Sugar Rain (32 page)

“I have no plan. No. One time it would have made me happy to cut out his heart for what he did to me and to my family. Instead I feed him nothing but the raw flesh of fishes, but he will not eat it. I took him down to see if I could force him to profane the statue of Beloved Angkhdt, but he would not. I tried to force him to defecate onto the altar, but he would not. He just lies here in this place, reciting poetry. No. You understand—I want him to die. Die and be damned. But when I was a little girl, my mother told me that every Starbridge, no matter what his sins, rose up to Paradise when he was dead. It is our birthright. It is in our blood. You understand—I don’t want it to happen. Not to him.”

Charity looked back towards the antinomial. She had not moved; she was sitting cross-legged, and with a piece of wire she was rasping out the embrasure of her flute, enlarging it, changing its shape. Her yellow eyes were slitted down to nothing, and she was breathing heavily.

“So he is still alive,” whispered the white-faced woman. “He is still alive. But I have heard of a new drug. The desanctification drug—it takes away that Starbridge privilege. It pollutes the blood. So I have sent men up into the light to scrounge for it. When they come back, then we will see.”

The antinomial opened her eyes. She stared at Charity, but there was no flicker of interest or recognition in her face. But she was caressing her copper flute and scratching out one of the holes with a bit of wire. Then she stopped, and looked up behind Charity to the wall, with a gaze so pointed and direct that Charity followed it. There, hanging from a hook, was a ring of keys.

Lord Chrism Demiurge had dozed off for a little while, but now he started awake. “ ‘She had no heart,’ ” he quoted groggily. “ ‘Her skin was cold, her breasts were cold, and her face was white as milk.’ ” Then slowly, sleepily, he put his hands over his ears again, for behind him the antinomial had started to play again, a whisper of low notes.

The stranger frowned. “How do you know? How do you know what she is thinking?”

“Since last night she’s put no guards on us,” said Charity. “What can that mean but we are free to go? Look,” she said, “here’s where we are. The entrance of the tunnel is northwest of here, no more than seven miles overland.”

“And from there?”

“I don’t know. It’s not marked—perhaps a hundred miles to the border. But we can get outside the city limits, that’s the most important thing. Perhaps then we can go up.”

She was sitting in a tent in the shantytown below the mausoleum, with the map that Freedom Love had given her spread out on her knees. “We could go up here,” she said. “And here, by this waterfall, if the way has not been blocked.”

The stranger stood beside her. Light from a candle gleamed upon his face, softening his lost, puzzled expression. At such moments, his resemblance to her brother seemed uncanny. His fat lips were trembling, and his reconstructed chin. He held in his right hand, as he so often did, Prince Abu’s letter. It had become his talisman. Often before he slept he would whisper its injunctions: “How can our hearts be dirty if our hands are clean?”

He had folded the letter into a square. Now he pressed the greasy paper to his forehead. “Caladon,” he said. “What’s Caladon to you? To me it’s just a word.”

When Charity said nothing, he went on. “What did that man say? Freedom Love. ‘We live forever in the present tense’—that’s how it is for me. In these dark caves the world does not exist, except the one place where your lantern hits, the one place where you are.”

He took the prince’s letter down and started to unfold it. “You understand,” he said, “I’m following you. I have no past; it’s hard for me to have faith in my future. Just where the lantern hits: here. ‘Get in touch with Thanakar. He is gone to Caladon. You should join him there.’ ”

He sighed, then raised his head to look at her. “It’s not much,” he said. “Who is Thanakar?”

She dropped her eyes back to the map. The way to Caladon was marked in red. “He was my friend,” she said. “He was my brother’s friend, and mine as well.”

“Was he your lover?”

Charity shrugged. The question brought back Thanakar so vividly, standing with her on the balcony, their elbows almost touching. She remembered his high forehead and long nose. “Yes,” she said, and then she shook her head. “What’s love? Besides, he may be dead.”

With her forefinger she touched the name of Caladon upon the map. “His memory serves a purpose, that is all,” she said. “Like you, I have no vision of the future. Caladon, I’ve never been there. I can’t picture it. So instead, I picture him, his face, his hands. Because I need a goal. Something to climb towards. Otherwise I’d stop. Otherwise I’d stop and die.”

“There, you see,” he said. “It’s memory that makes a picture in the mind.”

