Soldiers of Paradise Read online

  I knew nothing of all this. I made no distinction between barbarian creeds. But I was interested in the soldier. He was listening to the music, which was changing, and I wondered whether he could sense its change. His eyes were full of tears. “I am so happy to be here,” he repeated. “Here at the end of all things.”

  His food still lay untasted in his lap. And in a little while he spoke again: “So happy just to listen. I have heard so much about your music. In midwinter, when I was young, in the ninth phase, the bishop would have whipped a man for whistling in the streets. Already then they were afraid. Already they had begun to lose control. Now they are a hundred times more desperate. They want to kill you all.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He smiled. He brought his hand up to his mouth. “This is the last night,” he said, pointing towards Paradise, just rising. “It won’t be visible again, not in my lifetime. But look, you can see the mountain where I used to live, that black spot. Look.” He sniffed. “It has been warm here. Tonight it will snow. And tomorrow morning, that will be the end. I think the sun will never rise again. And look.” He motioned to the stone table not far away, the statue lying on its back. “The idols are broken. Tomorrow we shall see. False priests and false governors. At the hour of seven-times-ten they shall be overthrown.” He was a fanatic. He told me of a plot to murder his commander. His eyes stretched wide. But in a little while he spoke more softly, and then he turned to me. “Our general pretends to take advantage of the thaw. He pretends he is hunting atheists and cannibals, and clearing out these hills for good and all. But it is more than that. He is afraid. He is searching for the One. The risen One. The risen Angkhdt.”

  I looked around at the gathering dark. Music had started again, one of the many kinds of fire music, boastful, proud, and you could see fire flashing from the empty doorway of the hall. The soldier sat with his own thoughts, rocking and humming, and fingering his amulet. So I settled back to listen, and I watched the stars gather and combine as darkness fell, solitary at first, the brightest, one or two in all the sky. As I watched there were always more, filling up that aching space with light, with stars and patterns, numberless, nameless.

  Some children came down through the bright doorway, running and laughing, and carrying torches. You could see their faces in the torchlight, dirty, thin, and full of joy. One threw her torch high up into the air, meaning to catch it as it came down; she missed, and it exploded in a shower of sparks. And then they all ran down together across the open stones towards the tower gate, their bodies disappearing in the dark, until below us all that remained were their high, wordless voices and the flickering lights, chasing and spinning, part formless dance, part ruleless game.

  The soldier, too, was covered up in darkness. His body had retreated from my sight, and in the long silence I would have let his image go as well, until I remembered nothing. I would have cleared my mind, opened up my hand, and like a timid animal he might have stayed for a while, trembling on my palm until I prodded him away. In the end he would have gone, just as if he had been eager to escape. I would have forgotten him and everything. For that night I was in love. It filled me like a brimming flood, too deep, too painful for joy. I felt it around me as if for the last time. In the cooling dark, I could hear it in the music, in the scattering voices, see it in the children’s restless torches, mocked from above by an eternity of stars.

  But in time the soldier spoke again. I was surprised to hear the sadness in his voice, for without thinking I had thought that my new ecstasy was filling all the world. “The stars will shine like day,” he said. “And in the new light, the earth will blossom like a flower in springtime, and it will need no tending. Stones will move, and fish will speak. Birds will speak. The earth will bring forth all good things, and all men will be free. And Angkhdt will wipe the dirt from our faces, and He will stand up like a giant in the farthest north, and He will say, ‘Bring to me all tyrants and false priests, all kings and Starbridges . . .’ ” The old man’s voice sounded so sad. “I shall not live to see it,” he said, turning towards me, and I could see the outline of his face. “I have come to prepare the way . . . I had hoped to see Him,” he continued, his voice breaking. “No matter. In the new starlight He will come, born of this music.”

  His breath stank. I reached out to grab the string around his neck, to twist it in my hand until the slack was taken up. I held him at arm’s length and shook him once, gently. He went quiet, and I looked up at the stars. “Please,” he said, his voice full of fear. “You don’t really . . . eat flesh? You are not cannibals . . . as they say?”

