by Paul Park
After three days, Aspe overtook some remnants of the bishop’s army, leaderless since the day before, when General Cayman Starbridge and most of his staff had been captured and crucified. These soldiers watched the antinomials with open mouths, and when they saw the women, they turned and spat into the sand. But even so, most were willing to turn again and follow the colonel, especially when he threatened them with death. So Aspe’s army quickly divided itself into three parts: his own silent regiment of horse soldiers, the bishop’s infantry, and the antinomials. These last were terrible soldiers—undisciplined, vicious, undependable. But they were effective too, because in the month that followed they won a reputation in the hills for a kind of random savagery that made the enemy run whenever they appeared. They took no prisoners. And whenever Aspe recaptured some village, the starving people would come out, and they would beg on their knees not to be delivered to the atheists. “Cannibals,” they called them. “Not men, but singing devils.” They told stories of how the antinomials drank blood from their horses’ necks, and made campfires at night to grill the bodies of their enemies, or else ripped them raw with huge predatory teeth.
Most of the army hated the antinomials, and feared them more than the enemy. Some hated them and loved them too. It was infuriating to see them break off fighting in the middle of a skirmish for no reason and gallop back at random down the valley, like angry random gusts of wind. A man could never be sure whether they could tell barbarians apart, or recognize their allies from their foes, or even if they might turn on themselves some day and cut each other to pieces in an excess of frenzy.
But it was exhilarating, too, to see them riding, surrounded by this time by a great army of dogs come out of nowhere to follow them. It was exhilarating to hear them break the air each morning with their harsh, wild songs. They were fearless. They would ride laughing to overrun some dug-in guns, and then they would hold the place for hours, though outnumbered many times, and when their ammunition was gone, they would charge the enemy with bayonets, yelling like demons, the colonel out in front, until the enemy broke and ran. In those days, many of King Argon’s soldiers were adventists; they carried the red and white cockade strapped to their helmets, though some still wore the old penis-shaped pendants their fathers and grandfathers had worn. To them the antinomials represented God’s avenging scourge, and they spoke about them with a kind of superstitious awe, and they were always the first to run.
In the balance, thought Commissar Micum Starbridge, the antinomials did more good than harm, wild and undisciplined as they were. At first, Aspe was careful to keep them separate from the rest of the army, to let them fight on different days, to give them different objectives. But after a time, they answered to his call, because he bit them with his magic voice and drew them pictures in the air. In the evenings, in their camp, under the dark sky, he sang to them of home, of snowfall, of freedom, of safety from persecution, of a great journey back up above Rangriver, when all the barbarians were dead. He gave them memories of Paradise. They were easier to deceive than children. He led them in person when he could, his white hair streaming out behind him, and he took care to be the bravest and the strongest. At the battle of Halcyon Ridge, on September 99th, in the eighth phase of spring, he came back with the heads of two enemy commanders, identical twins, hanging from his saddle bow, and after that the antinomials were his, body and heart. In every man and woman, even the purest, there are deep biting instincts and an unconquerable love for destiny. They followed him without thinking.
The commissar loved them, though he hated their cruelty. Though he gestured angrily he heard about it, he condemned it as he might have condemned viciousness in one of his own children, had he had any—angrily, yet excusing them in his heart, as if their cruelty had come out of an excess of some good quality, energy, perhaps, or courage. He forgave them because they symbolized for him the pure essence of soldiery, the way they laughed and never complained, the way they fought until they died, the way they rode those huge, savage horses as if they were part of them, careening down the scorched gullies just for the love of riding, and then all changing direction in a mass, without a word or signal, wheeling like a flock of birds.
Also, there was something in their disorganized appearance that touched the heart in his starched, polished old breast. They had no uniforms. Some rode almost naked under the white sun.
When there was wood, at night they lit bonfires and played music and danced. Then the old commissar would walk down from his tent and sit somewhere on a rock above their camp. Alone and far away, but not out of earshot, he would sit with a cigarette and listen to some saxophone rip up the night, and watch the figures of the dancers. He hadn’t much to do. As he had anticipated, he was with the transport corps, bringing up ordnance from the city on the backs of dying elephants.
* * *
The commissar had gone with the first wave of reinforcements, veterans and reserves, and a few companies of the purge. Thanakar remained in the city a few days, putting together a mobile hospital with a man he had known from medical school named Creston Bile. They had seven surgeons and a muleteam, along with some episcopal spies posing as assistants. These spies were to make sure that no one but Starbridge officers got more than rudimentary first aid, certainly no anaesthetic, nothing to blunt the pain when God saw fit to wound a soldier for his sins. “We’ll ditch them first thing,” said Creston Bile. “I had to agree. Otherwise the bishop would have locked us up.” He was a good man.
The night before they were due to leave, Thanakar got a message from Charity Starbridge. “Please come please,” it said, in a style of calligraphy only the brightest and best-educated were allowed to use, the first percentile of the graduates from Starbridge schools. There Charity had been taught, along with physics, calculus, and astronomy, never to show discomfort or displeasure, but when Thanakar reached the commissar’s tower, she was on the verge of tears. She was trying to control herself, but her famished body seemed to shake from the exertion. “I don’t mean to scare you,” she said as she met him in the hall. “Please, if you have something else to do . . .”
