Authors: Paul Park
All around her, her people had sunk down to their knees. They had cast away their weapons, and they were wailing and rubbing sand into their hair, while their god burned like a candle on the steps. And as Charity watched, the white-faced woman pulled a whistle from her bosom and blew a shrill, high, noiseless blast that thrilled in Charity’s ears and hurt her teeth.
At the sound the stranger bent double, heaving and vomiting. The antinomial had disappeared into the darkness. Charity had not seen her go. She had one arm around the stranger’s waist as he vomited and coughed. When he could walk, she pulled him to his feet and led him forward, up over the rim of sand. Behind them the tombs were lost from sight, and lost, too, was the light from the torches and the fire. In front of them, to the left, a single torch was burning at the water’s edge, stuck at an angle in the sand. Beyond it, half a mile away, lanterns shone on the slopes of the eighteenth bishop’s mausoleum, and in the town beneath it.
Charity fished a flashlight from her pack and set off down the back of the small slope. The stranger had his arm over her shoulders; he was walking, but she supported much of his weight. His legs were uncertain, and he was trembling. His face was dripping with sweat. “Cold,” he said. “So cold.” He clamped his hand over his heart.
And those were his last words until he died. Charity gripped him underneath his armpit and led him away from the lights, north out of the great caverns where the blind birds flew, and into the old catacombs again. She was following the map, and from time to time she had to stop and rest and study her map in the circle of her lamp, while the stranger collapsed into the dust and hugged his knees. She talked to him to keep her spirits up, showing him the map and asking his advice, although he could not speak.
But after many hours she found the way. Six miles from the mausoleum, in a tangle of small corridors, she lowered the stranger down next to some boulders and shined her flashlight around the entrance of a narrow tunnel, decorated on one side with the head of a wild pig crudely daubed in red. She pushed her hair back from her face. She shook the flashlight once; it was failing, and there were no batteries. The stranger had left them in his pack, near the corpse of Chrism Demiurge.
“Cold,” he said. “So cold.” He was lying on his side. His teeth were chattering, and there was sweat over his lip. His hands and legs were shaking, but he quieted down when Charity turned him over and wrapped him in a blanket. She took a jar of water from her pack and tried to make him drink, but his jaw was trembling and his teeth locked shut. So instead she washed his face and talked to him and reached down into his shirt to touch his breast. She brought the flashlight down to try to find his wound, and rubbed his flesh over the mark of the white-faced woman’s teeth. He groaned and pulled away: The skin there was unbroken, but it had a bloodless, yellow look, and it was very cold. Her fingers left a mottled mark, which faded as she watched.
But in a while he was quieter. He stopped shivering and accepted water and a few morsels of food. Charity sat back against the boulder, saying nothing, only shining the flashlight down the corridor where they had come, shining it along the rows of graves, the great stone sepulchers and metal statues of Beloved Angkhdt, and angels with their scaly wings.
In time the flashlight failed. Then she sat in the dark. The stranger was unconscious, lying curled against her, and she was holding his hand. She was rubbing it between the two of hers, but in time she must have fallen asleep. When she woke, his hand was stiff and cold, and it was hard to pry her fingers loose. She had some matches in a box; she lit one and looked at his face. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling. “Good night,” she said as the match burned out, and then she settled back against the rock. She ate some food. Then she must have slept again, for by the time she heard the music of the copper flute, it was already very close.
Charity lay back and stared up at the roof of the tunnel, unseen in the darkness. “Snow,” she said.
“Snow. Now.” The tune was complicated this time. The snow was part of it, but there was something else, a variation.
“Mountain in the snow,” said Charity.
“No. See rock. Big rock, black, red. Wet. Hear me. This is mountain.” She played almost the same tune again, but louder this time, in a different key, an octave or so higher. “Rock is mountain-small,” she said. “Sharp, flat. Red, black. Gray. No wind. Snow. Hear me.” She blew a few soft notes.
“Yes,” said Charity. “A snowfall. Very light.”
