Soldiers of Paradise (33 page)

“Is the door locked?” asked the prince.

“I don’t know.”

Abu reached for the knob. The door opened partway, until blocked by some obstruction inside. But the gap was wide enough to step through, and Abu could see part of a table with a few men grouped around it, talking by the light of a kerosene lamp. He stepped inside, and the boy followed.

The room was indistinct in so much darkness, but Abu got the impression of vast space. Other pools of light suggested tables farther in. All around lay piles of crates and barrels, and boxes tied in black sacking.

A man got up from the table and came towards them. He had grown his hair long, but Abu could see that part of his right ear had been cut away, and he was branded on his forehead and his cheek. His right thumb and forefinger had been sewn together in a circle, the penalty for smuggling, second offense. At the table the men were playing cards, and drinking, and smoking foreign cigarettes scented with cardamom and clove.

“Who’re you?” asked the man.

“A prisoner.” Abu smiled and shrugged, and gestured towards the boy behind him.

The smuggler frowned when he heard the prince’s accent. He turned to the boy. “Who’s this? Rich customer, eh? What does he want? You should bring him to the store. Office hours—you know better than this.” He laid a rough hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Not here. You know that.”

“He’s a Starbridge,” said the boy, trying to pull away. “Where’s the captain?”

“Starbridge,” repeated the smuggler after a pause, and Abu felt his courage flicker at the way he said it. When the men at the table turned to look at him, he thought he had never before seen faces so hideous, limbs so distorted. Each one carried on his face or on his body the mark of some arrest. Multiple offenders lacked eyes or hands, or their necks had been broken so that they wore steel braces and had to twist their whole bodies in their chairs to look at him.

But again, there seemed more interest than malice in their stares, so Abu took heart and stepped forward into the room, and pushed his hood back from his head. The room was warm, the air thick with smoke.

The smuggler shook the boy by the arm. “Speak to me,” he hissed. “You weren’t followed here.”

“No, sir.”

“You took care?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The purge was out tonight. Didn’t you hear the whistles?”

“Yes, sir.”

“By God, you’re a fool.” He gave the boy a vicious shake and threw him down against a pile of burlap bags. “What were you thinking of?”

“No sir—please. We can use him. Please sir. Where’s the captain?”

“Use him? He’s a spy.”

“No,” said Abu. “I’m not.”

“No,” repeated the boy. “Listen to him. He says he’s not.”

“Of course he is. What else could he be?”

“He says he’s not. He can’t lie, can he? It’s against the law for him.”

“Yes, and I suppose you never broke the law, did you? Use him? You’re a fool.” The smuggler aimed a kick, but the boy twisted away. Abu laid his hand on the man’s arm.

“Don’t hurt him,” he said. “It’s my fault.”

The smuggler stared at him and pulled away with a curse. At the table, another man reached to turn the lamp up. Then he rose from his chair and stumped towards the prince, and peered up at him out of a battered face. “Starbridge,” he said. “You any relation to Scullion Starbridge?”

“Which one?”

“The magistrate here. He had my nose broken once a week for ten weeks. Broken and reset. That’s not standard punishment. That’s not scriptural. Second offense pickpocketing—that’s too hard. You any relation?”

“I suppose so. Not a close relation. Why?”

“Why? God damn you, that’s why.”

“I suppose so. I’m sorry about your nose. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” the man repeated, as if unsure of the word’s meaning. “Sorry, are you? God damn you for it, I say. God damn you.”

“No blasphemy,” said another kind of voice, a large soft voice out of the darkness beyond the table lamp. “There’s no blasphemy allowed here, Mr. Gnash. You know that.”

It was a woman’s voice. She stepped into the light and seemed to diminish it just by standing next to it, for her skin was as black as if the shadows still clung to her. Her voice, too, contained a resonance of darkness outside the glaring lamp. The light shone on the table and on a circle of pale, miserable men. Outside the lamp, perhaps, her voice seemed to suggest, perhaps only a little way beyond, hope and happiness might still scavenge in the dark, vague, snuffling beasts. “No blasphemy,” she said. “Please. Spider, who is our guest?”

“A Starbridge, ma’am,” answered the boy, getting up out of the corner and dusting himself off.

