Sugar Rain (30 page)

The men were armed with spears and long arrows and short bows, and they made no motion as the boat drew out of range. But the man on the water’s edge reloaded his flare gun. He shot it off again as the light glimmered away: a silver bead that seemed to rise so slowly before it shattered on the surface of the dark. The flare gun made no noise, only a soft puff that was lost in the creak of the boat, the slap of the paddles and the stranger’s panicked whine.

But as the boat sped away, the man on the shore tilted his hand. He let the muzzle of his gun slip down a few inches, so that the third flare he fired burst not above himself, but above the boat, beyond her bow. It lit up the water for the space of forty yards.

Dead ahead, there was an obstruction in the water. It towered up above the boat, an enormous mass of painted stone carved in the shape of a woman’s head. It was half sunk in the water; the lake had risen almost to the woman’s eyes. She stared out over its surface, her eyes white and empty. She wore a great stone headdress in her thick stone hair, a crown and diadem in the fashion of the old kings of Charn.

“Onandaga,”
whispered Gudrun Sarkis as the boat drifted to a halt. Charity took her paddle out of the water. There was no sound anywhere, except water dripping from the paddle blade, and the puff of the flare gun as the man behind them fired again.

This time he lit the water back the way they had come, and revealed five boats drawn up motionless in a line. They were long and very low in the water. Seven men were standing up in each, serene, attenuated figures, dark-skinned, but with their chests and faces painted white. They too were armed with spears.

Noiselessly Sarkis turned the boat towards shore. There, on an outcropping of rock, stood the white-faced woman, black-haired and dressed in black, with an onyx ring through one nostril.

So much blackness only accentuated the sick pallor of her skin, the changing color of her eyes. “Her eyes,” croaked Gudrun Sarkis. Throwing down his paddle and snatching up a spear, he bounded to his feet. As quick as thought, he aimed the spear and flung it, but at the very end his throw was spoiled by the force of a single arrow passing through his chest. His arm wavered. The spear clattered on the rocks beside the white-faced woman’s foot, and then Gudrun Sarkis fell over backwards into the water without even a cry, as the boat drifted in towards land. Charity stood up, but he had disappeared. Deep below the surface, he left a trail of phosphorescence.

The boat rocked gently in the water. As they drifted in towards shore the stranger hid his face, but Charity was curious. Varana had told her about the white-faced woman’s eyes, how they shone in the darkness. It was a lie; as the light faded above her, Charity could see nothing. Then someone lit a torch behind the rocks, a softer, reddish glow, full of soot and smoke. Soon there was a row of moving torches: wadded cotton dipped in kerosene, carried on the end of spears. Holding torches, the men gathered in around the white-faced woman, and by the flickering torchlight Charity could see what Varana had meant.

As the boat drifted up the narrow beach, Charity watched the woman’s face and saw her eyes change color. At first she thought it was a trick, a figment of the smoky light, but the woman was not ten feet away as the boat grunted to rest. Charity could see her clearly. Her eyes, which had seemed black at first, took on a reddish tinge, spreading from the pupil. Then they seemed to lighten to a nauseating pink, then lost color altogether. But then flecks of yellow appeared and spread into a pool; her eyes flashed yellow for an instant, until they were polluted by a mist of violet darkening to black—a full circle of unnatural shades.

Her skin was ageless and unlined, her face clear and handsome. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she was dressed in a long gown of Starbridge silk, cut low over her breasts. She was tall, with an expression of uncompromising pride upon her face. Standing in a circle of naked warriors, she made a proud and regal figure. But when she stepped down to the beach, Charity noticed that her teeth were badly stained.

The stranger was making a low, stricken whine. But he stopped abruptly when the white-faced woman spoke. “Where are you going?” she asked, and her voice was soft without being gentle. It was almost a whisper, audible only in the perfect silence, coldly arrogant in its softness, as if it were not even imaginable that anyone could speak while she was speaking. “Where are you going?”

“To Caladon,” said Charity.

“To Caladon. No. Your guide mistook the way,” whispered the white-faced woman. “It is easy in the dark.”

