Paul Park - Starbridge 01 - Soldiers Of Paradise

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SOLDIERS OFP ARADISE

ISBN: 1-930815-40-9

Published by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

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This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of

the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

eBook conversion by Karen and Robert Kruger

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Soldiers of Paradise

The Starbridge Chronicles: Book I

By Paul Park

ElectricStory.com, Inc.

For my sisters

Prologue

To those who remember starlight, the spring sky over Charn is one of the most desolate sights in all the

universe, for by the second hour after sunset there is not one star in all the sky. During the first few

thousand days of the new season, the canopy of heaven dwindles and grows dark, until by midspring the

night sky is so black it almost glows, and the eye plays tricks, seeing color where there is

none—iridescent clouds of indigo and mauve.

On winter nights the sky is full of stars. But as the season changes, a stain of darkness overtakes them

from the east, a microsecond earlier each night. There at the galaxy’s edge, staring out over the brink of

space, the citizens seem grateful for any clouds or mist, which might cast a veil between themselves and

their own loneliness. Twice each season Paradise fills up the sky for a few dozen rotations, and then the

people crowd into the temples, praying for clear weather. But otherwise they hate it, and they line the

streets with bonfires, for comfort’s sake. On clear nights the city burns like a candle far out over the hills,

and to refugees and pilgrims coming down out of the country, it shines like a beacon under the black sky.

At waystops and lodges high up along the trail they swing their bundles to the ground; and on benches set

into the rock they sit and hug their knees as evening falls, and watch the temples and the domes of Charn

light up against the dark, each one outlined in neon or electric bulbs.

And as they watch, the whole river valley seems to fill up with fire, for at dusk the lamplighters come out

in Charn, and with long prehensile hooks they pull down the corners of a web of ropes slung between the

roofs. Acetylene lanterns hang suspended from long pulleys, and they sway slightly in the evening wind as

the lamplighters hoist them back into a firmament of nets.

The lamplighters are small and semihuman, with soft blobby faces and bright eyes. They stand barefoot in

the muddy street, dressed in the green overalls of their caste, listening to the temple bells, to the cadence

that directs their labor. They are listening to the music. And on the ridge above the city, a traveler hears

pieces of it too. He has wandered down from the courtyard of the hillside shrine where he has left his

blanket. Grimacing, kicking at the stones, he has clambered out onto a pinnacle of rock. There, looking

out over the lights, he turns his head a little, straining to hear. It is what has brought him to this place. He

has heard wisps of it along the trail, even in far lands where the prophet’s name is never spoken, perhaps

in the mouth of some begging preacher or some thick-lipped merchant in the marketplace humming over

his pile of salt. But in Charn, the prophet’s birthplace and the center of his worship, he hopes to hear the

music in its purest form. Down below, it fills the mind of every citizen—harsh, rhythmical, sedate, issuing

at sunset from the doors of all the temples, mixing with incense and yellow candlelight, coiling like smoke

above the town.

On Durbar Square, the doors of the temple are thrown open. At the altar, the priest conjures to the

image of Beloved Angkhdt, and then he steps down towards the kneeling rows of worshipers, a basket

in his hands. It is piled high with packages of artificial flour, each one enough for one man for one day. In

the city, all is quiet for an obligatory count of four, but on his rocky pinnacle above the walls, the traveler

paces nervously. He has heard about this part of the ritual. His enormous frame is gaunt with hunger,

because in spring it is the starving time in Charn and all those northern dioceses. The melted snow of

twenty thousand days’ accumulation has scoured the hills to their foundations and stripped the pastures

clean. The trail that he has followed south has run through red rock canyons full of broken timber, and

valleys full of stone. He has passed through ruined villages, and hunted for garbage in the burned-out

shells of factories. Other travelers on the trail have stood aside to let him pass, and spat into the dust, and

made the sign of the unclean. He has not sung a song in many months. But on the pinnacle above the city,

he smiles as if for the first time. He shakes the hair back from his face, black hair with a streak of white in

it. He squints out over the city, smiling to himself. He takes a wooden flute from the pouch at his side, and

as the music rises up from all the temples of the town, he plays a few notes of another darker melody and

hums a few notes of another song. On the hillside above him at the shrine, the keeper puts her fingers to

her ears.