  I released him and stood up. It was too cold to sit. He followed me into the doorway and grabbed me by the arm. Inside the hall, my brothers and my sisters had slaved in from somewhere the corpse of a horse. Some were stripping the skin away from the flesh, pouring off the blood into wooden buckets; some were sawing through the bones, breaking the joints apart; some were building up the fire. It was like a drug, the smell of fresh-cut meat. For me and for the barbarian too: he looked past me into the uncertain light, and at first he didn’t understand what they were doing. When he did, the strength of his body failed. He leaned against the doorpost, panting heavily, his eyes wide with fear, and there were tears in his eyes, and his shoulders and his neck fell forward. He raised his hand up to his face, and with infinite effort dropped his forehead to his palm, and then ducked it to his armpits, once to each side, and murmured a little prayer.

  I left him and walked down into the hall, looking for someone. The music was saying something to me. It was in a form called “no regret,” played with wavering purity on the long horn, a large, difficult, metal instrument, which someone had left behind when all the rest of us were left behind. The boy who had picked it up to make it his still did not possess the lungs for any but the easiest modes. This one, “no regret,” he played tentatively, using a melody plainer and sweeter than usual. He knelt wheezing on his bed in the hot firelight, and others squatted near him, listening. And the music told me something too. I thought, if I am going to die tomorrow, I don’t have time to cleanse myself of my desire. I may have time to satisfy it.

  My brothers and my sisters were moving towards the center of the feast, to where the butchered horse was thrown onto the fire. Their desires were of the simplest kind. But mine was different. I had no interest in the food, though I was hungry. Instead, I turned aside and walked away under the shadows of the wooden arches, to my own bed and the bed beside it. She was lying on her side, with one arm stretched out. She was still asleep, or asleep again, for she had stripped off some of her red clothes and lay part-naked under dirty blankets.

  I sat cross-legged, and she lay beside me with her face pressed against the outside of my thigh, her elbow in my lap. She lay soft and responsive, so I touched her with more force, to press some hardness back into the long muscles of her arm. And as her body came alive under my hand, her spirit coming back from wherever it had been, I thought of all the times I had seen her, every image, every song. So we woke to each other, my fingers suddenly sensitized by memory, her fingers opening under mine, responsive at first, then tight and hard as she woke up. That was the moment. I will remember it. And since then I have dreamed of loving, and all my dreams have been like that, trying to recapture the brittle tension not even of her kisses, but of that one moment, that moment when I held her by the wrist, reawakening to her as if from sleep while she pulled sleepily away. She tried to pull away, and I clamped my hand down on her wrist.

  She let me hold her. Without relaxing in the slightest degree, she raised herself up on her other arm and looked around.

  Around us, the fire was burning brighter. On a table in the center of the hall, my brothers and sisters had piled roasted joints of horsemeat, high up to keep them from the dogs. A little girl had jumped up on the table’s back, straddling the carcass like a rider; with a stick she beat away their snapping mouths, until my little brother reached up for the horse’s head, bigge
r than his own. Holding it up between his hands, he did a dance, grinning from behind its cruel, empty beak. And then he threw it far away into a corner where it rolled along the floor, the dogs skidding and sliding after it, biting at each other. And to the other side he flung the neck, a bucketful of entrails, its feet and claws, and even a great haunch of meat, so drunk he was with generosity. My sister hit him with her stick. But I could see there was enough for all, because the pony was a fat one, a barbarian beast, shot in the white grass, and not one of our starving nags.

  I squeezed my sister’s hand, and she squeezed mine. I turned to look at her, and she looked away and lay back in the shadow of the wall. But even so I could see her naked shoulders and her arms, and her golden hair around her face. I could see her frowning, biting her lips. The shadow cut across her face. I kept staring at her, trying to memorize her beauty. And she would glance at me and glance away, holding my hand so tightly she was hurting me. I reached out and took hold of her jaw, and pulled her towards me, and when I kissed her I could feel her tense, hard lips, and feel her teeth clenched tight beneath them. She let me kiss her on the mouth.

