by Paul Park
The rain was pouring down. The bishop shivered in her white dress, because that day she had felt the same thing, and when she was talking to her secretary, she had thought it would be a relief to know something of the world. The heart beats in darkness, separate from the brain, the old man would say. She accepted that, but sometimes it would be a relief to know: there was a war, and it had gotten closer.
She had seen a stiffening desperation in her secretary and the members of her council, in their dedication to the small details of worship. But for a few days now there had been something like triumph in the old man’s chicken step, and his attention had been inclined to wander. True, the feather dance was a terrible ordeal. During some of the slower movements, she had been inclined to doze herself.
But sometimes she thought that since the land, and the people, and everything that breathed belonged to her, she should be allowed to take a closer interest. Sometimes as she sat in her own temple in the clothes of the living goddess, listening to supplications, she could catch wisps of news—a mother’s prayer for four sons in the army, a wife’s prayer for her husband. Knowledge bred opinions, and opinions interfered with love, that’s what her secretary said. He would tell her what had happened sometimes when all the news was cold, when it was no longer possible to take sides. In the meantime, she read hungrily: history, natural history, theology.
The boy leaned his head back against the wall. “It’s a feeling,” he said. “I feel . . . unhappy.”
Sympathetic, she touched his forehead. He reached up and brought her wrist down to his mouth to kiss it. “How long have I been here?” he asked. “I don’t know why I came.”
“To kill me.”
He frowned. “I forgot everything you said. Explain it to me once more.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your soldiers.”
“I have no soldiers.”
His grip tightened on her wrist, and there was some tired danger in his voice when he said, “That’s not true. They lit fires at the entrance of the tunnel, until the air was full of smoke.”
“God has given us many laws. Some are cruel.”
“Is it against the law for me to be here?”
“The laws aren’t my concern,” she said. “They don’t apply to me.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I’ve been so poor. I mean in my mind. My fathers and my mothers didn’t need to think to fill their world. It was full already—horses, dogs, freedom, snow, things to do, feelings. I never had those things. So instead I want to learn to think. But I don’t want to learn something and have it not be true.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said the bishop. “I am not allowed to lie.”
The boy stroked the cat and looked unhappy.
“There’s no reason for me to be humble,” she said. “I am the bishop of Charn.”
“Yes. There is a part of you I don’t like so well. But there is another part.” He put the cat aside, and then he reached to pull her down beside him and comb the hair out of her face. He combed his fingers through her hair and ran his thumb along the underside of her ear, admiring the softness of the skin, the delicacy of the black hairs that grew along her cheek. “You’re so different from my sisters,” he said.
She made a face, but he couldn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to him if he had. He couldn’t read the language of expressions. He couldn’t understand it. She lay down beside him and bent to take one of his testicles into her mouth, while he wrapped his hand around her tail, stroking the hair at the base of her spine. She licked carefully along his underside, using a technique described in Angkhdt 710, while he leaned back happily. “So different,” he said.
She laughed, releasing him. “I hope so. I’ve heard about your sisters. Muscles like steel and monstrous teeth . . .” She dragged her incisors along his inner thigh.
He grabbed her by the neck, pushing her face into his leg. She tried to twist away, but he held tight. “Stop hurting me!” she cried. “Can’t you tell you’re hurting me?”
“I can’t feel it.”
“Let go!”
Outside, night was falling, and spring rain. Lightning licked the hills around the city. It never really stopped; the silk-lined room was never absolutely dark.
“Lie to me about one single thing,” he said, “and I’ll break your neck. You know we have a music for lying. I can hear it in your voice.”
“Let go!”
He released her, and she jumped up and stood facing him, hands to her neck. “What are you talking about? Why are you such a child?”