“What is it?”
“Please, I feel so ashamed.”
“What is it?” he repeated gently. He took her hand. It was easier to touch her than talk to her. She grabbed him by the thumb with a tightness that he never thought could have come out of such thin fingers. She led him into Abu’s bedroom. The room had been swept and straightened, the quilts folded and arranged. “He did it himself,” she said. “The servants almost panicked when they saw.”
Abu was gone. He had left a letter on the bed, on a pile of photographic prints.
“May I read it?”
“Please.” She had not released his hand. She raised it up and pressed it hard against her thin dry lips.
The note was very short. It said: “I’ve gone to find the man who took these. Maybe I can do some good this time. We have a chance. Even so, you don’t have to hope, to try.”
The photographs were large and stiff, portraits of child laborers in episcopal industries—glass mines, steel foundries, cotton mills, dress shops, prayer farms. Some were very young. A girl posed next to her thread machine, an endless row of spools, levers, and metal gears. It was spotless, but the girl was dirty, barefoot, her dress torn and patched. Her hair was cut short, so as not to catch in the machine, and her face was smudged with dirt, or maybe just a flaw in the print, because photography was primitive in those days.
She only had ten fingers, and her hands were raw and bruised, yet even so she smiled. All the children in the pictures smiled—gaping laughter from a group of boys in caps, posing at the entrance to the coal pit; fox-faced smiles from prim little girls knitting socks; a wistful, almost guilty smile from a girl standing by herself on a heap of stones in an endless field.
“I didn’t know they started so young,” said Charity Starbridge.
In those days, a photographer focused a reflection on the surface of an acid pool. Then
he had to wait for the image to congeal, so that he could lift it out with wooden tongs and spread it between two plates of glass. He could make the prints at home, placing the plates on paper sensitized to light, but the image itself took six minutes to harden in the pool, and if the subject moved too much, or if anything happened to disturb the perfection of the acid’s surface, he had to start again. Thanakar wondered how a photographer could have been in those places for the time it took, before he was arrested. Or perhaps these were official portraits, sanctioned by the bishop, and that was the reason for the children’s smiles.
The last few photographs were different. They were taken in the slums of the city, and one showed the back court of a filthy tenement, and children playing games. One showed a family of Dirty Folk, heretics who worshipped snakes, and they never washed except a few times in a generation, when Paradise rose. One photograph showed a young flagellant, a girl with angry, haunted eyes, sitting braiding a whip.
The girl was sitting in an artist’s studio, photographic equipment in the background. Far in the back, showing through a doorway, there was a printing press with some blurred figures working over it, and the girl sat with one foot on a poster, one of several strewn around the floor. In the photograph you could only see a bit of it, part of a headline and a picture of the gates to the infant penitentiary, but it was enough for Thanakar to recognize a poster he had seen on the walls around the city for a few weeks, the first of their kind that spring. It had filled him with furtive hope. The bishop’s secretary had ordered special patrols to go and rip them down.
“Have you shown these to anyone?”
“No.”
“Don’t.” Thanakar replaced the photographs on the bed. Standing in the prince’s room, looking at Charity’s famished face, he felt some of that same hope. He had stood in the rain, watching a group of soldiers pulling down a line of posters on a wall, while people gathered to read ones further along.
The feeling rose in him and mixed irrationally with some of the pride he felt at being in the bishop’s uniform, finally, a captain in the bishop’s army. It was as if things might change for him, finally, and the world too. He stared at Charity until she dropped his hand to break the tension and walked away to the prince’s wardrobe near the window. His suits hung there in a row, ten of them, one for each day of the week.
“He hasn’t taken any clothes,” she said. “What’ll he wear?”
* * *
When Thanakar opened his eyes in the dark, awake and quickly sensitive, he found the shadows coalescing into unfamiliar shapes, the wall at his head instead of by his side, the window in a different place. It had been a long time since he had slept in a bed different from his own. And the sound that had woken him—the spray of rain against the glass, not that. Something else. There, again. He raised himself up on his elbow.
He had been woken by the sound of dreams. Charity Starbridge lay curled away from him. Light stretched in through the window from some distant source and drew a soft diagonal across the bed. It was enough for him to see her eyes moving under her lids, and he could hear the labor of her lungs, as if she were out of breath. Once her foot made a small kicking motion. Like her brother’s, her dreams led her fast, far.
He reached out his hand towards her but then drew it back. How sweet she seemed, smelling of hashish and sleep, and perhaps even a little love, her skin pale and luminous, stretched tight over her sharp bones, her hair so black. Looking at her, he tried to remember other women—a few, older, a long time before. They had never taken off their clothes. And sometimes, later, he had gone down to the market at night, to stalls rented from the bishop by the guild of prostitutes, but from those places he remembered mostly the colored lights and the peculiar textures of certain kinds of artificial cloth against his skin, and it was as if those things had happened to another body, not this clean one he had now, lying in this clean bed, but to another one, as if he had put on another body like a suit of old clothes to do some unmemorable and degrading chore.
