Authors: Paul Park
“I can’t understand what they’re saying.”
“They’re saying, ‘Save us! Save us!’ ”
Embarrassed, Abu smiled, and rubbed his lips with the back of his hand.
He had not washed in the week since he was taken, nor had he changed his clothes. He stood balanced on his chair, the back of his head against the window. To the orderly, only the outline of his big, soft body was visible, only the outline of his balding head. He stood leaning back against the bars, lit from behind by the arc light, a cloud of blue radiance shining around his head.
“I took one of your undershirts to rip up and sell as souvenirs,” said the orderly. “To pay for the postage and all that. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
Prince Abu smiled. “No, I don’t care,” he said. “Did you get what I wanted?”
“Yes, sir.” The orderly slipped a quart of whiskey out of a paper bag. “I mailed the letter to your sister,” he said. “Charity Starbridge. The courier had run away, so I took it directly to the post office.” He sighed. “The mails are undependable these days.”
“Thank you.”
“My privilege, sir. You’re our most famous client now. There must be fifteen hundred people in the courtyard, and I hear they are already lining up along the streets you’ll pass tomorrow. The police are expecting twenty thousand just around the bonfire.”
“How gratifying.”
“I know what you mean, sir. But if you’re not doing it for the effect, why are you doing it? You could just stop it anytime you want. You could just walk out of here, just by raising up your hand. Not that it wouldn’t be a sort of anticlimax.”
Prince Abu smiled. “Well, that’s it, isn’t it? I’ve let things go so far.” He brought the palm of his right hand up in front of his nose, so that he could see in minute detail the mark of the golden sun, the most powerful tattoo in Charn. He examined it mournfully. It had been the curse and burden of his life, a long, sad practical joke, for what use was power without strength or will or faith? “No,” he said. “It’s too late now. Where would I go?”
Raksha Starbridge squatted over the doorjamb of the princess’s apartment, trying to make it out. He had rubbed the faceless marble with a mixture of lemon juice and wine, and now he moved a lighted match along the stone. Gradually a line of notes came clear, blackened by the flame.
“There,” he said. He sat back on his ankles, the match trembling in his hand.
“What does it say?” asked Charity. The parson had already crossed over and sat in the hallway, but she still lingered in the door.
“Oh, God, I don’t know,” complained the parson. “It’s been so long. It’s coded to your name.” He rubbed the matchstick along the line of notes. “I thought you didn’t believe in this shit.”
“Just tell me what it says.”
The parson smiled and showed his rotten teeth. He gave her a sly wink and then started to hum a little tune. Charity put her fingers in her ears. “Stop it!” she commanded. “Just tell me.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s about remorse. Self-hatred. An outbreak of self-hatred. It says you’ll be dead in two months if you cross over. Suicide.”
The princess laughed. Relieved, she stepped over the threshold. “Then they’re too late,” she said. And then she looked back through the open doorway, suddenly afraid. The atrium stretched into the shadows, lined with cabinets and family portraits. Here and there she could see glimpses of frescos, tapestries, and carpets through the open doorways bordering the hall; she had lit all of the lamps before she went and run quickly through each room, passing her hands over the marble busts, touching the spines of her favorite books, inhaling, suddenly resensitized, the fragrances of her lifetime in those rooms: dust, hashish, cedar, and old stone. Suddenly resensitized, she had seen as if for the first time the beauty of a ewer of cut glass. She had batted it to the floor, and it had broken into a thousand parts. “What’s that?” Raksha Starbridge had cried. He had been looting the kitchen cabinets for food, looking for money in the pockets of her husband’s suits.
But as she hesitated on the threshold, it was as if she were searching for reasons to be afraid. As soon as she stepped into the outside corridor, then she was no longer superstitious. In that one moment she shed the whole impossible burden of her marriage, laying it down inside the door where she had picked it up the only other time that she had crossed that sill, the day she had warned the old man. She felt like a child again. And though the old man had always been gentle, and though she had cried until her eyes were sore the day she heard that he was dead, and though he and her brother had been the only two companions she had had to help her carry the burden of that house, still she left the old man’s memory there too. She ran down the outside corridor towards the elevator banks, suddenly remembering what it had been like, her wedding procession along that same hall, up from her mother’s apartment on the thirty-fourth floor. As she ran, the empty months fell away, as if even the memory of them could not exist outside the perfumed atmosphere of her husband’s house. She remembered how it had been before; more than that, she felt it in her body. At Starbridge Dayschools she had been eighth in her class, winning prizes in physics, mathematics, archery, and law. She had written a thesis in silver ink, using a whole arcane vocabulary of knowledge. So long ago—now, running down the corridor towards the elevator, the only word she could remember was
syzygy
.
Raksha Starbridge hurried after her. Sick of him, disgusted by his ugliness, she ran fast, trying to lose him in the empty passageways. At the elevator banks she kept her finger on the button, hearing the bell ring somewhere far below. But no one came. Once she heard one of the express cars at the end of the row rattle past her, ascending rapidly, but it didn’t stop. Out of breath, she leaned against the metal doors. The corridor was dark here, the carpet dusty, the walls faded and stained. A statuette of Angkhdt the God of Light crouched in a niche above the button for the elevator, his tongue a small electric bulb. Loose in its socket, it flickered miserably.
Raksha Starbridge appeared at the turning of the passage. “These are all broken,” he announced. “We’ll have to take the service car from the floor below.” But at that moment the door she was leaning against opened, revealing a gnomelike operator, perhaps the same one who had taken her upstairs on her wedding day. Then he had bowed almost to the floor and made an elaborate dance out of the gestures of respect, for she had been dressed in purest white, with a necklace of flowers from the bishop’s own garden. But now he peered at her with eyes full of hostility. Astonished, she stared back at him, expecting him at any moment to drop his eyes and bring his knuckles to his forehead. Then she remembered her new clothes.