* * *

In spring of the year 00016, scattered families of antinomials started to appear in Charn, and they hid

from the police in a neighborhood of abandoned warehouses between the river and the railway yard.

Immense, sulky, powerful, they had drifted south over the course of a generation, down seven hundred

miles from their villages in the farthest north, victims of religious persecution and the driving snow. They

were a silent, terrifying race, unfit for any kind of work. But in time they became famous for a sad

ferocious music of their own. Rich people risked their lives to seek them out. And one night towards the

end of July, in the eighth phase of spring, Abu Starbridge and his cousin made the journey through the

slums to a deserted warehouse built on pilings out over the river. They had difficulty finding it, though the

prince had been there once before. But finally they came in under the cowl of a long building, and inside it

was black as night, save for a small fire at the far end, past a row of steel pillars stretching up into the

dark. There, a gigantic antinomial sat cross-legged on the floor, holding a wine jar in his hands. But he

didn’t even raise his head when they got close. He didn’t even look at them, though they had brought a

basket full of chocolates and fruit. And he had started to sing already, even though at first there was no

one else around. From far away they could hear him. “There had been others before,” he sang. “Of

course there had been. There had been others.”

Part One:

Rang-river Fell

T here had been others before, of course, traders and travelers—our house was full of things only

barbarians could make: glass and steel, products of slavery and the burning South. The first barbarian I

saw with my own eyes, my brothers and sisters were coming back from somewhere, down from

Rang-river, where we lived in those days, when we were still free, before the soldiers burned us out.

That’s not fair. We would have gone anyway, soldiers or not. The world was changing, and we changed

freely—from the time I speak of, I cannot now remember anything but snow. From farther north, whole

households had already ridden through, searching for food.

This barbarian was on muleback and alone. We followed him along the cliff’s edge, singing and throwing

snowballs. He was taller than I expected, though not so tall as a man, and he smiled and gave us sugar

candies wrapped in real paper. His teeth were black. There are barbarians who pull their children’s teeth

in babyhood, canines and incisors—they leave gaps on both sides, and later they smoke cigarettes. Their

speech is slurred and indistinct. Because they are closer to beasts, they love them more. They eat no

meat, raw or cooked. They wear no leather or wool, for their own bodies are hairy past belief. How can

they live where it is hot? When I was young I never asked. I was still free, nothing in my mind, wisps of

things, snatches of songs, clouds in the sky. We capered around him, grabbing at his stirrups and the

heels of his rubber, spurless boots, looking for his tail. “Is it a rat’s, a rabbit’s, or a dog’s?” we sang,

each in a different mode. He reached down to pat our heads. He was keeping it hidden in his pants.

At the top of the gorge, we came up through cinder pines, and here it started to snow again. And here

we found people waiting, in from hunting, the horses steaming and blowing, and kicking at the snow. I

can identify the time, because the horses still looked sleek. Later, they ate bark from the trees. Bears and

lions, unnamed from hunger, came down to find them in their pens.

My sister stood away from the rest, and when she saw us, she turned her horse. Not knowing whether

the barbarian had been among us before, I hummed a word of possessiveness and pride, for this was

how I would have chosen my people to be displayed before a stranger. A woman on horseback, her

shoulders wrapped in bearskin, the rifle on her back, her long hair matted and tangled, she looked so

transient. The dead buck hanging from her saddle. Child as I was, I felt her beauty in my heart. But

barbarians are a practical people. This one felt nothing. He dismounted and walked towards her, talking,

and we could hear behind the words of her reply a hint of music, tentative welcome, as was proper, in a

mode of strength to weakness. Not that it mattered, because though like all barbarians he knew

everything, there was something the matter with his ears. He could hear our speech, but not our music. In

his country, the sun has bleached out melody from rhythm—they know all languages, and speak them in

dry cadences that mean nothing to us. They hit the bald words like drums. They never try to listen, they

only try to understand. He looked so puzzled. He couldn’t hear that in her music she was offering a place

to stay, freely, gladly. She meant no harm. Our town was close by, over the ridge. It seemed so easy in

those days.

