Soldiers of Paradise (3 page)

The biter stood behind me and reached out to touch its bulbous head, where it swelled out above the statue’s hands. “It is Angkhdt,” he said softly. “Prophet of God. The dog-headed master. It’s sad, isn’t it, that it would come to this?”

Questions, hard tenses, gods. I hated him. I hummed a few phrases of an anger song, a melody called “I’m warning you,” but the biter took no notice. “Where is the barbarian?” he asked.

I turned to face him, furious. How could he force me to remember? The man was dead, gone, vanished out of mind. Time had closed its hand. In those days we were in love with a lie, that objects could disappear into the air, that there was no past, no future, that people needed the touch of my hand in order to exist, the image in my eye.

It was a lie I cherished rather than believed. In fact, I remembered very well. And I wanted him to know what had happened. I wanted him to know the man was dead. And so, though I said nothing, through music I put a little death into the air, a song called “now it’s over,” but in a complicated rhythm because I could not cover in my voice a small regret.

The biter listened carefully, tilting his head. With his forefinger, he stroked the underlip of the stone phallus, and his face took on a strange gentle expression. “They murdered him,” he said. “Which one?”

How I hated him! Him and his past tense. Him and his questions. Yet there was a power in his hawklike face that made him difficult to resist, a keenness in his eye. I dropped my head and muttered part of a song, my brother’s music, the man who had first struck the scholar down.

He recognized it. It was a beautiful song, spare, strong, proud, like the man himself. At the second change, I heard the biter hum a part of it himself, as if in reverie, frowning. He brought his wrists together, and with his whole hand he caressed the angry stump where his other hand had been. “It is he,” he said softly. “It is always he. Little brother,” he said, and stretched his hand out to touch me, only I ducked away. “Little brother,” he continued. “Don’t you see how men like him can kill us all?”

I started away, my face full of disgust, but he smiled and called out to me: “I’m sorry. I apologize. No biting. Or at least, only a little. Because I am talking about the future. Don’t pretend you never think of it.”

I turned to face him, because I was pretending. He was right. He said: “I see you. You are different from the rest. I see you. Before. I saw you. The others cannot think. You can.”

I stood appalled. He was trying to seduce me, I could tell. It was the biter’s slough of reason, of cause and effect, so easy to fall into, so hard to climb back out. I could feel tears in my eyes, and I bent to pick up a loose stone.

The biter smiled. “I’m insulting you,” he said. “Listen. Use your mind. We are beginning to starve. There is no meat left in these mountains. Every day the hunters bring in less. There is none left.”

I listened, hardfaced. This made no sense to me.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “We have to do it. Something. All together, for the first time. Not just alone. Together.”

I stared at him. This made no sense.

“South of here,” he said. “Way south, there is no snow. There are deer on the hill. Fish in the water. Listen—every day I talk to the barbarian. The dead barbarian. Every day I come here. I listen to his stories. He is teaching me so much. Now he is dead, yet it is still the truth. He was … He told me about it. There is food to eat.”

“I prefer to starve.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Yes,” I cried, furious. “But I am not a slave of my own mind. I am not. I prefer to die. My brothers and sisters are too proud.”

“But I don’t mean that,” he said. “We are not beggars. I mean to take what we want. Steal it. These barbarians are a race of hairy dwarves. Free men and women would burn through them like a fire. And I can make it happen. He was teaching me a trick. A way of singing—don’t you understand?”

Bored, I turned away. But there was a peculiar music in his words. He brought his fist crashing down on the tabletop. “But I can force you,” he shouted. “I can force you to follow me. There is a power in this room, if I knew how to use it. There is power in these empty gods.” He came towards me, grinning savagely, and I backed away. “I will do it,” he said. “I hate your stupidness. And I hate myself.”

He lied. His self-love rang in every word. His voice was like two instruments in conflict, one ferocious, one insinuating. He had been a strong musician, and this music was a storm in him. “Do not laugh at me!” he shouted, and shook the stump of his arm in my face as if it were a weapon. He was a little crazy, too, I thought, with his bony face, his eyebrows, his dark eyes. In the light of the carbide lantern his shadow made a giant on the wall, reeling drunkenly.

