The Sparrow s-1

by Mary Doria Russel

  "Did you hear anything of the violence that Wu and Isley reported?" Giuliani asked, watching him move from place to place.

  "No. I was quite isolated, I assure you. I imagine, however, that with characteristic creativity, the Runa were beginning to expand on Sofia's suggestion that they were many and the Jana'ata were few."

  "Wu and Isley asked after you as soon as Askama brought them to Supaari's compound," Giuliani said, pausing when he saw Sandoz flinch. "Supaari told them that he had made other arrangements for you. What was the phrase he used? Ah. Here: 'more suited to his nature.' Can you tell us why you were removed from the household?"

  There was an ugly laugh. "Do you know what I said to Anne Edwards once? God is in the why." He would not look at anyone now. He stood with his back to them and stared out the window, holding the gauzy curtain aside, careful with the hardware of his brace, so as not to snag the fabric. Finally, they heard him say, "No. I don't know what he meant by that, except that somehow he believed he was justified in what he did."

  "In what he did," Giuliani repeated quietly. "You did nothing to cause your removal?"

  "Oh, Christ!" Sandoz spun to face him. "Even now? After all this?"

  He walked to his place at the table and sat down, shaking with anger. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft, but he was obvi­ously fighting rage, braced hands rigid in his lap, eyes on the table. "My position in the household of Supaari VaGayjur was that of a crippled dependent. Supaari was not a flighty person, but I believe he must have tired of me. Or perhaps he simply felt that I had fulfilled my role as a language tutor when he became competent in English and that it was time for me to take up another position, so to speak." He looked directly at Giuliani then. "My residential and occupational preferences were not inquired into at any time. How explicit am I required to be?"

  He was asleep when they came for him, just past dawn. Caught in the web of a dream, he was at first unsure if the hands were real or imagined, and by the time he knew, their grip was unbreakable. Later on, when he asked himself if there might have been some way to escape, he knew the question was folly. Where could he have gone? What shelter would he have found? Equally pointless: the struggle, the demands for an explanation. The first blow drove the air from his lungs, the second knocked him nearly senseless. Efficient, they wasted no additional time in beating him. Half-dragged, half-carried, he tried to memorize the streets and had an impression that the route was fairly consistently uphill. By the time they arrived at Galatna Palace, his head was clear and he was able to breathe without pain.

  Arms pinioned, he was escorted past the fountains he'd seen from Supaari's compound and taken through a side entrance to the palace, down hallways bright with colored tiles and floored with marble and jasper, past internal courtyards, under vaulted, ribbed ceilings. The simplest aspects of the interior were gilded, walls overlaid by silver-wire trellis, each diagonal defined and sparkling with a jewel: emerald and ruby and amethyst and diamond. He saw, in passing, a formal room of ecclesiastical proportions fitted out with a wide indoor canopy in a yellow silken fabric figured and embroidered in turquoise and carmine and spring green, tasseled and fringed with gold thread, its richness echoed by the piles of cushions, ivory and red and blue, their plush fabric creased and divided by braid and costly welting.

  Room after room: there was nothing straight that could be made curved, nothing plain that could be given a pattern, nothing white that could be brilliant. The very air was embellished! Everywhere, there was scent: a hundred fragrances and odors he could not name or recognize.

  It was, he thought crazily, the most spectacularly vulgar place he'd ever been in. It looked and smelled like a cheap whorehouse, except the jewels were real and each dram of perfume probably cost a village corporation's yearly earnings.

  He tried both Ruanja and K'San each time they encountered someone new, but no one would respond and he thought at first that all the servants were mutes. As the day wore on, he was given short orders in a form of K'San that was unfamiliar to him, as High German might be unfamiliar to someone who spoke Low. Go there. Sit here. Wait. He did his best to comply; he was cuffed when he got something wrong. It was he who became mute.

