by Paul Park
Behind him, his troops spread out unimpeded over the plateau. Victory was sure. Aspe’s savage face was flushed and happy, and he had taken off his helmet, and his long white hair blew around. It was this mood that Thanakar found it most difficult to penetrate as he rode up. The circle of officers gave way before his horse. But the colonel barely looked at him. He walked back and forth with his cheeks puffed up with fruit. But when the first guns sounded from the monastery a mile away, he turned towards the noise, quizzically, and Thanakar could see him stop his chewing. The bombardment was gentle at first, a few rockets taking range, but then the great field guns opened up, and then the murderous screaming of the grape. Thanakar shouted above the noise, and this time the colonel understood, for his hand stole up around his neck, searching for his scarf, and then he ran up the small slope behind him, to seize his flag and throw it down. He stood looking out over the river, and then he opened his throat and let out a roar so terrific, it drowned out the pounding artillery. At the sound, his horse pulled its bridle loose from the hands of a soldier, and Aspe ran down to meet it and vaulted onto its back, creaking and swaying in the saddle, shouting guttural commands in a language Thanakar didn’t know. Then he was gone, galloping over the open ground towards the monastery and the sound of the guns, his hair streaming out behind him.
The officers followed, and the soldiers too, and in a little while Thanakar was alone on the hillside. From where he was, he could look down and see where he had spent the night, though the upper valley was still hidden. But he could see the deserted camp where the antinomials had left it, never planning to return. And he could see the river flashing in the afternoon. He dismounted near where the colonel’s black standard lay among the rocks, and he sat down with his head in his hands, to listen to the music of the guns.
* * *
North of Charn, in winter and the first phases of spring, the land is empty and cruel, striated hills of petrified mud, eroded into strange shapes and strange colors, burnt ochre, dark red. Even close to the city, the land is empty during that part of the year. But later, when the wind abates, and the air grows hot and sweet, and the trees grow tall in sweet new soil, then villages come up, and huts of bridalweed, and naked sunburned people. But in spring before the Paradise rain, life is bare and stark. The people have grown up in the coldest times, and these questions of belief seem desperate to them. Among the twenty thousand days of spring, men are willing to die for trifles. The ancient cult of loving kindness withers and exposes harsher, more austere beliefs, like flowers withering on a rock.
The monastery of St. Serpentine Boylove had been built in autumn, and it was like a mirror held to the most poignant of all seasons. It had no defenses. It clung to the hillside like a spray of flowers of delicate steel spires, and below it hung secluded terraces where in autumn the monks had sipped hot cider overlooking their orchards in the river valley, and counted their money. Now the monks were dead or scattered, and among the terraces where they had sat, Argon Starbridge’s gunners worked happily, experimenting, studying the effect of different parabolas of fire. So intent they were on the practice of their art, that they had heard nothing of their own defeat until Colonel Aspe broke through the door. He had smashed the glass postern with his steel fist and rampaged through the sanctuary looking for defenders, but there were none. And when he found his way down a dozen spiral staircases and out onto the terrace, the captain of artillery was happy to surrender, and all the guns stopped bellowing together. Aspe was just one man, but the captain was an artist and had no false soldier’s pride. He was conscious of his merits, and when the colonel strode clanking to the terrace lip, he stood beside him and surveyed the valley with a sense of modest satisfaction.
For more than a mile, the valley floor was littered with a wreck of corpses, broken men and women, dogs, horses. It stretched up the road, up to the monastery gates, up to the very muzzles of the guns, still seething in a thousand parts. A horse wallowed on its back, kicking its hind legs in the air. Men rose, and staggered forward, and fell down again. Children cried. That whole army of independent souls had come together in a common attitude, dressed in common uniforms of their life’s blood, while above them played a quiet music. They were free.
