Authors: Paul Park
The hangman, perhaps distracted by the reaction of the crowd, required seven strokes of the hammer to complete his work. After the fourth stroke, the colonel dropped his marijuana cigarette and crushed it with the heel of his boot. His adjutant, in his memoirs, describes him leaning with his elbows on the rail, staring down upon the place of death, his hard, hatchet face thrust forward, his steel hand and his gauntlet clasped in front of him. And when the seventh stroke was done, he hawked a great gob of spit out of his throat. Turning aside, he spat it down between the slats of the floor, splattering the people in the gallery below. “Enough,” he whispered in his harshest voice. “Enough.”
And the next morning he was up at dawn. At the sound of the whistle, when the first soldiers tramped out onto the parade grounds—a muddy, open plain outside the city, where for a month they had drilled and skirmished, and fought mock battles—he was there already, sitting motionless on his horse. His face was shaven and clean, his gray hair combed over his shoulders. All morning he sat without moving, without speaking in the center of the vast ground, while his troops drilled in concentric circles around him in the rain. Towards two o’clock he beckoned to his adjutant and bent low to whisper in his ear.
Those who saw the colonel in this period report that he had changed much from his earlier campaigns, when he had led the bishop’s armies to a series of spectacular victories in the last phase of the fighting against Caladon. If anything he was less communicative, harsher, more morose, more susceptible to fits of anger. He was less active, more prone to delegate authority, often staying in his tent for days at a time, staring at nothing with his angry eyes. But at the same time he seemed more sensitive to politics, less irrational in his command. Always before, he had shown his undisguised contempt for strategies and plans, discussion and debate, preferring always action. Military analysts attribute his early victories less to his tactics, which were nonexistent, than to his ability to forge an army into an instrument of his own will, which he could then lay about himself with wildness and irrational abandon, battering his enemies into submission.
But in his later career as commander of the revolutionary armies, and later still as virtual dictator of Charn and Caladon, he showed a new political acumen. At three o’clock on the afternoon of November 86th, his adjutant rode in over the Harbor Bridge, into the sixth ward of the city, where Earnest Darkheart had his party headquarters. He stayed there for perhaps two hours, after which he rode east towards the Mountain of Redemption. There, at about six o’clock, a company of soldiers chased away a small detachment of the League, which was guarding the new masonry at Patience Portal. There, with sledgehammers and iron bars, the soldiers broke the seal on the door, reopening the mountain for the first time since it had been closed, by order of the National Assembly, seven weeks before.
It was, of course, far too late to help most of the inmates; the bells upon the mountain’s summit had been silent for twenty-three days. The bonfires on its upper slopes had long burned out. For weeks hundreds of vultures had been observed passing in and out through the upper windows. Clouds of them had reeled and flapped around the Cathedral of the Holy Song, disturbing the city with their rude cries. And when the portal was finally broken, none of the colonel’s soldiers ventured inside. Instead they leaped away from their battering ram and dropped their hammers and their picks, for out of the hole that they had made was issuing a huge tide of vermin, rats and surgeon bugs and furry lizards, escaping as if under pressure, scattering down the streets.
It was not until about five hours later that the first of the survivors crawled out, alive through God knew what horrors of cannibalism, and she was taken on a stretcher to Shoemaker’s Hospital. Later on through the night, others appeared, singly and in groups, several thousand in all.
On the morning of the 87th, the majority speaker of the National Assembly stood up in his seat to protest. “This arbitrary action … ,” he began, but then was overtaken by a fit of coughing. Called January First by his supporters, who had lobbied hard for a new calendar, the former priest of Angkhdt was still known in the city by his old, prerevolutionary name: Raksha Starbridge. That day he was at the height of his power—commander of the Desecration League, director of the Festival, president of the Tribunal, speaker of the National Assembly. His lectures on the liberation of the mind were reprinted every day and pasted up on broadsheets all over the city. His “New Precepts of Denial” were mumbled and misquoted at cocktail parties all over Charn. Passages from his book of essays,
Postmodernism and the Structure of Despair
, were embroidered onto people’s clothes and tattooed on their skin. Painted onto flags, they hung sodden in the rain above the Morquar Gate.
Nevertheless his intellectual prestige had cloaked for weeks the frailty of his political position. For weeks his power had depended on a fragile coalition of extremists. Though his gift for parliamentary maneuvering was unequaled, still the base of his support had eroded with each vote, as the mood in the assembly changed. All through the month of November his recklessness had found a sympathetic echo in the people, as with viciousness and frenzied hate he had scattered every remnant of the old regime. But finally all that was done, the ancient structure of the state demolished. People stood in the wreck, looking for the first time towards the future.
On the morning of November 87th, the government of Raksha Starbridge depended from a bare majority of seven votes. His own supporters, called the Rim, still comprised the largest single group, but it was losing ground. In order to preserve his power, for weeks Raksha Starbridge had resorted to chicanery: bribery, extortion, kidnapping, and fraud. These devices, effective in the short run, had made him a hero to what remained of his own party. That morning, when he rose to address the National Assembly, his supporters rose with him, and they clogged the air with shouting. Two of them leaped up to bear him on their backs down from his seat along the upper rim, down through the rows of benches to the speaker’s platform on the dais. And this was necessary, because in those days Raksha Starbridge could no longer walk without assistance. Weakened by drugs, his body had begun to break apart. He had lost most of his hair, and what remained was streaked with blood. Always he was bleeding, from his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his hands, as if the vessels of his blood were too fragile to contain his life. Not able to stomach solid food, he had lost flesh until his arms and legs were like sticks. His whole body had shriveled and decayed, though he was not yet an old man. And when he got to his feet, he had to hold himself upright, clasping the rim of the speaker’s rail in his bandaged, shaking hands.