  In the days that followed, he was held with an odd mixture of freedom and constraint. There were others kept, as he was, in subtle but ef­fective cages. They were able to move from cage to cage but not inside the palace proper. A zoo, he thought, trying to make sense of all this. I am in some kind of private zoo.

  The others were a bizarre but beautiful group of Runa and some Jana'ata, and there were a few individuals whose species he was unsure of. The Runa who shared his cushioned captivity came to his assistance when he needed help because of his hands. They were extraordinarily affectionate and friendly and tried to make him feel a part of whatever odd society existed within the ornate and costly walls of Galatna Palace. In their way, they were kind, but they seemed almost stupid, as though bred for looks alone, with coats of unusual color, brindled or pied, one striped like a zebra. Most had fine-boned and overbred faces, a few had manes, several even approached taillessness. None spoke the dialect of Ruanja he'd learned in Kashan.

  The captive Jana'ata were kept in a separate enclosure and paid him no attention, even though he could not detect any difference in their status within the zoo. They were heavily robed, with headdresses that covered their faces, smaller than Supaari. Later he found out they were females, and still later he realized that they must be the kind of sterile partners Supaari had told him about. He called to them in K'San, asked them to explain to him what this place was, but they kept to themselves. He was never able to get them to speak to him in any language.

  He had been fed irregularly but well in Supaari's household, like the pet of a small child who'd wanted a puppy but then lost interest. Here the food was provided ad libitum because, he supposed, so many of the others were Runa, who required more constant meals. It was an improvement in theory, but he had no appetite. The Runa always seemed touchingly pleased when he accepted food from them. So he ate, to repay their kindness.

  It came to him that he was now perfectly useless, probably kept as a curiosity, as unique and odd as the gaudy trinkets he'd seen stuffing the alcoves and jamming the shelves of Galatna that first day. And then he was fitted with a jeweled collar, and his humiliation seemed complete. He was, he thought, the exact counterpart of a capuchin monkey kept on a golden chain by some sixteenth-century European aristocrat.

  Supaari, however cool and perplexing, had at least been an intellectual companion. Now he tried to steel himself for the predictable effects of utter loneliness, to be patient with the hollow unreality he felt. He did sums and sang songs in his head and tried to pray but stopped when he realized that he was mixing the languages up. He was no longer certain of the differences between Spanish and Ruanja, and that frightened him as much as anything that had happened to him so far. The worst moment came when he realized that he couldn't remember the name of his neighborhood back in Puerto Rico. I am losing my mind, he thought, one word at a time.

  He was confused and vaguely frightened all of the time, but he forced himself to keep some kind of schedule, to exercise. This amused his Runa colleagues, but he did it anyway. There were scented baths, as elaborate and horrible as the rest of the place. As no one gave him orders about this, he chose the water with the least offensive perfume and did his best to keep himself clean.

  "Tell us," he heard the Father General say.

  "I thought that I had been sold as a zoological specimen," Emilio Sandoz said, trembling violently now, staring at the table, each soft word a separate act of self-control. "I believed, for a while, that I was in a menagerie owned by the Reshtar of Galatna. An aristocrat. A great poet. The author of many songs, yes? A gentleman of catholic tastes. It was, in fact, a kind of harem. Like Clytemnestra, I was compelled to master submission."

  It was perhaps three weeks or a month later when one of the guards came to the cageside and spoke t
o the others, who huffed and twitched and crowded around him. He had no idea what anyone was saying, had made no effort to learn anything beyond the most rudimen­tary phrases of the language spoken here. It was a form of denial, he supposed. If he didn't learn the language, he wouldn't have to stay. Stupid, of course. For reasons he could not have articulated, he was suddenly afraid, but he calmed himself with thoughts that would, very soon, shatter his soul. He said to himself: I am in God's hands. Whatever happens now to me is God's will.

