Sugar Rain (40 page)

Raksha Starbridge had voted first, which was the prerogative of the majority speaker. But finally, after half an hour, as the bailiff read the third-to-the-last name, Raksha Starbridge raised his hand. On the bailiff’s board the vote stood deadlocked, 319 to 319, with 121 abstentions. But the last three delegates were on their feet. One, a solid member of the Rim, was waving his right hand. But the last two were Rebel Angels, and when he saw them standing in their places, clothed in midnight blue, Raksha Starbridge signaled to the president to stop. “I’d like to change my vote,” he said.

Instantly Earnest Darkheart was on his feet. “Little fuck-face!” he shouted. “It’s your own law. You can’t vote against it.”

But again, Raksha Starbridge raised his hand. “It is my prerogative,” he said. “The proposal was read by Mr. Samosir, not me.”

At issue was a parliamentary device by which any delegate who voted with the majority could ask for a recount on a variety of pretexts. Raksha Starbridge had used that loophole once before, changing his vote when defeat seemed certain. During the recess the Desecration League had visited a dozen members in their houses, to ensure that at the recount the next day the Rim would be victorious.

But this time, Earnest Darkheart was prepared. “No!” he shouted. “Starbridge murderer! How long can we endure this tyranny?” And then he went storming down the rows of seats, pushing delegates aside as the president rapped his hammer. Instantly soldiers of the Desecration League went up to meet him, their truncheons in their hands.

But on the left side of the chamber, the seats around the colonel were dark with his officers in their black uniforms. As Earnest Darkheart rose, they had risen too, though their leader still sat sprawling in his chair, picking his nose. One shouted out, and at the word, sixteen soldiers of the new model army burst through the doors at the top of the chamber and spread out among the upper benches with automatic rifles in their hands. At the same time, the colonel’s adjutant drew a pistol from his waist. Holding it in both hands out in front of him, he blew a hole through the captain of the League, who was charging up the steps. At that the whole hall erupted into violence, and in the confusion Earnest Darkheart pushed his way down onto the dais. Leaping over the rail, he jumped onto the speaker’s platform, and he took Raksha Starbridge’s head between his hands and crushed him down onto the floor, crushing him senseless and breaking his jaw.

That was the end of him. He was led away by Aspe’s soldiers and kept under arrest in Wanhope Hospital, close by. That night an enormous crowd of people rioted for his release. From Morquar Gate to the assembly, they burned shops and pillaged houses, and towards dawn they tried to break into the hospital. But there they were dispersed by Aspe’s troops: two companies of what had at one time been the bishop’s purge. They had taken down the silver dog’s head from their flags, and torn the bishop’s ensign from their collars. But they were still the purge, black-coated and contemptuous, their officers on horseback, armed with whips and nothing else, the men striding through the crowd, looking for the orange badges of the League.

By five o’clock it was all over. Many of the members of the Rim had been imprisoned, on various charges of malicious mayhem. The League was scattered; even so, Valium Samosir and five hundred followers left the city by the northern gates, half an hour before dawn. They took with them a treasure of gold and works of art, reported variously at seven and eleven million dollars, looted from the public storerooms and from Kindness and Repair. Fifty miles north of Charn they joined with local cadres of the Desecration League, in the abandoned glassworks of Badgaon.

But in Charn, on the 91st, when he was strong enough to stand, Raksha Starbridge went on trial before the National Assembly. The charges against him—perjury, fraud, and possession of a hypodermic—seemed out of balance with the penalty, but it didn’t matter. In the assembly chamber there were only ninety delegates still wearing the colors of the Rim. Of the rest, most were in prison or had fled away. Of those who remained, few dared to speak; they sat huddled in their seats.

The evidence took seven hours to read. When it was over Raksha Starbridge asked to be assisted to his feet, so that he might address the chamber. He was sitting in the dock below the speaker’s platform, which was empty. But no one ventured to assist him, and no one could understand him when he spoke, for his jaw was wired shut. He tottered to his feet, and staggered to the rail and raised his hands, but no one could understand him. No one could hear him over the chanting of the Rebel Angels, who were stamping their feet and pounding on their chairs, and chanting, “Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge,” till the chamber shook.

