Sugar Rain (17 page)

Yet he was sick at heart. Abu had been his only friend, and he was dead. Charity had been less than that, and more. This is not the season for romantic friendships, thought Thanakar. This is not the weather for a sentimental friendship. He had barely known her.

Nevertheless, once it had been enough to make him happy, just to think that some day he might know her well.

At the bottom of the hill the road divided. He took the way back into town, along a row of houses. He had the impression that people were watching him from the upstairs windows, and he bowed his head. And at a turning in the road, he passed a covered carriage parked before the gate of some new guesthouse.

He recognized the escutcheon painted on the carriage door. Day by day the town was filling up with refugees, priests and Starbridges from Charn, running from the revolution. Late enemies of Argon Starbridge, now they were imposing on his mercy, hoping to cross the border into safety.

Thanakar lowered his umbrella to hide his face. He had no wish to meet the owner of the carriage. Some members of his family had even registered in his hotel, but he had no wish to see them. Always a misfit for the sake of his politics and his crippled leg, now he was isolated for new reasons. These refugees were seeking safety from the revolution and the new laws of attainder. Though Thanakar, if he had stayed in Charn until the end, would have been persecuted as harshly as any for his name and his tattoos, still he had not stayed. He had fled, not from the revolution but from Chrism Demiurge.

Thanakar thought that this difference was enough to place him, in the minds of other Starbridges, with the forces of rebellion. And even though he might not give a damn what they might think, still he had no wish to draw attention to himself. The old priest had been too senile to guess the name of Princess Charity’s lover, but Thanakar assumed that others would have no trouble guessing. He had no wish to hear himself blamed for her death; so, at the entrance to his hotel near the square, he pulled his hat down over his ears.

He need not have bothered. The instant he crossed the threshold into the common room, he heard his name shouted from the corner by a relative of his, a second cousin on his mother’s side, a boy named Oxus Starbridge. Thanakar had known him in the army.

“Cousin!” he shouted. “Cousin Thanakar!” He was very young, with a thin, nervous face and bad skin. “Thanakar!” he shouted. He came hurrying from across the room to shake the doctor’s hand. He looked pale and exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept in far too long. A sad new beard was trying feebly to hide his features, and he picked at it nervously and smelled his fingers as he talked. He was wearing the remnants of his army uniform; his shirt was ragged and his pants were torn.

A row of greasy couches ran along one wall. The boy collapsed onto one and drew the doctor down beside him. Elsewhere around the room, people stopped what they were doing to stare at them. They included a group of Starbridge officers playing cards at a round table, two married women with veiled faces, and an old bearded gentleman wiping his hands on a black-and-white-striped handkerchief.

“Thank God you’ve come,” said the boy. “I don’t know anyone here. Yours is the first familiar face I’ve seen.”

Thanakar put his hand out to touch the boy’s shoulder. “I’m glad to see you,” he said gently. “I’m glad to see that you’ve escaped.”

The boy made a gesture with his arm, as if dismissing recollections too painful to mention. “I swam the river,” he said. “My God, I’ve lived for weeks on garbage and stale bread. And now, I can’t believe it. I have an uncle in Caladon City, only they won’t let me across. They won’t let me go. I can’t believe it. I told them who I was.” He held out his hand so that Thanakar could see the silver bluebird tattooed on his palm. Then he stared at it himself. “They didn’t seem to care.”

Thanakar smiled. “Ignorant swine,” he said.

“It’s an outrage,” continued the boy. “When I get across, I’ll have them all locked up. Filthy bureaucrats! My uncle knows the king.”

“The king is paying them to keep us here. They take the place of soldiers.”

“I don’t care. Who are they, to go against my will? My father was Baroda Starbridge. By God, I’ll have them flogged.”

