by Paul Park
But he looked back when the second figure on the stage shrugged his cloak away and rose. He walked to the far edge of the platform, to where the bonfire had burned down, and pulled his hair back with the same gesture as his brother. And then he stood and raised his arms, but there was no accompanying flame. Instead, a small current of sound seemed to form around the motion, fast when the boy moved faster, stopping when he stopped. The doctor looked around to see if he could find the source. But it was not exactly music, or at least it didn’t remind him of the sound of any instrument or combination of instruments. It was more like singing, only more supple, more responsive to the slightest twist of fingers than a voice could ever be.
The second dancer made a rapid circle around his brother, the sound accompanying him, sinuous and clean. The crowd was silent, and the doctor wondered whether they could hear it too. “Do you hear it?” he whispered to his cousin. Abu turned towards him, smiling patiently, but as the doctor looked at him he saw his brows contract, and at the same moment he heard gunfire, so that his first impression when the shooting started was that his cousin, too, could make sound out of movement. He had confused cause and effect. Abu pointed to a stream of light.
It flowed over the bridge from the dark shore opposite—men with torches, shooting as they came. Over there, the city was disused and boarded up, but people lived ratlike in the cellars. The road from the bridge led down to the municipal gallows at the city limits. The stream of torches came from there.
Now Thanakar could hear singing too, religious anthems, bigoted old war songs from the antinomial crusades, and Abu and Thanakar struggled to their feet. Around them, the crowd barely reacted. Some sat glumly, sucking their knees, others turned contemptuous backs. But the dancers had stopped, and stood motionless on stage. And in a little while the crowd started to disperse in different directions. People stalked away to get their weapons or their musical instruments. Thanakar grabbed Abu by the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here!” he shouted. Men with torches were streaming down the access ramps, not far away, and occasionally a bullet whined close.
The cousins turned away and hurried back the way they had come. The doctor found it hard to run. He tripped and fell full length, hurting his shin. Abu crouched by him, and they rested in the shadow of a boxcar to let an armed party of antinomials run past the opposite way. The prince was out of breath. He sank down wearily to the ground and put his face into his hands. Thanakar stood up and leaned his back against the boxcar. He could see the bridge ablaze with light, and new fire burning by the docks. Where they were, it was dark and strangely quiet.
Abu whimpered at his feet. Under stress, sometimes the prince’s thoughts became disjointed, a running mix of questions and answers. “Oh God,” he said, “Why is it like this? How can it be like this? How can I do . . . Think. Think of what to do. What are the obligations of your name? One: courage. Two: duty to your . . . class. Three: courage. Four, four—how can they do it, every time? How can they ruin it?” He sat back against the doctor’s leg, and Thanakar reached down to touch his hair.
“Hush,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”
“Who are they?”
“The purge, I guess. I don’t know. There was a hanging tonight. Forty heretics, in honor of the festival. Didn’t you get an invitation? It must have gotten out of hand.”
“The purge. The purge, the purge, the purge, the purge. How can they? It is not my will.”
“I don’t think so,” said a voice near to hand. An enormous shadow stepped out of the dark between two cars, and then a man came out of it, walking towards them. He stooped to pick up Abu’s bottle from where he had dropped it, and he threw it into the prince’s lap with a contemptuous snap of his wrist. Thanakar recognized the voice and then the man, his cruel face, his heavy lips, the white centers to his eyes. He had exchanged Abu’s silver pistols for something more murderous, a machine revolver stuck into his belt. He carried a wooden flute.
“I don’t think so,” he repeated. “Not the purge. Just a few barbarians, like you. Don’t be afraid. It’s common enough. There’s hardly a month without something like this.”
“Barbarians,” groaned Abu. “Barbarians.” He uncorked his bottle.
