by Paul Park
“Seven dollars change,” said the woman, still without picking up the coin. “And my risk if it’s stolen.”
“There’s no risk,” answered Abu. “Seven dollars is fine. Really, it doesn’t matter.”
She was still looking at him. “Where did you get that coat,” she asked. Then, not waiting for a reply, she called out, “Jason. Come look at this.” And the thief came over, smiling. But when he saw the money on the table, his expression changed. Again, it changed by itself, without him moving a muscle.
“Look at that,” said the woman. “Not particular about the rate, either.”
Mock bent down and took a fold of the prince’s cloak between his finger and thumb. Then he reached out and pushed the hood back from Abu’s face, and bent forward to look at him, so that Abu could smell the rotten cheese still on his breath. The man seemed puzzled momentarily, until he saw the golden earring in the prince’s ear, and then his eyes took on a misty, distant expression, as if he were trying to remember something. “Let me see your hands,” he said.
When Abu laid them out along the tabletop and Mock reached down to turn them palmside up, all the people in the little room came and stood around him in a circle. And when the prince looked up timidly into their faces, he was surprised to see no malice in their eyes, only a kind of wistful melancholy. But he could feel the tension of their interest slip around him like a net as Mock pulled back his fingers. He had not washed for days, and for days he had slept in his clothes in places like this tavern. But still, the dirt upon his palm was as insubstantial as a dirty cloud with the shining sun behind it. The people stared at him.
“What are you . . . doing here?” asked Jason Mock, finally, after a long silence. He had jerked his hand away, as if the sacred flesh could burn him. Abu could barely hear him when he spoke.
“I wanted something to drink.”
“That’s true enough,” said the landlady. “He’s drunk enough to float a boat. He should thank me for diluting it. I should charge him extra for not killing him.”
The edge of this speech cut through the net around him, and Abu could feel the tension loosen as people started to whisper and talk. But Mock still stared at him, and Abu thought he could see some weary fire of hatred kindle in his eye, though he spoke as softly as before: “You’re a . . . spy, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“And all the time I was just talking,” continued the thief. “All that talk about the gallows, you must have thought: That’s closer than he guesses. But a man can say a thing, and know it to be true, and still not believe it. By God, what wouldn’t I give to die in bed, in a real bed.”
“I’m not a spy,” insisted Abu, but the thief talked without listening, as if to himself.
“Starbridge,” he said. “Starbridge. Are we really such a threat to you, that you have to search us out and find us here? Is there something in this room you think is too good for us to have?”
“You have nothing to f-f-fear from me,” said Abu. “I’m—I’m on your side.”
“Our side.” With movements as soft and melancholy as his voice, Mock pulled a pistol from his belt, cocked it, and primed the charge.
“My God, Jason,” hissed the landlady. “Not here . . .” But then she was quiet when the thief turned to scowl at her and show his teeth. Nobody spoke, but the circle widened around Abu to give the man room to fire.
Abu dropped his eyes and looked down at the table and the silver coin still lying there. He picked it up and rubbed it drunkenly between his fingers, wondering whether he would hear the noise first or feel the shock. He thought: The palmist said I was to die by fire. A fraud. Or perhaps not, he thought, because someone was shouting in the street outside the window, and someone hammered on the door. “Open up!” someone shouted. “Open. In the bishop’s name!” A man was beating on the door, and not just with his fist, but with a stick or something, the sound was so loud.
Mock seemed not to hear it. He brought the gun down so that it pointed at the prince’s head, but before he could shoot, the other thief had grabbed him by the wrist, and the boy stepped forward too, to restrain him. The knocking grew louder, and there were several voices shouting in the street. The landlady opened a door back into the house, and she and the other woman vanished through it. Abu staggered to his feet, and as the front window shattered from the blow of a stick, and as the two thieves struggled and swore over the gun, he and the boy followed the women back through the house and out the back door into an alleyway between two buildings, where the mud slopped almost to their knees. In a moment their clothes were coated with sweet rain, and Abu opened his mouth to let some in. His throat was dry.
