Sugar Rain (7 page)

But nothing was more pathetic than to see a crowd of priests together, and that morning in the council chamber of the Inner Ear, on October 45th, in the eighth phase of spring, there must have been two hundred slouching in their chairs, rows and rows of blind, footless, fat old men. Many were already dead, mere skeletons wrapped in gorgeous robes, their miters slipping from their polished skulls. Many more were almost dead, carried up from their apartments on the backs of servants. For no one had wanted to miss that meeting, dead or not.

The council chamber was built in the shape of a shallow amphitheater, high in the central tower of the Temple of Kindness and Repair, on a hill overlooking the city. In front of the chamber was a raised dais, and behind it stretched a great flat pane of solid glass, forty feet from edge to edge, mined unbroken in a single piece during the reign of the eighteenth bishop. From the dais you could see the city spreading out to the horizon, held in its cup of hills, and in the distance, miles away, the Mountain of Redemption loomed through the mist and smoke. Between the temple and the mountain, the valley floor was covered with a congeries of streets and walls and spires and gilded domes. You could see the river snaking through down to the port, or where the port had been before the war with Caladon had throttled it.

On the dais stood the bishop’s throne, but it was empty. Beside it in a smaller chair of carved obsidian sat Chrism Demiurge, the bishop’s secretary. He was an old, emaciated man, with the face and gestures of an old scavenger bird. With long, bloodless fingers he plucked restlessly at his robe. He looked around at the assembled company.

Presently he lifted his pocket watch up to his face, and with his left hand he pulled back his eyelids so that his right eye bulged out of its socket. In that way he could tell what time it was, for he was afflicted with a peculiar kind of blindness. He could perceive color and movement, but not form. Holding his watch an inch away from his right eye, he could see the motion of the hands.

And when the watch hands had aligned themselves into an angle that he thought he recognized, he produced a bell from among the folds of his robe and rang it. It had no effect. There was no lessening in the noise around him after the clear, sweet tone had died away. The buzz and twitter of the voices of the council continued as before, until the secretary stooped to touch a golden cord that ran over his feet. Long, sinuous, metallic, it ran away from him on either side in a great circle around the auditorium, looping through the banks of seats. It ran through the fingers of the assembled priests, a golden serpent with a golden voice, a cord of telepathic sorcery that linked the members of the council. As the secretary chafed it with his thumbnail, the priests fell silent one by one.

“Gentlemen,” said Chrism Demiurge. Quiet and insistent, his voice filled the chamber. He said, “We don’t have much time left. There is no time for us to argue. Instead I want to show you what I saw. It gives me pain to do so, but a minister of God has certain duties to the truth. The truth,” he repeated gently, and then he held out his hands. He had replaced his bell and watch back in the pockets of his robe, but in one hand he still grasped the telepathic cord. With the other he made a soft, caressing gesture. A brazier was set into the stone floor in front of him, and on it burned a small red smokeless fire. It flared up suddenly under his fingers and then subsided as the light in the chamber faded down to darkness. Mist gathered outside the window behind the secretary’s back, and the rain beat down. Soon the shadows lay thick in all the corners of the room, and there was no sound except the old man’s soft, gentle voice. “I saw her,” he said. “God help me.”

An image formed out of the shadow, floating above the little fire. At first it was just a cloud of radiance, amber-colored, soothing to the eye. Yet it didn’t seem to lighten any of the dark around it; it just hung there over the fire, and gradually it acquired mass and bulk and shape and became the figure of a woman sitting cross-legged in the air. She was naked, surrounded by a nimbus of amber light, and her hair was black and fell in heavy curls around her shoulders. In a little while she raised her head, and all around the room the golden cord glowed dimly as the priests recognized her, even the blind ones.

The thirty-second bishop of Charn had the pale skin peculiar to the children of that season. It had a richness to it, like something edible, some sweet kind of dessert. She had been born in the third phase of spring; now five thousand days later she was still almost a girl. Her body had a kind of awkwardness about it, because it was still changing. There was some clumsiness in the way she pushed her hair back, the way she shifted her position and stretched out her legs. Naked, she had not yet learned self-consciousness. But her face was a woman’s face, with a gravity beyond her age. Last child of an ancient family, she had been raised by priests in the fastness of the temple, and the endless round of rituals had left their mark upon her face, had given her an appreciation of futility unusual in one so young. But there was arrogance, too, burning in her clear black eyes, for she had lived her whole life in the courts of power and learned much.

