Soldiers of Paradise (23 page)

In the rain, the colonel snorted with contempt, and the rain ran down his uniform and down his back. He was a tall man, even for an antinomial, and old too, with long white hair. He was seamed and scarred with lines like silver in his pale skin, running like silver over his eyelids and his cheeks, his shoulders and his chest. His eyes gleamed black and empty, and his nose was beaked like the beak of a bird. He hated priests. He felt like strangling them or whipping them insensible. Partly it was the natural abhorrence of his race, and partly it was the sight of them, fat, dead, dying, arguing over foregone conclusions. He knocked his steel fist against the windowpane. Nobody noticed.

In this backward and neglected province of the empire, where the seasons came so hard, priests held sovereign power all through the spring. They were a cult of sorcerers, and they mutilated themselves and studied magic long forgotten elsewhere. Their leader was a bishop-whore, a living goddess of pornography, and Colonel Aspe itched to see her, to grasp her by the throat. He distrusted women. But already he had come to understand that she was nothing in these councils, a figurehead and not even that. All power twined like a nervous golden serpent through the fingers of the priests.

They realized he was gone and fell silent, communicating through the cord. Young priests gelded themselves at the time of their first vows; from then on, periodically, they would burn out one of their senses or cut off one of their limbs in a gruesome public ritual. The compensation, they believed, was in a stronger spirit, increased capacities for conjuring, telepathic power. They could summon demons, and angels from Paradise, and bring the dead to life. That was well known. It was best to take them seriously, thought Aspe.

In the courtyard below him, pilgrims waited in the rain, wrapped in sopping blankets. A monk moved among them, sheltered by a scarlet umbrella. The colonel leaned over the balustrade and spat in their direction. There was no chance of hitting them at that distance. But even so the action soothed him, prepared him for the inevitable hours of talk before his will was accomplished. He tightened the focus of his mind and reentered the room.

Inside, the priests sat in ascending circles, or reclined on low benches around a fire sunk into the middle of the floor. The fire was magic, giving off neither smoke nor gas, nothing but a drugged perfume that made it hard to think. The colonel avoided the chair that had been set for him. He never sat when he could stand. Instead, he reached across the fire to take the golden cord into his hand. It looped down low, almost to the floor, between a skeleton wrapped in crimson silk and an obese, footless old man. The colonel stooped and took it between his fingers, and chafed it with the ball of his thumb. It was an unknown substance, between cloth and metal, and against his skin he felt the tingle of a mild electric current. He resisted the impulse to try and break it, because he knew it would not break. He let it go.

The bishop’s secretary threw his marijuana cigarette into the fire. During the first part of the colonel’s audience, while Aspe had recited the emperor’s letter amid a whining drizzle of protest, the old man had sat as if asleep. Now he spoke. “You’re a very violent man, Colonel,” he observed. “Very … violent.”

“I’m a soldier,” croaked the colonel in his harsh empty voice.

“A soldier, yes. I wish the emperor had sent us more like you. We had petitioned him for soldiers, not staff officers.”

“He has sent you thousands, and you’ve butchered them all with your criminal imcompetence. There are no other soldiers like me. How long has your war with Caladon been going on?”

“I believe you know the answer to that question, Colonel.”

“I know that every day the adventists grow stronger and more arrogant. As I was riding here, not fifty miles from the capital, I passed a village where a crowd had gathered to listen to an adventist preacher. Not fifty miles.”

“These are difficult times, Colonel.”

“Worse than you think. You know King Argon has had a son?”

“So we had heard.”

“You are familiar with the apocalypse of St. Chrystym Polymorph?”

“There are so many different kinds of heresy,” sighed the bishop’s secretary.

“This is no heresy. This is one of your saints. And the vision is a true one. Listen: ‘When the rain comes, a Lion will come also, a King’s son out of the North. And he will catch the Serpent in his teeth. And with the first bite all false prophets will be bitten away. And with the second bite, all tyrants and oppressors, and all those who oppress the poor. And with the third bite, all false priests and tyrants. And his horoscope will be …’ ”

“Stop! Yes, we know all this. Great powers of darkness are arrayed against us. But prophecies come and go. For a long time, this new king was to have come out of your own people, Colonel, and the adventists quoted other texts. But we are still here, and where are you? Broken and scattered. Yes, it is a dismal time. But we have our own prophecies.”

