Soldiers of Paradise

by Paul Park

  The pervert burst into hoarse weeping, though no tears came. “Tricked!” he cried. “By God, if I had known, I never would have led you here. Not for eleven hundred dollars.” His voice rose into a scream as the bouncers behind him tightened their grip. It shut off like water from a faucet as one of them twisted his wrist. And in the sudden silence, women appeared out of the various doors of the rooms that lined the hallway. “Mrs. Silkskin,” said Thanakar’s hostess to one of them. “Could you fetch the little priestess? Pack her clothes.”

  “She can’t walk,” said the woman doubtfully.

  “Fetch her, dearie; I insist,” repeated the hostess. “Marco will help you.” She turned back to the doctor. “Please, my lord, let me take you somewhere where we can talk. Would you like a glass of wine? I can open a new bottle.”

  “No,” said Thanakar, smelling the back of his hand. “Where is she? We’ll settle the money later. I want to see her . . . the way you have her.”

  “Hypocrite!” cried the pervert. “Starbridge pederast! Liar! By God the end is coming for your kind. Your airs and graces. I’ll live to see you . . .” His voice rose high, and again it was shut off.

  “Where is she?” asked Thanakar.

  His hostess made a small gesture with her eyes, and Mrs. Silkskin stepped forward. “Come with me, sir,” she said, curtseying.

  The hallway was full of appraising eyes. Passing them, climbing the twisting stairs, Thanakar cursed his limp, the rattle in his knee. His guide kept her face averted and went slowly. A kindhearted woman, he thought gratefully. She waited for him at the landings. And at the top of the stairwell, they passed through a doorway and through velvet curtains into a small room furnished like a shrine. The eternal blue flame burned across the surface of a bowl of water on an altar and in the sanctuary a statue of Beloved Angkhdt reclined on a low dais, his tongue hanging out of his long jaw, two hands clasped around the base of his phallus. With another hand he supported himself upright, and his fourth arm stretched out in front of him. He held a curious symbol balanced on his palm, a high-arched model of a woman’s foot, cut off at the ankle. Around him, the walls were painted with lascivious scenes. Ornate letters gleamed in the mosaic of the floor, a persistent mistranslation of the Song of Angkhdt: “My love, I kiss the inside of your foot. More tender than any flower, riper than any fruit is the flesh there.” In certain southern dialects, old words for fruit and a woman’s sex were spelled the same.

  Jenny lay in an alcove, supported on silk pillows. Her small body was washed and perfumed, and dressed in the immodest fashion of southern priestesses. It left her chest and shoulders bare. Her hair was piled high on top of her head and fastened with a comb of sandalwood. She wore carved bracelets of the same material, and her face was painted, the mark on her face painted away. Her lips and eyelids were a shining green. And her feet were bound together at the ankles, and tied cruelly so that her naked insteps pressed together, the space between them a cruel parody of a woman’s sex. She didn’t raise her head when Thanakar stepped towards her, or recognize him when he knelt down.

  He could see the skin had already started to grow together on her heels, and along the balls of her feet. He took his penknife out to slice the ropes apart, and Jenny looked at it with eyes so full of sadness that he paused. Mrs. Silkskin stood behind him. “Doesn’t she have any decent clothes?” he asked.

  “No sir. Most people like her as is.”

  “Then bring me a blanket. Something to wrap her in. Have a covered rickshaw waiting at the door.” He reached into his pocket and took out a fat purse. “Give this to your mistress,” he said. “Silver and gold—she’ll have to use gloves.”

  * * *

  At dawn, soldiers had attacked the Temple of Kindness and Repair, seeking to free the bishop. By evening they had broken through into the outer courts. Lord Chrism sat on his veranda under a cool wet sky, talking to his disciple while seminarians played gongs and xylophones behind a wooden screen. This music was the softest and most soothing of the fourteen permissible types of sound. It contained a simple melody, and Lord Chrism had asked that the drums be muted, so that he could hear a young nun sing the vague and soporific story of the world’s creation. She had a lovely voice, and the distant sound of gunshots and explosions seemed to mix with it and find its way among the deep-bellied gongs and cymbals like another instrument. Lord Chrism sipped a glass of wine. Underneath his robes, goblins and cherubs yawned and slumbered, invisible and forgotten.

