Soldiers of Paradise (29 page)

“I don’t deny it,” said the commissar. “The hands don’t matter, nor the dirt, nor the man. Only if you keep this clean.” He pulled the white scarf from the colonel’s fist, and smoothed out its wrinkles. “Only if you never let it drop. But I believe you are what I would call a man of honor. Otherwise you would have broken them to your own will, and not to this.”

“They would not have been fit to lead, if they had followed me,” muttered Aspe, grabbing back his scarf.

“Remember that,” said the commissar, “and you may do some good.”

Aspe grinned. “Tomorrow you’ll see me on the ridge.” He pointed with his knife. “Watch for my standard. Tomorrow I’ll break him, by God I will. I’ll take him on the flank. I’ll have King Argon’s head upon a pole. And his guns won’t shoot one shell.” He got to his feet, and took his scarf and his bottle down the slope into the dark.

“What does he mean, ‘by God’?” asked Thanakar.

“He’s caught between two worlds. He is the saddest man I ever saw, to talk to us like that. His own people are beyond his comprehension.” The commissar shivered. “I feel a presentiment of death,” he said.

It rained all night, without managing to launder morning, which was neither crisp, nor fresh, nor clean. The sun peered dubiously through a damp mist, and the sky seemed full of illusions—clouds in the shape of continents and monsters as the commissar looked out, and once his mother’s profile drifted by. An expression of sternness changed to surprise as the clouds lifted her eyebrows, and then she blew apart.

Commissar Micum sniffed the air. “Sugar rain,” he said.

“People have been saying that for weeks,” yawned Thanakar behind him.

“It’ll come.” The commissar stooped and picked up a stone from the ground, and tested it between his fingers. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it seemed a little slippery, and it seemed as if some residue was left on his fingers. When the rain came, these stones would shine like mica, and it would be hard to stand upright.

The camp was hidden by a tattered mist, but through its rents they could see parts of the river, and antinomials washing horses. And in one place they could see a gathering of people, standing gray and dispirited, and curiously still. The sight depressed them, though they caught no shreds of talk. So they packed quickly, leaving most of what they had. Skirting the camp and meeting no one, they set out on foot, back through the Keyhole towards where the regular army had camped the night before. Doubtless the army was gone by now, thought Thanakar, up with Aspe before daybreak, circling round out of the valley to attack the monastery along the ridge, but the camp would still be there, and the hospital.

The rocks looked ghostly in the mist, along the road where they had passed on elephantback. Leaving the antinomials they had met no one, and there was no one on the road, yet still they were always turning to look behind them, and peering around boulders and up along the cliffs that closed in on either side. For random sounds seemed to metamorphose into footsteps, and the hissing of the river seemed like voices calling. Once they saw someone, an antinomial woman standing motionless by the water’s edge, barefoot in the water. And in the misty morning she looked dark and hard as a tall pile of rocks, her pack of muscles and her small hard breasts, her hair cut short around her broken face; she was not young. She looked at them as they passed. They mumbled and bowed their heads, and hugged their cloaks around them, for her expression was at once scornful, thoughtful, and immeasurably sad, and it made them feel nervous and unclean.

“I feel a presentiment of death,” the commissar said again, after they had passed. Thanakar would remember the words, because at that moment death followed close behind them, and in a little while, when the way broadened out and the cliffs started to spread away, death called out to them, and they turned to wait for him to gather form out of the mist. He was dressed, as he so often was in those days, in the red robes of a priest.

“Wait!” he called in his shrill voice, and they turned back. It was the bishop’s liaison, a thin handsome man with laughing eyes. “Wait up,” he said, leaning on a rock to catch his breath.

They waited, and he stood before them, a handsome man with thick black hair, his hands on his hips, taller than either of them. “I looked for you,” he said. “Where were you? How was your night among the heathen?”

“Happy,” said the commissar.

“Then it was better than my morning. One of them touched me. Pah!” He spit onto the road. “I washed, but nothing takes away the smell.”

“What were you doing there so early?” asked Thanakar. “Making converts?”

The priest frowned. Thanakar had an uneasy reputation among Starbridges, but the priest could understand it, given his obligations and his leg. Any differences between them were nothing compared with what they shared, the same blood, the same duty, the same family, bonds that mere hatred could never dissolve. “Preaching,” he answered. “Of a kind. More effective than any I’ve ever done before, I think. Yes. They’ve been a scourge to this whole countryside, and flouted God’s most cherished laws, but now I think we’ve seen the last of them.”

“What do you mean?” asked the commissar.

The priest marched past them a few steps. “You’ll find out,” he said. “No, I’ll tell you. I am triumphant. I never expected it to be easy, or even possible. Yet it was so easy.” He laughed, a shrill raw sound.

“Tell me,” said the commissar.

For an answer, the priest pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and smoothed it out for them to see. In spidery Starbridge pictographs, it read:

Find me a way to hang these cannibals and spare me the expense of rope.

Chrism Demiurge, episcopal secretary.
Kindness and Repair
Spring 8, Oct. 19, 00016

“God save us,” said the commissar quietly.

“Aspe came back late last night,” continued the priest. “The problem was always how to separate the atheists from the rest of the army, but he took care of that. He woke us up for a council of war. Then he roused his regiment, and they were up and away long before dawn. I left as soon as he was gone.”

“To do what?”

“I confess, at first I didn’t know. I thought it was an opportunity not to be missed. I thought of bringing them false orders, but Aspe can’t write, and they can’t read. I didn’t know what I was going to say. But the problem resolved itself. God found a way. Aspe was swaggering and boasting last night. I think he was drunk. And something he said … I stole his scarf. The fool didn’t even notice.”

“My God,” whispered the commissar.

“Pah!” continued the priest. “It was as much as I could stand to touch something that belonged to him. But something he said last night … I confess, I underestimated the power it would give me. At first when I got there they took no notice of me. You know what they’re like. But I was talking to a group of them by a bonfire, and frankly I was about to give up. They weren’t even looking at me. But then one of them noticed the scarf around my arm. I took it off and gave it to him, and after that, everything was different. It was like a magic talisman. Some savage symbol. They passed it from hand to hand, and the whole crowd came to stand around me, listening to every word I said. They seemed … very subdued. Then at the end, one of them took the scarf and wound it round the point of a spear, as if it were a kind of flag. Nobody said a word. Of course, I can’t be sure they’ll do it—who can be sure? But I really think they might. When I left, they were saddling the horses.”

“What did you tell them?” asked the commissar.

The priest laughed. “It’s so simple. I gave them a message from Aspe. ‘When you see my standard, come meet me up the road.’ That’s all.”

“My God,” said the commissar. “They’re going to charge the guns.”

“Yes, isn’t it priceless? A fly couldn’t live in that barrage. And Aspe—I thought it so appropriate that he should give the signal. My only fear is, if the mist holds, they might not see his flag.”

Thanakar looked up. The clifftops to the east were still invisible. “It’s a chance,” he said. He looked back down the Keyhole towards the antinomial camp. “I’ll go back,” he said.

“No,” said the commissar. “That’s no use. It’s a decision they have made. They’re not stupid. No. You’ve got to go the other way. Find the colonel. Find Aspe.”

The priest squinted. “Here,” he said. “What do you mean?” But before he could move, the commissar pushed him in the chest, and he tripped over a rock and fell down backward.

“Damn you!” shouted the old man, standing over him. “Damn your eyes, Gorfang Starbridge. Traitor!” And to the doctor, he said, “Go on, my boy. Hurry. I’ll keep this bastard back.”

But the priest drew a knife from his boot and lunged at him, and stabbed him through the chest. The commissar seized him by the arms as he tried to jump away, and Thanakar moved behind them, and snatched up a rock, and battered the priest’s head in from behind. Then he pried him loose from the commissar’s arms and flung him aside.

The commissar stood, swaying slightly in the middle of the road, his hands clasped around the knife haft, which protruded just below his breastbone. He grunted as he drew it out, and the blood poured down his chest. Thanakar went to him, but the old man pushed him away and sat down heavily on some rocks, stanching the bloodflow with one hand. “No time,” he said. “Hurry.”