“Then it must be clear to you why the emperor wishes you to win this war. He had no interest in your struggle with King Argon until this new prince was born. Now everything has changed. Now every adventist and heretic in the empire is looking northward. And if Argon wins this battle …”

“It is clear to us. The emperor’s wishes are the same as ours. What is less clear is why he has not chosen to send us any more soldiers.”

“They have become too precious to throw away. He will send soldiers, as many as are needed, after I am installed here as commander, with or without your consent.”

As he spoke, the colonel paced the room, the only movement in it, except for the silent oscillations of the priests’ necks as they followed his pacing with blind eyes. The bishop’s secretary raised up his hand and, spreading the fingers, he stretched it out towards the moving figure. “I thought so,” he muttered. “I thought I recognized you.” Aloud he said, “I require confirmation of the order. I don’t believe it. The emperor is the defender of our faith.”

“This is a practical matter. It is not a question of religion,” said Aspe.

“All questions are religious questions. God has given his government into the hands of his ministers. It cannot be taken away.”

“But we are talking about the army.”

“Colonel, you and I are not stupid men. We know what we are talking about. But it doesn’t matter. Even if you force me to submit, the army will never follow you.”

The colonel laughed. “I have reason to believe you’re wrong. Any army tires of being slaughtered month after month, even the most devout. Your standing orders have not endeared you to the men. Medical treatment for officers only. Four thousand men murdered because you refused to issue them ammunition, even though you had it.”

“They were not the right caste to carry firearms. Warfare has laws as immutable as God’s. We follow traditions of strategy beyond your comprehension.”

“True enough. Your strategy has allowed a modern army to penetrate to sixty miles from where we stand. In your own self-interest …”

“We have faith in God, Colonel.”

“I am relieved to hear it.”

“Yes. It must surprise you. Even if we were able to accept a new commander, do you think we could accept a man like you? I recognize you. I was here when they brought you down from the mountains, caged like an animal. Cannibal! What was your name then, Colonel?”

“I can’t deny it. But I’ve been a long time in the emperor’s service. He freed me. He raised me up. And I have accepted the true faith.”

“Have you? Every word you speak betrays your ignorance of it. A convert? No.” The old man rose from his chair and staggered forward a few paces towards the fire, his hands stretched out. The candles along the wall flickered and went out one by one, leaving the amphitheater dark except for the fire in its center. A cold draught came up from nowhere. The crooked figure of the secretary seemed to grow, augmented by its own shadow, and under his hands the air seemed to take shape, until Aspe could see a demon squatting on the coals, impudent, malignant, naked, with a tongue two feet long, curling like a serpent from his lips. The demon seized his phallus by the root between both hands, and squeezed and squeezed until it grew huge, and he could curl his tongue around its head. The colonel sank into his chair. The smell of incense was overpowering.

The demon leered at him, and squeezed and licked until his erection was huge and trembling. He held it upright in both hands, and licked until it gushed sperm like a fountain, flowing over his fingers in repulsive profusion. And the room grew dark, because the flow steamed and sizzled on the fire until it was extinguished, and there was nothing but the secretary’s mild voice.

“Salvation is a chemical process,” he explained. “Do you think it is enough to believe in it? Is that what they teach now in the emperor’s churches? No, Colonel. Men like you are the scourings of Paradise. You arrive on earth so deformed by sin, your flesh so hard with it, your damnation is a matter of course. Would you like to see? Would you like to see it?”

