Authors: Paul Park
In the summertime and autumn, generations of men and women had slaved to fill these granaries, working with increasing desperation as the weather grew colder and the power of the priests increased. When Lord Chrism’s father was a boy, the episcopal wheatfields had stretched for ninety miles around the city, land that was all barren now. Winter had scraped it clean, down to the red rock. And when the snow had come, and the countryside was empty, and the country people had all come in through the gates, then these caverns had been full of light, and soldiers pulling carts and sledges loaded with fat red grainbags, each one stamped with the black dog’s head of Angkhdt. Their labor had been a kind of worship, and they had chanted songs of worship while they worked. They had pulled the sledges over the ice and through the catacombs down underneath the city. They had pulled them through the crypts beneath the churches, where the grain was off-loaded and turned over to the parish priests for distribution to the multitude, between the sermon and the invocation, in small plastic bags.
Farther on along the wall, Lord Chrism stopped for breath next to another doorway. The carvings here had been among his favorites when he was a boy, and even though he could no longer see, he put his hand out to stroke the smooth neck of the brass statue. He slid his finger down her spine. In scripture, this woman had no name. The God’s encounter with her had been brief and furtive, and the granary itself was insignificant. But the statue was delightful. As the old priest stopped to catch his breath, he let his hand stroke the curve of her buttocks.
This granary was empty, too, and the light in the archway had burned out. But nearby there was another, prouder entrance cut into the stone and a wide rampway sloping up and to the right. It led up to Lord Chrism’s private quarters in the Courtyard of the Rights of Man, a long and weary way. Fingering the statue, Lord Chrism prayed to God for strength and muttered charms to slow his breath and smooth his heart. He turned back to his men, standing behind him in a pool of light. “Don’t wait for me,” he said. “Don’t … wait.”
He made a gesture with his finger, and they bowed their heads. They could not speak. Their lips were sewn shut with a metal thread. But they touched their knuckles to their foreheads, and then they walked past him up the ramp without looking back. At intervals along the walls extinguished torches hung in metal brackets. As the two men walked up the ramp, they lit them from the torches that they carried, so that a line of guttering blue lights followed them along each wall. Lord Chrism smiled. In the darkness, his eyes made out a curving double line of blue. He fingered the head of the prophet’s metal penis and fingered the ring of mystic symbols carved around the woman’s lips.
He waited a few minutes and then went up another way. Leaving the torches and the ramp behind him, he turned aside into an ancient doorway and up an ancient, dusty stair. Even though it could not help him in the way it helped a seeing man, he took a torch down from its bracket. For comfort’s sake, he lit it with an effort of his mind, a small effort, but he was tired. And soon, as he climbed the stairs, the light settled into the rhythm of his breathing. When his lungs were full, it burned up bright. When he exhaled, it glimmered out. Breathing hard, he was wrapped in alternating cocoons of light and dark.
At the seventh landing of the seventh stair he stopped to rest again. Soon he would rest for all eternity. If God existed, then on Friday he would be in Paradise, and God would cleanse his heart, and he would feel no fear or sadness anymore. If God did not exist, that, too, would be a kind of rest, mute blackness to the end of time. Either way it made no difference. He still had work to do.
But even so he stood a while longer, letting alternating images of doubt and faith possess his mind, until his breathing settled down and the torch cast a more even light. He murmured a prayer to smooth his ragged heartbeat and then pressed on, past storehouses and armories and warrens of useless, empty rooms. Ten thousand monks had lived in Kindness and Repair when Chrism Demiurge first came to stay there, a young priest, newly gelded. Then he had come up this same way. Raised in splendor in his father’s house, he had been shocked and frightened by this humble stair, for even then his footsteps had been muffled in the dust, and it was cold, so cold, with the winter thick outside. And even though he had been born to glory, and his tattoos specified that he was to be a great commander of the faithful, still there had been no ceremony to greet his coming. He had been given a cell in a section of the temple that, even then, was ancient and disused. On the way his father had terrified him with stories of the catacombs, and told him stories of vast conclaves of heretics who worshiped alien gods down in the darkest crypts, among the stone sarcophagi. When he became a man, his first act had been to send soldiers down through every corner of the catacomb, but they found nothing. It had been winter then.
