Soldiers of Paradise (6 page)

The fat man didn’t move, though I was waiting for him. I had nocked another arrow and had pulled it back. Yet he just sat there, his fat stomach in his hands. He was afraid. I came close into the firelight, and I could see him—he was afraid of death, and it made it hard for him to think. He had no weapons, yet he reached for none, nothing, not a movement, though his body was tense. Nothing, only he had opened his eyes wide, opened his mouth, and he had dropped his cigarette. His hands were shaking, grasping stiffly at nothing as I squatted down in front of him. I was not a frightening sight—hungry, barely grown, old clothes, ripped leather, filthy fur. Nothing to be afraid of, except death like the black night around him, and the fire burning low. I stuck my knife into his face, hurting his cheek with the ragged steel. “Holy beloved God,” he croaked, “don’t hurt me,” but it was as if he wasn’t really paying attention. And maybe it was hard for him to think because his friend was screaming hoarsely, without pause. Not that it mattered, for he was already finished: she had bent his hand back over his shoulder, cracking the bone, and his knife was useless. Yet still he kicked at her with his feet and hit her with his free hand, with his head, but it didn’t matter, he was finished. The hand around his testicles had lifted him up almost off the ground. And in a little while he stopped struggling and started to cry, as she had done, yet different, too, because the pain was different. He had words and no music, and no tears either, just a rhythm of breath and a contorted mouth, and she stood staring at him, trying to understand him, her quiet face so close to him, her tears dry. How could she understand? She made a quick movement, and his knife fell to the stones. She let go of his wrist and joined her hands together on his sex, hoisting him up still farther. And when he hung limp from her hands, she dropped him to the dirt, and he curled up like a baby, his shoulders shaking, his face turned to the ground.

Then she danced for them as they had asked, for them and for me, too, on the mountainside, in the white, fragile grass, by the dying fire. It was the darkest part of the night. It had gotten cold. The man had curled himself around her feet, and she stepped free of him. Turning her back, she walked a few steps away, and I could see her tiredness in the way she walked. She walked to where the bucket stood, and she stooped to wash her face in it, to wash her arms. She stood up, her back still towards us, and with a simple, awkward movement she let her shirt slip from her shoulders. I could see the firelight on her body, the muscles, the flesh. She pulled her hair back and held it in a knot behind her neck. Then she released it and squatted down again over the bucket, washing herself, scooping up the water and pouring it over her, rubbing her arms. She was using a language of movement that belongs to little girls. The water was cold, I could tell. And I could see it dripping down her back, catching the light, dripping from her legs, scattering in circles when she shook her head. The black night was all around us, and I could feel something opening in my body like an empty hand. I sat cross-legged by the fire. I had taken the gun. The fat man had not moved. At one point he had seemed eager to speak, until I pointed the gun’s long barrel at him through my knees and put my finger to my lips. The other had huddled himself together and sat nursing himself, his head bowed, his lips wet. He was watching my sister with pale eyes, so that it was by looking at him and listening to his breathing suddenly change that I first saw a new difference in the language of her body. She was dancing.

Death is the dark mountain where the snow never breaks beneath your feet. To believe in something else, to believe in something after death, that is a savage temptation, and only savages succumb to it. Myself, I would never want to live in a world that had not contained that moment: I watched her a long time. I watched her until she was weak and near collapse. For a long time she kept her back to us, and when she turned around I could see she had been wounded in the side—not much blood now, but I could see the wound was deep. I noticed that among the other things, her breasts, her tangled hair, her beauty, the light painting her body. And the way language vanished from her arms when she saw me—her eyes were partly closed; she opened them and let her head fall forward. And I was overcome with tenderness. I stood up and stepped toward her. She was close to falling, and I stretched out my hand. She came unsteadily, like a drunk, accepting my arm around her like a drunk. This was the first time that I touched her. She was shivering with cold.

 

Their clothes were too small for us, but we took their riding capes, and in one saddlebag I found larger stuff: a loose red shirt—velvet embroidered with silver thread—and heavy pants. My sister put them on. The rest we left, and left them their lives, too, because they seemed to value them. They squatted near the fire as if numbed by a narcotic, making no movement even when we turned our backs.

