Sugar Rain (44 page)

“You!” she cried as he came in. “What have you to say? Up at all hours playing the fool while we get our throats cut. A lot you care. It’s bad enough to live in this disgusting place.”

She was standing with the baby in her arms, illuminated by Jenny’s torch. He blinked stupidly at her, and at his daughter sitting hidden by the light, upright in her bed. Then, again, Mrs. Cassimer started to cry. Wordlessly, shaking her head, she showed him the split pillow, the cut in the oilcloth of the tent.

“But he’s all right,” said Thanakar.

“Yes, he’s all right, no thanks to you. A fine excuse for a doctor. Up all night, God knows where. Don’t you ever sleep?”

Thanakar sat down upon the cot. His leg was hurting him, and he was very tired. “I was trying some research on my own time,” he said. “No more. Tomorrow we will go.”

“And high time too,” cried Mrs. Cassimer, unmollified. She had been fussing with the baby, but now he was sucking on the pacifier and she was free to speak. “It’s been weeks since that gentleman came to give you your safe-conduct. We could have left here anytime. But every day you have been gone, with people dying all around, and all the riffraff of the country, God knows why—”

Thanakar held up his palm. “Enough,” he said. “You don’t understand. I had work to do. No more. We leave at the first light. Soon as we can. I’ll send to Craton Starbridge for some horses.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Cassimer, suspiciously. “And why the sudden change of heart? Don’t tell me it’s because of this.” She motioned to the pillow in the crib.

“No,” confessed Thanakar. He held up his hand. “Please, Jenny,” he said, and she switched off the light, leaving them in a murky half-light, which filtered in through the oilcloth walls.

“The director asked me to go,” Thanakar confessed. “She fired me. I have been experimenting upon animals, and four have died. That is still a crime, in Caladon.”

In an instant Mrs. Cassimer had changed. Her voice was softer as she came to sit down next to Thanakar on the cot. “It’s a crime all over the world,” she said. “Oh sir, Great Angkhdt tells us to love all animals. Especially in springtime, when they are so few.”

“I had thought, in this camp, that there were rats enough,” said Thanakar. “Not that it matters—it will be good to go. You’re right, it was unfair to keep you. Now that Craton Starbridge has provided such a … generous alternative.”

In Mrs. Cassimer’s arms the baby was asleep. The pacifier dropped out of his open mouth. Thanakar looked up and saw that Jenny Pentecost had gotten out of bed. She was standing in front of him in a nightgown, her hair braided on the nape of her neck, and she was staring intently at his face. She reached out her hand, and before he could move away, she touched with her forefinger the locket round his neck.

Working in the hospital laboratory at midnight, for the first time he had caught glimpses of a theory. When the doctors had broken in and found him with the carcasses of four fat rats, he had been excited. He had been too excited to explain himself, too excited to speak, though he had slapped one of his superiors across the face. But when he saw they were not interested, that they did not even want to hear what he had found, then his excitement died, and he had stumbled home, disgusted and angry with them and with himself. “It serves them right,” he thought, stumbling back through the rows of tents.

That feeling had not lasted long. Coming home to his own tent, he had passed the orphans’ hospital, and his lantern had reflected in the eyes and faces of abandoned children, curled up on pallets of raw straw. Once he had stopped to listen to some children laughing, and his anger had not survived the sound.

It had been replaced with weariness and a dull strange ache, which helped him fall asleep once his family was calm and he had helped them to their beds. But in the middle of the night, suddenly the excitement of his discovery resurfaced, and he jumped out of bed and paced upon the floor. It was not yet light.

He limped to the flap of the tent and stood looking out over the deserted hospital. He shook his head to clear it. Wisps of a theory seemed to surround him in the air, drifting close around him, then receding.

He shook his head, resolved to march on back to the laboratory and break in, and if the doctors were still there, to slap them in the face and make them listen. Listen to what? The theory drifted out of reach. Still, he limped back to his cot and pulled on his boots. He pulled on his overcoat. But then he paused, looking around at his sleeping family and at the cut in the tent wall. Mrs. Cassimer had taken the infant prince into her bed. Jenny was sleeping curled away from him, her long hair covering her pillow.