“We mean no harm,” said Charity, looking back over the lake. A pale fin broke the surface near where Gudrun Sarkis had disappeared. Beyond, Charity could see the five boats slowly approaching, paddled gently by their crews.

“They were hunting a big fish,” whispered the white-faced woman. “They say it lives near here—a very big one. Big as a ten-man boat. I came to watch them.”

“We mean no harm,” repeated Charity. “Show us the way and let us go. Please. I was told to give you this.”

She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out the glassine pouch of heroin. When the woman saw it, a yellow stain was spreading in her eyes; she stepped across the beach and plucked it out of Charity’s hand. With her fingernail she slit the tape that held it closed. She licked her little finger and scooped some of the powder onto the pad and rubbed it on her gums. “It is second-quality,” she said. “Where did you get this?”

She closed the pouch and tucked it underneath her clothes. When Charity didn’t answer, she continued: “This is good, but I have heard of better. There is a new medicine, a new kind of vaccine. Have you heard of it? It interrupts the hierarchy of nature. It desanctifies the blood.”

“Please let us go,” said Charity.

“No. I need this medicine. Come with me.” She turned and walked away into the darkness. Her men came down from the rocks to help Charity and the stranger from the boat. They pulled the boat up onto the beach. Then they escorted the two travelers away, down a muddy track among the boulders and over a small creek.

In single file, they passed over an expanse of packed dirt and then entered a narrow tunnel. Countless footsteps had worn a groove in the rock floor, and the ceiling was seared by the fire of countless torches. Above their heads were cracks and fissures in the rock, and Charity could hear the scurrying of rodents and lithe bats, and perhaps even larger animals. When finally they came out into an open cavern, the air above them was full of circling white birds.

At the outskirts of a small town of canvas tents, the white-faced woman waited for them. “You are my guests,” she whispered. “Though that may change. Until it does, I will prepare a place for you, with food and water. When you are ready, come to me.” Again she turned and walked away, but Charity could see where she was going. The shantytown of tents was built around the base of a small hill, and there was a stone staircase leading to the top. Each step was flanked with urns of burning fire, and Charity could see the white-faced woman passing up between them, followed by two men carrying torches.

At the top of the hill was a stone mausoleum. Charity walked up there some time later, after she and the stranger had sat and rested in a tent, and naked men had brought them bowls of mushrooms. “I won’t go,” the stranger said. “I’ll tell you that right now.”

So Charity went alone, and climbed the stone staircase in between the urns of fire. At the top she stood for a while against the parapet, looking down at the lights among the tents, and listening to the shouts of children playing. Then she turned and walked along a wall, a six-foot frieze of carved obsidian depicting the exploits of the eighteenth bishop of Charn. This had been his mausoleum—Charity recognized it from photographs. In some places she recognized the story of the carvings: the bishop receiving the felicitations of the guild of prostitutes; the bishop wrestling with sleep; the bishop at the end of his life, mad and blind, grazing on grass as if he were a pig.

Again the wall was lit with glowing urns. But at the first corner stood a man with a torch, and he bowed solemnly as Charity approached, and motioned her inside a narrow door. She looked up and caught a glimpse of the roof of the cavern, high above her beyond the circling birds, and then she stooped down to enter, for the gate was low. It was just a slit cut into the stone.

Inside, Charity found herself walking through a narrow corridor, barely wider than her shoulders. It was lit with candles set in niches in the wall and decorated from the floor to the ceiling with painted friezes from the visions of Beloved Angkhdt: the constellations of the zodiac as seen from Paradise; the angel with a thousand mouths.

The corridor led her to the burial chamber where the white-faced woman sat waiting for her. A brazier of raked charcoal had filled the air with smoke and with a strange, hot odor that made Charity dizzy. The brazier was set below the bishop’s black sarcophagus, next to a marble throne. On the throne sat the white-faced woman. Guardsmen came and went around her, perhaps six men in that small space, and they were tending the fire and bringing lights and vessels from a room farther back.

From a grate over the fire hung strips of some strange substance, and everywhere there was a smell of murdered animals. Charity sagged against the wall and put her hand over her nose. But she could not go back, for there was a man standing in the door behind her, blocking the whole space. “My God,” she cried, “you did not bring me here to murder me?”