Suppressing a gesture of impatience, Thanakar made as if to stand, but the boy was clinging to his coat sleeve. And there was something in his face that made the doctor pause, some underlying seriousness. His voice was high-pitched and precarious, as if he understood his own futility but was searching for a way of hiding it from others. Surely that was forgivable in one so young, thought Thanakar. And there was something else: The boy was close to tears. “They broke into my house,” he said. “The Desecration League. I got a message from my sister to come back, and I left my regiment and rode all night. On the morning of the fifty-eighth, I reached the gates of Charn just after dawn, and it took me until one o’clock to go the last few miles, there were so many people in the streets. They had torched that whole block of houses, from Cosro’s Barbican almost to the river. My own house was gutted—all the furniture was thrown out into the street. And they had written their obscenities on every wall, and everywhere the mark of the red hand—my mother lived there. And my little sister. They were gone.”

With great delicacy and care, the boy pushed a strand of hair back from his face and curled it behind his ear. “I ran away,” he said. “I swam the river, and I ran away.”

He seemed to expect no response to this, so Thanakar said nothing. He relaxed back onto the couch, feeling the familiar mix of pity, irritation, and embarrassment that so often possessed him when he listened to tales of other people’s misery. He put awkward fingers on the boy’s hand and twisted his face into a rictus of compassion. The boy had been afraid. He was confessing cowardice, and for a Starbridge that had always been the most desperate of all crimes. The boy knew it and he felt it; suddenly embarrassed, he turned his face away. But he turned back after a moment, when Thanakar had risen to his feet.

“Please,” he said, and when he raised his chin, Thanakar could see the movement of his epiglottis, a shudder in his narrow throat. “Please,” he said. “I had no money when I came away. This thief of a hotelkeeper is charging me six dollars a night. He has given me a mattress on the floor.”

Relieved, Thanakar fished some money from his coat, two fifty-dollar bills. The boy reached out to grab them. He took them and crushed them between his fingers. He crushed them into little balls, and as he did so, his face took on a sudden expression of hostility.

“Let me give you a receipt,” he said. “You understand—this is a temporary loan. I’ll pay you ten percent a month.”

Outside there was a crash of thunder, and the rain came down redoubled on the greasy windows. The common room was darkened; light came from a small fire on the stove, where three Caladonian merchants sat smoking hashish from long pipes. Light came from the table, where the officers played cards around an oil lamp; they had stopped in the middle of a hand and were staring at the doctor as he looked around. They were playing for money. Loose coins lay scattered across the table.

What is it? thought Thanakar. What is it about me? He turned and walked away, spurning the receipt that the boy thrust at him. His boots struck an uneven rhythm on the floor as he crossed the room and pushed through the low door into the courtyard. Outside the raindrops danced and spattered on the flagstones, while the horses in their stalls licked up the sugar and scraped the scum from each other’s backs with the sharp edges of their beaks, standing head to tail in the rain.

The ostlers were bringing straw. One saw him and made the gestures of respect, but Thanakar turned aside and limped up the small covered stairwell that led to his quarters on the second floor. At the top he rested, ducking his head, for the ceiling in the corridor was very low. He leaned his head against the doorframe. From along the corridor there came a sound that tore his heart, the sound of a girl crying.

 

When Charity Starbridge was a little girl, she had played on the soccer team at Starbridge Dayschools. She had been a good runner, graceful and strong, stronger than most girls, and sometimes after school she would practice by herself in the playground. She would run as fast as she could, back and forth across the deserted field, the silver ball floating in front of her—she never seemed to kick it. She would be dressed in silver spandex, her black hair wild around her face, and sometimes Thanakar and Abu, her brother, would stand out on the balcony of the Upper School, watching her practice on the playground below them. Thanakar’s leg had never let him run like that.

In his hotel on the frontier Thanakar thought, She’s dead. Why think of her? One night he got up from his bed, and limped over to the window of his hotel room, and watched the streetlights shining in the rain. They shone on the statue of Argon Starbridge in the middle of the square, shone on the façade of the stone customs house. He watched the wire fence gleaming in the rain. By day Thanakar’s mind was a strong citadel, but at night his thoughts rioted and raised rebellions. God curse all Starbridges; the priests of Charn had murdered everything he loved, and yet, and yet. Those palaces had been his home. It was not welcome news to hear of their destruction.