It was quiet where they were, though in the distance they could hear shouting and gunfire. The antinomial lifted his flute and played a little tune. He stopped to listen, and Thanakar could hear a response, a flute playing from elsewhere in the yard, and then it stopped. The antinomial played again, just five notes. Again came the response, and then Thanakar could see a lantern swinging towards them from across the yard, a man in its circle. He came close, an older man, with curly white hair and a machete in his belt.
“Good hunting,” he said. And then the two of them conversed together unintelligibly, in a mixture of words and sound. The older man pointed up above them to where the barricade loomed past, where Abu and Thanakar had crossed earlier that night. It was quiet there, a black wall against the darker black. Not far away, the railway tunnel opened its throat, guarded by its crumbling sentinels.
The older antinomial squatted down and held the lantern up, to peer into the prince’s face. Abu’s cheeks were wet. He had been crying, and the antinomial stretched out one finger to touch his cheek and then brought it back to look at it. “Water,” he said softly. “Wet,” and then he added something, a musical phrase that sounded like a question.
A flare burst above the barricade, lighting up the sky. The man with the cruel face looked up, squinting. Above them, the wall erupted into noise, a clattering of gunfire. As they watched, flames showed in several places along the top.
“Barbarians,” said the man. He spat.
The older antinomial looked up from where he squatted near the prince, his face more puzzled than concerned. “A bad one,” he said. “Both sides at once.”
The other nodded. He pulled his pistol from his belt and pointed it at Abu’s head, and squinted down the barrel, his lips tight for a moment, and then he put up his arm. “No,” he murmured, in a tone of infinite regret. “Not fair. Not fair.” He stood looking at them, and then he motioned with his gun up towards the barricade, towards a section that was still dark. “Go,” he said. “Don’t come back here. Leave me alone. Leave us alone.” He turned and walked away, down towards the battle at the bridge. A flare lit up the sky. Thanakar could see him throw his flute away and start to run.
“Come,” he said, reaching down again to touch the prince’s hair. “Let’s go. It’s not safe here.”
Abu was looking down where the man had run. “He never saw her again,” he said. “That girl with yellow hair. You know that, don’t you?”
“Hush now. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid. It’s just that it’s so sad. I mean the girl that he loved. Woman, now. Isn’t that sad? He never saw her again after that night. In the snow. He doesn’t know if she’s alive or dead.”
“Hush, now. Enough. Let’s go.” Thanakar bent down to caress the back of his neck.
“No,” said the prince, speaking without stammering or whimpers. He sat up straight, and his face put on a small defiant smile. When the man was threatening him with the gun, he had started to feel stronger. He feared so many things, but death wasn’t one of them.
“No,” he said again. “I don’t want to. I want to stay.”
Abu’s hair was thin on top, long in the back. Thanakar reached down to take a handful of it underneath his collar. “Come,” he said. “You can make it. I’ll help you.”
Abu tried to pull way. “Cousin, you’re hurting me,” he said. “I can stay if I want.”
“No you can’t. It’s not safe here.”
“I am not afraid,” said the prince. And then pleading: “Don’t you see, if I go now, they’ll never let me come back. It’s like choosing sides. Believe me, I’ll be safer here. They won’t hurt me.”
The white-haired antinomial had listened to this conversation without seeming to understand it. Now he r
eached his finger out again to touch the prince’s cheek. Abu pulled away.
“Don’t touch me,” he complained. “Why does everyone keep touching me? Just go. Go get the police. Find my brother-in-law. Tell him I’m in danger here.”
They listened to the rattle of the guns. “He won’t come,” said the doctor. “He won’t do anything. What can he do?”
The antinomial had not withdrawn his hand. “Micum Starbridge,” he said.
“Yes,” said Abu. “He’s my brother-in-law. He’ll come stop this. I know he will. Please, Cousin. Please go.”
“I can’t leave you here. You know that.”
“Yes you can. Please, Cousin, it is my w-w-w-wish. I’m sorry, but it is. It is my wish.” He held up his palm and spread his fingers out apologetically, so that Thanakar could see the golden sun tattoo.
The doctor stepped back, and his head snapped back as if he had been slapped. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Oh Thanakar, not like that. I’m sorry. Just go, please. I’ll be all right. I’m not afraid.” He smiled ruefully. “Courage is an obligation of our class.”
When the doctor went, the antinomial went with him with the lantern, lighting his way. Abu sat alone, leaning back against the boxcar, drinking, watching the fire along the barricade. In the center of the railway yard, the night held him in its empty cup. For a long time he sat. He had hardly dared hope that he could be alone; just a few of the right words and everybody had left, and he was free to drink a little in the dark. Others could run away when they wanted to be alone, but he was fat and weak, and it was hard for him to run. Instead, so often, events seemed to combine around him in a spinning circle, and it was a relief to know that there was always something you could say to make the circle widen and recede out of sight. He watched the line of flames, and then behind him, the fire at the bridge. So often, it was enough just to raise your hand, he thought. It was the first time he had used that power on his cousin, however, and it made him sad, for Thanakar would take it to heart. He would take it so to heart, and the more bitterly because he didn’t believe, intellectually, in the power of the tattoo. But physically he was helpless to resist, slave to . . . what? The mythology that had sunk so deep inside their bones that minds and opinions could mean nothing.
The prince’s tattoos were unique in Charn. The priests had been excited at his birth. Some happy confluence of stars, some strident crying in the language of the newborn had convinced them that he had been a king in Paradise, in another lifetime. Abu looked up. The planet’s silver rim showed beneath some clouds. It could not be true, for Angkhdt had said that all were free in Paradise, free as birds, men and women free and equal, spirits of pure light. There were no kings there. And even if there were, surely a king who had fallen down so far, so heavy with his own sins and misery, should be reborn lower than a farmhand. But the priests had loaded him with obligations and a horoscope that he had carried like a cannonball throughout his childhood—a great general, judge of all men, scourge of heresy. If so, he had thought, and not just he alone, why had God given him so few gifts to accomplish such great aims? Unathletic, nearsighted, undisciplined, asthmatic: these flaws seemed like sins in a child with such a brilliant future. But eventually he had given up, stopped wondering, and after a while the priests and the parsons also had stopped, admitting their mistake, though the tattoos and the power remained, an embarrassment to them all.
Yet sometimes on clear nights Abu still thought that greatness and strength might descend on him from the sky. At such times he wanted to be alone. He swallowed some of the harsh wine, almost the last. Even the miserable and the cowardly might find a cause to fight for, he thought, and you didn’t have to have a hope of victory to try. That night, watching dancing among these outlaws that he had come to love, not knowing why, he had thought for the first time that he had power he could use to help them.
Paradise was showing now, beautiful and full, silver fruit hanging in a tree of darkness. Abu drank the last of the wine and staggered to his feet. The world heaved and bucked. And as he walked down towards the bridge, and the darkness gave to light, and the quiet gave to screaming noise, and the solitude to angry and demented faces, the wine he had drunk comforted him and made the people dance around him, made the bloodshed and the bullets and the heat seem like hallucinations. In his uniform he felt as invulnerable as a god, because these barbarian rioters were just the men to respect it.
At the bridge, the antinomials had fought among the access ramps, but they had been driven back. The rioters—small men but very numerous, dressed in the yellow clothes of poverty, their faces gutted by the fires of poverty—had pushed them back. Abu Starbridge staggered to the top of a heap of sandbags. He stood there, splendid in his uniform of white and gold, and raised his hand above the throng, his palm shining in the firelight, etched with the golden sun in splendor, the symbol of his inexorable will. Some of the little men stared at him, amazed, some sank to their knees, and some took no notice. His voice, shouting, “Stop! Please stop!” was drowned out in the din.
* * *
Thanakar got stuck in a parade. As he hurried through the city gates, up towards the Temple of Enforcement, the streets had been stiffening with people. Exhausted, he had pushed forward without thinking, struggling through the crowd. People gave way, making the gestures of respect. Now he wished they had stood firm, because behind him they had packed so tightly that there was no way back, and in front the procession stretched for miles along the Street of Seven Sins.
He stood sweating in a crowd of seminarians. They had the places of honor by the roadside, and Thanakar had a good view too, because they were young and small, and he could see above their heads. There must have been a hundred of them, with red robes and high voices and shaved heads. Thanakar cursed, but in a way it was good just to stand there resting, because he had come such a long way and his leg was tired.
The road was lined with torches and with men who stood with gas lamps balanced on their heads and on their shoulders: small tanks, like bags of roots, and then the candelabra branched from them, like little trees lit with fiery blossoms. In the road, muscular young men tumbled through the air, leaping, and twisting, and slipping in hot rivers of elephant piss. Then came men cracking whips, and firedancers of various kinds. Men danced with torches in their teeth. Others tossed huge wheels of fire above their heads. Others had attached one end of a long rope to their hair, the other to a burning lamp. Wiggling their necks, they swung the lamp around them in wide circles while they clapped their hands and danced. They got down and rolled along the ground, the lamp skimming in a circle just above the tar.
Then came some elephants, painted in gay colors. In summer, they flourished in the summer jungles near the city, but these had been imported for the festival, brought up from the South in railway cars. The cold had made them sick. Their eyes shone feverishly in the torchlight, and some had a peculiar gummy liquid hanging from their tusks. They bellowed mournfully, but the sound was covered up with drumming. Drummers marched behind them, bare-chested, with white turbans and white baggy trousers fastened tightly at the ankle. They tied their drums across their waists, and beat on the ends as if to break them. In all processions there were hundreds of them, and in this one there were thousands, jumping, swaying, leaping in unison, their complex rhythms rolling up and down the line.
They leapt and turned in front of him, leapt and turned, back and forth, back and forth, banging on their drums with blistering palms. And as they passed, he could feel the rhythms in his body, as if a drummer had gotten loose in there and was drumming on his heart as if to break it, because he knew what came next. These parades were all the same. Elephants and skeleton dancers, shaking rattles to imitate the chattering of bones. Elephants; and then he could see them too, the flagellants, and hear the singing of their whips, and then his heart was breaking, as it always did, and he could feel tears closing his throat. They passed in front of him, the flagellants, his private symbol for what the Sta
rbridges had made out of the world.
They were naked to the waist, their hair and beards were long, their faces stony hard. Their whips were knotted with nails and fragments of shell, and the blood ran down their backs. They scourged themselves to a rhythm of stamping, over their shoulders, alternating sides, the thongs licking their armpits and the tender flesh under their arms. With every breath they struck, and with every exhalation they stamped another metal step, their ankles chained together. In the interstices between the rhythmic crash and stamp rose up the voices of a boys’ choir, like wild reeds growing through an iron grate; they walked between the men, dressed in white surplices, nursing candles, singing hymns, their sweet wild voices poking up high.
The doctor turned away. Coming up from the railway yard, he had already seen horrible sights. After they had left the prince, he and the antinomial had climbed the barricade and walked along it looking for a place to cross. In the mouths of narrow streets above the yard, crowds had gathered, throwing stones and firebombs. Here and there, groups of soldiers made more organized assaults. For a while, they had got nowhere, for the antinomials had blocked them, fighting like lunatics with no discipline or order. For a while, strength and courage had prevailed against numbers. The crowd fell back before a single furious giant wielding a length of four-by-eight, batting gasoline bombs out of the air so that they burst around him in a burning rain. Other antinomials stood around or squatted, watching, until for no apparent reason they too found themselves filled up with the same spasmodic rage and would leap down from the barricade, screaming like demons, throwing huge chunks of masonry down into the crowd. Flailing two machetes, a woman jumped down twenty feet into a mass of soldiers.