  I was with her the whole night. When it was almost morning, we walked outside into a snowstorm, to watch the snow falling out of a clear sky, the stars like chips of ice, and Paradise small behind the mountains, circled by a ring of ice. The thaw was over; it was the first night of spring, and the snow was coming back. Some little girls were throwing snowballs. I heard some music from the rooftops, fragile and sweet, a song called “children playing,” and when they heard it, the girls stopped and looked at each other as if confused, their arms at their sides. And one held up her wrist and stared at it, and turned it, and turned each finger in a movement so delicate, so expressive of the music, that it was as if another instrument had joined in, playing in a kind of harmony.

  Part Two:

  Among Strangers

  MORNING WAS MAKING ITS FIRST SUGGESTIONS as the voice of the antinomial flickered and went out. Not a moment too soon, thought Doctor Thanakar, stretching his crippled leg out on the carpet, relaxing for the first time in many hours. The man’s story had seemed to require physical discomfort to understand, for whenever the doctor had relaxed his body he had lost the sense, so he had spent the night cross-legged, his back and shoulders stiffly hunched, his hands held out in front of him. It was as if sorting the narrative out from all the vagaries of music had involved tedious manual labor that could only be performed in that position.

  For at times while speaking, the antinomial would play on different instruments—gentle, interminable melodies without repetition or variety. Sometimes he would chant the words, or clap his hands between them, or space them so irregularly that it was hard to make the jumps. Sometimes he would sing, or talk in a dreary, inaudible monotone, and the doctor would have to strain to understand. In the dark warehouse, it seemed to him the voice illuminated the story as badly as a flickering candle would a book. Intermittently, though, the man had played a flute, and that had been enough to compensate. For then it had been restful to listen, when music was the end and not the means.

  Morning came in through narrow windows high up along the walls, and the doctor looked around. He and the prince had come there in the dark for entertainment, and at first, while the antinomial was singing, a girl had heated wine for them. She had burned a dirty fire, and he had seen her face and shadows in the empty space around them. Even when the prince was drunk, she had fed it for a while longer with handfuls of dung. But then she had gotten up and gone, the fire had burned out, and Thanakar had sat for hours, listening to stories in the black dark. Now, with the windows turning pink, and pink light playing on the walls, he was surprised to see the warehouse was full of people. Antinomials were wandering between the rows of mattresses, or sitting among piles of broken bottles, or lying wrapped in rags. He was surprised that they had made no noise, required no light. And he was anxious to see them there at all, though none paid any attention. None had yet approached the remote corner where he and the prince sat on a shred of carpet.

  The girl, though, had returned sometime in the night, and was standing motionless quite close to him. She was dressed in a coarse shirt of unalleviated white, rolled up to the elbows and open in the front, so that he could see the hairless skin between her breasts. Her legs and feet were bare. It was a pose too frankly immodest to be stimulating. He had friends who came down nightly to this section of the docks, looking for antinomials, addicted to their powerful bodies and cheap fees. The doctor found it unimaginable, even if he had been able to imagine, in principle, paying for a woman’s body with a bucketful of entrails or a yard of cloth. To him the antinomial women were intimidating and unfeminine. This one was over six feet tall. And while he might admire her lithe bulk, her long legs, her unmarked face, her short, simple hair, she looked too alien to be beautiful. In the quiet air, she was humming a quiet, tuneless song. Perhaps, he thought, if he had been able, he could have heard in it the expression which her features lacked. What was it? Sadness without experience, perhaps.

