Soldiers of Paradise (35 page)

The parson had heard of him. “There is no need for that,” said Abu, still mouthing his words silently, so that only one half of their conversation was audible to the people around them. “I don’t mean to take up any of your time. The thing I want is close at hand.” He paused, then went on. “My servant’s father is condemned to death. I promised I would save him.”

The parson turned his face so that the dead half showed, and then he turned it back. “That was a foolish promise,” he said.

“I don’t see why. It is my wish.”

“Come up to my office. We can talk.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

In the sanctuary, the voices of the choir filled the vault. “This is a very large request,” said the parson. “Which man is it?”

“That one,” said the prince aloud, pointing at Abject’s father. The old man stood apart from the other prisoners, staring dully at his son. And when he saw Prince Abu point at him, he cowered and sidled back to stand next to his jailers.

“It is a large request,” repeated the parson loudly. “That man is rightfully condemned. He has broken literacy statute 14c and property statutes 39x and y.”

“Nevertheless, it is my wish,” said the prince. With the sound of his voice, he was conscious of a feeling rising in him that he had never known, a kind of happiness.

The parson shrugged, and smiled with the living half of his face. “Take him,” he said, and made a gesture with his finger. Abu felt full of happiness and power. But as he stepped back towards the prisoners, he noticed Jason Mock, chained at his wrists and ankles, his cheeks swollen under his beard, as if he had been beaten. One eye was swollen shut. Yet he stood up straight, away from the rest, and his face had no submission in it, only savagery and contempt. “Wait,” said the prince, giddy with new feelings. “Wait. I want that one too.”

“No,” said Spider Abject, pulling at his sleeve. “It’s too much. Be satisfied with one.” But the parson was still smiling. “Why not?” he said, making the same small gesture with his finger. “Mercy is the virtue of princes.”

In the nave, the singing and the chanting had stopped. Rumors had spread throughout the church, and the aisles were full of people. Excited faces peered around every pillar. Abu was the center of all eyes. “Why not?” he cried. “I’ll take them all.” And he walked forward into the ranks of prisoners. They clustered around him, clanking their chains. He held his hand out to the jailers, and sullenly, they surrendered their keys.

“Be careful, Cousin,” came the parson’s smiling voice. “Mercy is a virtue. But weakness is a crime. Be careful.” But already chains and handcuffs were falling to the stones. First free, Jason Mock strode among the others with a ring of keys, while Abu stood in a circle of panderers. They were pawing him with flaccid fingers, their faces still incredulous. He was supremely happy. With an imperious flourish, he raised his arm, and the crowd split away from him all down the aisle, and far at the end he could see the open portal, the doors pulled back, the square black night, the sugar thick on the stone lintels. But just then, as if put in motion by the prince’s uplifted finger, high in the tower above them the bells began to ring, sounding the alarm.

“Enough,” said Spider Abject. “That’s enough. Leave the rest.” Among the hundred or so prisoners, perhaps forty had been freed; Abject took his father underneath the arm and dragged him towards the open door. Abu stayed behind, unable to relinquish so much power and popularity. But finally he turned, just in time to see the boy and his father vanish down the steps into the night. And in a crowd of hunchbacked, yellow people, the prince moved slowly down the aisle, an old woman hanging onto each arm. But when he was still ten paces from the portal, a young sacristan in red robes flung himself before the doorway and blocked it with his outstretched arms. It was a useless gesture, and perhaps he only meant to shine for his superiors. He could not have hoped to offer any real obstruction, for Abu’s strength by then was irresistible. But as the prince raised up his hand to show his palm, Jason Mock burst past him, unable to wait, unable to judge the outcome of even such a simple test of will. He broke the young man’s head in with a length of chain, and pushed him down the steps into the square.

That act of violence ended all their hopes. Mock stood in the doorway, framed by darkness, and past him the square had filled with people, summoned by the bell. Soldiers of the purge were there, and when they saw the young man fall, they came running up the steps, all doubts resolved, all weakness set aside. Mock had dared to touch a priest. Trapped, he turned back towards the church, but there too soldiers were cutting through the crowd. Wildly he looked around. There was no escape, but above his head a cross of steel hung down from a stanchion over the door, supporting four red bulbs of burning gas. With a tremendous leap, Mock seized hold of the crossbar and pulled himself up until he squatted on it, chattering his hatred like a monkey, the fog drifting around him, sweetening his clothes. He pulled his chain up after him like a monkey’s tail.