Two ponies pulled a sledge piled with gutted animals, and when he saw it, the barbarian spat, and

touched his nose with the heel of his hand, and ducked his face down into his armpit. It is your ritual of

hatred; seeing it for the first time, standing in the snow, I found it funny. My brother had climbed up onto

the mule, and he was kicking his boots into its ribs, while I kicked its backside. “Look how he hates

death,” sang my brother, as the barbarian muttered and prayed. “He hates the sight of it.” A strutwing

goose trailed its beak along the snow from the back of the sledge, its feathers dripping blood. “He hates

it,” sang my brother.

* * *

My lords, how hard it is for me to tell you this. To tell a story in the mode of truth from beginning to end,

a man is chained like a slave. We were a free people then. This means nothing to you, I know. To me it

means my memories from this time are wordless. The beast on the mountain, what is in its mind but

music? Chained, it understands each link. It fingers them, it memorizes the feel. Barbarians have their

prayers, their work, their things, their names, their families to think of. But we had nothing. No names for

ourselves. No words for so many things. No future and no past. Good—here, now, I can be proud of

that. But it makes it difficult to begin. Difficult to remember a whole world. But I remember the death of

this barbarian; he was a scholar. He was studying a place familiar to us all, unnamed in our tongue,

Baat—or Paat—Cairn, something like that, in his: an empty city high up between the mountain’s knees,

where the river runs out. I used to go so often. And of all the places of my childhood I remember it the

best, because I know that now, right now as I speak, it is there unchanged—the great stone walls and

staircases, the fallen columns and carved figures many times my height—unchanged, just as I remember

it, in that eternal snow. We were a transient people then, dancers, musicians, hunters on horseback,

sloppy builders. We were in love with things that disappear: the last note of the flute, the single flutter of

the dancer’s hands. And in that old barbarian city, people had lived and disappeared. They would never

be back.

The scholar went there every day. And at night he stayed in our town and studied us, stayed in our

houses, took up no room, made no trouble. He played with his books and papers, his camera and tapes.

He had brought his own food, dried vegetables and fruits. Real food disgusted him. And at first my sisters

were careful where they slept and how they dressed when he was by, for they had heard barbarians

were sensitive to human women, and they had no wish to kill him. But nothing came of that; he slept

heavily on the mats and rugs we gave him. And by nightfall he was always drunk. Every evening he would

find a corner in the longhouse, and watch and drink until his eyes burned. And I paid close attention. I

said to him, “Stranger.”

“Yes, boy,” his voice a dry drumbeat.

“Stranger, what do you see?”

But one night, I thought he hadn’t heard. I was squatting beside him. He lay in the dark among the outer

circle of watchers, among the children and the cripples. Although it was a frozen night, he wore only a

cloth shirt, heavily embroidered, open at the neck, his chest hair like a blanket, I hoped. The liquor

numbs your senses, I know now. He was very drunk. My face, so close to his, ignited nothing. I saw

nothing in the mirror of his face. Fascinated, I stuck my hand in front of his nose. Nothing. His mouth

sagged, and I could smell his ruined teeth.

In the silence behind me, in a circle of torchlight, my sister started to dance. She was new to it, and

nervous, her gift just large enough to hide her nervousness. And she danced passionately, as if she were

looking to deny what we all knew, that she had not yet heard the song of her own self, that her

movements were stolen, mixtures of copies, and she was too young and hot to be anything but formless,

anything but molten in her heart’s core. She danced, and from time to time in her flashing hands and feet

an older dancer in the hall might catch the flicker of something as personal to him as his own body,

performed with a dextrousness that he, perhaps, no longer had. This was why old and younger dancers

were able to summon up the pride necessary to perform. Their greenness or their dryness gave their

work a tension missing from more perfect work, the tension of their bodies and their spirit in unequal

struggle. And when later we would watch a dancer in full flower, his death would dance around him as he

danced.

