Sugar Rain (25 page)

“Of course,” he continued, “there are reasons for this. The previous government of this city based its power on violence and coercion. Now we are seeing reaction, like a spring that is released from pressure. But that is not the only factor—brothers and sisters, the tyranny that once held us in slavery has loosened from our lives. All the outward trappings of that tyranny have been destroyed: the shrines, the idols, and the icons—though I am told that many still worship them in secret. But, brothers and sisters, noxious as it was, the ceremonial of the old regime contained some public benefice. It distracted the aggressions of us all. This benefice is something we have not been able to replace.”

Swayed by the professor’s speech, the assembly sat far into the night, and by daybreak it had appointed a commission. Raksha Starbridge, the majority speaker, received the task of drafting a new civic religion. It was to favor ritual over content. It was not to involve the worship of any deity of any kind.

Raksha Starbridge was delighted with the resolution. He laughed and clapped his hands. But Professor Sabian was horrified, even though his speech had been the seed of the idea.

Yet even he could never have anticipated the malice and the ingenuity that Raksha Starbridge brought to his new job. For almost one hundred days he used his power to terrorize the city, until even his own party turned against him. From October 94th, when he was inaugurated as director of the Desecration League, to November 87th, when Earnest Darkheart beat him senseless on the floor of the assembly, he presided over such a reign of violence in Charn that a generation later it was forbidden to allude to it, by imperial decree.

Nevertheless, later historians would agree that the most hideous of all the crimes of Raksha Starbridge was the sealing of the Mountain of Redemption and the abandonment of almost half a million prisoners to slow deaths from starvation. This work was started on the 13th of November. It was accomplished by the Desecration League, for even though the job was authorized by the assembly, neither the Rebel Angels, nor the police, nor the army, nor the guild of bricklayers wanted anything to do with it. The guild went on a strike of public protest, which ended with the arrest and disappearance of its leaders.

And for weeks the League kept guards around the mountain’s base, for fear of sabotage to the wet masonry.

For weeks, on every street corner, wherever the summit of the mountain could be seen, crowds gathered with telescopes and binoculars. And whenever there was a break in the mist, cries of anger and disgust rose to the skies, for the crowds could see the prisoners swarming on the mountain’s upper slopes. From time to time, a prisoner would jump down from an upper balcony. Though the bulk of the building would prevent him from ever reaching the street, still he might fall a thousand feet before he disappeared.

This was the worst crime. But there was another that was even more spectacular, and in some ways more symbolic of the season. On November 9th, Raksha Starbridge opened the so-called Sugar Festival, on the fairgrounds out beyond the Morquar Gate. It was to run for more than ninety days. But within a week of its opening it had become the center of the life of Charn. All day and all night the festival was packed with noisy, celebrating people, and they scarcely noticed, or they scarcely cared, that every day among the carousels, the colored lights, and the free candy, dozens of prisoners were being hung, shot, buried, crucified before their eyes. For many, it was the reason they had come.

 

On the morning of November 21st, when Charity Starbridge was scheduled to die, the fairgrounds at the Morquar Gate were still only half built. Yet to come were the ferris wheels, the electric roller coasters, and the bumper cars. Yet to come were the circus acts, the trapeze artists and the tightrope walkers, the tumblers and performing dogs. Yet to come were the bandshells full of drummers, and choirs singing new patriotic lyrics to old hymns.

Nevertheless, the heart of the fair was already then in place; hundreds of small cardboard booths, housing potshies, gunshoots, soothsayers, wheels of fortune, guess-games, cardswaps, number tables, duckstools, finger-switches, and a dozen more, games of skill and games of chance. Already in place were the distribution booths, where script won in the games could be exchanged for clothing, and blankets, and liquor, and painkillers, and little bags of new synthetic meal. Already in place were the massive canvas awnings, stretched tight from poles over the cardboard streets, sheltering them from the weather and the constant rain. And in the center, beneath the shadow of the Morquar Gate, the execution grounds were already in place, the whipping posts, the burning pits, and around them a circle of steel crosses, forty feet high, bolted together, held up with steel wire.

