Sugar Rain (26 page)

She was lying in a stone chamber. She could see that now. Its diameter was not more than forty feet. But a large, jagged hole had been broken through the wall. She saw its outline as the lights came closer, the blocks of fallen stone, the low boundary where the hole approached the sandy floor. Beyond the hole she could distinguish nothing, for soon all that space was filled with light.

The light came from two guttering lanterns held on poles. It was not bright, but even so, Charity turned her head away because her eyes had been made sensitive by so much darkness. She looked instead at her companions, their faces illuminated by the long red beams, their bodies half in shadow. More than ever the stranger looked like Prince Abu, for the light was bleaching out their differences and covering the marks of surgery. His terrified expression was very like the prince’s, the way his mouth flapped open.

Charity’s hands were still bound together at the wrist. The stranger’s hands were also bound; he put them up together to block out the light. But the antinomial had loosened hers. She was standing with her arms crossed on her chest. One of her eyes was swollen shut, and her face was covered with bruises.

Yet she stood in an attitude of fierce indifference, almost of inattention as she stared into the light. It reassured the princess. Awkwardly, because of her tied hands, she rose to her feet.

Two men were climbing through the hole and down into the chamber, while two others held the lanterns on the other side. They were dark-skinned and almost naked. Their hair was yellow, hanging straight to their shoulders, and their faces were sharp and cleanly formed. Their cheeks were covered with a kind of powder or dark paint that made them shine like masks. Their eyes were large and very pale, blue or gray, one of the illegal shades, Charity couldn’t tell which. Their movements were quiet and sure, and they said nothing as they dragged the stranger to his feet.

“Come quietly,” said another man, a fifth man standing framed outside the hole between the two lanterns. He was a different kind of man, older, with white hair, and he was dressed in a white robe. It was a type of clothing that Charity recognized from Starbridge funerals when she was young—the ritual garments of the corpse of some great gentleman, pilfered from some underground sarcophagus a long time ago, she guessed. The material was ripped under the sleeves. Nevertheless, the man’s face was kind.

“Nobody will hurt you,” he said. He gestured to his men. One of them was leading the stranger, cowed and unresisting, over the barrier of broken stones, while another put his hand out for the antinomial.

“Do not touch me,” she said softly, her voice resonant with music, and the man drew back uncertainly. He pulled a flashlight from a pouch at his waist and shined it in the woman’s face, while the man in white stepped over the barrier into the tomb. He spoke a few words in some foreign language, and then he smiled. He put his hands together in an old-fashioned gesture of greeting. “Welcome, sister,” he said, and then he added a few notes of music in a high voice. But he stopped when he saw the woman’s face fill up with fury and contempt and loathing.

“Barbarian!” she cried. “Barbarian!” She reached out suddenly and grabbed away the flashlight that was shining in her face and then leaped over the barrier between the two men with the lanterns. One put his hand out to restrain her, but she slapped it aside. Then she stepped out beyond the circle of the lamplight and disappeared into the darkness.

The man in white stared after her. Then he turned back to Charity, and again he made the same gesture of greeting, joining his palms together and bowing slightly. “My name is Freedom Love,” he said.

The name meant nothing. But the gesture reminded Charity of something, a description from some book, or perhaps an illustration: an old man joining his hands together in front of him, hiding his tattoos.

She tried to speak, but the man shook his head. “Come quick,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find her. Otherwise, she’ll starve to death here in the labyrinth.” He turned and led them out over the barrier through a gap of broken stones. On the other side the lanterns illuminated a low, straight corridor, hacked out of the rock.

They walked single-file, the lanterns first and last. Charity was behind the man in white, looking at him, searching for a clue somewhere, his clothes, his hair, his way of walking. And then she found it: a chain of amber beads around his neck. In her religious history text, when she was a girl at Starbridge Dayschools, there had been a picture of a man joining his hands and bowing, and underneath a diagram of a necklace of small beads. Underneath that a caption was printed in small black letters—“The Cult of Loving Kindness.”