“Because I am.” He dropped his eyes humbly. “I don’t know anything about love. Barbarians know all about it.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He was right, he didn’t know anything about it. Later he fucked her with a kind of desperation, as if she held hidden inside her body some vital secret. He searched for it, his fingers locked around her tail, and fucked her until she was like a river inside, and he couldn’t even feel her anymore. She cried out, exhausted, but still he kept on and on, and the sweat made their bodies skid and slip. And then, still hard, he lay on his stomach on the saturated sheet, his eyes unfocused, reflecting nothing. She let him go. It was part of what fascinated her, that enormous capacity for nothingness which stilled his soul and took the place of Angkhdt. She lay with her cheek against his back, her fingers in the groove of muscle along his spine.
* * *
She was a beautiful woman, and not in the normal masklike way. In some women, beauty speaks of who they are. In her it spoke eloquently, the more so because her training as a priestess and a goddess had muted other voices. She had grown up practically alone. Her skin was the color of custard or sweet cake, of something edible and good to eat. She was not tall. Her hair was Starbridge black and fell in thick untidy curls around her face and shoulders.
His form too, the shape of his features and his enormous body, seemed the most expressive part of him. Along with so much else, his race had rejected the idea that people differed, because they saw it as a way of chaining actions to reactions. So while they worshipped freedom, they rejected individuality. Free men and women resembled one another a great deal, it had turned out. They were arrogant, irrational, impulsive, humorless, ecstatic. And though this boy was trying to change, was eager to accept some shackles, still his body was the most expressive part of him, the only part he knew. He touched it often, scratching and rubbing, and he was always moving his arms and legs to stretch the muscles, and rotating his ankles and his wrists to hear the bones snap and realign.
He had been there for a week, living in secret in the bishop’s chamber, eating the food she brought him, before the old man found him. The bishop’s secretary limped up the stairs one night when they were half asleep. Devils and angels cavorted in his clothes, peeping with long-nosed faces out from his sleeves, hanging by their tails from his chain of office, playing hide and seek in his hair. They bounded past him up the spiral stairs, full of play. The old man reached the landing and stretched his hand out for the stone statue of the faun at the entrance to the bishop’s quarters, stroking it with withered pale fingers. Lamps burned bright here. And every angle of the corridor, every discoloration of the marble floor was known to him, illuminated by the lamp of memory for his blind eyes, for he had been a child here, a chaplain in the temple. But there was something unfamiliar now, an unfamiliar smell in this sacred place, something that made him pause, something that had brought him fumbling up the stairs from his own rooms, something. He smelled a faint, lingering smell of sin.
He shuffled forward, almost tripping on a seraph that had curled its rubbery body around his ankle. At the temple doorway he hesitated again, but the smell was stronger here. He shuffled through the doorway and along the corridor, and pushed through heavy curtains into the shrine itself. He summoned all his powers of perception—it was here. His blind eyes caught the image of a boy sitti
ng naked on the bishop’s bed. The bishop herself was asleep, her mass of curls falling over the stranger’s thigh.
Trembling, the old man reached out his arms, as if in supplication. “Unclean,” he whispered, so as not to wake her. Triumphant, miserable, mad, he opened up his hands. His was the loneliest office in the world, the hardest duty. How sweet she seemed, lying asleep, and he could hear the softness of her breathing and see the blackness of her eyebrows. “Unclean,” he whispered. From underneath his skirts, demons and cherubs uncurled and somersaulted slowly over the floor towards where the stranger sat, stroking a golden cat, his blue eyes curious.
* * *
That same night, Abu Starbridge was sitting in the taproom of a tavern in a vicious section of the city, a tangle of alleyways and rotting houses called the Beggar’s Medicine. Around the walls of an episcopal prison and the gallows there, the streets seethed like worms. In those days, the sugar rain just starting, the sewers and gutters overflowed and filled the streets with caustic mud. It slopped into the first floors of the houses and bit at their foundations. Already some facades had crumbled away, exposing ruined interiors and holes for the rats to play in, uncounted thousands of them, up from the docks, fleeing the rising water. It was against the law to harm them or even to frighten them, and so they ran everywhere, over men and women sleeping in their beds, gnawing corpses in their coffins, biting the ankles of the customers in the tavern where Prince Abu sat.
