Soldiers of Paradise (2 page)

The scholar went there every day. And at night he stayed in our town and studied us, stayed in our houses, took up no room, made no trouble. He played with his books and papers, his camera and tapes. He had brought his own food, dried vegetables and fruits. Real food disgusted him. And at first my sisters were careful where they slept and how they dressed when he was by, for they had heard barbarians were sensitive to human women, and they had no wish to kill him. But nothing came of that; he slept heavily on the mats and rugs we gave him. And by nightfall he was always drunk. Every evening he would find a corner in the longhouse, and watch and drink until his eyes burned. And I paid close attention. I said to him, “Stranger.”

“Yes, boy,” his voice a dry drumbeat.

“Stranger, what do you see?”

But one night, I thought he hadn’t heard. I was squatting beside him. He lay in the dark among the outer circle of watchers, among the children and the cripples. Although it was a frozen night, he wore only a cloth shirt, heavily embroidered, open at the neck, his chest hair like a blanket, I hoped. The liquor numbs your senses, I know now. He was very drunk. My face, so close to his, ignited nothing. I saw nothing in the mirror of his face. Fascinated, I stuck my hand in front of his nose. Nothing. His mouth sagged, and I could smell his ruined teeth.

In the silence behind me, in a circle of torchlight, my sister started to dance. She was new to it, and nervous, her gift just large enough to hide her nervousness. And she danced passionately, as if she were looking to deny what we all knew, that she had not yet heard the song of her own self, that her movements were stolen, mixtures of copies, and she was too young and hot to be anything but formless, anything but molten in her heart’s core. She danced, and from time to time in her flashing hands and feet an older dancer in the hall might catch the flicker of something as personal to him as his own body, performed with a dextrousness that he, perhaps, no longer had. This was why old and younger dancers were able to summon up the pride necessary to perform. Their greenness or their dryness gave their work a tension missing from more perfect work, the tension of their bodies and their spirit in unequal struggle. And when later we would watch a dancer in full flower, his death would dance around him as he danced.

I saw this without looking, but the barbarian stared and stared. My sister raised her naked arms. What did he see? I had heard wonders of drunkenness, stories of hallucinations, burning fires, men turned into beasts, whispers to thunder. I had seen a woman so in love with death that she had cut her foot off and died of the wound, not allowing the biters to come near. But this man didn’t look at me. Impatient, I stuck my fingers into his face, poking his uneven cheek. He jerked his head away.

Behind me, a musician had begun to play. She had built a new instrument, a kind of guitar that I had never seen before. Envious, I turned to listen, but she had just started when the barbarian got up and stumbled forward under the lamps. Ignoring me, he pushed his way into the center of the hall. My sister crouched over her guitar. The barbarian covered her shoulder with his hairy fingers, and she looked up at him and smiled. The rest of us were too surprised to move, though some of my brothers and sisters were violent and loved bullying. Others had not forgiven him for having brought his camera into the hall one night, or for having tried to sketch them. But most of us were free from that, and we would have been happy to hear him out. And I especially, for some reason, I felt my heart beating as I watched him in the torchlight, leaning on my sister’s shoulder, closing his drunken eyes. And when he started to sing, I was caught by a kind of sound that I had never heard before, the uncouth melody, the words like vomiting. His voice was harsh. It made me listen and remember, so that much later I would recognize, in a language that I didn’t know, the beginning of the Song of Angkhdt, which is barbarian scripture. “Oh my sweet love, oh God my love, God let me touch you, and feel the comfort of your kisses, for you are my light, my life, my joy, my cure, my heart, my heartache …” The language was dead before time began, abandoned by decree. It was decreed a sacrilege to use the holy words for common purposes. Now no one can tell how they were once pronounced, and barbarians fight wars over their meaning.

