Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  They put his hands in gauntlets and led him down the steps. There a procession was waiting for him, a double row of seminarians, young serious boys in pink and silver robes. Their hair was combed back straight, or parted in the middle. They were carrying handbells. And interspersed among them were a number of old flagellants that the council had raked up from some asylum. Since the procession had not yet started, most were still squatting in their places, scratching for fleas, smelling their fingers, muttering to themselves. Their hair and beards were long and wild, their backs ridged with scars.

  At the end of the procession stood an ancient pickup truck, freshly painted black and decorated with the symbol of the Inner Ear. It was a mark of the council’s favor that they had made such a vehicle available, for there were very few in Charn, all relics from the previous year. This one ran on a mixture of methane and solar power; the driver touched off the old-fashioned gunpowder ignition plate, and the engine shuddered to life, spewing clouds of evil smoke. And as if that were the signal, the seminarians opened their missals, and some had tambourines and tiny cymbals. The flagellants got to their feet, combing out their scourges, and it was they who provided the first rhythm of the march, tentative at first and then stronger as they got used to their own stroke, and the anesthetic paste that they were chewing took its grip.

  Then the boys started to sing, and even Abu was not too drunk to smile at the irony of that choir, the eldest of whom had already been emasculated, singing such a triumphant celebration of the phallus of Beloved Angkhdt. “It is hard as iron,” they chanted, a cheerful, hopeful song, and it filled Prince Abu’s heart with laughter as they led him to the tailgate of the truck. There in the bed of the pickup stood a large wicker cage, and they prodded him inside and strapped it closed.

  The symbolism of this was lost on him, but the crowd understood it. Ever since they were children they had heard the story of how Angkhdt had been carried in a cage through those same streets. Prince Abu’s silver mask had been carved into the scowling muzzle of a dog, and he peered through eyes of yellow agate. The prince was not aware of how he looked. But he knew the crowd was cheering, and he waved and clapped his hands as the truck started across the open square. It turned into the first of the long streets that led out to the municipal gallows and the burning ground.

  All through the city where he was to pass, the streets were lined with people. Near the Morquar Gate, Princess Charity was standing in another section of the crowd, among some factory workers. They were big, rough, drunken men.

  Their leader was Professor Sabian. Later he was to found the first of the labor caucuses that were to rule the city, but at that time he was still a public obstetrician, having given up a good position in the house of a Starbridge financier. He was very small, almost a dwarf, and by nature he was stooped and mild, with careful manners and clean clothes. But when he spoke in public in those days, he was transformed. His frailty and indecision vanished, and his voice, normally quiet and precise, rose to a shriek.

  That afternoon he was standing at the curbside, on a platform of barrel heads. Five hundred people had gathered to hear him, and when the funeral procession appeared at the bottom of the street, the professor shook his fists in the air. “Citizens!” he shouted. “Don’t let this distract you. Don’t be taken in. Now is the time to stand up strong and show that you will not be satisfied with the deaths of one or two or ten of these, for I tell you, the time is coming soon when we will wash our streets clean with their blood. Starbridge parasites! I tell you, not one will escape. Not one!”

  Charity stood listening in an open section of the crowd. She leaned her back against a concrete wall abutting the wide sidewalk. Her eyes kept closing by themselves. She had come on foot from Spider Ghat, following the crowds, and now she waited with the rest, hoping to catch a glimpse of Abu’s funeral cortege. She could not think further than that.

  The day before, she’d been in bed, asleep in her palace on the thirty-seventh floor. Out of that womblike stasis she had been expelled onto the street, and now she stood, weary in her deepest heart, her bare feet torn and bruised, her dress covered with mud. Around her the world that she had known was sinking fast, subsiding as the sun went down, yet still she stood, waiting to sever one last link.

  “Citizens!” cried the professor. “This is just a piece of theater. Do not let yourselves be fooled. But look around you now and feel the power of your numbers, and ask yourselves who else can stand against you when these princes, lords, and bishops turn upon themselves!”