Soldiers stood underneath him. The captain unbuckled his revolver. But the voice of the parson, still sitting in his litter at the back of the church, sounded out above the uproar: “Be careful! Be careful of the gas!” It gave Mock his idea. Grinning viciously, he wrapped his chain around his hand. That was the last the soldiers saw—Mock’s teeth shining in the middle of his black beard as he leaned down and smashed the glass bulb with his armored fist.

With a roar, the air caught fire, following the eddies of the fog a thousand feet above their heads. In the square people scattered, but in an instant they were surrounded and engulfed in whirlwinds of flame; it was in the air they breathed. The clouds burst open, and the rain caught fire and fell in torrents on the rooftops. Back in the safety of the church, something fell on Abu from behind and knocked him cold.

At dusk, Thanakar Starbridge stood among some corpus trees, looking back over the city. Colonel Aspe had pitched his tent among the only vegetation in the valley, and Thanakar wondered whether it was because he liked the smell. The trees bled a nauseating sap from punctures in their soft bark. It smelled like battlefields and operating rooms. Standing looking back at the lightstorm over the city, Thanakar reached for a branch; it seemed to shrink away from under his hand. The leaves rustled mournfully, though the air was still. It wasn’t raining, for the moment, in the barren valley where the army camped.

There had been no fighting, for Aspe still sat sulking in his tent. The soldiers chewed narcotics around the campfires and quarreled with each other in their soft southern whispers. They played endless games of cards, games with obscure rules, cards with unfamiliar markings. They spat and cursed. But Thanakar had been busy restructuring faces, rebuilding limbs. That day he had made a golden eye for a young soldier, with nerves of golden wire, but after hours of surgery the man was still practically blind. He had lain there patiently, though the pain was terrible and the disappointment worse—a young man not six phases old. After eight hours on the table all he could see were geometric patterns of metallic yellow. In the end, Thanakar had been too discouraged to proceed. His fingers were too sore. The wire had cut into his knuckles. It was a new technique.

At the entrance to the colonel’s tent, he stretched out his hand again into the corpus leaves, and again the branches seemed to evade his touch, while a tremor ran through them in the breathless air. It was a melancholy place. Thanakar ducked his head under the folds of canvas. Inside the tent, Aspe sat on a stool, hunched over a table in the shadows, his pencil moving noiselessly over a piece of paper. He drew careful circles and pentagons by the light of an oil lamp, and underneath he played at forming letters, imitations of script, imitations of printing, meaningless even at a distance.

Thanakar stood watching. The colonel took no notice of him. He didn’t even raise his head, but continued his slow scratching. Even in such a childlike occupation there was nothing laughable or weak in him. He glowered at the page as if he hated it, patterns of white scars standing out along his forehead. His neck and forearms, augmented by shadow, formed a tense and menacing arc. All his muscles were taut, his hand flat on the table, the fingers of his other hand cramped around the pencil, as if with one hand he prevented the table from rising in the air, while with the other he bent the rebellious pencil to his will. Left to itself, it might have written anything. It might have formed letters that made sense.

“Go away,” said Aspe without looking up.

“You sent for me.”

“I don’t recognize you,” he said, still glaring at his work.

“You sent for me.”

“Go away.”

Thanakar shrugged, irritated, and turned to go, but the harsh voice spoke again and held him back. “Wait,” it commanded, and the doctor stood and waited until Aspe had finished his drawing. It was a complicated polygon, with a paragraph of spurious handwriting underneath. Frowning, Aspe studied it for a moment, and then he drew two lines crossing through it from corner to corner of the page and put it aside on a stack of sketches, all similarly crossed out. Then he sighed and released his pencil; it rolled a little way and stopped. He raised his steel hand from where it lay outstretched on the surface of the table. He loosened the key at his steel wrist, and bent the steel fingers forward into his customary fist before he turned the key again, locking them in place. Then he sat back. “Captain Starbridge,” he said.

