Sugar Rain (8 page)

“Parish chaplain,” muttered the parson as Charity tugged his arm. “Can’t you see? He’s delivering a sermon to the prisoners.”

The parish chaplain stalked around the circle, gesticulating and shaking his fists, while below him the prisoners groveled and hung their heads. But then Prince Abu stumbled in. Standing in the middle of the circle, he raised his right hand to show the tattoo of the golden sun. For an instant no one moved. And then the prince and the chaplain were struggling in elaborate mock battle, full of kicks and pratfalls, until the chaplain tripped and fell, and it was over. The prince stood above his fallen adversary. He took a drink out of his empty bottle, and then he squatted down among the prisoners, pulling the scarves away from their ankles and their hands, helping them to their feet.

But then more dancers were leaping into the circle from the crowd. Dressed in black, with black, empty masks, they joined hands around Prince Abu and the knot of prisoners. Again, the prince raised his hand, and for an instant everyone was still.

Then one of the prisoners jumped forward, swinging his gray scarf, and one of the black soldiers of the purge fell, holding his head. He had hidden some red paint in the palm of his hand, and as he fell, he streaked his hair with it, leaving a long red smear.

It was a signal for pandemonium, as prisoners and soldiers struggled together. They formed a spinning circle around the prince; he stood untouched. Then suddenly all was quiet. The dancers threw themselves to the ground, frozen in various attitudes of prostration, while a young girl stepped over them into the middle of the circle, and twirled a graceful pirouette. She was dressed in a ragged shirt of orange and red, and her mask was red, and her naked arms were decorated with a motif of flames as she raised them to the sky. Then she began to dance, graceful and slow, moving among the other dancers, and when she touched them, they collapsed and lay still.

“She’s the fire,” whispered Raksha Starbridge, as the princess tugged his arm. “Oh, you know. Your brother broke into the chapel while the chaplain was preaching to the condemned prisoners. Your brother freed them on his own authority, but then there was a fight. The building caught fire, that’s all.”

The girl danced around the circle, making exquisite gestures with her hands, while musicians in the crowd beat a rhythm on the drums. The drumming worked up to a frenzy and then stopped suddenly with a single hollow beat. The dancers got up and dusted themselves off and mixed in with the crowd, but the play wasn’t over. But it had changed direction, and for the princess the second part was easier than the first to understand. It was as if the first part were describing events that everyone already knew, and therefore did not have to be explained. But the second part was news. It was the story of Prince Abu’s trial and condemnation; a boy stood up to tell it in a high, sweet voice. He was dressed in white. As he spoke, one or more of the dancers behind him acted out the words. When the time came for dialogue, they supplied it, their voices faint and muffled through their masks.

“I know these things are true,” the young boy was saying, holding his hands up for silence. “I know these things are true because I saw them. I am witness to the truth. I was there, and when the roof of the chapel fell, I saw him shield my mother’s body with his own. I saw him on the floor, crushed under a fallen beam, his face covered with soot. And when they took him up and carried him to prison, they didn’t recognize him. They put him with the rest of us. This was in the Mountain of Redemption, in the second tier. I know it because I went with him. I was by his side when he woke up. There were three hundred of us there in the long hall, men and women and young children, and he lived there with us, and he shared our water and our food. We knew what he was, a prince sent down from Paradise to help us. At any time he could have raised his hand and made them set him free. He carried the tattoo of the golden sun. But he had covered it with soot and dirt, so that he would not be recognized. And the guards who came to bring us food never guessed who he was, but we knew. His flesh was sacred, and he had the healer’s gift. He touched us with his own hands. His pockets were full of candy, and he shared it with us. He showed us games like hop scotch and the jumping rope. And we were happy, until the day we came before the judge.”

A dancer near Charity was putting on his makeup and his mask. And when he stepped into the circle of the stage, there were shouts of anger from the audience, and people spat and shook their fists. She touched the parson’s arm. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“Lascar Starbridge. He’s the judge. They’ve really done him up. Look at his arms.”