I saw this without looking, but the barbarian stared and stared. My sister raised her naked arms. What

did he see? I had heard wonders of drunkenness, stories of hallucinations, burning fires, men turned into

beasts, whispers to thunder. I had seen a woman so in love with death that she had cut her foot off and

died of the wound, not allowing the biters to come near. But this man didn’t look at me. Impatient, I

stuck my fingers into his face, poking his uneven cheek. He jerked his head away.

Behind me, a musician had begun to play. She had built a new instrument, a kind of guitar that I had

never seen before. Envious, I turned to listen, but she had just started when the barbarian got up and

stumbled forward under the lamps. Ignoring me, he pushed his way into the center of the hall. My sister

crouched over her guitar. The barbarian covered her shoulder with his hairy fingers, and she looked up at

him and smiled. The rest of us were too surprised to move, though some of my brothers and sisters were

violent and loved bullying. Others had not forgiven him for having brought his camera into the hall one

night, or for having tried to sketch them. But most of us were free from that, and we would have been

happy to hear him out. And I especially, for some reason, I felt my heart beating as I watched him in the

torchlight, leaning on my sister’s shoulder, closing his drunken eyes. And when he started to sing, I was

caught by a kind of sound that I had never heard before, the uncouth melody, the words like vomiting.

His voice was harsh. It made me listen and remember, so that much later I would recognize, in a language

that I didn’t know, the beginning of the Song of Angkhdt, which is barbarian scripture. “Oh my sweet

love, oh God my love, God let me touch you, and feel the comfort of your kisses, for you are my light,

my life, my joy, my cure, my heart, my heartache . . .” The language was dead before time began,

abandoned by decree. It was decreed a sacrilege to use the holy words for common purposes. Now no

one can tell how they were once pronounced, and barbarians fight wars over their meaning.

Of all that I knew nothing yet. But I heard the delirious conviction in the drunkard’s voice; it rang the

rafters. This was the first song I had heard—I mean with words. Among us words were thought to

muddy music, for the notes themselves can mean so much. That was not at issue here, in a language none

of us could understand. But some could not endure even the sound of your religion, the vicious ecstasy,

the sound of faith. I didn’t mind it. I thought they were jealous of a new thing. Anyone should be able to

stand up and sing. But we had habits, though it hurts me to say it, for yes, that was slavery too, of a kind.

You must understand, not all of us were gifted. But some sang every night, and their music and their pride

was the only law we had. One of my brothers, a bully and a dancer, took the barbarian by the throat,

and struck him down, and threw him out into the snow.

Late at night I got up from the sleeping room and went out. He was lying in a snowbank, breathing softly.

I thought his body hair might keep him warm. There was no wind. The stars hung close. I had brought a

bearskin, and hoped not to offend him, but I did. By morning he had thrown it off. He was a slave to his

own faith, and I suppose he smelled the leather even in his sleep. By morning he was frozen dead.

* * *

The antinomial paused to spit into the darkness, and wipe his lips, and wipe each one of his

enormous fingers on a rag before he picked his flute out of its case. He nodded to his guests He

said:

My lords, our world must appear cruel and incomplete. We knew nothing about love. That is a barbarian

lesson I learned later. But at that time we were a free people. We called each other brother and sister,

but we were always alone. Because what is freedom more than that—the need to hear your own music

always, even in a crowd? When the barbarian died, I felt stifled, watching the biters cut his tail off up on

the high ground above the river, watching them cut his body into pieces, the vultures huddling in a circle.