Charity’s breathing settled down, and she rolled over onto her back. The bones of her pelvis and the bottom of her rib cage stood out in a stark circle, filling with shadows as her belly sank down. Her skin along the ridge seemed stretched almost to breaking. Again he put his hand out to her, and again he hesitated.
* * *
In the morning, Thanakar went off to war. And in a little while he came to think: happiness, like most things, increases in value with its rarity. At first, hitching up his mules and looking at the glum faces around him, he had felt arrogant and alive, a rich man among poor. But as the weeks went by, and the wagons filled with wounded men, and the tents went up in villages of starving people, then Thanakar’s happiness made him uneasy, and he guarded it like a man carrying money through an alleyway, afraid that some skinny hand might snatch it. He held it in a secret place, and only took it out from time to time when he was alone.
He had dreamed of war ever since he was a child, and been ashamed he couldn’t go. God had made the Starbridges the wardens of Earth, of all the nine planets, and the two keys he had put upon their ring were the army and the church. A man not part of either found it hard to justify himself, because prison wardens have a job to do to earn their keep. And even though he had never believed much in the myth, it didn’t matter. He found it hard not to see himself through other people’s eyes, through the shrewd, assessing glances of windows, and superannuated officers who had known his father.
But you had to be well rested, to care what people thought of you. It was strange how quickly you lost the habit of imagining. Dreaming of war, his mind had made beautiful pictures, and because he had been a realistic child, even the most beautiful were also horrifying and grotesque. Still, they were pictures, because the mind’s eye is more developed than its hand or tongue or ear. But at the war itself, sitting at nightfall near the fire, drinking out of a tin can, he found that sounds, tastes, smells made up most of what he knew. Visual images were drowned in them. Coming up from the city, long black lines of soldiers had writhed like snakes over the rocks, and at first he had twisted backward in his saddle and sat gazing, trying to impress the image in his mind. But after a day he had stopped looking, and when, in camp after six weeks, he looked back on that trip, all that really came to mind was the dust at midday and the wind licking his face with its tongue coarse and dry.
Perhaps, he thought, stretching out his sore leg towards the campfire, if he were ever really in a battle, it would be different. Then there would be lots to see. But he was always where a battle had just been, and sometimes he could hear it going on over the next hill. Stretching out his leg, he turned and watched the canvas tents behind him and the shadows of the surgeons still at work, made huge by the lamps inside, made grotesque by the bellying wind. Still, he thought, all he felt like remembering from this night would be the taste of the whiskey in the can, the same episcopal whiskey they were using as anaesthetic now. The taste of the whiskey and the drunken singing of the amputees. Most wouldn’t know till morning that they had lost a limb. In the meantime, it would be hard to sleep.
Things you could imagine but you never saw, you could make perfect in your mind. You could control them. Yet as a child he hadn’t predicted there would be opportunities for pleasure here too—the smell of his dirty uniform, slept in, worked in. The anaesthetizing taste of whiskey. Being too tired to think of consequences lining up like policemen. The coals settling down. Life seemed precious when you saw so many ways to lose it.
The doctor stretched his leg out towards the campfire and leaned back. What made him happy was another image, one he carried with him like a snapshot. Charity Starbridge lay asleep, curled up away from him, her mouth open a little. As he watched, she turned over onto her back.
“Think there’ll be trouble?” asked a man.
Thanakar shrugged. It felt good not to care.
“It’s no good taking that line,” said the man. “You could have fucked this whole thing up.”
True enough, once again, thought the doctor wearily. That afternoon he had gotten into a fight.
“Not that I blame you,” said the man. “It’s just that things with the bishop are touchy enough.”
That afternoon they had been busy. Men had been stretched out all over the rocks. There had been no time for foolishness, but one of the surgeons was the bishop’s spy. He had put up an altar on the ridge and performed unproductive magic most of the morning, waving a feather fan. Thanakar had gotten tired of seeing him up there, his red robes flapping underneath his apron. So he had sent word for him to stop, to go work in a shallow cave where some of the most hopeless cases had been laid out of the wind. There were three Starbridges, whose names and obligations had driven them to acts of crazy heroism. And two others, general infantry, but when Thanakar came in later to see, he found the surgeon fussing with the corpse of an officer, while right beside him lay a common soldier with the most appalling injuries. Thanakar had heard him crying from across the field. But when he knelt down over him, the surgeon stopped his hand, saying, “Don’t touch him. Don’t pollute yourself.” He showed Thanakar the boy’s forearm and the tattoos of his horoscope. “Glass miner,” he said. “Human filth. He deserves this. It’ll teach him. Look at his complexion. Look how pale.” And he had stooped down to mark the boy’s shoulder with his scalpel, and cut the symbol for the ninth planet into his flesh.