bone. How can you be something you’re not? Every layer, there’s another layer. The image just gets clearer and clearer the deeper you go, as if it were underneath and you were cutting towards it. The golden sun.” He closed his hand, and winced at the pain.
Thanakar leaned to smell his breath. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you drunk?”
Abu laughed. “Not very. But I’ve got some really good hash. Charity put it on my tray for breakfast. I mean, the commissar got it from some priest, but he doesn’t like it much.”
“From a priest?”
“Some priest in his department. Those bastards always have the best drugs.”
“You’ve seen Charity?”
“She’s been cooking my meals.”
“Charity?”
“Sure. She puts hash in everything. I couldn’t even finish the guacamole.” He reached for a silver pipe by his bedside, but his hands were still too clumsy to use. Thanakar fixed it for him and lit it, and the prince sucked in a lot of smoke. “Do you want some?” he squeaked, still inhaling.
“No thanks,” said Thanakar, nursing the match. “It makes me feel as if everybody hated me.”
The prince laughed until he choked and started to cough. “What’s so funny about that?” asked Thanakar.
In the end, Thanakar forgot about the bracelet. Instead, he smoked hashish, and when in late afternoon he staggered down to his car, the rain was still pouring. “Not good, this,” remarked his driver as they idled at a crossroad where a cart was stuck in the mud, the porters striving and shouting as the rain burst along their backs. “Rain’s early.”
“It’s not sugar rain.”
“No, Sir. It’ll come. My great-great-grandfather moved away south at the first drop last year, and didn’t come home till the third July that summer, when the prince was born. Your grandfather, sir. He was an old man then.”
“Who?”
“My great-great-grandfather. My father told me.”
Thanakar was finding this hard to follow. “So you’ll go too?” he asked.
“Not now, sir. Too old. Besides, the prince used to have property down there. Your grandfather, sir. Your father too.”
“Don’t rub it in.” Thanakar stared glumly out the window. The car could go no further. Imported, like all engines, from across the seas, it was feeling its age. It was a relic from the previous year, from before the winter snow had blocked the port. Thanakar felt its cylinders misfiring gently; the gunpowder was damp. Ahead, the way was blocked by skinny vagrants in their yellow clothes, shrieking and cursing and weeping at the rain.
* * *
Miles away, Colonel Aspe stood on a balcony in the Temple of Kindness and Repair, a vast sprawl of cloisters and shrines on a hill outside the city. He had been talking in the amphitheater of the Inner Ear when the storm broke, and he had stopped midword to walk out from among the shrill old men, to watch the lightning from the balcony and suck deep draughts of air while the clouds thundered and spewed. They sicke
ned him, the priests of Charn. He turned to watch them through the window, the rain on the outside of the glass streaking their faces and their clothes. They didn’t even know that he had left, most of them, and he could hear them begging with him and pleading as if he were still there to hear. The bishop’s secretary, a bony-faced old man, was in the bishop’s chair, a cigarette hanging from between his bloodless lips, while all around him, in various attitudes of agitation and repose, reclined the members of his council. Some were clearly dead, others less clearly so, sleeping the last drugged sleep of the Starbridges. There were dozens of them lining the tiers of the amphitheater. All were dressed in red and golden robes, and since some were deaf, and most were blind, and some were dead, they communicated by means of art. A golden cord wound between them, up and down the steps. They held it in a variety of fingers, some fat and fleshy, some mummified and dry.
In the rain, the colonel snorted with contempt, and the rain ran down his uniform and down his back. He was a tall man, even for an antinomial, and old too, with long white hair. He was seamed and scarred with lines like silver in his pale skin, running like silver over his eyelids and his cheeks, his shoulders and his chest. His eyes gleamed black and empty, and his nose was beaked like the beak of a bird. He hated priests. He felt like strangling them or whipping them insensible. Partly it was the natural abhorrence of his race, and partly it was the sight of them, fat, dead, dying, arguing over foregone conclusions. He knocked his steel fist against the windowpane. Nobody noticed.