As she walked along the corridor, Charity cast her mind back to the book. Six generations before, in winter, the twenty-third bishop of Charn had had a dream, a chain without end, wrapped around the girdle of the Earth. After six days of meditation he had made a proclamation. He declared the existence of a great chain of precedence, a hierarchy in which every living creature was arranged according to its rank. He postulated a social language of infinite gradations, with forms of address peculiar to each individual, and gestures of respect or contempt that differed only by fractions of millimeters.

The twenty-third bishop had devoted his life to sorting out these differences. Subsequent bishops had abandoned the attempt. Such a structure was impractical on Earth, beyond the subtlety of mortal minds and fingers. But even so the dream had become part of the mythology of Charn. It was a vision, some said, of Paradise, where the soul of every creature would be arranged according to its worth, in a structure so harmonious and perfect, it would bring tears to the eyes of everyone who witnessed it.

Nevertheless, some sections of the Song of Angkhdt were open to quite different interpretations. In Charity’s great-grandmother’s time, St. Gossamer Marquette had preached another gospel, claiming that all human souls were equal in God’s love.

St. Gossamer Marquette was burned to death on the first day of autumn, 00015. Her disciples had scattered, and two seasons later her followers were so few as to be almost mythological. But the saint had worn an amber necklace, Charity remembered that from books. The necklace was the only thing that had survived the flames, and it had become the symbol of her heresy. That and a way of bowing she had preached.

“Where are you taking us?” asked Charity. The walls of the corridor had broadened out of sight, and the gravel underfoot had given way to coarse blocks of quarried stone. The way still led straight on, without a twist or a turn. From the burial chamber she had seen a light shining, far away. She had seen a distant light, and she had heard the sound of water lapping. Later, that sound had been obscured by the shuffling of their feet, but now she heard it again close by. In front of her, Freedom Love stopped walking and took a flashlight from his robe, while the lanterns drew off some way ahead. Outside the compass of their light, Charity could see more clearly where she stood, a triangular stone chamber perhaps fifty feet along each side, the ceiling perhaps twenty feet above her head. Near her, a stone stair was let into the wall. She guessed it led up to the surface, because some light was dribbling down it. It dribbled over rows of simple graves along the floor.

“We’ve lost her,” said Freedom Love. “She must have gone another way.”

They were in the tomb of some important bourgeois family. The cover of the grave where Charity had sat to rest was decorated with a list of modest privileges, together with some modest optimism that the dead man’s punishment would not be hard or long. Charity ran her hand over the stone. A chart of the solar system was etched into the dusty surface. The dead man’s soul had been consigned to Mega Prime.

The chamber was the terminus of an underground canal. Freedom Love climbed down into a ditch between the graves and gestured with his hands. Charity got to her feet and followed the lanterns towards the entrance of a low tunnel. There the water had receded back into the dark, leaving a scum of mud along the bottom of the ditch. But the men with the lanterns jumped down into it, and so did Charity and the stranger. They followed the lanterns into the tunnel’s mouth, where the light seemed to burn much brighter. Fifty feet along the ditch the water was around their ankles. Then the tunnel widened to the right, and they clambered up onto a stone landing, where a boat was drawn up into a stone trough.

“It took us thirteen days to find this place,” said Freedom Love. “It’s not on any of the maps. The Dogon don’t come up this far. But Sarkis remembered from his childhood, and after that we had to find the execution chamber by dead reckoning, under the pilings of the Morquar Gate. It took us three days with picks and shovels to break through. You have Gudrun Sarkis to thank—that man there.”

He pointed to the edge of the landing, to where one of the men was fussing with the boat. He was a squat, unlovely person of indeterminate age. His chest was decorated with a chain of bones and fur, and when he grinned up at Charity, she saw that his teeth were pointed, sharpened with a file.

“Why?” asked Charity.

“Human life is sacred, is it not?” replied Freedom Love vaguely. “Great Angkhdt tells us to succor those in pain. They were killing men and women for no reason—burying them alive. There were forty people in that room when we broke through. All but six of them were dead.”

“Not for no reason,” said the princess. “My family had a lot to answer for.”