In the sixth ward, the city walls had been demolished long before. The Morquar Gate stood by itself in the middle of the fairgrounds, a gigantic structure of carved brick. On it the League had hung a series of enormous banners proclaiming the maxims of Raksha Starbridge’s new civic religion. Prisoners on the cross could spend their last remaining hours pondering these messages. “Life is senseless suffering,” cautioned one, white words on a gray background. “I am the spirit of denial,” claimed another: “Through me lies the gate of joy.”

Charity squinted up towards another banner, hanging from the end of a long pole. “What have you got to lose?” it asked ambiguously. Another was more simple: “God does not exist.”

“Small consolation,” murmured Charity, as they rode in through the gate. In the early morning light, the carnival looked tired and unprofitable to her. The sun bleached out the colors of the neon and the crystal lanterns, and gave the crowds a pasty, furtive look.

“Morning crowd’s never the best,” remarked a soldier of the League. He was standing by the donkeys, wiping down their bellies with his hand. “Dark’s the best, or in the rain. Then you can see the lights.”

“I was expecting more excitement,” Charity confessed. She had heard about the carnival from Mr. Taprobane.

“Ah. They are a lot of cowards really. They are frightened of your friend.”

As soon as he had stopped the cart at the loading platform underneath the gate, the driver had jumped out and disappeared. Now Charity saw him, standing in a group of men next to a few wretched-looking canvas stalls. He was pointing back at them and shouting, and making the sign of the unclean.

“He’s frightened of the singing,” continued the young soldier. He was dark-haired and would have been good-looking, except that when he smiled his teeth were full of holes. His brows met in a line over his nose. He had loosened the bridle on the lead donkey. The dye from his red hands had made a smear across the animal’s cheek and on its belly, too, in the place where the scales joined the flesh. “Life is meaningless,” he said. “What can it matter if we sing or not?”

Ordinarily there was more of a ritual in these proceedings. But the sunlight put a weight on things. This was only the first of sixteen tumbrils expected at intervals throughout the day, and the mode of execution was not spectacular. Even so, ordinarily there would have been a crowd. This morning, frightened of the antinomial, the people retreated back into the fairgrounds, where some squatted down to watch from a safe distance.

Another soldier had come forward and climbed up into the cart. Smiling, he forced the stranger to his feet, but the antinomial rose by herself. She stood up straight in the back of the cart, her legs spread wide, and now she started to sing in earnest, staring at the sun.

The stranger put his hands over his ears. He was gibbering with fear, and when the soldier touched him, he cried out. Charity looked at him, surprised; he was afraid of death.

Fear required a concentration that she did not have. Reflexively she touched her lion’s-head tattoo. It was good to be a Starbridge, but it was not necessary. All around her were distractions.

The handsome soldier was still stroking the donkeys and untying their tails. But in a little while he came to help his friend put down the tailgate. Grinning at each other, they helped Charity to the ground. Then they dragged out the stranger; he was kicking and biting until they hit him on the head, and then he began to cry. They threw him out onto the concrete, and he knelt, weeping, on all fours. Charity went to him and raised him up. “Hush,” she said. “You’re not dead yet.” It was no consolation. He put his face into her neck and wept.

The antinomial jumped down unaided, singing all the time. Singing, she followed the others to an open space of poured concrete a hundred feet away, where a metal cover was set into a concrete ring. The soldiers opened it, and they poked down a ladder that was lying to one side. They held it steady for Charity and the stranger, and then they stood up, waiting. But the antinomial was busy with her music. She looked up at the sun; it was burning like a fire overhead. She sang part of the fire song while the two soldiers smiled at her. And then she climbed down the ladder until she stood in darkness, and she was still singing very quietly, just whispering, because she could still see some sunlight through the little hole above her head, until someone pulled the ladder up and closed the cover with a clang.

 

There was air from someplace, cold, new air. And the bottom was not muddy. It was dry. Deep sand, it felt like. Charity sat down and ran some through her fingers. In the blackness it gave out a comforting, small sound.