  “I have a memory of Paradise,” he was saying. “A very faint one. The prophets tell us that the sun shines so brightly there, objects have no shape and bodies no form. Permit me to doubt it. I am blind, and objects have no shape for me. So I know that it is not there that evil resides. That is not the difference between Paradise and Earth. Blind as I am, I can still see color most precisely. My old master told me Paradise would be . . . what? We would float as if in a sea of color.” He laughed, a dry rustle in his throat. “Permit me to doubt it. He was completely blind in the last years of his life, as if he lived at the bottom of a well. Completely blind. I think men build the frame of heaven out of what they never had, but they furnish it with memories of what they’ve lost. According to the prophets, it’s a place of perfect freedom.” Again Lord Chrism laughed his feathery laugh. “I am an old man. Yet even so, when I consult my heart and not my head, I picture scenes of endless . . . procreation there. In exquisite detail. More so now, in fact. I remember when I lost my manhood. I never used to think of such things. I was an idealist. I didn’t even know what I had sacrificed.”

  Behind the screen, the world’s prehistory pursued its gentle course, soft brass bells describing the formation of the stratosphere. The old man sipped his wine and squinted out into the waning afternoon. He looked towards the Mountain of Redemption, its impossible bulk wreathed in clouds. “These days you hardly ever see the lights of the cathedral,” he complained. “They’re always hidden in the clouds. Every night I look for them.” He sighed. “Perhaps it’s fallen down.”

  “It’s a question of faith,” muttered the disciple.

  “Don’t be fatuous. Faith doesn’t enter into it. Either it has or it hasn’t. It’s like everything else.” The old man paused, and when he spoke again it was in a softer tone. “I told you I had lost my idealism. It’s strange, because today I will perform the only idealistic action of my life. A paradox. No, because idealists are incapable of action. It takes an old man.” He leaned forward. “I tell you I will burn her! I will. When I perceive the singer has to raise her voice to cover up the sound of gunfire. Because I used to think with all my heart, and now . . .” He touched his skinny forehead with his fingers. “Now I know that if there is purity in Paradise, it is maintained by fire.”

  On the table beside him lay some old books and diagrams. “Look at this,” he continued, picking up a yellowed sheet. “In my grandfather’s time, a scientist estimated the surface temperature of risen Paradise at 978 degrees. And this.” He pulled out a photograph of a small bright planet passing over a dark larger one. “It is heresy even to think of these things, but look. This was taken through the telescope at Mt. Despane. Look. It is a photograph of Paradise in orbit around Planet Seven. That’s the next planet to capture it when we have thrown it off. Look at this enlargement of the surface. Burning gas. What must it be like, I wonder, for our poor souls in such a furnace? Do you understand now when I say that salvation is a chemical process? What can it possibly mean, except that evil must be purged with fire?”

  His voice had risen excitedly. But then he calmed himself and rubbed the ridge above his eye. “When I chose her for my bishop,” he said, softly and sadly, “it was because I could imagine nothing purer, nothing more innocent than a young girl. The Crystal Spark, I called her. Was I a fool? I tell you, at the beginning I was full of faith.”

  The music behind them had progressed into a description of the first protozoa, exquisitely articulated on the hammer dulcimer. Lord Chrism took one of his
books into his hands. “Look at this,” he said, caressing the binding. “Calf’s skin. Two years old. For a long time, I was afraid to touch it. This writer lived before the days of cameras and telescopes. Yet he observed certain phases in the coloring of Paradise, and he concluded that the seasons must change there with incredible rapidity—two hundred, three hundred times in a single lifetime. He writes that all the differences between Paradise and Earth stem from this fact. What would it be like, he asks, if winter didn’t last more than a hundred days? What would it be like if the church had no obligation to control men’s labor? People could breathe free. They don’t understand. If we let go our grip, every winter they would starve. Every spring.”

  “They’re starving now.”

  “More of them would starve. They would have starved months ago. Have you read the accounts from heathen times, when men farmed their own land? It’s terrifying. Think—why should a man store up food for hard times he’ll never live to see? Not one man lived out of a hundred. People complain now. What was the difference then between rich and poor?”

  Lord Chrism opened up the book and lifted it to within an inch of his blind eyes. He read for a moment in silence, and then he put it down. “In Paradise,” he said, “men share the same experiences. Grandfather, father, son, there must be such harmony. But here, a winter mother has perhaps one child. What can she have in common with her granddaughter who has thirty or more? What does a man have in common with his father? . . . What was that?”