The tent was built like an umbrella of oilcloth and strips of steel, radiating from a central wooden pillar. Light came from a kerosene lantern hung from a nail in the central shaft, and it shone on Jenny’s hair, and on her desk, and on the drawings stacked upon it.

Thanakar took the lantern from its nail, and he limped over to stand next to her cot. He put the lantern down upon her desk, and he stood over the pile of drawings, examining them one by one. He sat on the edge of Jenny’s cot and held one of the drawings up to the light. It was her most recent flea, dated seven days before.

He reached into an inside pocket of his coat, where he kept a small case of instruments and specimens. Unzipping it, he removed a magnifying glass; turning the wick of the lantern higher, he studied the drawing underneath the glass.

On the bottom of the insect’s carapace, between its lower limbs, there was a small protuberance, a small, sharp spiral, like the end of a small drill. Thanakar frowned, and then unfolded from a pocket of the case a piece of paper, an earlier rendition of the flea, one of the first Jenny had drawn. The bottom of its carapace was clean.

Finally Thanakar took out a pair of tweezers and a small vial full of samples. He unscrewed the top of the vial, and with the tweezers he caught the body of a small specimen, an insect in the vial. He pulled it out and stared at it under the magnifying glass. It was a small, translucent dot, one-sixteenth of an inch long, innocent of detail even under the glass. Nevertheless, Jenny Pentecost, sitting up in bed behind him, whispered, “You have found it,” in his ear.

“Is it the same?” asked Thanakar, without turning around.

“Yes.”

“I found it on a rat,” he said. “Look,” he said, indicating Jenny’s drawing. “That’s where it keeps the virus. In that drill between its legs.”

He put down his magnifying glass, and held the flea up to the light. “Of my new patients,” he continued, “four of six are members of the oil pressers’ caste. They were temple servants, in Charn under the old regime. They mixed prescriptions for the priests.”

He was speaking more to himself than to her, and he was holding the flea out towards the light. Then he brought the tweezers back up to his eye, until the flea was only inches from his face. “The curious thing,” he said, “is that mental illness could be spread this way. By a virus.”

“It is spread in many ways,” whispered Jenny, close to his ear. She had put her arms around his neck. Her face was close to his. She, too, was staring at the flea.

“Yes,” said Thanakar. “The king of the oil pressers had looted drugs out of the Temple of Surcease. He kept rodents, too, sacred to the God of Animals. They were in jeweled cages in his tent. After his death I brought four of them into the laboratory and cut them open.”

Jenny said nothing, but he could hear her soft breath on his neck. “Their guts were full of them,” he said. “The sacred fleas of Angkhdt. In Charn they grind their bodies up for medicines. They make an anesthetic paste. Once in the blood, it can cause hallucinations.”

“I know,” whispered Jenny.

“These cases I have seen, the first symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. Nevertheless, the patient dies in sixty hours. It is because they have been bitten by the flea. You could not have been exposed that way.” Thanakar indicated the difference between the drawings, the old one and the new. “You yourself see this is a new mutation.”

“They grind them up for medicine,” said Jenny, in his ear.

She had been asleep when Thanakar had left her to return to bed. But late at night she must have gotten up again, to find the book for him; it was Mrs. Cassimer’s copy, which she kept under her chamber pot.

The book was open to the sixteenth verse. In the margin a small passage was marked in Jenny’s hand, one of the so-called interjections of Beloved Angkhdt. It read,

What is it that drives me on?
It is like the scratching of a flea.
It is like the biting of a flea.

The night before, he had dragged his cot in from his own tent, to stay close to his family. But in the morning he went out, to wash and dress; when he returned, Mrs. Cassimer was awake, feeding the baby from a bowl of artificial soup. He sat down next to her with the book in his hand. “What does this mean?” he asked, indicating the marked verse.

“Oh, sir, that’s a naughty one,” said Mrs. Cassimer.

Jenny was still asleep. She had turned over onto her back. “Tell me,” said Thanakar.