In those days I was easily bored. I knew so few words. And this biter was talking about something. He was using words as a kind of action, and that made me uncomfortable. So I left him, and outside it had begun to snow again. The sky was full of wordless snow. It blunted the edges of the mountains and the buildings, blunted everything, relaxed and calmed me. The dogs were stifled as I slogged away. It was very cold.

Prince Abu wiped the sweat from his fat face. “It’s perfectly true,” he muttered, giggling. “At least in your case.” He was already drunk, staring down into the bottom of his winecup with unfocused eyes.

Thanakar stretched out his leg and looked around the dark interior of the warehouse. Shadows flickered among piles of cinderblocks and garbage. “It’s a bit much, him calling us barbarians,” he yawned, touching his wristwatch. Nearby, a woman squatted over the fire, feeding it with handfuls of dung.

“Shhh. Quiet!” whispered the prince. “He’s beginning again.”

The antinomial had dozed off momentarily, but now he roused himself. He sat for a while, nodding and fingering his flute, and then took up his recitation near the place where he had broken off. And when he started, he spoke in the guttural singsong which of all his modes was hardest to understand. He said:

My lords, that night a volcano burst up on the ridge somewhere, and my brothers and sisters and I went up to see—nothing, as it turned out, nothing but smoke and steam. It rained, and in the valley you could hear the trees exploding like distant gunshots, like gunshots where the hot stones spattered on the ice. The clouds reflected a dull glow from far away, that was all. We froze. I thought the night went on forever. That night I thought the world had changed, and perhaps it had, because in the morning the sun was late in coming, I could tell. It rose late out of a smelly mist, and we shivered and whispered, coming home over the ice. From far away we could see a fire burning in our town, and we laughed and ran down the last ridge, in through the gates, under the belltower, up past the longhouses and barns. In those days before the soldiers came, our town was built of logs and mud, among the ruins of an older place. The stone walls, the tower, the eternal well, all that was ancient barbarism. We had built our windowless, dark halls on their foundations.

Outside the dancing hall, the biter had made a great bonfire. With biter friends he had slaved together a wooden wagon with heavy wooden wheels and had pulled the stone table and Angkhdt’s statue from the mountainside, all the way down from the empty city. He had drawn his cart up to the bonfire, the open end facing outward, and the firelight shining through the braces and the wooden spokes. He stood in it as if on a stage, the fire at his back. Beneath him, my brothers and my sisters shambled around the stone table, and they admired its blunt surface and the lewd god astride it.

We heard the biter’s voice. He had been a great musician once, but now he used his voice to bite us. He used the thing that he had learned from the barbarian. He had combined barbarian magic with a new way of singing. He could make pictures in the air. And he was using them to bite us, for in those days nothing could bind my stupid family like fire, like dancing; he capered above them in a black flapping robe, his mutilated arm held crazily aloft, and they stood in the slush with their mouths open. At first I didn’t listen. For I was watching for the sunrise, and as I stood at the outskirt of the crowd, pushing towards the heat, I saw a little way in front of me the neck and shoulders of my sister, wedged in between some others. She was close enough to touch, almost, a girl almost ripe, older than I. I could only see part of her head, but I knew that it was she, because around her I always felt a sad mix of feelings, so I wriggled forward until I stood behind her. Her yellow hair ran down her back. My mind was full of it, full of the barbarian luxury of it. Yet even so the biter’s melody broke in, and I looked up to see him dancing and reeling. He was a powerful man. He could make pictures out of music. In his singing I could see the barbarian city on the mountain as it was when men still lived there, the paint still fresh on the buildings. His voice was full of holes. Yet even so, I saw that barbarian city so clearly, and a crowd of people standing in the square. I saw the colors of their clothes and the lines of their faces. In a central square of yellow stone, of high, flat buildings, lines of open windows, hanging balconies, a group of huntsmen dismounted. They were dressed in leather and rich clothes, red and brilliant green. A huge horse stood without a rider, and beside it, chained by one wrist to the empty stirrup, naked and dusty, his great dog’s head bent low, knelt the barbarian god. He had careful, yellow, dog’s eyes. Nearby, a pale boy, wounded in the chase perhaps, lay dead or dying on the stones, surrounded by slaves and sad old men. The sun burned, and the god waited, sweating in the dirty shade around the horse’s legs, until they brought a wooden cage and chained his hands and feet, and prodded him inside with long thin poles; he lay in one corner and licked along his arm.