On the lowest terrace, near where the road ran up to the gate, a single antinomial stood erect. He had cut himself loose from his fallen horse and limped forward to the gun itself, where he rested his hand on the burning metal. He was breathing heavily, and his lips were covered with a froth of blood. He wore sunglasses, and his head was shaved, and his pale, flat face had no expression, but when he looked up and saw the colonel standing on the terrace up above, he raised his fist and shook it. And from his bosom he took out a crumpled scarf, and wiped his lips, and spat into it. And though his voice was low and broken, the captain of artillery heard him distinctly from where he stood next to the colonel, a hundred feet away. “Aspe,” he whispered. “Aspe. Biter Aspe,” and he spat blood.
Part Five:
Sugar Rain
FIRST THERE WAS A NOISE AT THE WINDOW, an animal scratching at the pane. Precipitation had coated the outside of the glass with sugar scum, and the animal’s claws cleaned out a circle. Through it the bishop could see a circle of black night and glimpses of a small furry face. And then the casement gave way, the window swung open, and a cat jumped down into the room.
The boy had reached the temple about midnight, but it was almost four o’clock before he found a way up the walls and through the ninety courtyards to the Bishop’s Tower. No one had challenged him. The temple was almost deserted, for most of the guards had been sent away to war, and most of the rest were out patrolling the city. There was almost no one left but seminarians and priests—blind priests, fat priests, priests with no legs, inadequate as sentinels, though they never slept. Their conjuring had filled the courts with acrid fog, impenetrable except to atheists. They had sealed the gates and doorways with powerful geometry, but the boy was too ignorant to know. He was following the cat. When it leapt up on the balustrade, he followed it. Along the rooftops, the tiles were slippery in the sweet rain, and by the time he had climbed up all the gutters and drainpipes, up to the single lighted window in the bishop’s tower, he was too exhausted to stand. The way had been dangerous for him, and he had kept to streambeds and ravines along the road out from the city. There had been nothing to eat. So that finally, when he found the right drainpipe and climbed up, he barely had the strength to drag himself over the sill. The bishop was standing with his cat in her arms, cleaning its fur.
This was the room where she lived. It was small and spare, with walls of quilted silk. Part of it was a private temple lit with candles, and the wind from the open window roughened the light. Outside, lightning caressed the hills, soft and thunderless. The boy was shivering with cold. He stared at her, and she could see a wish for violence mix with confusion in his eyes as she smiled and put her hand out. She released a small magic and put a little sleep into the air, so that he dropped his head. He curled up on the floor, and she could hear his breathing settle down.
For a moment she stood and looked at him, stroking the cat. Then she put it down and found a towel and dry clothes, sacred vestments from the temple. She knelt down near him on the linen mats, wiping the water from his body, touching him with a kind of wonder. Even though she was the goddess of love and mistress of the seven arts of love, this was the first man she had touched. He was the youngest, the largest, the most beautiful that she had seen, for her life had been spent within the confines of the temple, among priests and parsons. On festival days she had heard petitions in her own shrine, and she had peered at the congregation from behind the slits in her masks. But in all those shambling lines of worshipers there had never been anyone as magnificent as this, and she touched him with a kind of reverence, stripping off his clothes. The leather cloak seemed so unsuitable, so stiff, so uncomfortable. She wondered what it was made of.
She gave him a drug as he lay sleeping, a dream, and
she went into it herself with a crown of flowers, for vanity’s sake. She could make a dream as real as flesh. She knew what he was; she had studied all kinds of heresy. She’d had a picture book. And of all heresies, atheism had seemed to her the most fascinating, as fascinating as an empty well—dark and empty, sleep without dreams. As the boy lay sleeping, she gave him a vision, form out of darkness, the beginning of the universe, nothing at first, just mist on a gray background, and then a scattering of stars. She gave him a horizon, and in a little while the sun rose. It burned away the mist, the darkness, and the starlight. It filled the sky with radiance, and yet it didn’t burn the eyes, and it invited staring, because Angkhdt the Interpreter sat on a throne among its rays in his most gorgeous clothes, with fire in his face and the crown of heaven on his brow. In one of his four hands he held an astrolabe, another grasped the collar of the dog of war. Another rested on the head of his familiar, the symbol of his poetry, a crouching dog with the face of a beautiful woman. His fourth hand lay clenched in his lap, a modest metaphor of phallic power.