In the morning I took a pony and some skis, and rode out through the gates of our town, out over the

hills, far out towards the abandoned city, where the barbarian had had a camp. I felt unhappy, but not for

long. The snow stretched unbroken all around me, and in a little while I had forgotten. My mind felt

empty as the snow, and I found myself humming and making little gestures with my hands, because I

loved that journey. You rode in over a high span of stone, the river booming far below you at the bottom

of a ragged gorge. Birds flew underneath the arch, and at the far side the remnants of a huge bird-headed

statue broke the way. Its head lay in a rubble of chipped stone, as long as my body, intricately carved, its

round eye staring upward. I had to lead my pony over it, and in through the shattered gateway where the

bridge met the sheer cliff face, the clifftops high above me. I rode up through a steep defile cut into the

rock, lined with broken columns in the shape of trees. Their stone branches mingled into arches, and I

rode up through another gateway where the rough walls around me rushed away, and out into a great

open space, where the wind pulled at my clothing and swept the stones as clean as ice. From here you

could see the sun, rising as if behind a paper shield, the sky as white as paper. And in the middle of this

stone expanse rose up an enormous pitchrock fountain, a giant in chains; that city must have been a great

center of slavery, the stonework is so good. His hands and feet are chained behind him, his eyesockets

are hollow. The water must have come from there and dribbled down from wounds cut in his chest and

arms and thighs. In the old days, he must have stood in a pool of tears and blood.

I went on and entered streets of empty palaces, their insides open to the weather, their doorways

blocked by drifting snow. I turned the corners randomly and wandered in and out of being lost, but the

pony knew the way, slave to habit. So I dismounted, and left it sheltered in a ruined porch, and climbed

up into an older section of the town, where massive pyramids and temples of an older, gentler design

stood like a ring of snowy hills. And in an open space near the largest of these, a tumbled hill of masonry,

I found the barbarian’s camp. He had discovered something, a hidden temple where the rock seemed

solid, and he had come up every day to work on it, and come back every night to live with us and drink

and sleep in our houses in the valley. He had kept maps and papers here, in a black tent standing in a

ruck of fallen stones. He had kept a fire outside, the black smoke visible from far away. Once I had

come to watch him work.

Now the fire was scattered, but there was a horse tethered outside. I had seen its footprints in the snow,

and dog prints too. I could hear dogs barking, and in a little while they came running towards me over the

snow, long-legged hunting dogs, but the tent was empty. I stood outside, the dogs jumping and cleaning

my hands. I opened my coat to the white air and sucked the cold air through my teeth. I was so happy. I

had no way of guessing then, my lords, that the future of my people lay in a barbarian city like that one

had been, full of sweat and noise and slavery. Our tails would grow long, and we would never eat meat

anymore. My lords, here in your hard streets, hunger forces me to make up answers to your questions

and sell my memories for food. It is a biting habit to think about the past. But I have no pride left; it hurts

me to say it, for humility was something far beyond my childlike imagination as I stood in that abandoned

city in the snow. Then my heart was empty as the air. I stamped my feet and shook my arms, and saw as

if for the first time where the barbarian had found a flaw in the gradual surface of the pyramid, and

rubbed it with gasoline and blasted out a hole the size of a man.

He had discovered a rough passageway into the heart of the stone hill; I entered it, and stopped on the

threshold of a round chamber. To my right and to my left around the wall stretched a row of statues in a

ring, facing inward to the room. They sat and stood in lifelike poses, some stiff, some slouching, and

some leaned together as if talking. Some were gesturing with open mouths, as if they had been cut off in

the middle of a word. The one beside me touched his neighbor lightly on the arm, as if to draw his

attention to something happening across the room. And they had all been carved by the same hand, that

much was clear, a hand that took delight in complicated clothes and simple faces. For though some were

old with stringy necks and some were young, they all had qualities in common. Their faces were unmixed.

Each had hardened over a single mood—pride in one, stupidity in another, malice, innocence. An old

man was biting on a coin. Another pulled a stone cork from a stone bottle, his face contorted in a

drunken leer. Another hid the stiffness in his lap under a fold of cloth and scratched forever at a bleeding

sore. For a free man, the joy of living comes from knowing that it won’t be long, that all flesh dies and

disappears, but these barbarian kings and princes, it was as if the god they worshipped had turned them

into stone. They would live forever, as doubtless they had begged him in their prayers.

