Authors: Paul Park
In Charn before the revolution, some high-ranking men and women had been sent to Paradise prematurely, some in disgrace and some in honor. They had not waited for their natural deaths. Instead their bodies had been put to sleep, their souls set free to start the long cold climb through space. “I was asleep for fifty months,” the woman whispered. “I tell you Paradise does not exist, not even in our dreams. They pumped the blood out of my body. They turned me into a monster, and for what? Only they never expected me to wake. How could they have known that I had such a clever doctor … in the family?”
“He woke you up,” said Charity.
“Yes. He woke me up. Yes. By giving me a hunger that I couldn’t bear. He woke me after fifty months of restless dreams, and I fled down here into the darkness, where I fitted like a key into a lock, into these people’s monstrous superstitions.”
Charity glanced up at the guardsmen, but they hadn’t moved. They stood quiet and impassive while the white-faced woman slouched between them, gnawing on her fingers. Then she snarled a few words of an unknown language. Still staring straight ahead, the men fitted their hands over their ears.
“You see?” whispered the white-faced woman. “They are savages.” She clapped her hands, and someone appeared in the doorway behind her, a bent old man carrying a silver tray. He came and knelt beside her chair and put the tray down on the step. On it were some stoppered vials, an oil lamp, a hypodermic, and a silver spoon.
Crooning to himself, he shook some powder from a vial into the spoon. The white-faced woman ran her thumb down the inside of her arm. But when the old man put the spoon over the fire, she jumped to her feet. “Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.” And without another word she left the chamber.
At the trial the indictments against Chrism Demiurge, the secretary of the council, ran to forty-seven pages. Offering no defense, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was executed in absentia on the 92nd of October. This was a curious spectacle: At noon precisely, various effigies were set alight on scaffolds all over the city, for the government had never managed to procure Lord Chrism’s body, though they had hunted for it in the temple for three weeks.
That season, rumors of Lord Chrism’s whereabouts were as common as the rain. He had been seen disguised in Beggar’s Medicine, in Durbar Square, in Caladon. He had been photographed crossing the southern border, dressed as an old woman. He had escaped into a hidden tower in the temple built entirely of mirrors, invisible to the naked eye.
Other citizens, more practical, swore that he was safely dead, that his body had been so mutilated during his interrogation that there was nothing left to burn. About an equal number claimed that he had risen up to Paradise in a golden car.
It wasn’t until the following autumn that two speleologists, working for the University of Charn, proved from dental records the identity of a body they had discovered in the lower town beneath the city’s streets. It was the body of an old man. The flesh of his hands had deteriorated, so that his tattoos could not be read, but he was carrying the crystal seal of the council on his forefinger, and a silver chain of office around the bones of his neck.
He was found in an old burial ground, a site important to the tribal history of Charn. By then nothing remained of the old cult of the White-Faced Woman, and the caves and crypts were dark under the city. But at the time we speak of, in the eighth phase of spring, the lower town was full of energy and light and a new species of religion. When Princess Charity Starbridge came out of the mausoleum above Tribal Site Number 471, she stood at the top of the stone stair amazed, for the floor of the cavern was lit to its far recesses with torchlight and with bonfires. On the parapet in front of her, the white-faced woman raised her hand, and from down below them came a roaring and a shouting, the clash of metal and the beat of drums.
Hundreds were gathering to see her, from every corner of the underworld. They surged towards her up the steps, chanting her many names.
“Better to lick cocks in Paradise than reign in hell,” muttered the white-faced woman. It was a paraphrase of holy scripture. Nevertheless, she was a queenly figure as she started down the steps: her rich black hair, her eyes, the dead white pallor of her skin. She was supernaturally pale; the blood had been pumped out of her body and replaced with a cold, colorless fluid, a nutrient developed by the bishop’s council.
Charity followed her down into the throng. The white-faced woman reached out her hands, and in an instant her people were around her, grasping, touching, plucking, struggling with each other to get near. They were desperate to touch her, to feel the cold miracle of her flesh. For it was not every man or woman, even in those days, who could claim to have touched a god and held her hand. And this was not just any god, but an incarnation of the White-Faced Woman, who had spread her legs for Angkhdt himself.
“Onandaga! Onandaga!”
they shouted, struggling in a mass around her.
At first she accepted them. She held out her hands as if to warm her fingers, and smiled back at Charity through the crowd. But when she reached the end of the stair and stepped out onto open ground, the mob around her grew. Charity lost sight of her among the flailing arms and heads, but could see by the movement of the crowd how she was jerked and pushed from place to place. Then there was a shout and a scream, and the crowd pulled back for an instant, long enough for Charity to see the white-faced woman, disheveled, with her bodice torn and her mouth contorted. She had bitten a young woman who had come too close.
But the tribal people of the caves did not require politeness or good manners from their deities. Proof of inhumanity was enough for them, and after a moment they closed in again. But the white-faced woman pulled a whistle from around her neck, a piece of silver jewelry in the shape of the penis of Beloved Angkhdt, and she put her lips to it and blew a note so high and pure that Charity could hear it in her bones and in her teeth. Instantly members of the woman’s bodyguard, who had been standing idle on the edges of the crowd, cut through it to the center, cleaving their way with sticks of scented ebony. The mass of people broke apart, and some were battered to their knees. The White-Faced Woman stood in the middle, with her men ringed around her.
