Soldiers of Paradise (28 page)

In the Keyhole, the rocks closed over their heads in a kind of tunnel. In the last moment before entering, Thanakar looked back towards the army. It had spread and scattered, and tents were going up. But a clump of officers still stood, arguing and staring after them through telescopes, and Thanakar could see bands of antinomials on horseback passing back and forth, and he could see the man with the shaved head and sunglasses standing in front of the rest, a trumpet in his hands.

“Do we have a plan?” he asked.

Aspe leaned backward to pluck the cigarette from the commissar’s lips and puff on it himself. “Long ago,” he said, “my brothers and sisters found a path far beyond what you call civilization. Because of what I am, I can beat these slaves,” he gestured vaguely up ahead, “wherever I meet them, whatever the odds. My way has gone far past strategies and plans. But because I have barbarians in my army, I have to pretend.” He shrugged, expelling smoke from his nostrils. “My brothers and sisters will camp up ahead tonight, if they want. They may hold it for the others in the morning. It is too late for them tonight. They rode all day and need their rest.”

“And us?”

“Look how beautiful it is.” They were in the Keyhole, in a long tunnel of sculptured sandstone, a hundred feet high. It was quieter here inside, and the river ran deep and placid below the road. The colonel pointed back to where a corner of the sun still shone through an arch of rock, making it glow as if translucent. “Look,” he repeated. “Danger gives each moment power, as if it were the only one there ever was. Don’t waste it worrying. It will soon disappear. How can I describe it? It is …”

“Transience,” suggested Thanakar.

“Yes. Perhaps.” Aspe sighed. “Often I can’t talk to my own family. I need to talk, sometimes. When I was young I tried to break away from them. But I could never break away.”

“A biter,” said Thanakar.

“Yes. A biter. It wasn’t always so. I was an artist once.” He stripped off his gauntlets and showed them his hands, one flesh, one a claw of steel. “When I lost that, it was as if all the music stayed caught inside, and it could only escape through talking, doing, making, words. I had lost the way to free myself.”

The elephant trudged on in silence for a while. Bullets started to flick around them.

The commissar hadn’t spoken in a long time. He cleared his throat nervously. “I’m very worried about Abu,” he said.

“Wherever he is, it’s bound to be safer than where we are,” replied the doctor.

“I’m very worried. He is so vulnerable.”

“Not half so vulnerable as we are,” said the doctor, looking around for the source of the bullets.

“It’s not good to run off like that. A man has responsibilities. It’s not good.”

“He’ll be all right,” said the doctor anxiously. They were approaching the end of the Keyhole. Through a break in the rocks up ahead, they could see the towers of St. Serpentine, high on the hillside, still in sunlight. They turned a corner and the valley opened up in front of them, ringed with sharp hills. Where the road started to climb up towards the monastery, half a mile in front of them, several hundred soldiers blocked the way.

“If this is an ambush,” murmured the commissar, “it’s the most foolish one I’ve ever seen. Unless those troops are bait.”

Aspe grunted. “Argon Starbridge has guns,” he said. “That I know. There.” He pointed up the road, up past the soldiers, up the hillside to where it disappeared into a tunnel below the monastery gate. A series of terraces were cut into the cliff just where the road disappeared. “There,” he said.

“I can’t see. It’s too far,” said the commissar.

“It’s as plain as day. Field howitzers. You can see the crews.”

“I can’t see it. Where?” The commissar was fumbling with his field glasses.

Aspe grunted. “Let’s go,” he said. “Forward. I want to test the range.”

Thanakar prodded their elephant into a walk again, and they shambled down the road. The enemy soldiers were adventists, drawn in three lines across the road. They carried red-and-white banners, and flags of the phoenix and the rising sun. At about four hundred yards they opened fire.

“Steady,” said Aspe, but it was useless. The bullets made a sucking sound as they hit the elephant; it just stopped and refused to go any farther, though Thanakar stood up and goaded it until it bled. It just stood there, and then it knelt down solemnly. It wouldn’t take another step.

“Stay here,” said Aspe. He jumped down from the elephant’s back, his boots ringing on the stones. He walked forward down the road a little distance, and from the pouch at his side he produced a copper bugle. Then he raised his arms and shouted out, as if calling for silence, once, twice, three times, and perhaps it was just a trick of the rocks, but his voice seemed to fill the valley and the gunfire lessened. As he put the bugle to his lips, it almost stopped. He started to play a song, full of low notes and deep melancholy, and Thanakar noticed that some of the adventists in front had dropped their weapons, and some were praying, and some knelt down and put their foreheads to the stones. And the sound of the music seemed to carry a long way, for Thanakar thought he heard an echo from behind them, but then he looked back and saw, sitting on an outcropping of rock far above the river and the road, the white-faced antinomial with sunglasses, the sunset gathering around him, and his long trumpet lifted to the sky. Above him, the clouds had caught on fire.

For a long time the two men played, not the same song, but melodies that seemed to catch each other in a sad, loveless embrace. And underneath the music Thanakar could hear the running river, and then he could hear the sound of hoofbeats and a different kind of singing, and in this new sound he recognized for the first time the war song of the antinomials, and it wasn’t wild or harsh or even loud, but instead it seemed to linger somewhere in the sky, pure, bitter, restrained, almost out of earshot, not one song but a thousand, mixing and searching high above them for harmonies among the clouds.

The commissar was studying the enemy through his field glasses. “Incredible,” he said. “They are weeping. You can see the tears.”

Thanakar looked back towards the Keyhole. From a gap in the rocks the first of the antinomials rode out, men and women riding on horseback, jumping over boulders. They rode and turned and mixed in a whirling pattern every moment more complex, because at every moment there were more of them. They wheeled and changed direction, spreading out around them in a spinning circle, the dying elephant at its hub, and then they turned and circled Aspe as he stood with his bugle to his lips. They carried rifles and machetes in scabbards on their saddles, but they never touched them, and if the adventists had opened fire, they could have killed great numbers. But all this time the enemy stood as if paralyzed as the antinomials spun and circled closer and closer, and it got dark. Soon light touched only the topmost towers of the monastery, and the rest of the valley filled with shadows, like a bowl filling up with ashes under the burning sky.

In time, the enemy lit torches and retreated up the road. Then the guns talked from the mountains and spat long streamers of green fire, trying to find the antinomials in their range, but they couldn’t spit far enough. Up the road, they lathered the whole valley with green fire, as if to show that there was no part of it they couldn’t reach. By the light of those unearthly flames, the antinomials dismounted and made camp.

“Or angels,” replied the commissar.

“There’s no difference,” said Thanakar airily. “They’re just as difficult to control.”

The two men were sitting outside their own careful tent, at the top of a small slope. They sat in deckchairs, looking down towards the riverside where the antinomials were camped around some bonfires. Tents stood scattered as if at random along the bottom of the valley, half erected, fallen down. A few seemed to have been lit on fire, and people squatted around them warming their hands. From the river came a constant noise of splashing and yelling as men and women, naked in the cooling wind, washed themselves and splashed each other like children. Dogs ran everywhere, little barking dogs from the city temples and huge shaggy brutes picked up along the line of march. They had slunk down from the empty hills wherever the army passed, to run with the antinomials: silent beasts, slinking with their heads close to the ground, stealing food, and boys and girls ran after them, slapping at their shaggy heads and laughing when they tried to bite. There was food enough for everyone that night. As the two Starbridges had looked on, appalled, the antinomials had butchered the dead elephant, gutted it, stripped off its skin, sliced long slabs of meat from its bones, broken the skeleton apart. Thanakar was a good cook, and he had made an excellent meal for the two of them over the primus, white rice and pickled figs, served in lacquer bowls with sprigs of mint. But as they sat in deck chairs looking out over the camp, it was impossible to eat. The smell of roasting flesh rose up everywhere around them, and everywhere people yelled and reeled as if drunk with blood.

Later they had seen the colonel stand up, surrounded by a circle of his family, his steel fist raised to the sky, and they had heard some of his talking, too, a low toneless whisper. It had no words or voice. Yet still it wasn’t buried among all the other sounds, the shouts, barking laughter, people ringing saucepans like gongs, people making music. It rose above those noises like a kind of vapor, like the distilled essence of all the sounds in that disordered camp. It seemed to distill what all of them evoked in different ways, a yearning for something out of reach, and the defiant joy that comes from never settling for anything less.

“I have to get back as quickly as I can,” Thanakar was saying. “I’m the only one who can redo hands. Bloodstar gets to the wrist all right, but the fingers turn out webbed, like a fin or a flipper. Not that we have the materials to do a careful job. Still, they must be wondering where I am.”

“We’ll go back in the morning,” said the commissar, half-listening. “We’ll all go back. The guns are impregnable from this side.”

The bonfires had burned low, and before long everything was dark. But tracer shells still drew occasional parabolas across the sky. They fell short, noiselessly, and flared up.

The two men heard footsteps coming up the slope, and Aspe stepped into their lamplight, carrying a bottle. He was smiling and flushed. Exultation freed his movement and the gestures of his hands, and made him seem bigger even than he was. The air was cool, yet his face shone with sweat, the seams and scars standing out in silver lines along his cheeks.

“I have come to see if you are comfortable,” he said. “I’m going back.” He paused when they said nothing, then continued. “I should have brought the horse. I was a fool. I have to walk, but I feel like walking. I have them,” he exulted. “I have them in my hand.”

“What do you mean?” asked Thanakar.

“Tonight they swore to follow me. Me. They swore to obey me for one month. It’s not long enough, for a long journey. It doesn’t matter. What is a month to them? A word. I will make it long enough.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, of course not. Why should you? When have you ever understood anything of importance?” Aspe sprawled down heavily on the stones in front of the tent, and his bottle made a chink as he put it down. He took out his knife and made a line in the dirt. “This is the valley,” he said. “North and south. The guns are at this end,” he said, touching the north end with his knife. “The guns and the monastery. We are here,” he continued, bisecting the line with a small mark. “Just north of this notch, facing the guns. The army is here, where we left them on the other side. Tonight I go back to join them, and tomorrow morning we must circle round, out of the valley onto the ridge. I know the way.” A tracer lit the sky, and lit the valley from the monastery to the notch, and showed the escarpment on either side. “I will meet King Argon there.” Aspe pointed with his knife to the top of the ridge northeast of where they sat. “I know the place. But I must keep men here. Otherwise the King will try and move his guns. But when he shoots those flares, he thinks he sees my army. My brothers and sisters will stay here all day. They have given their word.”

He paused, then went on. “No, not that. They have no word to give. I don’t want that. But I have given them a symbol.” He reached into his breast and pulled out a white silk scarf. “They will follow this, and the man who carries it. And I will burn it one month from tonight, when I have led them home.”

“I don’t understand,” said Thanakar.

“Then it is too hard to explain to you.” Aspe turned to the commissar. “Old man,” he said. “It is a sin to try and break the unbreakable horse. So it is. But I found this horse shackled and bound, and I broke the chain and loosened the rope. Only, I must lead it for a time. I too have my obligations. But when King Argon’s head is on a pole and I have sent it to the emperor, then I ride north, and my family rides with me. They follow me because of a memory I gave them. I can make pictures in the air. Have you seen it? No? Barbarians! No matter, it’s a trick I have. It is a magic that I learned long ago. I have given them a memory of freedom. Every night I have sung it in their ear. But I will not betray them, not this time. North, north above Rangriver, where the grass grows, and there’s fish in the water and snow on the hill. In the house where I was born, I will sing my music. I have pledged my word. I will not break it. One week from tonight I ride. And my people will ride with me.”

“The savior of his race,” muttered the commissar.

“Ah yes, a biter,” said Aspe, smiling viciously. “And maybe hoping is the sharpest bite of all. But there is beauty in the heart of ugliness—I learned that from your bishop. You know she has true power, that one. All the rest are conjurers and charlatans—your priests are masters of illusion, as I am. But she has a true power. When I saw her in the center of that circle of old priests, it made me think that there was hope, for me and all of us, and that a man could change. It made me hope I had some beauty of my own. A biter, yes. But look you, Starbridge, look. We can’t all keep our fingers clean. Maybe I have been ambition’s slave, and worse than that, a slave to other people. But without me, my brothers and my sisters would still be stinking in your filthy slum, because sometimes it takes a man with dirt on his hands.”