“Snow,” agreed the woman. “Just few. Five. Six. Seven. All. Clouds now. Clouds. Now falling.” She played the snow song again, simply, almost clumsily. “Hear me. Nothing there. Snow. No and. Deep one. In. Out. In. Feet. Hear now: wind.”
Charity lay back. She had cleared the sharp stones from an area big enough for her own body. She was comfortable, wrapped in the blanket that she had taken from the stranger. She was finishing her seventh meal since she left his body, a few squares of artificial food, the gift of Freedom Love, but welcome after all.
The antinomial had lit a fire. At intervals the roof of the tunnel was supported by a row of wooden posts. Out of a row of six, she had kicked one down and broken it apart and lit a tiny fire out of the splinters. She sat cross-legged next to it, and from time to time she took her flute from her mouth to warm her hands. The fire cast no light.
“Now,” she said. Charity was using her thumbnail to clean her teeth, but she stopped so that she could listen. “This is never-know,” said the antinomial. She smiled. She grinned, and then she played for about two minutes, a bitter, complicated melody in many different parts.
Charity lay back and cleaned her teeth. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t understand.”
“No. This and this.” The antinomial blew the mountain theme again, so that Charity could see how it fit in.
“Think,” continued the woman when Charity said nothing. “Think here, not here.” The woman touched her eyes and then her mouth. “Knowing world, be world up there River Rang, and I child.” She played a few notes more and then relented. “For you is never-know,” she said. “This is my song. My song. No name. Hear me: broken mountain. Sun, snow red. Cold in finger and this foot. Hunger after nothing food, when I so child and free. I free.”
“That sounds like a sad song,” said Charity.
“No sad. Never, and I free.” She played a few notes of the freedom song.
The voice of the antinomial was slow and coarse, her words badly pronounced and hard to understand. But over the days of their journey she told Charity a story. Words were all she had at first, and at first it was hard for Charity to listen. But in time the music made a part of it, and then a larger part. Charity was greedy for the music. She suspected that she would never, ever get down deeper than the first few layers of meaning, even if she listened her whole life. But in time she could recognize the simple melodies and even a few variations. In time she could lie down and close her eyes and listen to the music making pictures in her head.
“Snow,” grunted the antinomial. “Hard snow. Rock. Wet rock. Wet rock and me child.” She was patient. After they had eaten, after they had slept, they walked for miles through the tunnels. The antinomial carried the pack. Charity walked in front. In one hand she held her map, and in the other the torch that the antinomial had seized from Freedom Love and managed somehow to retain—a small, intense light. It skewered rocks and boulders with a narrow beam.
They walked for miles in the dark. “Rat,” grunted the antinomial. “Rabbit.” And then she whistled the bare music for the word, the barest sketch. She was strong and tireless. Even at the end of a long march, she could whistle for a whole minute without drawing breath. “Ice,” she said. “Black ice. Black ice, smooth.” And sometimes she would sing a wordless song in her coarse voice, to illustrate the difference between words.
The torch punctured the darkness. Sometimes the air was bad. In time Charity’s eyes would tire, and she would find a place to camp, to stretch out her blanket and sit on it, and portion out their food and water while the antinomial scrounged for wood and struck sparks out of the rocks. Then Charity would lie back and try to recapture the music in her mind, so that when the antinomial sat down and took her flute and rubbed it in her hands and put it to her mouth, the sound would mix with the music that was there already in the dark.
At first the sound was tentative, then overwhelming. Charity lay back and closed her eyes. She let the pictures come. After a while she no longer wondered whether they were accurate, because her head was full of them and she would never know. In her mind she pulled apart a skein of tangled images and let a world grow out of the space between them: snow. Wet rock and mountains. An empty town clasped in the fist of the high mountains, and horses slipping on the black ice, and the dogs barking and fighting over bones, and the red sun shining, and a little girl stamping with the snow around her shins, her hair wild and tangled, a flute stuck in her belt.