In this backward and neglected province of the empire, where the seasons came so hard, priests held sovereign power all through the spring. They were a cult of sorcerers, and they mutilated themselves and studied magic long forgotten elsewhere. Their leader was a bishop-whore, a living goddess of pornography, and Colonel Aspe itched to see her, to grasp her by the throat. He distrusted women. But already he had come to understand that she was nothing in these councils, a figurehead and not even that. All power twined like a nervous golden serpent through the fingers of the priests.
They realized he was gone and fell silent, communicating through the cord. Young priests gelded themselves at the time of their first vows; from then on, periodically, they would burn out one of their senses or cut off one of their limbs in a gruesome public ritual. The compensation, they believed, was in a stronger spirit, increased capacities for conjuring, telepathic power. They could summon demons, and angels from Paradise, and bring the dead to life. That was well known. It was best to take them seriously, thought Aspe.
In the courtyard below him, pilgrims waited in the rain, wrapped in sopping blankets. A monk moved among them, sheltered by a scarlet umbrella. The colonel leaned over the balustrade and spat in their direction. There was no chance of hitting them at that distance. But even so the action soothed him, prepared him for the inevitable hours of talk before his will was accomplished. He tightened the focus of his mind and reentered the room.
Inside, the priests sat in ascending circles, or reclined on low benches around a fire sunk into the middle of the floor. The fire was magic, giving off neither smoke nor gas, nothing but a drugged perfume that made it hard to think. The colonel avoided the chair that had been set for him. He never sat when he could stand. Instead, he reached across the fire to take the golden cord into his hand. It looped down low, almost to the floor, between a skeleton wrapped in crimson silk and an obese, footless old man. The colonel stooped and took it between his fingers, and chafed it with the ball of his thumb. It was an unknown substance, between cloth and metal, and against his skin he felt the tingle of a mild electric current. He resisted the impulse to try and break it, because he knew it would not break. He let it go.
The bishop’s secretary threw his marijuana cigarette into the fire. During the first part of the colonel’s audience, while Aspe had recited the emperor’s letter amid a whining drizzle of protest, the old man had sat as if asleep. Now he spoke. “You’re a very violent man, Colonel,” he observed. “Very . . . violent.”
“I’m a soldier,” croaked the colonel in his harsh empty voice.
“A soldier, yes. I wish the emperor had sent us more like you. We had petitioned him for soldiers, not staff officers.”
“He has sent you thousands, and you’ve butchered them all with your criminal imcompetence. There are no other soldiers like me. How long has your war with Caladon been going on?”
“I believe you know the answer to that question, Colonel.”
“I know that every day the adventists grow stronger and more arrogant. As I was riding here, not fifty miles from the capital, I passed a village where a crowd had gathered to listen to an adventist preacher. Not fifty miles.”
“These are difficult times, Colonel.”
“Worse than you think. You know King Argon has had a son?”
“So we had heard.”
“You are familiar with the apocalypse of St. Chrystym Polymorph?”
“There are so many different kinds of heresy,” sighed the bishop’s secretary.
“This is no heresy. This is one of your saints. And the vision is a true one. Listen: ‘When the rain comes, a Lion will come also, a King’s son out of the North. And he will catch the Serpent in his teeth. And with the first bite all false prophets will be bitten away. And with the second bite, all tyrants and oppressors, and all those who oppress the poor. And with the third bite, all false priests and tyrants. And his horoscope will be . . .’ ”
“Stop! Yes, we know all this. Great powers of darkness are arrayed against us. But prophecies come and go. For a long time, this new king was to have come out of your own people, Colonel, and the adventists quoted other texts. But we are still here, and where are you? Broken and scattered. Yes, it is a dismal time. But we have our own prophecies.”
“Then it must be clear to you why the emperor wishes you to win this war. He had no interest in your struggle with King Argon until this new prince was born. Now everything has changed. Now every adventist and heretic in the empire is looking northward. And if Argon wins this battle . . .”
“It is clear to us. The emperor’s wishes are the same as ours. What is less clear is why he has not chosen to send us any more soldiers.”