“Yes.”

Aspe looked at him for a long time without speaking, as if trying to recall why he had sent for him. If he suddenly remembered, he didn’t show it by any change of expression, but instead, after a few minutes of silence, he reached into the pile of papers by his side and took out a memorandum addressed to Thanakar from his adjutant, dated the previous week. It had been passed out at a staff meeting. Thanakar was embarrassed to remember, when the colonel turned it over, that he had fought boredom during the discussion by drawing caricatures of various officers, including a savage one of the colonel himself. He had drawn it from memory, for Aspe had not attended any meetings since the battle. Still, it was quite recognizable, the heavy jaw, the hatchet face, the tangled hair.

The colonel studied it and then looked up. “I am an ugly man,” he said. “But you have made me uglier than I am.”

“It’s a skill that I have.”

“I want this skill. What does beauty mean, Captain?”

“I don’t know,” said Thanakar, yawning.

“You must know. I have seen the bishop of Charn. She is beautiful.”

“I suppose she is.”

“Suppose?” cried the colonel harshly. “God damn your suppositions. Listen to me—your religion is a web of lies, but at the heart of it there is some truth. She is beautiful. Beauty in the heart of ugliness. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” answered Thanakar, too tired to be anything but irritated by this kind of conversation. “Beauty isn’t so important,” he said. “It doesn’t mean so much. A woman can be beautiful and still be bad.”

“Can she? I wish I could believe that. I’m an old man. Listen.” Aspe leaned forward and spat the next words like a curse: “This woman’s face is at the center of my thoughts. My thoughts! Look there.” He pulled out some papers, and Thanakar could see that he had tried his hand at portraiture. They were like a child’s drawings.

“What does it mean, Captain? Could you make a picture of her, and make it look like her, and make it ugly?”

“I suppose I could.”

“I wish I had your skill. If I had your skill, I would march back tonight and hang your priests up by their own chains and burn your city to the ground.”

“The emperor might not approve of that.”

“I am not the emperor’s slave,” said Aspe sulkily.

There was a silence, and Thanakar broke it. “Someone’s sparing you the trouble,” he said. “The city’s on fire.” He yawned. “I want to go now. I’m very tired.”

“Yes. You’ve been saving lives. I think you’re not having much success.”

“Not much.” Thanakar had made a hospital to treat the remnants of the colonel’s corps of antinomials. Aspe had not once inspected it.

“Yes,” he said. “You don’t surprise me. They have lost the urge to live, haven’t they? Well, they are free to go.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” exclaimed Thanakar bitterly. He had worked hard. But the atheists were dying, even of the slightest wounds. Men, women, children, they lay in bed, their eyes fixed on nothing.

“Yes. Very easy. Tell me, Captain. Are you also prepared to die?” Aspe picked a paper up and pushed it across the table. “Read that,” he said. “Read it aloud.”

It was a letter. It said:

I want a criminal—Thanakar Starbridge, of your staff—convicted in this city of adultery, murder, and attempted murder. Deliver him to the bearers of this letter. Do not thwart me in this. It is my jurisdiction. Do not thwart me.

Chrism Demiurge
Kindness and Repair
Spring 8, Oct. 42, 00016

“I thwarted him,” said the colonel grimly. “The bearers of this letter—I stuffed their mouths with excrement and sewed them shut. I handcuffed them to their horses and sent them back.”

“It wasn’t their fault,” said Thanakar.

“It was their risk, serving such a master. It doesn’t matter. They came this morning. That’s why I sent for you. You are free to go.”

“Thank you for warning me.”

“No. It was a debt I didn’t want to think about again. You tried to save my family. Only, for the love of Angkhdt, why couldn’t you have been in time? Why couldn’t you have ridden faster? Then I would have paid your debt with my heart’s blood.” Aspe paused, his expression mixing rage and misery, the scars standing livid across his eyelids and his cheeks. Then he continued in a lower tone, deep in his throat. “That was the end of me, that day. That was the end.”