The tent was large, smelling of fish and littered with the detritus of the family they had displaced: baskets full of wood and rags and coal and bones. A child came to stare at them from time to time through the open doorway, small, serious, potbellied, with long hair and a greasy nose. He was clutching a small wagon carved from bone.

The stranger made a face, and the child disappeared. “I need my memory to survive,” he said.

When Charity had told him about Chrism Demiurge, he had said nothing. Now with patient fingers he refolded the prince’s letter and put it in his pocket near his heart.

“He won’t tell you anything,” she said. “He’s lost his mind. I’m sure that he won’t recognize you.”

“I’ve got to try,” answered the stranger.

“You’re better off not knowing. Aren’t you afraid to know?”

“I’ve got to try.”

So later, when they left, instead of heading north along the road to Caladon, they wandered west beyond the mausoleum, back towards the prisoners and the pool. “There are guards,” said Charity.

“I’ll show them my tattoo.”

They had thought to choose the time when there were fewest people in the streets. But there was always someone. Old women sat cross-legged in the dust, sewing strips of plastic into sheets, while men played betting games with pebbles and the vertebrae of fish. When finally they left, with their packs on their backs, a crippled child followed them along the water’s edge. He followed them along the beach. But when they wandered up over the dunes, he let them go and squatted down in the wet sand.

From the top of the dune, they could see the lights around Lord Chrism’s tomb. “It’s no good,” said Charity. “Look at them all.” The paths and steps were lined with oil lamps, and the pool presented a flat circle of reflected light. It was ringed with torches, and there must have been three dozen tribesmen sitting around it in the dust. They were racing boats over the surface of the water, tiny canoes rigged with tiny sails. By blowing through long, metal pipes, they made an artificial wind.

Others sat in clusters on the steps, spears in their hands, and some even carried rifles. But the stranger was undaunted. “That’s the one,” said Charity, pointing to the largest tomb, and then she followed him as he walked straight ahead under the lights. And as the guards called out their challenges, he lifted up his hand, displaying the symbol of the golden sun crudely cut into his palm, the counterfeit tattoo of Abu Starbridge.

To Charity’s surprise, the symbol seemed to mean something even there, so far from the sun. The guardsmen stood apart to let the stranger pass, and they knocked their fists against their hearts. Charity followed the stranger as he marched up the steps, and she stood on the top step looking back. Behind them, the tribesmen had returned to their game, though one or two looked after them with open mouths. The air over the pond smelled flat and stale and full of salt.

Charity turned to go inside. Near the door the antinomial lay back against the wall, her eyes slitted down, her flute held loosely in her lap. In the far corner the stranger knelt over Lord Chrism Demiurge, rousing him from sleep. The old man had a gash on his left eye. The blood had dried to a black powder, which had streaked his face and stiffened in his hair. And when he turned his head, Charity could see that he was wounded in the eye itself. Blood had leaked into his eye, extinguishing the fire that had always glowed there.

“ ‘I dreamed that I had died in my own house,’ ” he quoted, his voice desperate and shrill. “ ‘And in my dream there was a darkness rising up around my bed, around my cup and chair, my book and bottle and the faces of my friends …’ ”

“Hush now,” the stranger interrupted. “Quiet now. B-be quiet. I mean no harm. Only there is something you must tell me.”

“No harm?” cried the old man. “ ‘I was alone. And in my dream the darkness was as cold as space, and I came down onto a world of darkness, breaking like a star. And like a star I squandered all my strength and all my light, until I was alone in that dark world.’ ”

“Hush now,” said the stranger. “Quiet, please, and look at me. Touch my face and listen to my voice. It is not so long since you last heard it, in my cell in Wanhope Hospital. You were there when my bandages were taken off.”

For a moment it seemed that he had caught the old man’s attention. Lord Chrism put his fingers out and touched the stranger’s face. He was mumbling deep in his throat; he coughed and swallowed, and the words came clear. “ ‘Dark streets,’ ” he said. “ ‘Dark houses. I came down onto an endless plain. Oh my beloved, how could you have left me, when the world without you has no rest or comfort, and the darkness burns like fire?’ ”

“Be quiet.” The stranger grabbed Lord Chrism by the jaw and slid his hand over the old man’s mouth. In the doorway Charity had pulled the ring of keys down from the wall and stooped to unlock the chains around the antinomial. The woman had not moved, but her eyes were open.