It was late when we rode away, near the red dawn. The stars were already dim, covered in a silky haze. My sister was tired, nodding to sleep in the saddle as we came in under the belltower, down through the heavy gateway of our town. She had not spoken once. I dismounted and went to help her, but I had hoped too much—she kicked my hand away and slid down to the ground, standing with her neck bent, her hair over her face, holding onto the horse’s mane to keep from falling. But in a little while she gathered her strength and set off across the open stones without looking back. Later, when I came into the hall looking for food, tired after loosing the horses and rubbing them down, she was already asleep in her tangled bed, still in her clothes.

Inside it was still dark, in the entranceway among the beds. Farther on, in the hearth, I could see a pale fire and hear music. Around me people were asleep. I walked among them down the length of the hall. In winter they had never slept so long. They would have been outside by then, trampling the snow, running with the dogs, but in this strange red thaw it was as if the air was starving us. I walked down through the aisles of beds, hearing some flute music from somewhere, a song called “I don’t know.” But it did nothing to ease my mind, for I could see the bodies of some children stretched out on the stones in front of the hearth, their faces mutilated in a way I had already seen. I hated that mark. The barbarians had cut a double line across their brows and a hole through their cheeks, as if they were trying to pollute the emptiness of death with meaning. I hated it; I was unhappy and ashamed to admit it even to myself, for unhappiness, too, is a barbarian ritual. It is the enemy of freedom, and to console myself I thought: things happen by chance. But chance had not killed these children and marked their faces. My lords, you must think we were fools. Now, tonight, it seems so clear—the barbarians had sent soldiers to destroy us. Your bishop had sent soldiers. And even then I knew we were in danger. But we are not easily roused, you can imagine. So I did nothing, thinking that what was clear to me was clear to all. Only I had brought the barbarians’ guns, long rifles and belts of ammunition. I threw them down on the stone steps below the stage and turned to go to bed.

I awoke to gunshots. I opened my eyes in stuffy darkness, and for a while I just lay there, listening to the sounds, gunshots and people yelling. I lay there, and in a little while I could see around me and see my sister in the next bed. The night before, she had taken a silver bracelet from a bag of barbarian jewelry. It had been slaved into a pattern of fighting beasts; now she held her arm above her head, moving her wrist from side to side, examining the effect, not altogether happy. “They mean to kill us,” she said, in a voice heavy with sleep. This was something she knew, something she had been told; doubtless the barbarian soldiers had told her, for even in a few notes I knew the mode, and I could hear no self, no speculation in it. I understood she was repeating something she had heard the night before. She continued: “They have a prince … a priest … a parson, who tells them what to do.”

These words meant nothing to her, I could tell. And I lost interest. I was more interested in the gunshots, the bracelet, her white wrist. I sat up, rubbing my eyes and saying, “Why?” to make her talk again. But that was all she knew. She made an answer, but I could hear a part of her own music in it. She was expressing an opinion, and so I listened only to the sound. I loved the sound of her. Some of her melodies I can no longer live without. They have become a part of my own music, part of myself, my own heart’s song. My lords, why am I telling you this? It is not the place. And if, then, it was part of my thoughts, it was only a small part. For I was listening to the gunshots. I thought, I will never see her again. And so my image of her then is a special burden: reclining in the half-light in a pile of dirty blankets, her red clothes already rumpled, studying the bracelet on her wrist, her skin the color of honey, her yellow hair, her yellow eyes. Her dark eyebrows—there was no delicacy in her face, no art.

Death is the dark mountain where the snow never breaks beneath your feet. Yet something in the way she looked made it hard to bear the thought of dying. And I cursed my weakness, for a free man comes to love death as a drunkard loves his bottle. It is painful to have reasons to live. And so I turned away from her, and in a little while I got to my feet and wandered outside into the sunlight.

I wandered towards the gate. Barbarians were there. You could hear them trying to break in, the rhythm of their hammers on the wooden beams, the lash of the whip, the beat of the cursed drum. I closed my eyes and blocked my ears, but even then I could feel the slavish rhythm in my heart and in my pulse, so deep within us runs that barbarian music. Our bodies are not made for the life we want to lead, for freedom, for emptiness—I saw that, I felt it in my body. That drumbeat can’t be stopped. Knowing that, it was as if something broke in me, something surrendered. I looked up at my brothers and sisters, perched on the walls and on the roofs of buildings, clutching their weapons and their instruments, watching the soldiers break down the door.

