Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  “P-princess Charity Starbridge,” said the stranger slowly, running his finger over the first line. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s from your brother. Shall I read it to you? You don’t mind, do you? I’ve read it so many times.”

  “My brother,” she said softly.

  “It’s very short. They blocked out the whole first part. Chrism Demiurge—look.” He held the paper out to her across the corridor, and she reached out her hand. It was still more than six feet beyond her fingertips, too far away to read, but Charity could recognize her brother’s awkward handwriting. The first two paragraphs had been painted over with gold ink.

  “Read it,” she said. Suddenly it was terrifying how much the stranger looked like Abu, the way he fumbled with the paper and peered at it shortsightedly.

  “Please excuse me. I can’t read very well,” he admitted. “I believe I used to have some education. Not anymore. It was among the things they stole from me.”

  “Read it,” said Charity.

  The stranger rubbed his hand back over his forehead and the bald crown of his head, a parody of a gesture painfully familiar to the princess. But his voice was not like Abu’s. It was lower, hoarser. But his trick of hesitating was the same, his tendency to stammer.

  When the man started to read, she closed her eyes. “The first part of the page is all blocked out,” he said. “But then he writes, ‘As you can see, it hasn’t been too bad. They give me enough food. They’ve got litchi nuts and pickled ginger, and . . .’ Something else I haven’t been able to make out. ‘Nothing to drink, of course, but that’s just as well. The man I’m sending to deliver this . . .’ Something else is crossed out, then he writes, ‘Anyway, I wanted you to know that I’m all right, and that I’ve not been treated badly. No torture, nothing like that. But it gave me time to think. Charity, I believe a change of government is coming. Now I know you may not think that my opinion is worth much. But I worry about your safety. Now that I am gone, and your husband too, I’ve heard, you’ll need someone to help you. Get in touch with . . . ,’ and then there is a name beginning with a T. It’s been blocked out.”

  “Thanakar,” said Charity.

  “That’s right. It’s got a K in it. ‘Get in touch with Thanakar. Send a message—he is with the army. Or if not, then he has gone to Caladon. He always talked of emigrating, and if I’m right about the government, then you should join him. Take money from the bureau drawer. There’s nothing for you here. He likes you very much. He told me so.

  “ ‘You must forgive me for rambling on, but I’m in a philosophic mood. I wasn’t a religious man; now I regret it in some ways. But I feel these questions of belief are too much stressed. These questions of faith: Faith comes from the outside in. How can our hearts be dirty, if our hands are clean? I always thought they were peculiar, these priests who murder people in the name of God. Don’t they understand that kindness is the only thing?’ ”

  The man stopped speaking for a moment; then he continued. “The end is all blocked out, except for the signature. And the date: ‘Wanhope Prison, October 44.’ The day before he died. And look at this—next to the date, he’s drawn a picture of the Sun.”

  Again Charity heard the sound of a deep, hard, hacking cough from the dark cell. The stranger was holding the letter out to her, pointing at the signature. “Yes, I see,” she said. “It’s strange—you look very like him. You must know you do.”

  For the first time a flicker of what looked like anger passed across the stranger’s face. “Of course I look like him,” he cried. “Of course I do. How do you think I got this letter?”

  “I don’t know. I was going to ask.”

  Again tears came to the man’s eyes. “How could you know?” he asked irrationally. “How could you guess? How could anyone guess something so cruel? I got this letter . . .” Here he shook it in the air. “I got this from Chrism Demiurge, may he suffocate in hell. He bought it from your brother’s messenger.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? I don’t know. I don’t know—he never told me his whole plan. Or if he did, I have forgotten. There’s so much that’s been wiped clean. What does he say? Your brother, here: ‘How can our hearts be dirty, if our hands are clean?’ But that’s just foolishness, because he never knew. I could have told him how a man could be the center of the most perverted schemes yet keep his innocence. I don’t remember my own name!”

  The man was crying, leaning his bald forehead against the bars of his cell. His words were wild and full of tears: “How can our hands be dirty, if our hearts are clean? But a man who stumbles in the mud, is he not still defiled?”

  “Calm yourself,” said Charity. “You’ll bring the guard. If you didn’t know what you were doing, then you can’t be blamed.”

  “I blame myself. Don’t you understand? This”—he shook the letter in the air—“this was a great man. ‘Faith comes from the outside in,’ is anything more true than that? He was a great man. And I am his counterfeit. Yes, I look like him. Don’t you see the surgeon’s marks? I don’t even remember what my own face was like. And look here.”

  He stretched out his right hand and opened up his fingers. His palm was covered with a silver membrane, bonded to his skin, obscuring whatever tattoos lay beneath. But in the center of his palm was painted, red and gold, the shining Sun in splendor, Abu Starbridge’s tattoo.

  “I understand,” said Charity. “They made you in my brother’s image.”

  “Yes,” croaked the man, interrupting. “So that Chrism Demiurge could kill the prince and still use him somehow. He wanted people to believe the prince had died and then risen again, like a god. The night after the execution, they took me to a bar in Beggar’s Medicine. I sat there drinking the whole night. God help me, I was just fresh from the hospital. I didn’t understand why they were staring. I didn’t understand why no one came to sit with me. I had enough money to buy drinks for the whole bar.”