The stain had frightened her, her first night in that room. Now, after ten nights, she was used to it. The room seemed similar to others. The doctor always chose the same type of hotel—expensive, gone to seed.
The room had been luxurious once. It was large, with casement windows and a stone floor. The wallpaper was rich and richly colored, a pattern of animals and trees that never once repeated. But all the furniture was gone; the room was empty, except for the ornate wooden bed, a table, and a wicker chair.
In one corner of the room a drain was set into the floor, and next to it a fat clay jug. This was the Caladonian custom. In the early morning a chambermaid would bring a jar of steaming water and clean towels.
In the room the air was cold, and the floor was very cold. Nevertheless Jenny shrugged her nightdress from her narrow shoulders and got out of bed. She walked on the sides of her feet with her toes screwed up, and when she reached the jar, she stood on one of the towels, to one side.
She was carrying a mirror in her hand. She stood naked on the towel, her shoulders hunched, her belly sticking out. For a minute before washing, she examined her small body in the glass. The mirror was not large enough to show her more than one part at a time, and she held it very close. As a result, there was no coherence to the images. Fascinated and detached, she stared at her knee, her buttock, her still-hairless sex.
She had a scab on her right hip where she had fallen down and scraped herself the week before. She examined it carefully, tilting the mirror by its silver handle to reveal a small circle of red skin with the scab in the middle of it.
She brought the mirror to her face and stared solemnly at her left eye. Below it, a dingy, mottled mark spread to the mirror’s edge, a birthmark on her cheek. In Charn it had been a sign of God’s displeasure, God’s thumbprint in her mother’s womb, where God had touched her and rejected her. People who had seen her, even relatives, had mumbled prayers and made small gestures with their hands. Every morning her mother had painted over the mark with grease and cosmetic powder. Jenny had never gone outside, for fear of the police.
But the police had come. Her parents were both dead. She touched the birthmark with her thumb. Strange that people could be killed for such a thing—in Caladon she could wash her face and keep it washed and no one seemed to notice. People avoided her for other reasons.
In Charn her jailers had sold her to a shrine operated by the guild of prostitutes. On the top floor of one of their hotels they had built a shrine, sacred to Angkhdt the God of Children. There she had lived for many weeks, until Thanakar Starbridge had found her and taken her away. It had been a violent and painful time. Still her stomach rose when she smelled incense, and still her legs were weak from so much kneeling, so much squatting in the dark. The prostitutes had bound her feet, to please certain customers.
Now all that was over. Now chambermaids brought fresh hot water every morning to her room. It was no use. Some stains never could come clean. When she was a little girl, her mother had bathed her cheek every morning with patent remedies and solvents.
Jenny turned the mirror in her hand. Her hair was very fine. Under it she could see the contours of her head, bloated behind her ear with dreams and too much sleep. What was it? She had dreamed of tunnels underground, an empty labyrinth of tombs.
On her desk by the window lay the drawing she’d been working on before she went to sleep. She could see it from where she stood, a drawing of a human head, with the bone cut away to reveal a cross-section of the brain. In her drawing the brain was full of caves and paths and corridors, and rows of little cells. Perhaps, she thought, a memory could be imprisoned in the brain, locked up like a murderer inside a cell, perhaps forever, perhaps not. Perhaps events and thoughts could be imprisoned in the past.
Jenny put down the mirror and picked up a clay dipper from the floor. She ran a dipperful of water through her hair and rubbed it dry. Then, before she was even dressed, she went over to the table. Shivering, wrapped in a towel, she turned the papers over. She was looking for a drawing she had made two days before, and when she found it, she took it over to the window, to see it in the light. It was the picture of two women in a cave. They were crossing a bridge over a small crevasse. In the foreground a precipice of stone led down to a pool of water, the terminus of a small stream that was boiling and rushing down the center of the page. The women and the bridge were in the background, almost lost among the carefully drawn rocks. Their faces were invisible, covered up in darkness.