“And his?” Freedom Love motioned towards the stranger, who was squatting by the water’s edge.

“He has no family.”

“An antinomial? Surely not.”

“Of a kind,” said Charity. “Not by choice. His memory was surgically removed.”

The stranger was less frightened now, though still his voice was trembling as he spoke for the first time. “I hate these stupid ropes,” he said. Again Charity was amazed by his resemblance to the prince, his childlike way of talking, the futile motion of his hands. He was pulling his hands apart, straining at the ropes, fluttering his fingers.

“I hate these ropes,” he repeated sulkily. But he shied away when Gudrun Sarkis, responding from a word from Freedom Love, drew a knife from his belt and came towards him. The stranger’s face took on an expression of slack terror, and the men around the boat started to laugh.

“Don’t torture him,” said Charity, for Sarkis was rolling up his eyes and twisting his lips in an expression of ferocity while the others laughed. “He has no memory of how a person should behave,” she said. She held out her own wrists, and at another word from the old man, Sarkis drew his knife under the knot and cut her hands apart. Then she went down to the edge of the landing to where the stranger was crouching against some fallen stones. And as she fumbled with the knotted ropes around his wrists, she tried to soothe him. She whispered to him and caressed his naked forearm in a gesture that was somewhat intimate, though he didn’t seem to be aware of that. She could not have touched him if he had not reminded her so strongly of her brother, who had been teased so cruelly when they were children.

“What are we waiting for?” she asked aloud. “Why are you all just standing around?”

Freedom Love was consulting his wristwatch. “We are waiting for the wind,” he said. In fact, the men had let the boat into the water, and they had pulled erect a flimsy mast.

“There is no wind down here,” said Charity, but at that moment there was a booming noise above their heads and a grinding of harsh gears. Immediately, the dead air around them seemed to move a little, and the lanterns flickered in their chimneys.

“Five-seventeen,” commented Freedom Love. “Every afternoon they open up the garbage doors below Saint Morquar’s Square, where the river runs underground. When the doors are open, there is a draft over this pool.”

Charity looked down into the water. It stretched away into the dark, as perfect as a sheet of steel. The light upon its smooth black surface seemed less an effect of shadow and reflection than of paint, as if the semicircle of lamplight were just painted on. When finally, after a moment, a pattern of ripples spread across the surface of the pool, it was like the swirl left by some unseen brush. Charity could see no hint of three dimensions, until Gudrun Sarkis pulled the boat against the stones and leaped aboard. Then thick black waves smacked up against its wooden sides as the vessel found its equilibrium, jostling the lamplight into a million shapeless dots.

As Gudrun Sarkis raised the sail, the rest of the men jumped down. They gathered up the lanterns and suspended them from poles in the bow and stern. Freedom Love reached out his hand to help Charity aboard, but she hung back. The stranger was still frightened. His eyes were shining, and he was tugging on her sleeve.

“Where are you taking us?” asked Charity again.

For the first time, Freedom Love evinced some irritation. “Come quick,” he said. “The doors only stay open thirty minutes. Do you want us to leave you in the dark?”

“Where are you taking us?” demanded Princess Charity.

“To safety. Come. Great Angkhdt tells us that we must trust each other.”

The sail flapped lethargically over to one side. It was a narrow triangle of red cloth, ragged and much patched. But the wind was gathering strength, and soon the boat started to draw away from the stone bank. Gudrun Sarkis leaned on his paddle to keep it in close, but still Charity hesitated. It was not until the last possible moment that the stranger jumped aboard, and Charity stepped after him.

“That is good,” said Freedom Love as the boat heeled away. It was a wide, shallow craft, sluggish and unresponsive, but it rocked as the stranger stumbled forward and sat down in the bilge. The four tribesmen sat on benches with paddles on their knees, while Freedom Love moved aft to take the steering oar. Charity sat at his feet as the boat moved out over the water, and she was listening to him sing under his breath. After a few false starts the melody came clear, and then the words:

What can I do to make you trust me?
Is it not enough to give you pleasure
Six times out of seven?