A man stepped out across the room opposite from where I stood, a biter. I would have known him by

his clean clothes even if I had not known his face. He had been a strong musician once, and I have

memories of him standing in the torchlight of the hall, bent over his violin, my brothers and my sisters

packed like slaves to hear him. Or even when he played alone, by himself in the high pastures, I

remember children running out to find him, and they would sit around him in the snow. But by the time I

speak of, that was past. A man had cut his hand off in a fight, I don’t know why, and he had given up

and taken to biting in a house by himself. Let me explain. Our kind of life was not for everyone. Some

found it hard to give up everything for freedom’s sake. They had things to occupy their minds. They were

addicted to some work, or they had friends and children. We had given them a name. We called them

betrayers, literally “biters” in our language, and we hated them. The pride of our race was so hard to

sustain. The rest of us had sacrificed so much to music, to emptiness and long cold wandering, that we

could only hate them. And we hated them the more because we needed them. The biters were our

doctors, builders, makers, parents. It gave them happiness to do things for themselves and other people.

Without that, life falls apart, no matter what your gifts. Babies die, houses fall down. We needed

someone to preserve us, to preserve a spirit they themselves could never share, a spirit to fill us with

hunger every morning as we broke snow on the mountains with our horses and our dogs, a spirit to fill us

every night and every morning with reasons to be up and to be gone.

But I am wandering: that day, in that stone chamber when I was a child, a biter stood in the middle of a

circle of statues, with a carbide lantern in his hand. He said, “Is that you?” He said “Is that you?” in an

empty voice, and then something else. I didn’t understand him. Biters often know peculiar words. But the

dead man, the barbarian scholar, had had a name and that was it. Mistaking me for him, the biter called

me by his name, a word that referred to him as if he were a thing, fit to be used, like a blanket or a bed.

My brothers and my sisters had no names.

I took up a loose piece of tile and skipped it across the floor. It made a circle round the biter’s feet. He

laughed. “Little brother,” he said, and he came towards me. “Little brother, what are you doing here?”

This was common biting, not worth a reply. I spat onto the floor and turned away. There was a statue in

the center of the room, different from the rest—a stone table and the figure of a man astride it, his legs

hanging down on either side. He had a dog’s head, dog’s teeth, dog’s eyes, and the hair ran down his

back under his rich clothes. And from his groin rose up a stiff enormous phallus, which he held in front of

him between his hands. It was so thick his fingers couldn’t close around it, and so tall it protruded to his

chin. Along its naked sides long lines of words were cut into the stone, and single words into the spaces

between his knuckles.

The biter stood behind me and reached out to touch its bulbous head, where it swelled out above the

statue’s hands. “It is Angkhdt,” he said softly. “Prophet of God. The dog-headed master. It’s sad, isn’t it,

that it would come to this?”

Questions, hard tenses, gods. I hated him. I hummed a few phrases of an anger song, a melody called

“I’m warning you,” but the biter took no notice. “Where is the barbarian?” he asked.

I turned to face him, furious. How could he force me to remember? The man was dead, gone, vanished

out of mind. Time had closed its hand. In those days we were in love with a lie, that objects could

disappear into the air, that there was no past, no future, that people needed the touch of my hand in order

to exist, the image in my eye.

It was a lie I cherished rather than believed. In fact, I remembered very well. And I wanted him to know

what had happened. I wanted him to know the man was dead. And so, though I said nothing, through

music I put a little death into the air, a song called “now it’s over,” but in a complicated rhythm because I

could not cover in my voice a small regret.

The biter listened carefully, tilting his head. With his forefinger, he stroked the underlip of the stone

phallus, and his face took on a strange gentle expression. “They murdered him,” he said. “Which one?”

How I hated him! Him and his past tense. Him and his questions. Yet there was a power in his hawklike

face that made him difficult to resist, a keenness in his eye. I dropped my head and muttered part of a

song, my brother’s music, the man who had first struck the scholar down.

He recognized it. It was a beautiful song, spare, strong, proud, like the man himself. At the second

change, I heard the biter hum a part of it himself, as if in reverie, frowning. He brought his wrists together,

and with his whole hand he caressed the angry stump where his other hand had been. “It is he,” he said

softly. “It is always he. Little brother,” he said, and stretched his hand out to touch me, only I ducked

away. “Little brother,” he continued. “Don’t you see how men like him can kill us all?”