Lascar Starbridge was taking his seat on the back of one of the other dancers, who knelt down on her hands and knees. He was a little man with trembling hands, and his skin was painted white, and streaks of black ran up his arms, to emphasize his veins. On the mask his eyes were painted red and black, and he had black teeth, red gums, and a black tongue.

“He’s an addict,” explained Raksha Starbridge. “Look how they hate him! Bastard! He knows he won’t live long. It makes him careless with the lives of others.”

Again people in the crowd were shouting and hissing, and some even threw stones. “I saw him once,” continued the parson. “In his court it’s a heresy to speak in your own defense. He says that in the time it takes to argue, other criminals might go free. He sits for six hours at a time, handing out sentences as the prisoners file past. He projects their tattoos onto a screen. He’s always mixing up the slides. He’s too high to see straight.”

Lascar Starbridge’s voice was slurred and feeble. As the dancers moved past him, he asked their names, and they would pantomine putting their hands into the projection machine. Another dancer held a spiral pad of drawing paper up behind the judge’s head, and as each dancer passed, he flipped another page over from the back, to show the different tattoos. Each page had a hand drawn on it, and on each palm was drawn one of the recurrent symbols of the criminally poor: a spiderweb, a checkerboard, a pick and shovel, a hangman’s noose.

In the audience, men and women rubbed their own hands together and they groaned. For Charity there was something poignant in the sound, so that for the first time the drama came alive for her, and she could see a picture of the strange scene in her mind as it must have been, the line of broken prisoners, and among them her own brother, Abu, not the dancer with his greasepaint and his mask but her own sweet brother, standing fat and tall.

“What is your name?” asked the beadle.

“Abu Starbridge. Prince … Abu Starbridge.” He was sweating heavily, and the light shone on his bald forehead. His face was dirty and his clothes were in rags, but at the sound of his voice, there was sudden silence in the courtroom. A dozen clerks stopped writing and looked up. The magistrate sat back in his chair, grimacing and showing his teeth. He looked terrified. Lifting his gavel, he half-turned so that he could see the slide of the prince’s hand, projected on the screen behind him. The tattoo of the golden sun seemed to spray the room with light.

“What’s the charge?” mumbled Lascar Starbridge, grimacing and shuffling his papers.

“Disturbing the peace,” said the beadle. “Inciting to riot. There must be some mistake… .”

“Enough,” interrupted the magistrate. “That’s enough. The prisoner is remanded to the psychiatric ward of Wanhope Hospital for observation. Next case.” His cheek was twitching and he raised one hand to smooth it. The pupils of his eyes were shrunken down to pinpricks, and his skin had an unhealthy pallor.

Prince Abu smiled. “There is no mistake,” he said. “Cousin, please. Might I remind you that the last nine men and women up before you on this charge were all sentenced to death?”

The magistrate glared at him and leaned forward over his desk. “Are you mad?” he hissed. “You must be mad. Take him away. No, stop,” he shouted, as the guards moved forward. “Don’t touch him. He’s a Starbridge. Are you insane?” he asked, stroking the twitch in his cheek.

 

He was not insane, not yet. But he was tired. All night he had sat drinking and listening to voices in the crowd outside his cell. Unable to sleep, he had pulled a chair up under the window and sat back with his head against the wall. And from time to time the wall would resonate to the sound of some speechmaker shouting through a megaphone. Once or twice he had stood up on the chair to look out through the bars, and then the noise of the people had risen like a wave. A thousand people stood outside his window, in the courtyard of the hospital, in the rain.

He had sat with a pen and notebook in his lap, thinking to write a poem before he died, something magnanimous and fine, but nothing came. And towards morning he must have slept, for he was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire and breaking glass. Spring sunlight was prodding gently through his window, making a white mark on the floorboards at his feet. The lamps had all gone out. His pen and his paper had fallen to the floor. And one of the hospital orderlies stood before him, holding breakfast on a silver tray.

Jolted from sleep, the prince woke with a cry. He heard bangs and smashes coming from the courtyard, and the sound of bells. “What … ?” he stammered. “What … ?” His eyelids fluttered with the effort of speech.

“A great change has come,” said the orderly. Sepulchral and grave, he stood like a statue, dressed in a white smock. His face had taken on that look of respectful reproach so familiar to the prince, and Abu closed his eyes to block it out. His mouth was foul with drinking, and his neck was sore.