Though it was not yet dark, the lamps were lit. The windows were opaque with grime, though they let in the rain. It soaked the tattered wallpaper and made it shine with the beginnings of a dull phosphorescence. Later in the season, there would be no need for lamps.
The company huddled around a coal stove, and Prince Abu sat apart, drinking, wrapped in a flannel cloak. He was listening to their voices, the high, sharp accent that the law required from the absolutely poor. It was an ugly sound, and the men and women who gathered there were ugly too—pickpockets, housebreakers, gamblers, unlicensed prostitutes, musicians, drunks. They lived outside the law, but even so, some laws still bound them when all the rest were broken, the so-called “character laws,” which had made them what they were. It was against the law for them to talk, except about themselves, their business, or their belongings. It was against the law for them to use any word describing or referring to an idea. It was against the law for them to practice courtesy or politeness, except to social superiors. It was against the law to speak kindly, except to their own children.
Five men and women sat eating around the stove, and Abu was happy to see fruit and bread on the table, and all manner of illegal delicacies. One of them had brought a rotten piece of cheese, stolen from some shop. It would have been enough to hang them; even their clothes would have been enough, for mixed with the yellow rayon of their caste, Abu saw rags of cotton, linen, even silk, in many proscribed colors.
A tall man, wearing a shirt that had once been white, sat balanced on the back legs of his chair, cleaning his teeth with a pocket knife. His hair was coarse under a black cap, and his black beard was stiff with dirt. Dirt lined the wrinkles and the cuts around his eyes, and lay smeared like a doctor’s salve over his pimpled cheeks. When he laughed, his teeth flashed strong and hard and very white. They were his pride, and he was always picking at them with the point of his knife or with fragments of wood. His name was Jason Mock. He was a thief.
“It tastes like shit,” he remarked, picking a piece of cheese out of his gums and scowling darkly at it on the point of his knife. He spoke in the high pitch common to them all. It seemed particularly out of place in his fierce mouth.
“You wouldn’t say that,” whined another man. “Not if you knew how slick it was. Hard to catch. Six months if you’re caught, just for that one piece. Second offense. It’s valuable.”
“Tastes like six months. Tastes like a year. What did you do, bury it while you were in?”
“That piece? That piece isn’t two days old. I just walked in and put it in my hat, slick as anything. That blind old parson never said a word.”
“Mmm. What’s it called?”
“Cheddar.”
“Mmm. Tastes like . . . excrement.”
“Hunh. You wouldn’t say that. Not if you were used to it.”
“Used to it? Excrement? I’ve been eating excrement ever since I was a boy. An expert. That’s why my teeth’s so distained.” Mock forced his knifeblade in between his molars and then pulled it out and frowned at it. “I can’t find the sense in it,” he continued. “Six months in jail, what for? It’s rotten. They should make it three months and serve it every day. That way nobody’d go near it.”
“Perhaps,” said a boy, “perhaps they don’t want us to know how bad it is.”
“You shut up!” retorted Mock. Then suspiciously, “What do you mean?”
“Perhaps it’s their secret, how bad it is.”
“Don’t you be smart with me. What do you mean?”
“Perhaps it’s envy of them, what keeps them up and us down. Envy more than force.”
“Shut your mouth,” commanded Mock. He lowered the two front feet of his chair until his boots touched the floor, and then he leaned forward across the table, glaring at the boy. “Are you trying to be funny?”
The boy dropped his eyes and clasped his hands around his mug of gin. He said nothing. Mock raised his knife and pointed across the table. But then he cried out, because the rats were passing back and forth along the floor, and one had bitten him in the ankle through a rip in his plastic boot. It was a slow, trusting, unsuspicious beast, and it stood on its hind legs looking up at him, as if curious of his bad language. Before he could be restrained, Mock brought his heel down and crushed its head.