  His voice was drowned out in the crowd. A chant came rolling up the line, people shouting in unison. “Starbridge!” they shouted. “Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge!” And at that moment, Abu Starbridge’s procession turned into the bottom of the street, and Charity could hear the music of the tambourines. Over the heads of the assembled multitude she saw soldiers on horseback trotting by, and then she stood erect and pushed into the crowd, pushing herself forward until she stood in the front rank.

  But by the time the prince’s truck arrived, the crowd was so excited that it had broken past the barricade into the street. Men squatted down to pull the cobblestones out of the roadbed, and soon the air was full of rocks and flying debris, raining on the shoulders of the flagellants, banging dents in the old truck. Prince Abu was awakened by the sound. Tired out from adulation, he had fallen into a drunken doze, but now he woke to the sound of stones pattering around him and the rhythmic, hostile shouting of the mob. “Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge!” they shouted. Abu peered out through the slits in his mask.

  But they did not get a chance to harm him. Within minutes a mounted company of soldiers had ridden back from the head of the column, clearing the street with their nightsticks and their whips. The rebels staggered back, but not before several of the boldest had penetrated to the truck itself. One, taller and stronger than the rest, a glass miner from Caladon, raised his pick above his head. Tottering, off balance, he swung it in a circle; he lifted it up high above the prince’s cage. But Charity had followed him into the street; before he could bring it down, she reached up to grab the spike of it as it hung down behind his back. The miner shook his weapon free, but even so the stroke went wide. It smashed down on the tailgate of the truck, puncturing the ancient metal, and then it was torn from his hands. But for a split instant, the truck’s forward progress was slowed, and it gave the princess time enough to leap up into the bed. This also became part of the legend: how Prince Abu, even at the very last, still had the strength to raise himself and offer comfort to a woman of the starving class, a laundress, an atheist who had not discovered God until that moment. She was dressed in yellow rags, covered with mud, and her feet were bare and bruised. But in the moment before the soldiers in the truck had pitched her out, Prince Abu scrambled to his feet to stand beside her, gripping the bars of his cage between his silver gauntlets. And some people reported later that he had reached out to bless her, that he had touched her on the hand, that they had pressed their heads together, and even had exchanged some words.

  It was over in a moment. The soldiers pitched her out. She fell to her knees in the rough street.

  Part Three:

  Thanakar

  THE CITY OF CHARN STANDS AT THE BASE of a broad promontory, thirty miles from the sea. It rises out of a circle of small hills, broken to the east and west by flat, rocky gorges, and the river running through. From the Harbor Bridge the river unwinds nineteen miles to the port—in those days a long reach of abandoned buildings and collapsing docks, where rusted cranes stood fingering the sky. Warfare with Caladon had closed the port: The estuary and the lagoon were blocked with the wrecks of sunken ships. The water there was shallow, too, because in that season the ocean had receded back ten miles beyond the littoral, leaving the lagoon covered with a brackish sheet of water, out of which rose the hulks of the abandoned warships, their gundecks canted over in the sand.

  By the middle of October in the eighth phas
e of spring, the war had reached a cautious stage. Argon Starbridge, King of Caladon, had pulled his army back across the border. A strong commander would have marched on Charn, to take advantage of the change in government. But Argon Starbridge had recently been beaten in a bloody fight, his army broken by the bishop’s on the Serpentine Ridge. And he was by nature a cautious ruler. Ancient and immensely fat, he sat immobile on his throne in Caladon, a hundred miles from the border, two hundred miles from the gates of Charn. He had been king for longer than old men could recollect, for his father and his grandfather had been the same as he—the same name, the same habits, the same bulk.