“What do you want?” asked the gnome.
“Please, sir, can you take me down?”
He didn’t answer, and Charity was afraid she had gotten the accent wrong. He shook his head and stared at her, and then he said, “That guard tell me that girl run loose up here. That girl break in. That girl you?”
“No sir.” She took a step backwards, suddenly glad that Raksha Starbridge had come up beside her. And when he put his hand on her shoulder, she didn’t pull away. “She’s with me,” said the parson. He winked.
Deeply suspicious, the gnome peered out at the parson’s ragged cassock, the neck of his wine bottle sticking from his pocket, his filthy hair, his broken fingernails. Then, slowly, as if unwillingly, he put his fist to his forehead and bowed low. He was powerless to do otherwise, no matter what he thought. He stepped back into the car and gave them space to enter.
All the way down, Charity could feel the pressure of his stare itching between her shoulderblades. The elevator was a small one, paneled with exotic carvings, upholstered in green velvet. The lights had burned out, but the gnome had hung a lantern of his own devising from a hook in the ceiling; it was touching, thought Charity, how closely he still clung to his duty, even though the city was on fire and most of his masters had already run away. These positions were hereditary. No doubt the gnome had spent his whole life in that car. Perhaps he had even been born on the overstuffed banquette. He carried some priest’s crude rendition of an elevator’s button panel etched into the skin below his little finger.
Charity had covered her own palms with paint; they felt sticky and unclean as she tightened and relaxed her fists. She thought she could understand something of the gnome’s deep disapproval, his fear of pollution, his feeling of possessiveness about his little car. She too felt polluted by the parson’s hand on her bare shoulder. When the doors opened on the ground floor, she jumped out quickly. “Please,” she said, turning back towards the gnome to apologize, but then she stopped. Without thinking, she had used the honorific appropriate to their stations, a princess and a palace servant. She stopped when she saw the look of horror on his face, but the parson was behind her and grabbed her by the arm. “Filthy slut,” he muttered. “Don’t give yourself airs.”
Then he pulled her away through the enormous gallery at the bottom of the building. Their footsteps echoed over the empty tiles, stirring up eddies of tiny green birds. Clouds of birds migrated through the distant vaults, following constellations set into the stone, mosaic figures of the zodiac. Charity looked up with an open mouth. Wineshops, bookshops, dress shops, and delicatessens stretched around her in a circle. Many were boarded up and dark, but the lights were on in a few restaurants, and in a few of the offices priests and seminarians kept late hours, dozing over the ledgers and accounts.
Charity stared up, entranced. “Is that the sky?” she whispered, but the parson didn’t answer. Instead, he dragged her away, onward through passageways and colonnades, through waiting rooms and mirrored halls. And finally they passed through the first gates, into a vast deserted courtyard under the open sky. It was almost morning.
Underneath the statue of Cosro Starbridge and his nine sons, they rested in a thicket of stone legs. Charity was eager to go on. The parson lagged behind, leaning against the ankle of the youngest son.
He hung back, out of breath, and with trembling fingers he unscrewed the top of his pint of wine. He threw his skinny head back to taste the last of it, and then he pointed forward, the bottle still in his hand. Across the yard stood an ancient gate, flanked on both sides by seated statues of Beloved Angkhdt. A quote from holy scripture was carved into the pediment between them: “Set me on fire, fill me with your seed.”
Giddy in the open air, Charity danced over the pavement and stood beneath it, and there was something in the stone muzzles of the god that made her pause, puzzling out the uncouth words, obscure in any language. “What does it mean?” she asked as the parson staggered up.
Scowling, he turned his head away. Among the refuse of his mind he groped for the continuation of the text, learned in seminary long before, when he was young. And in a little while he found it: “ ‘… For I am yours, my beloved, now especially, while the morning is still sweet, and the morning stars are hidden in a gauze of mist …’ ”
“What does it mean?” repeated Charity.
The parson scowled. “It means the world belongs to us,” he said. “To Starbridges. To you and me.” He flicked his empty bottle away over the stones, and it shattered in a corner of the wall. And as if that were some kind of signal, the doors trembled and grated open with a hollow booming noise, splitting away from Charity as she stood on the threshold, showing her the world for the first time. From where she stood, a small stair led down into the garden of the same temple she had seen from far above, where the gallows stood like a clump of trees, poisoning the air with bitter fruit. Soldiers patrolled the steps, paying no attention to her in her yellow dress, though they saluted the parson as he hobbled down beside her.
The air was warmer here and it was full of smells. That was the first thing she noticed, the air so rich that it seemed hard to breathe, so thick with odors: cinnamon and cloves, urine and gasoline, onions and wet mud. A woman sprawled out on the steps next to the captain of the guard, dressed in the peach-colored uniform of the guild of prostitutes, smoking hashish from a metal pipe, and as Charity passed, she threw her head back and laughed aloud. Farther below, a boy gnawed furtively on a radish. And below him the garden was full of people, clustered around the bases of the gibbets, talking with strange urgency, gesticulating and pointing. Charity stepped down into the mud. Immediately she was surrounded by a mass of people jostling against her, jabbering in languages she didn’t know. Happy and excited, she reached out her hands. The warm air, the sweat on her bare skin, the mud between her toes, all filled her with an ecstasy that was close to nausea, a feeling of pollution more vital than anything she had experienced before. She was ready to begin.