After a few minutes Raksha Starbridge sat back down. The assembly passed a vote of censure, and after that the verdict of the Tribunal was inevitable. Of the seven members, five had been appointed that same day.

On the 92nd, Raksha Starbridge met his end, grinning and shaking on the scaffold of the Morquar Gate. Spectators jammed onto the roofs of the adjoining houses, breaking the slates and kicking down the chimneys.

Two days later they climbed again onto the same roofs, to watch Colonel Aspe lead his soldiers up the Street of Seven Sins, out over the fairgrounds and northward over the hills towards Badgaon. In the evening there was a terrible storm, a hail of crystals as heavy as ball bearings, which bruised people’s skin and made the roads impassable. In the poorer wards, people crouched under their shelters as the rain fell like blows from a hammer on the boards above their heads. Many small buildings fell down that night, collapsing from the weight of sugar on their roofs. In the morning the rain lay everywhere in crystal piles, smoldering from the pressure of its own mass. In the fairgrounds of the festival the canvas hung like rags from the tentpoles, and more than half the booths were beaten down. The ferris wheel had fallen on an angle, twenty degrees away from perpendicular.

 

This new weather lasted intermittently through January. Every day there was some kind of hard precipitation. Sometimes the sky seemed full of glass. Some nights there was a sound like breaking bottles everywhere, and in the morning there were jagged shards of crystal in the streets. Children sucked on it like candy, and some fell sick. It contained unhealthy minerals which affected the nervous system, causing insomnia and fretfulness. In the countryside beyond the city, Aspe’s soldiers followed the uneven ground. In barren valleys and in rifts of clay they camped under shelters of corrugated tin. At night they wore earplugs, and by day they carried steel umbrellas. The rain battered them and pounded down upon their heads, but even so they kept strict discipline, marching north through country that had recently been desert. Now, under the deluge, life was coming back: lichens and mosses creeping over the stones, the cracks full of beetles and wet slugs.

And there were people, too. There were people in the hills, returning to farms and villages abandoned by their grandparents, trying to scratch some living off the rocks. In a town of fifty houses, nestled in a rock ravine near the Caladonian frontier, half a dozen families had made new homes. They had raised new rooftops, repaired old walls. Dry all winter, the creek was full of water, and on the morning of December 1st, Charity Starbridge stepped from rock to rock above the stream, trying to find purchase on the heavy sugar crust. Off balance, she waved her hands in the air. Upstream, up ahead, a small boy waved back.

She had left the village at first light, well rested and carrying a pack. It was twenty miles to the Whisper Bridge where she would cross to Caladon: two days’ journey over that terrain. The village had provided a guide, a young boy, the youngest child of the family who had first taken her in. Four weeks before, when she had first come up from underground, they had nursed her and fed her with a kindness that had seemed bewildering in that stark land.

She had stayed in the village longer than she had intended. It had taken her a long time to regain her strength. And the villagers had been so kind; some days she had thought that she might stay forever. They had begged her to stay, and sometimes she had thought, What’s Caladon to me? My cousin may be dead.

Sometimes, lying in bed, or walking with the shepherds as they took their flocks into the canyons, she had been tempted to stay. She had been lulled into a sense of peace. But in the last week of November, there were rumors of new soldiers in the area. A skirmish had been fought at Axel’s Cross, between the League and Aspe’s troops, and then the League was scattering northwards, refugees themselves. On the evening of the 98th, boys from the village had seen fires on the ridge. On the 99th, the village elders had brought the princess gifts: a shagweed blanket, a steel knife, and a new coat. They had knelt to kiss her hands.

Up ahead the trail left the creek and wandered up a slope of barren scree. Her guide waved back at her, and she stopped, resting, pushing the sugar from her eyes. She tilted her head, turning away from him and looking towards the ridge, searching for the music that she thought she had heard all morning, above the sound of water and the pounding of the rain. Throughout her whole stay at the village she had sought for it, the music of the copper flute. Sometimes she was sure the antinomial was keeping with her, unseen among the rocks, coming down in darkness, playing music just beyond the limit of her ears. Sometimes Charity was sure that she had gone. Why would she stay? Once Charity had taken food up to the ledge above the village, new potatoes wrapped in grass; in the morning they were gone, proving nothing.