“But what is his name?” She spoke in an unfamiliar accent, and seemed to grope for words before she found them, as if misplacing them in the dark. She was tall, with hair clipped short around her head.

“Abu Starbridge,” said the prince. “Ma’am,” he added as an afterthought. It seemed to suit her.

She smiled. “No one but children call me that,” she said. “It seems strange from you. Prince Abu Starbridge. I have heard your name. Come closer. I have never seen a prince before.”

He walked towards her, and when she could see him clearly, she laughed. “Why Prince,” she said. “You’re getting bald.”

“Yes,” said Abu happily.

“I have heard your name. I heard of you among the Children of God, before the river rose.”

The man with the broken nose swore again. “Fit company,” he said. “Atheists and whores.”

“Sweet friend, don’t say it. Atheists, certainly. They are the Children of God. A child cannot worship his own father, as other men must. It’s not in nature. It is in nature to deny. Yet I am certain that when our Lord comes again, He will come from them, naked, without even a name.”

The woman said this as if it were part of a speech she had memorized in advance. As she spoke, she looked at the prince steadily, as if to measure his reaction. He smiled foolishly.

 

Her name was Mrs. Darkheart, and she led Abu back through secret doors to rooms where she lived with her husband and her children. In the room where she made him lie down, someone had daubed crude adventist murals over the wallpaper. And when he had been left alone, Abu stretched out drunkenly on the bed. He couldn’t decide if he felt worse lying back with his eyes closed, the bed seeming to recede from underneath him like a wave pulling back, or worse leaning upon one elbow watching figures of strange saints and upright prophets reel around him, formal and forbidding even while they danced. There was no window, but still the rain was beginning to leak in from somewhere, and in some places the paint had cracked and the wallpaper was loose. The spreading phosphorescence gave some scenes peculiar emphasis: Angkhdt on his deathbed, foretelling his rebirth, and the water had seeped through all around his head and glowed there like a halo. The risen Angkhdt, the new made flesh, purging the world with water and light, and the world seemed to glow between his fingers. Everywhere the walls were painted with quotations from the saints, unfurling in banners from their lips as they marched drunkenly around the room. Abu closed one eye and tried to make some sense out of the words. Captain Darkheart had picked up some literacy somewhere, and he had made the inscriptions as a present to his wife. He didn’t share her heresy.

“Politically it’s not productive,” he explained hours later, towards dawn, sitting at the bottom of Abu’s bed with coffee in a styrofoam cup. “People just sit around waiting for something to happen. They say God will only come again when things are at their worst, so they greet each new catastrophe with glee—famine, starvation, rain. They’ll submit to anything. They hold the solutions in their own hands, but still they find it easier to sit and wait. It’s tragic. There are so many of us, so few of you.”

His wife came in with a baby on her hip. His eyes followed her around the room. “It’s different for her,” he said.

In her, he thought, because of the superior qualities of her mind, religion has been reduced to its purest form—a way of seeing justice in the world when there is none. He watched her lovingly as she lit a fire in the grate, burning trash and cardboard and splinters of lath.

Abu sat up in bed. He said, “But there are rumors of the advent. Now. Argon Starbridge’s son. The Prince of Caladon.”

“It is a lie,” responded Mrs. Darkheart without pausing in her work. “There are always rumors. A Starbridge prince—how is that possible? Can our salvation come out of a race of tyrants? Angkhdt, Angkhdt Himself was a poor man.”

“It’s a trick,” continued her husband. “A way of using us to fight their wars. Look.” He pulled out from his pocket a medallion on a chain, a painted miniature of a human baby in a golden crib. But its face was covered with hair, and its jaw stuck out almost like a dog’s muzzle. “King Argon has his spies out,” he said. “One of them gave me this. It’s Argon’s son. The chain is supposed to make a man invulnerable in battle, if he fights for truth.”

Abu took the amulet into his hands. “Is this … accurate?” he asked.

“The man swore so. He had seen him.”

“Poor child,” said the prince. “He must be pitifully deformed.”

“Like all gods.”

“You’re an atheist?”

Captain Darkheart looked offended. “No,” he said. “I’m an educated man.”