This is a story from the Song of Angkhdt. As we listened, standing near the fire with our mouths open, people said they saw the statue move, and some claimed that the lines of symbols on its swollen penis seemed to glow. I know nothing about that. But as stupid as it sounds, my lords, I did hear a voice out of its stone head, for the music had stopped suddenly, and the vision had disappeared. It was a curious, airless kind of voice, and either the language was unknown to me or else I was too far away to understand. But I understood the biter. He was speaking too. “Listen to God’s laws,” he said. “Love freedom. Love freedom more than death. Be kind to one another,” things like that, laws and hateful rules. That biter was a crazy man. So much loneliness, so much gnawing on his biter’s heart had made him mad. He was searching for a god to make him king, to force us to follow after him, yet how could he have thought that we would stand still and listen to that kind of song? In fact, he must have quickly realized his mistake, for all around, people were moving and touching themselves, the magic broken. In front of me, the girl had turned away and put her fingers to her head.

I was bored and angry, but not for long, because the biter started to sing again. In his voice I saw the god lying in darkness, in a wooden cage. It was empty night in the barbarian city, and I saw him raise his silver head just as a dog would have, for towards him over the flagstones flowed a rivulet of water—down one street, down another, out into the open square. He was waiting for it. And as it came, a gentle wind ran through the city, starting out of nothing, then subsiding. The god yawned, and passed his hand along the bars of his cage. He rubbed it slowly, rhythmically, coaxing some greenness back into the dead wood; slowly at first, imperceptibly, he sealed the wounded bark, he rubbed it whole. Under the cage the flagstones split apart as roots spread down. And in the iron joints the first leaves appeared, one, and then more, tiny and weak at first, but gathering strength and number until the cage had disappeared and Angkhdt lay as if in a leafy thicket or a wood, a gentle wind stirring the branches, while in the house women woke next to their sleeping mates, and shook themselves awake and looked around.

Again the vision broke. I heard the statue speak again, louder this time, and this time I could understand, for I was looking for the magic, and so was everybody else. That way it claimed our minds. It said: “You are my chosen people. Free men and women, free as fire. Like the fire you will grow and spread. For I have chosen a way …” It went on for a long time, telling us to take our things and leave our town, telling us to follow this biter and make war with him. In the crowd, some stood without listening, warming their hands, but others shouted angrily, and one climbed up into the open cart. He grabbed the biter from behind, one arm across his stomach, the other on his throat. He lifted him up off his feet, lifted him up kicking, and dropped him over the side of the cart into the crowd. Then there was quiet. My brother was in the cart, standing up alone. We were used to him, watching him dance, so we just stood there, watching. He raised his arms above his head and clenched his fists, and leaped the distance from the cart onto the tabletop. He kicked the dog-headed statue in the chest, and it turned on its base and fell heavily to the ground, legs in the air. The biter cried out and struggled forward through the crowd, but nobody looked at him because my brother, limping and twisting on one foot, had raised his hands above his head and started to dance. It was tentative and slow, a dance we all knew, a dance which belonged to us, part of all of us. All of us could dance it in our different ways. It was the song of freedom, of namelessness, the triumph of our race, and so poignant, too, to see him dancing with his broken foot, it gave each step a special transience. My brother danced, and the crowd spread out away from him, because this was the kind of dance that tells you not to stand together in a group, thinking the same thoughts.

My brother pulled a knife out from his clothes and danced with it, and now from the crowd came up a kind of music, hesitant at first, but stronger and stronger as it became clear to us what he was going to do. Our voices, young and old, rough and smooth, searched for a common music, making it out of nothing, and some had carried their instruments with them, and some ran to fetch theirs, and all clapped their hands and sang—we didn’t know this music. But like the dance it came together as we sang, more sure with every motion, every note. It sang of freedom, sang of emptiness, and it came together as if out of our own empty hearts. My brother danced a long time. And in the end, everybody knew it; we forced him with our voices, we built him to a climax, and at the end of it he drew the knife around his neck, once, twice, in perfect rhythm to the dance, a scarlet string around his neck—too tight, for he tried to sing then and couldn’t, for his mouth was full of blood. He spit it out, and summoning his strength, he sang a song that was not like singing nor like anything.