At night he found it hard to sleep. And in the morning—every morning for three weeks in the last part of October—Thanakar went to the customs house. Every morning the unravelers granted him an interview. Even in those tempestuous days, when their antechambers were packed with supplicants, they never seemed to have anything to do. They sat in their cubicles surrounded by stacks of unread documents, their eyes fixed upon nothing, as if contemplating some ideal vision of bureaucracy, infinitely removed from mundane paperwork. Their desktops were crowded with the tools of their profession—silent telephones, broken calculators, pens with no ink. Always they exuded an impression of lassitude and deepest melancholy, their soft, slow speech punctuated by silences and dismal sighs.

This melancholy was deceptive, thought Thanakar, because at some moments, deep beneath the surface, they seemed full of glee. They took care to end each interview with some words of optimism, some hint that no matter how insuperable the barriers might appear, some forward progress might be possible, given time. This was the essential part of their power, thought Thanakar later. He would meet supplicants who, even after forty interviews, were still hopeful. Thanakar himself, against his own better judgment, found himself seduced by an illusion of progress: After the first few visits, no further mention was made of Mrs. Cassimer’s and Jenny’s missing passports. It was as if that hurdle had been crossed. Instead, he pursued the unravelers in new and hopeful directions. They listed the addresses of people he might stay with in Caladon City. They speculated on his chances of finding a job. But always there was some new obstacle. Once Thanakar arrived to find that his file had been mislaid. Thanakar asked himself what his file could possibly consist of, since no one, at least in his presence, had ever done so much as write down his name. Nevertheless, that day they had had to start everything again.

Or once, after a long interview, the unraveler had implied that he was finally satisfied, and that all the doctor would have to do was show up the next morning to pick up his visa. Some inner wariness prevented Thanakar from celebrating; he had seen other supplicants come back from the customs house triumphant and boastful, and take exaggerated leave of everybody in the hotel, only to reappear at breakfast a few days later. Sure enough, Thanakar arrived at the customs house the next morning to find that the unraveler in charge of his case had been transferred.

Yet even so, despite these setbacks, there were intimations of progress. On each unraveler’s desk stood a number of rubber stamps, including one large, important-looking one with a metal faceplate bearing the Caladonian coat of arms. Though never actually stated, it was implied that this stamp was the coveted visa—multiple entries, six months. On Thanakar’s first visit the unraveler had touched it with her forefinger. On his seventh, the unraveler had actually picked it up and weighed it in his hand before replacing it with a sigh in its little metal stand. And on his seventeenth, the man had reached for it forcefully, only to hesitate at the last minute, think better of it, lean back in his chair.

During Thanakar’s twenty-seventh interview, the man mentioned for the first time another set of documents. This man was unusually tall, even for an unraveler, and he was dressed in a dilapidated uniform of yellow gauze. His veil was wrapped closely around his face, so closely that the cloth over his mouth was alternately convex and concave as he blew in and out.

Thanakar had seen him several times before. Most he couldn’t tell apart, but this one had a distinguishing eccentricity of speech: a kind of stammer, and a habit of qualifying everything he said, so that often the sense of it was lost, mislaid in a fog of vagueness. “I-I don’t know if you know,” he said. “At least, at least I hope you do. But there have been questions asked. There have been … inquiries.”

“Yes?” prompted Thanakar.

“Well, it has been noticed that you have not yet submitted certain documents, which may or may not be needed, at-at least not at this time.”

“What documents?”

“They-they still may not be necessary,” demurred the unraveler. “Not yet. Nevertheless, I have heard rumors …”

“What documents?” asked Thanakar between his teeth.

“C-certificates of health. Witnessed by a licensed physician.”

“I am a physician,” answered Thanakar. “Give me these certificates, and I will fill them out.”

“D-don’t misunderstand me. I am not sure these documents exist, in triplicate, or otherwise. The question is, are you licensed to practice? In Caladon?”

“Licensed? My father was a prince of Charn. God help me, what do you want from me?”

“I understand,” said the unraveler. “Don’t misunderstand me. You are an eminent man. Eminent. At least, I myself have never heard of you. And I am not talking about you anyway. But your companions, that is something else.”