by Paul Park
In the dark, a voice said, “Tell me. Don’t stop.”
So Abu told the story of the pictures, and told how Nicobar Starbridge was a traveling preacher in Banaree, preaching revolution in the simplest language, among the desperate and the starving, the homeless and the meek. He preached that God gave Earth to men as a free gift, to live in as they chose. He preached a new society where men and women would be free and equal. And finally, he preached violence, the destruction of property, factories, homes, the murder of the rich. He attracted a great army of disciples, men and women, who called themselves the Children of Paradise and roved the countryside in marauding bands. Some ran naked, some clothed, and if anyone was found with any money or possessions, he was whipped out of the group.
Abu told them how the Children of Paradise had captured a small town and renamed it the City of the Pure in Heart, and how they lived there in an ecstasy of dirt, and hunger, and drunkenness, and lust. And how, living with his mistress in a high tower while his followers rioted and drank, Nicobar Starbridge had written his last great book, and in it he rejected all knowledge and learning, and dreamed of a new language with no words to describe the illusions of past and future, for of all the lies that gave men power over their brothers, these were the worst.
Abu said, “It was his last work, because soon after, the bishop’s army took the city and burned it, and burned all his followers alive in a terrible purge. Nicobar Starbridge was captured, and he was taken in a cage to the palace of the emperor, who kept a kind of zoo for famous heretics. He put them in cages, and in the evenings he liked to walk in the gardens and discuss philosophy and theology with them. I’ve seen a portrait from that time. The emperor has dressed him up in scarlet robes, and has given him a scepter like a bishop or a prince of the church, as if he had never turned away. With his other hand, he is grasping one bar of his cage, and even in the painting you can see the whitening of his knuckles as he squeezes it. He is very ugly. He is wall-eyed, and his hair and beard are very long. He lived in a cage in the emperor’s garden until he was very old.
“And that was all. In most places, the revolt died out. But in Banaree, a group of men and women made a ritual of cleansing and rebirth—fire and water, I’m not sure of the details. They purged themselves of all possessions and desires. They took to the woods before the soldiers came, to the great summer forests of that year. At that time it was all untamed, stretching up without a break to the far north.”
There was silence, and then a woman’s voice came out of the dark. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you telling us this story? Who are these people?”
“You. Your ancestors.”
“But that is a long time ago.” Her tone was near despair. “I am not old.”
“I’m sorry. I’m explaining so badly. I’m trying to explain why those people were attacking you tonight. Why the people hate you.”
“Why do they hate us?” asked the woman.
“Because you are different. And . . . other reasons too. Let me tell you another story, this one from not so long ago. Maybe some of you were there.” Abu paused and let the dark illuminate for him another set of pictures, the lines and colors crude and childish, for he had been a child at the time. Antinomials attack the mail. Portraits of atheists: children. Portraits of atheists: mother. Riders in the snow. The cannibal’s dance. And he told them how in the last phase of winter, when he was just a schoolboy, an armed band of antinomials, led by a tall man with only one hand, had come down from the far north to loot the farmers in that district. They had stolen horses and murdered livestock, and for more than a month they had terrorized the people there, killing policemen, taking prisoners, burning farms, and stealing food. The bishop sent an army, which chased them to a mountain north of Gaur. They had a fortress there and made a desperate defense, but the general was in no hurry. He surrounded them and starved them out, but hundreds of days later when the walls were down and they were overwhelmed, he found that they had kept themselves alive by eating the bodies of their prisoners, and their brothers and sisters who had died fighting.
There was silence again, and out of the dark came the same woman’s voice, desolate and low. “I think there is no hope for me but death. I cannot understand these stories. I never . . . heard them before. What are antinomials?”
Prince Abu sighed. “You,” he said. “People without names. Atheists. Cannibals. You have no God.”
“And what is . . . what is God?”
* * *
“Sweet God,” prayed the bishop. At six o’clock the sun rose, white and heavy on the white horizon. The bishop had been up all night. “ ‘Sweet love,’ ” she quoted happily. “ ‘How sweet it is to watch you sleep, your body like an unstrung bow, unstrung by loving hands.’ ” The festival had exhausted her, but the worst was over, and she had been left alone in the aromatic gardens of the temple to watch the sun rise over the rooftops of her city. Around her, sparkwood, dogwood, black magnolias, suntrumpets shot their seed over the careful borders of the lawn; as she sat on the grass next to the fountain, streamers of flowers fell around her. It was the only garden for 300 miles, the only grass, the only flowers, the only living trees.
“Sweet God,” she thought, and she turned her head and listened for His footsteps in the garden, where Angkhdt himself had lived and worked, and tropical flowers grew miraculously in the open air, no matter what the season. She had seen an orchid open to the snow. “Sweet God,” she thought, “are you still with me?” because inevitably ceremonies and festivals—candles, solemn fat old men, the clustered spirit of a million true believers—would pack into a mass so ponderous that it could crush a stronger thing than God. At night the bells, the chanting, the suffocating ritual would frighten Him away, and she was never sure He would return. Every morning she sat alone, waiting in the garden for His timid step.