Of all that I knew nothing yet. But I heard the delirious conviction in the drunkard’s voice; it rang the rafters. This was the first song I had heard—I mean with words. Among us words were thought to muddy music, for the notes themselves can mean so much. That was not at issue here, in a language none of us could understand. But some could not endure even the sound of your religion, the vicious ecstasy, the sound of faith. I didn’t mind it. I thought they were jealous of a new thing. Anyone should be able to stand up and sing. But we had habits, though it hurts me to say it, for yes, that was slavery too, of a kind. You must understand, not all of us were gifted. But some sang every night, and their music and their pride was the only law we had. One of my brothers, a bully and a dancer, took the barbarian by the throat, and struck him down, and threw him out into the snow.

Late at night I got up from the sleeping room and went out. He was lying in a snowbank, breathing softly. I thought his body hair might keep him warm. There was no wind. The stars hung close. I had brought a bearskin, and hoped not to offend him, but I did. By morning he had thrown it off. He was a slave to his own faith, and I suppose he smelled the leather even in his sleep. By morning he was frozen dead.

My lords, our world must appear cruel and incomplete. We knew nothing about love. That is a barbarian lesson I learned later. But at that time we were a free people. We called each other brother and sister, but we were always alone. Because what is freedom more than that—the need to hear your own music always, even in a crowd? When the barbarian died, I felt stifled, watching the biters cut his tail off up on the high ground above the river, watching them cut his body into pieces, the vultures huddling in a circle. In the morning I took a pony and some skis, and rode out through the gates of our town, out over the hills, far out towards the abandoned city, where the barbarian had had a camp. I felt unhappy, but not for long. The snow stretched unbroken all around me, and in a little while I had forgotten. My mind felt empty as the snow, and I found myself humming and making little gestures with my hands, because I loved that journey. You rode in over a high span of stone, the river booming far below you at the bottom of a ragged gorge. Birds flew underneath the arch, and at the far side the remnants of a huge bird-headed statue broke the way. Its head lay in a rubble of chipped stone, as long as my body, intricately carved, its round eye staring upward. I had to lead my pony over it, and in through the shattered gateway where the bridge met the sheer cliff face, the clifftops high above me. I rode up through a steep defile cut into the rock, lined with broken columns in the shape of trees. Their stone branches mingled into arches, and I rode up through another gateway where the rough walls around me rushed away, and out into a great open space, where the wind pulled at my clothing and swept the stones as clean as ice. From here you could see the sun, rising as if behind a paper shield, the sky as white as paper. And in the middle of this stone expanse rose up an enormous pitchrock fountain, a giant in chains; that city must have been a great center of slavery, the stonework is so good. His hands and feet are chained behind him, his eyesockets are hollow. The water must have come from there and dribbled down from wounds cut in his chest and arms and thighs. In the old days, he must have stood in a pool of tears and blood.

I went on and entered streets of empty palaces, their insides open to the weather, their doorways blocked by drifting snow. I turned the corners randomly and wandered in and out of being lost, but the pony knew the way, slave to habit. So I dismounted, and left it sheltered in a ruined porch, and climbed up into an older section of the town, where massive pyramids and temples of an older, gentler design stood like a ring of snowy hills. And in an open space near the largest of these, a tumbled hill of masonry, I found the barbarian’s camp. He had discovered something, a hidden temple where the rock seemed solid, and he had come up every day to work on it, and come back every night to live with us and drink and sleep in our houses in the valley. He had kept maps and papers here, in a black tent standing in a ruck of fallen stones. He had kept a fire outside, the black smoke visible from far away. Once I had come to watch him work.

Now the fire was scattered, but there was a horse tethered outside. I had seen its footprints in the snow, and dog prints too. I could hear dogs barking, and in a little while they came running towards me over the snow, long-legged hunting dogs, but the tent was empty. I stood outside, the dogs jumping and cleaning my hands. I opened my coat to the white air and sucked the cold air through my teeth. I was so happy. I had no way of guessing then, my lords, that the future of my people lay in a barbarian city like that one had been, full of sweat and noise and slavery. Our tails would grow long, and we would never eat meat anymore. My lords, here in your hard streets, hunger forces me to make up answers to your questions and sell my memories for food. It is a biting habit to think about the past. But I have no pride left; it hurts me to say it, for humility was something far beyond my childlike imagination as I stood in that abandoned city in the snow. Then my heart was empty as the air. I stamped my feet and shook my arms, and saw as if for the first time where the barbarian had found a flaw in the gradual surface of the pyramid, and rubbed it with gasoline and blasted out a hole the size of a man.