Thanakar knelt beside him, but again he shook his head. “No time. No. Damn you,” he said gently. “No matter. Done for. Find Aspe.”

“Don’t talk,” said Thanakar, and put his hand out, but the old man pushed it away. “Nothing to say. Do it. Please. I’ll be fine. Just sit here.” His features were set in an expression of piglike obstinacy, a caricature of stubbornness. But the melancholy in his eyes was already a little unreal, a little glazed, as if the secret fire which had always burned behind them was now hardening them from within.

“No talk,” said the commissar finally. “They’ll be cut to pieces. God’s soldiers. Women, too.”

Then he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Thanakar was gone. “Damn you,” said the old man, very gently, with the last of his breath. He looked down over his chest, where the doctor had drawn on the flap of his white shirt over his heart, in blood, the mark of Paradise. “Damn you,” said the old man. “Go.”

The doctor stumbled down the road, and he found the refuse of the army still sprawled in camp: wounded, unfit, noncombatant; men sitting, drunk already, playing cards with insufficient fingers; two hundred men with dysentery from drinking river water; priests cavorting around a collapsible battlefield temple. Some people called to him and stretched out their hands, but he ignored them, and with the breath already hot and rasping in his throat, he found a horse, and pitched into the saddle, and kicked it up along the army’s track. A narrow defile led up from the valley onto the eastern ridge. The way was hard, and at the top it was choked with figures of the dead and dying, and the mist had lessened too, so that when he reached the ridge he could look out east and north over the plain, and in sudden gaps of light and sunlight he could see huge masses of men and horses clashing underneath the monastery walls.

He heard the noise, too, a roaring like the sea, and he could hear the voices of the drowning in it, for wounded men recognized him and called out to him as he rode past. He saw the hospital, and files of wounded men and stretcherbearers converging on it from all over the field, like tentacles to bring it food. He saw Creston Bile in his shirtsleeves, for the sun was burning through the mist, and it was hot. “My God, Doctor, where have you been?” the man called out, his forehead badged with blood where he had tried to wipe the sweat away. Thanakar didn’t stop.

Amid endlesly repeating scenes, he searched for Aspe. And up to the very instant, he thought he might not be too late, until, through a break in the mist, he saw the black flag fluttering at the topmost pinnacle of the ridge overlooking the river, and the colonel standing in a group of officers. Yet still the guns hadn’t spoken. Thanakar spurred his horse up the slope, shouting and yelling. He could see the colonel striding back and forth, eating an orange and giving dispatches with his mouth full.

Behind him, his troops spread out unimpeded over the plateau. Victory was sure. Aspe’s savage face was flushed and happy, and he had taken off his helmet, and his long white hair blew around. It was this mood that Thanakar found it most difficult to penetrate as he rode up. The circle of officers gave way before his horse. But the colonel barely looked at him. He walked back and forth with his cheeks puffed up with fruit. But when the first guns sounded from the monastery a mile away, he turned towards the noise, quizzically, and Thanakar could see him stop his chewing. The bombardment was gentle at first, a few rockets taking range, but then the great field guns opened up, and then the murderous screaming of the grape. Thanakar shouted above the noise, and this time the colonel understood, for his hand stole up around his neck, searching for his scarf, and then he ran up the small slope behind him, to seize his flag and throw it down. He stood looking out over the river, and then he opened his throat and let out a roar so terrific, it drowned out the pounding artillery. At the sound, his horse pulled its bridle loose from the hands of a soldier, and Aspe ran down to meet it and vaulted onto its back, creaking and swaying in the saddle, shouting guttural commands in a language Thanakar didn’t know. Then he was gone, galloping over the open ground towards the monastery and the sound of the guns, his hair streaming out behind him.

The officers followed, and the soldiers too, and in a little while Thanakar was alone on the hillside. From where he was, he could look down and see where he had spent the night, though the upper valley was still hidden. But he could see the deserted camp where the antinomials had left it, never planning to return. And he could see the river flashing in the afternoon. He dismounted near where the colonel’s black standard lay among the rocks, and he sat down with his head in his hands, to listen to the music of the guns.