Her metal headdress lay beside her. Carefully, so as not to prick herself, she began to get out of her clothes, recalcitrant wire and layers of spun steel, pulling the steel cloth down her arms and down her legs until it lay like peeled snakeskin in the grass next to her boots. She let down her hair, pulling out the pins, shaking it loose over her shoulders. And, dipping her steel skullcap into the pool, using it as a basin, she washed the makeup from her face, rubbing the white pigment into milk, so that it ran down between her breasts.
She rinsed her face, and stood, and yawned, and walked sleepily across the lawn.
She left her clothes where they lay; they were uncomfortable, and she was glad she wouldn’t have to put them on again. The bishop had more than eighty thousand suits of clothes, one for every day of the interminable year. Most she would never live to see. Some of the more delicate ones, she knew, rotted and were remade several times between wearings. It was foolishness, something for the fat old men to do, while underneath she always wore the same white slip. Blind, crippled, castrated, how could they understand? She was the bishop, and in her heart she kept the heart of love, inviolate, unsuspected, the crystal spark of the world’s faith. There was no reason to wear anything at all.
She laughed and ran up the steps into the cloister, into the sanctuary on the way to her own room. She stopped, reflexively, though she was eager to go on, eager to pull the curtains and lie down in her own bed. Yet she was unwilling ever to waste a moment in the sanctuary, walking through it as if it were just a place between two places. So she hesitated by the marble columns at the entrance of the shrine, a cave where Angkhdt had lived for one full month of his great journey, sleeping here with the so-called “black woman” (“. . . arms like night, midnight, three o’clock, dawn . . .”). Here he had written verses seventy-one through one hundred and sixteen.
Nothing remained from that time. But at the end of the altar, next to an oil lamp, sat a statue of the prophet. The marble gleamed in the light, heavy and yellow, the hard heavy shoulders, heavy thighs. The sculptor had gestured gently towards the old myth, elongating his jaw a little, putting hints of hair along hi
s forehead and his cheeks, just a roughening of the stone. His eyes were simple slits, but besides that his face was human, and the small marks of deformity only emphasized his human parts, his wide straight nose, his marble lips.
He held out his stone hands, empty most of the year, but today they carried the holiest relic in the world, the skull of Angkhdt himself. It was broken in places and the jaw was gone, but all the cracks and joints were filled with silver, the jaw rebuilt with silver. The skull was tilted in the statue’s hands, and the stone eyes looked down into the empty sockets of bare bone as if scanning them for movement, like a dog.
* * *
“Please,” asked Abu, “can I have a drink of water?”
“There is water,” said the boy’s voice.
“Can’t you light a light? I’m sick of this darkness. I feel as if I had been swallowed. There’s no air in here.”
“Light can’t help that.”
“No. I don’t suppose any of you have a drink,” continued Abu petulantly.
“Suppose.”
“Oh, never mind. Water will do fine.”
The boy lit a match. It shone on tired faces, or people curled up sleeping. Nobody moved, and it burned out.
“Well?” demanded the prince.
“I don’t understand,” said the boy. “You want water. There is water. Are you lying to me?”
“I want someone to get it. Please, will someone get it for me?”
“I don’t understand,” said the boy again after a pause. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m tired. I want someone to get it. Or I won’t tell you any more stories.”
Abu felt a cup pushed into his hands. He took it and drank.
“You have no pride,” observed the boy.
Abu took another drink. “You don’t understand at all,” he said. “You never will. Why you stay here is a mystery to me. Why you don’t go home.”
“I was born here. This is my home.”
“Yes, but there is nothing for you here. Why not go back?”
“I know the songs,” replied the boy. “No one can live there. There’s nothing to eat. There’s nothing but snow.”
“But . . . hasn’t it gotten warmer here since you were a child? It’s spring there too. Up by Rangriver, it’s nothing but green grass. No large animals yet, but plenty of rabbits. The trees won’t grow back for another generation. But God knows it’s a better life than here.”
He heard movement in the little cave, exclamations, and a hand closed painfully around his knee. “You’re lying,” said the boy. “Don’t lie.”
“Why should I lie? Don’t you know? Hasn’t anybody ever left here to go back?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “They are alive or dead. We are not like you. We can’t see it through their eyes.”
“Then let me tell you.”
“No. You see, but you don’t understand. I don’t want to see that way. Now there is grass. What color?”
“Green and gold.”
“Long or short?”
“Waist high.”
“Snow on the mountains?”
“Yes. Near the peaks.”
“Birds?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Abu.
“Yes,” said the boy. “You see, I do know. There are birds of prey. Hawks and harriers.”