She stretched out onto her back, arching her spine so that her breasts flattened down. She raised her arms above her head, in a gesture so languorous and inviting that it would have changed the breathing of most normal men. But in that chamber full of eunuch priests and half-dead corpses, the golden serpent glowed dully. There was no interest of that kind. Perhaps a few of the observers, keener and more perceptive than the rest, might have realized that the image made by Chrism Demiurge possessed a physical perfection beyond even that of the original. The bishop’s skin wasn’t that sweet, nor her hair that heavy, nor that black. He had made her perfect for reasons of his own, out of a sentiment that was perhaps the last spark of feeling left in his old breast. Or perhaps it was out of a sense of contrast, to make the change more poignant when the cat materialized between her legs, a huge, rough yellow tomcat with a missing ear. And when it leaped between her legs onto her stomach and lay down, its paws made dirty prints on her white skin.

The apparition of the cat made chaos in the chamber. One priest shouted aloud, and others muttered prayers. The golden cord glowed hot white for an instant. But in a little while, above the noise of the outrage came the ringing of the secretary’s bell and his soft voice saying, “It is true. I saw her with the demon, not ten feet from the altar of our God. I saw her. With my own … eyes.”

As he spoke, the cat became a demon indeed, under the influence of his caressing hand. It grew huge, bigger than the bishop, with a distorted, masklike face, all lips and gaping eyes. It licked her breasts with its great lolling tongue, and scratched her shoulders until the blood came. And when it pushed her legs apart to penetrate her, even in that circle of eunuchs there were some who cried out, astonished that her small body could accommodate so furious an attack.

 

On the morning of October 45th, in the eighth phase of spring, the council passed a vote of censure, and in a rider to another bill, the bishop was condemned to death, for witchcraft and for heresy. The vote was close, the roll call taken in complete silence. Everybody understood the importance of what was happening. And when Chrism Demiurge cast his vote, a sigh rose up around the chamber, an exhalation of relief. Everybody knew that they had taken an irrevocable step. Later historians, describing the events that led up to the October Revolution, wrote that the council at this time was overtaken by a kind of frenzy, like a pack of starving dogs that, for want of further prey, finally turn upon themselves. They point to tyrants and oligarchs of other years, who by combinations of good judgment and good luck managed to keep their governments intact almost to summer. They conclude that the council of the Inner Ear, that spring, must have been in the grip of some collective madness, to persist so long in policies that led up to their own destruction. This is not true.

In fact that day, which was to end with the mutiny of the bishop’s private guard and two regiments of her soldiers, started in an atmosphere of calm. All night the crowds had rioted around the Mountain of Redemption, but by dawn they had dispersed back to their own parishes, where food was still being distributed at the end of morning prayer. And at nine o’clock the weather broke, and the sun came out for half an hour. Charity and Raksha Starbridge had stopped in a vacant lot where some buildings had been torn down. The princess climbed up on a hunk of masonry to look back at the palace where she had lived her whole life, while the parson squatted below her, wrapped in his filthy robe. “Come down,” he cried. “Don’t waste your time.”

Waste? thought Charity. The Starbridge towers rose above the house, delicate spires of glass and stone, glinting in the sun. Behind them the mountain filled the sky, tier after tier of battlements, and Charity could see soldiers pacing back and forth along the nearest parapets. The mist had parted on the mountain’s crest, and even at that distance Charity could see the work up there, the cranes and winches, the great soaring arches of unfinished stone, all covered with black scaffolding.

