Read Soldiers of Paradise Online
Authors: Paul Park
Soldiers of Paradise (17 page)
“I’m very grateful.”
“Picture now. Sunrise. The barbarians go away.”
“Look,” said Abu. “Couldn’t you please light some kind of lamp? Please?”
“No. The picture is unpleasant.”
“It’s hard for me to concentrate in the dark,” complained the prince.
“No light. I prefer it. We prefer it. Someone would have lit one otherwise. There is a lamp.”
“I know.”
“But this is not a happy time for us. Not a proud time. Some of us are hurt. Tell me: why did you come here?”
“I came to watch you dance. You invited me.”
“Yes. I danced for you. You promised me a gift, and I refused. Now I want something.”
“I brought you something.” Abu fumbled in his pockets as the boy struck a light. He had brought a purse filled with gold dollars, each one stamped with the head of the Beloved Angkhdt.
The light went out, and Abu felt the boy take one of the coins out of his palm. “What good is this?” he asked.
“It is more useful than guns.”
“For a biter. I don’t know how to use it. I have a simple mind. No, I want something. Not this. Don’t make me say it. Guess.”
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“I mean I can’t guess.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” said the boy. “I want to understand my life. Is that shameful? You can see why I don’t want a light.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t say that anymore! I mean, why do men attack us in the night? Why do we have to live like this? What is the power in this horrible place? Where does it come from? How does it work? I’ve lived here all my life and I don’t know.”
“I’m not sure …”
“Don’t you understand? I live without history or knowledge. When we were free, that kept us free. Now we are slaves, it keeps us slaves.”
There was a long silence, broken by the sound of splashing water. Finally Prince Abu cleared his throat.
“They hate you,” he began, “because you are heretics. Atheists.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Because you eat meat.”
“I don’t eat meat. I can remember every time I’ve tasted meat in my life. Nine times. We have nothing.”
“Then they are told to hate you.”
“Who tells them?”
Prince Abu tried again. “Have you ever heard,” he asked, “of Nicobar Starbridge?”
“Speak louder,” said a woman’s voice.
“Nicobar Starbridge,” Abu continued, “was the founder of your … sect. A great heretic. This was … eight seasons, almost two full years ago.”
“I don’t understand,” said the boy’s voice from close by. “Nicobar Starbridge. A barbarian.”
Abu smiled. “Yes, a barbarian. Did you think you were a different species? There are men in Banaree who look just like you.”
There was silence in the cave. The sensation of gathered human presence vanished suddenly, as if the space had emptied out and he were left alone, talking to the empty dark. “This was not so very long ago,” he said loudly. “Eight seasons, almost. Seven generations. Your father’s grandfather’s great-great-grandfather. I can’t believe you’ve never even heard of him. It was in summertime.”
And then he told them, in the simplest language that he knew, their own story: how Nicobar Starbridge had been born a priest; how he had lived and studied in the capital, in the Twilight Temple. Even as a young man he had been famous as a conjurer and theologian, but he had run away before his first irrevocable vows, the night before he was to offer up his manhood on the altar. A temple servant had unlocked his cell, a woman, a seductress, and he had run away, taking some volumes from the library.
He told them how the fugitive had lived like a beggar on the roads, dressed as the lowest kind of laborer, his tattoos covered with dirt. He had labored in the mines, in the quarries, in the lumberyards, among the poorest of the poor. And about how he had resurfaced in the company of another woman, a Starbridge from Banaree. She had left her husband and her children to join him, and had cut the chains of matrimony to join him on the road and bring him money so that he could print the first of his books—a reinterpretation of the Song of the Beloved Angkhdt, and a new translation.
Abu summarized the arguments of the book: how Nicobar Starbridge had claimed that the bishops and the archbishops had founded their authority on mistranslations. He claimed that the prophet’s great description of his soul’s journey through the universe, through Paradise and the planets of the nine hells, had never been intended allegorically. It was a simple travel diary in verse, telling of real places a real man had been; some he liked, some he hated. The prophet’s description of the perfect love that chains the universe and all mankind was, according to the new translation, part of a long erotic poem.