  That season the seat of power in Caladon was the cathedral, a maze of windowless low buildings on Kodasch Promenade. There King Argon sat upon his throne, accessible to any of his subjects with the strength to penetrate that labyrinth of shrines. Even the most urgent couriers had to allow a full day, from the time they passed under the cathedral’s low, unguarded portal, to the time they stood at last in the round chamber of the sanctuary. There the rituals of statecraft moved unaltered, whatever the message, whatever the hour, whatever the day—the gold mosaic of the walls glinting in the candlelight, the acolytes dancing to the music of the flute and tambourine. And in the middle Argon Starbridge sat on his pierced and padded throne, surrounded by a circle of soldiers and ministers. In perfect rhythm to the music, they would pass him documents to sign or bend to whisper in his ears. Every hour they would help him change his clothes; it was the only way of judging time in that place, to see what he was wearing. As the day wore on, golden robes would give way gradually to scarlet ones. At nighttime he was clothed in regal black, changing to gray and pink as morning came.

  And every hour or so his courtiers would help him to his feet, and he would walk down the steps of the dais to the altar. There he would make the round of sacred objects. He would raise each one according to the ancient custom, and his hands would describe patterns in the air. His hands were long and eloquent. They were not the hands of a fat man.

  At other times he sat immobile on his throne. Or rather, he gave the impression of immobility. But the impression was a false one: From time to time he would take a book from one of his courtiers and study it for minutes on end. He would rearrange the rings upon his fingers. And although rumor claimed he never slept and never ate, a careful watcher, waiting for an audience among the banks of pews, would soon perceive the truth: The king was mortal. Occasionally his masked head would fall forward on his breast for minutes at a time, and he would be heard to snore. At other times, his seneschal would pass him little golden plates of candies and thimble cups of vegetable stimulants.

  * * *

  In summer, Caladon City had risen out of endless fields of flowers, two days’ journey from the nearest imperfection in the plain. Tulips, hyacinth, and sun trumpets had grown in hundred-acre paddocks, separated from each other by narrow, straight canals. The trunk road had passed over dozens of small bridges; travelers coming down out of the hills had found their sinuses assaulted by a mist of fragrances, so that houses and villages had seemed to rise out of a fog.

  In summer, Caladon had been a wealthy place, famous for its merchants and its women. The city ramparts had been covered up with earth; there had been gardens and fountains and low bungalows. But by the eighth phase of spring, 00016, endless weathering had stripped away the soil, down to its foundations of soda ash and lime. That spring a flat, white, caustic plain stretched to the horizon in all directions, and the city was surrounded by walls forty feet high, built of limestone blocks, discovered course by course all season by the searching wind. The citizens were glad of the protection. In the streets they wrapped scarves around their faces; women and children shivered in their houses and rarely ventured out.

  By midspring the rains had come, and turned the soda plains to mud. In some places the roads were washed away. Farther up into the country they were pitted and ridged, with gullies that could break a wheel. And in the high hills near the border there were mudslides, and the roads were full of carts and beasts of burden and soldiers shouting and cursing at the rain.

  In October of the eighth phase of spring, there was new activity on these roads. Argon Starbridge had garrisoned a series of hill forts along a ridge of mountains to the sea. In the village beneath each one there was a customs post—a stone building surrounded by hotels. The border wound over the hills between these posts. In those days it was marked by a fence of luminous barbed wire, twice as tall as a man. Even in daylight it seemed to glow, but at nighttime travelers from far away could see it burning over the hills, in places red, in places livid green. Closer to hand, they saw the fire resolve into its separate strands, and then it seemed a barrier of nervous handwriting, a scrawl of giant, illegible letters across the landscape, lighting up the sky, marching to the sea.

  Thanakar Starbridge saw it from far away, sitting in the boat he had taken from the wreck of Charn. It came down from the hills and made a barrier along the beach, and then it came out towards them on poles progressively longer, though the water there was shallow, close to land. Farther out, it was supported by pontoons, continuing on past them, out of sight across the glass-flat sea.

  Thanakar turned the boat and came to shore, following the lights. There was a place where the wire had come unstuck from its pole and sagged down almost to the water. He could have crossed it there, and in the weeks that followed, he would look back to that moment in frustration, wondering if everyone along this border was given just one single chance to cross, and that was his, and he had missed it. But that first night, as he rested on the oars, he was not anticipating trouble. That first night he was happy and relieved that he had led them all to safety, down the river from the burning city.