They climbed up out of the mud onto the gutter’s rim, and the boy took his hand and led him into a maze of narrow streets, where the evening was not punctured by a single lantern or a single lighted window. They ran quickly over the uneven stones, as quickly as they could, for there were sounds of pursuit behind them, and voices shouting in the dark. Someone blew a whistle, and from time to time around them whistles answered, some far away, some not so far. Episcopal patrols were talking to each other in their strident language, and they ran until they couldn’t hear it anymore.
Two high houses had collapsed against each other out over the street, forming a kind of arch. In the partial shelter of one wall, the boy stopped to listen. Abu listened too, but could hear nothing but his own coarse breath, and there was no light anywhere, except the phosphorescent rain. The city seemed as empty as an empty field, yet Abu knew that all the houses here were stuffed with abject life, though it made no noise, lit no lantern.
Then suddenly from a tower high above them came the sound of someone laughing. It was an eerie chattering noise, out of place because laughter, though not actually forbidden, was circumscribed in Beggar’s Medicine, this close to the prison. Yet even the fiercest soldier of the purge, even the most conscientious magistrate couldn’t have made a case against this laughter, unless perhaps for simple disturbance of the peace, because the ratio of noise to mirth or joy or gaiety was so high. It had the form of laughter, but not the content.
Yet even so, perhaps there was still some echo of subversion in it, because the boy started to smile. “Now I know where we are,” he said. He plunged back into the mud, under the arch. And at a juncture in the road, where the brickfront of the houses was kept from falling by long wooden poles jammed in the opposite gutters, the boy paused. Under a triangular tunnel of scaffolding there was a crack in one wall, wide enough to admit them. But first the boy pulled a brick loose from the mortar and threw it inside. Abu could hear the rats scamper and scream, yet still when he passed in through the gap, the boy’s hand around his wrist, he could feel them underfoot, stumbling clumsily against his boots. It was perfectly dark, but the boy pulled a pocket torch, and by its soft red light they groped their way inside and back through a dozen deserted rooms. The plaster on the walls had crumbled down to lath, and lay in heaps on the muddy floor.
They passed through corridors as complicated as the streets outside, up stairs, through rooms, until in that house or another they reached rooms progressively less dilapidated. They passed rooms full of people. Abu could hear soft conversations through closed doors, and occasionally voices raised as if in high-pitched anger. Light shone above the transoms. But always, out of several closed doors, the boy picked one that led, not to the sound of voices or to light, but to another dark corridor lined with closed doors. Or they would pass through a series of square unfurnished rooms with a closed door in the middle of each wall, and Abu would know there was some life behind two out of the four, but the boy always chose a door that led them through another square unfurnished room.
Finally they stopped before a door identical to all the rest, set in a wall of grimy, rose-patterned paper. Here the boy shined his flashlight over Abu and looked him carefully in the face. Then he turned and began drumming softly on the door with the heel of his hand. Abu was soberer now, but still he couldn’t di
stinguish any rhythm to the knocking, or any effect either, for the sound of talking on the other side of the door went on uninterrupted. The boy tilted his hand so that his knuckles sounded on the wood, but still nothing happened. After a while he stopped, and shone the light in Abu’s face again. He seemed unsure of what to do.
“Is the door locked?” asked the prince.
“I don’t know.”
Abu reached for the knob. The door opened partway, until blocked by some obstruction inside. But the gap was wide enough to step through, and Abu could see part of a table with a few men grouped around it, talking by the light of a kerosene lamp. He stepped inside, and the boy followed.
The room was indistinct in so much darkness, but Abu got the impression of vast space. Other pools of light suggested tables farther in. All around lay piles of crates and barrels, and boxes tied in black sacking.
A man got up from the table and came towards them. He had grown his hair long, but Abu could see that part of his right ear had been cut away, and he was branded on his forehead and his cheek. His right thumb and forefinger had been sewn together in a circle, the penalty for smuggling, second offense. At the table the men were playing cards, and drinking, and smoking foreign cigarettes scented with cardamom and clove.
“Who’re you?” asked the man.
“A prisoner.” Abu smiled and shrugged, and gestured towards the boy behind him.