Abu told them how, later, the priests had woven the erotic language of the Song of the Beloved Angkhdt back into allegory, so that later it had come to be accepted and become part of the myth. But in those days even to suggest that the song had a pornographic part was blackest heresy: Nicobar Starbridge and his mistress were hunted up and down the country, and the book was burned.
Abu stopped talking. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m telling this badly. Am I making any sense?” How could they possibly have understood a word? And in fact nobody answered him, so he stopped to catch his breath. In a way, the darkness and the silence helped him to concentrate, and when he continued, it was as if he were explaining a series of pictures he never could have seen so clearly in the light. Some were real, some imaginary; the real ones better drawn but less well colored. Dark browns and grays, pictures from his nursery walls: Nicobar Starbridge sitting at a table in his monk’s cell, an ugly, pale boy, surrounded by books and all the hardware of conjuring and priestcraft, grinning devilishly at his image in a mirror. Nicobar Starbridge in yellow rags, preaching to the multitude, while to one side a naked woman is molested by monkeys and wild dogs, and in the window of a nearby house an old man is playing drunkenly upon a harpsichord. The riot at the bishop’s market and the destruction of the tea exchange, the crucifixion of the merchant princes, with Nicobar Starbridge in the foreground, a demonic figure in mock judicial robes, ripping pages out of a book held by two angels. And finally, the destruction of the rebel armies—October 51st, third phase of summer 00014: Borgo Starbridge, the bishop’s general, seated on a hill, poring over a military map, while on another hill stood the rebel city in the shape of a great chamber pot, and all around, the plain was covered with struggling black and yellow figures, soldiers and rebels, painted in exquisite detail. And in the background, the canvas is lit by a row of funeral pyres tended by skeletons and happy patriots, a picture in itself, the burning of ten thousand heretics, for the fires burned for months that summer, and on the horizon whole forests are cut down to feed the pyres, and men are building a pile of wood up higher than a hill to burn the temptress, the seductress, Nicobar Starbridge’s mistress and companion, devilishly beautiful, with burning hair, while from the clouds above her, dog-faced Angkhdt scowls down.
In the dark, a voice said, “Tell me. Don’t stop.”
So Abu told the story of the pictures, and told how Nicobar Starbridge was a traveling preacher in Banaree, preaching revolution in the simplest language, among the desperate and the starving, the homeless and the meek. He preached that God gave Earth to men as a free gift, to live in as they chose. He preached a new society where men and women would be free and equal. And finally, he preached violence, the destruction of property, factories, homes, the murder of the rich. He attracted a great army of disciples, men and women, who called themselves the Children of Paradise and roved the countryside in marauding bands. Some ran naked, some clothed, and if anyone was found with any money or possessions, he was whipped out of the group.
Abu told them how the Children of Paradise had captured a small town and renamed it the City of the Pure in Heart, and how they lived there in an ecstasy of dirt, and hunger, and drunkenness, and lust. And how, living with his mistress in a high tower while his followers rioted and drank, Nicobar Starbridge had written his last great book, and in it he rejected all knowledge and learning, and dreamed of a new language with no words to describe the illusions of past and future, for of all the lies that gave men power over their brothers, these were the worst.
Abu said, “It was his last work, because soon after, the bishop’s army took the city and burned it, and burned all his followers alive in a terrible purge. Nicobar Starbridge was captured, and he was taken in a cage to the palace of the emperor, who kept a kind of zoo for famous heretics. He put them in cages, and in the evenings he liked to walk in the gardens and discuss philosophy and theology with them. I’ve seen a portrait from that time. The emperor has dressed him up in scarlet robes, and has given him a scepter like a bishop or a prince of the church, as if he had never turned away. With his other hand, he is grasping one bar of his cage, and even in the painting you can see the whitening of his knuckles as he squeezes it. He is very ugly. He is wall-eyed, and his hair and beard are very long. He lived in a cage in the emperor’s garden until he was very old.