  From the dark cell beside him came the sound of coughing and the clinking of a chain. Charity turned to peer into the shadow, but saw nothing. “And after that?” she asked.

  “That was the only thing I did. If Demiurge had other plans, he never told me. The revolution came too fast—a week later he was dead. I was arrested in my cell in Kindness and Repair. They took me for a Starbridge. Then they weren’t so sure. I told my story to the guards, to everyone. They brought me before January First, and I told him. He laughed. I thought that he would let me go. But yesterday he sentenced me to die. He said the revolution has no place for oddities left over from the old regime. God knows he’s right.”

  * * *

  The next morning when the soldiers came, Charity was standing by her door. She stuck her head out between the bars of sawn-off two-by-four, so that she could see them open up the dark cell and drag out the prisoner. Four men went in, and two more stood guard in the corridor with rifles in their hands. But even so it took a long time, and there were sounds of fighting and swearing and the cracking of a whip. And when the men came out again, one of them was limping, and one was bleeding from a cut over his ear.

  The prisoner was unconscious. They dragged her face down along the floor past Charity’s cell, by a chain knotted around her wrists. She was a big, muscular woman, with coarse, gray hair. She was dressed in rags, open down the back, and Charity could see blood on her shoulders and the welts of frequent beatings.

  “Not a pretty sight,” said the guard who was opening her door. “Antinomial scum. They should have shot her out of hand.”

  “What is she accused of?” asked the princess.

  “She’s a savage. She eats dead animals. She had trapped a falcon when the soldiers caught her, and torn two of its wings off. She put two men in the hospital when they arrested her.”

  He was the man who had been cut over the ear. He had been carrying the woman’s flute under his armpit; now he held it up for Charity to see. “Look at this,” he said. “A real souvenir. M
ade out of a bamboo club. Someone must have broken it over her back the night she lit her cell on fire. She must have kept the piece.”

  Charity reached out to touch it. It was a marvelous thing, made of a broken stick of split bamboo, hollowed out, punctured at intervals, bound back together with twine and copper wire. One long split down the back had been filled in, patched with soot and melted wax.

  The guard handed it to Charity, and she brought it to her lips.

  “Stop that,” said the guard, snatching it back. “Behave yourself. You don’t want to be dragged out like her.”

  The princess smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know how to play.”

  The night before, she had tried to learn how to listen. After the stranger had gone to bed, after he had blown his candle out and lain down on his pallet with his arms crossed over the face that was not his own, then Charity had sat up to listen. The whole night she had listened to the music from the dark cell. She had tried to understand what music meant, and she had failed. But even though she didn’t know the language, even so the music spoke to her, comforted her, and quieted her heart. She sat on scraps of straw, leaning with her back against the bars of her cell, her legs stretched out, her head bent back, listening. Once the flute player broke off into a fit of coughing—that too for Charity became part of the music. Then, when the melody started again, she could hear the imperfections of the flute, the buzz of the split along its back in the lower notes, as if someone were singing with something loose caught in the back of her throat. But after the first few notes, Charity couldn’t hear it anymore, after the song had taken hold. It was telling her of freedom in a language she would never know—she understood why it was banned. Why musicians were hunted down and killed.

  In school she had read about the antinomials. She remembered an illustration: men and women riding together in the snow, standing in their saddles to look forward as the snow erased their tracks. It was an illustration from her anthropology text; shaking her head, Charity reached behind her, above her head, and took hold of one of the wooden bars of her cell. She thought this music was the first and last that she would ever hear. And when it stopped, she had felt too sad to sleep. But in the morning she found that the music lingered with her, or rather, not the music but the picture, the giants in the snow, their harsh, bitter faces, their horses and their dogs. It comforted her and opened up a space in her where she could live apart, some protection around her when the soldiers came and beat the antinomial, and dragged her away.

  “Stop it,” said the soldier, and he snatched the flute out of her hand. “You don’t want to go like that.” He nodded up along the corridor after his companions.

  Charity smiled and shook her head. Her face was calm, and she looked pretty, standing in the milky morning shadows. For that reason the soldier was gentle as he tied her hands, and gentle when he led her out, down the stone corridors, out into the courtyard where the tumbril waited.

  It was an open cart drawn by donkeys, their shaved heads oscillating, their meager voices whining. The antinomial was already in the back, lying with her head against the side. She was conscious, though her yellow eyes were swollen down to slits. Charity nodded to her and received a hard, contemptuous stare.

  Then they brought the stranger out, whimpering stupidly, his hand still clasped around Prince Abu’s letter. They threw him up into the back of the cart, and he sat down clumsily as it began to move. He was whimpering and hiding his face. He was no Starbridge, Charity decided. He could not be reconciled to his death. Charity alone kept to her feet, her hands tied in front of her, resting on the rail. She felt very calm.

  There were only a few soldiers in the courtyard, but when the tumbril passed the gate into the street, its way was hampered by a crowd. There were perhaps a hundred people come to watch, encouraged by the weather. It was nothing like the crowd at Abu’s execution. His had been a spectacle, with marchers and men beating drums. That crowd had been delirious, stirred by currents that had since subsided.

  Less than a month ago; it seemed ten months. Since then the people had gotten used to these processions. But even so, a cry went up when she appeared, a crude, angry shouting like a crashing wave. “Starbridge!” shouted the crowd. “Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge!” The people had been well rehearsed. But even so, among the angry faces she saw others that were not as angry, and some people even made the gestures of respect. The ritual touched her in a way it never had before.

  She had thought that she would never hear any more music. But as the sounds of the crowd crashed around her, she heard part of another sound. “Shut up!” groaned the stranger, and the man who drove the donkeys turned back from his seat and snarled. He lifted his whip above his head, but the antinomial didn’t care. She was beyond his reach. She sat in the bottom of the cart, staring at the sky with her head bent back, humming a wordless song.

  Charity looked up too. Above them, the sun had broken through the clouds. It shone fiercely above their heads, deluging the city with cascades of amber light. Men and women in the crowd looked up blinking, their faces pale and astonished, for the sun had not been visible for weeks. And not for months had it been visible like this, shining unimpeded, making rainbows in the upper air. Later chroniclers would remember how the sun shone briefly on the day of Abu Starbridge’s execution and then not again until his sister Charity was pulled through the same streets; they would make a point of it, for religious reasons. But in fact there was no comparison—on the day that Princess Charity was buried alive beneath the Morquar Gate, the sun burned brighter than it had since the beginning of the rains. And all the while the antinomial stared up at it, scowling fiercely, singing her wordless music louder and louder.

  In the crowd, people made the sign of the unclean or put their fingers to their ears. The driver whipped his donkeys like a crazy man. He stood up in his seat and goaded them with a stick thrust up their anuses until they screamed aloud. He had twisted their tails together and tied them to the reins; he pulled their tails as cruelly as he could as they clattered up the Street of the Seven Sins out towards the gate.

  * * *

  In those days, in Charn, in the first days of the revolution, people were desperate for entertainment. New regulations had constricted the flow of drugs and alcohol into the city—on November 1st, workmen had built ten tons of sinsemillian into a pyramid in Morquar Square. Once on fire, it had burned for days, filling the streets around the gate with thick, intoxicating smoke, incapacitating the people in that neighborhood. In such quantities, the drug made it hard for them to walk.

  On November 2nd, six marijuana profiteers were crucified along the north edge of the square. That same morning, Rebel Angels visited every public tavern north of the river, smashing bottles and destroying stocks. Pools of alcohol collected in the gutters, and men and women filled their buckets and their boots. The next day the Free Word published a photograph of men passed out under a hoarding, under a line of posters condemning public drunkenness.

  Useless in the long term, these laws combined with others to encourage sad short-term effects. On November 3rd, Professor Sabian gave a speech before the National Assembly about recent increases in violent crime. “It is not the looting that appalls me,” he remarked. “It is not the activity of the black markets or the reports of profiteering. Those seem to me regrettable but legitimate by-products of the current emergency. No—it is the other kind of crime. In the past five weeks alone, the incidence of rape in the sixth ward has risen ninety-two percent. Murder has risen thirty-six percent; violent assault by sixty-four percent.

  “Of course,” he continued, “there are reasons for this. The previous government of this city based its power on violence and coercion. Now we are seeing reaction, like a spring that is released from pressure. But that is not the only factor—brothers and sisters, the tyranny that once held us in slavery has loosened from our lives. All the outward trappings of that tyranny have been destroyed: the shrines, the i
dols, and the icons—though I am told that many still worship them in secret. But, brothers and sisters, noxious as it was, the ceremonial of the old regime contained some public benefice. It distracted the aggressions of us all. This benefice is something we have not been able to replace.”

  Swayed by the professor’s speech, the assembly sat far into the night, and by daybreak it had appointed a commission. Raksha Starbridge, the majority speaker, received the task of drafting a new civic religion. It was to favor ritual over content. It was not to involve the worship of any deity of any kind.

  Raksha Starbridge was delighted with the resolution. He laughed and clapped his hands. But Professor Sabian was horrified, even though his speech had been the seed of the idea.

  Yet even he could never have anticipated the malice and the ingenuity that Raksha Starbridge brought to his new job. For almost one hundred days he used his power to terrorize the city, until even his own party turned against him. From October 94th, when he was inaugurated as director of the Desecration League, to November 87th, when Earnest Darkheart beat him senseless on the floor of the assembly, he presided over such a reign of violence in Charn that a generation later it was forbidden to allude to it, by imperial decree.

  Nevertheless, later historians would agree that the most hideous of all the crimes of Raksha Starbridge was the sealing of the Mountain of Redemption and the abandonment of almost half a million prisoners to slow deaths from starvation. This work was started on the 13th of November. It was accomplished by the Desecration League, for even though the job was authorized by the assembly, neither the Rebel Angels, nor the police, nor the army, nor the guild of bricklayers wanted anything to do with it. The guild went on a strike of public protest, which ended with the arrest and disappearance of its leaders.