Her hands were tied together, but not tightly. She poured a stream of sand onto her foot. The antinomial was quiet, finally. “Sweet God, deliver us,” prayed the stranger, next to her ear.

Thirty feet above them shone a ring of orange light, where the manhole cover made an imperfect seal. The light was not enough to penetrate the darkness or allow Charity to guess the dimensions of the well. She could not see her two companions.

Hearing about this new form of punishment from Mr. Taprobane, she had pictured it a different way. She had thought she would be gagged and trussed and lowered down into a space barely larger than herself. She had thought that she’d be lying on her back, watching the workmen pick up shovels above her head, and then there would be dirt in her face—it would be over in a moment. She had not pictured it like this, lying in the comfortable sand, and everything so quiet. She poured some sand onto her foot.

“It’s not so bad,” she said.

“Just wait,” murmured the stranger, close to her ear. He was calmer too. He too had been expecting something worse.

The air was cool and had a faintly sour smell, as if it came to them over a stagnant lake.

“It’s as if we’d come into another country,” said Charity after a while. “There must be an opening somewhere.”

She put her cheek down on the sand. She watched the orange ring, suspended in the dark.

Once, not long before, the last time Paradise was close to Earth, she and her cousin Thanakar had gone out on the balcony, when Paradise was rising above Monmouth Hill. For a moment they had been alone. Then Paradise had been as big as the whole world, when they were leaning on the balustrade, their elbows almost touching. The light from the planet had been on his face when he turned towards her, smiling. That was all.

In another moment her husband and her brother had arrived, laughing and making fun. With mock seriousness, the old man had pointed out a scar on Paradise’s surface—the Ocean of Iniquity, where his family once had a beachhouse. His grandmother had seen it in a dream.

It was with thoughts of her cousin Thanakar that Charity fell asleep, and her head was full of thoughts of him when she awoke. She had no recollection of where she was, until she turned onto her back and saw the glowing ring above her. It had lost its orange color; it was a milky gray.

She strained her ears to hear something of the festival, but there was nothing, only the sound of a deep muttering close beside her. Turning her head, she could see the outline of the stranger’s shape, deep black against a gentle black. Beyond him was another shape standing erect. It was the antinomial.

The stranger was saying prayers. Charity sank back down onto her elbow and listened for a while to the quick, careful rhythm of the chant, and from time to time the incantation of her brother’s name. It was a blurred, restful sound, mixing with her thoughts—she was not quite awake.

“As You suffered injustice, now deliver us,” chanted the stranger. “None of us can suffer as You suffered. Nonetheless we have no wish to try.”

His voice went on for a long while. And then it stopped suddenly, because the antinomial had spoken too, and her voice was different.

“Some,” she said.

There was breathless silence for a moment, and then the stranger’s prayer started again, quick and soft, almost inaudible.

“Now,” said the antinomial. “Black now bright now fire. See.”

Again the prayer stopped, and there was silence. “I don’t see anything,” said Charity.

“Not eyes.”

The antinomial’s speech had none of the sweetness of her music. It was deep and very rough, with an uncouth rumbling at the back of it. Yet even so, there was some music in it, Charity was sure. She could feel it rubbing at the back of her neck, tingling on her skin, as if it existed in a frequency beyond the range of Charity’s ears, so that she perceived it only indirectly.

“See,” said the woman.

Charity looked, and for a long time she could see nothing. She stared at the woman’s outline in the dark. After a moment she thought she could distinguish the antinomial’s outstretched arm, and so she looked in that direction, trying to penetrate into the darkness layer by layer. At length she saw the faintest glimmer of a light.

“There is something. Over there,” she said.

For a while it burned unsteadily, a beacon marking the farthest limit of her sight. Then it sagged and glimmered out, and reappeared again, lower down. Then it seemed larger, shaky and more blurred, until it split apart into two separate lights, closer now. For the first time she could hear a noise, the sound of lapping water.