She wiped the rain out of her eyes and clambered up the slope. At noon she rested with her guide, and again at four o’clock. At sundown they stood upon the highest ridge, under the shelter of a pinnacle of rock.

“Look,” said the boy. He pointed out over the valley, and in the distance she could see the Whisper Bridge, a single, arching span of metal, built in the reign of the nineteenth bishop to commemorate some victory. Half-hidden in the mist, it rose up on the far horizon, joining the lips of a deep crevasse. On the other side lay Caladon, shrouded in darkness. For thirty miles in each direction, the bridge was the only place to cross, for the Moldau River was impassable that season, swollen by the rain.

The bridge itself, a metal span not five feet wide, was dangerous. It had been built for purposes of ceremonial, back when the road through the crevasse was dry, and it had supported a great lantern, a beacon of victory, hanging from the middle of the arch. The light had been extinct for generations, but there still existed, clamped to the outside of the span, the steel rungs that the lamplighters had used, up one slope and down the other. On still nights, travelers had been known to slip across.

In the shelter of the pinnacle, in a cave hollowed from the rock, Charity made camp. She sat with her back against the stones, exhausted, looking out towards the bridge. There she fell asleep, curled in her blanket while the boy sat guard. He was proud of his responsibility, but in the morning he was fast asleep. At dawn Charity left him behind, curled up among the rocks, and she left the steel knife, too, determined not to find a use for it. She felt lighthearted, safe: the trail ran straight and true down to the bridge, or so she thought. But by midmorning she was lost, for the rain had washed away the route. The boulders were the size of houses, and the scree was slippery and loose. At one point a whole slope of it started to move, and she fell down to her knees in bitter sand and shards of silicon.

Cursing with frustration, she continued on, choosing the way at random, searching for higher ground. And when she heard a noise behind her, she turned around, hoping that the boy had followed her. But it was not he. Down below, at the bottom of the ravine, a man was leading a horse.

He was a soldier, dressed in high boots and stiff black pants. He wore a vest of some quilted material, which left his arms and shoulders bare. His hair was long under a studded steel cap, and he was carrying a rifle on his back. His horse was a good one, sleek and well fed, its horns sharp and gilded. It was heavily loaded, with a high, wooden saddle and many odd-shaped bundles.

Charity crouched down behind some rocks. She was too far away to see the soldier’s hands, but he was wearing an ensign, a tattered orange scarf tied to his naked bicep. It was the token of the League, and when she saw it, she staggered back, twisting her foot between two stones. Dislodged by her heel, one clattered down the slope, a rock the size of a man’s head, and it came to rest between the soldier’s boots.

He raised his face. Charity ducked down out of sight, but the movement betrayed her. Other stones followed the first. Peering through the sticky rain, the soldier took his rifle from his back. “Come out,” he said. “Come out where I can see you.”

Charity stayed low. But when the soldier started towards her up the slope, she turned and ran. Leaving her refuge in the boulders, she clambered on all fours over the uncertain shale, diagonally up the wall of the ravine. She trusted that the soldier would not leave his horse; nevertheless, her back felt cold and big. She was hoping that his rifle might misfire in the rain. It often happened, but in fact he never raised his gun. He just stood there, up to his ankles in the slippery rock, while she scampered on up the ravine. But after a few yards the shale gave out onto a slope of powdered silicon, and the rock was mixed with mud and shards of rain. She slipped and fell, and then the whole slope subsided downwards, so that she lost her balance and fell down, sinking to her elbows in the sticky marl. The soldier never moved. He waited, and in time she came to him, sliding downwards in a clatter of small stones.

“What have we here?” said the soldier. She did not look up. But he reached down and put his fingers underneath her jaw, and Charity could smell the dust on his hand, the cinnabar dye that the soldiers used to cover their tattoos. It left a mark upon her cheek. He used no force; he didn’t have to. But she could feel his strength, and so she turned her face to look at him.