The sun illuminated all secrets. You could see the earth, rolling insecurely in its enormous orbit, its seas advancing and retreating, its forests and deserts swelling and disappearing, the relentless flow of seasons. You could see glaciers, and mountains thirty miles high, and places of eternal day, eternal night. And above this chaos, this plunging flux of life and death, Angkhdt the Charioteer held in his hands the symbols of intellect, love, power, art, the four reins of the plunging chariot.
The bishop put her fingers to the head of the sleeping boy. In his dream he was lying on his stomach in the mountain grass, watching the transparent sun, and the world spread out like a map. Below him he could see countries, towns, cities, rivers, the clash of armies, the emperor walking in his garden, stopping to sniff a flower among the cages of famous philosophers. The boy was chewing on a blade of grass, and he didn’t even turn his head when she came into his dream as softly as if she had not wanted to disturb him. She was barefoot, wearing a summer dress. As she walked, the grass bent away under her footsteps, and ripples of dandelions and blue chicory spread out in her wake.
* * *
Far below, in another part of the temple, Chrism Demiurge was eating. His table was spread with silver dishes piled high with vegetables stewed in wine, fruit pasties, custards, obscure salads, far too much for one old man. But he was not alone. Along the floor crawled snakes and little hairless beasts, and he rolled bread into pills to throw for them and watch them fight. Blind to form, he could still distinguish color, motion, light. Around him, the red walls blazed with light, wax tapers set in girandoles.
Demiurge was celebrating, for he had heard news from the battlefield, a victory over the forces of darkness. He lifted a goblet of water to his pale lips, then leaned to smell the marijuana smoke rising from a silver censer in the middle of the table. Around it, making messes of the food, goblins and grimalkins played leapfrog and danced impudent and vulgar dances, rubbing their fat bellies. The priest laughed out loud.
There was a knock at the door, and instantly Demiurge’s face assumed an exaggerated look of guilt, like a child interrupted in some shameful act by a danger of discovery more apparent than real. It was a parody of an expression, and it mixed well with his laughter. He clapped his hands, and instantly all the gnomes and goblins stopped their sport and ran to hide themselves among his clothes, under his robes, next to his skin, so that all was in order when the door opened.
His disciple stood there, a colorless young man, almost invisible to his blind eyes. “Do you want something? I thought I heard you call.”
“No, I was just . . . amusing myself,” answered the priest, vestiges of laughter still on his face. “But will you sit with me, Corydon? If you have a minute.”
The disciple sat, and the old man continued eating. When he was finished he sat back and smiled, and let an amicable silence grow around them as he prepared a long sinsemillian cigar. He lit it and passed it to his disciple, and then he said, “My grandfather was a banker in this city. He had a relative who married young, according to the customs of the season, a pretty girl, yes, but very ignorant and naive. Very . . . naive. And her mouth was very small, so small that the nuns of her shrine were worried, for her bridegroom was a strong man, and a very holy man too, matrimonially speaking. At least, he had the same predilections of our Beloved Lord, as we read in Angkhdt 181 through 189, 401, 606 through 610, to cite just a few. This man had only had ten children, rare for that hot weather, very rare. Though he easily could have had many more; he was so well made, it was rumored that his first wife had choked to death.” The priest laughed noiselessly, then continued. “It was just a rumor. Yet this lady’s mouth was very small, and it worried the good nuns, so that they made her practice constantly with plaster models and many kinds of fruit. Many kinds. They taught her to stretch her lips by repeating words like ‘how,’‘where,’‘why,’ questions which otherwise might not have suggested themselves to her . . . rather uninquisitive mind. ‘Who,’ of course, was counterproductive, and as for ‘what’ . . .” He laughed again, a noise like a dry cough. “Catastrophic.”