In spring, of course, new heresies sprouted from a thousand seeds. Somewhere in this labyrinth there lurked a race of refugees and criminals, men and women who had run away from all the duties of their caste, who scavenged from the city and worshiped a strange god, an incarnation of the White-Faced Woman. On six successive nights Lord Chrism had seen her in a dream, a woman standing in a field of whitened bones. She had worn an onyx necklace, and her face was as white as wax. Each night he had woken up sweating, and once he had cried out. The dream had held the force of premonition.
At the fifteenth turning of the fourteenth stair, Lord Chrism stopped and peered back down into the darkness. A narrow door led from behind the landing; Lord Chrism fumbled through and pushed it shut behind him. He bolted it. It was the border of the realm of light. In a high, empty hall he threw his torch away, for light was coming in through the high windows, a cool, soft light, mixing with the smell of dust and dreams, and books and rotting tapestries. Lord Chrism wrinkled up his nose. There was something else here too, a smell of gasoline and perfume, and a sound like gravel thrown against the window. The rain had started up again. High above him, one of the casements had split open and the sugar rain was pouring through, soaking the tapestries and biting at the cloth, so that underneath the windowsill the fabric hung in strips. The sugar phosphorescence had penetrated the room, so that to the priest’s blind eyes one whole wall was lit with silver fire.
Muttering, he turned away. That vision of Paradise was not for him; he turned away and fumbled for a secret doorknob carved into the wall. A panel of the wall was carved into the likeness of the thirteenth bishop, a bibulous old man, and when Lord Chrism found his swollen wooden nose, the panel levered back to show another secret stair, which twisted up into a secret tower. Here were cells reserved for Chrism’s private enemies. His predecessor was still alive in one, an ancient paralytic, deaf and blind, still fed three times a day.
Wide, straight flights of steps rose up around a square central well. There was a landing at each corner, and Lord Chrism stopped at the first one. He turned the key in the lock of a small door and pushed it open without entering. He stood back against the wall. “Come out,” he said. “Come out now.” But nothing happened. There was no sound, and for a moment Chrism was afraid the boy had died. Like all antinomials, the boy worshiped freedom as if it were a god, and for an instant Chrism was afraid that even a few days’ captivity had been too much, and no bad treatment either. But then he heard a deep, guttural breathing, even and untroubled, like an animal’s.
The boy was sitting on his bed with his back against the wall. His huge hand moved delicately through the fur of the cat on his lap. It was the only movement he made, until he raised his head to stare out through the open door. He had been sitting in darkness, the shutters pulled closed over the window. The light from the open doorway cut diagonally across his face.
Like Prince Abu’s, his cell was large and luxurious, reserved for prisoners of the highest rank. That had not made any difference to the boy. He had defecated next to his bed and urinated in several places along the wall, ignoring the chemical toilet built into the windowseat. His blankets had been pulled apart and rearranged into a kind of nest. The room itself had taken on a hot, sweaty odor. The boy’s enormous body was glistening with sweat. He was naked to the waist.
“Come out,” repeated Chrism Demiurge. He peered inside, but his sight was too dim to distinguish the soft caress of the boy’s hand, the slow ripple in the darkness as he raised his head. The old priest was listening for some change in the boy’s breathing, to see if he was sleeping or awake. But then suddenly he caught a flash of blue, as the light from the doorway was thrown back at him, reflected in the boy’s alien, criminal blue eyes.
Lord Chrism shuddered. He had not seen the boy since he had come upon him in the bishop’s chamber, and he had forgotten his blue eyes. Criminals in Paradise, atheists and cannibals on Earth—these antinomials, God had marked them so that they could never hide. He had marked them with their hairless skins, their gigantic bodies, their repulsive eyes. Reflexively, Lord Chrism made the sign of the unclean, dropping his chin into each armpit, muttering a little spiteful prayer.