“There’s been a change,” repeated the orderly. He was a middle-aged man. In those days superannuated and wounded soldiers were put to work in hospitals and prisons. This man’s cheek and neck were rough with scars, and his left hand was made of wood. His head was shaved in a style forbidden by law except to certain grades of soldiers.

Prince Abu rubbed his forehead with his hand. “Are they trying to set me free?”

“No, sir,” replied the orderly. “Where do you want this?” Without waiting for a response, he turned back towards the table and put down his tray.

The prince rose to his feet. He stepped up onto his chair to look out his window into the courtyard. It was a weak, milky morning, and the rain had stopped. The crowd was still there, in diminished numbers. But it had lost its singleness; no one looked up towards Abu’s window now. People stood arguing in groups or sat glumly on the ground. The torches and the bonfires had all burned out, and columns of pale smoke rose up from the cinders.

“What happened?” Abu asked.

Behind him the orderly stood still, his wooden fingers clamped around the saucer of an empty coffee cup. “Forgive me, sir,” he said. “I want to ask you something. I’ve never met a prince before. I’ve never seen one, not up close. What I want to know is, are you a different kind of man? Physically, I mean. Genetically.”

The prince leaned forward until his bald head rested against the silver bars. He had such a headache. Behind him the orderly was still talking: “Forgive me, sir. I feel that I can speak freely, because soon you will be dead. It’s just that you don’t seem to be behaving rationally. Not just you. When I was with the army, the priests and the officers behaved like crazy men. I saw a priest set fire to a powder wagon. He blew himself to pieces and twelve of his own soldiers. Coffee, sir?”

“Thank you. Milk, no sugar.”

In the courtyard, in the crowd, a group of soldiers stood arguing. One of them was making furious gestures with his fists; he broke away from the others and ran a few steps forward, and then he stripped his black cap from off his head and stripped off his black tunic, and threw them down into the mud. Abu watched him.

“It’s not rational,” said the orderly behind him. “And you’re just as bad, sir. I mean no disrespect. But I can tell, you’re going to let them kill you. And there’s no reason for it. You could just walk out of here. They’d do anything you said. They’d have to.”

Prince Abu raised his fingers to his head. “I refuse to claim my privileges under a system I despise,” he said. In the courtyard a scuffle had broken out. The man who had taken off his coat was being kicked and beaten by two of his companions.

“Tell me what happened,” said the prince.

The orderly raised Abu’s coffee cup to smell it and then lowered it again. “The council’s voted to condemn the bishop,” he said. “The announcement just went up. Tomorrow night she burns.”

Abu’s cell was large and spacious. Its walls were lined with silk. The door was set into an alcove, behind some curtains, and as the prince turned around he saw that someone was standing there. Someone had entered without knocking, an old priest in purple robes.

As Abu looked at him over the orderly’s shoulder, the priest smiled and put his finger to his lips. Unaware of him, the orderly was still talking: “I’m not a religious man. But even so, it’s lunacy. You make someone into a living goddess and then you burn her at the stake. I tell you, they must be insane. Whole regiments have taken oaths of personal allegiance to the bishop. Half the city worships her. If the council tries to burn her, there’ll be civil war. There’ll be a revolution.”

“How interesting,” said the priest behind him. “How very … interesting.” He was an old man, with white hair and a predatory face. On his collar he was wearing the ensign of the Inner Ear, an anvil, a stirrup, and an eardrum, fashioned exquisitely in gold. Unlike most priests, he wore no other jewelry. His robe, too, was plain and unembroidered.

Abu had not seen his uncle since he was a little boy, yet he was sure this man was he, Lord Chrism Demiurge, secretary of the council. It was not that Abu recognized his face. But his voice seemed to speak out of the quietest recesses of the prince’s childhood. Gentle, barely audible, it seemed to linger in the air and fill it with softness and dry menace. The silence that surrounded it was absolute. In perfect silence, the orderly turned his head. In silence he replaced the prince’s coffee cup on the tray. In silence he began to make the gestures of respect.