  The storyteller was asleep. And the prince slept too, cross-legged, his head bobbing up and down, his sweet, lunatic face uneasy even in slumber. Though that was no surprise, thought Doctor Thanakar. It was a sign of madness that he could sleep at all in that position. For the warehouse was worse than unfurnished—mattresses and couches strewn with animal products. He had not wanted to stay, but the prince had barely seemed to notice, and had sunk to the floor with a contempt for his own dignity that had touched the doctor’s heart. The girl had brought them wine, and Abu had taken the cup out of her hands with childlike unconcern—a dozen cups, and now he slept. The doctor envied him. Prince Abu’s drunkenness was the aspect of his condition that the doctor had most wished to share, yet each time the girl had offered him the cup he had refused. She had offered it with passable politeness, but each time his own fastidiousness had shamed him into thinking she was mocking him, that their host was mocking him by squatting happily upon his hams the whole gigantic night, leaving the leather couch unoccupied as if in deference to his guests. Eighty months, eight thousand days had passed since the antinomials had fled that savage life up in the snow, the one they now described with such nostalgia. They had left in the last phase of winter, and it was now midspring. A whole new generation had grown up. But still the antinomials had not learned the value of other people’s comfort. “My lords,” the man had sung, in such a gentle tone. Yet so much of his story had seemed calculated to offend them. It was true, his people had been brutally misused. But it was partly their own fault. A cousin of the doctor’s had given a party, and had hired a troupe of antinomial musicians. But when the food was served, they had come down from the platform to mix with the guests. They had put their hands into the food, and everything had to be thrown away.

  The prince was talking in his sleep, guttural languages known only to himself. Thanakar looked at him with mingled irritation and concern. And when he turned away again, he found the girl was staring at him. In a sense, even that was peculiar and exciting, even though her expression was one of fierce indifference, for women rarely looked him in the face. Occasionally a servant would meet his eyes, a female of his household or one toiling on the road, and he would always turn his head, humiliated and embarrassed. But there was nothing envious or curious about this girl’s stare. It rested lightly on his face. As his host had said, the antinomials had no personalities, not in the way he knew. She was singing a small tune and then she stopped, and for the first time there was some content in her face, a smile, a reaction. She smiled. A cat had jumped onto the carpet from behind a pillar, a huge and golden cat. It was followed by a second, and then a third, of the same unusual size, the same splendid color. Golden sunlight was coming in through the windows; these cats were like sunlight made animate. They furnished space in the same way.

  Smiling, the girl sat down and stretched out her legs. A cat walked round her once, twice, stepping over her legs with ex
aggerated care.

  The cats paced and turned, rousing the sleepers. Prince Abu woke up shivering, for as always, his sleep had been a thin and insubstantial cover. As always, he looked around him with a kind of fear, and Thanakar could tell he had forgotten where he was. His dreams took him on such hard journeys, he woke up miles from where he went to sleep. The doctor would hear about it presently. In the meantime, he leaned forward to touch his cousin’s knee, to catch his eye, and it cheered him to see some reassurance come into that tired face.

  Abu and the doctor were the same age. They had been born within two months of each other, at the end of winter. Now they had reached the burning middle of man’s life. Apart from that, and friendship, they shared little. Winter babies are alike, people said, gloomy and fat. It was absurd. True, he was morose, the prince was overweight, but there resemblance ended. Abu was prematurely old. Not withered or bent—his skin was young and smooth. But his eyes were old, his cheeks yellow and puffy with drink, and he was losing his hair. Yet in a way, also, his face had retained some of the best of childishness: his frank, pure expression, his childish delight in little things, the sudden sweetness in his eyes when they had focused on the cats moving back and forth, back and forth across the carpet. It was a look that made it easy to forget his defects, the small futility of his hands as they fluttered near his throat, pulling at the buttons of his uniform. He had worn an overcoat and had worn gloves over his golden tattoos. The doctor had insisted on that much of a disguise at least. But in the fever of drinking he had stripped them off, and now he sat smiling and nodding, his useless body gorgeous in white silk and gold embroidery, his palms marked with the symbol of the sun, his fingers decorated with lists of privileges. In the worst slum of the city, he feared nothing. Among people who had every reason to hate him, he was as trusting as a child.