I started away, my face full of disgust, but he smiled and called out to me: “I’m sorry. I apologize. No

biting. Or at least, only a little. Because I am talking about the future. Don’t pretend you never think of

it.”

I turned to face him, because I was pretending. He was right. He said: “I see you. You are different from

the rest. I see you. Before. I saw you. The others cannot think. You can.”

I stood appalled. He was trying to seduce me, I could tell. It was the biter’s slough of reason, of cause

and effect, so easy to fall into, so hard to climb back out. I could feel tears in my eyes, and I bent to pick

up a loose stone.

The biter smiled. “I’m insulting you,” he said. “Listen. Use your mind. We are beginning to starve. There

is no meat left in these mountains. Every day the hunters bring in less. There is none left.”

I listened, hardfaced. This made no sense to me.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “We have to do it. Something. All together, for the first time. Not just

alone. Together.”

I stared at him. This made no sense.

“South of here,” he said. “Way south, there is no snow. There are deer on the hill. Fish in the water.

Listen—every day I talk to the barbarian. The dead barbarian. Every day I come here. I listen to his

stories. He is teaching me so much. Now he is dead, yet it is still the truth. He was . . . He told me about

it. There is food to eat.”

“I prefer to starve.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Yes,” I cried, furious. “But I am not a slave of my own mind. I am not. I prefer to die. My brothers and

sisters are too proud.”

“But I don’t mean that,” he said. “We are not beggars. I mean to take what we want. Steal it. These

barbarians are a race of hairy dwarves. Free men and women would burn through them like a fire. And I

can make it happen. He was teaching me a trick. A way of singing—don’t you understand?”

Bored, I turned away. But there was a peculiar music in his words. He brought his fist crashing down on

the tabletop. “But I can force you,” he shouted. “I can force you to follow me. There is a power in this

room, if I knew how to use it. There is power in these empty gods.” He came towards me, grinning

savagely, and I backed away. “I will do it,” he said. “I hate your stupidness. And I hate myself.”

He lied. His self-love rang in every word. His voice was like two instruments in conflict, one ferocious,

one insinuating. He had been a strong musician, and this music was a storm in him. “Do not laugh at me!”

he shouted, and shook the stump of his arm in my face as if it were a weapon. He was a little crazy, too,

I thought, with his bony face, his eyebrows, his dark eyes. In the light of the carbide lantern his shadow

made a giant on the wall, reeling drunkenly.

In those days I was easily bored. I knew so few words. And this biter was talking about something. He

was using words as a kind of action, and that made me uncomfortable. So I left him, and outside it had

begun to snow again. The sky was full of wordless snow. It blunted the edges of the mountains and the

buildings, blunted everything, relaxed and calmed me. The dogs were stifled as I slogged away. It was

very cold.

* * *

“What is he talking about?” whispered Thanakar Starbridge. “What did he call us, a race of

hairy dwarves?”

Prince Abu wiped the sweat from his fat face. “It’s perfectly true,” he muttered, giggling. “At

least in your case.” He was already drunk, staring down into the bottom of his winecup with

unfocused eyes.

Thanakar stretched out his leg and looked around the dark interior of the warehouse. Shadows

flickered among piles of cinderblocks and garbage. “It’s a bit much, him calling us barbarians,”

he yawned, touching his wristwatch. Nearby, a woman squatted over the fire, feeding it with

handfuls of dung.

“Shhh. Quiet!” whispered the prince. “He’s beginning again.”

The antinomial had dozed off momentarily, but now he roused himself. He sat for a while, nodding

and fingering his flute, and then took up his recitation near the place where he had broken off.

And when he started, he spoke in the guttural singsong which of all his modes was hardest to

understand. He said:

My lords, that night a volcano burst up on the ridge somewhere, and my brothers and sisters and I went

up to see—nothing, as it turned out, nothing but smoke and steam. It rained, and in the valley you could

hear the trees exploding like distant gunshots, like gunshots where the hot stones spattered on the ice.