  He was given a robe, obviously made specially for him, cut down to his size. It was staggeringly heavy and hot but preferable to parading around naked. He was taken, arms held firmly, to a plain and empty white room, unscented and unfurnished. It was astonishing. He was so relieved to be out of the welter, the visual and olfactory and auditory confusion, that he very nearly sank to his knees. Then he heard Supaari's voice and, heart racing, felt a rush of hope, thinking that he would surely be released. Supaari will take me home now, he thought. It's all been some mistake, he thought, and forgave Supaari for not coming sooner.

  He tried to speak when Supaari entered the room but the guard cuffed him in the back of the head and he stumbled forward and fell, thrown off balance by the unfamiliar weight of the robe. He was long past anger at the abuse and felt only shame at falling. Pushing himself to his feet, he looked again for Supaari and found him, but saw then a Jana'ata of medium stature and vast dignity, with violet eyes of surpassing beauty that met and held his own with a gaze so direct and searching that he had to look away. The Reshtar, he realized. A man of learning and artistry, he knew. Supaari had told him of the Reshtar: a great poet. The author of the sublime songs that had brought Emilio Sandoz and his companions to Rakhat—

  And then, suddenly, everything made sense to him, and the joy of that moment took his breath away. He had been brought here, step by step, to meet this man: Hlavin Kitheri, a poet—perhaps even a prophet—who of all his kind might know the God whom Emilio Sandoz served. It was a moment of redemption so profound he almost wept, ashamed that his faith had been so badly eroded by the inchoate fear and the isolation. He tried to pull himself together, wishing he'd been stronger, more durable, a better instrument for his God's design. And yet he felt purified somehow, stripped of all other purpose.

  There are times, he would tell the Reshtar, when we are in the midst of life—moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness—times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth.

  He would tell the Reshtar: When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. And when we heard your songs, we knew that you too had found a language to name and preserve such moments of truth. When we heard your songs, we knew they were a call from God, to bring us here, to know you—

  He would tell the Reshtar: I am here to learn your poetry and perhaps to teach you ours.

  That is why I am alive, he told himself, and he thanked God with all his soul for allowing him to be here at this moment, to understand all this at last…

  Intent on his own rushing thoughts, and by the certainty and rightness that he felt, he made little effort to follow the conversation that went on around him, although it took place in Supaari's own K'San dialect. He was not shocked when the robe was removed. Nudity was normal to him now. He knew that he was alien, that his body held as much interest for a man of learning as his mind. What educated man would not be curious, seeing a new sentient species for the first time? Who could fail to comment on the oddity of nearly complete hairlessness, the undeveloped nose? The strange dark eyes…the astonishing lack of tail…

  "…but a pleasing proportion, an elegant muscularity," the Reshtar was saying. Admiring its neat and graceful compactness, he moved thoughtfully around the exotic body, one hand trailing, his fine claws leaving on the hairless chest thin lines that quickly seeped red beads. He passed his hand around the shoulder and, regarding the curve of the neck, encircled it with his hands, noting its delicacy: why, one could snap the spine with a single gesture. His hands moved again, lightly caressing the hairless back, moved lower, to the bizarre void, the fascinating stillness and vulnerability of taillessness.

  Standing back, he saw that the foreigner had begun to tremble. Surprised at the rapidity of response, the Reshtar now moved to test readiness, lifting the foreigner's chin and staring directly into the dark unreadable eyes. His own eyes narrowed at the reaction: the head turned quickly in submission, eyes closed, the whole body quaking. Pathetic, in a way, and untutored, but with great appeal.

  "Lord?" It was the merchant. "It is acceptable? You are pleased?"

  "Yes," the Reshtar said, distracted. He looked at Supaari and spoke then with impatience. "Yes. My secretary has the legal work in hand. You may contract the binding with my sister on whatever date seems propitious. Brother: may you have children." His gaze returned to the foreigner. "Leave me now," he said, and Supaari VaGayjur, rendered Founder of a new lineage for his service to the Reshtar of Galatna, in company with the guard who had escorted Sandoz from the seraglio, backed out of the room.