“Watch that,” cried the landlady, a middle-aged slattern with painted lips and cheeks, and teeth stained blue from kaya gum. “That’s all I need. That’s murder on the premises, even if it’s only tenth degree.” She leaned over the stove to peer doubtfully at the furry, purselike body.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” said Mock. “What’s one more dead rat?”
“You can’t be too careful,” muttered the landlady.
Mock looked around the room. “Natural causes,” he observed. “Five witnesses. Six,” he said, frowning at Prince Abu, who sat in a corner with his cloak pulled around him. “Upped and died. Heart attack, I’d say. It’s common enough in these sad days.” He got to his feet and picked the rat up by its tail. Then he crossed the room, unbolted the door, and threw it out into the street. Rain blew in, and mud slopped over the sill into the room.
“Don’t just leave it on the doorstep,” called out the landlady. “Throw it across next door. I don’t want any questions tonight, not with you all dressed up. Not with that lot,” she said, motioning to the food on the table. “All those rats are numbered,” she muttered dubiously.
“Crap. That’s what they say. It’s a lie.” Mock bolted the door and turned back into the room, smiling. He limped as he came back to the table.
“You’ll come to a bad end, Jason Mock,” said the woman, shaking her head.
“That’s what the parsons claimed when I was born,” said the thief. “You think so too?” And without a muscle moving, his expression changed from a smile to a dark scowl. “Will I? I tell you it’s a short road for all of us, and the only thing that’s never sure until you know, is whether it’ll lead you to the scaffold or the stake, whether it’ll be this month or next. That’s all. Other than that, you can rest easy.”
During this outburst, the boy started to cry, gently, hiding his face in his hands. He put his head down in the cradle of his arms on the dirty table. The thief stood above him and clenched his fist in the air. “Nothing to cry about,” he said. “What’s there to cry about, Boy?”
“You leave him alone,” exclaimed another woman, younger and fresher than the landlady, but not much. “Haven’t you done enough?”
“What’s the matter, Boy?” repeated Mock harshly.
“Hush,” said the woman. “His papa swings tomorrow night.”
“What’s the charge, Boy?”
“Leave him alone,” repeated the woman, but the boy lifted his head and stared defiantly at the thief until the water hardened in his eyes and he could speak. “Robbery,” he said. “Aggravated by violence, so they say. I don’t believe it. He’s an old man. They picked him up with seven dollars and a book.”
“Book? What for?”
“He just liked the gilt along the pages,” said the boy. “It was just the pictures, that’s all. No harm in it. Starbridge nursery rhymes.”
“First offense?”
“Eighth. He’s been branded on both cheeks, and over his heart ten months ago. This time he’ll swing for sure. The inquest is tomorrow morning.”
“And . . . ?”
“And nothing,” said the boy. “He was a drunken old pig,” he said, his eyes filling up with tears again.
“Then what’s to cry about?” Mock grinned. “Now I once had a mother and two brothers. Not recently. Larceny was in our horoscopes. Look here.” He showed his hand. His palm was covered with a strange tattoo. It looked like a spider’s web.
The boy stared up at him. “Fuck you,” he said slowly, savoring the words in his mouth before he spat them out.
Mock grinned. “That’s all right then. That’s the attitude you want. Remember that.” And he struck the boy on the ear so that his head snapped back.
Abu was sick of the high voices. He had sat there drinking the whole afternoon, and now he made a motion with his hand to bring the landlady over to his table.
“How much do I owe?”
The woman squinted. “Eighty cents.”
Abu picked out some coins from his pocket and selected a silver sequin. “Can you change this?” he asked. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything smaller.” He put it down on the table, and the woman reached for it. But her fingers hesitated at the last moment, and she drew her forefinger around it in a circle on the surface of the table without touching it. “You’re a slick one,” she remarked, eyeing him closely. “Where did you get that?” Abu was finishing his wine.