The boy had no way of understanding the language of the prayer. But he understood its rhythm and its tone. Like all his kind, he was sensitive to music, and he heard the venom in the old man’s voice. He turned his head so that he could savor it more carefully. And because he was sensitive to dancing, he watched each motion of the old priest’s hands, though he cared nothing for barbarian ritual, as a rule. Yet this one seemed to concern him closely, so with music the boy put a note of interrogation into the air, a few notes of the melody called “talk some more.”
But when he heard it, the old priest staggered backwards and stuck his skinny fingers in his ears. And when he spoke, his voice contained nothing of its usual gentleness. “Silence!” he shouted. “No blasphemy! Do as I command.”
These words meant nothing to the boy. He understood their pitch, their tone, even their definitions, but not their sense. It was a barbarian way of talking, a way of using language as a kind of power. That was all he knew. He had no way of appreciating the complexity of form, when a Starbridge and a prince of the church stooped to address a piece of human filth. And in fact he was not interested, because there was something else, too, some other music in the air. He turned his head to listen.
The tower rose eleven stories around a central stairwell. On every floor the stair was lined with cells. And when the old priest made his exclamation, the sound drifted up through the stairwell, finding resonances in the ancient tower, awakening prisoners in their beds, disturbing them at their desks or at their meals. In a little while the whole building shook to the sound of their weak shouting, and their weak fists drumming on the doors. They recognized his voice. And some were banging on the pipes, so that the sound made up a kind of music.
The boy sat listening, trying to analyze its parts, to break it down into its voices, as if he were walking up the stair with his hand on the bannister, pausing at every door. There could be something vital to him, if he could separate it out. If he could disregard the muffled curses and the cries, and break apart the rhythm of the pounding, and travel up each step of that long stair, then perhaps he would hear something. He would hear it separate from the rest, a song that he had taught her with great difficulty, for she was ignorant of music.
The cat jumped to the floor. It stretched, and arched its back. He stood up too, swiftly and unhurriedly. In the doorway the priest muttered a charm to calm the boy and sap his strength. But the antinomial knew nothing about magic. He pushed the old man aside, so that he fell back against the wall. The boy was free; he leaped across the threshold and leaped up the stairs.
As he ran, he pulled his thumb along the rods of the bannister. It made a quick, even patter on the wood, mixing with his heartbeat and the slapping of his footsteps. He was humming part of a melody, a tune called “think of me.” And all the time he strained to hear another music blending with his own, badly sung and out of tune perhaps, but recognizable. He passed by doorway after doorway. He heard all the melodies of desperation in the frenzied banging and the strange, half-human cries; the music he was searching for was different from that.
He stopped on an upper landing. There were six doors in a row, but one was different from the rest, grander and more solid. It was built of oak and studded with nails. The whole surface of it was covered with symbols drawn in chalk, charms to reinforce the hinges, for the bishop was a powerful sorceress. She could have broken any ordinary door. But this one was sealed with magic. It was set into a recess in the wall, and on each side the frame was carved into a likeness of the God of Chastity, her lips clamped shut, her wooden fingers locked over her sex. In one of her five hands she held a spindle, and with each of the other four she passed a strand of thread back to her sister on the other side.
Between them, the doorway was sealed with a web of magic. But the boy cared nothing for barbarian superstition. He swept the edge of his palm down across it, and the web broke apart. The threads pulled back under his hand and writhed and tangled in the air, fringing the door as if with seething snakes. But the boy was ignorant of danger. He bent down to listen at the keyhole, and then he struck the door with all his strength.
Coming up behind him, Lord Chrism heard the hollow booming. “Stupid, so stupid,” he muttered, laboring up the stair, leaning on the rail. But at the landing he stopped, and from the chain around his neck he produced a silver key.
Already the boy’s hands were bloody, his knuckles mashed. His lips were pulled back along his gums, displaying long, carnivorous teeth. With a cry of rage, he smashed his naked shoulder against the studded door. But when he saw the priest, he turned around. The old man held the key out towards him at the end of its chain.