A wind blew down out of the mountain carrying noises from the work site, a muted throbbing and the grind of gears. Steel cables hundreds of feet long dragged a load of bricks and sand up towards the summit. Charity followed it with her outstretched finger. “What’s that?” she asked. Living on its lower slopes, she had never guessed the prison’s bulk. But the parson looked up grimly. “The time is coming,” he muttered, “when all men will be free. Women, too,” he muttered, smiling suddenly. That morning he had eaten three or four white pills, and his hands were shaking. When he got to his feet, he staggered and almost fell. “Come on,” he cried, lurching back across the lot to where a small alleyway led down towards the river.

Charity looked at his greasy head, his spotted neck. She too felt giddy, drunk from sensation, and she was staring wide-eyed at every new thing. She was standing on a broken block of carving two yards high, a piece from the shoulder of a fallen statue. She sat down and swung her legs over the side, kicking at the ridge of an enormous ear. She spread her hand over the surface of the stone. The rain had painted it with sugar scum; it was rough and pitted to her touch, and pools of sugar had collected in the joints between the stones. She brought her fingers up to her face, smiling at the sweet, nauseating odor, the taste of honey mixed with gasoline. So much smiling was making her cheeks tired.

Strange sounds came down the alleyway and drifted out into the lot near where the parson picked his way among the rubble. Charity could hear drumbeats and the sound of bells rising above a muddled, whining chant. The parson stopped and rocked back on his heels. He looked anxious and afraid, but the princess was happy because there, framed in the entrance to the alleyway, painted on a large square standard, was the portrait of a face she knew.

Caught by the breeze, it bellied towards her out of the opening, supported from behind by men carrying long poles. They strutted out into the yard, and behind them marched a procession of perhaps forty men and women. They blew whistles and rang handbells, and they had looted drums out of some temple, long black hollow logs covered with carvings. Each drum took two men to carry it; they took careful steps over the uneven ground, while others beat a ragged rhythm using sticks wrapped in red flannel.

Sitting on the fallen statue, Princess Charity clapped her hands and laughed, because the banner above them was unrolling on the wind, and the face that it carried was the face of her brother, Abu Starbridge. In a little while the marchers had found an open space, where the ground was clear for a circle of thirty feet. They put the banner up on poles stuck in the dirt.

They were a troupe of traveling dancers, and beneath the banner six or seven men and women went through a pantomime of recognition and welcome, embracing each other and slapping each other’s palms. The rest spread out in a circle around them, and Charity jumped down from her perch and came close, standing next to Raksha Starbridge in the crowd. The lot was filling up with people. Men straggled in from neighboring streets, and groups of children rolled their hoops and pointed and chattered to each other in high voices.

“What is it?” asked Charity.

“Passion players,” answered the parson. “It’s a play about your brother’s trial. Look, there he is.” He pointed to a dancer who was putting on his costume and his mask.

“Why? What happened?”

The parson looked at her. “I can’t believe you haven’t heard,” he said. “You must be the only person in Charn who doesn’t know. Today is his execution day.”

Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “Don’t say it,” she cried. “They will not dare.”

The parson shrugged and turned his attention to the play. Around them the crowd was quieting down. One of the dancers had put on a quilted jacket and a mask: a bald head and a high white forehead. He drank liquor out of an empty bottle and made a mime of drunkenness, stumbling and staggering around the circle until the crowd roared. Then he held his hand up for silence. His palm was painted with the symbol of the sun.

“How dare they?” whispered Charity, tears in her eyes. “How can they make fun of him? He is a prince of Charn.”

“Hush,” warned the parson, and put his fingers on her arm. “They mean no disrespect,” he muttered. “On the contrary. You’ll see.”

The play started. It was in pantomime and hard to understand for someone who knew nothing of the story. In most cases people seemed to know, and those who didn’t know were quickly told by others in the crowd. All around there was a hum of talk. Charity plucked the sleeve of her companion after every scene, whispering, “What is happening? What is happening now?”

“How can you be so ignorant?” grumbled Raksha Starbridge. “The whole city knows this story. Look, there’s the church. You know, where the fire started.”

Four dancers sat cross-legged on the ground, joined at wrists and ankles with gray scarves, indicating manacles. Above them stood another dancer, dressed in the red robes of priesthood. His mask was grotesque and distorted, painted half face, half skull, and he held a pillow out in front of him to indicate his fat.