“And that was all. In most places, the revolt died out. But in Banaree, a group of men and women made a ritual of cleansing and rebirth—fire and water, I’m not sure of the details. They purged themselves of all possessions and desires. They took to the woods before the soldiers came, to the great summer forests of that year. At that time it was all untamed, stretching up without a break to the far north.”
There was silence, and then a woman’s voice came out of the dark. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you telling us this story? Who are these people?”
“You. Your ancestors.”
“But that is a long time ago.” Her tone was near despair. “I am not old.”
“I’m sorry. I’m explaining so badly. I’m trying to explain why those people were attacking you tonight. Why the people hate you.”
“Why do they hate us?” asked the woman.
“Because you are different. And … other reasons too. Let me tell you another story, this one from not so long ago. Maybe some of you were there.” Abu paused and let the dark illuminate for him another set of pictures, the lines and colors crude and childish, for he had been a child at the time. Antinomials attack the mail. Portraits of atheists: children. Portraits of atheists: mother. Riders in the snow. The cannibal’s dance. And he told them how in the last phase of winter, when he was just a schoolboy, an armed band of antinomials, led by a tall man with only one hand, had come down from the far north to loot the farmers in that district. They had stolen horses and murdered livestock, and for more than a month they had terrorized the people there, killing policemen, taking prisoners, burning farms, and stealing food. The bishop sent an army, which chased them to a mountain north of Gaur. They had a fortress there and made a desperate defense, but the general was in no hurry. He surrounded them and starved them out, but hundreds of days later when the walls were down and they were overwhelmed, he found that they had kept themselves alive by eating the bodies of their prisoners, and their brothers and sisters who had died fighting.
There was silence again, and out of the dark came the same woman’s voice, desolate and low. “I think there is no hope for me but death. I cannot understand these stories. I never … heard them before. What are antinomials?”
Prince Abu sighed. “You,” he said. “People without names. Atheists. Cannibals. You have no God.”
“And what is … what is God?”
“Sweet God,” she thought, and she turned her head and listened for His footsteps in the garden, where Angkhdt himself had lived and worked, and tropical flowers grew miraculously in the open air, no matter what the season. She had seen an orchid open to the snow. “Sweet God,” she thought, “are you still with me?” because inevitably ceremonies and festivals—candles, solemn fat old men, the clustered spirit of a million true believers—would pack into a mass so ponderous that it could crush a stronger thing than God. At night the bells, the chanting, the suffocating ritual would frighten Him away, and she was never sure He would return. Every morning she sat alone, waiting in the garden for His timid step.
Her metal headdress lay beside her. Carefully, so as not to prick herself, she began to get out of her clothes, recalcitrant wire and layers of spun steel, pulling the steel cloth down her arms and down her legs until it lay like peeled snakeskin in the grass next to her boots. She let down her hair, pulling out the pins, shaking it loose over her shoulders. And, dipping her steel skullcap into the pool, using it as a basin, she washed the makeup from her face, rubbing the white pigment into milk, so that it ran down between her breasts.
She rinsed her face, and stood, and yawned, and walked sleepily across the lawn.
She left her clothes where they lay; they were uncomfortable, and she was glad she wouldn’t have to put them on again. The bishop had more than eighty thousand suits of clothes, one for every day of the interminable year. Most she would never live to see. Some of the more delicate ones, she knew, rotted and were remade several times between wearings. It was foolishness, something for the fat old men to do, while underneath she always wore the same white slip. Blind, crippled, castrated, how could they understand? She was the bishop, and in her heart she kept the heart of love, inviolate, unsuspected, the crystal spark of the world’s faith. There was no reason to wear anything at all.