The smuggler frowned when he heard the prince’s accent. He turned to the boy. “Who’s this? Rich customer, eh? What does he want? You should bring him to the store. Office hours—you know better than this.” He laid a rough hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Not here. You know that.”
“He’s a Starbridge,” said the boy, trying to pull away. “Where’s the captain?”
“Starbridge,” repeated the smuggler after a pause, and Abu felt his courage flicker at the way he said it. When the men at the table turned to look at him, he thought he had never before seen faces so hideous, limbs so distorted. Each one carried on his face or on his body the mark of some arrest. Multiple offenders lacked eyes or hands, or their necks had been broken so that they wore steel braces and had to twist their whole bodies in their chairs to look at him.
But again, there seemed more interest than malice in their stares, so Abu took heart and stepped forward into the room, and pushed his hood back from his head. The room was warm, the air thick with smoke.
The smuggler shook the boy by the arm. “Speak to me,” he hissed. “You weren’t followed here.”
“No, sir.”
“You took care?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The purge was out tonight. Didn’t you hear the whistles?”
“Yes, sir.”
“By God, you’re a fool.” He gave the boy a vicious shake and threw him down against a pile of burlap bags. “What were you thinking of?”
“No sir—please. We can use him. Please sir. Where’s the captain?”
“Use him? He’s a spy.”
“No,” said Abu. “I’m not.”
“No,” repeated the boy. “Listen to him. He says he’s not.”
“Of course he is. What else could he be?”
“He says he’s not. He can’t lie, can he? It’s against the law for him.”
“Yes, and I suppose you never broke the law, did you? Use him? You’re a fool.” The smuggler aimed a kick, but the boy twisted away. Abu laid his hand on the man’s arm.
“Don’t hurt him,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
The smuggler stared at him and pulled away with a curse. At the table, another man reached to turn the lamp up. Then he rose from his chair and stumped towards the prince, and peered up at him out of a battered face. “Starbridge,” he said. “You any relation to Scullion Starbridge?”
“Which one?”
“The magistrate here. He had my nose broken once a week for ten weeks. Broken and reset. That’s not standard punishment. That’s not scriptural. Second offense pickpocketing—that’s too hard. You any relation?”
“I suppose so. Not a close relation. Why?”
“Why? God damn you, that’s why.”
“I suppose so. I’m sorry about your nose. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” the man repeated, as if unsure of the word’s meaning. “Sorry, are you? God damn you for it, I say. God damn you.”
“No blasphemy,” said another kind of voice, a large soft voice out of the darkness beyond the table lamp. “There’s no blasphemy allowed here, Mr. Gnash. You know that.”
It was a woman’s voice. She stepped into the light and seemed to diminish it just by standing next to it, for her skin was as black as if the shadows still clung to her. Her voice, too, contained a resonance of darkness outside the glaring lamp. The light shone on the table and on a circle of pale, miserable men. Outside the lamp, perhaps, her voice seemed to suggest, perhaps only a little way beyond, hope and happiness might still scavenge in the dark, vague, snuffling beasts. “No blasphemy,” she said. “Please. Spider, who is our guest?”
“A Starbridge, ma’am,” answered the boy, getting up out of the corner and dusting himself off.
“But what is his name?” She spoke in an unfamiliar accent, and seemed to grope for words before she found them, as if misplacing them in the dark. She was tall, with hair clipped short around her head.
“Abu Starbridge,” said the prince. “Ma’am,” he added as an afterthought. It seemed to suit her.
She smiled. “No one but children call me that,” she said. “It seems strange from you. Prince Abu Starbridge. I have heard your name. Come closer. I have never seen a prince before.”
He walked towards her, and when she could see him clearly, she laughed. “Why Prince,” she said. “You’re getting bald.”
“Yes,” said Abu happily.
“I have heard your name. I heard of you among the Children of God, before the river rose.”
The man with the broken nose swore again. “Fit company,” he said. “Atheists and whores.”
“Sweet friend, don’t say it. Atheists, certainly. They are the Children of God. A child cannot worship his own father, as other men must. It’s not in nature. It is in nature to deny. Yet I am certain that when our Lord comes again, He will come from them, naked, without even a name.”