The clouds reflected a dull glow from far away, that was all. We froze. I thought the night went on

forever. That night I thought the world had changed, and perhaps it had, because in the morning the sun

was late in coming, I could tell. It rose late out of a smelly mist, and we shivered and whispered, coming

home over the ice. From far away we could see a fire burning in our town, and we laughed and ran down

the last ridge, in through the gates, under the belltower, up past the longhouses and barns. In those days

before the soldiers came, our town was built of logs and mud, among the ruins of an older place. The

stone walls, the tower, the eternal well, all that was ancient barbarism. We had built our windowless,

dark halls on their foundations.

Outside the dancing hall, the biter had made a great bonfire. With biter friends he had slaved together a

wooden wagon with heavy wooden wheels and had pulled the stone table and Angkhdt’s statue from the

mountainside, all the way down from the empty city. He had drawn his cart up to the bonfire, the open

end facing outward, and the firelight shining through the braces and the wooden spokes. He stood in it as

if on a stage, the fire at his back. Beneath him, my brothers and my sisters shambled around the stone

table, and they admired its blunt surface and the lewd god astride it.

We heard the biter’s voice. He had been a great musician once, but now he used his voice to bite us. He

used the thing that he had learned from the barbarian. He had combined barbarian magic with a new way

of singing. He could make pictures in the air. And he was using them to bite us, for in those days nothing

could bind my stupid family like fire, like dancing; he capered above them in a black flapping robe, his

mutilated arm held crazily aloft, and they stood in the slush with their mouths open. At first I didn’t listen.

For I was watching for the sunrise, and as I stood at the outskirt of the crowd, pushing towards the heat,

I saw a little way in front of me the neck and shoulders of my sister, wedged in between some others.

She was close enough to touch, almost, a girl almost ripe, older than I. I could only see part of her head,

but I knew that it was she, because around her I always felt a sad mix of feelings, so I wriggled forward

until I stood behind her. Her yellow hair ran down her back. My mind was full of it, full of the barbarian

luxury of it. Yet even so the biter’s melody broke in, and I looked up to see him dancing and reeling. He

was a powerful man. He could make pictures out of music. In his singing I could see the barbarian city on

the mountain as it was when men still lived there, the paint still fresh on the buildings. His voice was full of

holes. Yet even so, I saw that barbarian city so clearly, and a crowd of people standing in the square. I

saw the colors of their clothes and the lines of their faces. In a central square of yellow stone, of high, flat

buildings, lines of open windows, hanging balconies, a group of huntsmen dismounted. They were

dressed in leather and rich clothes, red and brilliant green. A huge horse stood without a rider, and beside

it, chained by one wrist to the empty stirrup, naked and dusty, his great dog’s head bent low, knelt the

barbarian god. He had careful, yellow, dog’s eyes. Nearby, a pale boy, wounded in the chase perhaps,

lay dead or dying on the stones, surrounded by slaves and sad old men. The sun burned, and the god

waited, sweating in the dirty shade around the horse’s legs, until they brought a wooden cage and

chained his hands and feet, and prodded him inside with long thin poles; he lay in one corner and licked

along his arm.

This is a story from the Song of Angkhdt. As we listened, standing near the fire with our mouths open,

people said they saw the statue move, and some claimed that the lines of symbols on its swollen penis

seemed to glow. I know nothing about that. But as stupid as it sounds, my lords, I did hear a voice out of

its stone head, for the music had stopped suddenly, and the vision had disappeared. It was a curious,

airless kind of voice, and either the language was unknown to me or else I was too far away to

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SOLDIERSOFPARADISECopyright©1987byPaulPark.Allrightsreserved.ISBN:1-930815-40-9PublishedbyElectricStory.com,Inc.ElectricStory.comandtheESdesignaretrademarksofElectricStory.com,Inc.Thisnovelisaworkoffiction.Allcharacters,events,organizations,andlocalesareeithertheproductoftheauthor’simaginationorused...

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