by Paul Park
Miss Azimuth had dozed off between sentences. But now she woke. Her thin neck jerked her head upright; her thin lips smiled sweetly, and she started speaking again where she’d left off. “It gives you images from your past life, you see, and from your life in Paradise. It gives you images from Paradise, you see. Not me, of course. But I’ve seen other places. I’ve seen eleven moons in a red sky, which must be Proxima Vermeil. And I’ve felt sensations, horrible sensations of heat and pressure. Intolerable sensations, but only for a moment. Sometimes an image of a fiery lake, a wind of fire, which must be Chandra Sere. The fiery planet, but it never lasts for long.”
“Paradise,” said Karan Mang, examining his painted nails.
The priest had found some candied apricots on a cut-glass dish. “Paradise,” he agreed, sucking his finger. “I have seen it. I and my friend. We saw a vision of an empty desert, and the grains of sand were made of gold.”
“That sounds very nice,” murmured Karan Mang.
The priest’s black eyes were rimmed with red, and then another circle of black. He was thin, but his flesh had that unhealthy looseness that suggests dangerous fluctuations of weight. He said: “We saw a vision of a garden, and the grass was made of emeralds. A tree grew in the garden, and its bark was made of agate strips. Its boughs were made of chalcedony, and its leaves were malachite and chrysoprase. A bird stood on a branch. It was made from steel clockwork, and its wings from silver mail. Every hour on the half hour it would open its jeweled beak.”
As he spoke, a slow wash of color spread across the walls of Cassia’s small tower room. In her dream, she was standing by the altar with the cat in her arms. The front of her grey velvet dress was stained with sugar efflorescence. It stank in her nostrils—an acrid odor that rose also from the boy’s naked back as he dragged himself up over the sill.
He crawled toward her on his hands and knees. Rain from the window spread a phosphorescent sheen across the cotton mats. Purring, the cat jumped down. The boy, gathering strength, sat back on his heels and then rose trembling to his feet. He was trembling with fatigue. His massive arms, his massive hands, were trembling. He raised his head for the first time, and his face was Rael’s face.
Or rather, not completely. Even in her dream, Cassia was aware that Rael’s face was not as strong, not as beautiful. Nevertheless, it was him; it was him in some more perfect world. She felt no fear, just a small mix of joy and trepidation and uncertainty, and she went to him as naturally as she would if she had seen him in his flesh. She had the cloth of ikat in her hand, and she touched his face with it and wiped some of the rain out of his face. “Why did you leave me?” she said. “Why did you leave me in the wood?” In her dream his tongue was loosened, so that he could answer her.
Someone pulled open the flap of the silk tent, and a draft fell across her as she lay upon her bed. In her dream, a wind came through the open window in her tower room. Time had moved, and she was lying on her bed with Rael in her arms. To her observers at that moment her body was perfectly still, but a half a mile away across the festival Rael stirred upon his mat and cried out, even though his sleep contained no dream, but only empty blackness. Enid and Jane’s grandmother had undressed him, and were scraping the dust from his body with a mixture of ground pumice and ginger oil; when she saw his penis stiffen, she rolled him over onto his stomach, to hide him from the girls.
But in her dream Cassia was making love to him, and the sensation in her body this time was one of pure fulfillment. Gently, tenderly he entered her and searched her body for their happiness. And he was talking to her also, saying, “Is this right? Is this right?”
Brother Longo Starbridge was standing at the entrance to the tent, and now he took a few big steps inside. He looked over toward Cassia on the bed, and then turned to the bulimic priest. “You!” he said. “Why can’t you give me a straight answer? Everything is ready.” He pulled his sleeve away to show his wristwatch. “Half an hour ago. Why can’t you ever get it right? You’ve had a hundred generations to work out the math.”
His voice woke up the sleeping priest: a bearded pardoner in scarlet robes. He raised his head from his fat breast, and opened his lids to disclose white blind eyes. The bulimic, meanwhile, had found a piece of sugared ginger and was rubbing it beneath his nose.
“It is one of the enduring mysteries of Paradise,” he said at last, “that we can never predict exactly when it rises. Try as we might. I told you that. ‘Between seven and nine o’clock,’ I said.”