* * *
His lips curled back, the same expression on his face but without the laughter, Colonel Aspe sat in his tent. The battle was over, the enemy had withdrawn and he had let them go, though he had held them as if in the clutch of his hand. At the moment of victory he had been distracted. On the terrace of St. Serpentine’s he had felt a great sudden pain that had left him helpless, as if the force of some new hatred, pulling suddenly in a new direction, had torn a crack in him, and the urge to move, which was like blood to him, had leaked away like blood.
Lacking the catalyst of his malice, the armies had disengaged, the enemy had withdrawn. Argon Starbridge had escaped with his life and his baggage, but now, in his tent, Aspe regretted winning for the priests of Charn even a partial victory. He thought of riding back to the city and putting it to the torch, but there were reasons, always reasons, and as always, reasons were the bit between his teeth. So instead he refused food and let his mind wander among the corpses by the river. He hummed melodies in all the modes of hatred. And he would put together melodies in his mind, sequences of events either imagined or remembered. Notes and cadences would summon up faces, actions, whole scenes. He added themes of misery and regret, low in the bass register, high in the treble, mixing them together like a symphony of hatred in his mind.
Chrism Demiurge whirled by, crucified and burning, his mouth gaping wide. He disappeared, and in his place Aspe composed, as if upon the xylophone, the bars of his cage in the emperor’s garden, and the light of the setting sun on them night after night, while his body wasted and his hair changed color. In the setting sun, the golden figure of the emperor, as he paused sometimes to talk. And like the rattle of a drum, the lock and chain snapping open on his jail, the emperor releasing him into a larger jail of promises, reasons, services, consequences.
These images mixed with memories of an earlier time, of Rangriver in the snow, when he was king of the biters up above Rangriver. He remembered the day when he had lost his hand. A hateful face, a dancer, a knife fight about . . . something, some piece of music, he had forgotten. But he remembered the scene, his violin where he had left it to get up and fight, his own instrument, so difficult that no one else could ever play it after he had set it down, so perfect that people had been compelled to listen, night after night, while the music poured from him in flashing streams. Was it through musical perfection that he had first sickened of a biting illness, the need to make his mark?
He remembered the circle of hot faces in the firelight, the sudden blow, his hand half-severed, the knife stuck between his bones, his ears ringing like cymbals, the faces around him changing into masks—ah, ah, ah, his enemy receding as if lost in a black mist, only his eyes and his teeth showing as he smiled.
He remembered the stone table in the snow, the statue of dog-faced Angkhdt, the broken foot and that same
smiling face, that dancer in the freezing air, dancing his last dance. In his tent Aspe’s memories were deafening. He thought: Other men have turned to biting out of love, or misdirection, or musical ineptitude. But with me it has been hate, always hate, and hatred is a kind of love, a way of refusing to accept the cacophony of certain kinds of music in the world.
Along the river, his sweet brothers and his sisters lay as dead as meat. The images banged around his ears. And then suddenly Aspe saw, in the middle of that circle of discord, the bishop’s face, a poisonous harmony of black curls, black eyes, sweet skin. So young, she was. He struck the table with his steel fist. Hatred, memories of hatred, cadenzas of hatred spun and jostled in his mind, until he cried: “Enough! Great Angkhdt, enough. No more.”
* * *
The bishop tended the shrine in her turret chamber while the boy watched her from the bed. Unlike all but six in the city, it was a shrine not to Angkhdt but to God Himself, not to the servant but to the master. In most temples, Angkhdt the prophet stood between men and the God of Love, but not here. The room smelled of lovemaking. She filled a crystal bowl on the altar from a ewer of water, reciting lists of prayers.
She had had a tiring day. She had consecrated forty newly gelded priests, their faces lumpy from painkillers and pain. And she had performed the feather celebration on the altar of St. Unity Bereft, a long boring dance whose significance was lost, but still it was recurrent in the endless calendar of worship. She had danced it once before, a little girl.
While she was gone, the boy had lain in bed. Today he seemed a little restless, she thought. He watched her with a curious absorption as she wrote symbols in the air above the bowl. The cat covered his lap, and he stroked the long fur under its throat and around its slitted eyes.
“Something bad happened,” he said.