  A bomb had exploded, not far away. Lord Chrism got slowly to his feet and walked out to the edge of the balcony. The sky was almost dark. Clouds of smoke reeled over the rooftops. The old man sniffed the air. “It smells like gunpowder,” he said. “Come in.”

  A captain of the purge was standing hesitating in the doorway. He was holding the feet of a dead hawk—the bird stretched snowy white almost to the floor. “Sir,” he said. “A message from Father Orison, with the army. Aspe has moved his tent. He’s not ten miles from the city walls.”

  “Thank you, Captain. What’s the fighting like outside?”

  “Fierce, sir. We’re holding them at Slaver’s Gate.”

  “Thank you. Is everything prepared?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let us start.” Lord Chrism lifted his hand up to his disciple. “Will you help me downstairs?”

  Men were already waiting for them in the Courtyard of the Sun and Stars. Soldiers had built a pyramid of wood. And on marble bleachers all around, the council of the Inner Ear sat in their richest clothes. The oldest, deadest ones had been propped up on golden cushions along the higher seats, their headdresses slipping from their naked skulls. Farther down, the priests were mountainous, gorgeous in their scarlet robes, the gaslight shining on their fat. Seminarians and nuns sat cross-legged on the tilestones, with scared, shaved faces and shaved heads.

  Through the fingers of the council writhed their telepathic cord. It hummed and crackled, and as the bishop made her appearance it seemed to glow, a ribbon of light snaking between the seats. There was a clamor of voices. At the four corners of the pyre, soldiers held torches.

  The bishop stood surrounded by parsons at the end of a long colonnade of soldiers, and Lord Chrism met her there and offered her his arm. Bombs and fireworks burst above them in the darkening sky, and by their intermittent light she appeared pale, dressed in her simplest white shift, her black curls tangled around her shoulders, her beauty undisturbed.

  “You have been found guilty of an imperfection, my child,” said Lord Chrism gently. “A chemical impurity.”

  She nodded, and with slow ceremonial steps, in rhythm to the drumbeats of a hidden orchestra, they made their way down towards the pyre. In his most spidery voice, Chrism recited the invocation for the dead, and in their solemn progress, they stopped from time to time to receive offerings and blessings from the priests, and sprinklings of holy vinegar, and invitations to parties up in Paradise. But before they had progressed halfway, the council’s ribbon seemed to glow even brighter, because a change could be perceived in the bishop’s gait and she seemed to move hunched over, her hands hanging to her knees. Her hair seemed to change its color, and spread over her face, and mix into her clothes, until, by the time she had twisted out of Chrism’s grasp and scampered away, she had become a white-maned monkey. In the open space before the pyre, she turned and squatted on her haunches, spitting, and grinning, and stuffing bits of garbage from the tiles into the pouches of her mouth. Lord Chrism spoke an order, and soldiers formed around her in a circle, but before they could come close, she selected one and leapt at him, transforming in mid-leap into a white tiger. She bore the soldier down and mauled his face between her paws; miraculously, when she left him, he jumped up unhurt. It was a game. The soldiers clustered around her, trying to grab hold, and she sank beneath their fingers into a nest of white cobras, dozens of them spreading out along the tiles. Their bites made the soldiers laugh, and in a little while some were reeling drunkenly, intoxicated by her venom, while the others scrambled over the stones, until the cobras stopped their writhing and melted into a white foam like scum along a beach, and some floated up into the air. The soldiers clapped their hands, and some of the seminarians, too, came forward to join in the fun, ignoring the hoarse imprecations of their teachers. And then the foam seemed to gather into a ball, and while the soldiers stood gaping, it spun itself into a spider, a white stag, a cloud of butterflies, and a crocodile, its white fur slick with oil, lashing its prehensile tail. No metamorphosis lasted longer than it took the eye to grasp it, and each one seemed larger than the last, until it formed into a snake again, a white python of enormous bulk. It coiled and towered above their heads, its mouth dripping milky venom. Laughing, the seminarians and nuns ran to drink it up; they sat in pools of it and splashed, while the snake wove and coiled above them. And then, twisting around them in a circle, it coiled down towards the pyre and disappeared among the logs.