“You said seven o’clock, you stupid piece of shit.” Brother Longo rubbed his face and rubbed his broken nose, then ran his fingers back through his red hair. “I haven’t slept,” he muttered, sitting down on the side of the bed where Cassia lay dreaming. Then he caught sight of Karan Mang. “Your guns have started to arrive,” he said. “At least that’s one thing going right.”
The eunuch shrugged. “I am gratified to hear it. But you do not surprise me. A caravan of seventy men, is it not? They were never more than twenty hours behind me.”
He was examining the back of his hand, an arch expression on his face. Longo Starbridge sat forward with his elbows on his knees and studied him with nude contempt. Then he shook his head. “I’m glad you can afford the time,” he said, and the gesture of his hand encompassed all the dirty plates and dishes, the hashish pipe in its crystal ashtray. “God,” he said, turning to Miss Azimuth. “I feel like I’m running this entire show myself. Shouldn’t you be doing something?”
All the time that he was speaking, Cassia and Rael were making love in Cassia’s dream. Brother Longo’s voice was like a thunder in the hills—threatening, but meaning nothing. “I have missed you,” Rael said. “I have missed you so.” But she sat up and put her finger to his lips. She had heard a step upon the stair.
“Testing,” said a voice outside the tent. A stagehand blew into a mike. “Testing one,” he said, heavily amplified. Then came a thumping sound, followed by a whine of feedback. The klieg lights on the stage moved back and forth. They cast patterns of blue shadows even in the tent, for they burned brighter now. Even at a hundred yards they penetrated the thick silk.
“Ah,” said the old woman. “Ah, my dear, don’t scold me. If you knew how we’ve been blessed. Look here.”
She gathered herself up out of her chair, gathered together her thin arms and legs and stepped carefully among the dishes to stand by Brother Longo’s side. “We are blessed,” she repeated in her highest, faintest voice, for it was full of suppressed laughter. She had smoked a lot of hashish, which had helped to calm her; she put her hand on Brother Longo’s wrist. “Only believe,” she said.
Behind her, Cassia had rolled onto her side. Her face was hidden in her hair. But now Miss Azimuth sat down on the coverlet, and she drew Longo Starbridge by his wrist so that he turned around. “Look at her face,” said the old woman. “Look.” She leaned over Cassia’s shoulder, and slid her hand into her thick black curls, and brushed them from her cheek.
“I’ve seen her before,” grunted Brother Longo.
“Yes, yes, yes, but do you know?”
Cassia was responding to the old woman’s touch. She pushed her face against the old woman’s hand, nuzzling her dry palm. In her dream she put her cheek against Rael’s cheek, and put her finger to his lips. “Hush,” she said. “Be quiet—we are not alone.”
On the pillow beside her head was an album of old photographs in a gilded vinyl binding. Miss Azimuth held it open with her free hand. The klieg lights made a pattern of blue shadows on the page. Nevertheless it was still possible for Brother Longo to make out rows of snapshots, postcards, newspaper clippings: the record of a vanished world. They were photographs from wintertime and early spring in Charn, before the revolution. Each was marked in the old woman’s spidery small hand; the bulimic priest had gotten up now and was standing by the bedside with the lantern in his hand, so that Brother Longo could read the captions—Prince Mortimer Starbridge and his sister. The Amethyst Pavilion (East
View, Center). Officers of the Bishop’s Purge. Monks at Drepung Monastery. Men of the 11th Cavalry. Skaters in the Snow.
Miss Azimuth had taken her fingers from Cassia’s hair, and she used both hands to turn over the stiff page. There on the other side, a menu from Old Peter’s restaurant, the golden letters barely faded. Recipes that were lost forever, and underneath the date: September 92, Spring 8, 00016. Less than a month later, the mob had sacked the temple.
On the facing page a watercolor portrait of Lord Mara Starbridge, the high constable of Charn. The artist had captured an expression of the purest vacuity upon his handsome face.
Again Miss Azimuth turned the page, using both hands. Brother Longo put out his forefinger to touch a photograph: Princess Charity Starbridge, age eleven months. Still a child, she smiled gleefully out of the picture, hands on her hips. For the sake of the portrait she was dressed in the clothes of a child laborer, a glass miner, perhaps. Artfully ripped, yet they were all of silk and velvet. She was carrying a pair of goggles and a white asbestos mask.