  He had been with the army when the news of his indictment came. He had been indicted for adultery, and Chrism Demiurge had sent the purge to take him in. But he had managed to evade them and return to Charn, arriving on October 46th. There he had found news of Charity’s death, the bishop’s condemnation, and the streets had been full of revolution. So he had left the city the next day, taking his family’s boat down through the catacombs and down the river.

  And he had taken flotsam from the city’s wreck: Mrs. Cassimer, his family’s housekeeper; and Jenny Pentecost, an orphan who had been his patient. Refugees, they had slept along the riverbank under the constant rain and skulked for food around the outskirts of the towns. In the estuary Thanakar had fished for hours in the dark with a small, pale flashlight tied to a piece of twine, trying to tempt an old sea cucumber from its hole. At night they had camped on the lagoon among the broken battleships, and they could smell the sea and hear the cry of the birds.

  But in time they had passed under the reach of the lido, and out onto the cold, flat sea. For a week they had motored up the coast until the engine gave out, and there was no more fuel. Then Thanakar had rowed until his delicate white hands were split and blistered, while Mrs. Cassimer boiled seaweed on the primus, and Jenny Pentecost stared straight ahead over the bow.

  That had been the first sign of her illness. An ordinary child, bred in the slums of Charn as she had been, would have looked around herself with eyes full of wonder. And maybe she would have been frightened, and maybe she would have cried about the weather and complained about the food—still, anything was better than just staring up ahead. Thanakar felt like shaking her, turning her by her frail shoulders, forcing her to notice when a small sea dragon flopped over the bow, forcing her to notice when the border came in sight, gleaming through the darkness like a wall of fire.

  He himself was too excited to speak. That first night he saw it, the wall of burning letters spelled out safety to him, and freedom, and success against all odds. Mrs. Cassimer was sleeping in the bilge; he pulled the boat in towards land and beached it on the shore, and made camp. In the morning he washed his face in the last of the fresh water, and limped up through the sand dunes to the village.

  It was a poor, muddy place
, thatched one-story houses built out of driftwood and flat stones. But there was one imposing structure, a new stone customs house rising from the central square, and near its steps a new stone statue of King Argon Starbridge, holding in his arms his infant son.

  Behind the king, facing the other way, stood one of his ministers, and between his marble hands he hoisted up a strand of glowing wire, part of the wire fence that straggled in across the square and cut the town in two. This was the border midway between Caladon and Charn, decreed by Angkhdt Himself, drawn by Angkhdt Himself across the map of the world. Throughout the chaos of the endless war it had never shifted, though in fact it had no practical significance. In the last phase of the fighting, Argon Starbridge’s armies had driven past it almost to the walls of Charn, and though they had been defeated there and been pushed back, still the intervening countryside had not been recaptured. The town on both sides of the border was the same. The people spoke the same language, lived the same lives, and passed freely through the gate at one end of the square.

  The gate was a hole in the wire fence, perhaps twelve feet wide, and no guard seemed to be on duty there. Thanakar limped towards it across the square, along the façade of the customs house. He limped through a group of children playing marbles, dirty kids with runny noses and ripped undershirts. And he had gotten past them, and past some women carrying pots, and past a child playing with his hoop, and almost to the gate itself, when he was stopped. A little boy ran after him, tugging at his sleeve. At first Thanakar thought he was a beggar, and he fumbled with the change in his pocket and tried to pull his hand away. But the boy held on tight and dragged him towards the steps of the stone building. “Coming, sir,” he cried. “Please, coming, sir,” he cried, his voice a high singsong, and he was pulling with all his strength on Thanakar’s cuff. And there was something in his face, too, some poignancy, some reserve of childish power, that sapped Thanakar’s will. He allowed himself to be pulled up the stone steps, under the lintel and the rough plaster frieze along the pediment: vultures feasting on St. Morquar’s brain.