by Paul Park
But as he made the incision, Thanakar had grabbed his wrist and slapped his hand away. He had stood and kicked him as he went down, and hurt his leg, so that later he could barely stand. Then he had wasted more time than he should have on the boy, who died anyway. He had given him the last of the morphine, and stopped him from crying out so loud.
This life was hard on Thanakar’s leg, riding on horseback and working all the time. Kicking priests. It felt good in a way.
“You can’t go around kicking priests,” said the man at the campfire. “Not and not hear about it.”
“He wasn’t a priest.”
“Close enough. Pass the can.”
Thanakar held out the whiskey. “Don’t drink up all the anaesthetic,” he said.
“A man could use a little.” In the tents behind them, quavering voices sang the national anthem.
The surgeon spy had gone back towards the city with a train of wounded, muttering curses and threats. “Glad to see the last of him,” said the man. “Still, I wonder what he’ll say. Not so bad for you, being a Starbridge. But he might decide to take it out on the rest of us.”
“I’m not sure the bishop has the power she once had. The colonel’s an atheist.”
“Temporarily. He’s not long for this world, the way he fights.”
“Still, he seems to be winning.”
“Mmph. Damned cannibal.”
Thanakar looked at Charity Starbridge through his mind’s eye. She was sitting up in bed with a pillow clasped to her chest, wrinkling her nose. It was hard for him to put together a scene with her, or a conversation. He had spoken to her so rarely. In the prince’s bedroom he had said almost nothing, just limped up behind her as she stood fingering the prince’s suits, and put his hands around her waist. Sleeping with her once, he hadn’t yet begun to touch the fantasy he had of helping her unlock the prison of her manners, so that he could coax her out, so that she could say what she felt sometimes. In the morning she had barely spoken, though she had been eager to touch him, to say goodbye.
“Good evening, Commissar,” said the man, making gestures of respect.
“Good evening, Captain. Don’t get up. Is Captain Thanakar around?”
“You’re stepping on him, sir.”
“Ah. My boy.”
“Micum.” The doctor roused himself. “Where did you come from?”
“Just crossing back. I went up to listen to some music.”
“No need for that, sir,” said the man. “We’ve got our own.” He jerked his thumb back towards the tents.
“So I noticed. What is that noise?”
“Choir practice, sir. Half a bottle for an arm, three-quarters for a leg. Have some.” He held out the can.
“Thank you, Captain.” Micum brushed off a rock and sat down by the fire.
“What music?” asked Thanakar.
“Antinomials. They’re camped over the next ridge.”
“Damned cannibals,” muttered the man, but Thanakar sat up. In six weeks he hadn’t seen one. They didn’t come much to the hospital, preferring to ignore a wound or kill themselves if it got too bad. “Are we that near to the front?” he asked.
“Not much of a front,” said the commissar. “And we’re not very near it. Aspe sent them back to rest.” He frowned. “They’ve been out repacifying.”
“Murderous bastards,” said the man. “Aspe’s just as bad. Sir,” he added when he noticed the commissar’s raised eyebrows.
“He’s a great commander.”
“He’s a lunatic. Sir.”
Micum laughed. “Perhaps. I’d think you’d be obliged to him, getting you into uniform. Without him, you’d still be delivering babies.”
“I’m not complaining, sir,” said the man. “But it was bound to happen. My great-great-grandfather was a doctor in this war.”
“How long ago was that?”
The man squinted. “One full year.”
“There, you see? You’re the first doctors this season. In my time, we never had such luxuries. Officers, of course, but all the rest, we just had to shoot them in rows and send them back for the priests to sort out. They’d be having parties just behind the lines. Funeral rites. You could hear them every night, and see the fireworks. It was cold, back then. This whole area was under snow, the first time I came out. Of course, we were never this close in. We were winning, that season. At one point, we almost thought we’d won.”