He had discovered a rough passageway into the heart of the stone hill; I entered it, and stopped on the threshold of a round chamber. To my right and to my left around the wall stretched a row of statues in a ring, facing inward to the room. They sat and stood in lifelike poses, some stiff, some slouching, and some leaned together as if talking. Some were gesturing with open mouths, as if they had been cut off in the middle of a word. The one beside me touched his neighbor lightly on the arm, as if to draw his attention to something happening across the room. And they had all been carved by the same hand, that much was clear, a hand that took delight in complicated clothes and simple faces. For though some were old with stringy necks and some were young, they all had qualities in common. Their faces were unmixed. Each had hardened over a single mood—pride in one, stupidity in another, malice, innocence. An old man was biting on a coin. Another pulled a stone cork from a stone bottle, his face contorted in a drunken leer. Another hid the stiffness in his lap under a fold of cloth and scratched forever at a bleeding sore. For a free man, the joy of living comes from knowing that it won’t be long, that all flesh dies and disappears, but these barbarian kings and princes, it was as if the god they worshipped had turned them into stone. They would live forever, as doubtless they had begged him in their prayers.

A man stepped out across the room opposite from where I stood, a biter. I would have known him by his clean clothes even if I had not known his face. He had been a strong musician once, and I have memories of him standing in the torchlight of the hall, bent over his violin, my brothers and my sisters packed like slaves to hear him. Or even when he played alone, by himself in the high pastures, I remember children running out to find him, and they would sit around him in the snow. But by the time I speak of, that was past. A man had cut his hand off in a fight, I don’t know why, and he had given up and taken to biting in a house by himself. Let me explain. Our kind of life was not for everyone. Some found it hard to give up everything for freedom’s sake. They had things to occupy their minds. They were addicted to some work, or they had friends and children. We had given them a name. We called them betrayers, literally “biters” in our language, and we hated them. The pride of our race was so hard to sustain. The rest of us had sacrificed so much to music, to emptiness and long cold wandering, that we could only hate them. And we hated them the more because we needed them. The biters were our doctors, builders, makers, parents. It gave them happiness to do things for themselves and other people. Without that, life falls apart, no matter what your gifts. Babies die, houses fall down. We needed someone to preserve us, to preserve a spirit they themselves could never share, a spirit to fill us with hunger every morning as we broke snow on the mountains with our horses and our dogs, a spirit to fill us every night and every morning with reasons to be up and to be gone.

But I am wandering: that day, in that stone chamber when I was a child, a biter stood in the middle of a circle of statues, with a carbide lantern in his hand. He said, “Is that you?” He said “Is that you?” in an empty voice, and then something else. I didn’t understand him. Biters often know peculiar words. But the dead man, the barbarian scholar, had had a name and that was it. Mistaking me for him, the biter called me by his name, a word that referred to him as if he were a thing, fit to be used, like a blanket or a bed. My brothers and my sisters had no names.

I took up a loose piece of tile and skipped it across the floor. It made a circle round the biter’s feet. He laughed. “Little brother,” he said, and he came towards me. “Little brother, what are you doing here?” This was common biting, not worth a reply. I spat onto the floor and turned away. There was a statue in the center of the room, different from the rest—a stone table and the figure of a man astride it, his legs hanging down on either side. He had a dog’s head, dog’s teeth, dog’s eyes, and the hair ran down his back under his rich clothes. And from his groin rose up a stiff enormous phallus, which he held in front of him between his hands. It was so thick his fingers couldn’t close around it, and so tall it protruded to his chin. Along its naked sides long lines of words were cut into the stone, and single words into the spaces between his knuckles.