As he spoke, the fire started to glow again, and there appeared above it, as if supported on the fumes, an image of the universe, the sun in the middle, burning and changing color, while all around it, in long erratic orbits, revolved Paradise and the nine planets of hell. Slowly, as the colonel watched, they pursued their vagrant courses, some set so close together that they almost touched as they passed, the delicate circles of their orbits elongated or contracted by proximity. Some would brush the sun by a hand’s breadth, and then set off on long solitary journeys to the farthest corners of the room. Eight gleamed like precious stones, lit from within by the power of the sun: amethyst, ruby, coral, jade. Two differed—Paradise, evanescent and white, tossed from one orbit to another, spinning lightly among the other planets like a bubble of milk, and Earth. Beautiful Earth. It floated almost into the colonel’s grasp; he snatched at it, and his hand passed through it. Then he looked again, through the layers of cotton cloud that wrapped it, and he could see continents, mountains, oceans, cities, men, all on a sphere as small as his clenched fist.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” continued the secretary’s voice. “The most precious of all jewels. Who could believe so much pain, so much suffering, so much violence, when surely there’s enough to make men happy, there, right there, within the grasp of your fist? Are you happy, Colonel? No? No, the sins that gave you flesh, transformed your spirit into earth, expelled you from a world of wonder, they are here with you. They have formed your body and your destiny. You have grown strong; yes, you feel the life in you, but you will die. Even you. Once dead, where then? Here?” And Aspe could see the secretary’s hands conjuring in the dark, describing circles around one of the small spheres. “No. For flesh as massive as yours, as arrogant, as rebellious, this one, I think. This one.” He gestured towards a smaller planet, one that burned bright red as it brushed the sun, and then cooled to onyx at the extremity of its orbit. “How many lifetimes here will it take to burn that flesh away? How many lifetimes before your spirit rises back to Paradise like a gassy cloud?”

The secretary was silent. Colonel Aspe sat as if in a daze, the planets revolving around him. He was only vaguely aware of the atmosphere changing, of a door opening and closing, of a sweet voice saying, “Please don’t scold me. I came as fast as I could. Is this the man?”

Nobody answered. Aspe half turned in his chair, and he saw a beautiful young woman, almost a girl, perhaps a thousand days past puberty. She was dressed in loose white clothes, and was surrounded by a cloud of light. He watched her with an unfocused mind, absorbed by little things, the play of light around her head, the sound of her breathing. She stood quite close to him. “Is this the new commander?”

“No,” answered the secretary. “This is the last joke of a decadent emperor, a man who has forgotten God. He has sent an atheist to laugh at us.”

“Are you sure? He looks like a real soldier. How strong he is!”

“No, ma’am. He’s a savage. You are too young to remember. Before you were born, he led a band of atheists down through the snow almost to our borders. They were murdering your animals and eating human flesh. We captured him and sent him to the emperor for a cage in his garden, though if I had had my way he would have died in the topmost cell of the Tower of Silence. He may yet. I was not consulted, ma’am. Watch when he speaks. He has bewitched the emperor into freeing him, and now he has come here. It must not be. He is a dangerous man. Very … dangerous.”

“I can see that for myself,” came the bishop’s soft, sweet voice. “He has rejected love. It’s evil, isn’t it, for a man to be so hard?”

Colonel Aspe listened almost without understanding. He was staring at the bishop, because one look at the bishop’s face had awakened memories he didn’t know he had. Her face reminded him of a life immeasurably far away, up above Rangriver, where he had sung his music, before he lost his hand. How had he come so far? He didn’t know. Stung by memory, he sprang up from his chair as she bent over him, a look of terrible compassion on her face. He seized her underneath the jaw and forced her down, until he could see her expression change. And then he let her go; she stumbled to the ground, looking up at him with such sweet and fearless eyes, he found himself stripping off his glove, and with his bare fingers he reached down to touch her face so lightly, and push her hair back so tentatively, as if asking her a question when he was afraid to hear the answer. The priests raged feebly around him. The candles had come up, and the fire burned up brightly. He turned to it, suddenly sickened by the perfumed flame, and he stamped it underfoot and kicked the cinders with his boot. “I can’t wait for your reply,” he said loudly. “You have no choice.” He bent down and grabbed the bishop by the jaw. “You are very beautiful,” he snarled, as she stared up at him from the floor.

Over the next few days, the colonel’s soldiers started to straggle in along the river road. They were small and ferocious men. They looked as if they had spent their whole lives on horseback, on high arid plateaus under the relentless sun; they were bowlegged and hunchbacked, their skin burned dark and crisp, their hair shaved, their eyebrows plucked, their jaws powerful and always moving, because they chewed some southern narcotic and spat it everywhere. In a few days the city was full of them, and they stabled their horses in the temples and put their tents up in the marketplaces and along the streets, and took what food they wanted from the roadside stalls. Yet they were disciplined too, and didn’t touch the women or break down any doors, just took what they wanted and sat in the rain inside their tents, chewing their drug with rotten teeth and whispering to each other in voiceless southern languages.