They were sitting around a fire, in a hollow in the rocks out of the wind: Micum and Thanakar, and the man. He was a Starbridge halfbreed on his father’s side, but unlike most, he had been acknowledged by his father and sent to school. That accounted for his easy manners with all classes, and he was not likely to be punished for them either, because he was a good doctor, and in the city he had been licensed to treat Starbridges, though only with his right hand. He was a big man, and his hair was red, not one of the criminal shades, but too bright for comfort, and if he had gotten into other kinds of trouble, it might have been held against him. In the city he had dyed it, as many did.
Now it was beginning to grow out. His name was Patan Bloodstar. His mother had been a nurse.
“Got a letter from Charity,” said the commissar. “She sends her love.”
Thanakar frowned, wondering what a letter from Charity would look like. “I am well. I hope you are well. I saw something today that made me happy, thinking of you . . .” There were form books for all types of letters, prepared by the bishop’s council for the use of wives, and if the letters varied depending on the horoscope, the season, the date, their tone never varied. Charity would follow them scrupulously, Thanakar imagined, and if she allowed in any bitterness or substance, it would take a clearer eye than the commissar’s to see it. Or if there was any bitterness, perhaps she would express it in the sarcastic beauty of her calligraphy, the complicated ideographs which proclaimed her education and housed her foolish sentiments as a palace would a slave.
“Charity is my wife,” explained the commissar.
Bloodstar stared at him, and made a little circle with his lips. “You’re a liberal man, sir,” he said after a pause.
“Not at all. Thanakar is like a son to me.”
“Well, sir,” said Bloodstar. “Here’s to the end of stupidness.” He toasted with the can. “My grandmother told me that in summer married women used to walk out in the streets. I guess it was too hot to stay inside. I’d like to live to see it.”
This kind of talk made Thanakar feel ashamed, as if he and Charity, by sleeping together, had somehow justified the bishop’s regulations. There were acres of cells up on the mountain reserved for adulterers, and they were mostly empty these days. Thanakar wondered if come summer they were mostly full.
“If things are going to change at all,” the commissar was saying, “we have to trust each other.”
From the ridge above them came the sound of gunfire, just a few shots, and then some yelling in the dark, and a dog howling. Then silence, and then the dog started to howl again, nearer now. The sound stretched and broke, suddenly, and there was silence again in the dark night, for the amputees had quieted down. And then they heard a woman’s voice calling out, very near. The commissar got to his feet. There were sounds of some rocks falling, and the frightened neighing of a horse, and the voice calling out again, wordless and soothing. Then they could hear the horse’s hooves, down on the bedrock where they had camped, coming towards them. A dog slunk out from between two boulders and stood grinning, his tongue hanging out.
The shadow of a horse stepped out of the darkness, its hooves talking on the bare rock. It hesitated for a moment outside the circle of firelight, and then it stepped inside, suddenly diminished as it shed night’s bulky cloak. On its back sat a young woman and a boy, staring down at them. They were dressed in horsehair breeches, and naked from the waist up. The woman sat behind, holding the reins in one hand and a rifle in the other, its barrel pointed to the sky. The firelight shone on her skin and her small breasts,
her proud face and the bandage wrapped around her forehead.
The boy leaned back against her. In one hand he carried a small horn, a mess of copper tubing coiled like a whip. Across his knees hung the body of a rock cat, bright gold in that light, still dripping blood. Tied to the saddle horn between his legs swung a battered trophy, a man’s severed head, tied up by his hair.
“Welcome,” said the commissar.
“Good hunting,” said the boy.
Behind them, the singing had been quiet for a while, but then from the tents broke out a long blubbering cry, as a drunken man awoke to what he had lost. The horse shied at the sound, and the woman reined it in a narrow stamping circle. It kicked nervously at the stones, kicking up sparks.
“Dangerous, riding at night,” remarked the commissar.
“A horse lives to run,” said the boy. “Tonight, not tomorrow.”
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Bloodstar. “Pedantic bastards.” He got to his feet, looking backward towards the tents, towards the weeping and the crying out, as other men cursed at being woken. “I’ll go see,” he said. He raised the can to his lips for a final drink.
The boy sniffed the air. “Whiskey,” he said. The woman kicked the horse a few steps towards them.