Over me above the gate rose up the ruins of a tower, squat, round, broken, hollow. There was a way of climbing to the top. I had discovered it when I was still a child, a way of scaling the stairless stones up to the remnants of a belfry high up above the town. Belfry, I say—once wooden scaffolding had supported a great bell, silent in my memory, except for when the beams had broken and the bell had fallen with a singing clash, as if waiting for the moment when a man was riding out into the snow, out through the double gate with all the world in front of him. Horse and rider died. Biters had taken days to slave away the wreck, for the bell cut deeply into the frozen ground. I remembered as I climbed the tower, the mass of fallen masonry and metal, the broken horse and man.

As I reached the top, my body full of breath, blood in my head, I could hear music around me. At first it had been part of the air, a low woodwind speaking music as a kind of farewell, and I knew that when I put my head up through the opening, I would be struck full in the face by what the musician saw, the beauty of the sun, the sun glinting on the hills. I heard, without listening, the melodies for all these things—red light on stone, on snow, the blood-red light, light struggling with darkness. I pulled myself up into the belfry and saw my brother lying in the shelter of the broken wall, safe from gunfire, playing his pipe. He had worked his song around the hammering under our feet, using it as rhythm. He did it without thinking, I suppose, out of instinct for the sounds around him. There was no reason why the swing of that barbarian cadence should mean the same to him as to me. Why should he want to stop it? He was right to lie there with his music. There was nothing to be done. But I stepped over his body to the lip of the wall, and far below I could see the soldiers slaving at the gate, hairy men in black uniforms. I kicked the stones along the parapet, testing them for falseness. They did not move, but I grabbed up a loose one, the size of a man’s head, and threw it down and watched it fall. There was no effect. I kicked the hunks of masonry, searching for a flaw, but I was not strong enough to break the stones apart, not by myself. I worked at it until my face was hot, and still my brother lay there. I cried out for him to help me, and the music changed a little. I tried to find the words that would make him help me, but there were none; he was still free. But his song was changing, there was pride in it, and hatred, and a shadow of laughter. So I bent down to snatch the instrument out of his mouth, and tried to break it on my knee. A pipe made out of black wood strapped with barbarian silver—it would not break. So I battered it against the rocks until it cracked, and the reed snapped off. Then I threw it back at him as he sat up astonished, his mouth looking for words. He grabbed at me, and I stepped out of reach, up onto the parapet.

For an instant I stood, balanced on the narrow battlement, in full view, with the mountains and the sunlight and the open air around me. It was so beautiful and still. The swing of hammers down below had stopped, the drumbeats scattering into silence. And my brother jumped up to stand beside me, violence in his mind, perhaps, but he did nothing. We just stood there, together in the silence and the shining hills, until there came up from the soldiers below us the sound of a single gunshot. And as I jumped down to safety, I saw him press his hand against his ribs, and saw the blood leak out between his fingers, saw the sudden terror in his face, the thought solidifying there that he was going to die not just soon, but then, right then. I could see the pump of his lungs, hear the low music in his throat, and then he stepped backward into the red, quiet air. Leaning over, I was in time to see him dropping like a stone into that mass of slaves.

A boy falling out of the sky—the image seemed to mean something to them, for down below the soldiers left off their work to gather round his body. They were doing something to him, pulling at him, arranging his limbs in some way. I was too far away to tell. A priest in red robes knelt to cut that mark into his cheeks, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I was watching my brothers and my sisters on the walls and rooftops, because the image of the falling boy had captured their minds too, had seized and shaken them, so that they had put their instruments aside. I heard a shout, chaotic and unmusical, and they began to open fire on the soldiers with the guns that I had brought down from the mountain, with bricks and rocks, with a drizzle of arrows. We are a peaceful race, and it amazed me to see the soldiers below scuttle back like insects, out of range. One was wounded, and I heard him yell, a high-pitched screaming, full of unconscious music. He expected to be left behind. But another soldier came running back. Above, the sky was cloudless with no wind, and on the tower top I tried to clear my mind. But I was distracted by the noise outside the gate—the wounded soldier and his friend, one kicking and crying, one scurrying around him in a kind of dance. The man bent down to take his hurt companion on his back. They made slow progress, and I watched them a long time as they labored out of range.