“They have become too precious to throw away. He will send soldiers, as many as are needed, after I am installed here as commander, with or without your consent.”
As he spoke, the colonel paced the room, the only movement in it, except for the silent oscillations of the priests’ necks as they followed his pacing with blind eyes. The bishop’s secretary raised up his hand and, spreading the fingers, he stretched it out towards the moving figure. “I thought so,” he muttered. “I thought I recognized you.” Aloud he said, “I require confirmation of the order. I don’t believe it. The emperor is the defender of our faith.”
“This is a practical matter. It is not a question of religion,” said Aspe.
“All questions are religious questions. God has given his government into the hands of his ministers. It cannot be taken away.”
“But we are talking about the army.”
“Colonel, you and I are not stupid men. We know what we are talking about. But it doesn’t matter. Even if you force me to submit, the army will never follow you.”
The colonel laughed. “I have reason to believe you’re wrong. Any army tires of being slaughtered month after month, even the most devout. Your standing orders have not endeared you to the men. Medical treatment for officers only. Four thousand men murdered because you refused to issue them ammunition, even though you had it.”
“They were not the right caste to carry firearms. Warfare has laws as immutable as God’s. We follow traditions of strategy beyond your comprehension.”
“True enough. Your strategy has allowed a modern army to penetrate to sixty miles from where we stand. In your own self-interest . . .”
“We have faith in God, Colonel.”
“I am relieved to hear it.”
“Yes. It must surpris
e you. Even if we were able to accept a new commander, do you think we could accept a man like you? I recognize you. I was here when they brought you down from the mountains, caged like an animal. Cannibal! What was your name then, Colonel?”
“I can’t deny it. But I’ve been a long time in the emperor’s service. He freed me. He raised me up. And I have accepted the true faith.”
“Have you? Every word you speak betrays your ignorance of it. A convert? No.” The old man rose from his chair and staggered forward a few paces towards the fire, his hands stretched out. The candles along the wall flickered and went out one by one, leaving the amphitheater dark except for the fire in its center. A cold draught came up from nowhere. The crooked figure of the secretary seemed to grow, augmented by its own shadow, and under his hands the air seemed to take shape, until Aspe could see a demon squatting on the coals, impudent, malignant, naked, with a tongue two feet long, curling like a serpent from his lips. The demon seized his phallus by the root between both hands, and squeezed and squeezed until it grew huge, and he could curl his tongue around its head. The colonel sank into his chair. The smell of incense was overpowering.
The demon leered at him, and squeezed and licked until his erection was huge and trembling. He held it upright in both hands, and licked until it gushed sperm like a fountain, flowing over his fingers in repulsive profusion. And the room grew dark, because the flow steamed and sizzled on the fire until it was extinguished, and there was nothing but the secretary’s mild voice.
“Salvation is a chemical process,” he explained. “Do you think it is enough to believe in it? Is that what they teach now in the emperor’s churches? No, Colonel. Men like you are the scourings of Paradise. You arrive on earth so deformed by sin, your flesh so hard with it, your damnation is a matter of course. Would you like to see? Would you like to see it?”
As he spoke, the fire started to glow again, and there appeared above it, as if supported on the fumes, an image of the universe, the sun in the middle, burning and changing color, while all around it, in long erratic orbits, revolved Paradise and the nine planets of hell. Slowly, as the colonel watched, they pursued their vagrant courses, some set so close together that they almost touched as they passed, the delicate circles of their orbits elongated or contracted by proximity. Some would brush the sun by a hand’s breadth, and then set off on long solitary journeys to the farthest corners of the room. Eight gleamed like precious stones, lit from within by the power of the sun: amethyst, ruby, coral, jade. Two differed—Paradise, evanescent and white, tossed from one orbit to another, spinning lightly among the other planets like a bubble of milk, and Earth. Beautiful Earth. It floated almost into the colonel’s grasp; he snatched at it, and his hand passed through it. Then he looked again, through the layers of cotton cloud that wrapped it, and he could see continents, mountains, oceans, cities, men, all on a sphere as small as his clenched fist.