Brother Longo ran his thumb across the print. The phosphorescent paint upon his hand was barely lit now. Yet still it mocked him. These were the real Starbridges, not like him. He raised his eyes. “So what?” he said.
Miss Azimuth was crooning faintly in her throat. “Patience,” she murmured. “Patience.” More rapidly now she pushed back the big pages, until she reached the final three. A single photographic print was mounted on each one. The first: Chrism Demiurge, secretary of the Bishop’s Council. After the bishop’s death, Lord Regent of Charn until the revolution. He was sitting on his obsidian throne, his ancient emaciated face, his blind eyes raised toward the camera. And underneath, a reproduction of the tattoos of his right hand, showing the silver skeleton.
The next: Prince Abu Starbridge, photographed upon the day of his execution. His bald forehead, his jowly and unshaven face, his panicked drunkard’s eyes. He stood on the steps of Wanhope hospital in the white robes of a martyr, his hands locked together in a pair of silver handcuffs. Underneath, in pen and ink, a reproduction of his golden sun tattoo.
The last: Cosima Starbridge, thirty-second bishop of Charn. Also dressed in white, the photograph also taken on her execution day. An expression on her face of angry sadness, which only added to the poignancy of her doomed youth, her black-eyed, black-curled, black-browed beauty. Underneath, a photograph of her right palm, showing the bishop’s silver crown. Caught in its six points, the silver cratered face of Paradise.
Longo Starbridge chewed his lip. “So what?” he said at last.
The bulimic priest held up his lantern. “Her own council condemned her. She was burnt by Chrism Demiurge before the first uprising. The people—it was for her sake. That’s why they attacked the post office—the general strike of October forty-eighth, all that. And so forth—because the people loved her. To kill her was an act of mania.”
“What was her crime?” asked Karan Mang from the other side of the tent. “It was sexual imperfection, was it not?”
The priest’s voice was guttural and dry. “Chrism Demiurge had her sequestered in the Temple of Kindness and Repair. But there was a boy from one of the persecuted sects. An antinomial. He found his way to her tower. He climbed up by the drainpipe. He tried to kill her, but of course he couldn’t. She seduced him. She kept him hidden in her room. Chrism Demiurge—he had them burnt for witchcraft.”
The priest talked in odd breathy gasps, swallowing air after each phrase. Now he swallowed a small belch. “That was his excuse. He had them burned in Kindness and Repair. My great-uncle saw it done.”
As he was speaking, Miss Azimuth had put her hand to Cassia’s head again, to stroke the hair out of her face. She stirred; she cried out softly and rolled onto her back. Miss Azimuth stroked the girl’s hair away and Longo Starbridge chewed his lip. Cassia’s face was the same as the face in the photograph.
She still had some silicon dust from the road stuck to her cheek, and she still lay in the torn dress that she had taken from the village in the trees. Her hair was dirty, and in her posture there was no Starbridge grace—her skirt had pulled up above her knees. But in a sense that too increased the similarity, because the photograph was taken on the day when the bishop had left all of her wealth, all of her power behind for the last time. Perhaps it was just an imperfection in the print, but she too had a black stain under her eye, and for her execution she was dressed in a simple white shift. Her legs and feet were bare.
“Look,” said Miss Azimuth. She brought Cassia’s hand up from her side and stroked back the fingers. The birthmark on her palm, which had been gathering shape all through that week, seemed to be clearer now. It was as if during that time it had been rising to the surface of her skin, and now it was obscured by just a few thin layers. The six points of the bishop’s crown were clear now. The face of Paradise was clear.
“But she didn’t go, you see,” said the old woman, and her high voice was barely audible. Yet it was all around them, diffused and filtered, like the light from the klieg lanterns which was making a blue pattern on the bed. “She didn’t go to Paradise. When she stepped onto the pyre, she disappeared. Instead there was a tree, a tangerine tree, flowering and bearing fruit. Though of course it was not the season,” she said, and the bulimic priest was nodding. His arm was tired. He had let the lantern slip, so that it was darker now. Most of the light came from the klieg light through the wall.