“Oh, no you don’t,” said Bloodstar. He put the can behind his back and stood motionless as the woman looked at him inquisitively. She sat quiet for a long moment, and when she moved, finally, it was a tiny gesture, nothing at all, except for the care that she put into it. She sat with her rifle stock in the crook of her thigh, the barrel pointed upward, and then she turned her wrist, so that the gun turned in her hand and the trigger guard faced out instead of in.
The commissar broke the silence. “That’s not very hospitable, Captain,” he said.
“Drunken savages,” muttered Bloodstar. The woman looked at him curiously, and the boy held out his hand. Still muttering, Bloodstar came down towards him and gave him the can. He needn’t have worried. The boy took only a small swallow, and Thanakar admired the light on his pale skin as he stretched back his head and the liquor knotted his throat for an instant. He didn’t offer any to his sister, nor did she take it. She just sat there, staring at Bloodstar until the boy finished with the can and handed it back, and then she wheeled the horse around and kicked it out into the dark. The dog got up and followed them. Behind Thanakar, the noise in the tents died down.
“Drunken savages,” repeated Bloodstar louder.
“They don’t drink much,” said the commissar. “Not like us. They don’t have to. Nothing to forget.”
“Cannibals,” continued Bloodstar, making the gesture of purification, dropping his face down to each armpit in turn. “That rock cat didn’t die of old age. They murdered it. I bet they eat it.” He poured the rest of the whiskey out onto the rocks, and then dropped the can.
“I’ll bet,” said the commissar sadly, looking out into the dark.
Thanakar sat cross-legged, feeding the fire. “Our ancestors ate meat,” he said. “Not so long ago.”
“Pedants, everywhere,” said Bloodstar, grinning. He sat back down. “How do you know?”
“Teeth. We’ve got the teeth for it.”
“I guess we’ve evolved a little.”
“No,” said Thanakar. “It’s not a question of that. At least, not at the beginning. It was a question of property rights. The eighth bishop banned it. He said animals were God’s property. His property, he meant. Starbridges used to eat meat long after that, long after it was illegal for everybody else. Then we lost the taste for it.”
“Well, that’s evolution, isn’t it?” asked Bloodstar. “They’re savages. Come on. They cut people’s heads off and ride around with them. What do you think happens to the bodies?”
The commissar was still standing. “Whatever they are now, they were a peaceful people once,” he said.
The next day, Aspe crossed over the escarpment down into the river valley, and here the land was more fertile, with the swollen river rushing through. The rain had had some effect here; already a thin gauze of grass had stretched over the wizened earth, grotesque somehow, like a sweet new shroud for an old corpse. This was monastic land and supported a number of villages, each grouped around a shrine. The people of each village had worked at a different cottage industry for the monks. There was a town of weavers, of tinsmiths, of tailors. And in front of each stone gate was the image of that town’s product—a stone umbrella twenty feet high, a stone sock garter, intricately carved, twice the length of a man.
The inhabitants, rotten with adventism, had rebelled. They had joined King Argon as his army had come through, and many of them had abandoned everything to follow it as it receded. Others had stripped off their clothes and run naked into the hills. In an adventist delirium, expecting their savior every minute, they had burned their crops. The monks had allowed only one food in each village, turnips for one, cabbages for another, and the tattoos of the villagers had prohibited them from touching anything but that one vegetable, boiled whole. For many that had been the bitterest part of slavery, and when King Argon came, they had torched their own fields, thinking that the land would blossom under the conqueror’s feet, and sprout up fruits and flowers, and need no tending. Argon had encouraged the fantasy, but even so he had had them whipped, for he was desperate for the food. They had run off terrified into the hills.
So by the time King Argon’s army had retreated to the monastery at the head of the valley, and Colonel Aspe was chasing stragglers towards it up the road, these villages were almost deserted. Aspe ordered that the remnants of the population be spared, and he sent the antinomials the long way round. At one gate, he reined his horse next to the immense stone statue there, wondering what it was. For generations, the villagers had made a little wooden toy in the shape of a duck. Only a few old men and women were left now, huddled in the shadow of the gate, and some came out when they saw him and went down on their knees next to his stirrup, begging for food. They had brought as offerings a few samples of the little toy. Aspe leaned down to take one. It was a duck, and when he pushed his finger into the bottom of its base, its bill sagged open and its tail sagged down.