She looked back towards Charity and gestured for her to come closer. “Follow me,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “I’ve got something to show you,” she said. She turned as if to walk away. But then she hesitated, because a woman was kneeling in her path, a mother who had brought her child to receive the blessing of the god. Charity saw the White-Faced Woman stoop, and with a gesture that was almost careful, she brushed the hair back from the child’s head and rearranged his blanket.
They were on a long, curving beach next to a pond. With them walked a single naked guardsman carrying a torch. The rest had stayed back to keep the townspeople from following. Looking back, Charity could see a knot of torches at the isthmus where the two ends of the pond curved back together. A small island was joined to the mainland at that point. It was a sandy, dirty place, covered with low dunes and coarse, white, noctiferous grass, perhaps half a mile from the mausoleum. The water had a strong mineral smell, for it was brackish and stagnant, with no outlet to the river.
“It’s not his fault,” said Charity.
“It is his fault. How can you say that it is not? He is the father of the lie that robbed me of my life.”
“Some lies have no father,” murmured Charity.
“No. But I was rich and proud, and he was jealous. He promised me that he would send my soul to Paradise. Instead he poisoned me with his foul drugs.”
They came up over a low hill of sand. On the other side stood a row of ancient tombs in various stages of dilapidation. Some were half-buried in the sand—small stone structures with elaborate roofs. Stone columns supported the four corners, thin and delicate, and between them stood curtains of carved stone.
Most of the tombs were empty and abandoned. But here and there a light shone from the doorways, or through the holes in the stone curtains. “These are my prisoners,” whispered the white-faced woman. “People who have come upon me in the dark.”
In an open circle in the center of the tombs, there stood a shallow, artificial pool, still full of water. Charity bent to wash her hands. She watched the torchlight on the surface of the water. From where she was, the place resembled a small town. The light from the occupied tombs seemed sleepy and inviting: little oil lamps placed on the steps or behind the curtain walls, so that shadows from the delicate stone tracery were cast out upon the sand, patterns of flowers or fighting beasts.
Guards sat in the open doorways, conversing in low tones. They called out greetings to the white-faced woman, their voices friendly and relaxed. And there was music too, a low, melodic, coughing sound.
“What’s that?” asked Charity.
“It is peculiar, is it not? I find it soothing. But he hates it. He puts his hands over his ears. Therefore I encourage her to play.”
The white-faced woman had turned her head towards the sound, and Charity watched her eyes change from black to red. “Not that she needs encouraging,” continued the woman. “She plays without stopping. But I have put them in together. It hurts him. You’ll see.”
Charity reached down to skim her fingers over the surface of the pool, scattering the reflection of the lamps. Then she rose and walked up the pathway towards one central tomb, following the music. Two guardsmen were sitting on the steps, boiling potatoes over a pot of coals. They stood up to salute as Charity passed, their fists over their hearts. The white-faced woman was coming up the steps behind her.
The music came from just inside the door. Shackled to the wall, the antinomial sat cross-legged. Light from a single candle illuminated her worn face and ragged clothes, and glinted on her flute. She had contrived to break a row of holes into a length of copper tube. It was a coarse and rasping instrument. Whole sequences of notes were missing, but it didn’t matter. As always, she was using music as a way of talking; this music was like food in a broken pot. The song, the song itself was the important thing, and each coarse note was so specific, they were like words in a language Charity almost knew.
“Why do you keep her here?” asked Charity. “She means no harm.”
“No harm?” whispered the white-faced woman, behind her in the doorway. “She killed two of my soldiers. Besides, look there.”
She motioned with her arm. In the far corner of the tomb, in a tangle of red robes, Lord Chrism Demiurge lay on his side. His hands were clamped over his ears and he was talking to himself, reciting verses from the Song of Angkhdt. “Unclean,” he moaned. “Unclean. ‘By the freshness of my body you will know me. Nor am I corrupted in my heart of hearts.’ ”
The tomb stank of excrement and filth. But inside it was still beautiful, the marble floor inlaid with lapis lazuli, the ornate walls. Chrism Demiurge lay chained to a screen of carved marble, an intersecting pattern of triangles and squares. From time to time he banged his head against the floor.
“The shock has been too much for him,” conceded the white-faced woman. “He thinks he is in hell.” She squatted down and took his arm in her cold fingers, and pulled him upright so that Charity could see his shriveled features.
Charity had not seen him since the night of an official reception when she was a little girl. Even then he’d been an old man with an old, fleshless face, and she had been afraid of his blind eyes, his quiet voice. Now he looked so frail; she could see the blood vessels underneath his skin, and underneath them she could see the bones of his skull, brittle and sharp-edged. Of his authority and pride, no residue remained. He shrank from the woman’s touch, fumbling and muttering and making the sign of the unclean.
Behind them the antinomial had stopped her music, and they could hear her harsh, even breath. “How long has he been like this?” asked Charity.
The white-faced woman shrugged. “My people have no words to measure time. Days, hours, weeks—some words are useless in the dark.”
Lord Chrism pulled himself away. His eyes seemed huge in his dead face; staring and luminous, they moved wildly around the chamber. “ ‘I make no excuse; she was a monster,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘I make no excuse; a hundred men could not have filled the cistern of her cunt.’ ”
“He has lost his mind,” whispered the white-faced woman. “He thinks he is in hell.”
“What is your plan for him?” asked Charity.