Yet his voice was still strong. Nasal and compelling, it rose up to the vault of the vast chamber, calling for silence as the crowd stamped and roared. “Citizens,” he cried. “This arbitrary action on the part of our armed forces—my colleagues have put forward a response, which I hope you will support. Soon you will hear from them. But first, I would like to speak my mind.”
At this point many members of the opposition jumped to their feet, hooting their derision and crying out, “Precedent! Precedent!” until at length they, too, were shouted down. Raksha Starbridge waited patiently until the hammer of the president was heard above the noise; then he resumed. “Citizens,” he said. “For weeks our colleague Dr. Sabian, as well as other members of this great assembly have dinned our ears with their complaints. Those who support the recent actions of the army—the events of yesterday night—doubtless will justify themselves on the same grounds.”
Here again he was interrupted by a rising swell of voices. He shrugged his shoulders and then turned to the table on the platform, to where a glass of water stood next to a ceramic pitcher. But his hands were shaking. He upset the glass onto the table. It rolled to the edge in a puddle of water and then broke upon the floor, as the noise of the crowd hushed abruptly. It was a trick to gain attention; in the silence following the crash, Raksha Starbridge spun back to the rail. Raising his pallid face, raising his shaking hand, he pointed towards his assembled enemies—towards Colonel Aspe, glowering on his bench, towards Earnest Darkheart and his wife, towards Martin Sabian. When he spoke, his voice was high and shrill.
“Cowards!” he shouted. “Cowards! Fools! I heard with my own ears, when Coriel Starbridge and her son died for their crimes upon the people’s scaffold, how some of you cried out in pity. Are you insane? Or else, are your memories so short? One hundred days ago, when we first gathered in this building, then I promised you that I would hunt these devils down, exterminate them all, and not a man stood up against me. Even you, Martin Sabian, even you. Where was your compassion then? One hundred days, one month—is that how long it takes you to forget what you have suffered, what your parents and their parents suffered from this race of tyrants? When you were coughing out your blood upon the altars of Beloved Angkhdt, when you were swinging from the gibbets of the Inquisition, do you imagine Coriel Starbridge wept for you?
“Now, to be sure, certain of our colleagues have addressed this question, claiming that our ancient enemy is crushed, that it is beneath the dignity of this assembly to be vindictive, that we must show ourselves to be superior, after all. They do not understand. Citizens, I am not a monster. It is not that I am thirsty for more blood. But I am a student of history, and I tell you, in four years out of five in this season there has been a revolution of the people. And in four years out of five, in summer and in fall, these Starbridge parasites have crept back among us, until they were as strong as ever. This time, more than ten thousand have already escaped across the border into Caladon. How many have we caught and killed? Fewer than four thousand. Is it any wonder that I have tried to make them an example, so that other generations might not have to go through this again?
“Now of course, this question of the Mountain of Redemption is another matter, one vastly more difficult and sadder. It was my decision, and I reached it after hours of sad imagining. People say I have no heart—I ask you, is it mercy to release a crowd of half a million homeless people into the streets? I tell you, they would have starved, and we would have starved with them. If Martin Sabian claims differently, he is a liar. Even now in the sixth ward, the citizens are eating seaweed scraped from rocks, and even that has to be imported.
“Now, be that as it may, it was my opinion that if they were to starve, then better privately than publicly. In my speech to this assembly I made a comparison, saying that if a man has just enough to feed himself and gives half of it to a stranger, then both will starve. It was my opinion that the population of the mountain formed an ever-present danger to the population of this city, as well as to the safety of this government. It was my opinion, simply that, and it was taken and made law by the members of this great assembly.
“But now, because of the policies of the present government, the specter of starvation has receded somewhat. Now we can afford to be compassionate. Now we can afford to assign blame, once the problem is no more. It is true: Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have died. That is a tragedy. All death is a tragedy. I myself, I know, am soon to die. It is for this reason, perhaps, that I think differently than you, who are yet in the middle of your life and strength. Look at me! Look at my hands, look into my face, and believe me when I say that a man’s life is nothing, less than nothing, and that we should not be afraid. Justice is everything, liberty is everything, but a man’s life is worth nothing, for it is gone in the tremor of an eye. From inside ourselves we seem like magic beings, our brains as big as continents, and we fear death like the annihilation of the world. I thought so once myself. But now I see that men barely exist. I look about me and I see the dead, all those who died so that the state might live. I see in my mind’s eye an image of the state, a huge, imperishable building of blank stone, and all about it a vast park, with all the souls of all the dead men underfoot like grains of dirt. Soon I will be one of them.”
This was the final speech of Raksha Starbridge before the National Assembly of Charn. Along with some other writings it was collected into a book of posthumous essays,
The Illusion of the Self
. When his followers fled the city they took this manuscript; elsewhere it was banned. Together with his other writings, it formed the base of a new book. Brutally suppressed, nevertheless it flourished underground, and in time a cult of true believers, remnants of the League, bore its message north, beyond the range of persecution. Later that same year, it was reported, children and grandchildren of these people passed beyond Rangriver. There in that traditional refuge, they hunted and ate meat, reading the precepts of denial until language failed and they used the books for kindling.
That day there were many abstentions. People hesitated to commit themselves, for they all knew that something was about to happen, the voting was so close. And at every name, men raised their heads to stare up at the vote, which the bailiff recomputed on a board above the dais, and to stare at the combatants, who waged their struggle silently in this war of alternating numbers. Raksha Starbridge stood upon the platform, his head bent low, his hands shaking on the rail. Colonel Aspe sat immense and silent, picking his nose with the index finger of his steel hand. Earnest Darkheart, black-skinned and somber, leaned backwards to listen to his wife, who had her hand upon his shoulder.