Aspe sat in his saddle, chewing a piece of melon. He played with the duck without looking at it as he squinted up the valley into the sun. Then he leaned and spat a few melon seeds meditatively onto the bald head of one of the villagers, and he was amazed to see the man grab them and put them into his mouth. Aspe dropped the rest of the melon rind onto a woman’s back as she searched among the pebbles for a seed that might have dropped. Another man grabbed it, but there was no fight; he broke off pieces of it and handed them around, making little bowing motions with his head.
The colonel gestured with his hand and his adjutant rode up, a slick officer of the purge. “Give them something to eat,” the colonel commanded. “Feed them.”
The officer shrugged. “It’s a waste, sir,” he said. “These people always die when the rains come. They’re used to it.”
“Feed them,” repeated the colonel harshly, and then he spurred his horse.
But his order was ignored.
* * *
Two days later, Thanakar saw some of the battlefront. He had crossed over to the valley and road, following the army’s baggage, and he had accepted an invitation from Micum Starbridge to ride his elephant. It was a hairy beast, healthier than most, but even so its shaggy back was clotted with scum, and scum hung down from its great lips, for it had caught a lung infection in the rain, in the cold nights. Thanakar was sorry he had come. He and the commissar rode in a carriage on its back, and Thanakar resented sitting so close to the old man, not because he disliked him. In the days of the campaign, he had grown fond of him. But if he had liked him less, he would have resented him less, because if a man is a fool, perhaps you have a moral obligation to try and hurt him secretly, to sleep with his wife if you can. Not quite that, thought Thanakar, smiling. But at least you don’t feel so guilty. As he rode, he looked fo
r things about the old man to dislike, and in his mind he drew a caricature of Micum’s profile against the slate-blue side of the gorge, his nose and lips protruding like a pig’s snout, his eye peering out from a little puckered whirlpool of flesh, his hair cut short like bristle. Thanakar relaxed, and the man became human again. His features slid back into place; he turned and smiled, his face warm and friendly, his eyes sad. Thanakar wished that he had come another way, but his leg was too sore for him to ride a horse.
The river valley was paved with smooth white stones. It was a flat mile across, and the slopes came down sheer on either side. The river ran a dozen twisting courses over the stones, and the road skirted the cliff along the east bank, one of a great skein of roads called the Northways, which twisted like the river all over the district. The army followed it upstream, towards the monastery of St. Serpentine Boylove high up ahead: spires and battlements cut into the mountain, but still out of sight from where they sat on elephantback. The view was blocked by rocks, a configuration known locally as the Keyhole. A few miles up, the cliffs on each side of the river jutted in until they almost touched, and the road led through a narrow defile while the river roared beneath it. And high above the road, the overhanging cliffs almost touched. There they were joined by a span of masonry, and Thanakar could see the heads of enemy soldiers walking back and forth along it.
He borrowed the commissar’s field glasses. Heads in black helmets moved back and forth, and on the rampart, someone had painted a white phoenix rising from its nest of fire, a symbol of adventism. Below that, Thanakar followed some ropes down into the blue sky below the bridge, and at the ends hung bodies. He was used to that. King Argon had decorated each hilltop in the district with a thicket of crucifixes, and nailed up loyalists and monks. Their red robes fluttered in the wind like flags, and carrion crows perched along their outstretched arms. Here and there a cartwheel had been hoisted to the top of a long pole, and a man had been spread out on it, disemboweled for the crows, while other men hung by one wrist from the rim until their arms fell off. Thanakar was used to it. As he watched the bridge above the Keyhole, another man was lifted to the rampart and pushed over, to jerk at the end of a rope. He was dressed in golden robes. Thanakar passed the glasses to the commissar, who peered through them. “Abbot,” he said briefly, and made the customary gestures of respect.