  Alone, the Reshtar circled once more but came to rest behind the foreigner. He dropped his own robe then and stood, concentrating, eyes closed, on the fresh outpouring of scent, more intense, more complex than before. A powerful, stirring fragrance, unparalleled and irresistible. A musk redolent of unfamiliar amines, of strange butyric and caprylic carbon chains, misted by the simple chaste dioxides of shuddering breath and stirred by waves of iron bloodscent.

  Hlavin Kitheri, Reshtar of Galatna Palace, the greatest poet of his age, who had ennobled the despised, exalted the ordinary, immortalized the fleeting, a singularity whose artistry was first concentrated and then released, magnified, by the incomparable and unprecedented, inhaled deeply. We shall sing of this for generations, he thought.

  Language, his life's work and his delight, which had failed Emilio Sandoz word by word, now deserted him utterly. Shuddering in violent moronic waves, he could smell the nauseating glandular reek of his own terror. Mute, he was unable even to think the word for the un­speakable joyless rite that was coming, not even when his arms were seized from behind. But when the powerful prehensile feet locked over his ankles and the belly settled in behind him and the probing began, he went rigid with panic and fathomless horror, understanding finally what was about to happen. The penetration, when it came, made him scream. Things became very much worse after that.

  Perhaps ten minutes later he was pulled to an unfamiliar room, bleeding and sobbing. Left alone, he vomited until he was exhausted. He did not think for a long while but only rested, eyes open in the deepening darkness. Eventually, a servant came to take him to the baths. By that time, his life was irrevocably divided, into before and after.

  In the quiet of the Father General's office, only Johannes Voelker spoke. "I don't understand. What did the Reshtar want with you?"

  My God, Giuliani was thinking, genius may have its limits but stupidity is not thus handicapped. How could I have believed—Eyes closed, he heard Emilio's voice, soft and musical and empty, saying, "What did he want with me? Why, the same thing a pederast wants with a little boy, I imagine. A nice, tight fit."

  In the shocked silence, Giuliani's head came up. Romanita, he thought. Know the act and move ruthlessly when the time is right. "You are many things, but you are not a coward," the Father General said to Emilio Sandoz. "Face it. Tell us."

  "I have t
old you."

  "Make us understand."

  "I don't care what you understand. It won't change anything. Believe what you like."

  Giuliani tried to remember the name of a painting by El Greco: a study of a Spanish nobleman in death. Romanita excludes emotion, doubt. It has to be now, here. "For your own soul, say it."

  "I did not sell myself," Sandoz said in a fierce whisper, looking at no one. "I was sold."

  "Not good enough. Say it!"

  Sandoz was still, his eyes unfocused, each breath coming with mechanical regularity as though carefully planned and executed, until the moment came when he leaned away from the table, put a foot on its edge and sent it crashing over, splintering in the volcanic explosion of rage, scattering the other men to the edges of the room. Only the Father General remained where he was, and all the sounds of the world were reduced to the ticking of an ancient clock and the harsh, laboring breath of the man standing alone in the center of the room, whose lips formed words they could hardly hear. "I gave no consent."

  "Say it," Giuliani repeated, unrelenting. "Make us hear it."

  "I was not a prostitute."

  "No. You weren't. What were you then? Say it, Emilio."

  Each word separate, the threadbare voice breaking on the last: "I was raped."

  They could see the cost to him, the price of saying this. He stood swaying slightly, the armature of his face demolished by the work of thin, fine muscles. John Candotti breathed: "My God," and somewhere Emilio Sandoz found, inside himself, the black and brittle iron required to turn his head and endure, unflinching, the compassion in John's eyes.

  "Do you think so, John? Was it your God?" he asked with terrifying gentleness. "You see, that is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, then the rest of it was God's will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn't it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances," he continued with academic exactitude, each word etched on the air with acid, "is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God."