There was a long silence, and then Prince Abu broke it. “Let me finish my story,” he said. “About the cannibals. I haven’t finished.”
“No,” said the boy. “I know what you will say. They wanted to kill us after we ate them. So they sent an army when the weather changed. The Paradise thaw. They burned our town. Your cousin was there.”
“You’re right,” said Abu, surprised.
“You think I’m stupid. But I was born here. I know how to talk, how to think. I learned everything I could. I am young, and I can’t live in a past I never knew, like my fathers and my mothers. Always in the past. The eternal present, always in the past. But I can’t live that way, because I want compensations for slavery. I want comfort . . . in my mind. I want to want things, to believe things.”
There was a pause. Abu broke it dubiously. “Well . . .”
“Tell me about God,” said the woman’s voice.
Abu sighed and cleared his throat.
“The truth,” demanded the boy fiercely. “No lies. Not even one.”
“I don’t think you know when you’re well off,” muttered Abu.
Then he spoke aloud. He told them about the power of the priests of Charn, how they owned every bird, every fish, every dollar, every stone. He told them about the episcopal factories, and the million-acre slave farms, and the towns of slaves clustered around a single temple, making umbrellas, silk, forks, olive oil, a different product from each town. He told them about the parsons coming to visit newborn children, casting horoscopes, checking for imperfections, listening to them cry. He said, “They believe that when a baby cries, it is saying something. It tells the story of another lifetime. It mourns its sins. And the priest listens, and in a few minutes he has given it a future and a penance. He names it. He engraves its future on its skin: education to such-and-such a level; work; address; permission to marry; name of wife; permission to breed; permissible food; permissible clothes; everything.”
“But you are different,” said a voice.
“Yes. I am a Starbridge.” He told them about the Starbridges, that enormous family from which all priests and rich men came, all generals and kings. “The laws aren’t meant for us; we have our own. And at one time we could be born from any family. But the fourteenth bishop argued that God punished sinners by placing them in poor families, and rewarded the virtuous by making them born rich. It’s a theory called predetermination.”
There was a silence, and then the woman’s voice said, “You’re not telling me what I want to know. There is a reason for all this. Some kind of . . . love. Tell me about that.”
“It’s the way things are.”
“No. I don’t believe that. There is a man—was—long ago. Someone. A reason why you live like this.”
“We have a story,” said the prince. He told them the travels of the prophet Angkhdt. He described for them the painting on the door of every temple—Angkhdt turning the planets back towards the sun with his bare hands; Angkhdt making an end to winter; Angkhdt bringing the rain.
He told them about Paradise and the nine planets of hell. “This is the first of the nine planets, the most beautiful of all. But there is something here, some smell of failure or decay that ruins everything. Some touch of death that ruins everything.
“And when it sinks from Paradise the soul comes here. And this is just the first of the nine planets. It takes a long time for a man’s flesh to burn away. It’s a chemical process. Am I making sense? It’s a long, long journey back to Paradise. A long journey through the stars. It takes a long time to come to Paradise again with all your human flesh consumed away.”
“But you. You are different.”
“Yes,” sighed Abu, depressed by this unlooked-for understanding. “I am a Starbridge. The world was put into my family’s hands to keep this system working. And I won’t die, unless I die by violence. I’ll be given drugs and put to sleep. And when I am asleep, I’ll dream. And out of every dream will grow another dream, and it will be like walking through a sequence of rooms until I open the last door, and I’ll be home in Paradise again.”
He took another drink of water.
“That’s the truth?” asked the boy’s voice, finally.
“That’s what millions believe.”
“Everywhere.”
“No. The world is big. I’m talking about this empire, these dioceses. Elsewhere . . .”
“Well?”
“Elsewhere there are other legends.”
“Legends!” Abu felt the boy’s hand grab his knee again, fingers pressing into his skin. “Barbarian! Do you think I care about your legends? Do you think I’m like you? I live in the world. Bricks and sto
ne, no power on earth can change it. Barbarian! This is what we ran away from. My father’s father’s father’s . . . When he migrated into the physical world. Do you think I want to understand your theories?”
“Please,” said Abu. “You’re hurting me. I’m sorry. It’s . . . difficult.”
“Difficult!” The boy did not relax his grip. “Do you believe it?”
“I believe . . . something.”
“Something!”
“Life isn’t perfect. There’s a reason why life isn’t perfect. I believe that. Please. You’re hurting me.”
“But you live as if you believed it all, don’t you? Starbridge!”
“Yes. I suppose I do.”
“But how can you? Don’t you understand—if it is not true, every part of it, then it is a vicious lie, every part of it.”
Abu said nothing, and the boy continued. “You don’t care whether it’s true or not. What do you care? You have your money.” He let go of Abu’s leg to grab the purse out of his lap, and the prince wondered how he could see so clearly in the dark. Abu heard the purse rip open, the coins flung away.