The woman said this as if it were part of a speech she had memorized in advance. As she spoke, she looked at the prince steadily, as if to measure his reaction. He smiled foolishly.
* * *
Her name was Mrs. Darkheart, and she led Abu back through secret doors to rooms where she lived with her husband and her children. In the room where she made him lie down, someone had daubed crude adventist murals over the wallpaper. And when he had been left alone, Abu stretched out drunkenly on the bed. He couldn’t decide if he felt worse lying back with his eyes closed, the bed seeming to recede from underneath him like a wave pulling back, or worse leaning upon one elbow watching figures of strange saints and upright prophets reel around him, formal and forbidding even while they danced. There was no window, but still the rain was beginning to leak in from somewhere, and in some places the paint had cracked and the wallpaper was loose. The spreading phosphorescence gave some scenes peculiar emphasis: Angkhdt on his deathbed, foretelling his rebirth, and the water had seeped through all around his head and glowed there like a halo. The risen Angkhdt, the new made flesh, purging the world with water and light, and the world seemed to glow between his fingers. Everywhere the walls were painted with quotations from the saints, unfurling in banners from their lips as they marched drunkenly around the room. Abu closed one eye and tried to make some sense out of the words. Captain Darkheart had picked up some literacy somewhere, and he had made the inscriptions as a present to his wife. He didn’t share her heresy.
“Politically it’s not productive,” he explained hours later, towards dawn, sitting at the bottom of Abu’s bed with coffee in a styrofoam cup. “People just sit around waiting for something to happen. They s
ay God will only come again when things are at their worst, so they greet each new catastrophe with glee—famine, starvation, rain. They’ll submit to anything. They hold the solutions in their own hands, but still they find it easier to sit and wait. It’s tragic. There are so many of us, so few of you.”
His wife came in with a baby on her hip. His eyes followed her around the room. “It’s different for her,” he said.
In her, he thought, because of the superior qualities of her mind, religion has been reduced to its purest form—a way of seeing justice in the world when there is none. He watched her lovingly as she lit a fire in the grate, burning trash and cardboard and splinters of lath.
Abu sat up in bed. He said, “But there are rumors of the advent. Now. Argon Starbridge’s son. The Prince of Caladon.”
“It is a lie,” responded Mrs. Darkheart without pausing in her work. “There are always rumors. A Starbridge prince—how is that possible? Can our salvation come out of a race of tyrants? Angkhdt, Angkhdt Himself was a poor man.”
“It’s a trick,” continued her husband. “A way of using us to fight their wars. Look.” He pulled out from his pocket a medallion on a chain, a painted miniature of a human baby in a golden crib. But its face was covered with hair, and its jaw stuck out almost like a dog’s muzzle. “King Argon has his spies out,” he said. “One of them gave me this. It’s Argon’s son. The chain is supposed to make a man invulnerable in battle, if he fights for truth.”
Abu took the amulet into his hands. “Is this . . . accurate?” he asked.
“The man swore so. He had seen him.”
“Poor child,” said the prince. “He must be pitifully deformed.”
“Like all gods.”
“You’re an atheist?”
Captain Darkheart looked offended. “No,” he said. “I’m an educated man.”
He was a rebel angel, one of an ancient sect of revolutionaries. Their cosmology was as orthodox as any parson’s—predetermination, the doctrine of inevitability, the prison world. Yet they did not conclude from this, as parsons did, that the poor were damned, the rich saved. The history of their rebellions was as old as Angkhdt. Six thousand days before, they had risen in small towns along the southern coast and driven the parsons and the Starbridges out naked into the countryside. Many had died of exposure, though some were taken in by pious folk. The rebels had opened all the prisons, drawn up new constitutions, and celebrated in the streets until the army came. Even then, some had escaped in the long boats they had used to farm the sea, for they had been fishermen, harvesting sea vegetables with woven nets. Some had escaped beyond the ocean’s rim, though many drowned, and boats and bodies had washed up all along the shore.