He was a rebel angel, one of an ancient sect of revolutionaries. Their cosmology was as orthodox as any parson’s—predetermination, the doctrine of inevitability, the prison world. Yet they did not conclude from this, as parsons did, that the poor were damned, the rich saved. The history of their rebellions was as old as Angkhdt. Six thousand days before, they had risen in small towns along the southern coast and driven the parsons and the Starbridges out naked into the countryside. Many had died of exposure, though some were taken in by pious folk. The rebels had opened all the prisons, drawn up new constitutions, and celebrated in the streets until the army came. Even then, some had escaped in the long boats they had used to farm the sea, for they had been fishermen, harvesting sea vegetables with woven nets. Some had escaped beyond the ocean’s rim, though many drowned, and boats and bodies had washed up all along the shore.

They had been a black-skinned people, and the captain, too, was very dark. He leaned toward Abu. “The world is our prison, yes,” he said. “But God cannot love our jailers more than He loves us. It cannot be the mark of a good man, how meekly he suffers. No. God loves the proud. He has made this world so hard a place. Does it make sense that He should love the weak more than the strong? Does it make sense that He should love the man who fails the test? But defy Him, defy them all and break away—those are the men He will choose for Paradise.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then He is a God to be hated. If we are wrong, and He damns us down to the ninth planet, then still He is a God to be defied. And if we can defy Him in this world, then maybe we can chance it in the next. Maybe there’ll be a way there too.” His face, which had grown fierce, softened again as his wife caught his eye and smiled. “I’m not wrong,” he said. “I’ve had many blessings.”

The prince said, “If …” but he was interrupted by the captain’s hand upon his arm. Darkheart was smiling at his wife as if he longed to touch her; she was sitting in a corner near the door with her breast uncovered, feeding the child. “Enough talk,” he said. “My mind is my own. No proud man could live differently. But I don’t expect you to believe me. It’s not in your interest. The question is, now that I have you, how can I use you? Do you need alcohol to live? I can get you some.”

“No,” said Abu, smiling. “It’s not as bad as that.”

“Don’t be ashamed. There’s decadence in your blood. It’s not your fault.”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Darkheart. “Show me your hands. Your tattoos.”

Prince Abu put his hands palm up on the blanket. “I’ll tell you what I’d like,” he said. “I’d like a bath. You can barely see them under the dirt.”

Darkheart ignored him. “What does this one mean?” he asked, pointing to the golden sun.

“All whims must be indulged, all requests granted, all commands obeyed.”

Darkheart laughed. “That—must come in handy,” he said.

“You’d be surprised how seldom.”

“You’re not in the right line of work. Now I, I would find it useful. And you will too, I promise you. Spider has a plan for you. Spider!”

He shouted, and the boy appeared in the doorway as if he had been listening there.

“Wait,” said Mrs. Darkheart from the floor. She unplugged the baby from her breast and covered herself, but it started to whimper, so she gave it to her husband. It was a little boy, and Abu noticed it had no tattoos, no horoscope. No parson had yet touched it.

“Wait,” said Mrs. Darkheart. She sat down next to Abu on the bed. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“There’s no air in here,” the prince complained. The room seemed crowded with five people in it, now that the baby was awake. “I have a headache,” he said.

“I’m not surprised.” She reached her hand out to touch him; her fingers were dry and cool. “You’re sweating,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

“No. I’d like some water.”

She turned to the boy. “Spider,” she said. “Please bring the prince some aspirin and a glass of water.”

He went, with a puzzled expression on his face, and Darkheart, too, showed signs of impatience. “I’m not interested in his comfort,” he muttered, trying to soothe the baby by grimacing and sticking out his tongue.

“Well, you should be,” said the woman. She took up one of the prince’s hands from where it lay on the blanket. “You’re a strange man,” she said. “Why are you here? Aren’t you comfortable in your own house?”

“I have no friends.”

“It’s your conscience. Look, there’s the line.” She brought his palm up to her face, to study it more closely. “Are there many like you? Rich men with consciences. I suppose there must be.”

“We are prisoners as much as you,” said the prince.

“Yes, I can see that. Your hand is much like Darkheart’s. This is your way of breaking out. You don’t have long to live, you know.”