  Instantly Lord Chrism’s voice was heard commanding torches to be laid on. Instantly the fire leapt up, for the latticework of logs had been soaked in gasoline and aromatic oil. At its apex rose a wooden stake. The bishop was to have met death there, tied to it with silken cords. Now she twisted around it in the shape of a python, illuminated by the leaping flames. But then she disappeared, and the stake itself seemed to grow, to flower and take root, roots creeping downward through the burning logs. The stake bloated, and grew bark, and swelled into a mighty tree, its limbs stretching out over the multitude, arching into a canopy of leaves as if it were midsummer. No one there had seen a tree before, not in full flower, and they stared up at it, enchanted.

  The boy could see down into the courtyard through the bars of her cell. He sat at the window while his cat played with shadows underfoot. And when he saw the fire burning in the lower branches of the tree, he smiled. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “Can you make oranges grow among the leaves?”

  “It’s a chestnut tree,” answered the bishop. She stepped from the dark behind him and looked down. Nevertheless, in an instant the boughs were heavy with strange fruits. The boy clapped his hands.

  “And can you put a songbird on the topmost branch?” he asked. Instantly a bird darted down from the sky into the foliage. It had long red feathers and a silver voice. “A firebird,” the boy exclaimed. “Can you make her wings burst into flame?”

  “That would be cruel.

  “Why? It’s not a real bird.”

  “No? How sweet it sings.”

  The cell was in a high tower. Above, the sky shone with magnesium and grenades. “My secretary is a fool,” said the bishop. “The city burns down every year. Tonight he risks a fire here for the first time. I wish he had more sense. There are more treasures here than I can carry.” She had prepared knapsacks for their journey, full of warm clothing and dry food. In the bottom of one, wrapped in a bundle of old manuscripts, reposed the jewel-encrusted skull of Angkhdt.

  “It doesn’t matter. Let it burn.
”

  “Not to you. This was my home.” She stood looking for a moment over the rooftops towards the light in the bishop’s tower, and then she stooped over the knapsacks. “I have brought us fruit from my garden, and the first hibiscuses. We’re going a long way.”

  Behind them, the cell door swung open, slowly, quietly. “Lord Chrism thinks I’m dead,” said the bishop. “He has released the lock. Come with me.”

  They passed through the doorway and up the stairs to the roof. At the second landing of the second stair, the way leveled out for fifty feet along a row of cells. The bishop paused. “These have been locked all winter,” she said. “It is time for them to open.” She moved down the line of heavy padlocks, and under her fingers the steel pulled away like taffy. The doors groaned open, and from a farther landing, they turned to watch the prisoners escape, dark spirits, some of them, half smoke and half shadow, smelling of gunpowder and sulphur. Some had hooves and curling horns, and dark heavy faces. They thundered up the stairs in clouds of roaring wind, crushing the travelers against the wall. Others seemed milder; they staggered from their cells out into the corridor, blinking feebly in the light, and their flesh was soft and pink, their faces blobby and unformed. Some were old, their withered arms covered in tattoos, and they carried quadrants, and astrolabes, and telescopes, and perfect spheres, and machines in perpetual motion, and precious equations on chalk slates. And some were beautiful, radiant, aureoles glowing around their heads. They smiled shyly at each other, unsure after so long. They made stylized gestures of recognition with hands that were mostly air, while their wings stirred up fragrances of musk and attar of lavender.

  The bishop laughed to see them and clapped her hands. “Old friends,” she cried. “Old friends.” And as they drifted up the stairwell they paused to greet her, joining their fourth fingers to their thumbs in careful ellipses and fluttering their wings. “They are the spirits of the changing world,” said the bishop to her companion. “New freedoms, new ideas. It’s time,” she said. And when the last had disappeared, she stooped to pick up her knapsack. “Come,” she said, and sprinted upward, not pausing, up and up until the stairwell gave out on the rooftops and a small cloister, a shrine to St. Basilon Far-Fetched, patron of travelers. She ran lightly along the balustrade, out into the open air, while the boy followed. The image of the saint hung down over vertiginous heights, and she sat down beside it, swinging her legs over the edge. Far below her, some of the outer courtyards of the temple were already in flames, and others were full of gunfire and struggling soldiers. But for an instant the mist had cleared, and she could see the lights of the city in the distance, and the silhouette of the dark mountain, and above it a spiderweb of lights. Only for an instant. They flickered out one by one as the clouds regrouped, and then it started to rain, a sugar storm, hard and sudden, the phosphorescent drops bursting like sparks along the tiles.