As she spoke, the white-faced woman was aware of her for the first time. She clapped her hands, and instantly one of the men ran forward and pulled the grate of meat out of the fire. But the smell remained. To steady herself, Charity leaned back against the wall and put her head against the stone. In that moment all her courage left her, and all she could think about was the sunlight far above her head. She had a pain in her heart that felt like hopeless love, and she was very tired.

“Come closer, child,” whispered the white-faced woman, and in her voice there was a parody of real concern. “Poor child,” she said, smiling softly, but again there was a tone of falseness deep within the words, as if she were trying to reconstruct from memory a gentleness that she no longer felt.

“Poor child,” she continued. “Don’t be afraid. It is meat from fishes. Dumb, cold, stupid fish—these men have always eaten it. It is what there is.” She rose and came towards Charity, smiling. All her men had disappeared except for two, who stood as stiff and quiet as cadavers, on either side of her throne.

“It is against the laws of Angkhdt,” said Charity.

“It is what there is. Besides, the laws of Angkhdt are not for you and me. Let me see your hand.”

Before Charity could pull away, the woman had seized hold of her right hand and bent her fingers back. Charity could feel the aching coldness even through the woman’s gloves. She shuddered and tried to close her fingers. But the woman was too strong. She pulled Charity forward into the torchlight.

“The silver rose,” she whispered. “Yes—I knew your mother well. Yes. I held you in my arms when you were first baptized.”

Charity shuddered at the thought. The woman, who had been scanning her face with an eager, rapt expression, scowled suddenly. She pulled her lips back to reveal her teeth, and then she turned away, back to her chair. “Come close,” she whispered, and Charity took a few steps forward and then stopped.

“I hate the smell,” she said.

“You will get used to it. I have.”

“I’m surprised their stomachs tolerate it.”

“Nonsense, child. Don’t be naive. It’s what keeps them strong.” The woman put her hand out to the guardsman on her left, a tall, muscular figure, dark-skinned and naked, with white paint on his face and genitals.

“We others have become decadent,” whispered the white-faced woman. “We have spoiled our strength. But the fire of life burns very hot here, underground.”

As she spoke, she was stroking the man’s thigh, fingering the muscles down his leg and on his knee. Then she reached up to hold his testicles in her left hand, weighing the sac, stroking the flesh until it came alive. She slid her fingers around the root of his sex and teased it until it stiffened, and then she put her hands around the shaft and squeezed until its veins stood out. “This one is particularly strong,” she whispered. “You can have him if you like.”

Charity was looking at the man’s face. He had not moved, or shifted his position. He was staring straight ahead of him, not even blinking as the woman stroked his penis with her thumb.

“No, thanks,” said Charity.

“You come from a family of prudes,” whispered the white-faced woman. Then she let go of the man’s sex, as if it suddenly disgusted her. When she continued, her voice was wistful and a little sad: “I was a prude myself.”

“Who are you?” asked Charity.

“I am the white-faced woman,” she answered, her mouth twisted with contempt, whether for Charity or for herself, the princess couldn’t tell.

That was all that she would say. When Charity pressed her to speak further, she shook her head. “Those things are finished, gone,” she whispered. “I have come so far along another road, I cannot recognize myself.”

She had been studying Charity with some curiosity, but now she looked away. Her face was white and still, the only movement the changing color of her eyes, from black to red, from red to yellow. “Do you believe in Paradise?” she asked suddenly.

“I don’t know.”

“Then you are a fool. But I was more foolish than you. More foolish, and fresher and more beautiful than you will ever be, when I let the priests of Charn take hold of me and fill my body with their drugs. They stole my life from me. Chrism Demiurge! But he will pay.”

“Some say Paradise is in the mind,” murmured Charity. She was thinking about other things.

“Do they? No one ever said anything like that to me. No. They drew me diagrams of my soul’s journey. The exact trajectory, they said, for Paradise was in orbit around Mega Prime. Two hundred million miles, they said; not very long. They told me I would wake up in my father’s house. They told me he’d be young and happy, as he was before the accident. They said it would be summer there. Summer all year round, and there was nothing for me here, after my prince was broken from the army. Just my crippled child, and it was not enough. I chose to go. But it was lies.”