by Paul Park
They had been a black-skinned people, and the captain, too, was very dark. He leaned toward Abu. “The world is our prison, yes,” he said. “But God cannot love our jailers more than He loves us. It cannot be the mark of a good man, how meekly he suffers. No. God loves the proud. He has made this world so hard a place. Does it make sense that He should love the weak more than the strong? Does it make sense that He should love the man who fails the test? But defy Him, defy them all and break away—those are the men He will choose for Paradise.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then He is a God to be hated. If we are wrong, and He damns us down to the ninth planet, then still He is a God to be defied. And if we can defy Him in this world, then maybe we can chance it in the next. Maybe there’ll be a way there too.” His face, which had grown fierce, softened again as his wife caught his eye and smiled. “I’m not wrong,” he said. “I’ve had many blessings.”
The prince said, “If . . .” but he was interrupted by the captain’s hand upon his arm. Darkheart was smiling at his wife as if he longed to touch her; she was sitting in a corner near the door with her breast uncovered, feeding the child. “Enough talk,” he said. “My mind is my own. No proud man could live differently. But I don’t expect you to believe me. It’s not in your interest. The question is, now that I have you, how can I use you? Do you need alcohol to live? I can get you some.”
“No,” said Abu, smiling. “It’s not as bad as that.”
“Don’t be ashamed. There’s decadence in your blood. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Darkheart. “Show me your hands. Your tattoos.”
Prince Abu put his hands palm up on the blanket. “I’ll tell you what I’d like,” he said. “I’d like a bath. You can barely see them under the dirt.”
Darkheart ignored him. “What does this one mean?” he asked, pointing to the golden sun.
“All whims must be indulged, all requests granted, all commands obeyed.”
Darkheart laughed. “That—must come in handy,” he said.
“You’d be surprised how seldom.”
“You’re not in the right line of work. Now I, I would find it useful. And you will too, I promise you. Spider has a plan for you. Spider!”
He shouted, and the boy appeared in the doorway as if he had been listening there.
“Wait,” said Mrs. Darkheart from the floor. She unplugged the baby from her breast and covered herself, but it started to whimper, so she gave it to her husband. It was a little boy, and Abu noticed it had no tattoos, no horoscope. No parson had yet touched it.
“Wait,” said Mrs. Darkheart. She sat down next to Abu on the bed. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“There’s no air in here,” the prince complained. The room seemed crowded with five people in it, now that the baby was awake. “I have a headache,” he said.
“I’m not surprised.” She reached her hand out to touch him; her fingers were dry and cool. “You’re sweating,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
“No. I’d like some water.”
She turned to the boy. “Spider,” she said. “Please bring the prince some aspirin and a glass of water.”
He went, with a puzzled expression on his face, and Darkheart, too, showed signs of impatience. “I’m not interested in his comfort,” he muttered, trying to soothe the baby by grimacing and sticking out his tongue.
“Well, you should be,” said the woman. She took up one of the prince’s hands from where it lay on the blanket. “You’re a strange man,” she said. “Why are you here? Aren’t you comfortable in your own house?”
“I have no friends.”
“It’s your conscience. Look, there’s the line.” She brought his palm up to her face, to study it more closely. “Are there many like you? Rich men with consciences. I suppose there must be.”
“We are prisoners as much as you,” said the prince.
“Yes, I can see that. Your hand is much like Darkheart’s. This is your way of breaking out. You don’t have long to live, you know.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Death by fire. Look at this.” She turned over her own hand. There, in the lap of her left thumb, someone had tattooed the mark of the gallows in white ink against her black skin. “How can people be so cruel? You’re not an informer, are you? You know enough to hang us.”
“We pay others to do that kind of work,” said Abu. “I’m too conspicuous to be a spy.”
“Exactly,” said the woman. “It’s what I told them. One man wanted to kill you.”
“One man tried to.”
“It would have been a waste,” muttered her husband, fluttering his eyelids to amuse the child.
Many people in Beggar’s Medicine seemed to have no age. Too sour to be children, too small and bent for men, too supple for old age, they seemed a race of nocturnal gnomes—smooth, hairless, yellow, as if even their faces had taken on the official urine-colored hue of poverty. Their skins seemed fragile and too small for them, and perhaps that was why they stooped and hunched their shoulders. Perhaps if they had straightened out their knees and necks, their skin might have split along the spine.
But the Darkhearts were a different kind, and so was Spider Abject. He stood up straight in the doorway, the aspirin in one hand, a glass of water in the other. There was strength in him, not just resilience.
“Spider wants you to get his father for him,” said Darkheart as the boy came in. “That would be easy enough for you, wouldn’t it?”
Abject’s eyes filled up with tears. He seemed prone to crying, but Abu liked him for it, because he never seemed to weep at blows or curses or abuse. He bore them sullenly, and sometimes he even smiled. But when he sat with his own thoughts or when he heard some words of kindness, then sometimes he would start to cry. And when Mrs. Darkheart reached to comfort him, to smooth the hair back from his forehead, he pulled away as if from a blow.
* * *
That night, as the prince and Spider Abject left the house, the wind blew accumulated sugar around them in a powdery mist which whitened their faces and made it difficult to talk. It was a dangerous time, for when the weather was like this—sugar in the air with no rain to keep it wet—the mist could easily ignite. Inside their houses, people blew out their candles and sat shivering in the dark. They spoke softly to one another, for superstitious folk thought curses and obscenity gave off a kind of spark.
The prison was a small one, but it was bright with floodlights. From the four corners of the building stone towers rose up into the mist, and from their battlements huge search lamps swung in circles. At night they shone for half a mile, strands of blue light which beat down rhythmically upon the cringing streets, like the scourging of some whip. And in the fog the prison seemed to glow, and rise to many times its height, the light caught in a swirling prison of its own.
This was the center of the township, one of seven in the city of Charn. It included a chapel and shrine, municipal offices, a bank, and, built into the prison’s base, the bishop’s market and dispensaries, where laborers could spend their salary receipts. The magistrate’s court was a small one, for it dealt with civil offenses only. Crimes against God were handled elsewhere. But still, the gallows took up much of the square; they walked through them towards the chapel door, as if through a copse of trees. There were public executions almost every day.
As Prince Abu and the boy approached, the bells were ringing for the evening service. Worshipers crunched up to the portals through the hardened mud, their coats dusted with sugar. Abject followed them up the steps, past the great dog-headed statues guarding the gate, under the carved pediment illustrating the choices of St. Terrapin the Just. At that time of night the chapel was the only entrance to the prison.
“Look there,” he whispered, standing in the narthex. He pointed down the aisle, directly underneath the pulpit, where rows of handcuffed men and women sat, interspersed wit
h turnkeys in gray uniforms. The service had already begun, and the pews along the aisle were full, but Abject found seats for them underneath a grinning angel. On the altar, the statue of Angkhdt was surrounded by a ring of acolytes, polishing and stroking him, and oiling his phallus. They chanted lists of names. The ceremony of the lamps had been concluded—abridged, most likely, because of the dangers of the weather. The candelabra were all empty, and instead a line of glass globes hung from the vault. They burned red gas, which cast uncertain shadows and made the white mosaics of the floor glow red.
The chanting repeatedly rose and died away, and at times the congregation joined in, reciting the eighteen kinds of self-deception, the seven laws of harmony, the eleven types of civil disobedience, the sixteen phases of a woman’s love. It was a beautiful performance. At certain times the sounds flowed regularly, and then they broke apart as different sections of the congregation broke away into different chants in different octaves, and all the sense was lost, only the order and the beauty remaining. They finished in a kind of round, each section coming down to silence at a different time, until only the impossibly high voices of the choir remained, and the bell-like booming of the parson in the pulpit, asking the benediction.
“Oh my children,” he roared when all was quiet, and the people sat submissively. “Oh my children. I take my text tonight from the five-hundredth chapter of the Song of Angkhdt, which has been translated for us, by permission of the emperor, in this way.” He paused for emphasis, then continued: “ ‘My beloved. My beloved, when I feel you under me, slippery with hunger, when you have sucked me dry, when you have sucked the sugar of my loins, then am I happy. Beloved, you have taken everything I have. If this is poverty, I am content. I would not trade it for the palace of a prince. I would not trade it for a bishop’s throne.’ ”
The parson was a fat man. He recited according to an ancient tradition, whereby the words of the text were run together without spacing, in a deep monotone. At one time it had been heresy to suggest, by giving it emphasis, that one word might be holier than another. The resulting spew of syllables was hard to understand, but the text was a common one, especially in poorer neighborhoods, and Abu guessed the people knew it by heart.
The parson had recited without pausing for breath, and all through the compulsory minute of meditation, Abu could hear him wheezing. He was much mutilated. One of his eyes had been torn from its socket, not long ago, it seemed; the left side of his face was still sunken and discolored, and his cheekbones seemed to have healed improperly. It gave him a disjointed look, for though one half of his face was collapsed and hideous, the other glowed pink and fresh, the cheek fat, the eye gleaming and benign. It was as if he had made his face into an illustration of the twofold nature of his calling, and at times he would give emphasis to one side or the other as he spoke, simply by turning his head, and his audience would know whether to cringe or to be comforted.
He said: “Oh my children, I direct your attention to the last part of this lesson, for the first part is very difficult to understand. Remember this—‘I would not trade my poverty for the palace of a prince. I would not trade it for a parson’s throne.’ Now, I can see some discontented faces among you, and perhaps you think: What idiocy is this? Perhaps you are a poor man with many children. Perhaps your horoscope forbids you to progress beyond a certain salary, so that no matter how you work— Oh I know, my children, I know how hard these things can seem. Such a man might cry out, seeing some Starbridge riding by in his motorcar, or feasting in a restaurant, or standing on the steps of the theater in his evening clothes, such a man might cry out, ‘Oh yes, gladly would I change my place with you. Gladly would I!’ Oh, my children, it is a natural mistake to think your own life is the hardest. But it is a mistake that Angkhdt will not permit us to make.” The parson turned the dead side of his face to his audience, and glared at them out of his unseeing eye. “This world is a cruel place. It is a place outside the reach of God’s mercy, a world we have all come to in our various ways. We have formed it with our sins. Man’s fate is a hard one, and you might be excused for thinking that a little comfort, a little freedom, a little money might make it softer. But consider, is life any better for the rich? Are their women more beautiful? Do they find the joys of love more sweet? Do their children love them more? No, these questions of comfort, they are not the important ones.
“For remember, we Starbridges have a purpose. Now, even now, a great war is being waged for your safety, not sixty miles from our north gate, against heretics and tyrants. Tonight I have heard news of a great victory against the forces of our enemies.”
To make this announcement, he had presented the congregation with the living side of his face. But now he turned to look at them head on. “My children, our victory has come at bitter cost. Many thousands of our soldiers lie dead upon that field. And of those regiments of dead, how many of my family? I hear that my own brother and my own nephew also, my sister’s son, have purchased your continued safety with their blood. Now, warm in this beautiful church or safe in your homes, would you be willing to change your places with them? My children, these Starbridge officers are your bulwark and your shield. We would have no war or victory without them. The ones that still survive, do you envy them their comfort as they stretch out their blankets in the rain?
“Or perhaps it is I you envy. Then tell me, is it my hand, my manhood, or my leg? Is it the mark of scourges on my back? Or perhaps you remember how on this very altar, on the feast of St. Delphinium, I dedicated my eye.” He showed them the dead side of his face. “That is what it means to be Starbridge,” he said. “Don’t forget it.
“Now we are at the start of a great trial. One of my predecessors in this pulpit recorded in his diary that in the ninth through nineteenth phases of last spring, it rained for seven thousand days. Many will die, rich and poor. But our survival as a nation, and a culture, and a race, depends on us. Now I have heard some of you whispering that great changes come with spring, great miracles, great new freedoms. But I say, if we cannot keep God’s laws, the laws that kept our ancestors from harm during this long storm, then God will squeeze us like a sponge. Tonight from this pulpit I heard you singing, high and low together, and the beauty of it brought tears to my eyes. I tell you, I make that song a metaphor, because it is in the harmony in which we live together that we can hope to touch God’s pity. And in those harmonies, there must be high and low. Without it, all the sense is lost. Without it, there is no beauty, no achievement. I tell you, high and low together, together we will raise an anthem to our God!”
* * *
When the parson had finished, the people sank down on their knees for the compulsory prayers before the next part of the service. “Now,” whispered Spider Abject. “Go now. They’ll take him back soon.” He stood up and pointed over the bowed heads of the congregation. “That one. There he is,” and Abu saw a hairless old man, asleep in the prisoners’ pews. “That one. Drunken fool! He’s asleep, the last night of his life,” said Abject, the tears starting to his eyes.
Abu led him to the side aisle, and they hurried down the narrow row of columns and arches toward the sanctuary, where the parson was already being helped into his litter. Behind him stood the entrance to the prison, an ornamented filigree of iron bars, and all around slouched soldiers of the purge. Two stepped forward to block the prince’s way. They scowled and snarled like dogs, but when they saw his hand their expressions congealed, and all their viciousness seemed to drain away from underneath, until the scowls meant nothing. Abu passed without a word, Spider Abject close behind him.
The parson had his back to them. He seemed a hill of red-robed fat, his bulk was so tremendous. Acolytes strained to lever him into his seat, but however hard they pushed, the fat seemed to flow away from underneath their hands, and they seemed no closer to lifting his essential frame than if they had stood across the room.
Abu waited, and then he cleared his throat. “Cousin,” he began, tentatively, but one of t
he guards said, “Wait. He’s deaf, sir. Wait until he turns around. Then he can read your lips.”
In the sanctuary, the choir started to sing again, their castrate voices rising to the vault. Spider pulled the prince’s sleeve, for in the prisoners’ pews the turnkeys were getting to their feet. But still the acolytes grunted and pushed, and cursed behind the parson’s back. And even when he was in place, bundled like a red bag of fat onto the velvet cushions of his chair, the prince could only catch his blind eye. Several acolytes moved to the litter poles, and some went up to open the iron gates to the prison. Behind the prince, the aisle, separated from the nave of the church by a row of columns and arches, had begun to fill with prisoners, chained in groups, waiting to pass through the same gate.
The parson’s acolytes spat on their hands and bent down to the litter poles. As they did so, Abu crossed in front and stood between the foremost, and held up his hand. The parson turned his head, so that the fat living side faced forward. “Cousin,” he said in a loud deaf voice. The acolytes stood up again, happy to delay their burden. In the aisle, the prisoners and turnkeys waited patiently, and the guards, who had been talking among themselves, were suddenly quiet.
Abu looked around, embarrassed. Then he turned back to the parson, but when he spoke, he spoke with his lips only, making no sound. He was careful to form his words clearly, so that the parson would understand, but he was going to tell a lie, though only a small one, and he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “Cousin,” he said, forming the words, no breath escaping. “Your sermon was very fine. It makes it easy to request a favor.”