Charity broke the padlock apart, but the woman wasn’t even watching her. She was staring at the old man, so Charity looked back to see the blood pulsing in his temples as the stranger squeezed his mouth. She saw his eyes stretched wide in fright. “Stop,” she said.

But the stranger wasn’t listening. He was shaking the old man’s head from side to side, but when he spoke, his voice was soft and level. “Think,” he said. “Just think. I am the double of Prince Abu Starbridge. But I was someone else before. I had a name, a life, a home. Perhaps a family.”

He released his hand over the old man’s mouth. Demiurge stared up at him with his blind eyes. “ ‘Sweet God,’ ” he said. “ ‘Make for me a Paradise in all the darkest places of my heart. Make it shine like sunlight, like the early morning sun …’ ” But then he stopped, his voice shaken from his mouth, for the stranger was slapping him across the face and battering his face against the wall. “Stop, you’ll kill him,” cried out Charity. But it was too late. The old man’s eyes stared wildly for a moment, and then his pupils drifted up into his lids. Charity knelt down and pulled the stranger’s hand away, but Lord Chrism could no longer be revived. A spasm shook his body, and then his head fell to one side.

The stranger let the corpse sink to the floor. Charity turned away. She looked up towards the stranger’s face. He was trembling with frustration, but his eyes were full of tears. She put her hand upon his wrist. “Never mind,” she said. “Never mind. It was a mercy,” even though she knew that that was not the reason for his tears. But she hadn’t time to think of any other consolation. She heard a hiss of anger from the open doorway, a cold, angry whisper, and she looked back and saw the white-faced woman standing there. She did not speak. Only she gave that same wordless hiss, and then she started forward.

The stranger stumbled to his feet. He shrank back flat against the wall, trembling and full of fear, his arms stretched out. In one hand he held a piece of rock that he had snatched up from the floor. But when the white-faced woman grabbed him by his collar and his shirt, he let it drop. She pulled him up, away from the wall into the center of the chamber; he was weak in the knees, but she supported him, and shook him by the front of his shirt. She bent her face to his and bit him on the cheek, and on the shoulder, and then she pulled open his shirt and bit him deep and hard over his heart.

Then she raised her head. She was supporting the stranger with her hands under his armpits, standing with her back to the door, so that she never saw the antinomial at all. But Charity saw her. Charity watched her getting to her feet, stiffly at first, rubbing her knees. Charity watched her straighten up, until she stood erect behind the white-faced woman.

She was holding her copper flute in both hands above her head. Charity scrambled up and grabbed hold of the stranger from behind, just as the antinomial brought her flute down on the back of the woman’s head, a single, massive stroke. For an instant Charity was aware of the woman’s face next to her own, her cold breath, her lips, her eyes changing from pink to yellow. Then she went down, without noise or protest, and lay crumpled on the floor.

“Now,” said the antinomial. She stood at the doorway looking out, and in one hand she held her copper flute. Charity had her arms around the stranger, but soon he found his feet. He stumbled over the two bodies on the floor, his hands clutched to his breast. He was whimpering and there was spit in the corner of his mouth.

Outside, the tribesmen stood around the tomb. They stood in a semicircle, three or four men deep, the torchlight shining on their painted faces. But still they showed no symptoms of alarm, even when they saw the antinomial kick over the oil lamp inside the door.

She kicked over the lamp, and a puddle of oil started to spread across the stone mosaic of the floor. Weak blue flames rustled on its surface, making a sound like the beating of a pigeon’s wing. The antinomial stepped into the middle of it, and the fire burst around her foot, changing color as it rose. “Now,” she said again, and she stalked out of the door and down the steps.

The stranger clutched his hand over his heart. His breath was wheezing and rattling, and there was a scum of foam over his lips. But Charity pushed him forward, and she took his other hand and raised it up, so that the tribesmen could see her brother’s symbol on the stranger’s palm, the tattoo of the sun. They didn’t care, they weren’t paying attention. They moved apart and let the travelers push through their ranks. They were standing up straight with their weapons in their hands, watching the tomb, and some had tense, puzzled expressions, and some were weaving and chanting and clapping their hands, and swaying with a kind of rapture. But it wasn’t until she had reached the dunes that Charity looked back and saw the reason. By then the flames were showing through the doorway and the geometric screens, and the crowd was wailing and moaning, because the white-faced woman was standing on the steps, her gown on fire and her hair ablaze.