“Chrism Demiurge made a show of burying her bones,” Miss Azimuth continued. “But when the place was dug up, there was nothing there. And the graverobbers, they found a message. ‘Look for me,’ it said. ‘Look for me among the days to come.’ ”
“I know the story,” murmured Brother Longo.
“And I knew it too!” exulted the old woman. “I knew it when I saw her. It is the lily on the stump—it is the sign, which Freedom Love predicted. This is our hour, you see. This is our hour of need.”
“The resemblance is certainly extraordinary,” said Karan Mang, examining his painted nails.
On the bed, Cassia was stirring. She moved her head back to one side, and rubbed her cheek upon the counterpane. “She’s waking up,” said the blind priest, who up to that moment had not spoken.
* * *
Now she could distinguish what they said to her. “She’s waking up”—she heard it clearly. In her dream she was sitting by the altar in her prison cell, and she was praying to the image of Beloved Angkhdt. She was moving incense underneath the brass nose of his statue. And she could hear the spirits close to her, conversing in low tones—the old woman, she was death. And then the men: the loud voice, the foreign voice, the rasping guttural voice. These must be the different aspects of Immortal Angkhdt, indicated by the four faces of the statue. Two human faces peeked out of the dog’s ears, and another was peering through the fur at the back of his head. Now these faces were conversing to decide her fate; they were arguing with death and with each other. “She’s waking up,” said the face behind the fur—the first time it had spoken. All-seeing, yet its eyes were blind, at least in this world. It looked into her heart to see that she was waking to a world of spirits and a world of miracles. It was telling her that her prayers were answered.
Rael called to her from the window of their prison cell. He was sitting on the windowsill with his cat in his lap, and he was looking out through the bars. “Come look,” he said, but she could see it all from where she sat by staring into the dog’s head of Angkhdt. She could see it reflected in his eye. She could see the courtyard below the prison tower. She could see the funeral pyre and the assembled monks. She could see the image she had put in all their minds: The great tree spread its boughs above the courtyard. The fire licked its leaves.
The blind priest clapped his hands. In her dream, Cassia heard a crack come from behind her in the dark. It was the breaking of the lock upon her prison door, the breaking of the lock that held her to this world and to this time. Beside her lay the bag that she had packe
d for their journey—no warm clothes, for it was hot where they were going. Just a little fruit from her garden, just a cotton blanket, and wrapped inside of it, the earliest codex of the Holy Song, together with the holy skull of Angkhdt.
“The locks are broken,” she said. In the silk tent, Miss Azimuth bent as low as her dry bones would permit, to try to decipher Cassia’s sleepy mumbling. She could not. But Rael heard her and Rael understood her; he was lying on his stomach in another tent a half a mile away, and when Cassia spoke he was instantly awake, his eyes open, his mind clear.
An oil lamp was burning a few inches from his face. He lifted his cheek up from the mat and then turned to the other side, away from the light. Now in front of him he saw a low, narrow table, and it had a statue on it, and several brimming bowls of water.
He heard a woman’s voice. “It is Angkhdt,” she said. He squinted in the uncertain light and saw a small, potbellied, animal-headed figure with seven hands. It sat surrounded by plastic and wooden models of machines. Rael recognized a few—a bicycle, a gun.
He raised himself up onto his elbows. The woman spoke out of the shadow behind the lamp. From his raised position he could see her sitting there. He could see something of her face.
“It is Angkhdt,” she repeated, responding to his baffled expression and mistaking its cause. He cared nothing for the statue. He was trying to remember where he was.
“It is an incarnation you might not have seen. But an important one. Especially now. He is surrounded by the gifts he brought to humankind. To all of us, although the rich have stolen them away. There you see—a motorcar, a camera, a radio, a freezer, an electric range.”
Rael was lying in a canvas tent. It had a peaked ceiling, supported by two poles. The woman sat next to the zippered entrance, the ceiling only a few feet above her head. It was too low for her to stand upright.
“Angkhdt teaches us to share ourselves,” she continued. “If the poor don’t help each other, who will help us? Not the factory owners and the bureaucrats.” In a sweet low voice she quoted: