Soldiers of Paradise (12 page)

And then, as perfectly as if it had been rehearsed, a man cried out, and then another, and then the whole mass of people were crying and groaning with wonder as the white rim of Paradise showed among the hills of the eastern horizon, hours before it was predicted. As it rose, white and mystical, seeming to take up half the sky, the noise around the cousins loudened and then died away. And in the new, stark light, they could see men and women falling to their knees, their lips trembling in prayer, and some, more miserable than the rest, perhaps, shook their fists and whispered curses, tears standing in their eyes. From somewhere near, a temple bell tolled deeply, and then another and another, all over the city, searching for unison, until finally they all swung together in a dolorous harmony. All stopped at once, and there was quiet for the obligatory count of twelve, and then from every mouth in the vast crowd, and from the festival grounds close by, and from all the people in the streets and slums around them, spilled out in unison the first words of the great psalm of despair: “Break me, oh God, break my hard body into dust, for I have forgotten every lesson from Your lips. Poison every cup, every dream, every attempt. No rest, no peace, no happiness, no. Never, never, never,” and on these words the temple bells swung again—“Never, never, never. But.”

Thanakar and Abu looked around them at the different faces. Defeated old women sat back on their heels and whispered it, defiant young men spat it out as if they hated every word. But they did recite it, all of them, whether with anger and disgust, whether with tears and broken hearts, whether they mouthed the words only or spoke them from their souls. It was proof of the enduring power of the myth, of its effect on every life, the power of the risen Paradise, the planet that could melt the snow and pull the tides three hundred feet in a single night. People knelt with outstretched hands, praying to its bright surface, as if in its shadows and its mountains they could see the palaces and the bright castles of the blessed, perhaps even the windows where they once had lived, the faces of the loving friends that they had left behind when they were born.

“Never. Never. Never. But. But oh my God, accept my life as payment towards the debt I owe, and help me to bear what is to come.” The psalm ended. Under the bleak light, Abu and Thanakar looked towards the deserted dais, the empty arena, the black uniforms of the bishop’s purge, hundreds of them, materialized from nowhere: stiff black uniforms and the silver dog’s head insignia; in those days their mere presence was enough to disperse the thickest crowd. They weren’t even armed, but already people were getting to their feet, dazed, their wits scattered, clearing away down side streets and through the mass of trucks. In those days it was enough for the spiritual police just to stand there, relaxed and even smiling, and in a little while the packing yards were empty, the war veterans hastily paraded away somewhere, down to the festival grounds.

The cousins barely noticed their departure. They stood alone in an empty, widening circle, in the middle of the draining crowd, looking upward, entranced, for they were Starbridges, and the purge meant nothing to them, and at that moment the festival had begun, in a frenzy of fireworks and light. First the guns on the Mountain of Redemption fired an evil, sulphurous salute, and laid down a pall of smoke over the whole city. It extinguished the sky, the face of Paradise, and people put their hands over their ears. Then there was quiet, and as the smoke thinned away, people could see emerging out of it the lights of the Temple of the Holy Song, far away above the mountaintop, glistening among the delicate threads of steel like drops of water in a spider’s web.

The silence was broken from the other side, beyond the eastern gate, by a single muffled report, and the first rockets burst over the fairgrounds in a tangled spray of silver and lime green. With interruptions, the fireworks would continue the entire night. The separate provinces of the empire were holding a competition, and a man could see the different character of different areas in their choice of colors and forms. Squat, stone-headed Southerners preferred only noise, huge rhythmic spatterings of explosions. Pallid, angular Gharians had developed projectiles made up of whistles and singing bells. Complicated urbanites from the immense, remote fire-cities of the Far West made lingering patterns in the sky, shimmering dragons and exploding birds with long red tails and exploding eyes. Sibilant weavers from the lakes of Banaree, where in springtime it was always milky morning, preferred calm and sparsity and empty spaces. Their rockets rose slowly: a small light would ascend, drawing a straight stalk behind it, and then petals of color would open noiselessly against the sky—gentle, silent blossoms of amber, lavender, and a hundred shades of blue, sent up separately into the expectant sky. There were spaces of darkness in between each bloom.

Abu and Thanakar were in the crowd once more. They had passed beyond the city into a great promenade of stalls and booths and garish lights, sweetshops, wheels of chance, bumper cars, barkers, soothsayers, and drunks, dressed in all the colors of the spectrum, because for the three nights of the festival, obligations of class were forgotten and people mixed freely. Still, there were few Starbridges in the fairgrounds, so the two cousins found themselves moving in a circle of eager familiarity. They loitered, and ate ice cream, and watched the fireworks burst above their heads. An old palmist with an old beard and yellow teeth grabbed Abu by the hand, to croon over his lines. Abu laughed. “Go on,” he cried over the pressing din. “Tell me the girl I’ve got to marry. Tall and thin? Short and horrible?” He was partly drunk, and held a plastic bottle of wine in his other hand.

The old man peered, and frowned, and shook his head. “Abu Starbridge,” he said slowly, as if he could read it in the lines. “Marry? No. You will not marry. I don’t think so. No.” He rubbed the prince’s palm. “No, see. Look here. Death by fire. Not far away.” He brought his own hand up and peered at it. “I have the same mark.” He traced along his own lifeline with a withered finger. “Here. Death by fire.”

The crowd had quieted down. People stood around them in a circle. Some squatted on the ground. “See?” the old man continued. “All in the same place. My grandson has it too. One man out of six. I’ve counted.” He gestured vaguely around the circle of faces and looked up, his eyes puzzled and worried. “What does it mean? Death by fire. So many of us, all at the same time.”

“It can’t come soon enough for me,” said Abu, and he put his bottle to his lips. But before drinking he paused, because the old man was still staring at him with the same puzzled expression, and all around the small circle, people shuffled and looked down.

“That was tactless,” muttered the doctor.

“I don’t understand. Why are they looking at me like that?” whispered Abu.

“You think everyone is like you. You have nothing to fear from death. A Starbridge prince. You’ll go straight to Paradise. But these people fear it. However miserable their lives are now, their next ones will be worse, whichever horrible planet they’re condemned to.”

“Nobody still believes that.”

“Everyone believes it. And even if they only half believe it, isn’t it enough to make them miserable?”

“Drink up,” said a thin man at the edge of the circle. “Starbridge. What do you care?” He motioned towards Paradise with his head. “What do you care about us? Two weeks ago my brother died. The priests marked him down for the sixth planet. He was twice the man you are.”

Abu blinked. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My cousin could have saved him. He is a great doctor.”

The man snorted angrily, and Thanakar said, “Stop it, Abu. Pay attention. Look at his clothes. Listen to him—he’s not permitted medicine. None of these people are.”

“Yes, listen to me,” interrupted the thin man. “I took my brother to the hospital. They threw him out; not even a painkiller, they said. Nothing that might dilute the punishment of God, they said. Punishment for his sins. Listen to me—he’d never done anything. God help him, he’d even believed in your religion. It was punishment for being poor, that’s all. Punishment for having had to work all his life. Bastards! Drunken pig! Do you know what it’s like, the sixth planet? It has no air.”

Above them, a firework fish broke noisily against the sky, its scarlet tentacles drifting and unwinding in the idle wind. Thanakar took his cousin by the elbow. “Let’s go,” he said, but Abu wouldn’t move.

“Why do you hate me?” he asked the thin man. “I’ve done you no harm.”

“No, not you,” answered the man savagely. “Never you. Just robbed me ever since you were born. Just grown fat while I starved.” The crowd was moving angrily, and Thanakar pulled the prince away. A ragged woman reached to restrain them. If she had grabbed his arm, the doctor would have pushed her back. But the tentative fumbling of her fingers, as if she feared polluting him, made her hold a strong one. She hesitated to touch his sacred flesh, and her hesitation made the doctor stop, ashamed. She would not look at them. She ran her tongue around her teeth, stained blue with kaya gum, and then she whispered in a voice as fumbling as her hands: “Sir. Doctor. Forgive me …” and her words scattered away.

“What is it?” he answered. The woman was kneeling in front of him, in a posture of abasement that he hadn’t seen in a long time.

“You are a doctor?”

“Yes,” he said, making himself smile.

“Please. My little girl is very sick. I’m afraid she’s going to die. She has the fever.”

In the silence that followed, it seemed to Thanakar as if the circle of faces around them had tightened suddenly, closing off escape. People stared at him with differing expressions, some hostile, some smiling obscurely. Trapped! Damn!, he thought.

“It’s illegal,” he said guiltily, and around the circle he could see in people’s faces the hardening of their thoughts. So many expressions, but not a single sympathetic one. It made him angry that they had already judged him in their minds. They thought he had no heart, like all his kind.

“Please, sir,” mumbled the woman. “For the festival.”

“Where do you live?” he asked, because he wanted to see some change, some loosening in the circle around him. But once the question was out, he realized that he had trapped himself, because Abu touched him on the shoulder and whispered, “Good for you,” and because the woman raised her head and looked at him with such an expression of gratitude, it was as if he had already saved the child’s life.

“Not far,” she said.

This was inexact. After the decision was made to go, they stood around waiting, for unclear and shifting reasons. People jabbered to each other in languages the doctor didn’t know. There seemed to be two opinions about where the child was. A message was sent, a reply expected. It never came, but in the meantime people argued about how to go and what to bring. They would need electric torches. None were available. Someone’s brother had one. And then suddenly they all started in a crowd, turning away from the fairgrounds into a filthy labyrinth of streets.

Thanakar had waited with a sense of anticlimax. But as he and Abu marched along, the street illuminated by fireworks and the fitful torch, picking through gutters filled with garbage and stinking excrement, Thanakar was overwhelmed by nervousness. The woman who had originally accosted them had vanished, and instead the whole crowd was accompanying them, twenty people at least. More joined them at every twist of the narrow street, and often they had to stop while a whole jabbering conversation flowed around them. But finally, after more than half an hour, they stopped outside a house as wretched-looking as any Thanakar had ever seen, a wooden shack with boarded windows, guarded by a bony dog. It rushed to meet them, snarling and showing its teeth, but someone threw a stone and it whimpered away.

The prince and the doctor stood appalled. But they had come too far to turn back, so they stepped in through the littered yard and up the steps, to where one man was swinging the electric torch. By its light he showed them a crude placard next to the doorway:
CONFESSIONAL. SIN EATING.
“Dirty place,” he confided. “Very bad. Not a good place.” He grinned and stepped aside to let them enter.

The house was divided into two rooms. In front, through a glass doorway, they could see the sin eater, sitting with a client, but they had no time to look, for the crowd propelled them past, to where a woman knelt next to a broken armchair. It was the woman who had stopped them at the fair. She had changed her clothes; unnecessarily, thought Thanakar, for her new dress was just as dirty, just as torn as the old. He looked around. Light came from a kerosene candle. It reflected dully off a wall decorated with pictures of animals clipped from magazines. On a bed nearby, under the woman’s hand, in a nest of dark sheets, lay a sleeping child.

No one followed him into the room. Thanakar had an impression of the doorframe behind him rimmed with faces, from the lintel to the sill. It was very quiet, and Thanakar could hear the sounds of the confession from the other room. The prince stood near, frowning and grinning. He took a drink from his plastic bottle.

The child was a girl, perhaps two thousand days old. The doctor approached her warily. Under her hair he could see the circle of her scalp; it looked so small and fragile, yellow in the yellow light. The light glinted in the hair along her arm. He said, “Is this she?” At the noise of his voice, the child turned her head, and he could see her puckered face.

“She’s lovely,” said the prince behind him.

“Yes,” murmured the woman softly. It was as if the presence of her child had given her strength. In her own home, her fumbling servility had disappeared. She didn’t rise, or look at them, or ask them to sit down. There was no place to sit.

The doctor cleared his throat. “You understand,” he said, “I have no medicine with me. No equipment.”

“I have faith in you, sir,” said the woman simply.

The doctor cursed under his breath and exchanged glances with Abu. He rubbed his hands together as if washing them. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

“Smell, sir?”