“Oh no, sir, I couldn’t do that. Not to you. That’s a naughty one.”

Mrs. Cassimer was knowledgeable on all aspects of holy scripture. But she was also prudish, and protective of her master. “No, sir,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you that.” But he insisted. “Please,” he said.

“Very well. That one’s about women. That’s what the parsons say. They’ve got a medicine for that. An ointment that they use.”

“A medicine?”

“Yes, sir. They make it out of bugs. And a little sugar. Rainwater, I guess.”

“But what’s it for?”

“An ointment, sir. They rub it on their penises. Oh, sir, Angkhdt had fifty women in one day, the day He overcame the nunnery.”

At 9 A.M., Thanakar sent a letter to the director of the hospital, enclosing several of Jenny’s drawings. Then he sent a message to the ministry of agriculture. That one was fruitful: By the middle of the afternoon a carriage had arrived, a large, heavy vehicle drawn by four horses. Craton Starbridge’s escutcheon was painted on the door, a white ship under sail.

At four o’clock Thanakar was packed and ready. He loaded his family into the dark, stuffy interior and then stepped onto the box, wearing an oilskin against the rain. He nodded to the coachman, and pulled his wide-brimmed hat over his eyes. He had a pocket full of marijuana cigarettes. He put one between his teeth.

Nobody had come to see them off.

From the walls behind him, the church bells rang the hour. Then they were moving, the horses struggling in the mud, kicking through the radiating circles of huts and canvas shelters. A mist was rising from the ground. People stood half-naked in the rain, gaunt, spectral figures, watching them.

Thanakar lit his cigarette, and pulled his hat down over his face. Mounted underneath him on the near horse, the postilion was acting as a guide. He carried a letter of safe-conduct in his boot, countersigned by the commander of the corps of engineers. Thanakar saw the flash of gold upon its seal, and through a dull narcotic haze he watched the soldiers at the checkpoint stiffen and salute. They pulled back the barricades of sharpwood and barbed wire, and let them out onto the road.

They were heading for the mountains. The postilion had already shown Thanakar their destination on a map, a small village north of Gaur, two hundred miles northwest of the city. In other seasons it was famous for its beauty, and wealthy Caladonians kept villas there. In spring most of these were empty, but there remained a small local population, who farmed the terraced hills and fished the lake for weeds. There was a hospital, where Thanakar had been guaranteed a job. There was also a small military garrison, largely convalescents on half-pay. Craton Starbridge’s first cousin was the captain.

But to go west, first they headed south. In all other directions the roads were reserved for military transport. Even on the great south highway, in the first few hours Thanakar counted seventeen convoys of soldiers, and even a few ancient trucks.

Like the coach, these vehicles were moving towards the border. The coachman pulled aside out of the road to let them pass. At other times he halted for another reason: Crowds of refugees, heading in the opposite direction, made the horses kick and shy. It was not till after midnight that they reached the end of their first stage, twenty miles from the border where the road split west. Rooms were ready for them at the hotel. Jenny was asleep, so Thanakar carried her upstairs. They were to share a room.

Late at night he awoke from a strange dream. What was it? No—the details of it already were unclear to him, a medley of strange images that slipped and twisted from his grasp. He saw a bright light shining in his eyes. It seemed to hover a few inches from his face and disappear. He touched his fingers to his face and raised his head. In the corner of the room, under a small electric bulb, Jenny Pentecost sat hunched over a table.

Supported on one elbow, he watched her for a while—her narrow shoulders, the points of her thin shoulderblades under her slip. Her fine brown hair was twisted in a knot behind her head, out of the way. Single hairs stuck out at odd trajectories under the light. She had her back to him.

He remembered how he had found her, in a brothel by the Temple of Surcease, the night before they left the city. He had come back from the army and had searched for her, and had found her on the top floor of a brothel, near the altar of the God of Children. Was it there? It must have been there, that she had contracted this illness. It must have been there that the flea had crept into her blood. No doubt there had been a jar of unguent on the altar, where her clients had paused to anoint themselves. What kind of men could they have been, to try to duplicate the prowess of Beloved Angkhdt upon a child?